She was subdued. “That was wrong, there are people I could stay with…. I just said that because I wanted to stay with you, because I thought you might be able to do something.”
“Something about, the hostages.”
“Yes! Gramp, I’d save all of their lives if I could, but I feel I’ll die if I can’t save his.”
“Your young man’s, of course”
“Yes!”
Then she was crying on her grandfather’s shoulder, while he patted her back and tried to think of some diplomatic phrase that might be useful.
The nightmare dragged on. Leaving Luon very much alone in her cabin (he couldn’t imagine how she was spending her time, for all he knew, she might be simply numbing herself with drugs), Gregor, following the example of the admiral and other crew members, spent most of his time in his combat couch on the bridge, where he snatched minutes of sleep and nibbled a few combat rations.
Once upon a time, only a few days ago, but in another world, the Twin Worlds people and their government had felt strong confidence in their planetary defenses. Some of them had even been ready to defy any possible attack from space. Their assurance had been grounded in what had seemed solid theory, and years of practical testing. The architects who had devised and built the defenses, having the full resources of a planet to call upon, could build their forcefield generators huge and extremely powerful, their product saturating and reinforcing material barriers and armor, quenching and damping out even thermonuclear explosions.
In addition, practically unlimited reserves of missiles could be stockpiled. Thousands, even millions, of all types could be launched into space at any attacker. Ground based beam-projecting weapons could be supplied with overwhelming potency, from generators bigger than entire battleships.
Throughout the long debates that had preceded and accompanied the years of rearmament, such defensive capabilities had been emphasized on most worlds. It did indeed seem possible, in theory, to create such tough ground defenses that even a numerous fleet attacking a well-fortified planet would find itself at a serious disadvantage whenever it came in range.
A vast amount of wealth had been invested in creating such powerful protection, and in the name of defense the planet’s people had been put to considerable discomfort and expense; to those who objected on these grounds, the unanswerable response was that no one could put a price tag on the ability to survive an interstellar war.
As soon as there came a pause in the shooting, some of Radigast’s surviving people and machines got to work analyzing such recordings of the catastrophe as were still available, trying to extract every possible bit of useful information. Presumably the analysts down in planetary defense headquarters on Timber were doing the same thing, but so far there had been no real exchange of information between the ships in space and the larger facilities on the ground.
One fact that quickly emerged from the analysis was that the enemy, during the first few hours of its direct attack on the planet Prairie, had concentrated its offensive efforts almost entirely on the location and destruction of the ground defenses. The only faint gleam of encouragement, if that was not too strong a word, was that the juggernaut did not seem to know in advance just where the defensive batteries had been positioned.
In less than a standard day, everything on the surface of Prairie, and much that was below the surface, had been reduced to lifeless clouds of dust and steam. The built-in planetary defenses, on which billions of people had gambled and lost their chances of survival, were gone, projectors and launchers melted, their hardware slagged or pulverized, their operators dead along with all their peaceful fellow citizens.
No more message couriers came up. The last one on the planet had been destroyed, and the last human voice down there was silenced.
It seemed that all the finest defenses in the Galaxy had accomplished was to delay for a few hours, perhaps a full day, the program of destruction.
Billions and billions of Twin Worlds citizens still occupied the surface of their surviving home planet, a world whose defenses, for whatever they might be worth, were still intact. Those billions might all be doomed, and Gregor feared that they probably were. But it was not fitting that their government should desert them.
With repairs still ongoing on most of Radigast’s ships, people and machines working hard just to keep the vessels from blowing up or dying, the admiral was moving what was left of his fleet farther away from Prairie, which had to be abandoned as a total loss, and closer to Timber. If that planet too was attacked, as he had to assume it would be, he would be in a position to make a last stand in its defense.
Progress toward Timber was slow, and Gregor was still too hopelessly far from that world to try for close virtual contact with anyone there on the ground. He felt a desperate need to resolve the situation regarding Belgola. Either he must find some way to confront the man face to face, or talk things over with whatever humans were currently closest to the president.
Belgola sent another message, this one to Gregor and Radigast jointly, demanding to know whether his earlier orders had been carried out.
By implication he seemed to be accusing the admiral of disloyalty and disobedience, the monstrous intruder had blasted the replica of Logos as soon as it came in range.
Belgola was telling them proudly that the strategy devised by Logos had changed, evolved in a new direction, and he wanted to leave the system, taking the remnant of the battle fleet with him.
Neither admiral nor diplomat had any intention of following such orders, but Gregor found himself arguing, trying to find out what the entity that gave them had in mind.
The admiral argued too. “Going where?” Radigast demanded. Damned if he was going to call a computer graphic “sir.”
The breach of military courtesy, if such it was, was generously ignored. “To discovery!” Belgola’s likeness assured its listeners. “To a new way of … a new kind of life, for the whole Galaxy.”
Gregor could only shake his head.
Any plan for pulling the fleet’s remnants out of the system ignored several important facts. One, perhaps the least important, was that many of Admiral Radigast’s surviving ships were no longer able to make c-plus jumps.
The president openly declared that he had already tried to beam his surrender message from his Timber headquarters directly to the attacker.
But if the attacker had heard the offer, it had been ignored like all other human messages.
Whether the giant enemy might or might not have heard some confused offer of surrender seemed to make not one bit of difference. All human communications were evidently being treated in the same way: totally ignored. Gregor got the chilling impression that the monster might not even be bothering to listen.
One of the admiral’s staff was saying: “But maybe it doesn’t hear. We have no evidence that it’s even listening. It probably eavesdropped on human communications long enough to find out what it wanted to know, to find out what we’re like. It doesn’t matter what people say to it. It just goes on killing them, regardless….”
Whether humans elected to fight back or to give up still seemed of little consequence to the attacker. It went on punishing the helpless planet, as if concerned that embers of resistance might somehow survive.
Admiral Radigast, still in command of what was left of the Twin Worlds fleet, had to face the fact that not only had the president effectively driven himself crazy, but the whole string of the president’s constitutionally designated successors had very likely been wiped out.
He also prohibited any piecemeal attacks, and ordered what remained of his force to pull back to the vicinity of the surviving planet, Timber, and deploy in a formation for its defense.
Probably, as Radigast admitted tersely to Plenipotentiary Gregor, the defense of the billions of people on Timber would also be a hopeless fight, probably.
“Let me tell you a military secret, Gregor, my friend. Timber’s ground defenses are no tougher than Prairie’s we
re.” Then the admiral’s expression altered slightly. “Now let me tell you another one. Want some good news, Gregor?”
The plenipotentiary only looked at him.
The admiral got out his laser pointer and explained. As far as Radigast could see, the only justification for even the faintest hope was the fact that his telescopes had discovered new wounds on the enemy’s enormous body. These fresh injuries looked trivial when seen in scale, but still they were there, glowing and bubbling, spewing gases and tiny bits of house-sized wreckage, in a couple of places on the invader’s monstrous hull.
The fact that mere human weapons had been able to damage the enemy to some extent gave some faint reason to hope.
Again Admiral Radigast, nearly exhausted, held a hasty council with all the surviving senior officers who were able to attend, in person or on holostage.
At first there were a number of empty places around the virtual conference table, but the software soon adjusted to eliminate the gaps.
This nightmare war was certainly not the one they had expected. No one could imagine any reason why the Huvean, or any other human enemy, would want to sterilize a perfectly good planet.
“We can at least be sure of who our enemy is not. It’s not Huvea. The war we’ve got is not the one that we expected, maybe it’s always been like that.”
“But we still don’t know who it is.”
“The only explanation I can imagine is that we face some insane alien terrorist, who operates on a Galactic scale.”
Gregor had gone back to his cabin. Luon soon appeared in the connecting doorway; she was in pitiable shape, but trying to be brave. “What’s going to happen, Gramp?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t see much in the way of grounds for optimism. Not for anyone in this system, here with the fleet or on any of the planets.” He smiled wryly. “Of course, the last time I told you what was going to happen I turned out to be abysmally wrong. I can be wrong this time too.”
“Timber hasn’t been attacked yet!”
“No. But we will all be happily surprised if it is not.”
A message, somewhat delayed, was just coming in from Timber. This time not from the presidential office, but from some minor official, who could get no help from his government and in desperation was appealing directly to the fleet: The news of what had just happened on their sister world had, not unnaturally, thrown most of Timber’s population into a panic. Others were flatly refusing to believe the truth, blaming a Huvean plot to disrupt communications and destroy morale.
The marvelous system of shelters on the surviving Twin World, very much like the ones on Prairie, was beginning to be perceived as nothing but a series of elaborately developed death traps.
Religious enthusiasts of several varieties were preaching conversion and repentance. Those of a more worldly turn of mind, still in the majority, were concentrating on the problem of getting as many people as possible off the surface of their world, and sending them in desperate flight to some other solar system where they might hope for sympathy and sanctuary.
Some authorities were ready to try sending fast couriers to other ED worlds, even including Huvea, appealing to them for help.
One officer reported to the fleet commander that while the systematic sterilization of Prairie was in progress, the invader also sent out small auxiliary ships as scouts and raiders, combing the inner system’s interplanetary space for fragments of human activity.
These machines were turning space stations inside out, and gathering a sample of artificial satellites of all description. They were also intercepting one after another of a swarm of human ships that had erupted from the dying world. Restrictions on travel were being defied or totally abandoned, as it seemed that local authority was beginning to collapse. The somewhat garbled reports reaching Radigast’s flagship from the surface and the near vicinity of Timber indicated that some units of this improvised evacuation fleet were carrying only two or three people, while others had a hundred or more on board.
Somebody, sending a message from one of the larger evacuation ships, pleaded with the admiral to send ships to monitor this panicked evacuation, or even take charge of it. His fleet should provide protection. But Radigast did not even reply to the suggestion. He and his people had more than they could do in simply trying to protect their own ships.
In one or two reported instances, unbelievable numbers of people had crammed themselves into small ships, willing to try anything to get away from the destruction.
“Can’t verify it, but there’s one story claiming several people died, crushed and suffocated by the sheer weight of other human bodies.”
The admiral refrained from any comment on that one. One report after another marched and danced across his holostage, showing that several of the small civilian vessels had been pursued and overtaken in space by the invader’s auxiliary machines. These ships were not being totally destroyed, but actually captured by the enemy, using forcefield grapples. One or more were moving away under the power of their own drives, but on new courses, in the direction of the murderous giant.
Meanwhile, some undetermined number of the small ships, particularly those who lifted off on the opposite side of the planet from the killing machine, had succeeded in getting away. Those who could would be heading out of system, spreading the word to other ED worlds of the disaster that had befallen the Twin Worlds.
At first the small enemy units, raiding the evacuation ships, faced little or no opposition. But then they began to get some, from the hundreds of scoutships Radigast had urgently recalled to the defense of the inner planets.
Scoutships were indeed warships in a small way, being much better armed and shielded than most of the evacuation fleet. But, although several fierce skirmishes were fought, they had little success in trying to beat off the enemy attackers of approximately their own size. In the small-scale fighting there were no clear-cut human victories to report.
One or two of the scouts were themselves captured and ripped open, though it might take two enemy machines to handle one of them with any facility.
Presently Radigast ordered the scouts withdrawn. He was going to have to find a better use for them than this.
“It’s capturing them, you say?”
“Not only grappling and capturing, sir, but in some cases carrying out an organized boarding. One or two of our small ships are being towed toward the enemy.”
The attacker was a monster, certainly; but there was nothing frenzied or random in its monstrousness. Wherever it and its boarding machines had come from, whatever power might ultimately have ordained this deadly mission, they gave no impression at all of hesitancy, of waiting for orders from somewhere else. When boarding captured ships, they entered with what seemed reckless speed, moving at a pace no humans could have managed.
It was impossible to determine much in the way of details, not at a distance of light minutes, and under the conditions obtaining. But in some cases the hulls of the captured ships had been ripped open, and small machines were recorded going in.
One interpreter of the distorted signals said: “I believe the aggressor is sending prize crews aboard. I can detect what seem to be people in spacesuits, coming out of the aggressor vessel, not from ours.”
And another: “I agree that the captured ships are being boarded. What I’m saying is that the prize crew does not seem to be composed of people. They don’t look like humans, not even humans in spacesuits. They look like robots. Simply more machines.”
There was a fruitless argument. In that precarious lack of certainty the matter had to rest, for the time being. The image was at the limit of magnification; nothing more could be done to usefully enhance it.
The next message courier to arrive came from the vice president of the Twin Worlds, and was addressed to plenipotentiary Gregor. It had been launched not from Timber but from the martyred planet of Prairie, evidently just before the end of all organized activity on the surface. Then it had been considerably delayed
en route.
The vice president was doubtless unaware that Gregor would only hear her speaking from the grave. But still she sounded near collapse. She informed him that she had been trying for several standard days to take over the president’s duties, but it seemed this could not be done constitutionally without some contact with the president, which had proven impossible to arrange.
The next part of the message was garbled, by some damage sustained in transit, but seemed to have to do with arranging a surrender, in hopes of preventing further loss of life. Then the vice president added: “Plenipotentiary Gregor, since you are the only senior official of our government I have been able to contact, I delegate my powers to you. Will you give the order?”
This was only a message, and therefore impossible to argue with or question.
Radigast was shaking his head, glowering at the image. “Our motherless commander-in-bloody-chief says we should surrender to his own computer. And our second in command wants us to give up to the enemy.” He turned to Gregor. “What do you say?”
“I want to send a reply.”
The communications officer looked at him strangely. “Sir? To Prairie?”
“Yes, I know. But I want to send it anyway.”
He had to struggle for the right words. Finally he settled for:
“Very well, ma’am. I accept the responsibility. But I will give no order to surrender at this time.”
The officer turned away, only to turn back again mere moments later. “Message sent, sir. I don’t expect there’ll be any reply. But here’s another, officially registered as coming from the president.”
The new communication carried Belgola’s interactive image, first urging Gregor to come to headquarters on Timber, then seeming to warn him away. It was ambiguous, even self-contradictory. Then the president’s image demanded to know what steps had been taken to begin negotiations with the attacker? Then it added, almost as an afterthought, that he intended sending up modules of a duplicated Oracle, which upon its arrival would assume command of the fleet.
Berserker Prime Page 12
