Yesterday there had been half a dozen armed guards visible, in and around the rooms where the Huvean hostages were being held, in a comparatively remote wing of the Citadel. Early this morning, Reggie had been able to spot no more than two. By midmorning, the last pair seemed to have somehow evaporated.
The last human guard had scarcely disappeared from the hostage quarters when the young Huveans, who had been watching the situation carefully, began to convince themselves that they had been thrown on their own resources.
But one of the Huveans still considered himself bound by an oath of honor not to attempt an escape.
The more aggressive youth snapped at the more passive: “What are you waiting for, an engraved invitation on real paper?”
The stickler for honor seemed to be looking at him from atop a distant hill. “Try to remember, that when we volunteered we took a solemn oath”
“We were all a lot younger then.”
“It was only a few standard months ago!”
“Even so. Look around you, open your eyes! That was in a different world, that place where people took solemn oaths and worried about their honor. In this world, where you’re living now, all bets are off, you bloody fool. Wake up and live!”
Another put in: “I would hardly call this an escape. It seems to me we’ve been deserted.”
Someone noted that if the stickler for honor was really determined to honor his pledge not to escape, it was probably going to cost him nothing, since everyone on the planet was soon going to be slaughtered anyway.
The first decisive act of the rebellion was to rid themselves of the distinctive robes they had been made to wear since the start of their confinement.
Their own Huvean-style clothes had been put away in storage, even before they arrived on Timber, and in any case, would have been no help in passing as Twin Worlders. Minutes later, by raiding a supply closet, an eager searcher came up with a stack of shirts and trousers worn by the maintenance supervisors who directed the crews of robots. Footwear was also available.
Doing their best to look casual in their new garments, they came drifting, singly and in pairs, out of the rooms in which they had spent most of their confinement.
A certain door, through which none of them had been allowed to pass, was now totally unguarded. It opened at a simple touch, and no alarms went off.
Reggie nodded, looking straight ahead. “Beyond that next gate ought to be the street. It seems that we can walk.”
“I’m getting out of here,” a colleague murmured.
And another: “I’m with you. The war’s on, there’s no use waiting around to be shot.”
They came to the last gate, of solid metal. Beside it stood a robot, one of the standard manshapes. It knew them at once, of course, despite the change in clothing. And it was ready to deal with an attempted escape, in the only way it knew, calmly, of course. “Hostages are not permitted in this area. You must go back.”
What came next was something that Reggie had done before, on his home world, but then it had been only as a lark. With Douras and a couple of others lending a hand, they seized the robot guard by all four limbs and wrestled it out of the way, when push literally came to shove, the robot, dependably programmed against doing physical harm to any human, was no more effective at keeping prisoners in than it would have been at keeping a lynch mob out.
A little carefully planned violence on the part of the prisoners toppled the sentry on its face. A moment later the grill had been removed from the opening of a nearby ventilator shaft, and the robot jammed head first into the aperture. It began at once trying to work its way back out, but its arms were pinned by the sides of the narrow shaft.
Reggie planted a foot on its metal rump and shoved it a couple of centimeters deeper. He had no doubt that the deposed sentry would broadcast some kind of silent alarm, but in the current conditions none of the security people remaining in and around the Citadel, if there were any, were going to respond.
Meanwhile the robot was still obligingly willing to be helpful, answering their questions, passing on what it was able to pick up of the latest news, its voice, metallicized and echoing, coming out of the shaft: The killing machines were said to be steadily approaching, and the sounds of fighting were coming nearer.
One of the humans interrupted. “All right. That might be good. Where are these ‘killing machines,’ as you call them, supposed to come from?”
“That has not yet been officially determined, sir. Rumors say they are Huvean.”
Douras was pleased and excited by the possibility. “I knew it! How far away are they?”
Someone had said they were no more than two kilometers from the Citadel.
“Headed this way?”
The muffled voice still sounded optimistic. “At last report, sir, they were not advancing in any direction.”
As the ten moved on, one said to another: “One could feel a little sorry for the clunker there, just trying to do its job.”
“There are plenty of people who need feeling sorry for.”
“Robots are excellent Christians, you know, always ready to forgive their enemies. They’d be ready to give up their own lives for us, if they had any.”
Another observed: “Not much of a sacrifice to give up what you can never have, and don’t want anyway.”
And a third: “Christians? I don’t think so. No hope or expectation of any reward. Stoics would be more like it.”
“Which way now?”
“To the spaceport!”
“No, wait! What’ll we do there, just buy tickets for home? Pay attention to what’s happening. The spaceport’s closed, and even if it wasn’t, there aren’t any ships available for ordinary travel. Besides, if the port was open, it’d be the first place we’d be looked forif anyone bothered to come looking.”
“It might be a lynch mob who does that. No, I want to get a look at these fighting machines. It seems to me there’s at least a good chance that they are ours, and looking for us.”
Reggie was thinking that simply blending into the cosmopolitan Twin Worlds crowd ought to be easy enough. There were no glaring discrepancies in personal appearance, and there ought to be only a couple, easily avoided if they kept their wits about them, in speech and manners. Of course their faces had been widely shown to the public on this world, with all the ongoing publicity.
They stole out of the Citadel in twos and singles. There were only a few people in the streets, and the appearance of a few more young maintenance workers seemed to draw no attention at all.
The hostage who had been scrupulous about trying to escape, on catching a glimpse of angry Twin Worlders, suddenly turned timid once again: “We’re going to be caught….”
“How the hell can you be any more caught than you were half an hour ago? And we survived that.”
Almost a full day later, Reggie Panchatantra was looking the situation over, peering out through the broken window of a deserted building. They ought to have brought more food with them; but it was too late now to be worrying about that.
From where he crouched he could just make out, a couple of kilometers away, a pair of the darkened towers of the Citadel, from which they had so recently escaped. They formed twin dark outlines against the brightening eastern sky. The time was near dawn in the streets of Timber’s capital city. Artificial lights that had survived the rioting as well as nearby enemy action were fading against the brightening sky; such of the defensive fields as were still in place added streaks of unnatural color and shadow to the coming sunrise.
As Reggie thought back over their escape, he was distracted by the sight of a young woman, walking straight toward him over the otherwise deserted street. Close beside her paced a robot, right arm raised and pointing straight at Reggie. In another moment he had recognized Luon, and climbed out of his hiding place; and then they were both running.
As soon as Reggie could get free of her embrace to draw breath, he held her at arms length, looking at her almost angri
ly “You should have stayed with your grandfather. There was no sense in your coming back here into danger.”
“You’d better not be saying you don’t want me with you!”
“No, Sweetie! Never that!”
The next minute was occupied with silent activity. At last Luon moved back a few centimeters and drew in a deep breath. “I had to come to you. Anyway, staying with my grandfather would be just as dangerous.”
“How’d you find us?”
“Porphy here kept looking for groups of ten people, he can hear breathing if he tries, and finds patterns”
“I don’t like that. If the authorities were really searching for us”
“But it seems they’re not.”
Reggie quietly introduced Luon to the other young people in the group as they drifted into contact, singly or in pairs. Of course they had all seen her briefly in the Citadel with Gregor, before the fighting started. But she had not yet memorized all their names.
Luon had been carrying a fairly substantial amount of money and she shared it out. Douras at first was reluctant to accept a handout from her, but in the end he did.
Like the robot, Douras was standing at a little distance with his arms folded, watching her. The man’s regard was obviously suspicious. “Your dear grandsire will certainly be in some danger, once our marines have landed. A while ago we heard some garbled rumor that he’s now become your president.”
Luon was frowning, shaking her head. “He’s looking for our president. It seems that for days no one’s been able to find Mr. Belgola.”
The Huvean snorted. “The rumors say Belgola’s dead. The truth is he’s probably run away, now that the war he wanted is coming home to him. I always thought that man was crazy.”
Luon began to wonder aloud what had happened to the official executioner. She had seen Huang Gun briefly when she and her grandfather had arrived at the Citadel, but had no idea where he might be, or even if he was alive or dead. The Huveans knew no more than she did.
It was not that any of the ex-hostages exactly missed Huang Gun, but they had some curiosity about his sudden absence. “The last thing anyone here can recall his saying was that everything would be taken care of.”
Glycas was fretting. “He can’t just have wandered off. He must have left some orders with regard to us.”
“Probably to have us all shot.”
Douras theorized gloomily that the withdrawal of official protection meant that before escaping they had been in the process of being quietly, unofficially, turned over to a lynch mob. And where were the marines? He had been expecting to see them before this.
Several of the Huveans besides Douras remained openly suspicious of the plenipotentiary’s daughter. Luon said she could hardly blame them, but it made things difficult. Soon another rumor was reported, to the effect that the new acting president wanted the Huvean prisoners to be set free, there was as yet no report that they had actually escaped. When the citizens of the capital mentioned them at all, it was usually to hope they were already dead.
One of the moderate Huveans told her: “Well, a rumor’s not going to save our lives. Your grandfather probably had a hand in drawing up the treaty, so it’s his fault as much as anyone’s that we’re here in the first place.”
Luon wanted to argue that point, but realized that she didn’t know enough to do so. “You don’t know him. I can believe the rumor. I’m sure he wants to get you out of this.”
“Then let him make peace with Huvea. I haven’t heard a word about that yet.”
The sounds of serious fighting were coming closer. This was no mere street scuffling between police and rioters. This had reached another order of violence altogether. Clouds of smoke, mingled with the dust from collapsed buildings, drifted this way and that in mild autumn breezes.
They reached a place where, in the distance, they could just catch a glimpse of one of the mysterious landers, motionless at the moment, standing several blocks away. It bore no insignia, and there was nothing familiar in its construction. The surface had a worn, scorched look, and in several places it bristled with mysterious projections. No one could identify it, but then none of them had any technical knowledge of the latest machines of war. They could not convince themselves that it might have been sent by their government to effect their rescue.
Hours later, they were resting in near darkness. “I have to be with you.” Her voice was muffled against Reggie’s chest. “Besides, there’s nowhere to go.”
“The last I heard, you were going with your grandfather to your fleet, then I thought the fleet had probably gone to attack Huvea”
Luon raised her head. “That never happened. It just didn’t! Our fleet is still right here, in our home system, but it’s all shot to pieces.”
Some of the other hostages, who had been listening, reacted joyfully to that information. “That’s the first good news I’ve heard in days, ever since someone toasted Prairie.”
Another had a skeptical question for Luon: “Who told you about the Twin Worlds fleet? Your trustworthy grandfather?”
She glared back fiercely. “My grandfather’s as trustworthy as you are. At least! But he didn’t have to tell me anything. I was out there with him, on the flagship.”
They all stared at her. “You’ve actually seen the fighting?”
“Yes!”
A couple of Reggie’s friends looked at each other, still suspicious of everything this Twin Worlder said. One asked Luon: “What does a ship look like, blowing up?”
Luon had to hesitate. “I’ve felt it right enough, right through my bones when our ship was hit. All that I’ve actually seen is symbols moving around on a holostage, and damage to the ship I was on, people with wounds and blood. That’s really all that anyone on any ship can ever see of fighting.” She wasn’t perfectly sure of her ground in saying that, but her new status as combat veteran gave her a certain confidence, and it sounded reasonable. “It’s not like looking at games and simulations. And I’ve heard the officers on board talking to each other.”
There was a babble of response. One voice stood out. “Then can you tell us who’s really attacking? It’s just not possible that our Huvean fleet has just come here and started wiping out planets….”
“Oh no? Why not?” Someone else, bitterly hostile, was hoping, was thoroughly convinced, that it was their own fleet that had come here to punish the damned two-faced Twins.
Luon brought them all up to date as best she could. She was able to tell the Huveans a few things they did not know, confirming some of the news stories they had already heard, and denying others. But she could tell them nothing that offered any real comfort.
“Well then, if our fleet’s not here trying to rescue us, where is it?” a Huvean demanded.
Luon stared at the young woman, thinking that the two of them, the speaker and herself, looked enough alike to be sisters. “I don’t have the faintest idea.”
Glycas, who now and then made noises like a leader, found a reasonable hiding spot and convened a council. At Luon’s order, Porphyry stood sentry, guarding against surprise.
They all had to realize, Glycas lectured, that simply running around on the surface of Timber was not going to do them much good, and might quite possibly get some of them lynched. Maybe the new acting president really was willing to let them go; but even if that were true, their chances of going home in the foreseeable future seemed practically nonexistent. At least a billion other people on this planet also wanted to get spaceborne; and everyone who had seen the spaceport in the last couple of days agreed there were no ships ready to take anyone anywhere.
Everyone remained hungry for news, for rumors, whether they could be true or not. “Is there any word on what’s happening at home? Has the Twin Worlds fleet attacked Huvea?”
“No. There’s been no word of anything like that.” And Luon repeated her assurances that the Twin Worlds fleet had not departed from the system. “And if it does leave, it will only be to find a hiding
place somewhere.”
Douras laughed scornfully at that.
The berserker was scrutinizing the patterns of defensive fire turned against it from this world called Timber, methodically discovering and plotting the positions of as many as possible of the planet’s ground defenses. They fell obligingly into a pattern very similar to that on this world’s late sister planet.
Once the berserker decided it could rely on this observation, locating and destroying the defensive batteries of Timber became notably more easy.
After being located, all these facilities were methodically blasted, whether or not they tried to hit back at the attacker. Again the berserker invoked its routine of dodging movements, of creating multiple images of itself in space, so that some on the ground thought they were being attacked by a thousand gigantic ships. Again it inevitably sustained some damage, but nothing to prevent or delay carrying out its mission here.
Across Timber’s countryside and in its cities there were heavy casualties, already millions of dead. But compared to what had happened to Prairie, these casualty figures were low, diminished by almost a thousandfold. So far, on the berserker’s scale of values, there was no mass slaughter on the planet called Timber.
Of course the mass slaughter had only been postponed. It would come, in due time. The mass destruction of life was the berserker’s reason for existence. But there were things its central processor wanted to find out, before proceeding to the inevitable fulfillment of its basic purpose. The berserker still wanted to learn more before it sterilized this world.
One important question was: How effectively would these life units fight at close quarters, as individuals, or in groups not acting through the surrogates of machinery? The situation was bound to arise somewhere, in what the berserker now computed would be a lengthy war ahead. What weapons would they be likely to employ?
It was prepared to begin using radioactive poisons, and chemicals, at first on a small scale, but nothing biological, that would mean promoting and protecting, nurturing some form of life. And it would only fall back on those tactics for some especially grave reason.
Berserker Prime Page 19
