The inventor had been rendered nervous by his talk with Cheng, and the effect was not entirely produced by the vast sum of money he had just been given, in the form of a guaranteed letter of credit, valid at practically any financial institution in the Galaxy. Nor was it entirely due to the impending destruction of his ship.
Remembering the inventor's nervous reaction in the Trophy Room, Harry was curious to know if the man had ever actually faced a berserker.
Before the Lady Masaharu took Gianopolous with her aboard the Secret Weapon, he had been having a confrontation with a series of guards. He kept insisting: "I want to leave here. Now."
The last of Cheng's human employees to hear this complaint simply turned and walked away, leaving only a cheerful robot to deal with the inventor.
The robot said, brightly: "Yes sir. I understand that you wish to leave. But no ship at this station is currently boarding passengers or visitors."
When Gianopolous persisted, Winston Cheng's robot pointed out that contracts had been signed, the sale was finalized. "Sir, you are required to keep yourself immediately available as a consultant for a period of ten standard days. That is clearly specified in the fourth article. Were you to separate yourself from the other members of the support group, the whole contract could be considered void, and your advance refundable."
"There was no such provision in the document as I read it!"
"Then, sir, I would suggest it is possible you did not read it thoroughly enough."
A copy of the document was readily available. The robot, suddenly deforming itself until it lost what faint resemblance to a human body it had possessed, produced a printout from its belly.
Gianopolous threw the paper on the deck without looking at it, knowing well enough what it would say.
He stewed in silence for a few moments, then burst out: "I tell you I want passage on some other ship. It seems that you have couriers coming and going here almost continuously. This contract business can be settled later, in civil court."
The agent dealing with him was imperturbably sympathetic. "I'm very sorry, sir. Passenger space is currently unavailable except on the evacuation courier. No other ships are scheduled to arrive."
"That is a barefaced lie!"
"No sir. This base is being abandoned, and—"
"This amounts to kidnapping!"
"Not at all, sir. You are perfectly free. No one is trying to prevent your leaving."
"Yes, I see. Quite so. What do you expect me to do, walk? Flap my arms and fly?"
"I regret, sir, that figures of speech as employed by humans are not always clear to me. Perhaps if you rephrased your argument."
Of course there was no point in Gianopolous trying to send out a message appealing for help—the only means of transmitting it in any meaningful way would be to put it on the evacuation courier, and in the natural order of things, days must pass before it was delivered anywhere.
In Harry's presence he grated: "There is not a single human being in the Galaxy who would inconvenience himself to save my life."
Harry considered it. "I don't suppose I would. But I've known people who make a habit of that kind of thing."
A minute later, word came from the tycoon, still caught up in eleventh-hour preparations, that he wanted Gianopolous to arrange some means by which the small ship could carry more hardware and perhaps more people on its all-important mission.
It had to be able to carry, with a reasonable degree of security in transit, an attack squad of perhaps half a dozen breathing humans in armored combat suits, their weapons, and an approximately equal number of their toughest, quickest robots. Two medirobots had also been installed, in accordance with the idea that prisoners were going to be found, and might be in need of repairs when rescued.
Cheng had talked to Harry since Harry's return to base, had somehow found time to read Harry's hastily written report, and then had taken a brief personal look at the Secret Weapon.
Harry noted with a feeling of vague satisfaction that everyone had now adopted his name for the ship. Well, almost everyone—he had yet to hear it pass the lips of the inventor.
While the inventor loaded his faithful Perdix with tools and supplies, and led his robot off to help him make final changes aboard the Secret Weapon, Cheng and the Lady Masaharu, in consultation with their combat veterans, were making final decisions on the assault plan. The scheme emerging from this process called for the initial approach to the berserker base to be made only by Gianopolous's ship. The Secret Weapon would not try to avoid detection, but approach openly in the character of a visiting berserker, relying on cleverly faked signals to prevent identification as an enemy.
The remainder of the attacking force consisted of Winston Cheng's two armed yachts. The original plan had called for assembling a somewhat larger squadron, but it had been decided that to add a few more ships would unacceptably increase the chance of the force being detected as it approached the berserker base; and there was no possibility of being able to scrape together a task force on the Space Force level.
Cheng was already spending almost all his time aboard the Ship of Dreams, accompanied by Satranji, who occupied the pilot's seat. Neither of the yachts were going to carry boarding machines or an attack squad of humans. The larger of the two, Ship of Dreams, the one Satranji would be driving, was in effect the flagship of Winston Cheng's fleet.
The plan as it had been finalized called for both yachts to follow the Secret Weapon sunward. When the fake berserker reached a certain calculated distance from its target, perhaps a hundred kilometers, they would remain in reserve, trying their best to keep out of range of detection by the defensive system that the berserker base was sure to have. They would depend on a secret signal from the Secret Weapon to enable them to maintain the desired distance.
At the very moment when the assault ship landed on the berserker base, or more likely crash-landed, disgorging armored humans and fighting hardware, both yachts would dart into action, closing with the enemy at the best speed they could manage. Depending on the needs of the moment, they would either support the attack with the heaviest weapons they had, create a diversion if that seemed to be called for, or, in the most favorable scenario imaginable, stand by to lend cover and support in the Secret Weapon's fighting retreat with rescued prisoners aboard.
Professor Gianopolous reported back, saying he had done what little he could in the time available, and lacking certain specialized equipment of his own workshop, to increase his ship's carrying capacity. He pointed out the difference, how he had created enough new space to allow for carrying all the desired machines plus a little extra ammo. Actually his inspired tinkering was quite impressive.
But the inventor was unhappy, despite the monumental letter of credit in his pocket. Reverting to pessimism, he complained to Harry that things were working out much as he, Gianopolous had suspected they would. Winston Cheng and his lieutenants were much more interested in his peculiar ship, ready-made as if for their purpose, than they were in his scientific achievements or his theories. In fact, now that they had his ship with all its systems working, the raiders, or most of them, had no use for his ideas or advice. On the other hand, they were, without admitting the fact, making it impossible for him to leave the base.
Harry, beginning to feel curiously detached, was willing to offer advice. "Cheng doesn't want word of what he's planning to get out. As soon as we're launched on our mission you'll be able to go wherever you like."
He had touched on a sore point. "Go how? There won't be any ships available."
Harry blinked. "Of course there will. There's a courier due in here at any moment now—they must have told you about it. The plan is to evacuate all support people, immediately after the final combat launch. You can certainly go with them. There'll be no one left here, nothing but a couple of caretaker robots."
"Of course they told me about that ship. But suppose I don't want to be just part of the mob. And where will it take me?"
"I don't know. Somewhere safe. You'll have a fortune in your pocket, and the full possibilities of Galactic travel open to you. What's there to be upset about?"
"That's all very fine. But there's got to be some way that I can leave now. On my own terms."
"I don't see why there's got to be. It looks like there isn't."
Gianopolous wasn't listening. "He can't just keep me here. Are you getting out of here, Harry? Take me with you."
"You're forgetting why I'm here, pal. Losing your grip on reality. When Cheng heads sunward in his yacht, some of us are going with him, in your ship."
Gianopolous firmly declined the opportunity—which Lady Laura offered knowing it would be refused—to play some active role in what he called a crazily suicidal raid. He declined to be aboard any of the ships taking part, and expressed a wish to leave the wanderworld for more peaceful regions, as soon as possible.
He did not look forward to the time when the actual raid began. As a nonparticipant he would find himself unwillingly stuck on 207GST, perhaps the only human amid a small horde of servitor machines. He would be waiting for the machines to receive some word of the outcome of the raid, and pass it on to him—most likely would be the ominous absence of any word, signifying total failure. However grim the message, the robots would announce it to him in the same unfailingly cheerful voices that they used for every utterance.
Gianopolous continued his complaints about not being allowed to leave the wanderworld. But Cheng didn't want him running around loose just yet, not after the inventor had learned something of the details of the coming raid. There was still a risk that the Space Force would learn of the project and attempt to stop it.
Harry, on returning to his cabin, felt that Becky and Ethan were coming closer all the time. Drifting off for a last nap before the balloon went up, he thought that he could almost feel them near.
In his last dozing sleep before the scheduled attack, Harry had one more dream, a nightmare in which little Ethan kept calling to him, but still remained hidden, never letting himself be found . . .
He awoke from a dream in which Becky and Ethan both held up their hands to him, wrists tightly bound in plastic ligatures—
Harry was just getting out of bed, with a new look of mad hope in his eye, when the siren signaled an alert—
He had just time to get his armor on when the attack came bursting in—
The team was going through a rather intense last planning session, with all key members of the assault team gathered inside the common room of their base on 207GST.
Mister Winston Cheng was on hand, moving from one terse conference to another, and certainly would be in the control room of his yacht when the attack was launched.
The peculiar ship they had newly purchased from Gianopolous was at the dock right where Harry had parked it, its camouflage tarp being stowed away inside, along with new medirobots and a carefully chosen assortment of other gear.
Team members and technicians were coming and going from the Secret Weapon, getting things in shape, with less than an hour now to go before the scheduled launching of the attack.
Harry was conducting a last refresher course on the use and limitations of body armor in the wardroom, with Doc and other people in attendance, while the coordinator had gone aboard the inventor's ship with the inventor, getting last-minute details straightened out.
Some kind of watch had been set, by Cheng's own security people and machines, to keep the nervous Gianopolous from just getting back into his clever invention and driving it away—it was no longer his property. But in this case the Lady Masaharu had brought him aboard.
The flagship yacht, with Winston Cheng aboard and Satranji in the pilot's seat, was hanging in nearby space, no more than a hundred meters from the dock, while the second yacht was keeping station about a kilometer away.
At last all the necessary components of the planned assault seemed to have come together, acceptably if not exactly smoothly. Now Harry could see little or no reason for any further delay in launching the attack. But it was not up to him to give the order to pull the trigger.
All the members of the actual assault team, as they gathered in the common room, were wearing their new suits of heavy combat armor. Even though all members of this crew were experienced in combat, some were used to different types of gear. Few or none were intimately familiar with the equipment provided by Winston Cheng, and most were having occasional difficulties dealing with the unfamiliar feel and mass.
Harry, in addition to his other tasks, had been given the job of calibrating the weapons that the human participants in the attack were going to carry—another step on the checklist. This process involved tuning up the coded signals that would be exchanged between suits and weapons, and were supposed to distinguish friend from foe, a procedure that assumed added importance if and when it came to firing them in alphatrigger mode. Similar guns were built into several of the berserker-killing machines.
Another item on the checklist was to make sure all weapons were fully charged.
Doc, the only medic accompanying the assault team, had finally been forced to proceed with a task he had been putting off, that of getting checked out on the armored suit he would be required to wear. Looking dubiously at the unpowered mass of inert metal, he asked Harry: "Can we depend on this when the fighting starts?"
"It's about that time when I always get the feeling that I can't depend on anything. But you know what? So far I've usually been wrong. Now, have you at least read the manual?"
Harry had been prepared to insist that he was going in with the primary assault team, and he was well satisfied that neither Cheng nor Lady Masaharu had any idea of assigning him to any other job.
The great access of physical strength provided by the servo-powered suits was fun, in a way, exhilarating, but it too required some getting used to. Some equipment had already been damaged, and with some difficulty replaced. Miniature hydrogen lamps mounted in backpacks powered the suits' limbs, giving the wearer a kind of weightless feel, to which some people tended to become addicted.
Well, some might, but Harry wasn't having any. Dealing with the complicated hardware over the course of many years had made him something of a connoisseur. He had started out hating the stuff, but gradually had come to feel something like affection for some of it. Solid, dependable weapons and other combat gear had saved his skin more times than he liked to count. Still, for almost all his life he had believed that a man had to be crazy to go looking for a fight. And that went double if you were contemplating an attack on berserkers.
Louise Newari, standing among the majority of people who were soon to be evacuated, said to Harry: "So now you have gone crazy."
"Yeah, that's about it."
Thinking about people who fought brought Satranji to mind, as a prime example—though maybe Del was just the man to pilot Chen into the inferno that he sought.
Harry had never particularly enjoyed even wearing a spacesuit, or doing anything that made wearing a spacesuit necessary. People tended to show surprise when he told them that, and he had never quite understood why.
Piloting in itself was almost always fun, but the way to do it was from the comfortable interior of a well-built ship. He had to admit, though, that the suit and other gear he had been issued on this base were well constructed; Winston Cheng's builders and armorers knew what they were about.
* * *
Gianopolous, still trying to find a way to get off the wanderworld and back to the safety of a laboratory somewhere, was not in on the final briefing. The Lady Masaharu, moving about in her own distinctive set of armor with what seemed perfect familiarity, was engaged with all the others on a last rehearsal of the plan: Once the raiders had ridden Gianopolous's tricky ship in past the outer defenses, the fierce protective barriers that must be presumed to exist on any berserker installation, the plan called for them to go for its inanimate heart with a commando crew of humans and machines.
Striking as swiftly as the machines housing their human bodies could be driven by human thought, optelectronic relays, and fusion power, they would destroy or disable or find a way to dodge whatever fighting machines opposed them. They would go on to locate the prison cells. Of course, such cells also could only be presumed to exist; the idea that any prisoners were, or ever had been, held at this hypothetical base was still only speculation, possibility grafted onto possibility, half wishful and half born of fear and horror.
The lady was going on: "Very well then, suppose we've reached our goal. We occupy the interior of the enemy base, and inside it there is more than a dense mass of machinery, there is space enough to move around. Suppose by that time we have discovered evidence of human life. What next?"
"The welfare of the prisoners will come first. What that will mean in specific details we won't know until we get there." It might mean anything from quick mercy killing to joyous homecoming.
"All right. Next?"
"We have to somehow disarm any destructor charges that the enemy might have in place. We have to look for evidence of them, at least."
The review went on. Presumably by the time any actual prison cells were reached, the surprised and thwarted enemy would have made some effort to summon help. If berserker reinforcements were available somewhere relatively nearby, so they could reach the scene in, say, a standard hour or less, the game of Operation Rescue would be up—but there was no use trying to take that into their calculations.
The speaker paused, looking from face to face. "Then—assuming some useful number of us are still alive at that point—we will gather, for the purpose of evacuation, whatever other life we can discover there. Of course giving priority to the human. And, naturally, highest priority to the family of Mister Winston Cheng. And that of Harry Silver."
To talk of rescue and evacuation is all pure fantasy, insisted an interior voice of reason in Harry's ear. The only likely scenario is that all three of our ships will be blasted into clouds of atomic particles, a few seconds after the base defenses pick us up. But Harry had given up on the voice of reason some time ago. Despite the fact that Louise Newari would like him to listen to it.
When the crew had finished talking their way through the rehearsal there was a pause. Everyone was staring at a holographic model of their objective, a blurry image that was the best the machines could do with the sparse information available. There had been no point in trying to create any detailed mockup of berserker defenses, or to model the base itself in any detail. The recon images were simply not good enough to let the planners do much more than guess any of the details. About all they could be sure of was the chain of half a dozen domes, smoothly graduated in size.
Sooner or later, in an anticlimax to the final planning session, someone murmured: "When you spell the whole thing out in detail, it begins to sound insane."
Logic insisted that as the hours and days went by, the chances must be steadily declining that any human prisoner would be found alive—and that any that might be found would still be recognizable by their next of kin.
There were no public discussions of that last possibility, and none were needed.
But eventually someone raised the point.
The answer was: "Not really. Our chances can't actually be getting smaller—not if they were zero to begin with."
On one occasion, years ago, Harry had been perfectly sure that Becky was dead. That had turned out to be all a mistake, an illusion brought on by an ordinary accident. But now Harry wanted to be done with illusions. He wasn't going to let Winston Cheng's crazy fatalism, that sometimes sounded like optimism, trick him into believing that the woman he loved could be miraculously resurrected one more time. The universe didn't work that way. Unless the universe itself turned out to be some kind of an illusion. Which, when Harry thought about it, would be all right with him.
If you thought about a problem coldly and logically, then all illusions concerning it were supposed to pass away. Well, weren't they? Harry had never yet been able to think about his own tragedy with any clarity. The shock had simply been too numbing, overwhelming. And now, when at last he was able to look clearly at the grim reality, he saw . . .
"What do you see, Harry?"
"I see myself."
"I don't understand . . ."
"I see myself turning into a kind of goodlife."
"What?"
He had seen himself looking for death, embracing death. Not the warmly dead embrace of a sex robot. Worse than that. He had become a death-seeking device of flesh and blood . . .
The rehearsal on the base was interrupted by a message from the Ship of Dreams.
Winston Cheng, looking exalted, and at the same time hollow-eyed and very old, was making a final speech to the assembled human members of his secret task force. Harry thought that the tycoon actually looked ill, but at this point that hardly mattered.
Del Satranji, occupying the pilot's chair aboard the yacht, was now and then visible in the background.
No one in the common room seemed to be listening very intently to this pep talk. They had heard it all before, and it was time to get on with doing things.
The old man was promising everyone more extravagant financial rewards for full success, and offered good reasons why he did not intend to accompany the initial assault force in their landing. Age and debility perhaps made any other excuses unnecessary.
"I know my physical limitations. I'd just be in your way. And quite likely I would die without knowing whether anything had been accomplished. But I do mean to follow closely on your heels. And be assured that if you do not survive, I will not either."
The old man also promised to stand by the people who were fighting for him.
Then he gave an order to his pilot, and Ship of Dreams edged away, taking its position at the agreed distance.
The clangor of a full alarm caught everyone in the common room totally by surprise. Harry's first thought was: What a crazy time to pick for the first test of the system.
People looked at each other for a long, blank second.
There came a punishing shock to the fabric of the wanderworld, briefly overwhelming artificial gravity, so several people were knocked down and had to pick themselves up from the deck.
Someone demanded: "What the hell was that?"
"What was—"
Instinct born of experience had started Harry turning, reaching for his carbine, when another lurch in the artificial gravity sent them all staggering again.
There had been some concern about stray debris from the Gravel Pit, two hours away by superluminal ship, straying at high velocity as far as 207GST. "One of those motherless rocks has got through the screens and hit us—"
But somehow Harry knew, this time it wasn't just a rock, motherless or not.
People were screaming on helmet intercom, human voices filling the whole range of frequency and terror.
The whole rocky fabric of the wanderworld was shuddering with what had to be repeated weapons impacts, masking the lighter tremor that meant the sudden reflex launching of a superluminal courier.
The second thought that occurred to Harry was that the Space Force might have discovered Cheng's secret enterprise, his private battle fleet which was definitely illegal under several statutes, and were moving to close him down—but no. And it certainly wouldn't be the Templars. Within moments, Harry knew that his first and worst assumption was correct.
The armored fingers of Harry's right-hand gauntlet were closing on the butt of the carbine, but he knew that anything he might be able to do with it would be much too little and too late.