And was she really pleased to be here? Really as delighted as she somewhat wearily claimed to be, at visiting what she could call without flattery the finest prenatal facility in this part of the Galaxy? Was the lady really as overjoyed as she said she was to be making this very human contribution on behalf of her husband and herself?
Well, perhaps. She was obviously intelligent, and Hoveler had somehow got the impression that she would not easily be bullied into doing anything she didn’t want to do. Perhaps the donation really resulted at least partly from a wish to be free of the responsibility of raising her own child.
Now a murmur came drifting through the laboratory, a raising and swiveling of media devices, a general shifting of the immediate onlookers to gain a better point of view. Dr. Zador, still wearing her surgeon’s mask—that article was now chiefly symbolic; maybe one of the media people had asked her to put it on—was emerging from the treatment cubicle, smiling as she held up the hand-sized blue statglass tile that now presumably contained the latest colonist—or protocolonist, rather—encapsulated for viable long-term storage. The tile was basically a flat blue rectangle the size of a man’s palm, bearing narrow color-coded identification stripes. At the urging of the media people, Acting Supervisor Zador once more held the encapsulated specimen aloft—higher, this time—to be admired and recorded.
And now, in seeming anticlimax, the station’s central communications facility was signaling discreetly for someone’s, anyone’s, attention. The signal was not attracting much notice, but it got Hoveler’s by means of a mellow audio pulsing through the nearest holostage, a device jutting up out of the deck like a flat-topped electronic tree stump. The bioengineer, looking around, found himself at the moment nearer than anyone else to the holostage. And no one else seemed exactly in a hurry to respond to the call.
As soon as Hoveler answered, the electronic voice of Communications, one facet of the laboratory vessel’s own computerized intelligence, informed him politely that their most distinguished visitor, Lady Genevieve, had a personal message waiting.
“Can it wait a little longer?”
“I believe the call will be considered a very important one,” said the electronic voice. That modest stubbornness on the part of Communications somehow conveyed, to Hoveler at least, the suggestion that someone closely associated with the Premier Dirac, if not Dirac himself, was trying to get through.
“Just a moment, then.” Putting on such authoritative bearing as he was able to summon up, and using his above-average size in as gentle a manner as was consistent with effectiveness, Hoveler worked his way through the jealously constricted little crowd to almost within reach of the lady; at this range he could convey the information without shouting it boorishly.
The lady’s bright eyes turned directly, searchingly, on him for the first time as he spoke to her. Seen at close range, she was somehow more attractive. She murmured something soft to the effect that any direct message from her husband seemed unlikely; to her best knowledge the Premier was still light-years away.
After making hasty excuses to the people in her immediate vicinity, she quickly moved the few steps to the nearest holostage.
Hoveler watched as the machine suddenly displayed the head and shoulders, as real and solid in appearance as if the body itself were there, of a youngish, rather portly man dressed in space-crew togs, pilot’s insignia on his loose collar. The man’s eyes focused at once on the lady, and his head awarded her a jaunty nod. It was a gesture on the verge of arrogance.
His voice rasped: “Nicholas Hawksmoor, architect and pilot, at your service, my lady.”
The name was vaguely familiar to Hoveler. He had heard some passing mention of Hawksmoor and had the impression the man was some kind of special personal agent of Dirac’s, but Hoveler had never seen him before. His image on the holostage was rather handsome.
From the look on Lady Genevieve’s face, it seemed that she too had little if any acquaintance with this fellow. And as if she too recognized only the name, she answered tentatively.
Hoveler watched and listened, but no one else—except the lady herself, of course—was paying much attention to the conversation at the moment. Hawksmoor now conveyed in a few elegant phrases the fact that he had talked directly with her husband only a few days ago, more recently than she herself had seen the Premier, and that he was bringing her personal greetings from Dirac.
“Well then, Nicholas Hawksmoor, I thank you. Was there anything else?”
“Oh, from my point of view, my lady, a great deal else.” His tone was calm, impertinent. “Are you interested in architecture, by any chance?”
Lady Genevieve blinked. “Only moderately, I suppose. Why?”
“Only that I have come here to this system, at the Premier’s orders naturally, to study its existing architecture and ekistics. I hope to play a major role in the final design of the colonial vehicles when the great project really gets under way at last.”
“How very important.”
“Yes.” After chewing his lip thoughtfully for a moment, the pilot asked in a quieter voice, “You’ve heard the Premier speak of me?”
“Yes,” Lady Genevieve answered vaguely. “Where are you now, Nick? I may call you Nick, may I not, as he does?”
“Indeed you may, my lady.” Brashness had now entirely left his manner; it was as if an innate arrogance had now given way to some deeper feeling.
Nick reported to the Lady Genevieve that he was even now at the controls of the small ship in which he customarily drove himself about and which he used in his work.
Hoveler’s interest had been caught, naturally enough, by the lady when she first appeared, and now a more personal curiosity had been aroused as well. He was still watching. It did not occur to him—it seldom did—that it might be rude to stare. How interesting it was, the way this upstart Nicholas—whoever he was—and young Lady Genevieve were still looking into each other’s imaged eyes—as if both were aware that something had been born between the two of them.
It was at this very moment that the sound of the first alarm reached the laboratory.
Hoveler, with his natural gift or burden of intense concentration, was not really immediately aware of that distant clamor. The Lady Genevieve was scarcely conscious, either, of the new remote signal. For her it could have been only one more muted sound, blending into the almost alien but gentle audio background of this unfamiliar place. And the whole Imatran solar system was deemed secure, as people sometimes remarked, to the point of dullness. The first stage of an alert, at last in this part of the large station, had been tuned down to be really dangerously discreet.
For the next minute it was possible for everyone else in the laboratory to disregard the warning entirely. Then, when people did begin to take notice, almost everyone considered the noise nothing more than a particularly ill-timed practice alert.
In fact, as Hawksmoor realized well before almost anyone else, the signal they were hearing was a quite genuine warning of an oncoming attack. Even he did not realize at once that the signal was so tragically delayed that those hearing it would be able to do very little before the attacker arrived.
“Excuse me,” said Nick to Lady Genevieve, not more than one second after the first bell sounded in the lab; before another second had passed, his image had flickered away.
Heartbeats passed. The lady waited, wondering gently, and for the moment dully, what kind of problem had arisen on the young pilot’s ship to provoke such an abrupt exit on his part. For a moment or two her eyes, silently questioning, came back to Hoveler’s. He could see her visibly wondering whether to turn away from the holostage and get back to her duties of diplomacy.
But very soon, not more than ten seconds after the first disregarded signal, a notably louder alarm kicked in, shattering the illusory peace and quiet.
This was a sound that could not well be ignored. People were irritated, and at the same time were beginning to wake up.
“Isthis a practice al
ert? What a time to choose for—”
Hoveler heard someone else answer, someone who sounded quietly lost: “No. It’s not practice.”
And a moment later, as if in affirmation, some kind of explosion in nearby space smote the solid outer hull of the station with a wave front of radiation hard enough to ring the metal like a gong. Even the artificial gravity generators in the interior convulsed for a millisecond or two, making the laboratory deck lurch underfoot.
Acting Supervisor Zador had turned to an intercom installation and was in communication with the station’s optoelectronic intelligence. Turning to her eminent visitor, eyes widened whitely around their irises of startling blue, she said, “That was a ship nearby being blown up. I’m afraid it was your ship. Your pilot must have undocked and pulled out when he saw …”
Zador’s voice trailed off. The lady was only staring back at her, still smiling faintly, obviously not yet able to understand.
Indeed, it seemed that no one in the lab could understand. The hideous truth could not instantly be accommodated by people who had such a press of other business in their lives to think about. Long seconds were needed for it to burrow into everyone’s awareness. When truth at last struck home, it provoked a collective frozen instant, the intake of deep breaths, then panic. A genuine attack, unheard of here in the Imatran system, was nevertheless roaring in, threatening the existence of everything that breathed.
“Berserkers!” A lone voice screamed out the terrible word.
No, only one berserker. Moments later, the first official announcement, coming over loudspeakers in the artificially controlled tones of the station’s own unshakable Communications voice, made this distinction, as if in some strange electronic attempt to be reassuring.
But to the listeners aboard the station, the number of times, the number of shapes in which death might be coming for them was only a very academic distinction indeed; the lab roiled in screaming panic.
Before the Lady Genevieve could move from the spot where she had been standing, Nick’s image was abruptly back upon the holostage. Steadily confronting the lady, who now stood frozen in fear, Hawksmoor now elaborated, succinctly and steadily and quite accurately, on his claim to be a pilot.
“My lady, I fear your ship is gone. But mine is nearby, it will be docking in a minute, and, I repeat, I am a very good pilot.”
“My ship is gone?”
“The ship that brought you here has already been destroyed. But mine is coming for you.”
“Already destroyed—”
The cool image on the holostage, projecting a sense of competence, strongly urged—in fact, it sounded like he was ordering—the Lady Genevieve to run for a certain numbered airlock, and gave her concise directions as to which way to move from where she was.
“You are standing near the middle of the main laboratory deck, are you not?”
The lady glanced around in search of aid, then looked helplessly at Hoveler, who—wondering at his own composure—nodded confirmation.
Turning back to the holostage, she answered meekly: “Yes, I am.”
Nick’s image on the holostage issued calm instructions. He would have his ship docked at that lock before she reached it. She had better start moving without delay.
He concluded: “Bring all those people with you, I have room for them aboard. Bring everyone on the station; there can’t be that many at the moment.”
Meanwhile Hoveler, though dazed by the fact that a real attack was taking place, was remembering the all-too-infrequent practice alerts aboard the station, recalling the duties he was supposed to perform in such an emergency. His tasks during an alert or an attack consisted largely of supervising the quasi-intelligent machines that really did most of the lab work anyway. It was up to him to oversee the temporary shutdown of experiments and the proper storage of tools and materials.
Reacting to his training, the bioengineer got started on the job. It was not very demanding, not at this stage anyway, and it kept him in a location where he could still watch most of what was going on between the Premier’s bride and one of his best pilots.
Hoveler used whatever spare moments he had to keep an anxious eye on Acting Supervisor Zador, who the moment the alert had sounded had found herself suddenly in command of local defenses. Obviously Anyuta was not used to such pressure, and Hoveler was afraid that she was somewhat panicked by it. Because just about the first thing she did was to reject Hawksmoor, who at least sounded like he knew what he was doing, in the role of rescuer.
Another message was now coming in on holostage for whoever was in charge aboard the station, and Hoveler could hear it in the background as he dealt with his own job. It was a communication from another craft, a regular manned courier that happened to be just approaching the station. Its human pilot was volunteering to help evacuate people from the facility, which was almost incapable of maneuvering under its own power. He could be on the scene in a matter of seconds.
“We accept,” said the acting supervisor decisively. “Dock your ship at Airlock Three.” A moment later, having put the latest and soon-to-be-most-famous protocolonist down on the flat top of the console near Hoveler and darting him a meaningful look as if to say You deal with this, she was running after the Lady Genevieve. Hoveler saw Anyuta grab the smaller woman by the arm and then firmly direct her down a different corridor than the one recommended by Nick, but in the correct direction to Airlock Three. At the moment, confusion dominated, with people running back and forth across the lab, and in both directions through the adjoining corridor. Some of the visitors were running in circles.
In the next moment the acting supervisor was standing beside Hoveler again, her attention once more directed to the central holostage. “Hawksmoor!”
“Dr. Zador?” the handsome image acknowledged.
“I am now in charge of the defenses here.”
“Yes ma’am, I understand that.”
“You are not to approach this station. We have another vessel available, already docked”—a quick glance at an indicator confirmed that—“and can evacuate safely without you. Take your ship out instead and engage the enemy—”
“My ship’s not armed.” Nick sounded as calm and firm as ever.
“Don’t interrupt! If your ship is not armed, you will still engage the enemy, by ramming!”
“Yes ma’am!” Nick acknowledged the order crisply, with no perceptible hesitation. Once more his image vanished abruptly from the stage.
Annie, what the hell are you doing?Hoveler marveled at the order and response he had just heard, what had sounded like the calm assignment and equally calm acceptance of certain death. Certainly something was going on here which he did not understand—but he had no time to puzzle over it now.
Right now he had no need to understand or even think about what might be happening outside the station’s hull. Dr. Hoveler and Dr. Zador, who were both required by duty as well as inclination to stand by their posts, exchanged a few words about the progress of the general evacuation. Then he felt the need to venture a personal remark.
“Anyuta.”
Her attention locked in some technical contemplation, she didn’t seem to hear him.
He tried again, more formally. “Dr. Zador?”
Now she did look over at him. “Yes?”
“You should get off this station with the others. You’re going to get married in a month. Not that I think there’s much chance we’re really going to be … but I can do what little can be done here perfectly well by myself.”
“This is my job,” she said with what sounded like irritation, and turned back to her displays. Old friend and colleague or not, the acting supervisor wasn’t going to call him by name. Not just now.
Hoveler, his own workbench already neatly cleared and now abandoned, stayed at his assigned battle station, which was near the center of the main laboratory deck, not far from Dr. Zador’s post. Regulations called for acceleration couches to be available here for the two of them, but, as
Hoveler recalled, those devices had been taken away months ago in some routine program of modification, and had never been brought back. The lack did not appear to pose a practical problem because the station would be able to do nothing at all in the way of effective maneuvering.
In terms of life support, the biostation possessed a full, indeed redundant, capability for interstellar flight, and had visited a number of planetary systems during the several years since its construction. But it had never mounted more than the simplest of space drives, relying on special c-plus tugs and boosters to accomplish its passages across interstellar distances.
Not that the lack appeared to be critical in this emergency. Even had an interstellar drive been installed and ready for use, any attempt to escape by that mode of travel now would have been practically suicidal for a vessel as big as the station starting this deep inside the gravitational well created by a full-sized star surrounded by the space-dimpling masses of its planets.
Still, with a berserker approaching at high speed, only a few minutes away at the most, some panicked person calling in from the surface of the planetoid was now evidently suggesting to the acting supervisor that even virtually certain suicide was preferable to the alternative, and ought to be attempted.
To this suggestion Dr. Zador replied, with what Hoveler applauded as admirable calm under the circumstances, that even had the drive capability been available, she was not about to suicidally destroy herself or anyone else. There wasn’t even a regular flight crew aboard the station at the moment.
Besides, it was impossible for anyone on the station to determine absolutely, with the rudimentary instruments available on board, whether or not the berserker (which according to the displays was still thousands of kilometers distant) was really coming directly for the station, though its course strongly suggested that it was. The Imatran system contained two or three worlds much larger and vastly more populous than the planetoid, collectively holding a potential harvest of billions of human lives. These planets lay in approximately the same direction as the station along the berserker’s path, but scores of millions of kilometers farther sunward.
Berserker Wars (Omnibus) Page 60
