Berserker Throne (18 page)

The rational argument with which he tried to convince himself went like this: No human authority would allow the agent of such a discovery, an achievement of such great and glorious consequence for all life in the Galaxy, to be arrested for some crime committed in a place far from where he was, to be taken away and quietly murdered. But Harivarman had been involved in politics too long to allow mere rational argument to determine his decisions. Maybe the widely beloved Empress had come to believe that she could never be murdered either.

And there was still another reason why Harivarman held stubbornly to his secret. In his mind faint nagging doubts about the truth of his discovery persisted. Those doubts in themselves might have been enough to hold him back from making an announcement. Instinct whispered to him that something was not right, something about what he thought he had discovered . . . maybe it was only because the revelation seemed too perfectly well-timed, coming as it had.

But there it was. The interstellar drive was real and right enough. Not only the control circuits but the whole drive unit was functional, or ought to be, as far as Harivarman's rough tests could tell.

If the Prince was not going to be able to depend on the great value of his discovery to save his life, then escape, using the berserker's drive, appeared to be as much of a necessity as ever. For his third work session on the berserker the Prince brought Lescar out to the job site with him. He told Lescar very little more than he had told him at the start, and showed him only the room in which the innocent-looking drive unit now reposed, and got him started working on it. Lescar's first assigned task was to dissect the control system of the drive further, in preparation for its installation in a different kind of vehicle.

As Harivarman had expected, Lescar's only open reaction to this assignment was to signify his understanding of it and immediately take up a probe and get to work. The servant's willingness to take on any task the Prince assigned him was understood by both.

But the Prince was frowning, even as his assistant took his tools energetically in hand. To Harivarman himself, the necessity of explaining some of the technical details of the escape project to a helper, putting the whole idea into plain words, had been enough to make it begin to seem impossible.

And the more fiercely Harivarman tried now to reconvince himself, the more unlikely the whole scheme of using the drive unit began to appear in his thoughts. It was an
interstellar drive
they were concerned with here, and not the motor of a groundcar. It was even a drive of a largely unfamiliar type.

For a few moments the Prince hovered on the brink of changing his mind suddenly, of telling Lescar to abandon the project and go back to the house and forget what he had seen. But the Prince did not do so. Instinct forbade that too. The trouble was, thought Harivarman, that they had no choice. The more time he had in which to consider the political situation, the more firmly he became convinced that now, with the Empress gone, his enemies were soon going to attempt to finish him off, one way or another.

A day of intensive effort passed, and then another, with the two men working busily—most of the time not really side by side, but just out of each other's sight. Lescar's job in its present stage could rarely benefit from two pairs of hands, and the Prince was still keeping his own work secret even from Lescar. Harivarman labored in the adjoining room, now tracing the paths of control signals through the body and the main brain of the berserker, seeking additional memory banks, looking for more confirmation of his find. The indications that he found were intriguing, but still somewhat ambiguous. A large part of the thing's brain was evidently inaccessible, inside an inner seal of armor impervious to any of the tools he had on hand. In there, if anywhere, he thought, would also be a destructor device, a booby-trap.

The Prince had contrived to keep the berserker covered most of the time with a sheet of opaque plastic, material he sometimes used as a background or light-reflector when making photographs. Lescar, on the couple of occasions when he happened to glance into the room where the Prince was working, saw nothing that startled him particularly. Harivarman had implied that he was trying to get the astrogation system of a Dardanian lifeboat working.

Throughout these days of hard work the Prince actually grew increasingly skeptical regarding his world-shaking discovery. Or perhaps he was not so much skeptical of the discovery itself as of its immediate value to him. To announce a revelation of such magnitude now—especially if it were quickly challenged, as any such claim would be—would lay him open to charges of making up wild lies in an effort to save himself. And there was no way his claim could be quickly proven.

But, if he had not discovered what he thought he had—then what had he found?

He badly needed to talk to someone, and he could not talk to anyone. Not yet. Not even to Lescar.

And doubt still whispered to him that
something
was not right. A kernel of unease still nagged at him. Perhaps it was only because he had to bear his knowledge all alone.

Harivarman found himself continually being struck by the fact that his discovered control code, if such it truly was, appeared to be so easy to use. There was even a fairly wide choice of frequency and modulation of the signal. The signal itself, suitably compressed, could be transmitted in a fraction of a second, complex though the code-sequence was and virtually impossible to arrive at by accident or through trial and error.

Of course, ease of use, if you thought about it, was really logical enough. If you had a control code for berserkers at all, you'd certainly want it to be easily and quickly usable.

All very logical, but yet something about it nagged.

By the second day after Lescar had been added to the work force, something like a routine had been established, and the two men put in several hours of effort without anything out of the way happening. By this time Harivarman was ready for a break, and he had left his own job for the moment, as he did periodically, to confer with Lescar. The Prince was standing, almost drifting, in the room where his assistant labored, though he had not joined Lescar inside the inflated shelter. With the transparent wall of the shelter between them, the two men were discussing, in the private code of gestures they had worked out, the length of time a flyer might have to be immobilized to fit it for escape.

Suddenly through the stone around them there came a faint vibration, frightening because it was unexpected and at first inexplicable. Harivarman could feel it through the one hand with which he was gripping the wall, holding himself in position.

Simultaneously Harivarman observed an odd change, as of a moving shadow, in the light that shone through the imperfectly closed doorway from the next room. That shadow would move in his nightmares for the remainder of his life.

In the next moment, before Harivarman could speak or move, the connecting door between the rooms burst fully open. That intrusion was accompanied in vacuum-silence by some destruction of the adjacent wall, as a large object that was too wide for the doorway came through it anyway on six long mechanical legs, stone bursting and erupting around it. The berserker's half-gutted belly still hung open, a cable or two trailing from the site of Harivarman's surgery. The legs were all unfolded now and at least four of them working, performing at least well enough to propel the huge berserker at the speed of a walking man.

If Lescar cried out, the sound was not broadcast on radio and Harivarman did not hear it. Harivarman did not spare a moment to look at his helper, but instead took one look at what was coming through the doorway and sprang for the doorway leading out to the corridor. It was an instinctive effort to reach . . . no, not the flyer. Nothing in the flyer would be useful to him now. It was a prisoners' vehicle, weaponless.

Even as the Prince sprang to escape, he saw from the corner of his eye how the thing turned after him; it might still be powerful enough to brush stone walls aside, but this first real sight of it in unimpeded motion suggested that it was crippled, and terribly slow for a berserker. Now Lescar in his shelter might be given time to get his helmet on, before the plastic was ripped away from around him.

The Prince scrambled through the door and leaped from its outer sill. He flew across the corridor, caromed off the far wall, and in another practiced low-g dive spun back again directly for the doorway of the berserker's original room. He had left his recording of the supposed control signal in there.

Meanwhile the berserker, perhaps only belatedly recognizing the presence of another life-unit, had turned back after Lescar. Reaching out one of its limbs it tore the shelter down, the ruptured plastic exploding in a puff of briefly visible atmospheric fog. Harivarman, reentering the room at top speed, holding what he hoped was a control device in hand, was just in time to catch the faint wavefront of that puffy blast, and to see that Lescar had indeed managed to somehow close up his helmet.

In both hands the Prince raised like a gun the small recorder-transmitter that held what he had deduced was the control code. He transmitted the signal.

The machine, just on the point of seizing Lescar, halted. It had actually caught him by one arm before the signal reached it, but the movement of the berserker's arm that would have crushed the man if it had been followed through was instead aborted. The slowed effort of the metal arm only launched Lescar gently into a harmless hurtling flight, a flight that ended when his master caught him in midspace as he went by.

That last aborted movement of the berserker had left its own body spinning gently. It brought itself to a neat and almost gentle halt, a giant spider hanging against the big room's opposite wall. It clung there, obviously still in control of itself, no doubt still alert, but making no further demonstration of hostility.

The Prince clutched his servant in his powerful arms, damping the desperate struggles that the smaller man was making in his blind panic. Eventually, talking on radio, wrestling, soothing, Harivarman got Lescar under control, held back from crazy flight.

According to Harivarman's elementary understanding of how the code should work, the berserker might now be susceptible to spoken orders transmitted on the same frequency as the first disabling code had been.

Lescar had frozen in terror and shock. Still gripping him cautiously with one hand, the Prince managed to turn on his own helmet microphone to that frequency. Then, pointing with his free arm at the machine, Harivarman said: "Remain there. Do not move until I order you to move." It scarcely occurred to him as a possibility that the machine might not be able to understand his speech. His language was, he knew, not greatly changed from one of the human tongues that had been in common use on a number of worlds in the days of Dardanian greatness; berserkers, like humans, made an effort to learn the languages of the enemy.

The machine remained.

The Prince still held on to Lescar, who was still in pitiable shape though not seriously injured physically. The man was cowering, and his face seen through the helmet glass looked stunned; Harivarman could feel the tremors in the other's body even through their two suits and his own gloves. "You're safe now, Lescar. It's not going to move."

Harivarman was not yet trembling himself. He thought that he might, later, when he could afford the luxury. Now, dragging his servant with him, not taking his eyes from the inert berserker, Harivarman backed from the room out into the corridor. Lescar did not resist, or try to help.

His master had him inside the flyer, both their helmets off in breathable air, before the servant spoke. "Your Honor, I will go and get weapons. Somehow. Then we must destroy it."

"Later, my old friend. Later. For now, this moment, do nothing. Just wait here and rest. Will you promise me?"

It took the Prince a few more minutes of talking, persuading, calming, before he was sure that Lescar was going to follow orders strictly.

Then Harivarman resealed his own helmet, and went back to face the thing that he had found, and the thing that he had done.

In the process of soothing and coaxing Lescar out of his near-catatonic state the Prince had gained time himself to recover from the ghastly initial shock. He saw Lescar settled safely into the flyer. Then, feeling himself more intensely alive than he had felt for years, he returned to the room where he had left the berserker, to again confront the deadly thing that he had evidently been able to bring under his control.

Looking through the doorway from the corridor, he saw that the machine was exactly where he had left it a few minutes earlier, clinging like a spider against the opposite wall of the big room.

The Prince stood in the doorway. He keyed in his suit radio's transmitter on absolute minimum power, carefully choosing the same frequency at which he had sent the immobilizing code. It was not a frequency in common use within the Fortress, and with the low power he was using it was unlikely that Lescar in the flyer, or any other living listener, was going to pick up this transmission.

Speaking softly, again raising one arm to point at the machine, he demanded of it: "Do you understand me?"

The answer in his helmet was low, but clearly, slowly spoken. "I do." The tones of that voice were strange, fragmented and uneven. The Prince had heard the like often enough in his years of warfare. That voice had been put together as the berserkers in the old days had fashioned human voices for themselves, electronically melding words and syllables together from the recorded speech, the preserved emotions, of some of their multitudes of human prisoners.

Harivarman felt a faint shudder go through him. It was as if something in the space around him had sucked heat out of his suit. He said: "Use the minimum effective power in your transmissions, please." Then, marveling at that last word he had just used, he added: "That is an order."

"Order acknowledged," the berserker answered. Then it paused for two seconds before it asked him bluntly: "Are you goodlife?"