Berserker's Star Page 6

  Harry was looking at him.

  Not interpreting the look correctly, the man just babbled on. “There’s a deal coming up on Maracanda. A big drug deal, the biggest ever, and we’ll cut you in. That’s why we want your ship. It needs a ship like yours, one that’s not too big.”

  “If you used too big a ship, I suppose it would just get in the way.”

  The man was shaking his head. “You don’t understand, Silver. Don’t understand about that place, Maracanda, what it’s like. You don’t have the first idea. And the woman in there?”

  Harry had been gazing out the port, through which he could just see part of his own ship’s unmoving hull. He turned his head back. “What about her?”

  “It’s all bullshit about her looking for her husband. She is in on it, too, the big deal, the special stuff. She came out with us from Maracanda. The three of us were all sent out to get a ship, whatever means we had to use.”

  It sounded very confused, a long way from believable. But real life often gave that impression. Harry’s voice dropped a little lower. “To get my ship?”

  “No. No! Any ship, man. It just has to be about the size of yours.” The man gestured, with arms that were starting to regain a passable degree of function.

  Harry watched him warily. “You’re saying there’s no Alan Gunnlod?”

  “There is no bloody fucking Alan. And Gunnlod’s not her real name. I tell you that’s all bullshit. Redpath and me, we were just gonna take your ship. But if you leave us here, that woman will kill you to get it. She’s one mean bitch.”

  “She was trying to stop you.”

  The man laughed bitterly. “You had us stopped—she must have figured that you would. She’s smart, all right. You’re smart, too, but she’s one mean bitch!”

  Harry took another step back. “You’re one mean storyteller.”

  The other man chimed in. “All right, give her a chance, turn your back on her, see what happens. Pretty soon you’ll be dead, she’ll have your ship. Or have you doing what she wants.”

  And the first again: “Man, I swear by all the gods—lock me in that closet again, but take me somewhere where I can live!”

  Harry surveyed the pair of them with distaste. “One thing you’re both right about—my deprived status regarding drugs. Good old stuff, marvelous shit, to put in my veins. How could I miss out on that glorious experience?”

  He smacked his lips inside his helmet, thinking how good a shot of scotch was going to taste, once things settled down. He promised himself he’d make it a double. “My trouble is, I’ve led a sheltered life. Well, goodbye, gentlemen.”

  One of them gave a despairing cry: “I wouldn’t treat an animal this way!”

  “Neither would I.”

  At the last moment, just as Harry had half expected, the two of them came tottering on stiffened legs, making a despairing, hopeless attempt to rush him, just as he was about to close the door on them.

  Harry saw no point in getting really rough. Not at this stage. He caught the front of each lurching body with one of his servo-powered arms and shoved the stumbling pair away, just hard enough. The push sent them reeling and falling in the feeble gravity, far enough away to give Harry time to get out through the hatch and close it after him, abruptly cutting off their last despairing yells.

  Lily had offered no advice and no suggestions while he was disposing of her erstwhile fellow passengers. He kept a sort of watch on her from the corner of his eye. He had fixed things so that even while he had been busy on the station, his helmet communicator kept projecting on a corner of his faceplate a small view of the Witch’s control room, with her inside. But she offered neither help nor hindrance. Briefly Harry wondered if she, too, might be praying to Malakó.

  When he came back through the mated airlocks into the control room again and set about the brief routine of undocking, Lily was sitting just where he’d left her.

  She greeted him brightly enough. “So we are rid of them?”

  With separation from the station complete, Harry heaved a sigh of relief, and started the process of disassembling his suit, which began with loosening certain interior fasteners. “We are. If great Malakó is kind, maybe the world at large won’t have to lay eyes on them again.”

  Lily shifted her position, as if she found her chair uncomfortable. “Speaking of laying eyes, why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Was I staring? Sorry.”

  Lily shook her head. After a while she said: “It occurred to me that you must have decided to trust me, for you left me all alone on your ship, with access to the controls.”

  “Yeah. So I did.”

  “How did you know I wouldn’t steal your Witch?”

  Harry seemed to find something about that remark amusing. “I couldn’t imagine you doing anything like that. Why would you?”

  “Why? Your ship must be very valuable, Mr. Silver. Obviously there are people who want it. But you didn’t seem to worry that I would just drive it away and leave you marooned with my— traveling companions, as you called them?”

  “Call me Harry. I had faith in you, kid.” Harry smiled, easing off his helmet, drawing a deep breath. He sighed with relief, breathing good, familiar, well-filtered and processed shipboard air.

  “Call me Lily, then. What was it you couldn’t imagine—my having pilot skills, or my wanting to take over your ship?”

  He shook his head. Chuckled a little, as if at some joke that he did not intend to share. “What I couldn’t imagine, Lily, was you being dim enough to try anything of the kind, having seen what happened to contestants number one and two. You haven’t learned all my secrets yet.”

  Lily smiled. “Perhaps you have not yet learned all of mine.”

  “That is quite possible.”

  “Whatever may happen on the remainder of this journey, Harry, I do not believe that either of us will find it dull.”

  He looked at her and gave it some thought before he answered. “Amen to that.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The autopilot was nursing the Witch back out toward the periphery of the Thisworld system, seeking a lane of normal spacetime sufficiently empty of particles and gravity to furnish a good, safe springboard for a c-plus jump. If Harry had melded his mind into the thoughtware and applied his judgment, the process would doubtless have gone a little faster, but it seemed to him that he had earned a rest.

  There had been silence in the cabin for a couple of minutes, not even a background hum of anything at all, when Lily spoke up suddenly, asking if they could have some music.

  “Sure. Probably the Witch has got a hymn to Malakó somewhere in storage.”

  “All right. But no, on second thought, make it something totally secular. I’ll probably be hearing more hymns than I can stand after I catch up with Alan.”

  ” ‘Secular’ covers a lot of territory.”

  “I’ll leave the choice up to you. Or to your Witch.”

  Harry felt safe in leaving the choice of music up to his ship, which by this time knew pretty well what he liked and what he didn’t. The result this time seemed to him satisfactory, as usual.

  With a light tune playing in the background, the Witch’s pleasant voice cut in, providing some information on the music— not singing it. Once Harry had told her that recorded human voices did a much better job of that.

  But then the voice just cut off in midsyllable, and in the same instant the music stopped in midnote.

  A second later, Lily looked up, mildly startled.

  Harry didn’t look up. He was already gazing intently at the holostage that stood beside his pilot’s chair. His moment of surprise had come in silence, a few seconds earlier.

  Lily looked at Harry, then back at the display, the little stage on its pedestal positioned almost between them. She shifted her position in her chair. There was something on the stage that she had never noticed before.

  When she spoke, there was the start of a quaver in her voice.

  “Th
at little bright red image. Is that another ship, or—”

  Harry didn’t respond, or move, until he had spent another fifteen seconds steadily watching the little image. When he answered, the best he could find to tell Lily was: “No, it’s not a ship. It’s just what you’re afraid it is.”

  The young woman let out a preliminary kind of gasp, as if she might be going to scream. But quickly she got herself under control and huddled silent in her chair.

  “It’s not going away,” Harry added in a calm voice. “Which I take to mean it’s probably spotted us.”

  Since the moment when the berserker had appeared, Harry had been very busy doing several things. Among his other activities was a steady and methodical swearing, at the subvocal level, at the small blur on the holostage. That served to relieve his feelings, while the more practical part of his mind was riffling thoughtware in a blur, much faster than a cardsharp’s fingers.

  By all the tests of logic and technology, the cancerous little blur that had just shown up on his stage could hardly be anything but a berserker machine—but at least, thank all the gods of all the planets, there was only one of them.

  “Can’t we jump?” Lily was asking, her voice gone up in pitch. “Get out of here?”

  “If we tried to jump right here and now, we’d kill ourselves.” By interstellar standards this region on the outskirts of a system was a virtual dustbin, space choked with deadly dust and gas, maybe as much as a hundred trillionth of the density of the air inside a spaceship’s cabin. A few more minutes, and he would have had the Witch in cleaner emptiness, then quickly into the comparative security of flightspace, where the likelihood of any enemy locating them would be enormously reduced. But there was no use crying or cursing about lost chances.

  As matters stood, they were just on the point of getting clear of the Thisworld system, and the berserker was no more than eighty thousand kilometers away, so optelectronic pulses could leap from the Witch’s hull to the enemy’s, then bounce back again, bringing information, in less than a second.

  Harry already had his ship well into a routine of evasive action, while at the same time working to increase their distance from the killer.

  Lily needed less than a minute to recover from her shock sufficiently to fasten herself into her chair, which, like Harry’s, had automatically changed its shape to become a true acceleration couch. Its built-in pads and extra forcefields might or might not be enough to do her some good if the ship’s artificial gravity should stutter during the stressful maneuvers that now seemed inevitable.

  As soon as Harry had a moment free of intense mental concentration, he gave Lily what he hoped was a reassuring grin and made his voice relaxed and careful.

  “That object hanging just above your right ear is a gunner’s helmet, and it’s connected to a couple of modest weapons we have that might be useful. But don’t put on the helmet unless you’ve had some training. If the answer’s no, for God’s sake tell me now. We’re at a point where one good lie on your part will probably kill us both.”

  “No gunnery training, no.” The young woman put up rigid fingers and thrust the helmet farther away. “I did go to pilots’ school for six weeks—and I was pretty good. That was where I met Alan. At one point we were both going to be professional spacers.”

  “But you can’t do gunnery.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s all right, we’ll manage.” Harry nodded, smiling. “As long as I know.” Wishing he could feel as confident as he was trying to sound, Harry mentally flipped the thoughtware switches that brought the Witch’s nominal armament, such as it was, under the pilot’s control.

  He could tell from the berserker’s darting movements on the stage that it had certainly detected the Witch’s presence and was coming after them. The damned thing seemed to be gaining ground with every heartbeat of its prey; yes, it was small, thought Harry, almost certainly not as big as the Witch, but equipped with a powerful drive. Even at this distance, he thought he could tell that it had a different shape than any spacecraft ever fashioned by Earth-descended humanity.

  How soon would there come a reasonable opportunity to jump for flightspace? Studying the configuration of the clouds around him, it seemed to Harry that the course he had begun to follow toward Maracanda was taking them in the wrong direction, but how could he have known? While the artificial gravity held everything rock steady inside the hull, the Witch was speeding, lurching around the fringe of some kind of nebula. They were heading almost straight away from the berserker, and space around them was thickening with each second of their flight, growing dense enough with dirt and gas to make direct superluminal jumping virtually suicidal.

  Bad luck.

  Or was it luck? Had the machine already scouted out this territory? Was it deliberately maneuvering to drive them into a zone where the overtaking and killing would be easier?

  The berserker was closer now, and the Witch’s sensors could form a clearer image of it. According to what Harry’s instruments were trying to tell him, the killer machine was actually smaller than his ship. There might be some advantage to the human side in that, but there was a downside, too—the smaller object could be driven faster in this gassy, dusty environment. And it needed to waste no space or energy on lugging along a peaceful cargo or keeping a human crew alive.

  Harry considered jettisoning his valuable freight, but the benefit would be minimal; and right now carrying the extra load was less dangerous than risking even a millisecond of distraction.

  The range was getting so short that it was even possible to make out some details of the enemy’s shape—not that it mattered very much. On one end there stuck out a protrusion like the head of a rooster, holding some kind of crossbar in its beak. Just what the significance of that might be, Harry could not guess. A beam weapon blasted from the enemy, flicking after his ship at the speed of light.

  The Witch’s shields, which Harry was particularly proud of, glowed fiercely for a moment, managing to protect the ship and its passengers from the berserker’s weapons. The only effect perceptible inside the cabin was a strange sound that reverberated through shields and metal, like a handful of fine gravel tossed against a thick window.

  Lily stiffened in her chair. “What was that?”

  “Nothing to worry about, no harm done.” Harry’s words were slow, almost drawling—trying to make things as easy as possible on his passenger’s nerves. “I’ll slug him back.”

  It was worth a try. But the berserker’s shields were also, as expected, very tough, and the modest projector on Harry’s ship could do it no harm. Dust and gas in the berserker’s vicinity flared into incandescence, but that was all.

  There followed a brisk exchange of missiles, also ending in a scoreless draw, and subjecting the two humans to nothing worse than one more strange noise.

  Lily had begun making her own peculiar noises; on a merely human scale, they sounded insignificant. Harry didn’t look at her. He wasn’t far from the stage of making strange little noises himself.

  The Witch wasn’t going to be able to outrun this killer in normal space, that was growing discouragingly obvious. What worried Harry most immediately was missiles at point-blank range, or an actual ramming.

  “Here the son of a bitch comes,” said Harry. Then he added rhetorically: “Hold on.”

  Within the next minute or so, at a range of only a few hundred kilometers, the berserker almost succeeded in snaring the Witch in a deadly forcefield entanglement. Harry’s thoughtware awoke a resonant image in his brain, drawn from some historical drama, or purely his imagination: that of a gray net hurtling, the weapon of some ancient gladiator.

  Meanwhile he had made a smooth and practical adjustment in the deployment of his ship’s own shielding fields, so that the attacker’s could find no purchase on them, and the harsh but immaterial net slid away. The human mind, when born with sufficient talent and properly trained, then melded with the right machines to make up
for the excruciating slowness of organic nerve signals, could under the right conditions outperform in the dance of combat any mere computer—most of the time.

  Harry kept twisting the Witch’s tail, doing his best to get out of there.

  For the time being, he had to give up even trying to strike back. He parried a missile, parried a projector beam, eluded another forcefield grab. Again a missile blast that did no harm. Under his skillful piloting, the Witch managed to slide away somehow, again and again, just in time.

  Over the next twenty seconds, he even managed to gain a little ground in the pursuit.

  The gain was illusory, for quickly he was losing ground again. The chase dragged out for a full minute, then another. Still he was constrained to hold his ship in normal space, working deeper and deeper into the brier patch of a gradually thickening dust cloud.

  Harry could feel how his whole body had gone wet with sweat over the last few minutes. He was also feeling intensely naked without his armor. He hated the computers that drove his enemy; they were secure in the certainty of their programming, they never had to sweat or tremble. The berserker’s brains, of course, did not hate him, or anyone. They just went ticking on about their job without feeling, without true thought. No animosity, just business. Planning the next move without fear or hate or triumph, dead things fixated on their wired-in purpose of creating yet more death.

  Contrary to what Harry had more or less expected, his passenger seemed to be gaining better and better control of herself as the strain dragged on.

  After several minutes she spoke again. “Harry?”

  “What?”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Talk to me. It might help. Just don’t worry if you don’t always get an answer.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “About things on Maracanda.”

  “Never been there.”

  “That’s right, you told me that. Then about something else. Anything but your favorite subject.”