“It’s a particular berserker,” said Domingo, and fell silent, sighing faintly.
Chakuchin, who had fought berserkers before, outside the Milkpail, paused, trying to figure it out. “But still only one of them, right? And I thought they couldn’t get any of their really big units into the nebula.” That was not strictly true; a machine or ship of any size could be brought in among the tenuous clouds of interstellar matter and eventually manage to make its way around and through them. But any vessel or machine above a certain size, perhaps twice the cross-section of the Sirian Pearl , would be unable to move through those clouds at a speed great enough to allow for effective action.
Iskander took a try at explaining. “Leviathan is a special berserker. It has three or four names, actually. Some call it Old Blue, some something else.”
“Why special?”
“Partly because it’s a damned tough one. Weapons from one end to the other. And it has a way of coming up with something new.”
“Huh.”
“And partly because it behaves erratically. Even for a berserker. It’s been around the Sector for generations, and attacking Milkpail colonies for the better part of a century.” Iskander’s sardonic voice made it sound as if he might be making up grim jokes.
Simeon, sounding not all that much enlightened or impressed, muttered something vague. Domingo, listening in on the conversation, could hardly blame him. Few people, thank all the gods and godlings, had Domingo’s own experience or anything like it. You had to at least have lived here for a few years, on one or more of the colonies, to understand …
His own thoughts returned to more current problems. He could not rid his mind of the people he was leaving behind, the abandoned ceremony. And Maymyo in particular, spending her wedding day at her battle station, virtually alone. But there was a job to be done, and quickly. Once more he issued orders.
Now the little squadron led by the Sirian Pearl moved into a higher orbit. And now it quickly left the small globe of Shubra behind, hurrying to a neighbor’s aid.
Domingo wondered how much help, how many ships and what type, would be on the way to Liaoning from the other colonies. Probably Liaoning had tried to dispatch couriers to some of them, too, but he could not assume that those messengers had ever reached their destinations or that more help would be forthcoming. If it was coming, it might of course arrive too late. But whether it was much or little, in time or too late, his own duty and that of his fellow citizens was clear.
Leviathan. He put down—tried to put down—old personal memories and feelings. He had to look at this as a military strategist, a logical commander.
It would be something, it would really be an achievement, if they could surround the damned thing in space with this many fighters and settle a lot of old scores for a lot of colonies and ships.
“Maybe we’ll get out of the milk a little way, have a chance to see a few real stars.” That again was from Chakuchin, the newcomer on the crew who was still somewhat homesick. Domingo had been here in the Milkpail for twenty years, with only occasional peeks outside. By now he’d almost forgotten what stars out in clear space looked like.
The little ships had built up speed. The folded whiteness of the Milkpail was passing over and under and around them continually, almost like atmospheric clouds flowing under and around a speeding aircraft, gatherings of whiteness and subtle color flickering with the velocity of their passage. Lungs trying to breathe this stuff would labor vainly, on what to Earthly life was no more than a good vacuum. But when the brightness was seen millions of kilometers deep, it looked thick and practically opaque.
“Something out there to our right, Captain.”
“I have it. Thank you.”
Even as the crew watched on their individual viewing devices, the three-o’clock detectors confirmed that something moved out there to starboard, something that was independent of the inanimate currents and surges that worked perpetually within the nebula itself. Life of a kind that never visited a heavy planet’s surface. A school or shoal perhaps of microscopic bodies, half matter and half force. Life throve here in the nebula, in themes that were unknown anywhere else in the modest portion of the Galaxy that had been visited by Earth-descended folk. It flourished, unbreathing life in wide variety growing in the light gravity, mild pressure and plentiful energy that obtained here.
Something out there absorbed energy, ingested material food—that same gas, far too thin to sustain a human breath or insect’s wing—metabolized, and lived. It might be one of the more or less familiar nebular life forms, the types that were harvested on and near the surface of Shubra and the other active colonies. It might be something not yet encountered by the colonists; right now it was too far off for Domingo to be able to tell, and he had no time to stop and look.
“Damn, but this is a peculiar place!” Chakuchin said it with admiration, with the pride of a new but authentic resident.
CHAPTER 2
When necessary, all of the major systems of the Sirian Pearl could be driven by the agile thought of one skilled pilot working alone. But the ship served its human masters most precisely and reliably when it was operated by a crew of six, who could divide its several functions efficiently among them. The five crew stations other than the pilot’s, all separated in different parts of the ship, were now filled with Domingo’s friends and fellow colonists. He congratulated himself, as the voyage of the relief force got under way, that days ago, even with wedding preparations and mayoral duties competing for his attention, he had made himself take time over the final selection of the crew for his new ship and for a couple of test-and-training flights.
Domingo himself now held the helm. He was sitting in his armored chamber near the center of the ship, still wearing some of the good clothes he had put on for his daughter’s wedding. On his forehead rested the spacecraft commander’s mindlink control band; it was a physically light weight, but he well knew that it could be as heavy as any crown.
Without moving a finger or even blinking an eyelid, the captain personally held the Pearlon what he considered her best course for Liaoning—close to, but not identical with, the best course as simultaneously calculated by the ship’s computer. He still considered the human brain, particularly his own, superior to hardware at the most difficult parts of the incredibly complex task. There was some feedback from the equipment to the optic centers of the brain, making the control a partly visual process, trickily akin to imagination—inexperienced pilots often got into trouble imagining that there was no difference.
The autopilot, teamed with the ship’s computer, might have managed to conduct the flight just as well—or almost as well—as he could, but right now the captain preferred to drive his new ship himself. The Pearlboasted new engines and improved protective fields—at this speed inside the nebula you needed protection against collisions with mere molecules, there were so many of them. Domingo might have raced well ahead of the five other ships in his small squadron, but he did not. Urgent as was the need for speed, he calculated that it was a still more urgent need that his force stay together in the face of a certainly formidable and possibly superior enemy.
Leviathan. The captain had a personal score to settle with that particular legendary foe—whether or not it made sense to feel a personal enmity toward a machine. But he couldn’t be certain that he was going to encounter Leviathan this time. All he could really be sure of was that he was leading his people against berserkers.
The berserkers were robotic relics of some interstellar war that had been fought long before the beginning of written history on Earth. They were, in their prime form, vast inanimate spacegoing fortresses, moving lifelessly across the Galaxy in obedience to their fundamental programming command that all the life they could find must be destroyed. In all the centuries of expansion of Earth-descended humanity among the stars, berserkers were by far the greatest peril that they had encountered.
Still without stirring himself physically, Domingo could have c
alled up on any of several screens or stages the image of whitespace whipping by outside. But after making the checklist test of that function shortly after launching, he forbore to use it. Instead, during the first hour of the flight, Domingo called up human faces, those of his fellow colonists aboard the other ships, coming and going on his screens and stages. In this way he held conversation fairly steadily with the other units of the relief squadron. There were five other ships in all, including the craft commanded by Gujar Sidoruk, and Niles Domingo, as commander of the relief force, wanted to make sure that when the combat zone was reached they would all continue to follow his orders.
That willingness established to his satisfaction, as well as it could be before the fact, he ordered intership conversation to be broken off and imposed complete radio silence.
Desultory intercom conversation continued aboard the Sirian Pearl.There was no reason why it should not.
Some of the crew, talking now among themselves, expressed concern for people they knew on Liaoning, and speculated on the strength of the berserker force attacking there. It was possible that the report of only one berserker was outdated, that more attackers had come in later, after the courier was sent. If the enemy force at the scene proved to be overwhelming, the relief squadron would have to turn and run for home again—if it was still able to do even that much. Everyone understood that, but no one mentioned it.
Domingo took little part in the rambling intercom chatter, but he listened to it with more than half an ear even while his mind went its own way, watching the instruments before him and trying to make plans. As it was with the captains of the other ships, so it was even with his own crew: He knew some of them better than he knew others. The population of Shubra was small, but it was far from stable. People moved on- and offworld frequently. Some of the present population were almost strangers to the mayor. Some were combat veterans and some were not. Domingo, who certainly had earned that status, wanted to monitor the nerve, and assess the probable behavior under pressure, of those who had not.
It would have been an excellent thing, of course, to have the Pearlmanned by an all-veteran, picked crew; but in this militia organization, rank had no such privilege. The available pool of experience had to be shared out among all the crews.
The veterans on the Pearl, besides Domingo himself, included Iskander Baza, Wilma Chanar and Henric Poinsot. That left two rookies on the team.
Apollina Suslova had not been many months on Shubra and was really still a citizen of Yirrkala. On being assigned to Domingo’s crew—every capable adult had an alert station somewhere—she had told him that she had been briefly under bombardment at least once, on yet another colony, but she had never known the strain of helping to control a ship in battle.
Domingo suspected she was becoming attracted to him, and he found the idea not displeasing. If it should turn out that way, though, he’d have to get her off his combat crew. In his experience the two kinds of relationship didn’t mix. A married couple aboard ought to be different. He hoped so, at least. Not that he himself had any intention of getting married again.
Simeon Chakuchin, unlike his wife Wilma Chanar, was a comparatively new settler, but all indications were that he was psychologically strong and capable. Not everybody who reached the frontier colonies fit those criteria, though you’d think they might.
The captain’s meditations were interrupted by the voice of Iskander Baza on intercom: “I’ve got Liaoning on the detectors, Cap. Still at extreme range.”
The captain switched one of his own display stages to take the forward detectors’ signal. Even to his trained perception, the solid-looking image was no more than a vague mottled blur. The planetoid that was the destination of the relief force was in an orbit not greatly different from Shubra’s. The two bodies moved in long slow orbits around the same almost-hidden sun, a giant of a radiation source. Its fierceness, dulled by intervening clouds, still turned the atmospheres of its inhabited planetoids, as well as much of nearby space, into a white veil of sometimes glaring brightness.
The nebula not only made interplanetary observation difficult, but it rendered the faster modes of space travel totally unattainable within itself. There was no possibility that human ship or berserker machine could ever achieve effective faster-than-light velocity through these vast, attenuated clouds of matter. Therefore all of the colonized planetoids were separated by long hours or days of travel time, as if they had been light-years apart in more ordinary space. Now, to Domingo and the others watching their own progress as charted by their onboard computers on holographic models of the intervening nebula, their best attainable motion was a painful crawl.
But eventually, long hours after the relief mission had begun and minutes after Baza’s first claimed sighting of their goal, the computer-enhanced image of Liaoning ahead was beginning to show a definite change behind the thinning veils. The image was becoming just a little clearer, something marginally better than a blur.
Domingo ordered: “Cut the chatter, everyone. To stations. We’re getting near.”
With all six ships on full alert, the small relief squadron at last prowled within clear instrument range of its goal. The nearly spherical ball of Liaoning, slightly prolate, showed more and more clearly against the ubiquitous milky background. Still the instruments revealed no sign of the attacking enemy.
“Tight beam, Wilma. Tell them we’re here.”
The message went out on radio, aimed precisely at the planetoid ahead; no receiver anywhere else should be able to pick it up.
The seconds passed that should have brought an answer, but they did not. And then at last the Pearlwas close enough to see the settlements on Liaoning’s surface.
To see, rather, the places on the surface where those settlements had been.
Domingo’s crew, and those of the other relief ships, in almost silent shock, gazed down at a scene of total devastation. Not a building had been left standing, not a settlement was still recognizable.
They hurtled closer.
Questioning radio beams probed the scorched-looking land below. Still there was no response of any kind. No sign that any berserker still lurked in the area or that the death machines might have been inefficient enough to leave anything still alive behind them when they departed.
The marks of the terrible enemy weapons became plainer and plainer on the surface below, as the Pearldrew nearer and nearer to the planetoid. There appeared to be no survivors.
Hours ago, Domingo had silently made plans for what ought to be done in this worst case. He implemented those plans now, issuing terse orders. There was a small spacegoing launch aboard the Pearl, and he selected three of his crew members to go down to the surface of Liaoning in the launch and directly investigate the death and ruin at close range. The captain himself remained where he was, at the helm of his fighting ship.
Iskander Baza was the first crew member detailed to go down. Polly Suslova, who the captain thought could use the experience, was second. Henric Poinsot, steady and reliable, was the third of the crew to be chosen.
When the launch ejected itself from his ship, Domingo could feel nothing through the Pearl‘s metal frame or through the field of artificial gravity maintained within the ship, a field usually set, like that of their home planetoid, at Earth normal strength. But he could see, on the stages and screens in front of him, how the long, narrow shape of the smaller vessel dwindled rapidly away toward the scorched surface of the planetoid.
Minutes passed, minutes that brought an almost continuous stream of progress reports from the swiftly receding launch below. The relayed observations added little but detail to the horror already known. So far there was no sign of any survivor out of the hundreds of colonists who had lived here. Now, with Domingo’s permission, other ships in the relief squadron sent down launches of their own, descending to different areas on the blasted surface.
The launches landed, one after another, at separated sites. The first reports direct from the surface co
nfirmed the catastrophe. One crew reported finding a small wrecked berserker unit, an automated lander—ground defense here had not been totally ineffective.
At last one of the searchers picked up a faint tone from a survival radio. In less than an hour the launch crews were able to uncover first one human survivor and then another from isolated hideouts. Briefly the rescuers’ hopes rose. But that was all. No more people were found alive.
The two survivors were brought up into space and taken aboard one of the other ships of the relief squadron. Then Domingo, while his own crew and others listened in, questioned them on tightbeam communications. He spoke with special gentleness to one of the two, a young girl. In his mind he kept seeing Maymyo in her place.
Both of the people who had been recovered alive were injured, and both of them had tales of horror to tell. The two survivors had been isolated, in deep separate shelters. They were numbed and shaken by what they had been through. They murmured disjointedly of incredible dangers, of being stalked and bombarded by death, and of miraculous escape.
Domingo asked: “How many of them were there? How many berserkers? I don’t mean landers. How many of the big machines in space?”
One of the survivors had no idea. The other had heard a report that there had been but a single enemy.
“Leviathan? Old Blue?”
“I don’t know. Somebody said that it was … that one. People always say it’s that, when there’s only one … I don’t know.”
A medical person who was on the ship with the survivors and trying to treat them now intervened. The captain ought to cut his questioning as short as possible. The patients were both in a bad way, with shock and other problems.
“I’ll keep it as brief as I can. Which way did the enemy go from here? Have you any clue as to that?”
But the survivors, not surprisingly, were able to offer their rescuers no clue. Neither of the stunned humans had seen the enemy approaching their world or attacking it, even on instruments, much less observed its departure.
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