Berserker Throne (14 page)

Now one of the junior officers who had been hovering about took the time to explain to Chen that until further notice he was going to be confined to quarters.

"Does that mean I'm under arrest?"

"Confined to quarters."

"I know, but does that mean—?"

It was a noncom who answered Chen this time; the officers, including the one who had spoken, had all disappeared even as Chen was trying to question them. A sergeant said, "You haven't been formally charged with anything. The ship's crew who brought you in can't charge you, because all they know is hearsay, what they heard about you after they left Salutai."

"But when will I get out?" He called that question hopelessly after the sergeant's departing back.

"I don't know." By now almost everyone was gone; the only one left to answer Chen was a young uniformed woman standing in his room's doorway, evidently his sole remaining guard. The tone of her reply was doubtful, as if she were ready to admit her lack of experience in things like this, or perhaps a lack of experience of things in general. She was rather small, with a proud figure, and evidently an ancestry of dark races. Her nametag proclaimed her Cadet Olga Khazar.

The attitude of Cadet Olga Khazar, poised as she was in the doorway, strongly suggested that she was about to go out and close the door behind her.

Chen sat up straight in the chair where he had been deposited. He asked, as if the answer were not already obvious: "And now you're going to lock me in?" And at the same time he thought it strange that they had left one low-ranking guard here, and the door not yet even locked.

She replied almost timidly: "Yeah, that's orders. You're not going to kill yourself, are you? We'll have to watch you every moment if you're suicidal."

"Kill myself!" Then Chen was speechless for a moment, unable to imagine any words powerful enough to comment suitably on that idea. "If I'd wanted to die, believe me, I wouldn't have had to come all this distance to arrange it."

Now Chen could see a shifting of shadows just outside his door, and hear that a small gliding vehicle of some kind was rolling to a stop just behind Cadet Khazar, who evidently had not been left as much alone on the job as had first appeared. The cadet turned round to look at the arrival, and a moment later Chen saw her stand at attention and salute.

A moment after that, Commander Blenheim stuck her blond head into Chen's room. He got up from his chair and tried to stand at attention. She asked him: "Feeling better?"

"Yes ma'am, thank you. Look, Commander, I didn't kill anyone—least of all the Empress. What makes anyone think I did?"

The officer shook her head with what might have been sympathy, moderated with a large mixture of wariness. "Recruit, I really can't tell at this distance what you did or did not do on Salutai. All I know for sure is that the authorities there appear to want to question you about the crime. Someone on Salutai evidently thinks you did it. So you are confined to quarters until we can find out more. You have not been formally charged with anything as yet."

Chen murmured: "Or someone there wants everyone else to think that the authorities want me."

"That I suppose is a possibility." The commander nodded thoughtfully. "Who would want that?"

"I don't know, ma'am. I don't know who or why." But then in what felt like a flash of insight he perceived the shadow of an answer, or thought he did. "It's about the Prince, isn't it? Some of his enemies, I guess, will stop at nothing."

If the commander had any opinions on the Prince, or on political matters, she was keeping them to herself. Poker-faced, she eyed Chen silently, as if hoping he would say more.

Chen didn't know if what little he had said so far had helped his cause or damaged it.

He looked around the little room. Encouraged by something in the way she looked at him, he asked: "Ma'am, please, don't I get out of here for anything?"

"We'll have to arrange some kind of exercise period, since you may be in here for many days . . . and there are certain safety procedures in which training is mandatory for all Templar people on the Radiant. We'll have to arrange for you to have that as well. Otherwise, sorry, I think not. For now."

There was a robotic-sounding radio voice outside the room. It sounded as if it might be coming from the commander's vehicle, out of Chen's range of vision, and she turned away, Cadet Khazar throwing another salute unnoticed after her.

A moment later Chen could hear the older woman's voice asking: "Another ship?" Then there was some kind of radio reply, too low for him to make out. A moment after that, his room's door shut and closed him in. He got a final look, almost of sympathy, from Cadet Khazar before he heard the less subtle finality of the lock.

Before he climbed back into his flyer to return to the City, Prince Harivarman unpacked some of the exploration gear that he had loaded aboard the craft only minutes ago, and stowed it away in one of the empty rooms nearby. The chamber he chose for this purpose was one of the innocent rooms off the same corridor as the room in which he had just made his great discovery.

The Prince created this cache of tools and emergency equipment with no fully reasoned plan in mind, only a half-formed idea that once he returned to the City he might find himself in need of a good reason or excuse for coming back out here, and retrieval of the cached equipment would provide one. Exactly why he thought he might soon have to begin accounting for his movements he could not have said. And of course he could demonstrate to any observer of his return trip that he was coming back
here
, to this innocent room, not
that
one down the corridor . . . it was, he thought, like a positional move in chess, made out of an educated instinct, though no immediate tactical advantage could be discerned.

The job of creating his innocent cache was quickly done. Then, with his mind in a bleak turmoil, Prince Harivarman went to look once more into the room where he had discovered
it.

There against the far wall the berserker crouched. Or at least the long, bent insect-legs of metal made it look like it was crouching. It had not moved—no, of course it had not moved. The uppermost bulge atop the metal shape, what would have been the thing's head if it had had a head, was tilted a little sideways, and from the center of this head the roundness of a lens faced Harivarman. It was as if the berserker were regarding its visitor quizzically.

Harivarman looked a moment longer, then closed the door on it again. Quickly returning to his flyer, he boarded it and immediately headed back toward the City.

He was an imaginative man, at least at certain moments, and he thought he could feel the stare of that dead lens even now, boring into his back.

He drove the flyer slowly, cruising under manual control, as if he were observing the walls of these passages closely on the way, reading more inscriptions and locating artifact-sites. But in fact the Prince's thoughts, for the second time in an hour, had been jolted into an entirely new frame of reference.

Without consciously planning it, he had started his trip back to the City along a different route than usual. He was heading not for the house where he and Lescar lived, but directly toward the Templar base, where he was going to report his discovery immediately.

It was an automatic reaction. Reporting a berserker machine of any kind was not only a requirement under any human law; it was, one knew without having to think about it, the only thing a decent citizen of the Galaxy could ever do—like reporting an unexploded bomb if one should ever happen to come upon one somewhere.

Still, he was proceeding slowly. Something told him that he had to think.

From what the Prince had seen of this particular berserker unit in his two hasty glimpses of it, it did not appear to have been badly smashed up in the old fighting. Doubtless it had come to the Radiant as part of an assault wave in the last berserker attack here hundreds of years ago. It must have been damaged in the fighting then, for it was certainly inert. Quite possibly at least a part of its brain had been destroyed. But equally obvious was the fact that much of the unit was still intact. Harivarman, calling up its remembered (never to be forgotten!) image, decided now that it must be some type of small but advanced lander, probably capable of functioning as a small independent starship, designed as part of a team to make a sneak attack on the Fortress . . . .

Harivarman suddenly slowed his flyer. He turned out of the small ship channel he had been following, and down a branching passage. He had come too close to the City too quickly; he needed more time to think before he got there.

His thoughts were now focused on the shape of the berserker's lower hull. Looking at that shape in his mind's eye, he was increasingly sure that it must possess an interstellar drive. In such a comparatively small package the drive would have to be an elementary affair, not much different from that of a lifeboat carried on a large human vessel.

Small or not, for all Prince Harivarman knew, the berserker's interstellar drive might still be functional—
and, if so, it might offer a means of escape.

With some finite amount of effort—impossible to say just yet how much work might be required—he and Lescar might be able to gain possession of a vehicle that could, in a pinch, get them away from the Fortress. If not all the way to a friendly planet, then at least to some shipping lane where they could broadcast a distress signal upon re-entering normal space, and have a good chance of being picked up by a friendly ship.

At best, such an escape would be neither safe nor easy. It would be very dangerous. Just to begin with, there was the astrogation system, or rather the probable lack of one, to be considered.

And at worst such an escape plan would turn out to be suicidal madness. And preparation for it would mean a lot of work, an intense effort. And to have even a minimal chance of success, Harivarman would have to involve Lescar in the project. And now there might no longer be enough time.

Now, if the Empress was truly dead, Prime Minister Roquelaure, or one of the Prince's other enemies, would soon be sending killers after him. The more Harivarman thought about it the more certain he was of that. His would-be executioners might appear in uniform or out, they might be armed with warrants or only weapons, but they were almost certainly already on their way. He doubted that he had very many days left.

If there was a plan now that offered him any chance at all of getting away from the Radiant, he could hardly afford to be particular about its details and risks.

It had been the Empress who sent him into exile, but it had been no part of her plan to have Prince Harivarman die. He still thought that, had she lived, there was an excellent chance that sooner or later she would have called him back. Harivarman's mere existence served as a check and balance to other factions in the great game that the Empress knew how to play so well, the perpetual contest of intrigue and politics. But there were other powerful players in the game, most notably the prime minister, whose goals and ambitions were immoderate. If certain of those players came into power now, or even, as they were sure to do, became more willing to use the power they already had, then Harivarman in exile, isolated, would be virtually helpless against them. He still represented a potentially great danger to them, as long as he remained alive.

With the news of the Empress's death, the Prince for the first time since his arrival at the Fortress had known an urgent craving for escape. He had at first suppressed the feeling subconsciously, he supposed, because there seemed no possibility of acting on it. But now, suddenly . . . there might be.

There just might.

The flyer cruised slowly on toward the City, with the lone man aboard it lost in thought.

Before he decided on anything so drastic as using the berserker hardware in an escape, he would have to gather all the news he could about the reported assassination of the Empress. He would have to make absolutely sure, to begin with, that it had really happened, that the story was more than some madly tangled rumor. The commander would know the truth of that, if anyone on the Radiant did. Or she might at least have more evidence to judge it by. Perhaps she would be willing to share her knowledge with Harivarman openly.

He also had to try to obtain the most recent information possible on the general political and military situation in the Eight Worlds, and on what the Templars were thinking now. In particular he must learn how likely Commander Blenheim would be to turn her eminent prisoner over to his enemies if they came now to the Fortress to present her with what they said were valid extradition documents. He suspected she would have a hard time refusing them.

Depending on how long it took to locate the Superior General and apprise him of the situation, it might be weeks or even months before any decision made by that official could be expected to arrive at the Radiant by courier . . . or the SG, Commander in Chief of all Templars, might want to come here in person before deciding. He might even want to convene a synod or consistory of senior Templar officers. That was a rare event, and Harivarman could not recall offhand its proper title.

Deep in thought, the Prince moved his fingers lightly on the flyer's controls, altering his first choice of destination with as little consciousness of deliberate planning as he had experienced in making it. Avoiding the Templar base by a wide margin, he instead entered the City from his usual direction. Once surrounded by the usual City traffic, he shifted his vehicle into its groundcar mode, and proceeded straight to his garage.

Lescar's vehicle was in ahead of him, already occupying its customary spot. From the garage the Prince walked directly into his connecting private quarters, consisting of about eight rooms. The apartment was not particularly luxurious, but he had never cared much for luxury, and had been satisfied that the place was large enough for some elaborate entertaining. As things had turned out, he had very seldom had any occasion for that.