Belgola announced his plan of sending the enemy a large number of human volunteers, who would explain to it the mutual advantages of integrated existence.
“Given a pure machine as intermediary, our ridiculous conflict with Huvea will be settled in no time. As a gesture of good faith I mean to turn over the ten Huvean hostages to the visitor’s custody.” He paused, smiling, with the look of a man who thought he had just scored a point. One eye still slowly trickled tears, while the other seemed to be studying a corner of the ceiling.
“I have ordered the executioner to see that they are transported to the spaceport, and have sent other orders for a ship to be in readiness.”
Huang Gun had told Gregor that the order was not yet carried out. “Sir, the status of the hostages is one of the things I have to speak to you about.” But even as Gregor said the words, he could tell that words were no longer going to be of any help. Huang Gun might have the young Huveans under guard somewhere, but robot guards were ineffective against angry, desperate humans, the best they could do would be to bluff with deadly threats, threats that no one was likely to believe.
Interruption came, in the form of a different robot at the door. It entered amidst a wreath of graphic illusions.
This one reported, in calm, disinterested tones, that a mob had broken into the upper levels of the Citadel. There appeared to be no immediate danger that violent people would be able to penetrate the deep shelters. Not for several days, at least.
Gregor wanted to ask the messenger what Huang Gun had done with the hostages, if he had been able to protect them. But he didn’t want to let the president know they had not been sent off into space.
Belgola-Logos was not going to be distracted by mere riots in his capital. Disdaining the spoken word in favor of something wireless, and facing one of the robot servants that had been standing by, he silently ordered the machine to prepare Gregor for the operation.
Gregor couldn’t hear the command, but he felt its result. Immediately a metal hand clamped down on Gregor’s arm and started dragging him away. The machine was of course being careful not to hurt him, but it was quite firm about it; if he got bruised or bloodied it would be because he was trying too hard to pull free.
This can’t be happening. But it was.
Gregor turned his head, screamed out his needs to the world in general: “Stop them! They’re going to kill me!”
His hopes rose up as Porphyry, yes, his newly assigned protector immediately stepped forward to grapple with the robot holding Gregor. But a third machine closed in on Porphyry from behind, and started methodically trying to pin Porphyry’s arms.
Thank all the gods, Gregor’s new guardian seemed stronger. Porphyry’s hand dipped into his carrying pouch, came out with Gregor’s pistol. Without hesitation, Porphyry shot the robot holding Gregor. The weapon made only a faint spitting noise, but the impact of the invisible force-packet was quite loud as it tore a hole in the machine’s torso and knocked it back. Gregor, his arms suddenly freed, fell to the floor.
The unit grappling with Porphyry managed to knock the pistol loose. Rolling over on the deck, Gregor snatched up the gun, even as the hand of yet another robot, reaching, aborted its own grab to keep from bruising him.
The old weapons training came right back when it was needed, even after all the decades. Gregor, lying on his back, shot down the robot contending with his rescuer, and then without hesitation pumped several more force-packets into Logos, as the counselor came rolling forward on its mount. More than one shot hit the president’s tottering frame, which happened to be standing partially in the way.
Splashing blood, and sparking from its connections, Belgola’s body fell in a slow collapse, sputtering away life and optelectronic activity. Both came to an abrupt end, followed a moment later by the last shreds of holostage illusion. Walls of bleak concrete loomed gray in the harsh emergency lighting that suddenly glared from overhead.
All the robots under the direct control of Logos were shuddering into stillness, keeling over, slumping down like tired men. Porphyry, the only machine still on its feet, bent over the fallen Belgola, then straightened slightly.
“I have called for medical assistance,” it told Gregor in its cheerful voice. “But none can arrive for approximately a quarter of an hour. In any case, the late president appears to be clinically dead.”
“Robots…” Gregor was sitting up, his aged lungs gasping to gain breath.
“Sir?”
“Porphyry. Listen. Not only you. I am issuing orders to whatever machines, control systems, can still hear me.” He paused to get in two more gasps. “I am assuming full command. Command of everything.”
He hoped, devoutly, that he had managed to kill Logos. But even if he had, there would probably be backup systems ready to take over.
Nothing acknowledged his command, but nothing argued with it. Crawling, trembling, gasping, the pistol still in his hand, Gregor made his way slowly to crouch beside Porphyry, over the body of the man who had been his friend. Both of Belgola’s eyes were looking in the same direction, but they were seeing nothing at all.
Gregor pulled himself together, and with a grip of assistance from the robot got to his feet. He dropped the gun back into his own pocket, where it lay flat and inconspicuous.
The door had opened again and more robots were coming in. Gregor took charge and gave orders, to whatever crew, at first only machines, then a little later humans, were willing to take them from him.
The humans, all low-ranking folk, most from Citadel Security, were desperately willing and eager to be told what to do, by any human authority who sounded sane. Gregor showed them the body and the wreckage, and tried to reassure them. Rioters, unknown people he would never be able to identify, had somehow got in and wrought this havoc.
Issuing specific orders, he sent these anxious but reasonable people out to spread the cheerful word, through the deep shelters then across the planet, that President Belgola had died fighting gallantly for his people. The surviving population of the Twin Worlds could take comfort in the knowledge that a new, acting president was securely in place.
Communicating that message, or any other, to the whole planet was going to be a problem. A combination of enemy action and mob violence had pretty well shredded the usual systems. As soon as Gregor was alone with the robots again, he set Porphyry to trying to re-establish solid communication with the rest of the planet and with the fleet. The early results were not promising.
Then Gregor said to Belgola’s surviving helpers: “Find some efficient way to make sure all that damned counseling and planning hardware, everything my predecessor had established, is turned off. Kill all computer planning but essential services and communications.”
The ordinary-looking machine in front of him nodded. “Yes sir. I have passed on your commands.”
Gregor looked at the dead man, who still lay where he had fallen. None of the shots had hit Belgola in the face, and he seemed to be smiling faintly. Perhaps in relief, at having left all his problems to someone else.
Gregor meditated briefly, and said: “The next step is to bury him.”
“Where, sir?”
Gregor was leaning his back against the wall, and trembling, his right arm scratched and bruised from trying to wrestle with a robot. There was not even a good place in this room to sit down, and soon he was going to need a real rest. “Somewhere inconspicuous, here in the shelter. There will be no ceremony at burial. Just as a temporary measure, till the crisis is past, and order can be restored. Don’t mark the place, but remember it. Then I want all nonhuman staff to forget everything that has happened in this room, since I came down here.”
“Yes sir. But the central computer of essential services informs me that a record of the deleted events, and of your orders, will be kept, sealed apart from our memories, until it can be claimed by competent authority.”
Gregor could feel a kind of sobbing, starting in his diaphragm. Was he going to laugh or cry? H
e couldn’t tell. He told the robots: “Of course. Why not? Lots of luck in finding any competent authority. If your central computer manages to do so, be sure to let me know.”
Within the hour, a very minor human authority had showed up, the same sheriff who had brought Gregor and Luon to the Citadel. Gregor was able to arrange to have himself confirmed and sworn in as the executive head of the Twin Worlds government, which made him also commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
Just as the ceremony was about to begin, he was informed (by a module that under the previous administration had functioned as attorney general) that President Belgola had recently changed the protocol. A robot/computer now had to perform the swearing-in, before the central data bank would accept it as a valid act.
“Then let it be Porphyry. And the sheriff will take part as well.”
That was all right with the former attorney general. One of the humans in attendance brought up from the deep shelters a copy of the necessary book. Gregor held it in his hand, pages of dull and ancient paper on which no electrical impulse was able to rewrite the words.
Now, in the very infancy of Gregor’s new government, it seemed impossible to discover what had happened to the Huvean hostages, except that they could no longer be located inside the Citadel, or any of the shelters immediately connected.
His grandchild, too, had disappeared. So had the executioner. Well, it hardly seemed likely that they had gone anywhere together, unless, of course, both were with the hostages.
The word that President Belgola was dead spread quickly through the shelters, then up into the streets. Up there, Gregor’s robot scouts informed him, the tide of mob activity had crested, and then sunk back into the great pool of humanity from which it rose.
As one of Gregor’s first official acts, having established such control of the government as he was able, he wrote out an order indefinitely blocking any execution of the hostages, and directing that the ten young Huveans should be kept in safety until they could be returned to their own people. He instilled the order in every government computer system he found still functioning.
When Gregor, with only a couple of sheriff’s deputies at his side, and no fanfare, re-emerged on the planet’s surface, trying to see what was going on, he found that at least one of the energetic preachers was still going strong: “I tell you, men and women of sin, that God has sent a destroying angel for our punishment!”
“Who speaks of God? Never mind God! Who else could it be, doing this to us, but Huvea?but we’ll get back at them. Someday!” The speaker’s voice rose to a scream. “We’ll scorch and boil their worlds so nothing ever will live there again” There were some who could draw comfort from that thought.
Out in the sparsely populated countryside, away from Timber’s cities, along the winding roads and through the sprawling forests, people sought shelter, or pursued rumors of some spaceship that was still on the ground, and still offered possibilities of escape. This turned out to be the ship that had waited in vain to carry the hostages to the berserker, according to the last orders given by the late president, waited, until someone managed to hijack it, and flee the system.
With an increasing feeling of desperation, Gregor continued trying to locate surviving shards of local government that might be made to form a whole. He was not having much success.
Slowly he began to feel some confidence that no one might ever know that he had killed the president. Traces of blood and violence in the deep shelter, if anybody was going to take any notice of them at all, might easily be attributed to the actions of the mob.
At last he was able to send an urgent message to Admiral Radigast, a redundant transmission by both courier and tight beam: “I want to come back to your flagship. It’s hopeless to try to do anything, organize anything, from down here.”
On the ship, he would at least have available to him a small, clear space in which to think. A protected place in which to rest. Means of communication, and such power as the shattered fleet could still muster. The only surviving Twin Worlds power and organization was in the fleet, battered as it was.
The mass of people who still endured on Timber were concerned for very little beyond their own lives. Those who had any interest in the fate of the hostages were divided in their feelings. Anyway, all ten of them were supposed to have volunteered.
There still remained a large number of citizens who were unshakable in their conviction that Huvea was behind the attack. Some of these were demanding that every Huvean who was still in Twin Worlds power should die at once. Meanwhile, another substantial number were insisting with equal vehemence that the ten should be set free, and sent home as soon as a ship could be made available, whoever was attacking, it was certainly not these helpless children. There were many others who assumed that the hostages must already have been killed.
On the bridge of his flagship, looking at the messages that had come trickling up from Timber, Radigast spat out part of the latest flavor pod that he had stuffed into his mouth. He’d been expecting something like bourbon and tobacco, and had got what tasted like vanilla. The gob lay where it landed, he would have to pick it up himself; the motherless housekeeping robots were all hard at work on more important tasks.
So, Belgola was supposed to have died some kind of heroic death. “Fried his motherless brain,” the admiral muttered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Up on the bridge of the Morholt, Radigast could feel the whole massive skeleton of his ship groaning and throbbing around him under the laboring efforts of repair machines. The machines could not improve matters much, but they kept his ship from totally dying. New reports were coming in: their great enemy was disgorging more small spacegoing units of several types, which were going down to land on Timber.
But he had to let that go for a minute. “President Gregor.” Radigast spoke quietly, and raised his right hand in a salute, slow and stiff and with an unpracticed look about it.
“Don’t joke, Admiral.”
“Sir, I feel very far from joking. I was looking up the chain of succession. Who has inherited the office, if not yourself?” He paused, looking over Gregor’s shoulder to see if anyone else was there. “What happened to the little girl, sir?”
“She decided to stay down there. I alerted the sheriff, and sent a robot to try to find her.”
Gregor’s visit to Timber had turned out to be one motherless fiasco, if the tone of Gregor’s voice when he asked to be picked up was any indication. The transmission had contained only a few gems of information, one being the fact that President Belgola was definitely dead. But Radigast expected a full report in person as soon as possible.
The admiral had been continuously at his battle station for more hours than he wanted to count up, grabbing catnaps when he could, but he was not about to leave it now. He kept on trying to mobilize all his available resources, mass them in a compact volume of space within striking distance of Timber. If they were going to be able to do any good at all, it would have to be here. Consolidating your own force was what you were supposed to do, when confronted by a stronger enemy; and it was no longer possible to doubt that this particular enemy was stronger, though his own ships combined still had more tonnage and occupied more space. Most of that martial mass, unfortunately, was only scout-ships, and sending them to the attack would be like deploying a mass of mosquitoes to stop a rhinoceros.
Any opponent that brushed off eight battleships, while going on about its business almost without a pause, was probably not going to be seriously bothered by anything that a few hundred scoutships could do. But Radigast had to try, and the scouts were about all he had left to work with. Summoning some eight hundred and fifty of them in and hurling them in a swarm against the giant enemy would at least force the enemy to use up more of its resources on secondary targets.
The only conceivable alternative would be to turn his back on Timber’s helpless billions, on the theory that they were dead souls anyway, and save the remnant of his ships and his own peo
ple by pulling them out of the Twin Worlds system altogether, pausing just long enough to pick up Gregor and a few other useful folk if possible. Then it would be up to the acting president to establish a Twin Worlds government in exile somewhere else.
But so far no one, with the possible exception of the late president, was in the mood to abandon anything. He, Radigast, would have to make one more effort with the fleet, and the only way to do that was to time it for the moment when the enemy came close enough to Timber to be engaged by whatever ground defense batteries still functioned. Therefore Radigast was praying that Gregor might be bringing useful information on the state of morale and hardware on the ground. Basically, were there any ground defenses left?
Luon on running away from Gregor had begun an attempt to search the whole Citadel for Reggiean effort she decided to abandon when she began to grasp how huge and complicated the place actually was. And the vast structure was being evacuated, though not according to any organized plan. People were just getting out on their own initiative. Men and women whose normal posts of duty were in this place were simply deserting it, military and civilian alike.
Snatches of conversation caught in passing conveyed to her a rumor that the hostages were being taken to the spaceport. That at least gave her something to go on, and she began to walk in that direction. With the streets in turmoil, with serious fighting apparently only a kilometer away, getting any form of transport appeared hopeless.
How many kilometers to the port? More than she remembered, her last journey that way having been in a swift and comfortable groundcar. She had covered five or six of them on foot, struggling with a growing sense that she ought to have kept looking close to the Citadel, when light rapid footsteps overtook her and an artificial hand closed gently on her arm. She turned to recognize a face of passing beauty.
“No doubt you will remember me, my lady. I am Porphyry, and your grandfather has sent me to you. How can I be of assistance?”
Berserker Prime Page 18
