He met the others’ eyes, one after the other, as if challenging anyone to dispute the point.
Kensing was more than ready to hope that Annie still had a chance at life; it was almost but not quite unheard of for a berserker’s prisoners to be rescued. But Nick was willing to dispute his employer’s assumption. “We don’t know that, sir.”
Dirac gave the speaker his steely glare. “We don’t know the people aboard the station have been killed. Correct?”
There was a brief pause in which Nick seemed to yield. “Yes, sir. Correct.”
The Premier smiled faintly. “To be on the safe side, then, we must assume that there are living people. And my wife may well be among them.”
“That’s correct, sir. For all we know, she may.”
“That’s all for now.” And Dirac’s hands moved over the surface of the table in front of him, dismissing Hawksmoor, whose image vanished abruptly, calling up other images on his private stage.
He said: “Kensing, I’m going to order the search for survivors of the courier abandoned. Any functioning space suit in the vicinity would be putting out an automated distress signal, and nothing like that is being received.”
Kensing didn’t know what to say, but it seemed he wasn’t required to say anything at this point.
Dirac continued: “But I am going to keep a number of my pilots busy, Nick among them, combing through all the space debris that resulted from the combat, the berserker stuff along with ours. We may be able to glean a lot of information from that.”
“Yes, sir, I expect so.” The room was replete with wall displays, in addition to those on Dirac’s desk. From where Kensing stood, he could read most of the wall information fairly well. Obviously surface and satellite telescopes were still locked onto the retreating enemy and its prize. He was tormented by the idea that somewhere inside that distorted little dot, Annie might be still alive.
Dirac followed his gaze. “Look at that. As far as anyone in-system here can tell by telescope, the bioresearch station has suffered no serious physical damage. My ships will soon be refitted-I don’t see why it should take more than a few hours-and as soon as they’re ready, we’re going after it.”
“I’m coming with you, sir.”
“Naturally, I expected you’d say that. With your experience in defense systems you’ll be useful. Welcome aboard. See Varvara when you go out; she’ll sign you up officially.”
“Thank you, sir”
The Premier nodded. “She’s not dead, I tell you.” Obviously he meant his own young bride. Looking quietly into some holostage presentation of nearby space, he added: “I am sure that I would know if she were dead. Meanwhile, I want to gather every possible bit of information about the attacker.”
Berserker debris, Kensing knew, was often valuable to military intelligence because it allowed types of enemy equipment to be distinguished. He nodded. They were going to need every gram of advantage they could get.
Leaving the conference, Kensing once more encountered Colonel Marcus and the bodyguard Brabant. They were talking in the corridor with a woman Kensing had not met before, who introduced herself to him as Varvara Engadin.
Engadin was somewhere near the Premier’s age, probably around fifty, but still slender and impressively beautiful, and her name was familiar. She had been the Premier’s intimate companion-as well as his political adviser, according to the stories-when Kensing had first met the family. At that time Mike’s mother was already several years dead.
“Ms. Engadin, I’m supposed to see you about signing on the crew.”
“Sandy.” She put both hands out to him in sympathy. “I’ve been hearing about your loss.”
Conversation focused briefly on the tragedy. Though everyone spoke in polite and diplomatic terms, plainly all agreed that Dirac was determined not to accept the overwhelming probability that his bride was dead, and he fully intended to get her back. To have his way, to impose his will, as usual, even when his adversary was a berserker.
Kensing, his own feelings torn, commented that everyone really knew the odds were pretty heavily against that. This psychic pretense was not at all the Premier’s usual mode of behavior.
“Know him pretty well?” the colonel asked. He had a way of swiveling a lens on his front box to make it plain who he was speaking to.
“I’m a friend of his son’s-a close friend for a time, but I haven’t seen Mike for a couple of years. And I’ve stayed with them in one of the official mansions. How about you?”
“Don’t really know them. Been working for the Premier only a couple of months now. I was just in the process of turning down a chief pilot’s job when this came up. Now it looks like I’m in for the duration.” Marcus did not seem at all displeased by the prospect of going to war again. Somehow the metal boxes and the voice coming out of them impressed Kensing as capable of expressing shades of feeling. Somehow the colonel’s boxes could give the impression of swaggering as they rolled.
“What do you think has happened to his wife? Really?”
Kensing felt compelled to dig for expert opinion regarding the fate of those aboard the station.
“He could be right. She might not have boarded that courier at all.”
“And what do you think…” He couldn’t make himself state the question plainly.
“Hell, I don’t know. There’s always a fighting chance. But no use anyone getting his hopes too high.”
His official enrollment completed, pacing down a corridor toward his newly assigned quarters with Marcus rolling at his side, Kensing listened to more of the colonel’s opinions. Frank Marcus commented that two bizarre points about the recent raid set it apart from almost any other military action that he was able to remember.
“First point: regardless of what this berserker did out here, in the vicinity of this planetoid, it made no effort to get at the inner planets of the system. Didn’t even send scouts sunward to look them over, or to raid the space traffic going on that way. There’s quite a bit of space traffic, almost all of it unarmed ships.”
“The inner worlds are heavily defended,” Kensing offered.
Marcus dismissed that with the wave of a metallic arm, a tentacle-like appendage of inhuman but obviously practical shape. “In my experience, when a berserker as big and mean as this one-hell, any berserker-sees it has at least a fighting chance to take out a couple of billion people, it’s not likely to pass up the opportunity.”
“So why did it take the biolab? Not destroy it, but actually grab it and carry it away?”
“I don’t know yet. But I do know something that strikes me as even more peculiar. Our tricky berserker didn’t even make a serious attempt to depopulate this planetoid. And it was right here. And the defenses on Planetoid Imatra are-were-a hell of a lot lighter than those on the sunward planets. It took out the defenses that were shooting at it, and that was that.”
Kensing, whose job had long required of him serious-up to now purely theoretical-study of berserkers’ tactics, had already been trying to make sense of it. “So, that means what? A monster machine that doesn’t want to kill people? Indicating that in some crazy way it’s not really a berserker?”
“I wouldn’t want to tell that to the guys who were manning the ground defenses, or to the people who tried to fight it in space.
No, it’s ready enough to kill. But it had some bigger goal than simply attacking this system. It wouldn’t deviate from its plan, even for the chance to take out a couple of billion human lives.
Of life units, as the berserkers say. Wouldn’t even delay to polish off a million or so near at hand.”
“All right. Was that your second point?”
“No. Actually the second peculiarity I had in mind was that even now, days after the attack, the damned raider is still in sight.
Either it can’t go superluminal while it’s towing something as big as that lab, or it doesn’t want to risk the attempt. And if it hasn’t tried to go c-plus by now, it’s not going to
. Because now it’s close enough to the Mavronari to start getting into the thick dust.”
Kensing paused in the corridor to take another look for himself, calling up the picture on one of the yacht’s numerous displays.
True, the berserker was currently observable only with some difficulty, but there it was. Still fleeing in slowship mode, though with a steady buildup of velocity in normal space, so that the tiny wavering images of the raider and its captive prey, as seen from the vicinity of the Imatran planetoid, were measurably redshifting.
Not greatly, though. “A long way to go to light speed.”
“Right. It hasn’t been humping its tail hard enough to get near that. C-plus wouldn’t be a practical procedure, as I say, for an object moving in that direction-into the dust.” In fact, as Kensing discovered when he queried the terminal, the very latest indications were that the berserker’s acceleration appeared to be easing off somewhat, and computer projections were that the burdened machine might actually have to diminish its velocity in the next few hours or days as it penetrated ever more deeply the outlying fringes of the nebula.
Within the next few hours, a war council composed largely of key members of the Premier’s staff went into session aboard the Eidolon. Kensing, as the official representative of Imatra, was in attendance. Kensing’s Imatran compatriots continued to maintain a wary distance.
Kensing had remained aboard the yacht, sending down to his apartment on the surface for extra clothing and some personal gear. It now seemed unlikely that he would leave the Eidolon for any reason before the squadron’s departure, the projected time of which was only hours away.
The war council’s current session on the yacht heard speculation from some of its members that the berserker might have sustained serious damage in the recent fighting, enough to keep it from going c-plus. Therefore it had turned toward the nebula as its best chance of getting away before a human fleet could be assembled to hunt it down.
An officer objected: “That doesn’t answer the question of why it chose to withdraw instead of attacking, killing.”
“It may have been heavily damaged.”
“Bah. So what? This’s a berserker we’re talking about. It cares nothing for its own survival, except that it must destroy the maximum number of lives before it goes. And obviously it was still capable of fighting.”
“If we just knew why it decided that an intact bioresearch station, perhaps only this one in particular, would be such an enormously valuable thing to have.”
Varvara Engadin spoke up. “The answer to that question ought to be staring us in the face. In fact I think it is. We’re talking about a vessel that has a billion Solarian human zygotes stored aboard.”
“Yes. If not active life, certainly potential. A billion potentially active Solarian humans. One would expect a berserker to use up its last erg of energy, sacrifice its last gram of matter, to destroy such a cargo. But why in the Galaxy should it want to carry it away?”
Kensing, trying to imagine why, found ominous, half-formed suggestions drifting across the back of his mind.
Someone else argued that whether the enemy had entirely lost superluminal capability or not, the compound object formed by the berserker and its captured station was more than a little clumsy for serious spacefaring. It would certainly be considerably harder to maneuver in any kind of space than the speedy vehicles at the Premier’s command.
Computer projections, now being continuously run, showed that even when the delay for refitting the Premier’s ships was factored in, his squadron was going to have a good chance of catching up.
Frank Marcus, the frontal surface of his head box slightly elevated to present an interestingly complex gray contour above one end of the conference table, expressed his opinion-even as the subject of his remarks sat listening imperturbably-that Dirac, whose notable accomplishments had not so far extended into the military field, did not appear to be entirely crazy for having decided to give chase.
Someone else formally, not too wisely, put the question to Dirac. “Is that still our plan, sir?”
Dirac’s steely eyes looked up across the table-looking through the boundaries of virtual reality, because for this session the Premier had remained physically in his own suite. “What kind of a question is that? We’re going after them, of course.” Dirac blinked, continuing to stare at the questioner; it was as if he could not understand how any other course of action could be considered. “Whatever plan that damned thing is trying to carry out, we’re not going to allow it to succeed.”
Someone asked what local help was going to be available.
At that, eyes turned to Kensing. He, trying to sound properly apologetic, repeated on behalf of himself and his determinedly ground-bound local colleagues their regretful assurances that they had not a single armed vessel left in-system, nothing with the capability of playing a useful role in such a pursuit.
“I understand that,” Dirac reassured him.
On that note the conference adjourned temporarily. More hours passed, ticking toward the deadline. The refitting of the Eidolon and its escort ships neared completion, and they were very nearly ready for the pursuit they were about to undertake.
Meanwhile the enemy, whose actions were still distinctly observable from the ships in orbit around Imatra, continued on a steady course toward the approximate center of the Mavronari Nebula. Inside this mass of gas and fine dust, the ambient density of matter was known to be high enough to make c-plus flight in general so perilous as to be practically impossible. Therefore observation of the berserker from the Imatran system ought to remain possible for several more days at least.
The retreating berserker, someone commented, was continuing to retrace exactly, or nearly so, the very course on which it had been first detected when inbound toward Imatra. If that fact had any particular significance, no one could guess what it might be.
The fact that the enemy had captured the station whole, and therefore appeared to be operating under some deliberate plan of taking prisoners-perhaps growing massive numbers of goodlife, or using human cells to produce some other biological
weapon-loomed ever larger in the worried planners’ thoughts.
That a berserker had chosen abduction over mass destruction seemed to many people especially ominous.
Despite the scoffing of Colonel Marcus, the peculiarities of the situation were such that Kensing, like several of his colleagues in the war council, could not entirely rid himself of the suspicion that their swiftly retiring foe might not be a genuine berserker at all. In the past, certain human villains had been known to disguise ships as berserkers to accomplish their own evil purposes of murder and robbery.
But when he broached the idea to other experts on Dirac’s staff, they were unanimously quick to put it down. In this case, all the material evidence worked against any such conclusion. By now a considerable amount of the smashed debris from small enemy machines had been gathered out of space-some of it by Nicholas Hawksmoor, much more by others-and painstakingly examined.
Concurrently some large pieces of this wreckage, at least one chunk meters across, had rained down intact upon the planetoid, whose shallow, artificially maintained atmosphere tended to guide the occasional meteorite down to the surface without burning it up. To all the available experts on the subject-some of them inhuman expert systems-this wreckage looked and felt and tested out in every way like real berserker metal, shaped and assembled by berserker construction methods.
The master computers on Dirac’s yacht, state-of-the-art machines in every way, assured the planners that they still had time to overtake their foe, but that there was no time to waste; every passing hour brought the enemy closer to the shelter of the deep nebula. Dirac intended leaving very quickly, as soon as his ships were charged and ready. As far as Kensing could tell, Dirac’s crew, some thirty people in all, was solidly with him. No doubt they were all volunteers, hand-picked for dependability and loyalty.
As it happened, one ot
her person who had not volunteered, at least not for a berserker chase, was now on board. Kensing discovered this for himself in the course of a routine inventory of equipment. One of the yacht’s medirobot berths was occupied, the glassy lid closed on the coffin-like chamber and frosted on the inside. The berth was tuned for long-term suspended animation maintenance of the unseen person in it.
Generally in favor of a hands-on approach whenever possible, Kensing went to take a look at the medirobot for himself. It stood in an out-of-the-way corridor on the big ship.
Varvara Engadin shed some light on the situation. This occupant of the deep-freeze chamber was a volunteer for the first projected colony to be established by the Sardou Foundation.
Some individual so devoted to the plan, so determined to take part in the great colonial adventure, that he or she had requested suspended animation for whatever period might be necessary until the heroic mission should be ready to begin.
Across the portion of the Galaxy settled by Solarians, a number of methods had been tried to deal with the problem of overpopulation. Effective means to prevent conception were widely used, but still by no means universal. On worlds whose aggregate population ran into the hundreds of billions, millions of unwanted pregnancies occurred each year. Removal of a zygote or an early fetus from the mother’s body was routine, but in this day and age the overt destruction of such organisms was unacceptable. Rather, some long-term storage was indicated, but storage indefinitely prolonged was also a denial of life.
The course favored by most of the Premier’s political supporters had been to announce a mass colonization effort-and actually to begin the preparations for such an effort, with a launch date scheduled for some time securely and vaguely in the future. Surely people still had the spirit to go out and establish colonies.
A variation on this was a plan-actually several plans-to hide away secret reserves of humanity against the time when the berserkers might manage to depopulate all settled planets. Those in favor of such a scheme contemplated searching for a reasonably Earthlike planet, hidden, heretofore unknown.
Berserker Kill Page 10
