Shiva in Steel

by Fred Saberhagen

  There was no single, pivotal moment in the battle when success or failure was decided. Rather, the attackers' chances slowly diminished, while the defenders' gradually improved. By the time the berserker leadership was ready to use extreme violence, it was no longer an available option. All their heavy weapons had been destroyed.

  All throughout the base, alarms kept at their useless, mindless task of making sure that everyone had been alerted.

  When he went out of the computer room to look around again, this time with a slightly different purpose in mind, Harry was walking by himself. He had walked a hundred meters through winding corridors, all battle-scarred but quiet now, when someone spoke his name. Harry spun around, his weapon at the ready, and saw that it was only another suited human standing there, carbine ready but not aimed. Marginally, Harry relaxed.

  "Hello," said an almost-cheerful voice. "It is Lieutenant Silver, isn't it? Spacer Third Class Havot, reporting for duty. Everything's been quiet around here."

  TWENTY-TWO

  There was definitely a bad side to fighting a decisive battle on the home front. Shooting it out there, the primary question to be decided was inescapably that of your own survival. But being on the defense also conferred a few advantages. Every spacer in Normandy's command was a frontline soldier now. Even those whose normal duties saw them completely deskbound had weapons in hand, and their training had been such that they knew how to use them.

  Every spacer on the base was also aware that he had nothing to lose by fighting on to the last breath. The people on the planetoid had their backs to the wall. There was no way any of them were going anywhere.

  "Yeah, I'm Harry Silver. Been kind of looking for you."

  "Oh?" Havot relaxed minimally; he didn't think they would ever send just one man out to arrest him. He very sincerely hoped that the truth about his two most recent killings never came out. Because if it did, that would make it absolutely imperative for him to get away.

  Havot was no stranger to Solarian laws in their numerous variations, and he needed no lawyer to explain to him that the conditions under which he'd done his latest murders were very different from those surrounding any similar events in the past. For one thing, these made him not only a common murderer, but goodlife, which on many worlds was considered a worse offense. For another, and more important, his legal guilt was compounded by the fact that he was now a sworn-in member of the Space Force, subject to military law.

  If he should be brought to trial on Hyperborea-and he still thought the odds were against that-a military court would hear his case. With only doubtful and disputed evidence to go on, conviction might not be likely, but it would be a disaster if it came. The penalty imposed for desertion, treason, and the instrumentality only knew what else, would not be merely one more term of life imprisonment layered on top of those-he'd really lost count of how many-he was already supposed to be serving. Instead, the punishment would be death, and between the moment when he heard his sentence pronounced and the moment when he stood before the firing squad, the delay would be no more than a few hours, perhaps no more than a few minutes.

  More likely, in Havot's estimation, was that the shooting of two people on Silver's ship had been attributed to berserker action, and the authorities simply intended to send him back to the prison hospital on Gee Eye. He had every intention of avoiding that fate, if at all possible. If Harry Silver's ship was the only interstellar vessel remaining intact, then he was going to have to deal somehow with Harry Silver.

  "Buy you a drink?" suggested Harry. "I think we've got a little time."

  "Sure."

  "Some of the frangible bottles in the bar were still intact when I came through there. Amazing luck. Come along and we'll discuss space travel."

  "I'm your man." They were walking now, and Havot stepped over the detached arm of someone's armored suit; he gave no thought to the question of whether there might be a real arm inside. Human bodies and enemy machines lay scattered about in fragments, indoors and outdoors, along with pieces of every type of component of the base, including maintenance machines and blasted robot couriers. Only the built-in high redundancy of systems now kept the installation functioning at all.

  No one had yet managed an exact count of how many berserker landers had reached the surface of the planetoid, though the commander had one member of her staff doing little but trying to fix that number; nor could the total so far destroyed be fixed with any precision. Therefore, no one knew just how many might still remain unaccounted for.

  But in the Solarian fastness of the computer room, hopes were rising that their archenemy Shiva had been caught in the emperor's suicidal blast. At least the deadliest berserker was missing, and humans could hope that it was out of touch with its legion of killers.

  How many hours the entire battle lasted, from the first sighting of the enemy to the last shot, Commander Normandy could not have said. When later she read the numbers in the final, official summary, they seemed meaningless.

  Hour after hour, her brave troops, outnumbered at first but with heavy automated support, blinktrigger and alphatrigger weapons at their shoulders, had fought the intruders, up and down the corridors, in and out of private rooms and meeting rooms. A lot of the real estate was now in very bad shape, though some portions of the base were amazingly untouched.

  Human reflexes were of course too slow to come in first in such a contest, but their efficiency was augmented by mechanical and optelectronic aids-and inside these walls, humans possessed the considerable advantage of knowing the territory.

  "Lieutenant Silver will want iv take a look at this." The commander was looking at a holograph recording that she meant to show Harry when he got back.

  Marut himself had transmitted the message from his dying destroyer, a couple of million klicks away, drifting now in a slow orbit of the great white sun. Marut reported that he didn't think any of the enemy engaging him had got away, but his ship wasn't going to make it either. Whatever the captain's last message, he was already dead before it reached the base.

  In the recording, Marut finally admitted that Harry had been right about their planned strike against Summerland-it would have been a disaster.

  "Maybe a disaster as bad as this one." The dying spacer on the holostage managed a faint smile.

  Normandy shook her head. "Disaster for you, Captain, but we're still here. Any berserker fight that anyone lives through is a victory."

  It was impossible for anyone to be sure whether time in this case was on the side of life, or working to death's advantage. Which side could reasonably expect the first arrival of reinforcements?

  There was no way to be sure if Shiva was counting on more bad machines to show up or not, but human aid had been summoned and was bound to arrive during the next few days.

  Robot couriers were still coming in, on the usual fairly regular schedule, from other bases and from the far-flung network of Solarian spy devices.

  Every now and then, small groups of heavily armed Solarians sortied out of the computer room at the commander's orders, making their way in single file through some concealed passage whose designed purpose had to do with utilities and maintenance. Other small groups came back to grab a little food and rest. Their continuing objective was to make sure that enemy access to the grounded Witch was effectively blocked. When that had been accomplished, it would be necessary to hunt down whatever units of the enemy survived.

  The enemy's radio traffic had been gradually dying down, slowing from a ragged torrent to sporadic bursts of mathematical code. Now none of the commander's monitors had detected any berserker signals for ten full minutes.

  At one point, the Solarians, probing to locate the enemy, tried the familiar tactic of sending a robot ahead of them, hoping to trigger any booby traps the enemy might have put in place. Trouble was, the regular service and maintenance robots were too naive, not capable of deliberate stealth. And the enemy was too clever to reveal its position until it could get more life within rang
e of its destructive force.

  Moving as silently as humans could manage in armor-and still, inevitably, making more noise than man-shaped berserkers-the armored bodies of the squad emerged, single file, around a corner in one of the regular corridors, on a journey that had already taken them through manholes and ductwork, through gaps blasted in what had once been solid walls and floors. Everywhere they went, they encountered ruin in its various stages, as well as a great many patiently flashing alarms.

  The hunters had become the hunted, and vice versa. Now and then, they flushed out a berserker.

  Once, an ordinary maintenance machine, innocent but not too bright, skittered by and a nervous Solarian wasted a shot, blasting it into fragments.

  A Templar veteran advised him: "If you have time enough to watch it move, and if it's moving away from you-not likely it's a berserker."

  Elevators would become traps for any inhuman presence trying to use them. Certain massive, almost impenetrable doors had revealed themselves when the shooting started and had gone into action, solidly closing off corridors at strategic places so that the base could be sealed into several domains, each independently defensible, though still connected by hidden communication lines. The base commander knew how to generate a set of keys by which the doors could be opened again.

  Harry, in his bad moments, was sometimes perturbed by the idea that Summerland, in its new mode of existence as a nest of death, probably had its own kind of Trophy Room. And his earlier vision of that place had changed-now he saw human bodies, especially brains, well preserved for study. Beautifully preserved, but thoroughly dead, along with the bacteria that would otherwise have destroyed them with decay.

  The enemies invading the human base had done their best to shoot the lights out when and where that was feasible-when the machines calculated that they could see better than the defenders in the dark-wreck the power supply and all the systems of life support. But the designers of the base had made the key components of those systems extremely hard to get at, and had provided redundant systems.

  In many of the rooms and corridors, the furniture and equipment, the walls and floor and ceiling, were all badly shot up. Air kept leaking out from a dozen comparatively minor breaches, but so far, the generators and emergency supplies were making up the losses. Alarms, unheeded now for many hours, were still sounding everywhere, and maintenance robots ran or rolled about in dithering uselessness. Or worked, with insanely methodical patience, accomplishing one modest repair at a time, while all around them, the world of the beings they served was still being torn apart.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Several times in the course of the battle, the berserker attack on Hyperborea had come very close to succeeding, gaining an advantage that would not only doom all life on the planetoid, but would send some inner secrets of Solarian intelligence to exactly the place where they could be expected to do the most harm.

  But gradually, at first imperceptibly, the balance had tipped, and now it seemed that not only could the secrets be saved, but there was a good chance that the archenemy Shiva might have been destroyed, or possibly blasted into orbit by the violence of Galaxy's explosion in the low Hyperborean gravity. Of course, no one could be sure that the berserkers had not already made another copy of that evil miracle-but at least there were some grounds for hope.

  Everyone who had gone space-borne on Captain Marut's destroyer was now counted as missing and presumed lost. It was remotely possible that some crew members from that vessel, or from one of the lost launches or patrol craft, might have survived and could be picked up alive if a search were to be made. But that possibility was already vanishingly small, and diminishing with every passing hour.

  Commander Normandy, who had survived without a scratch even the irruption through the wall of her computer room, was putting together a list of casualties, in which "missing" was still the largest category.

  As far as the commander could tell at the moment, none of the people who had come to Hyperborea with the emperor had survived.

  The question was whether the emperor's grand gesture at the end had succeeded in its purpose. If not, the glory he had spent his life in seeking might very well still escape him at the end.

  "What price glory, Lieutenant Ravenau?"

  "I've heard the question asked before."

  Harry predicted that some members of the cult down on Gee Eye would soon be saying that Julius wasn't dead, that he'd only been carried or called away and would return someday in glory to lead his people to a final triumph.

  And someone, more than one, would be putting in a claim to be Julius's anointed successor.

  "Meanwhile, it would appear that he found what he was looking for."

  Lieutenant Colonel Khodark, one of the last Solarians to fall, ambushed when he decided to lead a foray out of the computer room, had spent the last couple of hours, and was going to spend a few more days, unconscious in a medirobot. The berserker that had struck the colonel down was disposed of soon thereafter.

  Eventually someone noticed that both confinement cells were empty-the accused spy Karl Enomoto was still in the hospital-and thought to raise an official question as to what had happened to the earlier prisoner.

  When the commander asked around, as Harry had asked earlier, someone remembered sending Havot to occupy a forward post. "We've lost contact with him? Put him down as missing, for now."

  Sadie, when questioned on the subject of Spacer Havot, promptly acknowledged that she had released him as soon as a red alert had been declared.

  "Oh, yes," said Commander Normandy, now with a vague memory of Khodark telling her something about that, way back at the start of the festivities. Normandy still wasn't going to devote her full attention to that problem, if it was a problem. Not when there were likely to be live berserkers still loose in her base. But she did comment. "Probably wasn't a good decision, Sadie. Shows stupidity, somewhere."

  "Yes, ma'am," said the A. I. adjutant. Sadie spoke in her normal voice. There was of course no question of any emotional reaction on her part. Sadie understood as well as the commander did that "stupidity" was a quality that could be attributed only to human beings.

  Basically, the secrets of Hypo and Negat did not appear to have been compromised; if any berserker machine had learned them, that machine was destroyed before it could get away.

  Still, people wondered whether what kind of a berserker it was that had apparently been blown up with the emperor's ship. They could only hope that it had been Shiva.

  A long time would have to pass before humans could be sure about that."

  The Gee Eye Home Guard, unable to shake their indecisiveness, mobilized, but then just kept milling around in their own small sector of space, closely guarding their own planet-staying too close to it to be effective in case of a real attack.

  During the hours of battle on Hyperborea, the ships from Good Intentions spent their time occasionally firing at shadows, setting off alarms at the sight of passing asteroids, trying now and then to call the base on Hyperborea with questions. Their calls were not returned-not until several hours after the shooting on the planetoid was over.

  The next courier that Normandy sent off to Port Diamond went plunging through flightspace with figurative banners waving, carrying a report of victory. She looked forward to being able to begin a thorough search among the scattered berserker wreckage for some kind of optelectronic brain that might be identifiable as Shiva.

  "I think we got it," one hopeful officer commented. "I think the emperor really bagged it."

  "How in hell can we be sure?" her colleague asked.

  A considerable time would pass before anyone began to feel really confident. It seemed that whatever quantum arrangements had made the brain of Shiva unique among berserkers were probably gone beyond the possibility of recovery.

  As he walked toward the social room with Harry Silver, Havot was saying: "Soon-maybe less than an hour from now-things on Hyperborea will once again turn very civiliz
ed. Which means I'll be locked up again. Also, I'll be demobilized, returned to civilian status. I do believe I like being a civilian."

  "But not being locked up."

  "Very perceptive of you, Lieutenant. I suppose you have an aversion to that as well? Didn't I hear your name mentioned somewhere in connection with some vague talk about a smuggling charge?"

  "Not a lieutenant anymore. I resigned my commission, which means I'll have to go back to making a living. In my business, a man like you could be quite useful sometimes, so I think that you and I have things to talk about."

  "Sure, thanks. Your ship all right?" Havot asked lightly.

  "Yeah. All ready to go, as a matter of fact. There was a little ruckus on board earlier, but that's all been straightened out."

  "Glad to hear it. That it got straightened out, I mean. Anybody hurt?"

  "Two people shot. One pulled through."

  "Friends of yours?"

  "I wouldn't say that." Harry looked up at him briefly, vaguely. "She saw the man who shot her."

  "A man? She thinks it was a man?"

  Harry nodded.

  "Silver, you've probably heard about my background. I don't know what this woman thinks she saw, but they're not going to stick me with something like that. All the shooting I did today was at berserkers, and I fought well. Damned hard, and damned well, if I do say so myself. I think there might be pretty good legal grounds for a review of my whole case."

  "Yeah, I could go along with that. You want me to put in a word for you, I'll say I think maybe your whole case should be reviewed."

  They had reached the social room by now, and Havot paused in the doorway, alertly inspecting the interior before he entered. There was, not surprisingly, no one else in sight. "It'll have to be in a civilian court. I expect to be out of the military within an hour. And, no offense, but I'm not sure your putting in a word for me would help. Somehow I have the feeling that you're on the run yourself. Or just about to be. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be going with you."