Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  • Item: One civilian ship, the Witch of Endor, in the process of being refitted for a fight. Some heavy offensive arms could be installed, but when the job was done, her shielding would still inescapably be weak by military standards.

  • Item: Four armed launches, down another notch in size from the patrol craft, and incapable of independent superluminal flight-they would have to be towed to the near vicinity of Summerland, another detail of the plan with plenty of room for things to go wrong. As part of a force setting out to attack a berserker base, they seemed to Harry good material for comic opera.

  • Item: Three, or four, or maybe even a dozen-it was still uncertain how many could be cobbled together before the deadline-space-going pods or machines, even smaller than the launches. Marut's tentative new plan called for using these as imitation berserkers, convincing enough to fool the defenses of a berserker base for some substantial fraction of a minute. The miniature fakes, like the armed launches, would have to be towed to the scene of action.

  Before Harry had been forced to spend much time in contemplation of the utter inadequacy of this array, an alarm interrupted his unhappy musings. Lights flashed on the stage in front of him, and a discordant ringing sounded in his ears.

  Something, somewhere in the Hyperborean solar system, had automatically triggered a base alert.

  The first indication that an intruder had entered the system came from the base's automated early warning array, a deployment of robotic sentinels throughout a vast volume of space and adjoining flightspace surrounding the Hyperborean sun. Tens of thousands of units, each self-sustaining and comparatively simple, spaced millions of kilometers apart, were arranged in vast, concentric spheres, the outermost of which lay at a distance of several astronomical units antisunward from Hyperborea.

  The signal was physically carried to the base by a courier moving at superluminal velocity, a risky procedure this deep in a system's gravitational well, but absolutely necessary if the warning was to stay at least slightly ahead of the object whose presence it was intended to announce. The courier arrived at the base only a few minutes after it was dispatched, and an orange alert was at once imposed.

  Had Harry's ship been even marginally spaceworthy, he would have scrambled at the alarm's first tingle, without waiting for orders. But the techs had had to drop their tools in the middle of the job, leaving the Witch in a shape impossible to get off the ground, let alone enter combat. Harry could do nothing but grind his teeth in frustration as he ran a quick survey of the landing field on his ship's screens and stages. He observed that the destroyer was still sitting where it had been, but none of the human techs were anywhere in sight at the moment. Presumably, they'd all responded like good spacers to the alert, and were already inside the comparative safety of the fortress's protective walls, crewing some kind of defensive positions. Probably they would be wearing gunners' soup-bowl helmets, in effect wiring their brains into almost direct control of the base's heavy, ground-to-space defensive weapons.

  Sitting ships were sitting targets, not the place to be when things got rough. Harry got himself out of the Witch and in a few moments, he was out under the stars and galaxies, loping unhurriedly toward the base, looking around as he progressed. This time, at least, there were no wrecked ships falling from the sky. Rather, the reverse, in fact.

  As Silver loped along, headed for the base's nearest entry port, he could watch Marut's crew running, or riding some transport, toward their waiting destroyer, and then, only moments after the last armored figure had been swallowed by the ship's airlock, the destroyer lurching up from the ground, a full-power liftoff without sound or flare, and rapidly vanishing into the decorated blackness of the sky.

  As one of her duties upon declaring a full alert, Commander Normandy had promptly relocated from her workaday office to her battle station. This meant going much deeper underground, and she did not go willingly, for she yearned to be out in a fighting ship with Captain Marut, or with her own people who were crewing the small patrol craft. But those were only momentary yearnings, as she went where the duties of the base commander required her to be.

  Two of the armed launches, as many of them as were currently considered combat-ready, also got up into low orbit, though they weren't as quick about it as Captain Marut had been.

  Once back inside the base, Silver made his way through deserted corridors to his room, the better to keep out of the way of people who had useful things to do. This, of course, was not the time to pay a visit to the bar, which he assumed would be closed down anyway. Once in his little cabin, he sat around in his armor, sweating, swearing to himself at the irritation of being afraid to take it off. After giving the matter some consideration, he did go as far as removing his helmet, trusting that here inside the walls, he'd be given warning enough to put it on.

  Every now and then, he tried to think about chess.

  Only a little later, when the second and third and fourth reports on the intruder had come in, suggesting that the situation was more or less under control, that the war god wasn't swinging his full-sized hammer at the base, not at this minute anyway-only then did Harry clamp on his helmet and move restlessly back out to his ship. He'd thought of something useful that he could be doing.

  The next stage of the alarm, long minutes after the first, arrived by c-plus courier in the form of an urgent message from Good Intentions, saying that their independent defense array had picked up, entering the solar system, a mysterious presence that fit all too well the profile of a berserker scout machine. When could they count on help, and how much help, if it became necessary?

  The folk down on Gee Eye had to wait an ominously long time for their answer. By the time their query arrived at the base, everybody on Hyperborea had their hands full, and few were paying any attention to their civilian cousins living sunward.

  The second report from the early warning array came in about twenty minutes after the first, and was somewhat more circumstantial. The presence of a berserker intruder was confirmed. Only a single enemy unit had actually been detected, and the main object of the berserker's interest appeared to be Good Intentions rather than Hyperborea.

  Working on the theory that the information she had been given so far was accurate, the commander dispatched a courier to Port Diamond with a coded message describing this latest development for the people at headquarters.

  Ordinarily, the two patrol craft attached to the base, and their well-trained crews, would have been dispatched without assistance to investigate the intrusion-but Captain Marut was straining at the leash, and the commander judged it a good idea to let him assume command of the Space Force, including most of the ships with which he was planning to tackle Shiva.

  She also realized that it would have been something of a gamble to commit all of her mobile forces to the defense of the civilian colony of Gee Eye against what seemed only a probe, or a light attack. But in fact, she was not gambling much-when someone asked her about this, she replied that if a heavy attack was about to land on her own planetoid, the few ships she had sent away weren't going to be of much help anyway. The base on Hyperborea relied for protection mostly on its fixed defenses.

  Less than two hours after the sounding of the base alarm, the hastily assembled posse of three ships-one destroyer, two patrol craft, and two armed launches-with Captain Marutin command, having driven out to hunt down the intruder, sighted the enemy.

  The enemy replied to a volley of Solarian missiles with a couple of volleys of its own, at a range of several tens of millions of klicks, a large fraction of an astronomical unit. On the present occasion, this was little more than ritual sparring, for the missiles at subluminal speeds took the best part of an hour to reach the point at which they had been aimed; and only then could they seriously begin to hunt, questing for a target that might well be long gone by the time they got near its original position. The type of missiles launched by Solarians in this sort of combat had to do a lot of independent computing, a lot of nice dis
crimination between enemy and friendly hardware. They were about the closest things to actual berserkers that Earth-descended humans ever allowed themselves to build, close enough to make many people feel uneasy; but for effective combat at these immediate ranges, there was not a whole lot of choice.

  Another effective mid-range weapon was of course the c-plus cannon. It could project slugs a few score million kilometers-up to half an A.U. No doubt Marut would have liked to mount such a weapon on his destroyer, but there were several technical reasons why such an installation was not feasible. Nor were any of the Solarian ships now available in-system armed that way. The patrol craft were too light; Harry Silver's Witch was just barely massive enough to carry the lightest model of the weapon.

  To his surprise, this time Harry actually felt a twinge of disappointment at not being able to get into the action. Almost anything would be better than this sitting around and waiting.

  At least one argument had been avoided by the forced grounding of his ship. Marut's position in the matter was that even when the Witch was ready, someone else ought to be placed at the controls, while the civilian stayed on the ground and out of the way-he warned Commander Normandy: Give Harry Silver back his own ship and the man would be long gone.

  Shortly after the first message from the inner planet reached the base on Hyperborea, an almost continuous string of radio messages from Good Intentions started to flow in. Some were clear, uncoded transmissions, the people down on the sunward world evidently thinking security be damned, this is an emergency. This time, it looks like bad things could be happening to us.

  Gee Eye's own homemade warning system, not nearly as extensive as the Space Force net enclosing the whole solar family, had somewhat belatedly picked up the intruder, and ever since that moment, the leaders of the sunward planet had been clamoring for the enemy to be beaten off.

  The townspeople cried piteously for Space Force help. Haven't they all been paying taxes to the Sector Authority? Actually, that was a doubtful proposition, but it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to check up on it.

  For all anyone on the base knew, the intruder could well be a scout from the same berserker force that had earlier ambushed Marut's task force.

  Naturally, the Gee Eye people knew nothing about that. They were scrambling their own modest fleet, really only a small squadron of home-defense ships, and activating what ground defenses they possessed-if Claire Normandy's database told the truth about the latter, they were certainly not enough to seriously slow down any serious berserker attack.

  So far, Gee Eye's Home Guard fleet seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time to get into position.

  Claire Normandy detailed one of her subordinates to reply minimally, and in the proper code, assuring the Gee Eyes that the danger was recognized and steps were being taken. The subordinate was to promise nothing specific in the way of help, but instead, to prepare the neighbors for a detailed appeal for volunteers.

  Even assuming that Harry Silver could be induced to volunteer, more skilled people were desperately needed-all the details of the revised plan of attack on Shiva had not yet been worked out, but whatever they turned out to be, the experienced spacers required to make the plan work would be in short supply.

  Before the alert was sounded, the commander had ordered a computer search for people with the special skills and experience the task force needed. The only database in which it made any sense to look was a fairly recent, fairly decent, representation of the population of Good Intentions. Under Sadie's direction, her little office unit needed less than a minute to do the job, winnowing the list for anyone who fit the profile.

  "You mean anyone at all, Commander?" Sadie asked.

  "Anyone." Then Claire rubbed her forehead with irritation. "No, scratch that, put in one exclusion. Leave out anyone who's ever been indicted for goodlife activity."

  In all, the base data bank contained, among much other information, details on about a billion individual human lives. Included in that number were the great majority of the ten thousand people now living on Good Intentions. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that not a single person of that approximate ten thousand had ever been accused of being goodlife. Even so, the harvest of people experienced in combat was about as sum as the commander had earlier predicted it would be.

  "What will happen if we simply try to draft these people?" Sadie asked.

  "I don't know, but I want to avoid that road if I possibly can. Put out the call for volunteers."

  With everyone on the base but Harry Silver either space-borne in a fighting ship or at an assigned battle station on the ground, Harry suddenly found Hyperborea a lonely place. All the good flight-crew people available except himself-and the base commander; he'd heard she fit that category-were already millions of kilometers away and fast receding. Whether they were putting their modest force up against a mosquito or an armada, it was still impossible to say.

  For the moment, he was separated from all human society, and as far as he could tell, unobserved. Harry decided he might as well use the time to advance his private goals. It seemed unlikely that he'd have as good a chance again in the foreseeable future. It was the work of only a moment to once more unlimber the Sniffer from its locker. Quickly, he gave the robot orders, sending it back underground with instructions to pick up the box of contraband and bring it to the Witch.

  Damn, but it made Harry's joints ache to think of Becky lying there for sixty standard months or so in her-wedged-in space suit. The hellish cold of deep space would have seeped into her dead joints years ago. What was left of her now would be as hard as the surrounding rock. He wanted to do something about that, perform some kind of ritual at least, but he couldn't come up with anything. He didn't believe the woman he remembered would have cared about having a fancy funeral, or any particular religious observance, and she had no close relatives alive that Harry knew about. But when he thought the situation over, he decided that he might as well pick up the contraband. In fact, Becky would probably have wanted him to have the stuff, though she must have been angry at him when she set out to hide it here-if hiding it had been her purpose. He couldn't think of any other object that she might have had in mind.

  Nagged by a craving to know more of the circumstances of her death, Harry considered trying to follow the Sniffer to the spot and examining the ground in person-but in the end, he decided against that course. For one thing, he doubted he'd be able to force his own suited body very close to Becky's inert form, wedged in a narrow crevice as it was. Even Sniffer had had trouble getting in there. The holostage images sent back by the robot could be made to display the exact dimensions of all the objects in them, and he could see that trying to get himself between the rocks would certainly be a tight fit. It was quite possible that over the past five years, the crevice had grown narrower as the rocks shifted. Harry supposed that the major excavations carried out by the Space Force, in the course of digging hangars for the base, might have had something to do with that. Even if Becky's suit had so far resisted being absolutely crushed, it looked like it was now wedged in so tightly that getting it out would be a major operation. The rock masses were so huge that sheer inertia dominated, never mind the feeble gravity.

  While waiting for Sniffer to fetch his treasure, Harry once more scanned the holographic images that the robot had sent back during its earlier jaunt. Then, deciding there was nothing useful to be learned, he destroyed them in the cabin disposal.

  After that, he sat in his captain's chair in the Witch's control cabin, flanked by two other seats that were seldom occupied, and brooded: What would be the point, anyway, in trying to dig her out? For one thing, he'd have to explain how he'd happened to locate her body. And then the business about the contraband would be likely to come out. And it was hard to see how the lady herself would be any better off.

  Now it was finally, truly, sinking in on him that she was dead.

  Trying to give himself something more positive to think about, Silver fir
ed up his ship's communication gear and tried to pick up more stray transmissions from Space Force ships, anything that would give him some indication of how the ongoing search operation, or skirmish, was progressing.

  Less than half an hour had passed in this fashion, and Silver was still sitting isolated in his ship's cabin when the Sniffer came bounding and sliding back over the rocks, past the robots that were now standing idle around Harry's ship, waiting for the technicians to return and resume work.

  The maintenance robots haughtily paid Sniffer no attention, and in a few moments, the autodog was back in the cabin, standing in front of Harry. Inside its chest, where an animal's heart and lungs would be, was a small cargo compartment, and at a code word from Harry, the door of this came open. Reaching in an armored hand, he brought out the little box, which felt as if it were of sturdy construction, no bigger than an ordinary loaf of bread and not a whole lot heavier. Immediately the moisture in his cabin's air began to freeze on the surface of the container, filming it in a layer of ice.

  The box of contraband appeared to be only latched shut, not locked. Harry got a tool out of a locker and applied some heat. After the box had warmed up to the point where it was merely frozen, Harry opened the lid, observed that the contents were pretty much what he had expected, then closed the container again and tossed it as if carelessly into the bottom of a locker. The commander's people had already gone over the interior of his ship, and it didn't seem likely that anyone would have a reason to search it carefully again.