"No. No, they won't have any way of knowing that I fall under their jurisdiction."
"Why do they do that, anyway? Ask people in uniform for their orders?"
"Beats me. I suppose, if you were deserting, or AWOL… but if you were really deserting, the first thing you'd do would be to get out of your uniform. And the military like to feel they're in control. They worry about goodlife spies, and things like that."
"Goodlife." Flower looked pensive. "Of all the things for them to worry about, I don't think these so-called goodlife people are a big cause for worry, do you?"
Gift shook his head. "I have a lot of other problems on my mind, more important than whether some crazy people want to worship a machine."
Flower looked sympathetic. But she didn't nag at him with questions, for which he felt grateful.
Flower asked him: "Will they send you back into space when your leave's over?"
"I don't think so. They told me I'm in line for a home office job."
"Are you happy about that? Not being on flying status any longer?"
"Hell yes." That kind of job, if the truth were known, was what he had thought he was applying for in the first place, when he'd volunteered for the mysterious assignment that had turned out to be a place on a Hypo crew. It had been something of a belated effort on his part to stay out of combat, now that there were signs that the war in the Home Sector might be heating up. He had to laugh at that, looking back; so far he hadn't been able to share the joke with anyone.
At some point he found himself letting Flower believe, just to impress her, that he was much more knowledgeable about Hypo's inner secrets than he really was. He caught himself doing that, and thought it was stupid, but then he went right on doing it anyway.
Next time they went to the dining room Gift was dressed in some pretty sharp civilian clothes—a crimson turtleneck and a rich gray jacket over it. Flower hadn't been stingy in the gift shop, and the case for a wealthy family was strengthened. But this did nothing to help Gift's situation with regard to the same elderly couple, who had evidently been continuing to spread the word that there was a handsome young celebrity aboard. So Gift was deviled again, by a different set of generous civilians, into having to answer questions about his heroic feat of getting the crippled courier home. More beaming people who wished him well, and whom he loathed wholeheartedly. It was difficult, trying to be pleasant; but he made the effort, not wishing to call even more attention to himself, and he thought that he succeeded.
After the first two days, he called cabin service and had a robot bring his and Flower's meals to the cabin. They spent most of their time in bed, and hardly left the room for anything. It worried Nifty a little that maybe Flower wasn't going to like the new arrangement, but to his surprise it was fine with her.
NINE
A moderate twist of spacetime away from Earth and its threatened billions, in a remote region of the Gulf, the captain and crew of a scoutship were having success, of a kind, in keeping a certain scheduled rendezvous. This qualified success had cost them months of training, weeks of effort, and a great investment in astrogational skill.
And now, they had at last managed to locate the Hypo spy ship they had been dispatched to meet—but at first sight, the pieces of the spy ship were somewhat hard to recognize.
Stark evidence of disaster.
The scout proceeded warily, flickering several times in and out of normal space. The crew's first concern was whether the enemy might still be present. But minutes passed, and there was no indication of that.
The scout's captain, staring gloomily at a holostage in front of his combat chair, beheld a thin haze of Solarian spacecraft parts, spread out in a slowly expanding cloud of less easily identifiable artifact dust, artifact gas, and bigger bits of wreckage.
Presently he ordered out a swarm of half-intelligent robots, after instructing them in what to look for. These spread rapidly through nearby space, hungrily gobbling samples, industriously telemetering data back to their waiting human masters.
After an hour or so of this, the ship's computer, pressed for an opinion, delivered in its cool voice an estimate that the deadly battle had taken place some four or five standard days before the scout's arrival on the scene.
"Well, Skipper." This was the harsh voice of the first mate, sitting in the combat chair to the captain's right.
"Yeah."
Neither man needed to speak his next thought aloud: Had they arrived four or five days earlier, they might have been just in time to tip the balance the right way in a savage fight. Or, perhaps, to be obliterated, along with the Hypo craft.
The scout's mission had called for making the rendezvous to exchange with the spy ship certain crew members and equipment, and above all, to take on a practically weightless but perhaps very valuable cargo of information. In the vastness of the Gulf, such intended meetings were often missed—but this time fortune smiled on Solarian plans.
Following the melancholy discovery of wreckage, confirmed by spectroscopic analysis as that of the ship they had come here to meet, there was nothing else to do but conduct a perfunctory search for anything of value that might possibly still be salvageable.
It was slightly encouraging to discover a good bit of other wreckage, which was just as readily identifiable as having come from a berserker. The swarming Solarian robots reported that two chunks of the latter were very large, the size of ground cars.
The first mate, who generally preferred to look at the bright side of things, commented: "At least it looks like the bandit didn't get away without a scratch—in fact, I wonder if the contest might have ended in a draw."
"Mutual destruction? Maybe. There is a lot of junk around here. Let's see if we can run a reconstruction."
Presently the ship's computer was re-creating the fight, on a small holostage in view of the scoutship's officers, using as data the types, positions, and velocities of recognizable debris reported by the searching robots.
"The berserker must have been one big bastard," said the first mate. "By comparison with our spy, I mean."
"Possibly on its last legs, though—look at those hull plates." The stage image of one of the larger pieces of wreckage rotated on the captain's command. "That's severe damage, right there, but you can see that some of it's old stuff that had been repaired before this last fight started. Maybe the hit that finished it off was a small one."
"Yeah, a last straw kind of thing. I guess there must be a moral there somewhere. Like 'never give up.' "
"Or else: 'Don't start a new fight while you're still punchy from an old one.' "
After a pause, the first mate said: "I don't think berserkers ever look for light duty. They don't have any retirement plan."
Then, as the search for important hardware and human remains pressed on, came an incredulous—and almost incredible—claim, in the voice of the organic engineer in charge of the robotic search: "Captain, we've got a survivor here!"
"Full report!" the captain barked, after a moment of silent shock. With his next breath, he had to choke back an angry accusation of insanity.
Minutes later, he was glad that he had demonstrated restraint.
Evidence of breathing by a suited figure who could only be one of the spy ship's crew, still alive though several systems in his or her suit were on the brink of failure, had been duly noted and reported by one of the searching robots. Minutes later, the fortunate one was being picked up by a livecrewed launch, and brought aboard the scout.
The man in the battered spacesuit proved indeed to be still alive, and at first glance gave every indication that he was going to stay that way, despite having a badly shattered left arm, and a number of other medical difficulties. His inert form was hauled aboard the scout, stripped of its armor, and shoved into a medirobot.
One of the searching robots also discovered and brought in a heavy Solarian shoulder weapon, which had been picked up drifting near the living man. The strong implication was that he'd been trying to fi
ght off small berserkers with it.
"Have we got an identification on this man?"
"Yes, sir. One of his tags is still intact. Spacer Second Class Traskeluk." The name was soon confirmed, on a copy of the spy ship's secret roster, which the scout was carrying.
A hurried but careful search, extending for several kilometers in every direction, was conducted for additional survivors.
Having failed to achieve any more miracles along that line, the scoutship did not dawdle in the area.
The captain, as soon as he had his ship safely back in flightspace, and felt he could be spared from the control cabin, went down the companionway and looked into the medirobot, at the recumbent figure there, stripped now and with probes sticking out of it everywhere among the bandages. It was a muscular body, mesomorphically masculine though not particularly large, with heavy facial features and thick black eyebrows. Drifting in and out of consciousness, the injured man kept babbling something that the medirobot mikes brought outside.
The captain raised his own more modest eyebrows. "What's that noise he's making?"
The human medic—scouts as a rule carried no fully qualified organic surgeon or physician—looked over her shoulder. "Believe he's trying to sing, sir."
"Trying to sing. Sing?"
The medic nodded, turning back to the medirobot panel. She was a fifteen-year Space Force veteran. "Sounds to me like part of an old Templar battle song."
"Well, proves he's still breathing, anyway." The captain looked at the medirobot's panel. Unless all the gauges were lying, it seemed very likely that the occupant was going to make it home—and what a story he would have to tell.
And think of the man's family! They would have been told that he was dead, killed in action. And now, what a glorious surprise!
"The personnel file on Cedric Traskeluk says he is unmarried, with no dependents."
"Oh. Well, anyway, that's one tough man." The captain shook his head admiringly. "Evidently he has something to live for."
The ship's computer was still chewing on the data gathered at the scene of destruction, trying to reconstruct the spy ship's last minutes. No doubt about it now. It appeared that the berserker that had almost wiped out the spy ship's crew had been itself destroyed, after all, by some kind of lucky hit.
Further analysis of what had been discovered in the way of drifting debris turned up even more berserker parts. More confirmation that the thing had been damaged in some earlier firefight.
"With another Solarian ship?"
"Who else? We are the only branch of Galactic humanity who are at all likely to be arming spaceships. But the earlier fight could have been a year ago, or even a hundred years, and a long way from here."
Again the man in the medirobot drew in breath and made a peculiar noise. Maybe, by God, he really was trying to sing.
Meanwhile, Traskeluk, drifting in and out of awareness, gradually came to realize that he was in a medirobot. He remembered the berserker. Did he ever. Certain images of that would stay with him as long as he had two brain cells left.
He decided that if he was conscious now, the chances were that he was going to pull through.
Finally it came to him. He was aboard a scoutship, of course. His own ship must have had a scheduled rendezvous with this one—only the senior crew members would have known about that, just in case someone was captured. No one could be made to tell what they didn't know.
Somehow he'd lasted long enough. His suit had kept him alive for hours, or days. How many days? It didn't matter. Their number had been enough.
No, he wasn't that much surprised to find himself still living. Not really. He'd been determined he was going to live, somehow, live long enough to do just one more thing before he died.
He couldn't feel anything at all in his left hand, but slowly he clenched the fingers of his right into a fist.
Get his hands on Nifty Gift.
Now that Traskeluk was alive and—most of the time— awake again, he couldn't get the thing that Gift had done out of his mind. He lay thinking it over, in the intervals when he could get his mind to focus—such periods were coming faster now, and lasting longer.
Traskeluk tried several times, but could come up with no other conceivable explanation. Nifty had deliberately run out, had crept and scrambled away like the sniveling coward Traskeluk had always suspected him to be, leaving two of his shipmates to be slaughtered—or worse, captured—by a berserker.
While the two of them, Terrin and Traskeluk, had been still space-swimming for their lives, he, Trask, had told the ensign several times what he was going to do to Gift when he caught up with him again.
She hadn't tried to argue with him. In a way, it was as if the ensign knew she wasn't going to make it.
And Trask, the survivor, could verify with certainty that Ensign Terrin had not made it through alive. Another memory that was going to be with him from now on.
The two people who had been so helplessly exposed in space had seen exactly what Gift did. They saw him run, were witnesses to his betrayal, even as they screamed at him for help. They'd had time to comment on him after he was gone, though only one of them had taken advantage of the opportunity.
When people standing outside the medirobot began tentatively to ask the battered occupant if there'd been any other survivors, Traskeluk, now fully conscious most of the time and doing fine according the medirobot, assured his rescuers, in a weary, blasted voice, that there weren't any.
Meanwhile, in much more peaceful surroundings on distant Earth, Admiral Bowman was doing his best to prepare himself to brief the premier of Earth, a leader even busier than himself. In a moment he was going to have his first encounter with the lady, whom he had never met before, but whose reputation for occasional ferocity could make higher ranking people than Bowman cringe.
And, though he was not the bearer of good news, he was going to be as honest as he could.
The government of Earth, as Admiral Bowman had understood for some time, in fact represented much more than the leadership of a single planet. What Geneva, Switzerland, had been to ancient, uniplanetary, pre-space travel society, Earth was now to the hundreds of worlds colonized by Solarians.
In Galactic politics and commerce, central location is, as elsewhere, something rather more than a convenience. Under favorable conditions, a flight of a few weeks can carry a voyager from Earth to anywhere in the Domain.
The home planet had also become a kind of birthplace museum for the ED race, and got a lot of tourist business in consequence.
On this planet, which many called the Cradle World, or Homeworld One, there were still vast land and ocean areas that appeared to be almost free of any human presence. Restoration to a state of nature—that could, of course, mean different things to different people—was popular. Much of the land was owned or leased by estates belonging to old land-holding corporations, some of which were also cults. Who had the right of occupancy and use of land was sometimes a murky question; but for a long time now, such matters had been traditionally settled in nonviolent ways.
The number of designated spaceports on the planet was something over a hundred. There was also desultory traffic at other places. Regulation of inbound traffic tightened enormously under conditions of a defensive alert.
And then there were the defenses, which, as Bowman had noticed on his way down, could convert the sunny skies to near mud-brown opacity. An experience as eerie as observing a full solar eclipse, because outdoor artificial light was simultaneously forbidden. If you looked out from under the sky at certain angles you could see regions of sunny blue—or, at night, even the stars.
There was already in existence, scattered across the whole Solarian domain, and probably as strong on Earth as it was anywhere, a political movement calling for the evacuation of the entire Milky Way, or the small portion of it Solarians had colonized, in effect conceding defeat. The doctrine preached by the leaders of this faction called for moving the whole race of ED humanity in fl
ight to another galaxy.
Thoughtful Solarians who had retained a more traditional outlook observed that there was no reason to believe the berserkers would let any such migration depart in peace. And opinions were divided as to whether the programmed berserker mission of wiping out all life applied solely to the home Galaxy, or was ultimately to be extended across the entire universe. (No Solarian, and probably no berserker, had had a close-up look at another Galaxy yet; several expeditions had been launched, but the travel difficulties posed by the intergalactic void had turned out to be more formidable than expected.)
A small minority of people, on Earth and elsewhere, were beginning to be openly, defiantly goodlife (though they indignantly refused to accept that label) in the sense that they thought it was worthwhile to try to open some kind of negotiations with the foe. Some even claimed Carmpan support for this position.
Any Carmpan who allowed himself (or herself) to be questioned by Solarians denied this. But some Solarians argued— giving evidence that was hard to refute—that it was impossible to determine what any Carmpan really thought about anything.
"The premier will see you now, admiral."
Moments later, Bowman found himself standing before the lady and her cabinet. She was gray-haired, simply dressed, with eyes of a piercing Nordic blue.
Somehow Bowman was not surprised to see a Carmpan visitor here, among the very important folk. As introductions went around the circle, the non-Solarian was presented under the name of Nine Thousandth Diplomat.
Formalities quickly out of the way, Bowman had launched into his briefing, and was telling the premier and her assembled luminaries that humanity faced this kind of a situation: "We have no battleships, ma'am. Zero battlewagons in the Gulf theater. The few we might have moved out that way are here, instead, in Sol System, ready to take part in a last-ditch defense if the enemy gets this far.
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