Shiva in Steel Read online

  The commander sighed. "I want more than your unwilling body, Mr. Silver. So before I start telling you what to do, I'm going to give you some explanations."

  Harry agreed mildly. "That would be nice."

  "I'd like you to come to my office. Talking face-to-face is almost always better."

  More often than not, capable and well-trained human brains, working in tandem with the best military hardware, including state-of-the-art optelectronic computers, could at least hold their own against whatever hardware and software berserkers could put up. But when the humans were pitted against Shiva, this was turning out not to be the case.

  "As far as we know," the commander said, looking at Harry across her desk, "no one has yet laid eyes on Shiva-I mean, of course, whatever fighting machine that brain happens to be housed in-and survived. But we have learned something about it. What we are talking about here is not new physical weaponry, but a new level of command computing. The pattern is of a single, guiding machine intelligence, making both strategic and tactical decisions for the enemy in Omicron Sector."

  Harry nodded. Captain Marut was sitting silent in a corner of the room, evidently thinking his own thoughts.

  Commander Normandy resumed. "The origins of Shiva are obscure. It first appears on the scene in a certain skirmish won by the berserkers about two standard years ago. A few months later, there was another, larger battle in which the enemy enjoyed uncommonly fine leadership-and shortly after that, another. By the increasing scale of our defeats, the size of the units and the fleets involved, it is possible to chart the monster's rise through the layers of berserker command. Just how this one machine has learned or otherwise acquired such fiendish capability is a question that demands an answer-but no one has come up with anything like a certain explanation.

  "Our best hope is that the existence of this monster can be attributed to some chance or random factor-an accident, a contamination, an improvised repair. It's even a theoretical possibility that Shiva is simply the beneficiary of a lucky string of random events, taking place outside the computer but deciding battles in its favor. That possibility of course is very remote, more mathematical than real.

  "We can only pray that no blueprint exists, that there are not a hundred or a thousand similar units already under construction."

  "Logically, wouldn't that be the first thing they'd do once they realized that they'd somehow come up with a winner?"

  "Of course-but no device as complicated as an optelectronic brain can be duplicated as simply as a radio or calculator. Sometimes it's not even possible to examine the most intricate parts, where quantum effects dominate, without destroying whatever unique value those parts may have."

  Another possible explanation for Shiva's string of conquests was that the berserkers had achieved a breakthrough in computer science and/or technology. One particularly frightening suggestion was that they had found a way to get around at least some of the quantum difficulties that plagued all such devices on the smallest level.

  "Therefore, there is a very good chance that Shiva is truly one of a kind," the commander went on. "Trying to examine it closely enough to duplicate it might destroy whatever makes it unique. This gives us, as human beings, reason to hope that if we demolish it, there will never be another."

  Yet another idea put forward was that the device might have managed to successfully incorporate some living, if no longer sentient, components-for example, a culture of human neurons, scavenged from prisoners. It had long been realized that live brains could do certain things better than even the most advanced computers. Yet this was open to the fundamental objection that no berserker had ever been known to incorporate live components within itself-and there was a general agreement among experts that none ever would.

  "They've been known to hold prisoners," Harry observed.

  "Oh, absolutely-as hostages, or sources of information, or as the subjects of experiments. But never as functional components of their own system."

  However Shiva might have come by its special powers, humanity's survival was going to depend on finding some means to nullify them. If the master killer should be promoted to some larger command-or if the enemy high command should manage to duplicate Shiva's capabilities in other machines-the results would be disastrous for all Galactic life.

  "Theorists have also debated the possibility that Shiva's success depended on the help of some renegade human, a goodlife military genius, whether Solarian or otherwise. But there is not a shred of hard evidence to support such a conjecture.

  "In the known history of the Galaxy, few forms of humanity other than our own have ever demonstrated any military competence at all. And there is no reason to suspect that any exceptions are involved in the present situation. And no Solarian human with any outstanding competence in military tactics or strategy has been reported missing, as far as I am aware."

  "Would headquarters pass on that information to you if they had it?" Harry wanted to know. "To the commander of a weather station?"

  "This base is rather more than that, Mr. Silver, as I'm sure you have deduced by now."

  Harry was nodding slowly. "And you, as its commanding officer, have more responsibility than shows on the surface. Probably more rank, too."

  "Be that as it may," the commander said. And Marut, sitting in his corner, raised his head in mute surprise to look at her, as if he had just sighted some new obstacle in his path.

  "All right," said Harry Silver, and looked at them both. His voice took on a stubborn tone. "Which brings me around again to my original question, which I asked about half an hour ago. You've been explaining all around the edges, but we haven't got to it yet-how do we expect to find this super-smart piece of hardware just waiting for us somewhere? Don't tell me we've got a spy at enemy headquarters."

  The commander sighed. "Has your brain been fitted with a deathdream, Mr. Silver?"

  "Hell, no."

  "Therefore it would be a bad idea for you to carry the answer to that question-even assuming that I could give it to you. People who know certain things should not go into combat, into situations where there is a real risk of being captured. Even if you did have a means of instant suicide available, it's far from certain that you could activate it before interrogation began. The berserkers have known all about our deathdreams for some time."

  "Ah," said Harry after a moment.

  "That is why we are particularly worried," she added, "about the prisoners who were apparently taken from several task-force ships. Some of the people aboard those ships evidently had information that should not have been carried into combat."

  "Those particular people," said the captain, "were to have disembarked here, stayed on Hyperborea."

  "But they didn't," Harry observed. "Well, Captain? What do you think about it? Wouldn't you like to know how headquarters thinks it knows where Shiva can be found?"

  "No." Marut was shaking his head calmly. "I have my orders." After a moment, he added: "When it comes to classified information, none of us should know anything beyond what we absolutely need to do our jobs."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  Commander Normandy went on with her briefing. If the unknown sources on which Solarian intelligence depended were correct, Shiva was scheduled to arrive, eight days from now, at the berserker base-once a Solarian colony-whose code name was Summerland, and which lay at no great distance, as interstellar space was measured, from Hyperborea. Only about eight hours of superluminal flight. No doubt the code name, Summerland, had become wildly inappropriate since the berserkers moved in, but that had been the name of the human colony and everyone stubbornly refused to change it. Since it had been overrun, it was a good bet that nothing of even the inanimate works of humanity survived there.

  "Summerland," said Harry Silver in a muted voice, and for the moment, he had no more to say.

  "I understand you know the place quite well?" the commander asked.

  "Yeah. Lived there for a while."

&
nbsp; "You were aware that several years ago, it became a berserker base?"

  "I have heard that, yes."

  "Well, that's our interception point. Where Shiva's going to be."

  "If you really know that much, where is it at this moment? Somewhere in this sector?"

  "Mr. Silver, you will get no answer from me to any further questions on the subject."

  When the conference in the commander's office broke up, Harry went to get something to eat. The mess hall was small but reasonably cheerful, and there were promising aromas in the air.

  There was Sergeant Gauhati. Harry determined to avoid eye contact and to sit down somewhere else. The room looked like it could seat around forty or fifty people with plenty of elbow space. Officers tended to congregate on one side, enlisted spacers on the other, but all ranks evidently shared the same mess here. And unless there was another food-service facility, one the visitor hadn't seen as yet, the total number of people on this base must be rather small.

  He carried his tray to a small table, where he sat down alone, not looking for companionship. He had plenty to think over. By now, Harry was firmly convinced that he himself was the only civilian on the planetoid. None of the casual talk he overheard even came close to bringing up anything that sounded like a military secret. He was wishing now that he'd kept his mouth shut and hadn't asked to hear any.

  He couldn't quite identify the entree on the day's special, and hadn't bothered reading the posted menu, but the stuff passed the taste test. It gave a convincing imitation, at least, of lean animal protein and a promise of satisfying the appetite, instead of simply killing it.

  Someone was standing in front of Harry, and he looked up, startled. Marut, holding a tray a little awkwardly in his one good hand, asked: "Mind if I join you?"

  "Help yourself."

  The captain sat down. "Just had word from the officer in charge of docks and repairs here. I am definitely down to one destroyer, the other isn't salvageable."

  "Does this change your plans?"

  "Not at all. I propose to go on, with whatever force I can muster, and achieve the interception at the scheduled time and place."

  Harry leaned forward across the little table. "Look-let me say it one more time. Assume for the moment that you do know where and when to catch up with Shiva. When they planned your mission on Port Diamond, they assigned half a dozen tough ships to do the job. Seems to me that to try it with half your original strength, or less, will simply be throwing human lives away."

  Marut's voice stayed quiet, but tension was building in it. "You look, Silver-we have no other option. And if your achievements as a combat pilot are really as good as the record indicates, I can't imagine why you don't see that. I assume that in spite of your griping, you're coming with us? Or would you choose to sit here in safety?"

  "Safety, huh?" Harry pulled thoughtfully at the lobe of his left ear. "I expect the commander will get around to making the big choice for me if she doesn't like the way I decide things on my own. Tell me, Captain, just out of curiosity, exactly what tactics did your original plan call for?"

  "That's classified information, and furthermore, I see no point in going into it now."

  "You're probably right. Might be dangerous to tell me anything classified. Anyway, I suppose you'll have to work out a new plan now?"

  "No doubt I will. We will. But it hasn't been done yet."

  The rest of the meal passed mainly in silence.

  On leaving the mess hall, Harry went to his cabin to get some sleep. As he kicked off his boots and shed his coverall, the narrow bed looked very good.

  Cursed with a fine imagination, Harry, as he stretched out and called for darkness in his room, could readily picture what Summerland must look like now. The clouds of dust and vapor, raised by the berserkers' cleansing process, must have thinned enough to let a little sunlight into the lifeless lower atmosphere.

  So it was no surprise to Harry that when sleep came, Summerland whirled through space before him in a system where a greenish sun cast a green light on everything.

  Dreaming, he drifted closer, and for a time, everything on the world before him was, impossibly, just as he remembered it. And although his waking vision had never beheld Becky Sharp anywhere near that system, he knew in his dream that she was somewhere there, just out of sight…

  FIVE

  Early on his second day aboard the base, Harry renewed his assurances to the commander that she could have his ship, at the standard rate of compensation, the money to be put into his hands within thirty standard days. How far beyond this donation his willing cooperation was going to extend, he wasn't sure just yet. He'd tell them all he could remember about Summerland, even though that wasn't a subject he wanted to think about just now. As to whether he'd volunteer to drive some kind of ship in Marut's planned action-he didn't absolutely refuse. But right now, Harry's inclination was not to go along. As part of the deal, however, he would get his suit on right away, head back out to his ship and reconfigure the downlock codes, any, way she wanted them.

  Legally, the commander's emergency powers allowed her to draft him, or just about anyone else, into the Space Force for the duration of an emergency as nasty as the evidence suggested this one was shaping up to be-but as a practical matter, Harry wasn't worried about having his arm twisted. Not yet. Marut would probably prefer to get his revenge on Shiva without the help of any damned reluctant civilians-even if he did have to take their ships.

  On the evidence Harry'd heard so far, even when admitting the importance of the objective, the mission Marut was proposing sounded like a sure bet for compounding the disaster of the ambush. Harry still couldn't understand what made them think they knew where Shiva was going to be. Well, lucky for them if they were wrong about it.

  The commander didn't push him when he showed reluctance. Instead-and this made him wary-she sweetly expressed her appreciation of Silver's newly patriotic and cooperative attitude, at least with regard to his ship.

  Then she suggested-firmly, in the way of commanding officers everywhere-that since their deadline for launching toward Summerland was still six days away, it would be a good idea to fit the Witch with some new hardware. For example, a c-plus cannon. She just happened to have a spare one-the new, compact, relatively low-mass model-sitting in the arsenal. A likely piece of spare equipment for your typical weather station. Sure. The Witch was not really built to be a fighting ship, but she was versatile, and if her armaments could be beefed up according to Commander Normandy's specifications, and with a pilot like Harry in the left seat, she might be almost a match for a regular destroyer.

  Harry wasn't familiar with that particular model of weapon, and thought that tacking one on his small ship sounded a little ambitious, but he made no protest. He'd already, in his own mind, said good-bye to the Witch. She was a good vessel, but there were a lot of other good ones around. He'd stand by to cooperate with the techs.

  And now there was time for a little personal discussion.

  After briefly harking back to their meeting of fifteen years ago, Harry asked: "How long've you been here, Claire?"

  Claire Normandy, not reacting one way or another to the familiarity, said she had now been on station here for a little more than two standard years-minus a couple of months of leave.

  Harry came back to business. "The captain seems hell-bent on going on with this mission, whether I sign up to go with him or not."

  "Yes, he is."

  "Not my business, really-or it wouldn't be if he wasn't taking my ship-but do you think that's a good idea? My ship and your two little patrol boats aren't going to work as replacement for three battle cruisers and one destroyer."

  "It may not be a good idea, Mr. Silver. But so far, it's the best we have."

  From time to time, Marut grabbed a little sleep, ate something, had his wound looked at by a medic-it wouldn't do, Harry supposed, not to be in top shape when Shiva blasted him into atoms-and soon plunged back into the effort of improvising
his new command.

  The majority of survivors naturally seemed somewhat discouraged. Tirelessly, the captain kept exhorting: "We're not beaten yet, people."

  In his spare moments, Captain Marut tried to keep up the morale of his surviving troops. Once or twice he visited the critically wounded, silently regarding their mangled and often unconscious forms as they lay in the two rows of medirobots that were jammed next to one other in the small, overloaded base hospital.

  One or two of these people caught some of Marut's fervor and assured the captain that they were ready to press on with the mission-or they would be when the deadline for liftoff arrived. Harry, listening to a secondhand version of what was said, couldn't tell if the crew were really that gung ho or if they were simply humoring their commanding officer in hopes he'd soon return to his senses.

  Among the task-force crews, casualties to qualified pilots had unfortunately been even heavier than to the other specialists.

  Gradually, Marut revealed the tactics that he meant to use. He wanted to arrive at the Summerland system with his makeshift force no more than a couple of hours ahead of Shiva and its escort, and take over the berserker station there.

  When another officer pointed out that any berserker base was bound to have powerful defensive weapons, the captain said he hoped to seize control of that armament and use it to blast the machines carrying and escorting Shiva as they approached.

  The officer protested: "Nothing of that kind has ever-"

  "Been attempted. I quite realize that. So the enemy will have no reason to expect it now. We'll have an advantage of surprise."

  One way to look at it, thought Harry, was that the captain's chief purpose in life had now become revenge on an enemy that had slaughtered his comrades.

  Some of the other ways of looking at it were no better. Harry wondered if maybe it griped the captain even worse that a disaster like this could abort his career.