Berserker's Star Read online

  A brief silence ensued while Lily tried to find some cheerfully soothing remark that would have nothing to do with Alan. The best she could come up with was: “Harry, are we—Do we have a chance?”

  “We do.”

  It took Lily a moment or two to decide what else would be good to talk about. Then she offered: “I suppose you’re wishing you still had that c-plus cannon?”

  He muttered to himself, coming to a decision. Not that it had been all that difficult to reach. Then he said: “That’s what I meant when I said we still have a chance. Now is when we have to use it.”

  “What?”

  “The cannon. The one you suppose I wish I had.” He flipped on the autopilot and got up from his chair. A moment later, shaking somewhat with ongoing strain, he was stuffing his reluctant body back into his space armor. He hated the process, but few people could have managed it more quickly.

  The fact that he had just, only minutes ago, taken off his armored suit didn’t mellow his mood or his attitude toward the berserker that was forcing this distasteful task upon him.

  He pointed out to Lily the locker from which he had taken his own suit. “There’s another suit in there. One size fits almost everyone. It’s self-adjusting. It might possibly save your life.

  Hope you know how to put it on. If not, do the best you can with it, I’m busy.”

  She jumped from her chair and got busy, too.

  Lily had the spare suit out of storage and was struggling nervously to get it on over her coveralls—fortunately, she seemed to be managing unaided. She was also talking to him again, as he had encouraged her to do. Alan had rejoined the conversation, and she was telling Harry something about how much fun she and her husband used to have when times were peaceful and they had been starting out together in pilots’ school.

  Meanwhile Harry, back in his chair (which had readjusted itself to fit the shape of the heavy suit), was lost in concentration on his task and heard only snatches of what she was saying.

  In response to Harry’s gentle mental touch upon the thoughtware, the Witch was once more making incremental gains in her flight from pursuing doom. The only thing wrong with making this kind of progress was that, in order to pull away, the ship kept driving deeper and deeper into gas and dust. If they kept on, they would quite soon find themselves in a region of space in which the pursuing berserker, being smaller, would enjoy a clear advantage.

  In a few truncated sentences, he communicated the gist of this unhappy situation to Lily, who had conquered the suit and was back in her chair.

  Probably she at least felt a little better protected now. Her response was: “What can we do?”

  “We’re down to about one chance. Don’t bother me!”

  Maybe, he thought to himself, we have three minutes. Quite possibly somewhat less.

  “Only one thing we can do now,” he repeated, muttering more to himself than to her. “No choice now, no choice at all.”

  He was going to have to somehow unlimber the cannon that he had taken such pains to conceal in his vessel’s prow, not that long ago, in a different sector of the Galaxy.

  If his current enemy had ever bothered to compute the likelihood of such a mule-kicker of a weapon appearing on such a small ship, the answer must have come out at very nearly zero. For the simple reason that using it in this fog of dust was going to put the gun platform in almost as much danger as the target. But if Harry failed to fire it now, and quickly, the odds against survival would be even worse.

  “Stay in your chair,” Harry advised. “I’m turning down the gravity.” That was a necessary preliminary, to allow him to work up in the prow, a couple of meters above his combat chair, an area otherwise just about impossible to reach. He couldn’t, of course, turn the gravity off altogether, or the next burst of acceleration called for by the autopilot, at a thousand gravities or so, would instantly accomplish the berserker’s purpose.

  In the dreamlike, underwater movements engendered by weak gravity he darted as swiftly as he could about the control room, hastily ransacking drawers and cabinets, collecting the special tools he was going to need. Then he launched himself in a slow and gentle, nearly weightless dive up to the cabin’s arched overhead, clamping his suit to a featureless section, where he immediately got to work on the paneling.

  With his helmet still keeping his brain in close touch with the Witch’s circuits, he called up a projected view, on the inner surface of his faceplate, of a certain area of the Witch’s outer hull. A spot about a meter wide in the featureless smooth surface was in the process of turning itself into a small hatch. Presently the hatch opened and a gun muzzle emerged. This protrusion was somewhat thicker than Harry’s arm. It looked dark and crude, more threatening than effective, like some antique cartoonist’s idea of a massive weapon.

  The next step was to connect the weapon to the Witch’s gun-laying system, which had already locked onto their pursuer.

  Step one accomplished. Two coming up.

  Following a recent skirmish on a world called Hyperborea, the supply of cannon slugs on board the Witch was down to a single projectile. The magazine containing it had been concealed behind a solid-looking panel on the other side of the control room, while the breechblock of the cannon was empty when it was folded away. Therefore it was now necessary to open both magazine and breech, and load.

  The sole remaining missile was about the size and shape of Harry’s fist and forearm, and very heavy, being formed of pure solid lead. Very pure though not so simple, a cunningly balanced mixture of lead’s four stable isotopes, sealed inside a thin film of oxidation. The slug was machined and shaped down to the thousandth of a gram, and it looked as blunt and simple as the muzzle of the gun itself. All the weapon’s computer-cleverness and power lay buried in its breech.

  To get at the ammunition, Harry had to undo another set of secret fasteners. Then he opened the magazine and dragged out the remaining slug, grateful for the augmented strength the suit gave to his arms and hands.

  Lily, with only the vaguest idea of what he was doing, couldn’t stand the suspense. “Harry? Can’t we try to run? What in all the hells—”

  “No, that’s one thing we can’t do any longer. Not if we mean to stay alive. Now shut up.” Yes, he knew that a minute ago he had been telling her to talk. That was then, this was now.

  The next twenty seconds seemed an eternity, but at the end of that time, still working inside the inner hull, he had opened the breech of the weapon and slid the slug into the chamber. Now that the cannon’s circuitry was integrated with the ship’s systems, Harry was doing a quick, nearly weightless dive back to his combat chair. During the few seconds of his passage, the output of the hydrogen power lamps that drove the ship and everything in it was mounting silently, surging up rapidly to maximum, forging an insanity of coiled-up forces inside the cannon, a knot beginning to warp all nearby time and space.

  Now Harry had himself clamped into his chair again, and none too soon, for the berserker was hardly fifty kilometers away, closing at six klicks per second on a quick countdown to ramming.

  “Here goes,” Harry announced to the universe in general. For just a moment he wondered if it would be worthwhile praying to great Malakó. But he thought he preferred his old favorite, To Whom It May Concern.

  The Witch’s gunlaying system was not the finest in the Galaxy, especially when it had been hooked up by a semi-amateur to this brute of an odd weapon, but at this range he thought that he could hardly miss.

  The real danger was not that he would miss. The real trouble was that firing a c-plus amid the natural gravitic haze of the surrounding sea of dust would be a move fraught with uncertainty, to put the difficulty mildly. Whatever else happened, whoever survived, the result ought to be spectacular…

  The firing itself was invisible and inaudible, and it happened the instant Harry pressed the manual control to arm it fully.

  It was an experience Harry Silver had had once before in his ship’s cabin, and it wa
s no more enjoyable now than it had been then. A jolt of physical recoil, felt on a natural and human scale, would have been something of a relief, but that was not what happened. Instead the world turned strange around Harry Silver, the energies released passing twistily through all his bones. Lily’s, too, for he saw her suited body stiffen in her chair.

  For just half a second, he thought that he saw certain old familiar faces in the cabin…

  One in particular, that almost made his heart stop for a moment…

  A second strange scene passed through his mind.

  Another one followed.

  He saw yet one more, including the image of a certain face that always made his heart beat faster.

  Then the effect had passed, the nerve cells in Harry’s brain returned to something like their normal activity, and the version of the world claiming to be reality was back again.

  Lily’s voice came to him through his helmet, saying something that showed she, too, had been strongly affected. “I’ve just seen Maracanda… but maybe it wasn’t that.”

  Outside the ship, and in the image on the holostage, the result of the cannon blast was instantaneous. What the death machine ran into was not so much a hit as an obliteration, its image instantaneously transmuted into a sleet of particles and rays, a shotgun blast of dust that bloomed in radiant glory as its particles collided with those of the vastly thinner, slowly drifting nebular cloud. A swift cascade of secondary collisions produced a truly beautiful, utterly silent blast, a glorious and cataclysmic rainbow.

  Actually, no mere collision with thin gas and dust could have achieved quite that effect. The culprit had been a slug traveling at de Broglie speeds. Only relativistic time retardation allowed the mass of stressed metal to survive until it reached its target.

  By the time (and time, too, had been warped) it got there, its mass had been magnified awesomely by its velocity, one aspect waves of not much more than mathematics. The molecules of lead were churning internally with phase velocities greater than that of light.

  Deep down in the Witch’s lower hull, the hydrogen power lamps still surged, compelled to make up some of the energy they had so recently borrowed from long seconds in the future. It was all done in silence, and Harry could sense the roaring flow only through the Witch’s circuits. Some large component of the energy could never be made up, and the deficit thus created went on chasing itself into the future in the form of an eternal negative. Or so the experts seemed to be saying when Harry listened to them. Just how the damned thing worked was more than he had ever been able to understand, but it seemed that as long as the ship’s systems could stand the strain, the Witch and her occupants were going to be all right.

  Harry Silver was lying back safe in his pilot’s chair, gasping, about as safe at home as he ever got. Inside his armor, its micro currents of air were busy drying out his sweat.

  One problem solved. But now that it was settled that he and his passenger were going to survive for the time being, returning life brought with it its own set of difficulties. He had been forced to reveal to his passenger that his ship was still carrying a monstrous weapon, strictly forbidden to any civilian vessel whose crew might be desperate or near suicidal enough to want to use it. The mere possession of it could conceivably be enough to earn him a year or two in prison, from some judge who made a strict interpretation of the law. Lily would hold a power of blackmail over him as soon as they came under Space Force jurisdiction again.

  But at least there was no longer any red dot swelling on the holostage. And for the moment, that disappearance was all that counted.

  “It’s gone?” Lily’s voice was barely audible.

  “It’s gone. We killed it.” Harry got out of his chair and with shaking fingers started to take off his armor. He was looking forward to a good stiff drink.

  Some time later, when they were smoothly under way again, and Harry was on his second drink, Lily surprised him. He had been expecting some question or accusation about the cannon. Instead she observed: “You don’t have a regular partner.” That was really a question, though she made it sound more like an accusation.

  “Not right now.”

  “Except your ship, I suppose. Sometimes you speak of her as if she were a woman.”

  “Oh, I can tell the difference.” Harry looked his human shipmate up and down. He had long experience of the way battle, terror, and destruction sometimes worked as aphrodisiacs. From the look on her face, the position of her body, he judged that she was in a kind of balance, ready to be tipped this way or that.

  His passenger was looking steadily at him. He couldn’t tell what might be going on inside her head. Could anyone ever really tell about anyone else?

  Finally he asked: “Great Malakó won’t mind? Or Alan either?”

  Her voice was faint and querulous. “I don’t know anything about Great Malakó. I try to read about it, but… and sometimes I think I don’t know anything about my husband, either.” She paused. “You have just saved my life. Again.”

  Harry grunted. “Right now you can be my partner in conversation. How come you dropped out of pilots’ school? You said you only went for a standard month and a half.”

  “Alan was very enthusiastic about going into space work, back when we started school. Then he lost interest. So we both dropped out. If you are wondering whether he will be jealous, when he finds out you and I have been traveling alone together—”

  “I wasn’t wondering. Not particularly.”

  “The answer is that I don’t know. I fear there are days when I am not one of his enthusiasms.”

  “And maybe you have days when he doesn’t excite you so much either.”

  Lily flushed. “I love my husband very deeply.”

  “Yeah. This new religion he’s got, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to drop you. Does it?”

  “I don’t know.” Then she shook her head. “No, I can’t believe Alan would do that. But all religions have splinter groups, don’t they? I think there are some followers of Malakó who try to attain great holiness by being celibate.”

  “I guess all religions have splinter groups,” Harry agreed.

  “That’s what really worries me, makes me afraid that when I get to Maracanda, maybe they won’t even want me to talk to him. That there’s usually one sharp, pointy little splinter that tends to become more and more fanatical.”

  “And you think that Alan might be attracted to that kind of thing.”

  She nodded. After giving Harry a thoughtful look, she said: “He’s like you, in one way at least. He’s not the kind of man who wants to do anything halfway.”

  Harry raised his glass. “Since you’re madly in love with him, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “It was meant to be. But I suppose you don’t have a regular religion.”

  Harry grunted again.

  Now she was annoyed. “Tell me, Mr. Silver, what do you have?”

  He cast a glance around the cabin. “For one thing, I have this ship. It’s all mine, free and clear, along with its attachments and its cargo. Which may not amount to much in the cosmic scheme of things, but a fair number of people would like to own it. Or at least want to ride in it.” He turned in his chair. “Also I have something of a thirst. Join me in a drink?”

  “From your inflection on the word, I presume you speak of alcohol? Malakó has no objection to that either. In moderation.”

  “I’m all for moderation. Though some people carry it too far.”

  Half a minute later, savoring his first postcombat sip of scotch and watching Lily quickly swallow hers, Harry remarked: “Whisky is my favorite drug.” The mention of drugs brought no particular reaction. At some point he meant to raise the subject of smuggling, too, but he hadn’t yet thought of a good, smooth way to bring it up.

  The subject of traveling seemed to come up naturally. Harry expressed his curiosity as to whether his remaining passenger had ever actually been within ten thousand light-years of the Core. Sagit
tarius A, the ancient and still somewhat mysterious radio source, was there. So were other, greater mysteries, among them the one that humans called the Taj.

  “No, I haven’t been anywhere near there.” It sounded as though Lily really wished she might have been. “Have you?”

  “Not close. Not really close. From all I hear, just getting into Core Sector’s not easy, let alone exploring it.” Over the years there had been several famous, partially successful expeditions organized to go probing at the center of the Galaxy. Each of them had brought back more questions than answers. “Normal space and flightspace both tend to get a little twisty there. Travel is sometimes possible, but never exactly easy or routine.”

  Lily said: “From all that I’ve been able to find out, believers in great Malakó, or some of them at least, look forward to visiting the Core on a true pilgrimage. That’s why Maracanda’s a holy place for them.”

  “Maracanda’s nowhere near the Core.” Harry was gently sipping the refill in his glass.

  “True, but it has something called the Portal.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some kind of visual phenomenon, it seems. Sometimes it’s described as if it were a giant telescope.” She smiled lightly. “But anyway, I don’t suppose your ship will ever go on any pilgrimage.”

  “Hard to say where the Witch will go.” Harry sipped again. “If she brings me along with her, no doubt my presence near the Core would spoil any ennobling effect.”

  “But Harry, great Malakó aside, don’t you want to go there, too? Just to go there, just to see?”

  “Well, yeah.” After a while Harry added: “But the Taj is one thing I might be afraid to look at. There are a lot of wild tales about the Core, even among people who don’t make a religion out of it.”

  Both of them had heard the stories about the Taj, and the legend of the boy Michel Geulincx, who was supposed to have gone there in an incredible way, and to have undergone an even stranger transformation.

  Before long the subject of Alan came up again, as it always did with this lady. Harry thought that if they had to talk about the missing husband, he might as well try to make it interesting.