He had a strong impulse to do his best to make that doomed pair out to be selfless heroes, people who had voluntarily given up their own lives to let him get away with the important data. That would seem like the least that he could do. But he didn't want to talk about any part of the experience any more than was absolutely necessary. It would be a mistake, his instincts screamed, to appear to be making an effort to convince his questioners of anything.
He was in the midst of yet another retelling when the lady herself, the legendary Commander R, known in whispers as Mother R, a disturbing apparition with mousy hair, looking disheveled and partly out of uniform, wearing an open kimono over a shapeless sweater and military trousers, came shuffling out of her private room in her carpet slippers. Her appearance reminded Gift, the former literature major, of Pushkin's Queen of Spades. Mother fixed him with her liquid brown eyes, beckoned to him almost timidly, and uttered a few soft words.
Gift thought wildly that such an emergence must be a rare occurrence; everyone else in the room was goggling.
He followed her, wondering vaguely if he ought to salute.
The only thing impressive about her office, a shabby little cubicle, was the degree of its disorder.
The commander herself was one of the least military people that Gift had ever met in the service. It was obvious to everyone that if she were not a certified, demonstrated genius, her idiosyncrasies of appearance and behavior would not be tolerated in any branch of the Space Force. Gift and this brilliant worrior had only met once or twice before, and then very briefly, when he and a small group of other new people (including Traskeluk) had been introduced to the commander, of whom they had never heard until that moment.
Settled in a visitor's chair in her private office, talking now to Commander R, who wanted to hear all about the disaster he'd survived, Gift stuck pretty closely to the version he had found himself settling on in the hospital: He had been half-stunned by a weapon blast just as he got aboard the courier, and his memory on some details was imperfect.
Everyone Spacer First Class Sebastian Gift had encountered in the hospital had given him assurances, well before he even thought of asking, that when he left the hospital he would be going home on convalescent leave.
He hadn't been quite sure that Hypo was going to let him go on leave that quickly or easily. But now it turned out that they would. He was glad, because over the last day or so there had been moments when he felt a deep, almost childish yearning to go home.
But right now his mind was being kept on business. Because Commander R now thought that he would never be going out on a deep space mission again, no longer be at risk of capture, she on her own responsibility started telling him something about the inner workings of the department they both worked for.
She said to him: "When you get back from leave, you'll start learning your new job, far from the front." He and his shipmates would have completed their tour of duty in any case.
Gift realized he wasn't really getting the full briefing yet on just what his new chairborne job was likely to be like. But a hint, a foretaste, enough so that if he really didn't want any more of Hypo he could back out now, or as soon as he got back from leave. The commander really wasn't taking much of a chance in telling him as much as she did. His security clearance was already high enough, and it was presumed that now he had, or soon would have, a need to know. He was being quizzed on his general knowledge of just what went on in this cavern, that his spy ship and a score of a hundred others risked destruction to supply with data.
The quizzing could have and should have been done more cautiously. Anyway, Commander R was notorious for disregarding regulations. She was a baby-faced, wide-eyed woman who at first glance projected the image of an inmate of a home for the elderly who had been drafted as a kindergarten teacher.
"Suppose," she was telling Gift now, in her sweet voice, "suppose we simply captured the machine and didn't release it. Then of course its intended recipient would not, unless there were a redundant transmission, get the information it contained, or be able to act on it. This would definitely limit the usefulness of your find."
"Yes, I quite see that."
The new system promised a much greater frequency of success, when it could be made to work at all. The key innovation was that in which the information content of a berserker courier was somehow scanned, without the necessity of stopping the machine or deflecting it even slightly from its course.
The esoteric science involved in the new system lay on the frontiers of physics and mathematics. Gift had some background in those fields, but he'd need additional education if he was going to be useful in the home office.
"As far as we can tell, our enemies are not really great at fundamental research, even though they do manage to keep up with us in weaponry. Therefore we have reason to hope they won't figure our method X for some time yet."
The operation involved setting up and maintaining a kind of "net," capable of examining a substantial portion of berserker courier traffic over exceedingly large distances. Ships and machines passing within range were probed, scanned by quantum devices. The stored information aboard was read, but the couriers were not interfered with in any detectable way. At least Solarian intelligence hoped that the quantum scanning was undetectable.
When Commander R was through talking to Nifty, she sent him to sit beside a clerk at a desk in the Hypo office, who on his writerscreen was officially cutting the orders for twenty days' of convalescent leave for Spacer First Class Sebastian Gift.
And when he left the place, leave orders in hand, he was pretty much on his own.
His parents, and all the other people he felt connected to as family, lived on Earth, a couple of days away by interstellar ship.
Paradoxically—or not, in the eyes of people fighting berserkers, which were themselves the embodiment of death—here in the midst of paradise were truly massive military installations, and a garrison including military experts in many fields. Things were being rebuilt at a frenzied pace, following the massive berserker raid of almost half a standard year ago.
A surprise raid by the enemy, on a massive scale, a few standard months before Gift's return to Port Diamond, had disabled a great part of the fleet that had to be counted on for the defense of Earth. A number of capital ships, ships of the line, dreadnoughts, had been caught in their docks on satellites orbiting Port Diamond itself. The ruins left by that assault were still partially visible. One great battleship, knocked into a degenerating orbit, had fallen to the ground, its armor allowing its sheer bulk to survive reentry and impact. The dead hull had at last crashed down into a hundred-meter depth of ocean, within sight of the base, where it still showed partially above water, housing the bodies of hundreds of Solarians who had gone down with their ship.
Now the general attitude of people in uniform was grim as they hurried past the man already on convalescent leave, but who had not yet put on civilian clothes because he was relying on military transport to get him back to Earth. There were moments when it seemed to Gift, still reveling in the fact of life, that he was the only one paying attention to the natural beauty surrounding them.
Jory Yokosuka was spending the morning hanging around CINCGUL headquarters, making plans for success on her new job, and hoping for a ride on some fast military ship going out to Fifty Fifty where the job was to be. Media credentials, which she had in plenty, would sooner or later get her on some passenger vessel—there were still one or two traveling across the Gulf in that direction—but the military would be faster, and if she was going to write about those people she preferred to talk to them, to live with them, as much as possible.
At the moment when Nifty Gift arrived at Hypo headquarters, Jory Yokosuka was strolling up and down near the neatly impressive front of Port Diamond base HQ, not more than a hundred meters away.
Jory had been on Uhao only a few days, and on the base with her journalist's credentials for only one, but she was good at her job and already, like mos
t of her fellow journalists, knew perfectly well where the artlessly concealed entrance to Hypo was—she could see it now, a block down the street; and earlier she had walked past it—and that something important went on in there. What exactly was going on, behind the mysterious code word, was a challenging question; and getting in to find out had so far proved perfectly impossible. But journalists, in Jory's view, existed to find out things that other people tried to keep concealed.
Jory was not the only journalist who made an effort to see and interview the latest space hero while he was still on Uhao, at Port Diamond. But no one had any more success than Jory did, even though she hadn't been able to get in more than a couple of questions and answers. Now she was planning to try again.
Alert as usual, she now saw the staff car with the mysterious hero in it drive by, and then saw the car stop near the Hypo entrance.
Well, well. Not exactly an astonishing surprise, but very interesting.
Earlier she had considered loitering outside the entrance to the disguised Hypo workroom, as if waiting to meet someone, scanning the faces of people who came in and out. But she was mortally certain that security would be on her before she'd done that for very long.
Part of her vague suspicion regarding Nifty Gift was owed to the fact that his most recent predecessor as celebrity war hero, while actually quite heroic enough—having died in the line of duty—had not in fact done anything remotely like the deed on which his fame rested, i.e., destroyed a berserker battleship by ramming it with his farlauncher after getting his own crew to bail out.
Her personal communicator hummed discreetly, and she lifted it up beside her ear.
The message, relayed from her robotic secretary, was from a Ms. Prow, who introduced herself as personal assistant to Jay Nash. Even while Jory listened, despite the importance of the message, she was keeping one eye out for Gift to emerge from that humble doorway down the street.
She did not see anyone emerge, but the message was one that pleased her mightily.
She was now in a mood to boast, to the next person she spoke to, that the famous Jay Nash had accepted her application for employment.
"That means I'll be getting out to Fifty Fifty as soon as possible, and joining him there."
All across the relatively small portion of the Galaxy that had so far been explored by enterprising Solarians, the dominance of their Earth-descended humanity was unchallenged by any other life form. Only death itself, the reaper personified in berserker metal, confronted them as serious competition. There seemed no reason to believe that matters would be different farther on, as Galactic exploration, war or no war, slowly proceeded. Also our busy race provided the berserkers' only real active opposition currently active anywhere, as far as any Solarian had been able to discover.
And the central overall military headquarters of the children of Sol, insofar as any one place qualified for that title, was located on Earth. What was housed on the cradle planet was not really the peak of a rigid chain of command, but more a clearinghouse of information.
To the military leaders at Port Diamond, and to the superior authorities who dwelt on Earth itself, fell the responsibility of deciding whether to wholeheartedly put their faith in the reports handed them by their intelligence experts, human and computer.
These reports were substantially different from what headquarters generally expected, and usually got, from intelligence. They were so firm in their conclusions, so elaborate in their detail, that they purported to offer what was practically a blueprint of the whole oncoming berserker attack. They demanded from the highest level of leadership a response that was equally decisive.
Time and again one of Earth's strategic planners had said to another something like: "That some kind of major attack is impending can be taken for granted. But as to the strength and exact purpose of the onslaught, or its precise target…"
People continued to debate the pros and cons of the new method of trying to intercept information. Many still questioned the reliability of the results.
"Might this seeming great intelligence success be in fact some kind of a berserker deception?"
"Deception on such a grand scale seems unlikely—but the possibility cannot entirely be ruled out."
A few months after the Port Diamond raid, a fierce space battle in the Azlaroc region, thousands of light years away near the far side of the Gulf of Repose, had dragged to an inconclusive finish, leaving both sides with some justification for computing it as a victory.
One of the Solarian carriers engaged in that battle, the Lankvil, had limped home with great difficulty to Port Diamond, where she seemed likely to be confined to a repair dock in low orbit for the next three standard months. But a maximum repair effort was being made; workers, human and mechanical, entering the dock like infantry going into battle.
At the last moment the decision was made to bring the Lankvil right down to planet surface, an unusual step to take in the repair of any large ship.
Field Marshal Yamanim himself, the ranking military officer (commander in chief, Gulf theater, or CINCGUL) for a hundred light-years in every direction, had to have that carrier back, in fighting shape, and soon.
Right now the field marshal was taking personal steps to make sure that he got it.
FIVE
Field Marshal Yamanim had ordered a maximum effort to repair the Lankvil, and, with a view toward inspiring its accomplishment, had had himself driven out in a small boat to where the stricken carrier lay. The enormous hull was more than half submerged in the ocean, and the water around it was swarming with thousands of people and machines. Repairs and even reconstruction on any warship would normally have been carried out in orbit, but this was a special case.
Today, on the same day that Nifty Gift had returned to Hypo to pick up his orders and enjoy an unscheduled conference with his boss, the field marshal had arisen earlier than usual, put on work gear over his dress uniform, and had hastened to plunge in among the laboring people and their slave machines. His idea was not to inspire them to greater efforts— or at least that was not his idea any longer—because he hadn't been at the site two minutes before he realized that the people doing the job were already driving themselves past the point of exhaustion. Satisfied that no inspiring speeches were required, Yamanim still wanted to see the details of the task remaining, and discover if there was any help the workers needed, and any way he could use his authority to obtain it.
Yamanim swam a few strokes in the near-tropical water, as the quickest way of getting from his boat to the nearest flange of the great hull. His soaking uniform would dry out quickly. He was upright and serious-looking, even when dripping wet. Physically, the field marshal exemplified what anthropologists had come to call the Earth-standard type. Not many fit it as well as Yamanim: Average size, middle age, and a facial appearance that suggested that the entire contents of the home planet's human gene pool had been smoothly scrambled in some computer simulation. His skin was a vague tan that had little to do with exposure to sunlight, his hair and eyes were an average brown.
Mentally he was a long way from average.
Punched by berserker weapons in the thickness of the great carrier's triple hull were several holes, each wide enough to drive a scoutship through. The giant vessel lay in deep water, just outside the regular harbor for surface craft, its mass partially buoyed by gigantic inflation tubes and collars as well as antigravity devices. The harbor was pretty well filled with smaller victims of the berserkers' firepower. High in the atmosphere, a lot of work was being done to keep the weather in the vicinity calm and clear. That was one department where the field marshal had already exerted his formidable influence.
From the position to which he had now climbed, high on the damaged hull, where he stood holding on With one hand to keep from sliding and rolling down, Yamanim had a good view of an ominously similar object lying halfway to the horizon. This was the ruined battlewagon Anozira, part of whose grounded hull was sticking up out of fifty
meters of ocean, still on the spot where it had crashed after being blasted out of low orbit. Everyone could see that ominous silhouette in the background, but so far Yamanim had heard no one comment on it.
Besides the obvious jagged openings in the Lankvil's outer hull, there was a great deal of internal damage. Hull cavities were matched by gaps in the interior decks. New plates, slabs laminated out of several materials, maybe several kinds of matter, were being hoisted and welded into place.
With great pride the master of shipyards, now standing beside the field marshal, stubbornly maintained that there was indeed a fighting chance of getting her out of here and headed back to the front in three days.
"It better be more than a fighting chance, Frank. It better be a fact."
"I don't know, sir…"
"I do. Have you seen what a planet looks like when berserkers get done with it? One lifeless cloud of mud and steam."
"Yessir."
Yamanim, on the verge of moving on to the multitude" of other tasks awaiting him, patched in to the local communication net and gave the human workers a little speech, telling them that the berserkers were sure this carrier could be scratched from the Solarian line of battle. Maybe it was hokey, attributing triumph and chagrin to the unliving enemy, but he had noticed that people, including himself, wanted to do it all the time. Evidently it was more satisfying to fight a foe who could be made to suffer—if only in your own imagination.
Once Yamanim had decided that his continued presence on the Lankvil's hull was only going to slow things down, he wasted no time in getting out. He changed out of damp clothes in a temporary office that overlooked the shipyard.
Soon he was neat again in a dry version of the Space Force uniform he generally preferred to wear: Dull battle dress except for the five stars gleaming on cap and epaulets.
Berserker Fury Page 6
