Berserker Base Page 7

  All four looked at Lars with interest as he approached, Naxos remarked: "We were wondering about you. The rest of us have been back here for some time."

  "It was something of an experience. Give me a drink."

  As be drank water, and picked up some food from the tray where the machines always left if, Lars listened to the others talk. The berserker apparently had no objection to its living tools talking freely among themselves about what they had experienced.

  The others were reporting fragmentary success at best, and some of them reported almost total failure.

  If occurred to Lars as he listened that his team might well have been the most successful.

  "How'd you do?" someone asked him finally.

  He could think of no reason why he shouldn't tell them the truth. He felt sure that everything about the Gracias-Temple episode was already known to the berserker. He said: "Quite well, I think, compared to what you've told me."

  He related fee essentials of the story of Gracias and Temple. His fellow captives were allowed to share in that distant and perhaps isolated human victory. Nothing happened to interfere with Lars's felling, The great machine that held them did not care that they rejoiced over the defeat of one of its units. Perhaps, Lars decided, it computed that its prisoners would be more useful to it if they were allowed to hear something to make their spirits rise.

  When Lars had finished his narrative, Dorothy took the floor. She detailed, as if reluctantly, a human defeat, the story of a squadron of ships wiped out by the berserker unit that her mental vision, allied with that of her Carmpan partner had been forced to follow. The spirits of the four people listening were dampened somewhat.

  Again there was no reason to think that their reaction mattered to their captor, which seemed to care nothing about what they said. Lars had the strong impression now that it was simply allowing reasonable periods of mutual contact as being conducive to the life-units' mental stability.

  He voiced this thought.

  Nicholas Opava suggested: "Or maybe… it wants us to tell things to each other that it couldn't get out of us with its probe. So it can hear them."

  The five people looked at each other, while the words hung in the air. Then the group broke up, with nothing else said beyond a few muttered routine complaints on hunger and fatigue.

  The group was next summoned to the mind-machines a few hours later. Lars thought he had the same Carmpan as a partner this time, but he could not be sure. Not even when the flow of mental pictures started.

  WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

  "You're going up," Gemma said.

  Pat yanked his boot on. "Yes."

  "Even when you know how the Cotabote feel about it?"

  "I do not know how they feel. About this or anything else. Maybe you can tell me. You're the big expert on the Cotabote. How do they feel? If they feel. Which I doubt." He pulled on his boot, which had shrunk in the continual damp of Botea. He wrenched it over his ankle and stamped down hard.

  "You don't even try to get along with them!" Gemma said angrily. She hadn't come in from the doorway. She was standing there with the hood of her shirt thrown back so he could see her beautiful black hair, her beautiful black skin, her beautiful, beautiful face. He ought to file a protest like the Cotabote were always doing, a protest against her looking so damn beautiful all the time.

  "Get along with them?" he shouted. "You spend all your time trying to get along, with them and where does if get you?"

  "It wouldn't kill you to put it off a week. You said if was routine. Is there something you're not telling me?"

  "It is routine," Pat said. "You're starting to sound like the Cotabote. I have to do an orbital survey of the diamond mines once every six weeks. Adamant says so. And your Cotabote are so worried about my worms digging up the middle of their village, they should be glad I'm keeping tabs on them."

  He did need to check on the orbiting infrascopes that kept an eye on the mechanical digger worms and their movements through the coal, but that wasn't why he'd kicked the date up a few days. He'd gotten a transmission from Adamant that a berserker had wiped out a settlement-planet called Polara. It was the second report on a berserker in three months, and it had been only two weeks later than the transmission date, which meant Adamant had considered the information important enough to it by ship at least as far as Candlestone, which was the closest relay. Adamant hadn't considered it important enough to ship it the whole way, or maybe the operator at Candlestone had made that decision, but Pat chose to take that as a hopeful sign that Adamant didn't consider the berserker to be anywhere in the neighborhood. If they thought it was, they would have raced to Botea with a navy. After all, they had to protect all those IIIB diamonds the worms were digging out of Botea's coal deposits. Still, he appreciated the warning, and the masses of general data on berserkers that had accompanied the transmissions, and he intended to go up and check on the orbital defenses, Cotabote or no Cotabote.

  "It's only been thirty-five days since your last survey," Gemma said. "The Cotabote say you're up to something. They want me to file a protest."

  "So what else is new?" he said. "Go right ahead." He gestured toward the computer. "What are they worried about this time? Their smash crop?"

  "No," she said. She sat down in front of the voice-terminal. "They say the harpy hurts the nematej."

  "The nematej?" Pat said. He stamped his foot into his boot and stood up. "What exactly could I do to it that could possibly make it worse than it is already?"

  "They say the last time you did an orbital survey it started to smell funny." She glared at him, as if daring him to laugh.

  He was too amazed to laugh. "Nematej already smells like vomit, for God's sake," he said. "It's got thorns everywhere, even on its flowers, and the last time I looked it was choking off their stinking smash crop." He shook his head. "They're incredible, you know that? I've been here two years, and they still come up with new ways to make my life miserable."

  "What about your telling them your planet-range ship is called a harpy?" she said. "You're as bad as they are."

  "Now that," Pal said, "is going too far. I am not as bad as the Cotabote."

  "All right, you're not," Gemma said. "But you do try to antagonize them. If you could just treat them like human beings.'"

  "They are not human beings. I don't care what the ICLU says. They're some kind of alien, whose sole mission in the universe is to drive people crazy."

  "You're being ridiculous," Gemma said. "You know perfectly well they emigrated from Triage and before that from…"

  "Emigrated, my foot. They were probably thrown off every planet they tried to settle, They…"

  Gemma held the voice-terminal out to him. "You have to give me access to the computer," she said stiffly.

  He yanked it out of her hand. "Access for Gemenca Bahazi, ICLU rep," he said, and handed it back to her. "Go ahead, file protest number five thousand."

  "I will," she said. "I want to file a protest to Adamant Fossil Fuel and Diamond Chip Corporation on behalf of the Cotabote," she told the computer.

  "Sure thing, sweetheart," the computer said.

  Gemma scowled at Pat.

  "How many protests is this ayway?" Pat said. "A million? Two million?"

  "Two hundred and eighty-one," Gemma said.

  "This will be Protest Number Two Hundred Eighty-three, darling," the computer said. "What title do you wish to give this protest, you cute thing?"

  "Title it: Refusal to Cooperate," Gemma said grimly.

  Pat put on his flight shortcoat, stuck a portable voice-terminal in the pocket, and then stood and watched Gemma at the terminal. She had stopped talking and was frowning. Even frowning, she was beautiful, which was good because she was usually frowning at him. He told himself it was because an ICLU natives representative was not supposed to smile at the Adamant engineer who was mining the planet out from under those natives, especially with the Cotabote on her neck all the time. When he wasn't furious with her, h
e felt sorry for her, having to live in the Cotabote village and put up with them twenty-six hours a day.

  "Give me a listing of all the protests filed this month," she said, and frowned at the screen some more.

  "What's the matter?" Pat said. "You lose a protest?"

  "No," she said, "I've got an extra one. You've been locking the door when you leave the office, haven't you?"

  "I'm surprised you didn't accuse me of erasing a protest. Yes, of course, I lock it. It's keyed to my voice. So's the computer. You probably just forgot one. Admit it. I do that to you."

  "Do what?"

  "Make you forget what you're doing. You're crazy about me. You just won't admit it."

  "Read me the titles of those protests," she said. "Without any 'sweethearts,' please."

  "If that's the way you want it, honey," the computer said. "Refusal to Cooperate, Refusal to Cooperate, Endangering Lives, Refusal to Cooperate, Threatening the Cotabote, Refusal…"

  Patrick leaned down and said, "Shut up," into the voice-terminal.

  "Come with me," he said.

  "What?" she said, and looked up at him, still frowning.

  "Come up in the harpy with me."

  "I can't," she said. "The Cotabote wouldn't like it."

  "Of course they wouldn't like it. When do they ever like anything? Come anyway."

  "But they already think…" she said, and stopped. She turned her head away. Pat bent closer.

  "Is this how you talk Devil out of his orbital survey?" a suddenly present Scamballah asked. "I sent you here to file a protest, not to flirt with the Adamant representative. I've told you over and over again he's just waiting for a chance to vile you."

  As if they weren't belligerent, spiteful, and evil-minded, the Cotabote were also sneaky, and Scamballah was the worst. Pat called her Scumbag the day she started calling him Devil, but he wished he'd named her Skulk. She had come up the steps to the office on the outside of the railing so she wouldn't be seen and had been clinging there next to the door for who knows how long. Now she climbed over it and came into the office with her youngest daughter, shaking a spongy-looking finger at Gemma.

  "I'm filing the protest, Scambalah," Gemma said.

  "Oh, yes, you're filing it," she said, shaking her mushroom-colored finger right in Gemma's face. Gemma ought to reach over and bite it off, Pat thought. "I told you to find out what he was up to, but did you? Oh, no. You're filing a protest. And while you're sitting there he's walking out the door. Did you tell him it was ruining the nematej?"

  Scumbag's daughter had come over to stand by Gemma. She slack her finger in her mouth and then used it to draw on the terminal screen.

  "Gemma told me," Pat said. "I thought the Cotabote considered the nematej a noxious weed.''

  "I wanna picture," Scumbag's daughter whined. "Make her make a picture." She stomped her feet. "I wanna picture now."

  Gemma typed up a picture, apparently not trusting her own voice to ask the computer anything.

  "Not that picture!" she wailed.. "I want a different picture!"

  "The Cotabote will decide what is and is not a weed, and not you," Scamballah said. "You, Devil, are only the Adamant engineer. In our contract, it states clearly that you will not harm our crops or our village."

  The Cotabote loved quoting their beloved contract, which Pat had never seen. He had heard'it was a doozy, though. Scumbag's daughter began punching buttons wildly on the computer keyboard.

  "I haven't hurt your crops or your village, and I haven't done anything to the nematej either. Yet."

  "A threat!" Scamballah shrieked. "He threatened me. You heard that, Gemenca. He threatened me. File a protest!"

  He wondered exactly how she was supposed to do that with that imbecilie brat beating the keyboard senseless.

  "Scamballah," Gemma said calmly. "I'm sure he didn't mean…"

  "That's right. Take his side. I knew he'd corrupt you. We forbid the orbital survey. Tell him that, Gemenca." She waved an arm at Gemma. "You're our representative. Tell him."

  "I have told him…" Gemma began.

  "And I told her to keep her nose out of Adamant's business," Pat said. He snatched up his acceleration helmet. "She's not going with me, and that's final."

  Scamballah whirled to glare at Gemma. "You weren't supposed to tell him you were going with him. Oh, I knew I shouldn't let you come alone. I've seen the way you look at him! You wanted to be alone with him, didn't you? Filthy! Filthy!"

  Scamballah's daughter had given up on the keyboard and was standing on the computer. She pulled down a mine mask from the wall. Pat took it away from her.

  "Alone with me? Ha. She wanted to spy on my orbital survey, and I said, over my dead body."

  Scamballah's daughter wailed.

  "You will take her!" Scumbag shrieked. "I say you will! We'll file a protest."

  "Scamballah," Gemma said. "Don't listen to him. He's…"

  Scumbag's daughter was reaching for the energy rifles on the wall above the masks.

  "I'm going," Pat said. "You can file your protest when I get back." He picked up the command core to the harpy and the extra helmet, and opened the door. "Everybody out. Now."

  "You can't force us out of your office!" Scumbag said, but she grabbed her daughter by the neck and dragged her down the steps, still bellowing.

  Gemma was still standing by the computer.

  "You, too," he said, and handed her the helmet. She wouldn't take it. She walked past him, out the door, and down the steps.

  Pat shut the door and stomped out to the ramp of the harpy, nearly tripping over a heap of smash leaves and nematej branches the Cotabote had left as offerings. They were either terrified of or fascinated by machines, Pat had not been able to figure out which, and were constantly leaving them presents or sacrifices. Probably not sacrifices, since he felt human sacrifice would be more in line with the way the Cotabote thought, which, considering Scamballah's daughter, might not be a half bad idea.

  He turned at the top of the ramp, trying to gauge if Gemma was close enough to grab. She was. "I won't take her, Scumbag, and that's final," he said.

  "You will or I'll tear up our contract!"

  Pat tried to look like that had made an impression on him. "Get in," he said gruffly, and yanked Gemma up and into the harpy.

  "Shut the door," he told the computer. The ramp retracted and the door slid shut. Pat tossed Gemma her helmet and went forward to insert the command core into the harpy's drive computer. Scamballah started banging on the door.

  "Hurry,"' Gemma said, pulling on a flightcoat.

  Pat looked up at her in surprise. "What did you say?"

  "Nothing," she said.

  "Strap yourself in," he said, and slid into the pilot's seat. "We're going up fast."

  He hit the ground-jets hard. Scumbag and her daughter backed up to a respectful distance. He eased the harpy out of the clearing and took her straight up.

  There was a lot of junk orbiting Botea, all of it Adamant's: the infrascopes, mappers, and geos for the mines, the big relay that sent Gemma's protests plodding across the Galaxy to Candlestone and then on to Adamant, and the various defense satellites. Botea had two orbital atomic guns and assorted 15-T and 8-T exploders, all aimed at anybody who tried to steal Botea's precious IIIB diamonds. The selectively conductive crystals, the only thing kilolayered computer chips could be made from, were found on other planets, but always halfway to the core and in nearly diamond-hard newkimberlite deposits. On Botea they were practically lying in heaps on the ground. Well, not quite, but only a little way down in veins of soft yellow coal, and nothing standing in the way of getting them out except some soft deposits of coal the worms could chew their way through. And of course the Cotabote. The planet's defenses were really intended for pirates or small independent fighters, not an armored arsenal like a berserker was supposed to be, but at least they were there.

  Pat stayed clear of the mine field of satellites and set a lower orbit that would keep him close
enough to do visuals on everything without putting him on a collision course. He had taken off far too fast, which meant he had a lot of correcting to do, and it was a good fifteen minutes before he and the computer got the harpy into the orbit he wanted. He told the computer to run a check on all defense satellites with orders for the computer to tell him when the atomic gun came into line-of-sight, and hoped Gemma wouldn't realize that wasn't part of his usual routine.

  She had taken off her acceleration helmet and was hunched forward so she could see Botea out the tiny forward viewport.

  "It's pretty, isn't it?" he said. Botea was covered with clouds, which was good because the swamps and smash fields were a nasty green even from this distance. At least you couldn't smell them up here, Pat thought. "Aren't you glad I suggested you come with me?"

  "Suggested?" she said, trying to get out of her straps. "You practically kidnapped me!"

  "Kidnapped you?" he said. He unhooked his straps and latched onto one of the overhead skyhooks: "All I did was use a little reverse psychology on old Scumbag."

  "You shouldn't call her that. She'll probably file a protest."

  "Then I'll file one over her calling me Devil. And don't tell me she can't pronounce it. She knows exactly what she's doing."

  Gemma still didn't have her straps free. "You still shouldn't antagonize them. Adamant could…"

  "Could what?" he said. He bent over to help her with her straps. "They haven't answered any of the Cotabote's two hundred and eighty-three protests in over two years, have they?"

  "Two hundred and eighty-one," Gemma, said, and frowned again. Pat got her straps unhooked, and she drifted straight into his arms. He put his free hand around her waist.

  "Well, well, so Scumbag was right," he said. "You were just waiting for your chance to be alone with me."

  "The Cotabote think…" she said, and he waited for her to wriggle out of his arms, but she didn't. She suddenly smiled al him. "You really handled the whole thing very well. Maybe you should be the ICLU representative. You have a real gift for making people do what you want."