While on his landing approach to the Templar base, Harry had noted a domed structure that was by far the biggest component of the Templar complex except for the main hangar. He had assumed that the huge dome must contain the Trophy Room. Observing the same structure from the ground, he could see that it was separated by fifty meters of covered tunnel from the rest of the installation. The only means of entry from inside the base was through this single interior corridor.
Statglass ports had been set at intervals into the right wall of the corridor, giving passerbys a view of part of the local proving ground. The view was largely uninformative, because that was the zone where certain tests and experiments deemed too energetic and dangerous for any indoor venue were carried out. As Harry had also noted on his approach, it was an airless wilderness of black sky, almost empty space and grayish rock thousands of cubic kilometers in extent, running along one slab-sided flank of this angular wanderworld. All its borders were clearly marked by navigational aids that stood out boldly on the holostages of ships entering the system.
Striding down an internal corridor between the professor and their host, going to see the show, Harry could see certain indications of high security in place, and he could feel, as always when he was getting close to a Trophy Room, tension in the air. As usual, his own heartbeat quickened.
He had visited some similar establishments where full-body armor was required on everyone who entered. The rules here were not quite that strict. But as the three men approached the end of the covered corridor, Harry observed a pair of heavily armed young Templars standing guard, at parade rest in full combat armor, helmets closed. They were standing with their backs to the approaching people, facing the doorway leading to the inner lab, focussing their attention in that direction. That door was colored red and surrounded by serious warning signs. Guarding against external attack was not the prime concern of people pulling this assignment. Instead, they were intent on seeing that the dangerous entities being housed and investigated in the lab remained securely inside it. Sentry duty at a Trophy Room was not a job to be performed casually or haphazardly, though the captive bad guys had of course been stripped of all hardware that might qualify as efficient weaponry, and deprived of power beyond the amount required for testing. Testing here was focused on the capabilities of berserker brains; the auxiliary hardware, once definitely separated from anything like an optelectronic brain or control system, was generally looked at elsewhere.
Briskly returning the guards' salute, the abbot led Harry and the professor on through the red door and into the domed space, big enough to have housed a village, as privileged guests. Harry looked around in appreciation; he had never before been in a Trophy Room this big. Here and there were details confirming that this structure must once have been a spaceship hangar.
Darchan was pointing to the far wall of the cavernous room, where the outer hull of the captured courier was displayed—they had gone to the trouble of skinning it like a trophy snake. The length was fifty or sixty meters of scorched and battered metal, the unrolled partial diameter at least half that much. Glowing symbols, laser-painted, outlined the spots from which certain components had been removed.
Avoiding the lift that would have carried them to the statglass-windowed observation gallery on an upper level, the abbot led his two favored guests to a forcefield platform that gently lowered the three of them right down into the pit. The center of the dome was sunken several meters below the level of the rocky ground outside. The whole dome glowed with gentle light, making the arena ideal for human observation.
The broad floor was surfaced with some flaky-looking composite material, but Harry had the irrational feeling that it ought to be sand or sawdust, as if in some primitive barroom, or, more likely, a gladiatorial arena. He supposed that the actual flakes, as of some kind of cleaning compound, could serve the same end of easy cleanup and disposal.
The suggestion was that those in charge expected things to get messy here. Then the cleaning machines would have an easy job of it, simply removing the whole top layer.
A couple of human techs, or more likely engineers, fitted in protective suits and gloves, their faces protected by clear shields, small tools in their hands, were busily at work on today's guest of honor. Harry and the other visitors put on shields and gloves before approaching.
Here, the abbot and his two honored visitors were able to stand almost within arm's length of the rack on which the most important components of the captured enemy were pinioned. The rack itself was but little bigger than any ordinary dining table, and had been constructed partly of what looked like simple, natural wood. Some of the enemy's intimate parts exposed on it were crystalline, and some metallic, while yet another category consisted of mere blurry little globs of force, flickering in and out of existence somewhat faster than the human eye and mind could follow.
This was a much smaller selection of key components, in volume probably not enough to make an adult human body. The collection included no type of hardware that Harry had not seen before, yet he could hardly take his eyes off it. The whole made a brightly lighted display, spread out over a space not more than a couple of meters square.
In midair, just a couple of meters above the rack, there glowed a full-sized schematic image, showing what had been discovered so far. The inner workings looked infernally complicated. Some components were dark and some were bright, some looked almost familiar in terms of ED human technology, and some did not.
The colonel-abbot felt constrained to apologize once more to his guests for being unable to give them any details as to how this particular enemy unit had been captured—all that was highly classified. He spoke to Harry in an apologetic tone. "I have promised, under oath, you see."
Harry once more assured his host that he understood how such things were managed. Gianopolous merely nodded, as if amused at the abbot's taking such rules and restrictions so very seriously.
But the civilian Gianopolous felt free to wax enthusiastic regarding the latest interrogation methods.
Harry groaned inwardly; the inventor was turning out to be one of those people who had to be an expert on everything. They were as wearing as tough guys, though usually easier to shut up.
Abbot Darchan was going on: "Since the beginning of human history, the interrogation of prisoners has always been considered something of an art. And we are carrying the art to new heights."
Gianopolous was reverting to arrogance. "Ah, excuse me, but hasn't the interrogation of prisoners always come down to threats and punishment?"
Harry put in: "Not in this game we're playing now. Nobody's yet figured out a way to torture a berserker."
Gianopolous raised an eyebrow and looked smug; maybe I have, he seemed to be implying. No doubt that I could if I really tried. Anyone want to give me a contract?
Abbot Darchan was answering the inventor in his own way. "Relying on such crude methods is a mistake. Of course, by those means it is almost always possible to induce any human prisoner to tell you what he believes you want to hear. But the value of information obtained in such a way is rather limited. And of course, as Harry says, threats and punishment are as meaningless to a berserker as to any other machine."
"What method do you use here, then? Argument?" The last word bore a load of sarcasm.
But the abbot accepted the question at face value. "That would hardly do. No, the optelectronic brain is much less subtle, much more vulnerable to direct investigation than the organic brain, which is a thousand times more complicated. The methods we use here come down to basic techniques, carefully applied. The measurement of voltages and other optelectronic qualities, a deciphering of the code of information."
Harry was still looking around. "You've made this place into a real arena," he observed.
"Precisely what it is." A new aspect of the abbot's character was coming into view, He seemed to be quietly expressing some real hatred. "Here the dark forces are momentarily given free rein, the chance to be very active. We must know our enemy if we are ultimately going to defeat it—and we must do that, or it will wipe us out. No third outcome is ultimately possible.
"If you deprive one of these obscenities of its functions gradually, weaken it a little at a time, the hope is that it will never fully realize what's going on, and it will never employ what powers it can still exert to destroy its own memory, or scramble all the information. Because doing so would deprive it of useful tools when next it had the chance to kill."
There was a stirring of movement visible in the upper gallery, a section elevated behind a statglass wall. Harry looked up to see that a class of ten or twelve Templar officer acolytes, people the Space Force would have called cadets, clad in the simple robes/uniforms of Templar novices, with first-year tabs on their uniform collars, had been brought in to stand looking down into the pit from behind a thick statglass barrier. Almost certainly this would be the first time that any of them had been able to get a direct look at the enemy they had sworn to fight.
Some kind of communication channel was evidently open, because a murmur of restrained conversation came drifting faintly down to the lower level of the broad arena floor where the techs and visitors were standing.
Great care had already been taken that at this point, the berserker's circuits had been extensively disconnected, shorted out, disrupted to the point where the remaining central intelligence was stone deaf and blind. Soon that would be remedied.
Either the instructor above or the abbot below, the latter probably with the thought of monitoring how well his teacher taught, did something that brought the instructor's voice down from the sealed gallery into the pit.
" . . . basically three ways a berserker can react when it realizes that it's been captured—or is about to be. Who can tell me what they are? Yes?"
Harry was watching and listening now. The class, who all appeared to be nearly the same age, looked back, showing the usual assortment of student reactions, from smug to bewildered to absent. Male and female wore their hair in the same simple style. For the males, facial hair was under current rules forbidden.
The first hand raised was that of a fresh-faced girl. "It can blow itself up."
The instructor nodded routine approval. "Yes, or melt itself down, if it incorporates a self-destructor device, as the great majority of them do. You must expect any and all of their machines to be equipped with something of that nature. Today's subject had one, but our people were skilled enough, and lucky enough to be able to disable it.
"Self-destruction is possibility number one, and we have to consider it the most likely. But it could be fatal to ignore the other choices an enemy might make." He nodded toward an eager face. "Yes?"
This novice was ready with a different answer. "It might play dead."
"Correct! As you might expect, they can do that very convincingly. A variation on that theme is to attempt an imitation of some innocent machine, one that is perhaps temporarily out of order.
"It's very important to keep that possibility constantly in mind. A berserker having chosen that mode might remain in it for a year, or if necessary for a hundred years, while to a casual examination appearing totally inert. Then, when it detected a substantial life form, preferably a human, within striking range—sudden death."
There was a moment of silence.
"I said there were three basic possibilities." The teacher looked around, but it appeared no one was ready to complete the trio.
"Option number three is what I like to call the mode of just keeping busy. Keeping its hand in, as it were. Microscopic organisms make up the vast majority of the Galaxy's living things—there may be ten to the thirtieth power of them on an average habitable planet. And they are to be found in a great variety of environments. If a death machine has the tools to detect them and kill them—and it very likely does—it may simply keep on with simple killing until it exhausts its remaining power, or has sterilized its environment as far as it can reach, or until some better target, like an ED human who is not fully alert, presents itself."
Harry's attention had shifted back to the actual berserker on the rack. The technicians, murmuring a few words of jargon back and forth between themselves, were well along in the process of detaching the separated modules from the rack and fitting them back together in a more compact form. Harry could see where the courier's brain, or a large part of it, was going to go. Around it a new body was taking shape, vastly smaller and simpler than the massive hardware provided by its original designers. Most of the parts of this new incarnation were of human manufacture, color-coded to show their origin.
Harry watched as the strange, alien form took shape under the techs' careful hands. It vaguely resembled a scooter, as yet lacking wheels, of a convenient size for some ED human to be able to stand on and ride. Now the empty rack, on which the half-dissected enemy had been pinioned like some huge exotic insect, was being raised up out of the testing space, to disappear behind a panel in the dome. Harry knew regret that the damned thing could feel no pain, no terror. But maybe it felt something analogous to sickness. He could at least hope for that.
Something the instructor in the upper gallery was saying caught at Harry's attention, and he looked that way again.
"The bad machines of course operate their own extensive intelligence and counterintelligence systems; unfortunately, there are always people ready to turn goodlife. The berserkers study Earth-descended humanity at least as intensely as we study them. There's no doubt they have rooms analogous to this one, where human prisoners are tested. Where the different layers, the different modes of human memory are searched, probably by methods of gradual disassembly similar to . . ."
"What is it, Harry?" the abbot was asking, sounding faintly concerned, while the instructor's voice droned on.
"Never mind. Nothing." He took a deep breath, and made an effort, and was standing still again.
One of the most recent refinements of interrogation and discovery technique involved keeping the subject device concentrated on an activity down near its most basic level of programming: finding a way to kill something. There were almost always some life forms within reach, though many of them presented a difficult challenge when the berserker had been deprived of all sophisticated weapons.
The students' instructor was trying what was doubtless a standard joke. Smiling at the group, he offered: "Therefore, we need a life form to feed the berserker. Any volunteers?" There was a dutiful titter of laughter.
One of the acolytes observed: "Sir, that thing our people are putting together looks like it can't even move."
"It will move, adequately for our purposes, when they've finished. The technicians are now adding the final touches—there are the wheels—restoring some mobility, of course in a vastly different mode than what the device originally possessed."
Two small wheels had appeared, one mounted straight behind the other, as on a children's scooter. A pair of hardware arms, of a size to fit a human toddler, were also being attached, in the place of steering grips or handlebars. Each arm came equipped with a matching four-fingered hand, also small, reinforcing the impression of a child's robotic toy.
"Where will they put the brain?" one of the acolytes was asking.
"We're on our way to getting the central computer put back together—with just a few small omissions. It'll occupy that box near the top, where the steering handles would sprout out if there was a human rider."
". . . mobility will be restricted to just a little low-speed rolling instead of space travel. We have already stripped away courier functions, and are now reenabling the basic brain to move and act, within the limits imposed by the diminished body. The trick is to allow just enough capability to provide us with the data that we're looking for."
The human engineers who had been working hands-on seemed in need of a bit more room, so the abbot stepped back, motioning his two guests with him. This partial reassembly of the machine would give the restored brain more choices, allow it the possibility of planning. The process was quickly accomplished.
Or was it? The new arms tightly fastened on and so were the small wheels, but it seemed the human engineers were not quite finished after all. One of them was dabbing at the subject with a small stick or brush in one gloved hand, while holding a small flask in the other.
"What's he up to?" Gianopolous wondered aloud, forgetting for the moment his pose of omniscience.
The abbot's answer came in a low whisper. "He's painting it with a bit of fresh animal blood, just enough to give it an appropriate scent."
The professor's jaw dropped slightly. "In the name of all that's chaotic, why?"
"You'll see, in a moment." The abbot looked around. "Now we must get out of here."
Suddenly all the humans were evacuating the lower, arena level, getting up out of the pit. A scattering of flashing red lights appeared, and an audio warning began to hoot. The abbot made a point of being the last to leave the level of the arena floor, making sure that he had shepherded everyone else ahead of him.
In moments they had joined the other watchers in the upper gallery, where students deferentially made way.
Not until the abbot and his guests had ringside seats was the monster released from the rack, and one of its power cells restored to allow it some physical activity, of course at a vastly restricted level of power and energy.
"We must not reduce its capabilities too much, of course. Otherwise it will sense its own absolute weakness, and probably play dead. We will learn little or nothing."
The innocent-looking berserker/scooter swayed upright, a simple gyro mechanism allowing it to balance easily on its two small wheels. Its first controlled movement was a slow turn in place, evidently trying, with partially restored faculties, to take the measure of this new and simplified environment. After that it began to move in a large circle, at a creeping pace. Within half a minute it was slowly making its way around the arena, remaining close to the steady curve of boundary wall, probing the limits of this new world with dimmed-down senses. Only once did it put on a burst of acceleration, evidently testing its capabilities.
Readings from all the onboard telemetry were continually pouring in. "It's still trying to orient itself," the instructor explained. Presumably no sound from the observers' stations could now reach the arena, or at least none that would register on the subject's attenuated senses.
"It will also," the abbot was saying in a low voice, "be attempting to identify the nature of this unfamiliar environment. And also to deduce some reason for the gaps in its recent memory, and compensate for them as well as possible."
The inventor seemed to be growing fascinated despite himself. "Does it realize that it's a prisoner, undergoing interrogation?"
The abbot shook his head. "We can hope not. But at this point we cannot be sure."
Moments passed. The only sound in the large space was that of the machine's small wheels on the crisply flaky arena floor. A faint scrape and a rattle, clearly audible in the waiting silence, where one of the reassembled parts perhaps was slightly loose.
The scooter had completed nearly one full circle of the arena wall, when it abruptly changed course, taking a straight line across the open space, back to the place where it had first recovered its awareness.
"Now it has some grasp of its new surroundings, and a realization of its diminished powers." The instructor's voice had, perhaps unconsciously, fallen to a whisper. "Time for the next step."
The teacher was telling his class: "We must present this berserker with a challenge. Set it a difficult task, one that will cause it to mobilize all its computing capacity to solve the problem. The idea is not to leave it with any surplus capacity for planning trickery."
"Sir, that sounds difficult."
"It is."
A panel about two meters wide that had been invisible at the base of the curving wall now slid open. A faint murmur went up from the acolytes when they saw the shape that moved out of darkness to fill the opening.
The low growl that the animal gave came as no surprise to Harry, but the beast was larger than he had expected.
Fur had been shaved away in a few places, spots surrounding the brightly colored plugs or probes, of composite material, that had been inserted in several sites on its long skull and along its backbone.
One of the acolytes was making a sound of sympathy, pity, almost of physical pain. No words were formed, but what those words would have been was plain enough: Oh, the poor animal—
The abbot immediately frowned, as if he had been expecting this particular objection and had his disapproval ready. "What did you expect, young woman? Feeding it a mouse or a snail, or even a deer, would not gain us much information." Harry remembered that there was a Templar doctrine, a dogma, of being ruthless in the defense of life.
Large, hungry cats or similar predators were considered the best distraction, because they posed the crippled berserker a problem, forcing it to concentrate on overcoming a life-unit's resistance.
The beast was about the size of a mountain lion, but leaner, some genetic variant. Harry wondered if it had somehow been specially bred for this task. Another Templar sideline that he had never come upon before.
The comparatively massive predator had begun to stalk the vehicle that so strongly resembled a child's toy.
The cat moved forward as if under irresistible compulsion, as if it might find the scent of fresh blood overpoweringly attractive. The hungry predator snarled and continued its advance.
The berserker did not crave blood, or meat. Its only want was for the fuel to keep it going, and for something less material than that.
The innocent-looking scooter was somewhat shorter than its live antagonist, and doubtless many kilograms lighter. And the brain controlling the machine was working with a certain disadvantage, in that it could not yet be certain of the strength and toughness of this unaccustomed body that was suddenly all it had to work with.
The scooter's two small arms and their child-sized hands, now raised with fingers spread, reminded Harry of the delicate forearms on a T rex. That would not be the only resemblance, and certainly not the strongest, but it was the single characteristic of the scooter that even suggested fearsomeness. The metal joints, and the composite panels sheathing the thing's flanks had a fragile, rickety look. If it was going to succeed in harvesting the raging, hungry life in front of it, it would have to improvise some weaponry.
Harry was fascinated. For the moment, the constant pressure of his own loss had been lifted from his mind. What would the damned thing do, what could it do, with the meager tools it had been given? Might it discover some way to drain its modest power supply to produce a terrific electric shock—?
Maybe it would, but that was not the only idea it had come up with. Reaching down along its own flank, stretching one small arm to its maximum extent, the rebuilt berserker was prying off one of its own thin side panels, that were only loosely attached to the vertical column.
The animal closed in with a charge. The berserker raised the thin panel in two hands. The movement appeared clumsy, but before Harry could revise his thinking there was a blur of metal under the bright lights, as if a simple steel frame had turned into a sword, and a splash of fresh, hot blood.
The great cat yowled, and in the next instant it was backing away, moving on three legs while the fourth hung maimed. In the first clash it had been forced on the defensive, its raw wound displaying white broken bone.
The cadets were gasping, murmuring, calling out. The scooter, the panel swinging swordlike in the two small hands, reversed the direction of its slow retreat. It advanced steadily, relentlessly. No doubt it was studying the movements of its crippled adversary. Then presently it charged again. The broad arena had no corners, only the vast oval offering unlimited possibilities of retreat, but no place to hide.
The animal sent up a snarling yowl. It might have managed a limping run, attempting escape on only three legs. But its instinct was to fight back.
The pursuit went on, changing directions. The acolytes were watching, a slightly different expression on each of their twelve faces.
The scooter rolled closer, cleaving to a curving path. Then it darted in, as quickly as it could move, and struck again. A small cloud of dust and flaky fragments rose up from the fight. The snarling outcry of the beast became a sound like nothing Harry had ever heard before.
At one point the lion's powerful hind legs, both still intact, kicked the scooter meters away. Sharp, strong claws tore metal fingers from one of its small hands. But the machine spun back to the attack as soon as its wheels had touched the ground.
Harry's original idea about the electric shock might be proven right—if the machine had been allowed the ability to reconfigure itself internally. But one shock did not finish the predator. In another moment it had turned, reduced at last to trying to flee, and was trying to get away, with the innocent-looking scooter snarling after it.
The best pace that the cat could manage now was more like a crawl than a run.
And all the while the fight went on, the Templar investigators kept mining data from their probes embedded in the berserker's brain. One of them kept letting out short bursts of elated murmuring. "Look at that sigma interaction! Got it . . ."
The mountain lion turned back once more, snarling bloody froth. Half a minute later it died, twitching and convulsing, the little sword-panel had been used until it broke. Then the machine went in to finish the job with wheels and hands . . . it was a bloody mess, and two or three of the acolytes were turning away, struggling not to be sick.
Harry was not at all surprised to see that the little robot jeweler's hand, even though half of its metal fingers had been broken, was still powerful enough to dig one out of the probes that was still half-buried in the newly lifeless head of the animal. The cat was motionless at last, but the machine's work was not yet done.
The child-sized digits, displaying surprising strength, uprooted the thing, producing one more airborne streak of blood. Then the scooter's body spun, its short arm flashed, hurling the dislocated probe with great accuracy at the nearest spot where its dimmed-down senses had somehow managed to perceive the ultimate horror. The horror of swarming life, intelligent, defiant . . .
"Look out!"
It was fortunate that the warning was unnecessary, because it came a full second too late.
Every human in the observation gallery had instinctively ducked away. A checkerboard pattern of shockwaves sprang into brief existence all across the broad statglass surface. Over the next few seconds the pattern slowly faded, the tiny squares winking in and out of visibility, to reveal the defensive barrier undamaged.
In the room behind the barrier, a murmur of discordant prayers went up. Templars shared a strong tendency to be religious, but were not all of the same creed.
When there seemed to be no more useful data to be derived from the situation, the reactivated berserker was quietly immobilized, by foam sprayed out of nozzles descending from the roof, foam that hardened quickly into a mass that looked as solid as concrete.
An observer just coming on the scene might have doubted that such a precaution was really necessary. The scooter had collapsed into a startlingly small pile of inert hardware immediately after hurling the probe, having seemingly expended the last of its available power in that effort. Were it not for the streaks and spatterings of blood, it would have regained the look of total innocence, a child's toy broken and abandoned. But no one would be taking any chances. The first approach to the new pile of concrete would be made only by tame robots, and they would be very careful.
The cadets were murmuring softly, sobered by the demonstration. That was part of its purpose.
When the three men had moved on out of the Trophy Room, all of them were at first silently thoughtful.
The abbot was looking expectantly at his guests. He seemed a trifle hurt that neither of them were properly enthusiastic. At last he said: "I think it was a good show, if I do say so myself. I can tell you that we obtained a large volume of data to be analyzed."
"It was." Harry nodded. "A good show."
Professor Gianopolous, looking a touch pale, murmured something about the sight of blood affecting him. Then he immediately excused himself to go to his room. If the show had impressed him in any way, beyond making him sick, he was not inclined to reveal the fact.
The other two watched him out of sight, before slowly starting down the other branch of corridor. Abbot Darchan asked: "What was it you wanted to see Gianopolous about, Harry? If it's any of my business."
"Oh, the project?" Harry found he could be casual. He might have been talking about the last days of someone else's life. "More or less routine. I'm just going to do a little driving. That's my usual job. But thanks for the tour, that was quite a demonstration, even if my mind was elsewhere. And thanks for the warning."
"Yes, Harry, let me emphasize the warning. You watch your back, my lad. I know you've got no nerves, but even so. I admit I'm glad my name is missing from the list. I wouldn't sleep too soundly if I knew that one of those damned things was on my trail, never sleeping, never resting, calculating day and night on how to get at me."
Harry managed a smile for the abbot. He had the feeling it was his first smile in a long time. "That's where you and I are different, pal."