Berserker Base
Page 27
Now there was a brief silence, interrupted by booming voices, different voices, also definitely human. Local radio traffic was being patched into the former prisoners' quarters by Hilary Gage.
It was evident that the Adamant navy along with other hostiles were heavily engaged in attacking the berserker base.
Jameson cheered them on, and gave some further explanation of how the attack had come about. "There're some people called the Cotabote, who think Adamant ought to be held responsible for everything in the universe. They live on a rock you probably never heard of, called Botea—"
"Oh."
"—and they suddenly started complaining to us of nightmares, of all damn things. Strange bad dreams about people sealed-up in rock—"
"Oh," said Lars again.
"Well, one thing led to another. Your chunky partners here, as I say, were sending out a lot of calls. We'd been wanting to find this base, and we were almost here when we ran into two other fleets that had the same idea in mind. One was a whole armada from around Adam. The other almost as big, from Nguni. Various non-ED people in contact with 'em all, and we got together. We'd have had to turn back otherwise, when we saw the size of this base."
Space pinged and twitched around them with the energies of weapons, lancing and hammering, from swarming ships down at the world below, and from that world back out at the attacking fleets. You could feel the energies through armor, you could feel them through anything.
Pat asked: "What are the Carmpan doing now?"
"I get the feeling that they're making an intense effort to get the attacking human fleets to lay off this particular berserker."
She shuddered. Maybe she hadn't expected that.
There was a greater twitch in space, a dart and flash somewhere nearby. There were no screens in this prison room from which to watch the battle, but Lars had sensed something like that dart and flash before. Not through his own eyes. "Qwib-qwib," he murmured.
"What's qwib-qwib?"
"Another story that I'll tell you sometime." Lars wondered if the last qwib-qwib in the universe had got its factory up and running somewhere before going kamikaze. He supposed it had.
The plucking and thrumming of space became gradually less noticeable. Gage, too damaged to do much fighting, was fleeing the battle as best he could. Gradually Lars began to believe that he, that all of them, might survive.
Someone in the jammed compartment started up a song.