Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  There was no doubt that Marut, in the reaction he showed to this berserker stuff, fell into the first of Silver's categories-fascination. He was evidently less familiar with this stuff than Harry was.

  Harry supposed that the captain must have been considered at least tolerably knowledgeable about berserkers too, or he wouldn't have been among those chosen for the mission against Shiva.

  Commander Normandy, on joining the men, offered her official congratulations on the destroyer's successful blasting of the enemy courier.

  The man with the still-bandaged arm acknowledged the praise abstractedly.

  Now she had to renew her efforts to calm the captain down. Being in this room seemed to excite him, and the small victory had made him keener than ever to press on with his new plans for attack.

  Following the recent skirmish on the approaches to Good Intentions, a couple of metric tons of similar material, residue of the defunct berserker scout, was being brought home to the storage place on Hyperborea. It arrived, towed in a container behind a launch or lifeboat from a patrol craft, twelve standard hours, or a day, after the last blast of the skirmish had been fired. Chunks of jagged metal and miscellaneous materials, towed carefully. The container holding the stuff would be parked in an orbit around Hyperborea until specialists could go over it carefully, looking for booby traps of various kinds as well as for information.

  As Silver became more deeply involved with the commander's and the captain's plans for defense and attack, they picked his brains for all the information possible on Summer-land.

  Less than ten years ago, there had been a human base on Summerland, and in fact, several members of the Space Force crew on Hyperborea had spent time there, in varying amounts. A few people could remember one or more children having been born there. And visual records of the place were plentiful-it had once been beautiful.

  Harry'd been explaining to the commander about the Sniffer robot he carried in his ship, how it could be set to look for things-or for people-and how it did a better job overall than any organic bloodhound.

  Somewhere in the Trophy Room there was a berserker device-now no longer functional, of course-that did much the same thing. This led to comments on the many general similarities in design.

  "After all," said the captain, "the war's been going on for a long time. Sometimes they copy us, sometimes we actually copy them."

  And Commander Normandy, despite all the greater problems she had to contend with, remembered Harry's request to immunize the Sniffer. Actually, he'd needed her approval to tag his machine, before he turned it loose, with something that made it "smell" friendly, show the proper identification, to the defenses.

  Pausing briefly in her inventorying of the Trophy Room, she inquired: "While we're on the subject of battle damage, did you ever locate your missing bit of ship, Mr. Silver?"

  He'd had plenty of time to prepare an answer for that question. "I'm not sure. Sniffer brought me back a picture of something wedged in the rocks, but the fragment looked badly damaged, and it was a bit too large for my robot to haul. It could have come from one of the captain's ships. Anyway, that was just about the time other events began to demand everyone's full attention. I think my fairing can wait until we get some bigger problems settled; the Witch can be made fully operational without it." Harry delivered his reply with full confidence that the commander wasn't going to check up on it, given the other demands on her time.

  Meanwhile, just being in the same room with all this berserker hardware could give a man a chill-especially those parts of it that looked like components Harry'd seen before, when they'd been in full working order and animated by their own internal, infernal, programming. Despite all the evidence that everything in the bins and on the shelves had been thoroughly neutralized, Silver kept half-expecting something in the room to stir, to put out a gun barrel or blade, or extend a crusher in the form of vise-grip jaws, and then, with a single precise movement too fast for any human eye to follow, annihilate the next live body that came within its reach.

  Berserker hardware. No human mind had guided the mining and refining of this metal, the fabrication of these parts. There was quite a variety, of which one or two chunks were probably large enough to serve as the basis for a disguised attack force or raiding party.

  Silver squatted beside one of them, and put out a bare hand-he'd taken off one of his gauntlets, against the rules-to touch the surface. The act brought back evil memories, and Claire Normandy saw him briefly close his eyes. She didn't harass him about this open flouting of the rules.

  Some of the berserker wiring and software would be allowed to remain in place in the adapted units. If Marut's plan was to succeed, the thing would have to be accepted by real berserkers as a regular, working shuttle unit of their own breed.

  Captain Marut paced through the cramped space restlessly, mumbling oaths, adding what were probably obscenities, in some language Harry couldn't even recognize. The captain didn't look as if he were the least inconvenienced by the requirement of wearing full armor. He probably preferred to live that way, Harry thought.

  Of course Marut hadn't been able to find among the berserker trash the part he really wanted, something that might be adapted to get one of his ships going again, or augment one of the weapon systems on the destroyer that could still move under its own power. Harry thought that what the captain was really looking for, and wasn't going to find, was some magic way to restore the ships and people he had lost. But there were other things here, weapons, components of infernal machines, that humans could adapt, could use, if only they could get close enough to the enemy to come to grips.

  The captain, thought Harry, was in danger of turning into a kind of berserker himself, the kind of leader who very often got a lot of his own people killed.

  Not that Harry, at the moment, minded very much. In his present mood, a boss with that sort of attitude was looking better and better to him.

  "You couldn't make a real space-going machine or ship out of this. But you might be able to disguise your war party."

  "That's all we need." Marut seemed to be trying to convince himself that it was so.

  All the poor slob really needed, Harry thought, was the four or five good ships and well-trained crews he'd lost. He wasn't going to find them here, but that fact hadn't quite sunk in as yet.

  The Trophy Room had been considerably enlarged, more space dug out of rock, to hold the four little space shuttles, each of which could be stripped of certain auxiliary equipment, thereby expanding the small cargo bay. It occurred to someone that this space was sufficient to house, in concealment, one human wearing space armor.

  Marut's eyes were suddenly glowing with a dangerous light. "Silver, are you thinking the same thing I am?"

  "I doubt it."

  "Do you know… suppose that one of these gadgets could be towed behind an armed launch, or a larger warship?"

  "I could suppose that if I tried. What then?"

  "Suppose we took out certain things-this, maybe this." The captain's armored fingers slapped, in rapid succession, two different slabs of metal. "A small amount of new hardware would have to be added-no more than we could manage."

  "Then what?"

  "Then we put a spacer in it."

  "A human being inside?"

  Marut was being unexpectedly inventive. "You got it. Hell, we couldn't trust any pure machine with that part of the job-with what comes after we land on Summerland."

  "You're serious about this?"

  "There'll be plenty of volunteers among my people." Then he turned to the commander. "Ma'am, can we get your workshop to make up some duplicates of these? In outward appearance, I mean."

  So, on the commander's authority, the four little shuttles were brought out of the cavernous Trophy Room and taken to the base shipyard, or dock, under the landing field, where they were to be partially rebuilt and retrofitted.

  A message was brought to Commander Normandy in the Trophy Room. After reading it in private,
she announced that she had just received fresh confirmation of Shiva's plans.

  "It's going to be at the base at Summerland?"

  "That's right."

  Harry squinted at her. "And just at the predicted time? I suppose it's useless to ask where this tip comes from?"

  "Yes, Mr. Silver. Quite useless."

  "How long's it going to stay there?"

  "Just long enough for the usual maintenance, I assume." Berserkers, like Solarian ships, had to power up from time to time, in one way or another. This often involved bringing aboard tanks, or frozen blocks, of hydrogen to fuel the power lamps-of course no ship or machine could carry onboard sufficient energy to propel its mass across many light-years at transluminal velocities; riding the Galactic currents through subspace was the only way to accomplish that. But just tuning in to those currents tended to burn a lot of power.

  Marut, growing more and more enthusiastic, was willing to open up a bit about the tactics that the task force had originally planned to use. "We were to pop into normal space, about a hundred thousand klicks from Summerland, within five seconds after Shiva showed up for its scheduled docking-you say you know the place, Silver? Somehow, we have no really decent hologram."

  "I can sort of visualize it. And could you really have managed that? Timed your emergence that accurately?"

  "We had a good task force put together. We had everything we needed. Of course we expected our plan to work. Otherwise, we would've come up with something different."

  The three soon left the Trophy Room, adjourning their discussions to the commander's office. There she was able to call up the most recent recon holos of Summerland, which showed the recently established berserker base, resembling an evil castle in some fairy story, squatting in what had once been a verdant valley-where now a lifeless river ran, still steaming, between bare, rocky hillsides, down to a lifeless sea. Doubtless the enemy still had units perpetually prowling, sifting, straining, making sure that on Summerland not a single molecule remained to twitch with signs of life.

  "We were lucky to get these. We haven't had a whole lot of success with robot recon craft, and until this Shiva thing came up, it was very doubtful that sending a live crew to do the job would be worth the risk. The defenses appear to be rather ferocious."

  "And now-"

  "We're not running any more recon missions. For one thing, I don't want to take the chance of alerting the target base that something is up; and for another, we simply don't have the time. We have to decide everything on what we know right now."

  There was no telling what else the berserkers might have built since the last holos were taken. There was no reason to doubt that the ground defenses of the new enemy base would be powerful. And it had to be assumed that Shiva would be traveling with a formidable escort.

  Harry said flatly: "I'd put our chance of success with such a stunt under ten percent."

  "We'll have a much better grasp on that when we've run a formal computer simulation. Several of them."

  "Sure," said Harry. But he was shaking his head. If you ran enough simulations, and kept tinkering with them, you were bound to be able to get one at last that showed you the result you wanted.

  "You don't seem to understand, Mr. Silver."

  "What is it I don't understand?"

  "Even if, which I don't believe for a moment, a good, honest simulation were to grant us less than a ten-percent chance of bagging Shiva with the force we can now put up-we still can't let the opportunity pass without giving it a try. If we fail to kill this monster now, how in hell is humanity ever going to stop it?"

  Harry had no answer for that one.

  "You said you came here from Omicron Sector, Silver."

  "That's what I did."

  "And your own ship was damaged there. You must have had a fairly good look at what was happening."

  "I saw some of it." Harry still didn't feel like talking about his skirmish in getting out of Omicron. "Though I don't know what that has to do with anything. I stick by what I said before, this scheme you're coming up with now, putting people in pieces of junk, having them pretend to be berserkers-it just isn't going to work. And you just don't have the horses to go in there fighting."

  Marut drew breath as if for some forceful reply, then apparently decided to let it wait until some other moment.

  Harry said: "I suppose they ran some simulations for your mission before you started out from Port Diamond."

  "Of course we did. Exhaustively."

  "Sure. And I suppose the chances then were estimated at better than ten percent. As the mission was originally planned, with six fighting ships in a task force-"

  "Don't be idiotic, man!" Marut glowered at him. "Our estimation of success was much closer to ninety percent than ten."

  "All right, even if it was ninety percent then, now it'd be like trying to stop a tank by throwing eggs at it."

  It was clear at this point that the revised plan for an attack on Shiva had Commander Normandy's approval, or at least her acquiescence. Now people from the station crew and people from the task force were already hard at work, along with such appropriate robotic assistance as Claire could summon up. If Marut's wild scheme was going to have any chance of success, not a minute could be wasted. The usual cautions and procedures, required by strict regulations, for dealing with all captured berserker assets had gone by the board-the last trace of murderous programming poison had to be got out of this hardware so it could be used for something else.

  Later in the day, Silver, along with several other pilots, got to take their new miniships for a test drive, not getting more than a few klicks from the base.

  "Actually, we ought to spend a few days, at least, getting the feel of this. But there's no time," said one of the pilots.

  "Days? I'd say a month was minimal," said another.

  Clamped into the combat chair, helmet on his head, Silver put the armed launch-or maybe the unit newly disguised as a berserker shuttle-through its paces.

  The other pilots' respect for Harry Silver went up substantially when they saw how well he performed with the helmet on his head and his hands grasping the slow controls-those in which delays on the order of a large fraction of a second were not critical.

  If the mission was to have any chance of success, heavy improvisation was called for at every step.

  "All right, we might have the hardware to make a stunt like that barely possible. But we still don't have the people," said the first pilot.

  Most especially, they didn't have the pilots. Soon it was obvious that even with Silver counted in, there was going to be a critical shortage of the trained, experienced people needed to carry out the revised plan of attack. It was going to depend on a flock of half a dozen tiny single-crew ships, maneuvering' skillfully in the near vicinity of the berserker base.

  If they only had half a dozen more, as good as Silver was-but even he wasn't sure, considering the matter as objectively as possible, that there were that many in the Galaxy.

  NINE

  By now it was clear that Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern had been telling the truth about one thing: A new swarm of volunteers was indeed about to arrive. They were actually from Good Intentions; they were coming on the ship called Galaxy, and every one of them was a follower of the man who called himself the Emperor Julius.

  Fortunately, a good many of Claire Normandy's Space Force Colleagues were ready and able to enlighten her as to what it was all about. Harry, who'd spent some time on Gee Eye years ago, could help, too. But not Captain Marut, whose face was as blank as the commander's when the subject of the Emperor Julius and his fleet came up.

  Harry said to her: "Are you serious? You've been here for two years and have never heard of him?"

  "Perfectly serious. Who is he? I have some hazy recollection of what an emperor was supposed to be-bearer of some kind of ancient title."

  "That's right. Well, Julius and his followers have been squatting on Good Intentions for upward of five years-"
<
br />   "I've told you I pay no attention to affairs down there."

  "-and he claims to be the ruler of the Galaxy."

  "He claims what?"

  Harry, and others among Commander Claire's associates, did their best to explain the emperor to her.

  The captain was relieved that evidently none of the titles of rank in the cultists' military organization-if one could call it that-had to be taken seriously. There was to be no disruptive attempt by anyone to weaken his, the captain's, authority of command over the new task force.

  Captain Marut immediately began to speculate as to whether it might be possible to use this cannon fodder to conduct a diversionary attack, under cover of which, the serious attackers, masquerading as berserkers, would be able to get close enough to the berserker station to launch a landing party. But it would be best to make as few changes as possible in the plan already taking shape.

  What name the Emperor Julius had been born with, or where or when that event had taken place, perhaps no one on Hyperborea now knew-or much cared.

  Normandy thought it all over. Then she asked: "How is one supposed to address an emperor?"

  Captain Marut, who had spent most of his life in distant sectors, had never heard of the emperor either.

  "You're accepting his claim?" The captain couldn't believe it.

  Claire Normandy briskly shook her head. "I'm not placing myself under his command, or treating him as a genuine head of state. But he's volunteering, isn't he? He and some unknown number of followers, and their fleet, while thousands of others are sitting at home demanding to be saved. I can say an awful lot of nice things to people who are actually going to volunteer, and who bring their own ships."

  Marut shook his head slowly. "All the evidence confirms that it's one ship, ma'am. And nothing but a crazy cult."