Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  Havot, seeking shelter, looking for sanctuary, for a chance to regain control of himself, had not stopped to try to do anything with the two bodies of the people he'd shot, still inside the main cabin.

  For the moment, shocked and terrorized by what the pilot's helmet had called forth from the depths of his mind, he had abandoned hope of immediate spaceflight and only wanted to crawl under a rock somewhere.

  There weren't many things that truly frightened Christopher Havot. But he had just encountered one of them. He had to admit to himself that he would face almost any fate rather than put that helmet on his head again.

  He was a couple of hundred meters from the Witch before he was able to stop bounding, to try to pull himself together and try to think.

  One decision had already been made: Someone else was going to have to pilot his getaway ship for him. Any thought of using the autopilot was only a bitter joke, when he couldn't even figure out how to turn the damned thing on.

  Whatever human pilots were still alive and on the ground were probably inside the base now. Fighting was going on there-he could see the flares and hear the blasts-but Havot had never been particularly afraid of ordinary fighting.

  Thoughts under control again, carbine ready, Havot started to work his way across the pockmarked ground toward the base.

  Now Harry was approaching his own ship, shoulder weapon ready and Enomoto, similarly armed, close at his side. Finding the outer hatch of the airlock open, they quickly stepped up into it. As they entered the artificial gravity of the tilted vessel, the ship seemed to swing itself into a level position, while the ground beneath it became the slope of a long, steep hill.

  The lock cycled quickly. When the inner door slid back to show Harry the inside of the main cabin, he stopped, the sight of the two fallen bodies, amid disorder, tending to confirm his worst fears.

  Enomoto, at his right shoulder, muttered something. The internal atmosphere was still basically intact, and in a moment, Harry realized that the mess might not be as bad as it looked at first glance. A quick survey of the panel showed him that the ship ought to be operable, but there was no way to be sure of that without a trial.

  Before he could take in details, before he could even see if one of the fallen forms was Becky, there was another task that must be done. Harry looked left, looked right, shoulder weapon on the verge of triggering. The berserker that had shot things up might still be here. Maybe it was in the other cabin, just beyond the interior door.

  With Enomoto standing alertly by, Harry checked the panel indicators once more and made sure the airlock was secure, then stepped forward to open the door leading to the other cabin-in there, all was peaceful. Ruin had not advanced this far. A few seconds' search demonstrated that no berserker lay in ambush and that there were no other humans, alive or dead, onboard.

  Now he was free to return to the main cabin, to make the discovery that he dreaded most.

  There were two fallen bodies inside the cabin, but Harry paid little attention to one of them. The armor of the second one was so badly scorched and torn as to be useless for identification-but in his heart, Harry already knew that it was Becky's.

  A moment later, he faced the nightmare sensation of once more discovering her fallen body. Twice now in a few days he had done this, and this time, it was for real. The position of her body suggested that she might have been seated in the pilot's chair, but now she was crumpled on the deck, close to the locker in which Sniffer spent most of his time. Now all the locker doors were standing open.

  For just a moment, as Harry started to turn over the suit, he had the eerie feeling that it was going to be empty, just as empty as that other one that lay in freezing cold, wedged between dark rocks.

  The servos of Silver's own suit purred and murmured almost inaudibly, multiplying his strength, so that the armored body of the other rose and turned quite easily in his grip, despite the full one gee of artificial gravity.

  But this suit wasn't empty. Fate didn't give that kind of blessing twice in a row.

  Something, some kind of energy or missile weapon, had hit the back with terrific force, peeling away the surface armor like the skin of a banana. Fortunately, the power supply and other solid hardware had taken the main impact, saving the human flesh inside from utter ruin. The suit's servos were dead, and life support was running only on backup batteries or fuel cells.

  Even as Harry moved her, her eyes came open behind the faceplate, looking at him through a tangle of curly hair-she was still alive. Somehow, Harry accepted the fact without surprise, because the alternative would have been more than he could have coped with. Her suit's own hypos must have bitten her, because she didn't seem to be feeling too much pain, and the tourniquet pressure points were probably working, so she wasn't losing too much blood.

  "Harry…" Her suit's airspeaker had a tinny sound. Better to stay off-radio, if possible.

  "You're all right now, kid." Harry could lie in a calm and steady voice; that was one trick he could always manage when he had to. "Let me think." What was he going to try to do with her? What would be the least dangerous place that they could reach? He wasn't going to try to get the ship off the ground, not when it had just crash-landed from unknown causes, and not into the hell he'd just come out of in the launch. For whatever reason, the berserkers weren't shooting at the Witch, not right now. But what would they do if he tried to lift off?

  But maybe it would be possible to change the odds.

  Enomoto was pacing around the cabin like a man looking for a way out. Harry's gaze swept back to the control panel, where there were new gadgets and indicators he'd never had a chance to see before. If a man got desperate enough, he could fire the Witch's new c-plus cannon while she was still sitting on the ground, maybe at a target within point-blank range.

  There was that cruiser-weight berserker up there just a few kilometers, streaking around in low orbit, and no one else seemed able to do anything about it. So now it was up to Harry to take care of that, even if he might scramble his brains in the process, and Becky's, and the brains of everyone else on the planetoid; but he had to try, because their brains weren't going to do them much good if they were all dead.

  "What're we doing?" Enomoto asked.

  "Are we desperate?"

  "What? I don't understand."

  "Never mind. I seldom ask a question when I don't already know the answer."

  Harry got into the pilot's seat, grabbed the umbilical and hooked it to his helmet, then tore it off and threw it aside with a curse. "Thoughtware's really scrambled. Don't know how the hell that happened. Have to go manual."

  When Enomoto at last realized what was going on, he was suddenly worried after all. "Maybe you shouldn't…"

  "Shut up. Should or shouldn't doesn't matter. It's a case of have to."

  In the rush to get things going, there hadn't been any chance to test the weapon, which he wouldn't want to do in the near vicinity of valuable objects and people, but they'd all been going on the assumption that it, along with their other cobbled-together hardware, was going to work just fine.

  Harry had seen similar weapons fired, more than once. But that had been out in deep space, with a target light-minutes distant, scores of millions of kilometers. Then the big slugs would begin skipping in and out of normal space in a freakish, half-real way, outracing light. Only relativistic time retardation allowed the mass of stressed metal to survive long enough in the real world to reach its target. In the last part of their trajectory, the slugs would be traveling like de Broglie wavicles, one-aspect matter with its mass magnified awesomely by Einsteinian velocity, one-aspect waves of not much more than mathematics. The molecules of lead churned internally with phase velocities greater than that of light.

  The results of a point-blank firing this deep in natural gravity would be uncertain, to say the least. About all that anyone could count on was that they would be in some way very spectacular, and that they would probably do the user less harm than they did the
target. From this close, the gunlaying system could hardly miss, let the bandit go quantum-jumping all it wanted to.

  "Here goes."

  And Harry fired the cannon.

  The firing itself was invisible and inaudible, but even as he pressed the manual control, the world turned strange around him, the energies released passing twistily through all their bones. In the same moment, he heard Karl Enomoto cry out. Harry had been afraid that something like this, or even worse, was going to happen when he fired, but he could tell now that it wasn't as bad as it could have been. He thought he saw Becky, standing before him, or maybe it was just her virtual face. And now it was only her ghostly image imposed on his faceplate, so that he could see through her and, behind her, the black rocks where he had once discovered her virtual dead body… and then the effect passed; the nerve cells in Harry's brain stopped jumping, and the real, solid world was back again.

  The instruments on the panel told him his shot had hit the berserker in its shrieking-fast low orbit and wiped it out. No quantum-jumping evasive tactic had been able to help against a c-plus, not at this point-blank range. The display on Harry's panel, as badly confused by the event as human eyes and ears, showed that the leaden slug had taken no time at all to get where it was going. In fact, there was one indication that the projectile had reached the target about a microsecond before Harry fired. He supposed-he wasn't entirely sure, but he supposed-that this was only an illusion.

  Slumping back in the pilot's chair, Harry with a sigh of relief turned it away from the panel.

  "We're not lifting off?" Enomoto demanded.

  "We're not. We can't. Told you, the thoughtware's scrambled. It was, even before I fired the cannon."

  "What scrambled it?"

  "Can't tell." Neuroptelectronics had its disadvantages, sometimes going bad at the worst possible time. It might take ten minutes to straighten the mess out, or ten days; there was no way to tell until he tried, and it was going to have to wait.

  They were stuck on the surface, for now at least, and there was no use crying about it. Maybe the base hospital wasn't the best place for a badly hurt woman, not when berserkers were threatening to overrun the base. But he couldn't come up with any better option. At least there was some chance of defending that facility. Here, the next moment might see the enemy coming in the airlock.

  Now, if only he could get her there.

  "Karl, stick with me. I'm going to need your help. All the help that I can get."

  "Right, boss." Enomoto had the same rank as Harry, but there was no argument over who should be in command.

  Harry crouched over Becky and did his best to touch her tenderly, which, under the circumstances, was not easy. "Can you move, kid? Can you walk? Maybe you could if I got you out of that suit?" Without its servos working, the thing would be a great deadweight.

  Feebly, Becky was shaking her head behind her faceplate. No. Then she murmured: "… wasn't a berserker, Harry."

  That pretty thoroughly scrambled all his trains of thought. "What?" Although he'd heard the words plainly enough.

  "Not a berserker," she repeated.

  Harry demanded: "What, then? Who?"

  "Some guy… person: I don't know for sure."

  It took him half a minute to remember to switch to his own airspeaker, time enough to realize that the damage to her armor would indeed be consistent with a shot from a Solarian carbine, like the one on his own shoulder.

  "Who?" he demanded again.

  "Might have been Havot. That crazy guy… came in." She winced under the impact of some interior stab of pain. "Thought he was locked up."

  "All right. I'll take care of him-whoever it was. Right now, you need some help."

  "It hurts, Harry."

  "I'm here, kid. I'm in charge now."

  The ship's medirobot was tucked snugly inside a wall, and opening a panel revealed a coffin-sized space into which he tumbled her after getting her out of what was left of her armor. He didn't try to peel off the remnants of her undergarment-the robot could do a better job of that.

  Then, calling in to the base from the cabin of his own ship, Silver brought the commander up to date on what he-and Enomoto-had been doing.

  "Silver, was that you? Firing the-"

  "It was. Direct hit." With a c-plus, having said that much, there was no need to claim a kill.

  But his main concern right now was to take care of Becky.

  No point in trying to radio for help. There was no way the base could send out anyone to assist them now.

  Only after he'd started moving toward the base did it occur to him to wonder if the big berserker he had just destroyed in orbit had been the last space-borne enemy. If so, that raised an interesting question-might Shiva have been aboard it?

  Or had Shiva come down to the ground, finding it necessary to direct the fighting at close range?

  Now that Becky was in the medirobot, the two men who were trying to save her life had to figure out a way to somehow guide the mobile device into the base.

  The medirobot, the size and shape of a waist-high coffin, ran on its own beltlike tracks. It rolled along at a brisk pace when told, by voice or by gentle guidance, where to go. With Enomoto and Harry trotting beside it, they got it out of the ship and then began moving toward the base, over what had once been a smooth landing field.

  Enomoto was dubious. "Won't every entrance be-"

  "Covered, besieged by some squad of berserker landers, trying to force a way in? I don't know. Maybe not; a hundred landers make a hell of a formidable force, but I doubt they'll be spread out evenly around the whole perimeter. They'll be pushing hard at a few points, wherever they think the weak spots are."

  They pushed on.

  Actually, the entrance they used was a hole recently blasted by berserkers in the base's outer wall. Whatever units had opened the breach were gone now, either moved on deeper into the base or destroyed by the defense. At least the two men and the machine they guided managed to avoid the enemy in the labyrinth of corridors.

  At last they came to an airlock that was still intact. The automated defenses holding at this point recognized Harry's suit and Enomoto's, and the coded signals of the medirobot, and since all three were together, allowed them to pass.

  Once back in territory that was still held by humans, Harry guided the bed-sized vehicle straight to the base hospital-Enomoto happened to know where that was, and the shortest way to get there. Vaguely, Harry remembered seeing signs, but they'd been scrambled now.

  Once Harry had done all he could for Becky, delivered her into the presence of the overworked human medics and their inhuman helpers, he took a couple of minutes out, doing nothing but sitting slumped over in a corner, before he started for the computer room. There were a lot of casualties. He couldn't help wondering how many of Commander Normandy's people were still alive and functioning-there couldn't have been more than a hundred of them to start with, at the outside.

  Karl Enomoto slumped beside him, staring blankly in the direction in which the medirobot, with Becky in it, had just been wheeled away. Inside the medirobot was the box of contraband Kermandie wanted. Enomoto had been able to spot it in Silver's ship, grab it up and hide it there while the man was distracted.

  Enomoto hung around the hospital for a few moments, looking for a chance to retrieve the box and hide it somewhere else until he could arrange to get it offworld and back to Kermandie.

  Now Harry had somewhere else to go, and he didn't think that anyone would try any longer to keep him from going there.

  EIGHTEEN

  Once Harry had found his way to the deeply buried computer room, getting in was easy. He'd expected that today many of the rules would be changed. There would be no problem getting in anywhere as long as you were obviously human. In fact, the human guard at the door was glad to see any fellow Solarian still armed and active. Nor would there any longer be a possibility of keeping any of the folk who worked here isolated from combat. Combat was coming to them. I
t was all around them now, and might arrive in their laps at any moment.

  Once the heavy door of the main computer room had closed behind Harry, things for the moment were almost quiet. The occasional blasts of battle noise seemed to come from very far away. He just stood there, looking around and feeling very tired.

  The overall arrangement was reminiscent of a medical operating theater, with four near-concentric rows or tiers of stadium seating. The chamber was windowless and indirectly lighted, its surfaces predominantly gray, with a mixture of other colors in pastel and here and there, bright highlights, very small. At the moment, it was occupied by only half a dozen people, with empty combat chairs waiting to accommodate three or four times that number. Evidently what they were doing here was so important that there was no thought of calling it off, or letting it wait, even in the midst of battle. A soft murmur of activity still left the room so quiet that a modest throat-clearing sounded like an interruption.

  Each duty station had a combat chair, so that Harry was reminded of the bridge of a big warship. The resemblance was strengthened by the fact that most of the people here were wearing wired helmets, much like those worn by a combat crew in space, connecting their brains ever more closely to the optelectronic hardware that took its orders from them, saving picoseconds in whatever processing the giant computers were about.

  When Harry had a chance to appreciate the size and complexity of the equipment assembled here, he let out a silent whistle. It was a bigger room than he'd anticipated, large for any kind of computer installation. The machines appeared to be equipped for wrestling with truly gigantic problems.

  The design of this workplace demanded a high ceiling, which was also called for by the fact that for some reason, computers of this type worked better if their modules could be stacked vertically in a standard gravitational field.