His real eye glittered, and the mechanical one almost lurched from its socket in her direction. Triumphantly he barked: "Wasn't the Trojans in the horse, girl. It was the Argives, trying to sneak into Troy."
Jory blinked, feeling a little dazed. " 'Argives'?"
"The Greeks, girl, the Greeks! A whole nation back on Earth. Goddammit, don't you ever read?"
In a drama, of course, the great bulk of the images and sound would be computer created, but even then it helped immeasurably to have live action in the can to use as a base.
Nash said he'd put in a word with the authorities, to try to further her education, but there wasn't going to be time now to arrange any more briefing for Jory.
Sometimes she despaired of communicating with this man on a rational basis.
She was now assigned her final battle station, in a bunker, a small fortified room just below the surface of the ground, fifty meters or so from the dugout where she'd left her few personal belongings.
After checking it out, she went back to her quarters, and a chance to take off her armor for a time. Beneath it, like most people, she was wearing a snug-fitting specialized coverall. Take off the armor, and luxuriate in scratching a few places where itches had developed through the day. And then enjoy the even greater luxury of a hot shower…
The main trouble with the place, she thought, was that it was too far underground. Jory realized that she would have to rely on her machines to see anything at all. Well, they could see more clearly than she could, anyway.
FIFTEEN
Thinking over the two short meetings she had so far had with her boss, and pondering her brief talk with the colonel, Jory returned to her underground living quarters. There she managed to get a few hours' sleep, successfully ignoring the snores of a couple of other journalists, one male, one female, who were flattened out in their respective bunks in the same small room. Waking at the time she'd set for herself—she was generally able to do that—she enjoyed a quick shower and set out for breakfast in the nearest mess hall.
After that she rejoined her assigned guide—who for once had not been replaced between tutorial sessions. At the moment her job still consisted mainly of learning, and getting ready— if such a thing was possible—to be shot at.
Not even underground was it possible to get away from the ceaseless scrape and rumble of machinery, which seemed to be reshaping almost the whole surface of the atoll into fortifications. Work continued around the clock through the eternal, shadeless, almost sunlit day. Machines on the surface dug what looked to Jory like simple trenches, and unwound spools of the equivalent of barbed wire, long strands of polyphase matter, each displaying a quasi intelligence on the level of that of an ant or bee, programmed to entrap or at least delay berserker landing machines when they appeared.
She took the thin strand in hand and inspected it with a look of disbelief. It reminded her of fiber-optic cable. "This stuff is going to stop a berserker lander?"
"No, not by itself. But it's tougher and nastier than it looks. It'll give them something to think about, and it will at least delay the small machines, if there are any." Her tutor paused. "Anyway, it might be that the real reason we're deploying so much wire is that we happened to have a lot of it on hand."
"And that people feel better if they're being kept busy?"
"That might be a factor too."
Other tasks of a high priority included setting land mines, and calculating the best emplacements for the moderately heavy weapons that were available, maximizing their fields of fire. They were setting up mantelets and bunkers, hardening the stuff that here passed for soil into respectable defensive armor.
Chemically coded paint reflected the destructive energy beams fired by one's own side. The code was changed at carefully chosen intervals, to prevent the enemy's learning it and taking advantage of the knowledge.
She heard again all that the authorities thought visiting civilians ought to know about alphatriggers and blinktriggers.
The carbine hand—or shoulder weapon carried by most troops on the ground—was basically an energy projector, whose beam cracked and shivered hard armor, but could be safely turned against soft flesh. The beam induced intense vibrations in whatever it struck; in a substance as soft as flesh, the vibrations damped out quickly and harmlessly.
Hard surfaces, like those of suits of armor, could be protected by treatment with a spray of the proper chemical composition. The formula was varied from one day, or one engagement, to the next, to prevent the enemy's being able to duplicate it.
Mow there was a rumor, quickly making the rounds, that Yamanim had completed what he considered his urgent business here, and was leaving the atoll. Minutes later, it was not hard to verify that he had left, because there was no longer any sign in the sky of the fast cruiser on which he and Jory had arrived. That vessel had been seen breaking orbit, and according to scuttlebutt heading directly back to Port Diamond. Jory verified that the ship was gone, and assumed that the field marshal was on it, though no one made any official announcement of his whereabouts.
Though seriously tempted once or twice to reveal the source of his knowledge, he had steadfastly refused to reveal to the land-based defenders the fact that when the predicted attack came they would be able to count on carrier support.
When one of his aides suggested that these brave warriors be told all the known facts, Yamanim explained why not: All the officers to whom Field Marshal Yamanim spoke on his hurried visit would sooner or later be talking, passing on information, to pilots, to space crews, if they did not fit in that category themselves. And everyone in this garrison, members of those crews especially, stood in some danger of becoming a berserker's prisoner.
"Understand now?"
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."
Another reason for the policy of secrecy, seemingly farfetched but not totally disprovable, was that there might actually be berserker hardware right here on the base, disguised as something else. A determined search for any such material was instituted. Any number of bad jokes were made, regarding uncooperative machines. Every item of new equipment arriving by any means was thoroughly inspected.
As part of the regular defenses—not Hypo's far-flung spy system—vast reaches of interstellar space, across much of the ED domain, including much of the Gulf and the territory around it, had been for some time, perhaps the past hundred years, studded with millions or bazillions of sensors.
"What was that last unit you mentioned?"
"I'm saying that even the order of magnitude of the total number is classified ultimate secret."
Mostly these were small devices, no bigger than human heads or hands, and were triggered by the passage of probability waves cast out by machines or ships moving in nearby flight-space.
But there were indications that the enemy had found a way to nullify this early-warning net.
A few tanks, heavyweight machines manned by special Templar crews, and capable of slugging it out with almost any known berserker lander, had been brought to Fifty Fifty and were being stored out of sight, ready to roll to the surface on a moment's notice. If Hypo's predictions were as rock-solid as the leadership assumed, the enemy occupation force when it arrived would get a far more enthusiastic reception than any of their leaders could have computed.
Earth was of course strongly concerned by a berserker threat so comparatively near at hand, but few other worlds as yet perceived the threat to Fifty Fifty as an immediate danger to themselves. The Home Sector was not currently the best armed in all of human territory. There was not a lot of mobile firepower that could be quickly deployed to a new location. Other sectors would contribute too, of course, to the defense of Earth, but they were farther away and many of them had their own problems. They were not going to strip their own defenses, even to save Dear Old Earth. In fact, no one would ask them to do so.
More substantial help, in the form of an arsenal of the latest weapons, of fleets including battleships and carriers, had been promised,
was being promised anew with every standard day, and could be absolutely relied upon to arrive—someday. The trouble was that day, as all the promisers admitted, might well be a year or more in the future. That would be too late to save Fifty Fifty, and Earth, from the current present danger.
The hundreds of human reinforcements who had already been brought in, and who were now digging themselves in as if for an eternal stay, were most of them combat specialists. They were more or less well-trained, but the great majority lacked any real combat experience. Most of the real veterans were on worlds far from home.
The interstellar brotherhood of anti-berserker devotees (some said fanatics) who called themselves the Templars had pledged to send special help, and the first installments of this aid were already on hand. In theory the Templars dispatched their forces around the Solarian-settled portion of the Galaxy to wherever the need was greatest at the moment. As usual, the organization and its activities were the subject of strong rumors.
Many people on the homeworlds now wished fervently that there was a Templar base somewhere nearby—but of course such bases, and the bulk of the Templar forces, tended to be out on the frontier, where combat was virtually part of day-to-day life—and where unoccupied living space was much easier to find. Out there, the Templars and the local authorities had an easier time of it, getting along.
After she had verified Yamanim's departure, Jory and her latest mentor moved away together. She had a question: Why did everyone seem to think that in this coming battle the human side would be so outclassed?
"That's simple. Because we are."
"Explanation, please?"
The answer to the question about inadequacy soon became obvious, if one believed the briefings, though it was not obvious to a layman simply looking at the sleek hardware. To civilian eyes even the worn and obsolete machines seemed impressive enough.
"That's only a courier. Essential for communication, but practically useless if you're trying to knock an enemy machine out of space."
Jory wondered briefly whether this was the exact same type of ship in which Spacer Gift had made his recent and much-publicized escape. Good old Nifty. Mysterious Nifty. She wondered where he was now.
"And how does one tell a courier from a fighter, say?" The man's eyes widened momentarily, and he was silent for a moment, as if trying to conceal his shock at such ignorance. At last he said: "Mostly by the overall shape. Actually we don't generally count couriers as ships. They're an expendable asset, like ammunition."
When it was certain that the berserker attack was imminent, all the ships now cradled on the islands would be launched into space, to avoid being caught on the ground like sitting ducks.
"Show me."
"All right."
Jory and her guide walked for a few hundred meters, a good part of the way around the tiny world, to the far end of the landing field, where they would be relatively out of the way of vital activity.
There they approached a launching pad that held a ship accessible for inspection. The landing field, much of it bordered by the illusion of what appeared to be a waterless beach, stretched out so far toward the near horizon that the curvature of the odd world beneath their feet was plainly visible.
The pad itself, the size of a small house, was sculpted out of the peculiar, sand-colored matter of the atoll. This native stuff had been carved and molded into a cradlelike, shallow depression, from which tilted columns arose to embrace the egg-shaped hull, two or three times as big as an ordinary ground car.
Standing under the overhang of hull, the guide casually raised his right hand and gave a proprietary thump against the rounded metal flank. This ship was roughly ovoid, bulges here and there suggesting fins or wings, though not pronounced enough to be called by those names. Moving to a position directly under one of these pinnae (the proper technical name), her escort informed her: "Here you have what is, unfortunately, a typical example of the Solarian fighter."
Upon the little spaceship's flank were markings and insignia of several kinds, all of which, said the guide, would disappear when power came on and the ship was livened for combat. Jory's guide explained what each symbol meant. He demonstrated that rubbing his hand over them made them vanish. The markings could be turned on again in flight, on the rare occasions when that seemed desirable.
Jory could see no obvious break at any point in the smooth curves of what appeared to be featureless metal. She asked, "Where are the weapons? Missiles, things to shoot with?"
"All inside the hull at the moment. We're in an atmosphere here, and streamlining makes the liftoff just a little faster. In space, where there's a prospect of combat, they appear as needed."
Jory's robot of course, gaudily labeled as a civilian tool, had been activated for this expedition. It kept tagging along, and she used it to keep taking pictures and notes.
The fighter was notably longer and leaner than the other types of ship—Jory, looking around as her guide pointed them out in their revetments, could see that this was so. This difference was because the missiles carried by the fighter, either stowed inboard or slung outside the hull, were not as large.
"This type operates alternately in flightspace and in normal space, and dodges rapidly from one mode to the other. The fighter routinely risked jumps in and out of crowded, 'heavy' regions of normal space that ordinary spacecraft would be unable to accomplish. It carried short-range beam weapons and a few missiles. In combat it was effective mainly against small berserker fighting machines. Because it doesn't carry big bombs or missiles, it can't do much damage to large berserkers, except possibly by suicidal ramming." .
As a climactic effect, the guide did something that produced the opening of a hatchway in the silvery hull, and invited Jory to climb in and look around. She boarded through a narrow groove, going up a series of awkward steps. Her guide didn't attempt to come with her; there simply wasn't room inside for two.
"I wouldn't touch anything, though," he cautioned mildly.
"Never fear." Crossing her arms, she hugged her fingers in her armpits, as if to keep them out of trouble. Now she was looking down into a kind of grave-sized windowless pit, containing a helmet on a cord, a single combat chair; not very much else. "What about the berserkers? I assume their machines are divided into types as well?"
"More or less. For our own convenience in discussion, we tend to group them into varieties more or less corresponding to our own ordnance.
"For fighters the berserkers rely mainly on what we usually call the Void fighting machine. Also known to Solarian intelligence as the Type Zero or Goose egg or Cipher or Null."
"And how effective is the Void?"
"It's good. It's actually better than anything we can put up. Very fast and agile, but somewhat fragile too. Berserkers after all care nothing about the survival of any of their own hardware, if it can get the job of killing people done."
"Can I quote you on that? That the Void is better than any of our fighters?"
The guide shrugged. Now it was possible to see that he was deeply angry; not at Jory, not even at the berserkers. Rather at the fact that he and his comrades were so miserably equipped— or believed they were. And she doubted they would cling to that belief without good evidence.
"They told me to brief you, Ms. Yokosuka, and that's what I'm doing. What the censors are going to allow you to send out of here is something else."
"What exactly is wrong with this one I'm standing in? Or on?"
"Too slow, to begin with. And it displays a certain tendency to shed small pieces of its outer hull under the extreme physical stress of combat. Actually under any physical stress at all."
"Oh." When Jory looked closer, she saw that patches of irregular surface were indeed visible on the hull, from which small pieces did seem to have been shed. The instructor's bare hand scraping at one such sore spot produced another little fragment.
Jory stared, wide-eyed. Suspiciously she wondered if her guide was hoaxing her in some elaborate way; but th
e expression on his face soon convinced her that he wasn't.
She eased herself down a step, sliding her body in through the pilot's hatch. Now she was standing on the single combat chair, and now she had let herself down into it. The space was cramped, especially with her body fat with armor.
"May I try on the helmet?" she called, a little louder than before. Her guide had vanished from her field of vision when she let herself down into the spacecraft from the top. The helmet hung poised on its little rack, connected with the nearby panel by a silvery, stretchable cable. Tentatively she started to pick it up.
Her guide's dry chuckle reached her ears from below. "That would be about the last thing I'd recommend you do."
Jory hastily put the odd-shaped silver bucket back on its support.
Jay Nash had worked hard, pulled all the political strings he could, to get permission to remain on Fifty Fifty with his small livecrew when the attack came, and record the attack. Nash wasn't going to change his mind about that. But other reporters were going to ride with the Solarian Gulf fleet, or what was left of it after the sneak attack, when it moved out of Port Diamond.
That fleet had been officially designated Task Force Sixteen, and most of the people on the islands were still ignorant of its existence. Maybe Nash himself had been told. He was widely trusted.
But the widespread ignorance, it could be hoped, extended to the berserkers.
A little later, back in her quarters again, Jory was privately reviewing her notes, gathered from a variety of sources. Her bunkmates (all of them were now female, after some switching around) were going about their own business in the crowded room, while she lay on her back in her bunk with her boots off, and ignored them all. Her robot was curled doglike, in a way that occupied a minimum of space, beneath her bunk, next to her stored personal armor.
Berserker Fury Page 17
