Berserker Throne (23 page)

The Prince said: "I think perhaps Commander Blenheim can yet be made to see the justice of my cause."

"That will be excellent, sir. Excellent."

"I am glad to be able to offer you—a certain hope."

"And sir, of course . . ." Lescar let his eyes move sideways, in what might have been the direction of the last archaeological site.

"I am going to take care of that too. Right now. It all fits in. Don't worry." And the Prince seized his servant's hand and shook it. That also had happened only two or three times in the past, at moments of great crisis. The Prince went out. A moment later Lescar heard the faint sound of a flyer departing the garage.

Left alone, the little man hastened to put through the two calls as he had been ordered.

The first was to the former Princess—she had had to relinquish the title on separation—Beatrix, in her lodgings at one of the City's more luxurious tourist facilities. Beatrix, without asking questions, without appearing to be particularly surprised, agreed to come to Harivarman's house at once. Lescar said nothing to the Princess about who else he was supposed to summon.

Next Lescar called the City apartment of Gabrielle Chou, where the answering robot said that its mistress was not in, and insisted that there was absolutely no way that she could be reached at present.

"I repeat, this is an emergency."

"I am sorry, sir, but—"

"Then I must leave a message. Tell her," said Lescar, "that it is vitally important to—to her own future welfare, that she come to Prince Harivarman's lodgings as soon as she can."

He broke off, wondering and worrying. He had never really liked Miss Gabrielle. But he meant her no harm, and of course he had done his best. Her own future welfare. That was what his master had told him: provide whatever reason would get them there.

* * *

It took the Prince only minutes in his swift flyer to reach the room in which the berserker controller unit awaited him. There were moments on the way in which he imagined himself finding it gone; but it seemed that he had already had enough bad luck for one day. The thing was there, just as he had left it.

It took him only a few minutes more, standing in the doorway of that remote room, with his suit's lights shining on the metallic and deadly beauty across from him, to issue the machine his orders. He discovered that, as in his old days of military planning, when the moment came to issue orders the details lay ready in his mind. Some part of him must have known that he was going to do this, must have been at work on the details already, perhaps for days.

"Orders acknowledged," the controller said. The tones of its voice sounded like, and no doubt were, the exact same tones that it had used with those words before.

Trembling a little, the Prince got out of the way of his new slave as soon as it began to move again on its six legs. As far as he could tell from watching these first ordered movements, the great belly wound that his experimenting had inflicted on it did not inconvenience it at all, no more than the old wound whose trauma had now evidently been somehow bypassed. He retreated farther as it came past him, through the doorway into the corridor. This doorway was wide enough for it to get through without knocking more bits out of the walls. He drifted near it as it hovered in the corridor, and he tried without success to pick up its radio signals as it called in its extra bodies from the deep.

But the signals certainly were sent. Only seconds had passed before the Prince saw the forty-seven fighting units come swarming in wraith-like silence around the corner of the nearby corridor intersection. Almost instantly they had roused themselves from the inanimacy of centuries. They were coming toward Harivarman now, and toward the controller that had summoned them.

In the weak gravity the android types among them moved almost like suited expert humans, shoving themselves in graceful trajectories from corridor wall to corridor wall. The miniature flyers hovered on the invisible forces of their drives. The self-propelled guns, the crushers and the gammalasers escorted one another in loose formations calculated to allow for mutual support.

Still the Prince, using his comparatively simple suit radio, could manage to detect nothing of the complex communications traffic that must be passing between them and the controller.

He was reassured when all but one of the silent assembly shambled to a harmless halt some meters away from him. That one, a tall, three-legged thing, came to drift harmlessly close beside him, in evident obedience to one section of his detailed orders. There was a certain voice recording that he wanted to make now, a recording that this particular machine would be assigned to carry on a certain mission.

It was all working, or it was going to work. A great feeling of triumph arose in Harivarman. His nagging feeling of something not quite right, something faulty in his perception of events, had been almost swept away.

Almost, but not entirely.

After the recording had been completed to his satisfaction, he placed himself directly in front of the controller once more. The vague feeling nagged him still. He supposed it was unnecessary guilt. "My orders are understood? And they will be obeyed, in every particular?"

"Orders understood. And will be obeyed." It had already told him so, but it would patiently tell him again and again, however often it was ordered. Impatience was no part of its programming. He was truly in control, as far as he could tell. Again the man felt reassured.

Harivarman reentered his flyer, and gave the final signal. This command too was promptly relayed and obeyed. He let the wave of his assault troops get under way ahead of him. First he followed the limping controller in its progress toward the City, while the other machines swept on ahead and were soon out of sight. Just to keep up with the controller he had to drive the flyer faster than he had expected. He had almost forgotten how swiftly and effectively berserkers of any type could move, what good machines, considered purely as machines, they were.

Suddenly the Prince found himself talking aloud. "Now if only the Templars don't fight . . ." Of course there never had been any Templars who would not fight. But perhaps this time, if everything went as he had planned, this time they might see, they might be convinced, that they had no chance.

Impatient, exultant, and fearful all at the same time, Harivarman accelerated his flyer's progress, passing the controller, leaving it behind. The thought crossed his mind that he should perhaps have made more recordings, and sent one or two machines ahead, warning the Templars to surrender. But he could remember that a day ago, two days ago perhaps, he had already considered that plan and rejected it. To have warned the Templars would only have made combat and killing certain.

The Prince set his radio to scanning the communications bands again, this time trying to pick up the first human reactions broadcast from the City ahead. So far there were none, none that he could receive here anyway. Damn the Fortress and its ancient peculiarities . . . .

So far he had passed no traffic coming out of the City. That was not necessarily significant. Traffic here in these remote ways was never heavy, and frequently it was nonexistent.

At last Harivarman's flyer emerged through a forcefield gate at the end of the ship passage, and came up into atmosphere. These inner gates had no real automated defenses, and he thought that the berserker machines had probably been able to come through them without fuss or difficulty.

Above him now there shone the familiar fiery sun-point of the Radiant, centered within the great interior curve of distant surface that here answered for a sky.

The first change from normality that Harivarman noticed was smoke, over on the other side of the Fortress's vast central space. Smoke mottled the comparatively thin, concave layer of the atmosphere there, spreading grayly across the distant curve of surface. And mixed in with the film of smoke, pocking it and disappearing, there were detonating flashes, silent at this distance.

Harivarman swore, wearily. It had perhaps been inevitable that not all the Templars could be caught completely off guard; nor even, perhaps, had all of the dragoons been taken unawares.

The second change was much closer. He passed a wrecked flyer, a fairly sizable machine, that lay against one of the roadway's sloping edges, crushed and flattened there as if a human being had hurled a berry or a nut against a wall. There were no outward signs of the flyer's occupants, living or dead. He did not stop to look for them.

The Prince drove his flyer on quickly, past the silent wreck to which, he noted, no emergency vehicles had yet responded. He kept his vehicle under manual control, to be able to react intelligently to any sudden emergency, relying on his reflexes to slide it safely through tight corners. He had to get over to the other side of the inner surface, where the fighting seemed to be.

Only now did the Prince come in full view of the City, which occupied only a relatively small part of the rounded and self-mapping world that was the inner habitable surface of the Fortress. Now there was suddenly plenty of radio traffic for Harivarman to listen to, and now he beheld ahead of him a nightmare scene. More smoke, more detonations—he could hear the sounds now, delayed by distance—the sky-tracks of berserkers and their projectiles twisting and dodging through the light counter-fire that was still going up from a site near the Templar base.

Harivarman accelerated again, turning down a new street. He had always seen vehicular traffic here, but there was none now.

Heading for his house, fearful now of what he was going to find there, he passed several damaged houses, pocked with flying fragments, debris of some kind hailing from above. Now he saw smoldering parts scattered in the street, fragments of what looked to Harivarman like the remains of a wrecked berserker. The fighting had not been totally one-sided, then, surprise or not.

Looking into his rearview screen, he saw the controller pacing after him, much faster than any human could have run, keeping his speeding flyer in sight. He had the flyer still in off ground mode, wheels retracted, for greater speed and maneuverability, but he was keeping within a meter of the road surface, not wanting to draw fire from either side.

Now he slowed just enough to let the controller catch up with him. Pulling beside it, Harivarman shouted questions and orders at it, demanded a report.

It focused lenses on him as it paced tirelessly beside his speeding vehicle. In the same half-human-sounding tones that it had used before, it reported that his orders had been obeyed, were still being obeyed, that its units were killing only when they met resistance. It reminded him that he had authorized them to do that.

He glared at the machine, mumbled something, and drove on rapidly. He had to get to his house. Each scene of violence encountered on the way made him more fearful of what he was going to find when he arrived there.

A minute later he was passing within fairly easy sight of the docks. He could see quite plainly that all of the ships in dock had been smashed, immobilized. One of them was still exploding, one flare and shock after another, and something in it burning. Smoke went up to foul the air, but the automated damage control devices at dockside had been allowed to operate, and the air was being cleaned, the destruction so far contained.

Rage returned to Harivarman, as sick and bitter as before, but this time never to be satisfied. What was done, was done. Even if it had been against his orders, though how that would be possible . . . perhaps not against his orders, after all. Perhaps the docks, the ships, had been a center of resistance. He had given the berserkers authorization to kill, to shoot back when necessary to achieve their objective. He had said to the controller that they could crush human resistance whenever and wherever it threatened to hold them up.

He had never expected that there would be resistance on this scale.

But it was all on their own heads, on the heads of those who would have gone calmly on, satisfied to do their duty, watching as he and Lescar and Bea and others were taken away to pre-judicial murder.

Harivarman's flyer passed the wreckage of still more human-built machines. There was the first human casualty he had seen clearly, a Templar body lying in the street. There had been more fighting then, more killing than he had planned for. Well, so be it. He had hoped for a greater surprise, for Templars taken totally unaware, made prisoners, rendered ineffective without bloodshed. He glanced back toward the docks. Above all he had hoped for the berserkers to be able to capture an intact ship for him, one in which he would be able to get away. He should have known that no attack would be likely to achieve such a measure of surprise. Not here, and not against Templars.

Everywhere the Prince looked now, his determination, and what was left of his self-possession, received another shock. He simply hadn't expected that there'd be this much physical destruction. But the whole City was certainly not in ruins; there had been no wholesale massacre, such as uncontrolled berserkers would surely have accomplished with the advantage of surprise. At least the Prince could be sure now, with considerable relief, that the entire civilian section of the Fortress, with the exception of the civilian area immediately around the docks, appeared to have been spared any general attack. On the whole, the berserkers appeared to have carried out the detailed, complicated orders from their new human master at least as well as could have been expected.

He had had no choice. He had had no choice.
He had had no choice.

He had pulled ahead of the controller again, and now when he stopped his vehicle to look around, it caught up with him once more. As it did so he commanded it to stay near him, ready to receive his further orders. But at the moment he could think of no more to give it. When he drove on again, it maintained its position near his flyer, pacing swiftly on its six giant legs, still apparently untroubled by the severed cables and other loose ends that trailed from his dissection of its belly.