The commodore rejoiced to hear it. But he suggested rather firmly that the injured he had already installed in units on the yacht be allowed to remain there. “Moving them again would certainly be traumatic. Unless there is some compelling reason—?”
Lady Genevieve was soothing. “I expect Premier Dirac will have no objection.”
Scurlock also assured the newcomers that live medical help in the person of Dr. Zador would be available in about an hour. The process of her awakening, he said, had already been begun.
The necessity of dealing with recently wounded people naturally led to the discussion of berserkers, and this to description of the brisk fight the newcomers had just been through.
With sudden apprehension, Scurlock asked: “I take it, Commodore, you have not engaged in any hostilities with the machine? I mean the one we’re attached to?”
Prinsep blinked. “No. You sound concerned. So this giant berserker may still be active?”
“I should think we have very little to worry about in that regard. But with berserkers one can never be sure, can one?”
“I suppose not. No, a few hours ago we found ourselves pitted against a different enemy. A more modern force.” And Prinsep briefly outlined recent events, beginning with the latest raid on Imatra.
Dinant and Tongres, and the three severely wounded crew people still in their care, soon joined the group on the station. They had lost track of Superintendent Gazin, they said, somewhere on the yacht, and hadn’t wanted to delay their passage to search for him.
Havot, though now weighed down by a leaden weariness, retained the curiosity to ask: “Lady Genevieve, we’ll all be interested in hearing how you personally managed to survive.”
“Survive, young man?”
“Your first encounter with the berserker, back in the Imatran system. Historians are almost unanimously agreed that you died then.” And he favored the lady with his most winning and seductive smile.
Seated in one of the spare cabins on the yacht, Mike Sardou was telling his old friend Sandy Kensing how he had very recently awakened, to his own intense astonishment, in the glassy coffin of an operational SA device here on his father’s yacht. He didn’t know how he’d come to be there or who had given the order to revive him. He didn’t know how long he’d been there, until Sandy broke the news.
Michael related now how, as his mind had cleared fully, he’d prudently kept out of sight of Prinsep’s people, while watching them bring their seriously wounded aboard and start putting them into the medirobots.
Here was evidence that some kind of battle was going on, or had recently been concluded. Mike couldn’t recognize any of the people, or even the space armor they were wearing.
Nor could he guess what connection they had with his own predicament. But Mike strongly suspected that his father—or some faction among his father’s supporters—had put him in the coffin, under a false identity, in an effort to get rid of him. Alternatively, he might for all he knew have been kidnapped by some of the Premier’s enemies.
Kensing asked: “Does the name ‘Fowler Aristov’ mean anything to you?”
“That’s the name that was on my SA unit. Beyond that, no, I never—” Mike broke off. Someone was coming down the corridor.
In a moment Nicholas Hawksmoor, still in suit-form, had appeared in the half-open doorway.
Kensing quickly performed the necessary introduction. Hawksmoor with his encyclopedic memory had already recognized the Premier’s son, the image of whose face showed up in a thousand records of one kind or another.
But all the records to which Nick had access also agreed that young Mike had gone off on some kind of a long trip, only vaguely specified, three hundred years ago. His confirmed presence aboard the Eidolonwas contradictory and astounding.
At first Nick was suspicious of the contradiction in his records. “You’re Mike Sardou?”
“Yes.” Warily.
The wariness existed on both sides. “What’re you doing here? Your father told me, told everyone, that you had gone off traveling.”
“If my father really said that, then obviously my father lied.”
Nick didn’t answer.
Mike went on: “Damned if I know what I’m doing here; I mean, I’m not surprised to find myself here on the yacht, because the last thing I can recall is going to bed in my stateroom … where are we, by the way? Where in space?”
It took the others a couple of minutes to bring him up to date on events, after which there was a pause while Mike tried to digest the information. Then Nick demanded: “Can you think of any reason why you should have been put to sleep, under the name of Fowler Aristov, three hundred years ago?”
Mike looked at them, his first stunned incomprehension swiftly turning into rage. “Yes, I can think of a reason—of a man who thought he had reasons, and who would have stopped at nothing—my father. Oh, damn him. Damn him!”
Nick’s helmet nodded. “I can believe that, yes. You’ve been … reprogrammed, in a way. As I have. By the same man. Our father. I acknowledge him as my creator too, you see …”
Nick paused, lifting, turning his empty helmet to reposition the airmikes, in an eerie semblance of a human tilting his head to listen. In a moment the others heard the footsteps too.
Brabant arrived, to stand in the doorway looking at them all in indecisive anger.
Mike recognized him immediately. “Brabant, what is this?”
“Kid, I think you just got a little too big for your britches, is what it is. The old man doesn’t put up with any back talk. You should’ve known that.”
“So he did this to me.” There was a seething, quiet rage behind the words, reminding all the others of the Old Man himself.
Brabant looked around at the others, then back at Mike. “If you hadn’t been his son, he would’ve wiped you out, instead of saving you here. But he doesn’t put up with any crap, from you or anyone else.”
Nick said: “Our father puts up with nothing from anyone. He always gets what he wants.”
Brabant’s expression altered profoundly. “So, you’ve figured it out.”
There was silence for a moment.
The bodyguard, sensing a crisis but uncertain of its exact nature, went on: “What the hell, kid? It could be worse. Part of you’s had fun for three hundred years, being an architect and a pilot on the old man’s staff. And the other part’s had a nice long peaceful nap. Maybe the old man will let you reintegrate sometime.”
Brabant’s voice trailed off as it came home to him the way the other three were looking at him.
“We hadn’t figured it out,” said Kensing slowly. “Not quite. But we have now. Dirac recorded him. Recorded his own son, and then reprogrammed him, to make him what he wanted—a useful, obedient architect and pilot.”
“All of you,” said a new, unfamiliar voice. “Stay where you are.”
All four turned to see a stranger in an armored suit, aiming at them a weapon usually effective only against hard surfaces. Superintendent Gazin, suspicious, as always, of goodlife.
* * *
On the station variegated greenery, grown from odd stocks of potential colonial materials, much of it deliberately mutated, had over the centuries overgrown rooms and corridors, almost a whole deck, not originally intended as gardens. Vines twisted around doors, groped blindly for controls, tested the seals of hatches. Already, as a result of neglect, the growth was hiding some things, keeping others from working properly.
Dirac’s lady and his aide Scurlock were smoothly cooperative in the effort to care for Prinsep’s wounded, and quite properly concerned. Soon the Lady Genevieve, with the air of a gracious monarch, assigned the commodore and his surviving shipmates a corridor of cabins on the station.
There were a good many cabins and staterooms waiting to be used. Overcrowding had not been a problem, even if, as some remarks by the old inhabitants suggested, the Lady Genevieve had not been the only person born—or reborn—here in the last three hundred years.
As soon as the commodore’s bleary eyes had seen to it that all of his wounded were receiving the best treatment available, and that the handful of his people who were suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion were as well off as seemed possible under the circumstances, he considered giving in to his own need for rest. But for the time being he still struggled to stay awake.
Privately Prinsep now at least half suspected all of these long-term survivors, or at least Dirac, of having become some exotic kind of goodlife. But he didn’t want to voice his suspicions until he could talk them over with his own trusted people—the remnant he had left.
With this in mind the commodore, struggling yet a little longer to keep awake, warned Dirac’s contemporaries that there was a good possibility of continued danger from the pack of bandits he and his people had just been fighting.
The commodore worriedly renewed his inquiry: “I take it your berserker here hasn’t made any aggressive moves toward you lately?”
“It has not,” Scurlock reassured him. “I think we may assume our ancient foe poses no immediate threat. We’ve had no trouble with it for a long time. But if you were planning—some aggressive move toward it—I’d advise caution.”
“Aggressive moves on our part were a possibility as long as we had our flagship. But now … unfortunately, as you can see, we are here in the character of refugees rather than rescuers. At the moment we find ourselves needing help rather than offering protection. Of course, we do bring certain weapons and equipment that you may have been lacking. If there is anything that we can do …”
“There’s no hurry, after three centuries—can it really have been that long? We must begin by offering what we can in the way of hospitality.”
Sounding urbane and eminently reasonable, Scurlock, after checking with Lady Genevieve, commanded the still-working service robots to bring refreshment for everyone.
Gradually the story of the past three centuries aboard began to be told by the long-term residents—or enough interesting fragments to make it possible to start trying to guess the pattern of the whole.
And now Prinsep, though almost asleep on his feet and about to retire to his room, inquired with anxious delicacy about food; he was visibly relieved to hear that that area of life support was still in excellent condition.
Prinsep, divesting himself of armor in his newly assigned cabin, on the verge of letting himself give way to exhaustion, in turn warned the best available approximation of a trusted aide—Havot had to play the role—that they would have to watch out for Dirac.
They were talking through the coded communication still available in their helmets.
“You want me to watch out for him?” Havot nodded. “I was about to suggest the same thing myself.”
“I see signs that he’s a dangerous man, Havot—is that really your name, by the way?” Then the commodore shook his head. He shed the last bit of his armor and in his underwear reeled toward his bed, speaking uncoded words in air. “Sorry, I’m getting punchy. No matter. Yes, I want you to do the watching-out.”
“You still trust me, then.”
“Oh yes. Actually there are some matters, Christopher—is thatreally your name?—in which I trust you profoundly.”
Havot thought it over. “You know, Commodore … ?”
But the commodore was sound asleep.
TWENTY-THREE
Kensing watched, poised for action, as the stranger advanced one hesitant step and then another. The weapon in the newcomer’s armored hands swung unsteadily to aim at first one and then another of the four men who confronted him. Blink-trigger carbine, alpha, or simply manual firing? It could make a very important difference.
“I am Superintendent Gazin of the Humanity Office,” he proclaimed, in a voice that seemed to be struggling to establish authority. “Investigating goodlife activity.”
Brabant’s voice was infinitely more confident, though his own weapon still rested in its holster. “I’d take it kindly if you didn’t point that thing at me.”
Immediately the barrel of the superintendent’s weapon swung back to aim at him. “Drop your own gun first!” he commanded. Then Gazin glanced at Nick, who was standing in suit-form near Brabant. In the next instant the superintendent seemed to freeze, as he became aware of the empty helmet and, presumably, of some of its implications.
Exactly what triggered the eruption of violence Kensing could not have said. He threw himself down, rolling on the deck, trying to get his own unarmored body out of the way as Gazin’s weapon flared, beam searing ineffectually at Nick’s armor. Beside Kensing, Mike Sardou was also trying to save himself.
The man from the Humanity Office—whatever that might be—had fired at Nick, and Brabant had shot back. Brabant’s heavy sidearm proved the most effective weapon, force packets puncturing Gazin’s suit and driving the man staggering against the bulkhead behind him. Gazin’s weapon fell from his arms and he crumpled to the deck on top of it.
Nick, his armor scorched and glowing but still intact, had already decided on his next move, and now performed it with nerveless optelectronic speed. He spun toward Brabant, both metal gauntlets of the hollow suit lashing out.
The bodyguard went down at once and soundlessly. Brabant, his head smashed, twitched on the deck and died without another word.
Kensing, climbing slowly to his feet, found his own sidearm in his hand. Slowly he reholstered it.
Mike—the two examples of him—stood beside Kensing, his organic form close to Sandy Kensing’s right side. The hollow suit, inhabited only by patterns of information, was just at his left.
“Two men dead,” said Kensing, gazing with gradually developing shock at the still forms on the deck, Brabant and the stranger. “What do we do now?”
“Easy,” said Mike, raising his eyes to look past Kensing into the empty helmet of the other version of himself.
The airspeakers on Nick’s armor had the answer ready: “We go after the old man.”
Mike nodded. “He’ll be coming over here, all right. To see what’s happened.”
“And I know just where we can take him,” the speakers said. “I know just how.”
“Nick?”
No answer.
Dirac was standing now in the cavernous space of the Eidolon‘s flight deck, right beside the open hatch of the little shuttle from which he had just disembarked.
He tried again, raising his voice—only modestly, he didn’t want to advertise his presence on the yacht to any of Prinsep’s people who might still be around.
“Nick?”
Still no reply. The sheltering spaces of the Eidolonaround him were all silent. A certain quality in the ship’s silence, he thought, momentarily letting himself be fanciful, suggested that his once-proud yacht had been waiting for him. Well, he would investigate, and by the time Loki had transmitted himself over from the station, he, the Premier, might have uncovered some answers. Loki had orders to remain on the station until Scurlock felt sure of being able to manage these well-armed intruders.
As for himself, fully armored and armed as he was, the Premier felt confident of being able to deal with any emergency that was at all likely to come up, at least until Loki should arrive.
Proceeding cautiously to the deck where the medirobots were located, Dirac found all five units occupied, just as the ineffective-looking commodore had announced. None of the devices were in SA mode, and each of them contained a semiconscious stranger, man or woman.
There was no one else around. The members of Prinsep’s crew who were still active had by now probably joined their commanding officer on the station. But where were Nick and Kensing and Brabant?
And—on a deep level the most disturbing question—what had happened to Mike?
When Dirac tried asking the ship directly, its bland, imperturbable voice informed him that the people he was trying to locate could be found in the ten-cube.
“Why in the devil—” But there was no use trying to debate these matters with
the ship. He would go and see for himself.
At the threshold of the VR chamber, the Premier discovered that the facility was indeed in use. Most of the interior was glowing with a huge and elaborate presentation.
Letting the entrance door close behind him, Dirac frowned at what he saw. Nick—or someone else?—had called up and was displaying a certain design project the Premier had meant to keep secret for some time yet. The display was not truly interactive, a simple holograph that required no special helmet for viewing. It was the model of a projected colony, the heart of a new plan he had been perfecting in secret. It showed how the colony he now intended to found would very likely look when construction was well along.
The solar system and the world on which this plan would eventually take form were yet to be determined, of course, still unknown even to Dirac himself. The site would depend to a great extent upon where his—partner—wanted to take them.
At the center of the model as it was now being presented arose a palatial residence …
And voices were discussing it. He couldn’t see the speakers—he supposed they were behind some portion of the glowing image—but he could hear them plainly.
“—and whose house is that going to be?”
“Can’t you guess?”
Two voices, those of Nick and Mike. They were quite different. Both sounds were intensely, equally familiar to Dirac, though he had not heard one of them for centuries.
Mike was saying: “The great mansion must belong to the man who even now—in his own warped mind—is becoming less and less a man, and more and more a god. The one who’s going to rule it all.”
And Nick: “Except that he isn’t going to have the chance.”
“To sit in this house and rule this colony.”
“Oh yes, definitely, this is a colonial plan. The outer defenses. Right here in the middle, the palace for god to occupy. And a lot of other housing round it.”
“But—I wonder what this is over here? Some kind of temple? Church? Monument?”
Berserker Wars (Omnibus) Page 92
