Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  Harry assumed that normally several shifts of people crewed these positions around the clock. That would mean that perhaps half of the people under Normandy's command worked in here.

  Commander Normandy looked up from what was obviously her battle station near the center of the room, saw that Harry had come in, and briefly raised one hand in greeting.

  Catching his breath, he moved slowly toward the place where she was sitting in her armor. When he stood beside her chair, he said: "So this is what you people do on Hyperborea. This is the place that Shiva knows it has to get at."

  Commander Normandy looked at him solemnly. "This is it."

  Buried deep beneath alternating layers of steel, force fields, and native rock were massive supercomputers-virtual duplicates, at least in function, of the machines at the secret Intelligence stronghold known as Hypo, on distant, sunlit Port Diamond. Harry was no computer expert, not on any level nearly this advanced. But he knew enough to make a fair estimate of the power of devices of this size and configuration, served by as many live brains as worked in this room. He would have wagered that those human brains were also some of the highest quality. Commander Normandy had not been exaggerating when she told Harry how quickly his downlock codes would have been shredded here. Looking at the great machines, Harry could well believe they'd have disentangled his would-be fiendish mathematics like a stage conjuror snapping knots out of a rope.

  He also observed, without surprise, that right in the midst of this heavy technology had been placed what were doubtless very effective destructor charges, ready to swiftly and thoroughly obliterate the computers, along with their human operators, should their capture by the enemy ever appear likely.

  Taking a chair beside the commander's, Harry gave her a terse report on what he and Enomoto had been doing, and reported himself ready for reassignment.

  Her first response was to send him to one of several bunks ranged at the side of the room, with orders to get an hour of rest if possible.

  When Silver returned an hour later, hot-drink mug in hand and feeling greatly refreshed, she provided a briefing on the current situation. Immediately in front of her combat chair, between it and the arc of towering computer units, was mounted a large holostage. At the moment, the stage showed what was known of the progress of the battle ongoing outside and around them.

  Most of Commander Normandy's people, and the bulk of the defensive weapons dug into the planetoid, had survived the first onslaught. The situation was grim from the Solarian point of view. But the fight was not yet lost. What Shiva's prisoners had never known, they could not have been forced to divulge, and that information included the status of the formidable Hyperborean early warning system and the general state of Solarian readiness.

  The Hyperborean early warning system and the defenses associated with it, which were deployed widely enough to encompass the whole solar system, could give only a few minutes' warning, but that had proven to be of inestimable value. And the system still managed to inflict some damage on the enemy units pouring through.

  For a short time after the landers hit the ground, it had seemed quite possible, if not probable, that the enemy would overwhelm the base before the people in it and their localized defenses could effectively respond. But that response had come in time; and after a while, a lull set in, an interval of relative quiet, that no one expected to endure for long.

  It seemed to Harry that the worst possibility-and he could think of several bad ones-was that the berserkers had good reason to expect reinforcements.

  "What about our side, Commander?"

  "We have no such prospects, as far as I know. If any help reaches us during the next several days, it'll be purely by accident."

  Shortly after the berserker assault struck home, Colonel Khodark had come up with a new idea: One of the chief assets of the base was the large fleet of robot communications couriers, designed to carry intelligence off to Earth and Port Diamond and bring back supplies and various kinds of information.

  These vessels had been pressed into emergency service and launched as missiles. Most were ineffective, but the overall effect had been to help beat off the berserker attack.

  By the time Harry had reached the computer room, several of the gates and locks in the base's outer walls had been forced and ruined, and much of the interior was in the possession of the enemy. But the extensive compartmentalization inside meant that a lot of rooms still enjoyed a full, breathable atmosphere. In places, the enemy seemed to have withdrawn; but that could mean only that they were regrouping for a fresh onslaught.

  "What are we doing now? What do you want me to do?" Harry asked.

  "Right now we seem to be holding. And I want to keep you in reserve. The books say that every field commander is supposed to have reserves, and I have none. Except my computer operators here, and they… had better keep on with their own jobs."

  Harry said yes ma'am. He said he supposed that things here sometimes got as hectic, in their own way, as they could in the control cabin of a spaceship.

  He said: "I'd like to try on one of your helmets someday."

  "Someday." Battle-weary as the commander was, she could not resist smiling at his wistful tone. "What they show you is a lot different from what a pilot sees."

  "I bet."

  "And yet in some ways, not so different. I've been a pilot too, you know."

  "A good one, is what I've heard."

  Two or three of the people now on duty in the room looked especially busy, bodies tense, hands active in brief dancing spasms on keyboards and contact panels that must in some way complement the controls in their helmets. The remainder were simply sitting, though most of them had helmets on, staring as if lost in thought at displays that were utterly meaningless to Harry. Here and there, one of the operators looked up as if surprised to see the face of an outsider in the room.

  Whatever work was going on, none of the output was visible to Harry, at least not in any form that he could begin to interpret.

  Now and then, someone stood up to stretch, sometimes to exchange a few words with someone else nearby. Occasionally the commander exchanged a few easy words with one or two of the crew who were occupying the chairs and working at the consoles.

  She also introduced Lieutenant Silver to a few of the operators, people who at the moment appeared to be waiting for the machines, to which they were still attached, to tell them something new.

  "I was a pilot," he informed them solemnly. "My new career is security consultant. I sell a little insurance on the side. Health and accident, you know."

  He got a couple of nervous smiles at that. Harry exchanged handshake and polite murmurs with several people, none of whose names he really caught.

  Someone asked him where he'd been when the c-plus cannon had fired. They'd all been able to feel it, even here.

  Commander," Silver asked, "is Shiva here? On the surface of this planetoid, right at this moment?"

  "To the best of my belief, yes."

  "How do we know?"

  "Less than an hour ago, a courier came in with some data that had to be decoded." She gestured at the machines before her. "Here."

  "A courier from where? What kind of data?"

  It was an intercepted berserker communication. They are very difficult to decode. The gist of the message was that the machine we call Shiva had changed its plans and no longer intended to go to the Summerland base. Instead, it had decided to personally lead, tactically conduct, the counterattack against the badlife base on Hyperborea. I take that as confirmation that he-it-is here."

  "Wait a minute, Claire-I mean, Commander…"

  "Surprising, isn't it? But it looks like the stakes on the table are even bigger than we thought."

  "Wait a minute. You said: 'They are very difficult to decode.' That sounds like you intercept them all the time."

  "Putting it that way would be a gross exaggeration. But we do pick up enough to keep us busy in this room."

  Harry was staring
at her, an expression of bewilderment on his face that few people had ever seen there. "I don't get it. How could you bag enough berserker couriers to matter? And doesn't the enemy notice when they show up missing?"

  The commander was shaking her head slowly, and her eyes were fixed on Harry's. She said: "They don't show up missing-that's the beauty and the secret of it all. Our people out in the field are able sometimes-don't ask me exactly how-to scan those couriers in passing and extract the information that they carry, without stopping them or even delaying them. Until Marut's task force was ambushed, the berserkers were unaware that any of their dispatches were being read. Of course they're chronically suspicious of organic cunning and trickery, and they change their codes from time to time, and it always takes us a while to solve the new ones. We intercept only a fraction of their messages, and we can read only portions of those we intercept. Still, that can add up to a considerable advantage."

  Harry again found his lips pursing as if he were about to whistle-but he didn't make a sound.

  "It must have been a bigger surprise to Shiva than it is to you. It must have learned what was going on, from the prisoners it took from Marut's task force. A very astonishing discovery, and terrible-if anything can be terrible to a berserker. Shiva evidently computed that it had to do something about it, without delay, and the thing it decided to do was to come here, after us, after our secrets."

  "All your secrets are here, on Hyperborea?"

  "Most of our data-stealing, code-breaking secrets. They have to be. The decoding is done here, near the frontier, rather than many days away at headquarters, because the information has to be made available rather quickly if it is to be of practical use. The task force from Port Diamond was scheduled to stop here to pick up the latest information-not on the weather, but on planned berserker movements. So, for the system to work, the machines in this room must contain analogs of the methods our spy devices use. If Shiva could capture this room intact, it would learn everything."

  Harry nodded. Then he let out the ghost of a chuckle. "And I thought my downlock codes would be too tough for you."

  Claire Normandy's face showed a fainter reflection of his faint amusement. "It would have taken several minutes, at least, to set up for the job, and as you can see, I'm very reluctant to divert any of my workers from their regular tasks, even for that length of time."

  Harry was just starting to say something else, when suddenly he fell silent. The commander looked up startled at the first strange rumbling coming from inside the blank wall of the computer room, no more than six meters from the place where her combat chair was rooted to the floor.

  People in the room stared at each other, then grabbed for their weapons.

  The inner surface of the wall burst open.

  Two anthropomorphic boarding machines came smashing their way into the computer room and, without pause, moved straight toward the nearest seated operator. It was plain that their orders must have been to somehow locate this Solarian nerve center, to somehow fight their way in, and to take another prisoner right from the midst of it.

  Talk about audacity. Harry's weapon and several others were already blasting at the intruders. Returning fire with their built-in lasers, the machines advanced across the room and seized a cryptanalyst by her arms, trying to drag the screaming, unfortunate woman out of her combat chair.

  But the human was strongly belted in, and with her body sheathed in servo-powered combat armor, even a thin-armed woman would be able to put up something of a struggle. Nor did she fight alone. Fellow workers immediately rallied around, unable to fire now for fear of hitting their comrade, but grappling the enemy with their suits' own fusion-powered arms and grippers.

  A small chorus of human screams went up, on airspeakers and on radio. The berserkers howled, banshee shrieks at inhuman volume, to terrify their victims and to drown out human voices. Airspeakers became useless.

  Handicapped by the necessity of taking this specimen alive, the enemy units were having a hard time.

  When one of the roughly man-shaped berserkers was burned down by friendly defensive fire, a replacement came leaping through the hole in the wall to take its place. One mechanical body fell atop another, and around them lay those of human casualties in their armored suits.

  The local skirmish was over in less than a minute. The death machines were finished off, and the commander called in heavy machinery to block the tunnel through which they'd somehow squeezed and dug their way. Harry saw to the placement of the blockade and stood guard for a time. The berserkers had been denied another captive, though two operators had been killed, one literally torn apart, armored suit and all, and several others wounded.

  When the wounded had been carried off, it was time to tend the great machines. Not until a quarter of an hour after the last invader of the computer room had been reduced to scrap did someone notice that the back of one of the great cryptanalysis computers had actually been broken into.

  One of the operators said: "They did it-Shiva did it-somehow, while we were all distracted, fighting for our lives, trying to keep Ann from being taken prisoner."

  Harry asked: "How many machines were actually in here, anyway? Did anyone keep count?"

  Even as he asked, he knew it was a foolish question. There were almost as many guesses as there had been observers.

  "Shiva, all right." The commander nodded. "It seems that we must score one for Shiva. Assume it has obtained the information that it came here to get. So now we must make sure it never leaves." Presumably, Shiva's unique and most vital component was much smaller than the big decoding computers on the base. Evidently it didn't function continuously in the same attenuated realm of metamathematics. And with its allied machines, it had plenty of raw computing power to draw upon when necessary. Experts had been unable to form a consensus on the precise physical form of the archenemy; Harry tended to picture a solid-state slab of something dull and greasy-looking, no bigger than a briefcase.

  Overall, the elaborate computer installation had suffered moderate damage, worse than many of the other rooms and systems aboard the base, though not as bad as others-but, as someone pointed out, computers were mere hardware, and could be replaced.

  "Trouble is," said Colonel Khodark, "you can say the same thing about berserkers."

  Spare parts, replacement units for the computers, were stored in a cave even deeper than the computer room itself, dug far down near the center of the planetoid, and so far, untouched by the enemy. People and machines were starting to make repairs even before the last berserker lander, anywhere in the base, or on the surface of the planetoid, had been hunted down and exterminated.

  It was going to take hours to get the facility up and running again, days before it was back operating at full capacity. But, barring some renewed attack, nothing could prevent that now.

  Commander Normandy, in odd moments between life-and-death decisions, had taken note of the fact that the emperor's Galaxy was back on the ground again, and wondered how much fighting the one-ship imperial navy might have done in space, and to what effect. And whether the emperor had actually been aboard his somewhat grotesque flagship when it got off the ground.

  When the enemy attack swept in, the commander had briefly considered putting some of her own people onboard the Galaxy and ordering the emperor himself to stay on the ground, on the theory that he ought to be saved, somehow, as a rallying point for his followers.

  But there had been no time for any of that. In addition, Julius had as much as warned her that being told to keep out of harm's way was one order he would not obey. If she tried to enforce it, she could be sure of a rebellion in the ranks.

  She thought she was beginning at last to understand the emperor's motivation. With his empire, never really more than a dream, collapsing around him, what Julius wanted above all out of this situation was a chance to achieve a hero's death in combat. That was fine with the commander, if his heroics somehow helped win the battle.

  An hour and
a half after the first berserker lander hit rock when coming down on Hyperborea, not only had most of the berserker machines been wrecked, but most of the Solarian ground defenses had been shot out or turned off.

  Down in the computer room, Lieutenant Colonel Khodark was saying: "If we're exhausted, so is the enemy. I mean, they're worn down. I think they no longer possess any heavy weapons with which to take advantage of… our weakened state."

  Meanwhile, the people and the machines in the buried room worked on.

  Some of the intercepts sent on to Hyperborea were extremely fragmentary, and most were of no immediate use. Still, every one of them must be mined, squeezed, wrung out in an effort to extract useful information.

  "Too bad," Harry observed, "the sector commander in Omicron didn't have this kind of help available."

  "He did. But evidently against Shiva it didn't do him a whole lot of good. The enemy must have been moving too quickly. By the time we got information processed and to the people who could use it, often it was too late."

  The commander went on to relate how, about two standard months ago, a series of messages had been intercepted that, when decoded, proved to be of a value hard to overestimate. They indicated that the malignant machine, already christened Shiva by its Solarian antagonists, was soon going to be shifted from its outlying position to one of much greater authority-or, perhaps, it was being recalled for study and duplication.

  Harry, when he heard the explanation, was impressed. "Either way, bad news for us."

  "Yes indeed." Colonel Khodark nodded. "But we did in fact believe we knew, with a very high degree of probability, the very place and time where the damned thing called Shiva could be intercepted. What we couldn't foresee was that the enemy was going to change its plans. What we have here is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Better than that, maybe once in a dozen lifetimes."