Berserker Attack Page 8

  Chan Amling was issued a somewhat worn and soiled gray friar’s habit, but very little else, in keeping with his mendicant role. He did half-seriously request permission to take along a pair of dice, arguing that he would not be the first friar in history to go so armed. But Time Ops was soon able to establish that such equipment was scarcely standard issue for religious, even in Vincento’s time, and he turned down the request.

  Both Derron and Chan had hung around their necks abominably carved wooden wedge-symbols. The images differed in detail of design, but each was big enough to conceal the bulk of a miniaturized communicator, as well as being too ugly and cheap-looking for anyone to want to steal. If any of Vincento’s contemporaries should be moved to wonder audibly why Derron wore such a thing, he was to say that it was a present from his wife.

  From an arsenal assembled in Stage Three, Odegard and Amling were issued sturdy travelers’ staffs. These again were dissimilar in outer detail, but both were much more effective weapons than they appeared to be. All of the agents were armed, with staffs or other innocent-appearing devices; they were all to be dropped within half a minute of one another, present-time, though, of course, they were to arrive in different places and on different days.

  Their processing for this mission had been too hurried and with too much individual attention for them to get to know one another very well. But during the last few minutes before the drop, as the masquerade-costumed group bade one another good luck and good berserker hunting, there was an atmosphere of joking camaraderie in Stage Three.

  Derron felt it. It crossed his mind that once again he had good friends among the living. The launching file formed on order, and he took his place in it calmly, looking forward over short Chan Amling’s gray-cowled head.

  Amling turned his head slightly. “Five will get you ten,” he whispered, “that I land up to my crotch in mud someplace. Out of sight of the bloody road, at least.”

  “No bet,” said Derron automatically, as the count began. The line moved briskly forward, one figure after another in front of him abruptly vanishing from his sight.

  Amling made some last remark that Derron could not catch, and then Amling too was gone.

  It was Derron’s turn. He swung a booted foot in a long stride out over the mercurial launching circle, then brought it down.

  He was standing in darkness, and around him was the unmistakable, never-to-be-forgotten feeling of open air. Except for a mere whisper of breeze and a drizzle of rain, he was immersed in an echoless silence, a great loneliness in which his materialization must have passed unnoticed. Good.

  “Reverend Brother?” he inquired of the darkness in a low voice, speaking in Vincento’s language. There was no answer; Amling might well have come down in some mud hole out of sight of the road. He had a knack for achieving what he was willing to bet on.

  As Derron’s eyes grew more accustomed to the gloom, he realized that the hard surface under his own boots did indeed seem to be the stones of the old Empire highway that passed through Oibbog. Operations had put at least half of the team spatially on the bull’s-eye, then. Whether they had done as well temporally remained to be seen, though rain and darkness were reassuring signs.

  Subvocalizing, Derron tried to reach Operations for a routine check-in, but the communicator seemed utterly dead. Some kind of paradox-loop would be blocking contact. Such things cropped up now and then; there was nothing to do but hope that the condition would not last long.

  He waited the agreed-upon few minutes for Amling, meanwhile opening his staff at one end and consulting the compass thus revealed, to make sure of the direction he was facing on the road. Then, after calling once more to his reverend brother with no result, he began to walk, boots clopping solidly on the pavement. Lightning flashed distantly at irregular intervals. He drank deep breaths of the washed air.

  He had not gone far before the transducer behind his ear gave him a sudden twinge. “… Odegard, can you read me yet? Colonel Odegard …” The male voice sounded weary and bored.

  “This is Colonel Odegard; I read you.”

  “Colonel!” Sudden excitement. Off mike: “We’ve got contact, sir!” Back on: “Colonel, it’s plus two days and three hours here since you were dropped. Time scale has been slipping.”

  “Understand.” Derron kept his speech subvocal. “I’m about plus five minutes since dropping. Still on the road in the rain, at night. No contact with Amling yet.”

  “Odegard, you’re blurring on the screens.” It was Time Ops’ voice speaking now. “But it looks like you’re farther from the cathedral than we intended, just about two miles. You may be outside the safety zone, so get in closer to Vincento as fast as possible.” By “safety zone,” of course, Time Ops meant the zone of protection against any direct violence from the berserker, a zone created by the intense concentration of sentry observation round Vincento’s lifeline. “We’ve just pulled out the team ahead of you. They report all’s well with Vincento. You say you haven’t seen Amling yet.”

  “Right.” Derron stepped up his pace a trifle, though he was having to tap along with his staff to be sure of not floundering off the pavement into the mud.

  “We haven’t found him either. Can’t see his line in this blurring on the screens. It may be just the time-slippage and a paradox-loop.”

  Lightning flared directly ahead of Derron, obligingly showing him that his road ran straight for some distance in that direction and giving him a glimpse of the cathedral spire, which was farther off than it should have been. He supposed it was about two miles away.

  He reported this to Operations, meanwhile puzzling over something else that the lightning had shown him—a dully gleaming object in the center of the road ahead, lying atop a line or thin trench that seemed to have been scratched or dug across the pavement.

  “… I’m just coming up to it now. Looks like …”

  It was soft to the prodding tip of his staff. He waited for the lightning, which flashed again in a few seconds.

  “Never mind trying to contact Amling anymore.” The body was quite naked; it could have been here a day or an hour. Derron stood over it, describing the situation as best he could. Human robbers might have stolen a staff and even a cheap pectoral wedge, but would they have taken a friar’s habit? …

  He bent to touch the deep scratch mark that cut across the road beneath the body. No medieval tool had made that ruler-straight slice through stone; quite likely it had been carved by the same cybernetic limb that had removed the back of Amling’s head.

  “Ops, I think it’s marked the boundary of the safety zone for us. To let us know that it knows about it.”

  “Yes, yes, you may be right, Odegard, but never mind that now. You just move in close to Vincento quickly. Protect yourself.”

  He was moving that way already, walking backward and holding his staff like a rifle while all his senses probed as best they could the rainy night through which he had just passed. Not that all his alertness would do him any good, if the enemy was out there and able to strike.

  But Derron lived. After a hundred paces he turned and walked normally ahead, once more making good time. The berserker had killed casually, in passing, leaving its mark like some defiant human outlaw. And then it had gone on to its more pressing business here.

  By the time Derron had reached the place where the road bent sharply to the left toward the washed-out bridge, the lightning had gone on over the horizon; he felt rather than saw the bulk of the hill and its cathedral ahead of him and above. But nearer, close by the side of the road, he could make out the monastery’s high wall, the tumbled stones of what had been an arched gateway, and the remnants of a broken gate. And when he stood just before the gateway he could distinguish, just inside, a coach that he knew must be Vincento’s; standing deserted in a puddle. From the shelter of a cloister came the gentle mumbling and grunting of load-beasts. Derron paused only a moment before plodding on through the gate and across a soggy garth toward what looked like th
e main entrance of the main building, which was a sprawling one-story structure.

  He made no effort to be quiet, and the dark doorway before him promptly emitted a challenge. “Who’s there? Stand and give your name!”

  The dialect was one that Derron had expected to run into. He stopped in his tracks and, as the beam of a lantern flicked out at him, he answered. “I am Valzay of Mosnar, mathematicus and scholar. From the coach and animals I see here, I judge that you within are honest men. And I have need of shelter.”

  “Step for’ard then,” said the wary male voice that had challenged him. A door cracked, and behind the door the lantern retreated.

  Derron advanced slowly, displaying hands empty save for an innocent staff. When he had gotten in out of the rain, the door was shut behind him, and the lantern brightened. He found himself in what must have been the common room of the monastery. Facing him stood a pair of soldiers, one armed with a crude pistol and the other with a short sword; judging by their patchwork uniforms, they were members of one of the mercenary companies that were now multiplying in this war-torn land.

  When they could see his gentleman’s clothes more plainly, the soldiers’ manner became more or less respectful. “Well, sir, how d’you come to be awanderin’ afoot and alone?”

  He scowled and swore, wringing water from his cloak. He related how his skittish load-beast, scared by lightning, had run off with his light sulky. A plague was too good for that animal! If he could catch it in the morning, he’d have some of its hide off in narrow strips, they could bet on that! With whip-cracking vehemence he shook water from his broad-brimmed hat.

  Derron had an effortless feel and skill for acting when there was a need for it, and these lines had been well rehearsed. The soldiers chuckled, relaxed most of their vigilance, and became willing to chat. There was, they said, plenty of room for another boarder here, because the proprietary monks had all cleared out long ago. The place was no tavern with girls and ale, worse luck, and even firewood was in short supply, but the roof did keep the rain off. Yes, they were from a mercenary company, one that was now in the pay of the Holy Temple. Their captain, with the bulk of his men, was now in Oibbog across the river.

  “And if the cap’n can’t do no more’n wave to us for the next couple days, why that’s all right with us, hey what?”

  For all the jocularity, they still maintained a minimal professional suspicion of Derron—he might conceivably be a scout for some well-organized band of brigands—and so they did not tell him how many soldiers had been caught on this side of the torrent when the bridge they had been guarding collapsed. He did not ask, of course, but he gathered there were not many.

  In answer to a question he did ask, one of the soldiers said, “Naw, no one but the old gentleman as owns the coach, and his servant an’ his driver. And a pair o’ friars. Plenty empty cells, sir, so take your pick. One’s about as damp as the next.”

  Derron murmured his thanks and then, with some brief assistance from the lantern, groped his way down a vaulted passage lined with doorless cells and into one of these, which was pointed out to him as unoccupied. Built against the cell’s rear wall was a wooden bunk frame that had not yet been ripped out for firewood. Derron sat down to pull off his squelching boots, while the lantern’s light receded once more down the passage and vanished.

  His boots off and tipped to drain, Derron stretched out on the wooden frame, the knapsack under his head, a dry garment from the knapsack over him for cover, his staff within easy reach. He did not yet have the feeling of having achieved his goal and returned to Oibbog. Amling’s death seemed a bit unreal. Neither could he quite grasp the fact that Vincent Vincento in the living flesh was somewhere within a few meters of him, that one of the founding fathers of the Modern world might even be the author of the snore that now drifted faintly down the passage.

  Lying on his wooden bed, Derron reported briefly to Operations, bringing them up to the minute on his progress so far; then, genuinely tired, he found himself drifting toward sleep. The sound of rain was lulling, and there was nothing he could do about getting a look at Vincento until the morning. Even as his consciousness dulled, it struck him as mildly odd that his thoughts were occupied neither with his mission for Operations nor his private mission of return. Not with the staggering fact of time travel, or the loss of Amling, or the menace of the berserker. Simply with the fading sound of diminishing rain and the freshness of the infinite clean atmosphere around him. It was the theme of resurrection… .

  He was jarred out of the beginning of sleep when Operations put a throbbing behind his right ear. He came wide awake at once, with only a mild start, and tucked his carven wedge-symbol closer under his chin.

  “Odegard, we’re starting to read through some of this blurring on the screens. We can count fourteen lifelines in or near that monastery-temple complex. One of them, of course, is your own. Another is Vincento’s. Another one seems to be an unborn child’s line; you know how they show on a screen in dots and dashes.”

  Derron shifted his position slightly on the creaking wooden rack; he felt oddly comfortable and snug, hearing the last dripping of the rain outside. He mused subvocally, “Let’s see. Me, Vincento, his two servants, and the two soldiers I’ve seen. That makes six. And they said there were two friars. Eight, which would leave six more unaccounted for. Probably four more soldiers and a camp follower who’s picked up a little dotted line she won’t want to carry. Wait a minute, though—that one soldier did say something about there being no girls here. Anyway, I suppose your idea is that one of the apparent people I find here will have no lifeline showing on your screens—meaning he or she is really our hypothetical berserker-android.”

  “That’s our idea, yes.”

  “Tomorrow I can count noses and … Wait.”

  In the darkness of the entrance to Derron’s cell, a shape of lesser blackness became discrete with movement. The figure of a hooded friar, utterly faceless in the gloom, came a half-step into the cell before halting abruptly.

  Derron froze, recalling the hooded robe missing from Amling’s corpse. His hand moved to his staff and gripped it tightly. But he would not dare to use his weaponry without being very sure of his target. Even then, at this close range, the staff would be torn from his hands and broken before he could aim it. …

  Only an instant had passed since the hooded figure had entered. Now it muttered a few indistinguishable words, which might have been an apology for entering the wrong cell. And in another moment it had withdrawn into the blackness, as noiselessly as it had come.

  Derron remained half-risen on one elbow, still gripping his useless weapon. He told Operations what had just happened.

  “It won’t dare kill you there, remember. Be very sure before you fire.”

  “Understand.” Slowly he stretched out again. But all comfort had gone with the last of the rain, and resurrection was a lie.

  When Vincento was awakened by a touch, and found himself in darkness, bedded amid damp straw with bare stone walls close about him, he knew a moment of sinking terror. The worst had already happened, and he lay in the Defenders’ dungeon. The terror was deepened when he saw the faceless monk-hooded figure bending over him. He could see it by the moonlight which now filtered through the tiny window—evidently the rain was over… .

  The rain … Of course, he was still on his way to the Holy City, his trial was still to come! The intensity of his relief was such that Vincento accepted almost with courtesy his being awakened. “What do you want?” he muttered, sitting up on his shelf of a bed and pulling his traveling-rug closer about his shoulders. His manservant Will slept on, a huddled mound on the dark floor.

  The visitor’s hooded face could not be seen. The visitor’s voice was a sepulchral whisper. “Messire Vincento, you are to come alone to the cathedral tomorrow morning.

  At the crossways of nave and transepts you will receive good news from your friends in high places.”

  He tried to digest this. Could i
t be that Nabur or perhaps Belam wanted to send him some secret reassurance of leniency? That was possible. More likely, this was some Defenders’ trickery. A man summoned to trial was not supposed to discuss the matter with anyone.

  “It will be good news, Messire Vincento. Come alone, and be willing to wait if you are not met at once. The crossways of nave and transepts. And do not seek to learn my name or see my face.”

  Vincento maintained his silence, determined to commit himself to nothing. And his visitor, satisfied that the message had been delivered, melted away into the night.

  When Vincento awakened the next time, it was from a pleasant dream. He had been back in his own villa, on the estate that had been provided for him by the senate of his city, safe in his own bed with his mistress’s warm body solid and comforting beside him. In reality the woman had been gone for some time—women no longer meant very much—but the estate was still there. If only they would let him return to it in peace!

  This time he had been aroused by a touch of a different sort—the touch on his face of a shaft of morning sunlight, which came striking into his cell from the high thin window of the cell across the corridor. As he lay recalling with curiosity his strange midnight visitor, making sure in his own mind that that had been no dream, the sun shaft was already moving slowly away from his face. And instantly that motion made it a golden pendulum of subtle torture, driving all other thoughts from his mind.

  The pendulum he really faced was that of choice. His mind could swing one way, tick, and meet in foresight the shame of swallowed truth and swallowed pride, all the humiliation of an enforced recanting. And if he swung his thoughts the other way, tock, there they confronted the breaking agony of the boot or the rack or the slower destruction in a buried cell.