Rogue Berserker Read online

  Belatedly Harry realized that he had packed nothing for this trip. It must have been in the back of his mind that Winston Cheng could be counted on to provide essentials, and beyond the essentials Harry did not care. He said: “I have no luggage.”

  Dorijen accepted that without comment. “I have been instructed to bid you welcome to the base. I am also instructed to ask you a few more questions.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There is the matter of your pay.”

  “Pay?” It suddenly occurred to Harry that he had never bothered to find out if he was being paid for this adventure or not. But from what he knew of Cheng, he had no doubt that something had been arranged.

  Dorijen named a figure. The scale turned out to be roughly twice as much as a good pilot would expect to get for ordinary work. Harry stood considering, unable to extract any further meaning from the numbers.

  After allowing him a few moments to think it over, the robot added: “Cash if you like, of course, sir. But cash will be of limited usefulness here on the base, unless you enjoy gambling. Alternatively, where would you like the money deposited?”

  This discussion seemed hellishly irrelevant. Just like the rest of Harry Silver’s own prolonged existence. Who in the Galaxy would he want to leave his money to? Harry said to the robot: “Just hang on to it for the time being. I’ll let you know.”

  “Very good, sir. With your permission, I will establish an account in your name with Cheng Enterprises, on which you may draw at any time.”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  Dorry had turned and seemed about to lead the way, but before they had actually got moving, a youngish woman of unquestionable humanity had appeared and began to introduce herself.

  “Mister Silver—”

  “What?”

  “I am Louise Newari, and I assist the Lady Masaharu.” Newari was dark-skinned and fine-boned, dressed in a simple utilitarian fashion that contrasted with the robot’s clothes.

  “Pleased to meet you, Louise.”

  “I understand you have suffered a loss very similar to that of Mister Winston Cheng.”

  Harry only nodded.

  The young woman nodded in sympathy, while she continued to watch him carefully. “Then all our sympathies must be with you as well.”

  “Thanks.”

  She had turned to the robot. “It’s all right, Dorry, I’ll show Mister Silver to his room.” And back to Harry. “Are you carrying any baggage?”

  As Harry watched the robot bow and turn away, it occurred to Harry, who had been vaguely expecting to go immediately to work, that yes, he was going to need a room. From time to time it would be necessary to sleep. He looked at his empty hands.

  He said: “Actually I didn’t bring anything. I came away in something of a hurry.”

  Louise Newari seemed to accept this without surprise. “Let me, or any of the support staff, know your needs.”

  Following his guide deeper into the base, through a corridor carved from rock by smoothly precise machines, he looked around him at simple living quarters that bore few traces of the luxury prevailing at the site of his first meeting with Winston Cheng. The hard rock walls were generally bare of any decoration. There were recyclers of respectable quality for food and air and water. The chilled rocks of the wanderworld contained substantial deposits of water ice, from which hydrogen, and therefore power, could be extracted in abundance.

  He grunted something, and followed his guide down the short corridor, until she stopped to open a door.

  “Satisfactory, Mister Silver? If not, other accommodations can readily be made available. We really have much more room here than we need.”

  Harry glanced inside, saw a narrow bed, single chair, small table, and in the far wall another half-open door with indications of standard plumbing beyond. Clearly the lights and air were working. Standard communications terminals stood waiting. He nodded. “It’ll do.”

  His escort began to tell him something about meal arrangements and schedules. She seemed on the point of saying something nice about the robot chef, when she suddenly stopped. “Or are you not a gourmet?”

  The idea of food, and certain faint smells wafting down the corridor reminded Harry that in recent days he had eaten very little. “You know … I think I used to be.”

  “Then shall we go to lunch?”

  “There’s a lot of hardware I’m going to have to look at, stuff I need to learn—but yeah, now’s as good a time as any.”

  * * *

  Lunch turned out to be totally devoid of the gourmet decadence that obtained at headquarters, but Harry’s stomach welcomed the first full meal he could recall having had in days. As soon as it was over, he informed Louise Newari that he was ready to get to work, and five minutes later was sitting in the base’s newly established operations room, being introduced to several more new colleagues, all of them looking at a composite telescopic image of the Gravel Pit’s inner system.

  Studying the image, Harry found it impossible to see anything that might help the newly established force accomplish their mission. The image was a smoothed-out blend of data from several observation posts, and it had been left deliberately indistinct in all the areas where information was still scanty. There was an uncomfortable amount of blurring in the image.

  “They’re somewhere in there,” he mused aloud.

  A gaunt, balding man of indeterminate age had appeared at Harry’s side, and offered a comment. “It seems they must be. If all of our suppositions can hold water. You’d be Harry Silver. Sorry about your loss. Call me Doc, I’m on your assault team too.”

  * * *

  The first order of business for the expedition’s planners was to discover exactly where within the Gravel Pit system, if anywhere, the berserker had established itself. Until such base or installation could be discovered, the expedition could have no goal.

  Harry settled in and started to familiarize himself with the equipment available, and with the latest recon reports, having to do with the crazy swarms of orbiting rocks, dust, and fragments that had given the system its informal name. The astrophysicists had not yet agreed on a single explanation of how such a seemingly ordinary sun had acquired such a large and unruly family.

  As dinner time approached, Harry was introduced to a few more people—one of them a Space Force veteran, another a Templar dropout—who had been detached from other duties in the service of Cheng Enterprises and brought in as pilots. There would be a lot of scouting to be done, as the berserker base had not yet been located.

  One of the junior pilots had heard of Harry by reputation, and appeared seriously impressed to discover that he was going to be working for him.

  Presently Harry came to the conclusion that he had now been introduced to most of the other active participants in the expedition, only a minority of them actually combat specialists of one kind or another. It seemed there would be only eight people actually landing on the enemy base, assuming they could survive long enough to reach it: Cheng himself, of course, and the Lady Masaharu who was not going to be separated from him. Harry and Satranji made four, and Doc five—exactly what Doc’s function was supposed to be, Harry had not yet discovered. Most of the people now inhabiting 207GST were only support workers, who would be evacuated on the last courier to leave before the attack was launched.

  Altogether there were fewer live humans on 207GST than Harry had somehow expected, no more than a couple of dozen in all. But certainly that number was great enough that the secrecy Winston Cheng was trying to maintain could not be expected to last much longer.

  Communication with the outside world was not forbidden, or even actively discouraged. But in practice it was restricted, and Harry suspected that not a bit of information actually left the base on any of Chen’s ships without passing through informal but careful censorship.

  * * *

  Had he not been forewarned, Harry thought he might have had some trouble recognizing Del Satranji, when the two of them arrived
in the common room for dinner at approximately the same time. As it was, neither of them had any difficulty.

  The years did not seem to have mellowed Del Satranji; in fact Harry could not remember him looking as taut and tense as this. He gave an impression of tightly controlled energy, of danger just below the surface. At the sound of Harry’s voice, his eyes flicked up, registering no surprise. He turned away from the buffet where he had been standing, and came to confront Harry.

  “Haven’t seen you for a while, Silver.” The raspy voice was vaguely familiar too, now that Harry heard it again.

  “Likewise.”

  Satranji was somehow smaller than Harry remembered him. Not physically large at all, in fact somewhat below the average in height and weight. Nor was he extravagantly muscled, but as Harry now recalled, he owned some kind of advanced belt in martial arts, with a skilled and vicious and energetic look about him.

  With the living man before him, Harry could remember hearing somewhere that Satranji was an unfrocked Templar, who had been expelled from the order for unspecified reasons, probably having to do with his ruthless treatment of suspected goodlife.

  The robot Dorijen appeared somewhere in the dining room, dressed now in a different gown, but maintaining the same cool elegance.

  The Lady Masaharu had turned her head to watch, and was observing the robot’s entrance with icy, silent disapproval.

  Now the robot had come to stand at Satranji’s side. Softly, possessively, it placed one hand on the man’s arm.

  Satranji was smiling faintly. Jerking his head slightly in Dorry’s direction, he said to Harry: “My wife tells me that the two of you have already met.”

  Harry looked from the man’s dark eyes, to the cool blue eyes of the machine, and back again. “Your wife.”

  “That’s what I said.” Satranji’s voice was very soft and very certain. His eyes bored into Harry’s. With this man, everything had to be a challenge.

  Other people in the hallway and the common room were watching. It was as if each of them wanted to be wrapped in a cloak of noninvolvement. Harry thought for a moment. Suddenly he felt very tired. He said: “I don’t remember you well enough to be able to tell when you’re joking and when you’re not.”

  “So you don’t remember me.” Still the same soft, deadly voice. “Have I said anything that sounded like a joke?”

  “That’s what I can’t tell. You don’t see me laughing.”

  Satranji nodded slowly. “That’s good. Believe me, Silver, from now on you’ll remember me just fine.” He turned to give wife Dorry a sharp glance, which the robot was evidently well trained enough to interpret correctly. It followed him closely when he went to take his seat at the table.

  Harry moved on with the routine of getting his own tableware. No doubt about it now. Satranji’s little lady, his better half, the machine called Dorijen, was joining the assembled members of the team—those who could manage an hour away from their work—for dinner.

  Harry helped himself to the nearest available place. There was obviously going to be no formality about this gathering. Harry’s meal was gently interrupted by another casual introduction or two. People came in and sat down and started eating, some in a hurry and others ready to take their time, while machines brought additional food and drink. On Harry’s visit to Cheng’s headquarters he had seen several human servants, but here on the wanderworld the generality of household and maintenance workers were as robotic as the bride. Harry had seen no other that was anything like as human as Dorry in appearance.

  During the dinner hour the inanimate staff serenely ignored the presence of their mechanical colleague sitting at table, in front of a full place setting. Humans, including her husband, and machines seemed to be agreed that Dorijen was served nothing in the way of food or drink, and being a robot she naturally did not mind.

  There was one exception to this lack of service, in the form of a single glass of red wine, poured at the start of the meal as if by prearrangement. This the robot sipped and drank with delicate grace, while her husband contented himself with water.

  Someone sitting next to Satranji, evidently just making conversation, asked him if he wasn’t having any wine.

  “Got to keep the mind perfectly clear for just a little while yet. I’ll have mine later. Actually, I’ll have the same wine later, after Dory’s warmed it up a bit for me.” He licked his lips and leered.

  No human or robotic voice had any comment on that. Meanwhile Dorijen had been occasionally taking part in the human conversation, as blandly as a visiting politician, and listening to others with far more courtesy than many humans Harry had encountered. From time to time Dory’s pale, graceful hand toyed with a utensil or touched a cup, so that a casual observer might never have noticed that the figure in that chair was ingesting nothing but the wine.

  The dress Dorijen had put on for dinner was elegant, but still there was, of course, something wrong about the robot’s personal appearance. To the best of Harry’s knowledge, no one had ever crafted an imitation human that would stand the test of a full minute’s scrutiny, while moving and speaking in a good light. But the machine called Dorijen came about as close as any that Harry had ever seen. Its smooth skin, looking warm and fine as that of a live baby, stretched with the appearance of nature over other components neatly imitating the body parts of a young female human. Beneath the convincing skin there were imitations of muscle and bone, of veins and tendons, and a healthily thin layer of something standing in for subcutaneous fat.

  When, half an hour later, Satranji rose from the table with a stretch and a yawn, and announced that he had had a full day and was going to bed, the machine rose and went with him. Halfway across the room, it began to sway into a closer approximation of a seductive human walk.

  Harry and a few others were close enough to overhear what the Lady Masaharu said to Cheng in a low voice. “Mister Cheng, that fellow should be replaced. I do not, of course, say that solely because of the robot. I understand that you consider Satranji’s cleverness and skill, his knowledge of the Gravel Pit, of great importance to the expedition. But I no longer have faith in his reliability.”

  Cheng’s eyes were far away, but he was listening. He nodded gently. “I will soon have an announcement to make regarding Mister Satranji.”

  The Lady Masaharu bowed her head in silent acquiescence. It was plain that other people in the group had been really offended by Satranji’s behavior. Harry heard a quiet murmur: “But he’s living with this robot. Sleeping with it.”

  And another: “It shares his living quarters, and perhaps his bed.”

  A snort. “No ‘perhaps’ about it. He brags about the fact.”

  People, some of them mindful of the earlier near-confrontation, were looking at Harry.

  Cheng was looking at him too. “Have you an opinion on the matter, Harry?”

  Harry shrugged. “What I’ve seen so far means nothing to me. He can sleep with a garbage disposal if he wants.” At the best of times, Harry was not inclined to be diplomatic. And these were not the best of times.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Early next morning, base time, after Harry’s first dinner aboard the base, he found himself working closely with Satranji in one of the small hangar bays, going over a robot scout to see why the robot crew chief repeatedly redlined it when it was due to go out on a mission.

  The scout was a wingless pod the size of a small aircraft, now made somewhat larger by the fact of several panels having been swung open in its smooth surface. At the moment no other human was in the workshop. Nor had Harry seen Dorijen this morning; maybe, he thought, she was sleeping late after a long night of debauchery.

  Satranji broke a silence in his abrupt way: “Why d’you fight ‘em, Silver? The bad machines.”

  Harry came to a stop, straddling the scout’s metal fuselage at one of its thinner points, a test probe idle in his hand. He seemed to remember that earlier Satranji had been well aware of his loss. “You’re asking me that?
”

  The compact man pulled his head out of a metal cavity. “All right, sure, now one of ‘em has eaten up your people. That makes it personal. I can see that. But even before your wife and kid had the bad luck, you’d already spent a good part of your life shooting it out with berserkers. How many years was it, anyway?”

  Harry didn’t answer.

  Satranji just wasn’t going to let it rest. He seemed determined to provoke some kind of violent response. “So, tell me—why? There are a lot of good pilots, better pilots than you, who never get into that.”

  Mentally Harry stepped back for a moment to consider piloting. It was crazy to claim that there were a lot of people better than he was. Possibly one or two. But what difference did any of that make to anybody now?

  At last he only said, distantly: “You’re here, Satranji, ready to get your stupid head shot off in a fight. Must be some reason for that, besides the fact that the pay is good.” He resumed the process of running the instrument he was holding through a nearby cavity in the scout’s metal hull. So far it had told him nothing very useful.

  Satranji liked that answer, it kept the steam of his pointless anger going. “Oh, my pay is good, depend on it. Better than yours. And we were talking about you.” Satranji was still smiling, but with a new intensity. He was acting like a man who for some mysterious reason had set his mind and heart on having a knockdown brawl.

  As was the case with almost everything these days, Harry discovered that he didn’t much care, one way or the other, whether he and Satranji had a fight or not. But their brawling wasn’t going to kill any berserkers. He shrugged, and reviewed the last several readings that his test probe had given him. So far he had been able to find no reason for the crew chief’s rejection of this bird.

  “How much are you getting paid, Silver?”

  Harry sighed a private sigh. Evidently this had to be settled, somehow, before they could get anything done. Harry gave the question as much attention as it seemed to deserve—a little more, in fact—and remembered he had been told. But somehow he had forgotten what the numbers were. “I don’t know.”