The Builder who now stood towering over the gaping little audience of intruders was a slender, fine-boned being, taller than all but a very few Solarian men but topologically like a Solarian except for the single eye that stretched across the upper face, with a bright bulging pupil that slid to and fro with the rapidity of thought.
After a stunned pause, Commodore Prinsep responded to the short speech of welcome, but the commodore was never able afterward to remember exactly what he had said. The thin orange-and-yellow figure looming above him on the dais listened as a machine swiftly translated Prinsep's words into bursts of whistles and clicks.
From the first moment, the ship's captain was a convincing presence. Neither Prinsep nor any of his companions had any doubt of the nature of the being now confronting them. All of them had seen, times beyond counting, images of the Builder race, pictures extracted from a precious handful of alien video records that were older than Solarian humanity. Copies of those videos reposed in every general encyclopedia, in every comprehensive data storage bank. Images of Builders were as widely recognizable as those of Solarians from the first century of photography.
In most of the ancient Builder graphics, no matter how elegantly enhanced, the berserkers' creators showed as hardly more than stick drawings of orange glowing substance. Now for the first time in history it was plain to Solarian eyes that that orange color and brightness were the result of some kind of clothing, the exposed skin being a dullish yellow where it showed on the face, the four-fingered hands, and across part of the chest.
Before the commodore and his boarding party had fully absorbed one shock, another fell. A new flurry of excitement passed among them when one of their own species suddenly appeared on the dais within arm's length of the captain. A biologically youthful man with sandy hair, dressed in modern ship's issue clothing, arose from another of the central chairs, the tall back of which had concealed him.
Among the people who had come in with Prinsep, only Nick immediately recognized Sandy Kensing. Nick quickly informed the others of his identity.
Kensing distractedly greeted the new arrivals. From the moment he rose from his chair, he had been looking anxiously among them for Annie Zador. Now he was relieved to hear that Dr. Zador had been well when last reported. It came as no surprise to Kensing to learn that she and Dr. Hoveler had elected to remain back on the station.
"But we had given you up for dead," Prinsep reminded Kensing sharply.
The youth looked haggard. "I know that—I was about ready to give up myself, until Colonel Marcus welcomed me aboard here. Now he's gone back to the station to try to help out."
"What? Who's gone where?"
"I'll explain as best I can about the colonel's survival and my own. But first I'd better tell you we've got immediate problems—real berserkers are attacking, and this vessel—the one we're on—is their prime target. And it always has been. To berserkers, this particular ship has a higher priority for destruction than any Solarian ship. Much higher than a mere billion Solarian protolives."
Then Kensing, taking pity on the hopeless silence of bewilderment before him, drew a deep breath and slowed down a little. "I can quite appreciate your confusion, shipmates. I've been in the deep freeze, and I'm only a few hours ahead of you in the process of learning about—this."
His expansive gesture included the self-proclaimed captain beside him, as well as the ship around them all. "But you're better off than I was. When I came on board, Dirac and Scurlock thought they were giving me to a berserker. And I believed them, until . . .
The speaker drew another breath. "Let me start over, by introducing the captain more thoroughly. Her name—his name—I'm not yet sure which—will translate at least approximately as 'Carpenter.'"
The captain, still listening to simultaneous machine translation, bowed, a strange, stiff gesture.
Tersely Kensing went on to inform his compatriots that Captain Carpenter was very likely the last mature Builder surviving in the universe. Originally part of the ship's reserve crew, he/she had also been thawed out, at the orders of this ship's optelectronic brain, only a few hours ago—but in the captain's case, after a longsleep of some fifty thousand standard years.
Acting Captain Carpenter was one of an elite corps of individuals, fanatically dedicated to the preservation of the Builders' race, who had boarded this ship when it set out on its desperate voyage—part of a last effort to escape the destruction being visited on the Builders' civilization by their own creation, the berserkers.
Prinsep, who had been attending carefully, supposed that under the circumstances he could accept that. Actually he supposed that he had very little choice. "All right," the commodore demanded, "then what is this damned thing, anyway? Where are we?"
Kensing gazed at the older man uncertainly. "The best translation I can give you, Commodore, for the function of this vessel seems to be 'seedship.'"
Captain Carpenter, following the conversation with the aid of his own machines, quickly confirmed the fact. The vessel they were on was only one—almost certainly, the last surviving—of a great many similar craft that had been launched by Carpenter's desperate race in its last days, and represented their last-ditch attempt to establish a beachhead in the future for their posterity. It was a frenzied gamble they had undertaken only when they realized that their war against their own creations, the berserkers, was certain to be lost.
The great majority of seedships had been destroyed by the implacable berserkers soon after they were built. Also obliterated at that time had been all of the Builders' other ships and other spacegoing installations.
Every one of the Builders' planets, fruit of a long, aggressive campaign to expand their empire, had been sterilized.
But this one seedship, and most likely this one alone—its individual name seemed to translate as something like Phoenix—had escaped destruction. Though it had been heavily damaged, its original live crew wiped out, it was still carrying deep in its metal guts more than a billion encapsulated zygotes—almost certainly the only examples of Builder genetics still extant anywhere in the universe.
But all of the artificial wombs it had originally carried, as well as the capacity to construct more, had been destroyed by berserker boarding devices and other weapons.
Relentlessly pursued almost from the moment of its launching, this vessel fifty thousand years ago had narrowly escaped destruction by plunging into a deep nebula—that which Solarians now called the Mavronari—a cloud of gas and dust hanging broad and high and dense enough in Galactic space to baffle any effective pursuit. Inside this nebula, travel at c-plus velocities was impossible.
Ensign Dinant was still inclined to be skeptical. "It looks just like a berserker. All our experts have identified it as one."
Kensing nodded soberly. "Of course it does, of course they have. Not only did it come out of one of the same original Builder shipyards, but it was deliberately designed and built to look like a berserker—enough to fool, if possible, the killing machines themselves."
Except for the basically benign programming of this vessel's computers, the match had been very close indeed. Certainly close enough to fool Solarians. But of course the objective of fooling the unliving enemy had ultimately failed of attainment.
Evidently sensing that some doubts still lingered. Captain Carpenter was willing to offer proof. A simultaneous translation of his speech came through: "We must be quick. But I will show you all this vessel's cargo. Please follow me."
Even a freight consisting of some billions of encapsulated zygotes, a cargo having the same magnitude of volume as that of the Solarian research station, did not occupy a high proportion of the space available. Not on a battlewagon the size of this one.
And now, as Kensing, accompanied by Captain Carpenter conducted Prinsep and his companions on a tour of this vessel's cargo holds, their last lingering doubts were satisfied.
Prinsep picked up a sample to inspect it closely. Each Builder zygote was protected inside a small circular plate, not much different in size, though substantially dissimilar in texture and composition, from the Solarian tiles with which all the Earth-descended people present were well familiar.
Tongres even did some half-abstracted calculations: A billion tiles or disks would seem to need a volume of about 90 meters x 90 meters x 50 meters.
Prinsep wondered, keeping the question to himself for now, whether Builders knew sexual attraction and love in the Solarian sense. And decided in his own mind that probably they did.
Even this vessel, immense enough to tuck away such a bulk of cargo, was still only in the middle range of size for a berserker mothership. In this vast interior, the secret cargo might remain indefinitely unexamined and unremarked by a handful of tired, frightened boarders who were necessarily intent on other matters, in particular their own survival.
And still, around them, the fight against the latest attacking waves of real berserkers was going on. From time to time, Captain Carpenter in a few terse phrases reminded his visitors of the fact. The full combat resources of the Phoenix, hoarded for millennia against the need for this final stand, an arsenal including extra defensive shields, and weapons that could have annihilated the planetoid Imatra a hundred times over, were being mobilized and thrown into action now.
"What can we do to help?" asked Prinsep.
An immediate expression of gratitude came from Captain Carpenter together with the answer: not much at the moment. But if and when the berserkers could again be beaten off, perhaps a great deal.
Not only were their own human lives at stake, Carpenter explained, but also the survival of a viable drive aboard the seedship. And, aboard the bioresearch station, the survival of a fleet of artificial wombs which would be usable by either species.
That statement momentarily staggered the commodore and those with him. "Usable by either species?"
"Right!" said Kensing, adding: "And that, you see, is the key to the whole mystery of this ship's behavior."
For one race's artificial wombs to be used on the other's zygotes would certainly require heavy modification in both hardware and software. But both races shared the same fundamental chemistry of life. Tools and energy and comprehensive libraries of information were available. It had been determined centuries ago that with time and effort and ingenuity, the Solarian wombs could be modified to handle satisfactorily the protoindividuals of the other race.
Briefly interrupting Kensing's explanation, Captain Carpenter clicked and whistled for his new allies a kind of apology for the way his ship had treated certain Solarians over the course of the past three hundred years.
When the live crew of the Phoenix had been wiped out early in the agelong voyage, leaving the seedship's computers to do their best absent the conscious control of any living Builder, the elaborate software entities inhabiting those machines labored under the certainty that ultimate success or failure rode on the decisions they were now forced to make. At times the strain had proven too much for the command computers, leading to decisions that were contradictory and counterproductive.
Approximately fifty thousand standard ED years (as confirmed rather precisely by the seedship's master clocks) after plunging into the sheltering nebula, this particular ship had at last emerged again. In the course of its tortuous passage through that protective but also dangerous darkness, it had found one or two sites where a colony might be established. But without the hardware to grow organic beings, or the necessary software to construct and operate it, the sites were useless.
Therefore, a very little more than three hundred years ago, on emerging from the dark nebula into more or less clear, normal space, the bright, wary, dangerous shipboard computers, charged with the preservation of their cargo, and the eventual establishment of colonies at any and all costs, had begun to cast about for the means of making a colony once more possible.
And the computers commanding the Phoenix encountered something new. The signals of Solarian civilization, sent into space both deliberately and accidentally for centuries in this part of the Galaxy, were detectable at several points along the radiation spectrum commonly used for communications.
For a Solarian standard year or two after its emergence from the most heavily constricting clouds, the ship had hung back in the fringes of the Mavronari. For all its computers knew, the Galaxy into which it had reemerged, some fifty thousand years older than the one it had escaped, might well be completely dominated by berserkers; indeed the shipboard computers felt compelled to assign a pessimistically high probability to that situation.
During the dark millennia of steady groping through obscurity the onboard computers had done such research as they could manage on the problem of surviving the berserkers and ultimately defeating them. The odds were not good. Further delay in the establishment of a colony was undesirable.
But reckless haste, their basic programming impressed upon them, might produce results that were disastrously worse.
With mechanical patience, using such tools as remained after the long-accumulated damage of battle, time, and travel, the seedship's computers investigated the new world before them. They again evaluated the option of reviving one of the precious few organic Builders of the reserve crew, but continued to judge that the optimum time for that step had not yet arrived.
The computers representing the last hope of the Builders began, cautiously, an active search along the Coreward fringe of the Mavronari, still seeking favorable places for the establishment of a live colony, but concentrating upon the lack of nurturing hardware and software.
The course followed by the seedship in its seeking, along the ever-more-attenuated outer fringe of the Mavronari brought a fortuitous discovery that altered and delayed all of the computers' other plans.
Traces of very fresh activity on the part of the newly dominant intelligent race suddenly appeared in the electromagnetic spectrum. These were rapidly decaying signals, undoubtedly artificial, echoing in multiple reflections from one interstellar cloud to another, no more than a few years old but already faint almost beyond the most sophisticated detection.
The seedship computers expanded their field antennas as best they could. They watched and listened, recording all artificial signals with an omnivorous greed for information.
Presently scout machines were programmed and dispatched, clever, heavily armed devices superficially indistinguishable from berserker scouts. These moved swiftly, in wary silence, homing on the signals just discovered and listening with particular attention for more.
Presently more such transmissions were detected, recorded and analyzed, and bearings taken. One of the seedship's scouts returned with new information.
Presently the small scouting machines drifted forward again, as warily as possible, in the direction of the signals' source. They listened again, and then advanced and listened once more, to younger and ever younger samples of the alien communications spectrum. Thus cautious exploration proceeded in small increments.
Eventually direct contact was effected. Abruptly a small Solarian ship—an utterly new phenomenon to the seedship computers—was detected within visual range.
The electronic strategists were wary about approaching the Solarians openly, because they knew that, to humans of any race who knew anything about berserkers, their vessel was virtually certain to be identified as an old, battered berserker.
Surreptitious observation had not continued long before certain evidence came to the attention of the seedship computers, evidence tending to confirm that the small vessel was under the control of living beings, not berserkers. Warily, and experiencing something analogous to gratitude and joy, the computers accepted this fact as evidence that even now, some fifty thousand years after their victory over their creators, the berserkers had been unable to expunge intelligent life completely from the Galaxy.
But caution was still essential. For one thing, the seedship knew that it looked like a berserker. Perhaps its controlling software entities were capable of appreciating irony. To be attacked and destroyed as a berserker, after fifty thousand years of strained survival . . .
Provoking either attack or panicked flight on the part of the alien was undesirable.
There was another goal: whatever effort might be necessary, it was very important to learn at least one Solarian language, or preferably several. In the absence of any wealth of recorded information, there seemed no alternative to either taking an unacceptably long time about the job, or else learning from live beings.
To somehow establish contact with such beings without alerting their whole race to the presence of a formidable stranger seemed essential—on the other hand, to be caught taking prisoners was predictably almost certain to create hostility among the very beings the ship hoped ultimately to enlist as allies.
Therefore the ship planned very carefully the acquisition of its language tutors—though in the end it had little real choice as to who they were going to be.
It appeared feasible to capture the small ship, and that was easily accomplished.
Upon investigation it became clear that the little craft had been part of a small, private operation in space, with only a couple of people on board. Fortunately for the seedship's purposes, it was small enough to be taken undamaged and without a fight.
Unfortunately the universe held other deadly dangers besides the killing machines. The Builders' own history demonstrated amply that one intelligent race could be perfectly capable of waging war upon another. Were this not a fact, the berserkers would never have been created. Therefore great diplomacy was called for; the seedship's brain would have to predict (and much depended upon the accuracy of the prediction) just what the attitude of these unknown beings was going to be toward a billion Builder zygotes.
Ensign Dinant was the last to doubt. "But—when it attacked Imatra—it killed defenders, it seized the station violently and carried it off."
The commodore responded soberly. "Of course, the Builders and their machinery would have been willing to wipe out all Solarian life—if such a thing were possible—if they saw that as the only way to capture our biostation or its equivalent. The only way to save their own race. Hell, we'd do the same to them, right?"
The Builder who had ordered the first Imatran raid, Carpenter's predecessor as captain, might have planned to tell his pair of kidnapped Solarians the truth. But he, having gone out in a small combat scout to oversee the operation, had unluckily been killed in the first fighting. And after his sudden death his machines, once more forced to grapple with unwelcome responsibility, had failed to carry out that plan.
At the conclusion of the violent combat that had accompanied the seedship's seizing and carrying off the station, the stored body of only one adult Builder remained in viable condition—and the computers soon decided that before they risked playing that final card, rousing their sole remaining master, they had better gather as much information as possible about the newly discovered Solarian race.
Early in their occupation of the station, the machines examined several of the Solarian artificial wombs, the priceless replacements for Builder devices destroyed beyond recovery. The captured machinery appeared to be adaptable—and so, as far as could be determined, were Freya and her counterparts. But no real trial had been attempted. The tricky complexities of alien biology were difficult even for big computers; and their situation would have to be even more desperate than it was before they would have dared experiment on Builder zygotes without prolonged and intensive computer modeling.
And the computers had been willing to accept almost any risk rather than allow the Solarians to realize just what the real prize was—these invaluable artificial wombs, and the expert systems that made them functional.
The one disaster the computers had never dared to risk was the destruction of these priceless nurturing devices, so miraculously obtained. At the threat of open fighting aboard the Solarian biostation, the seedship it had withdrawn its combat machines, leaving the belligerent Solarians to their own devices while keeping open some channels of communication and observation.
The seedship had installed sensors, recorders, on the Solarian station's womb-deck, and some of these devices had survived the Solarians' suspicious search. The Builders' master computers wanted constant reassurance that the Solarians left in control of the station were doing nothing that would put the artificial wombs and associated systems at risk.
Hundreds of years had passed since the seedship computers had seized and made off with their Solarian treasure. In that interval they had succeeded in getting it almost out of sight of berserkers and Solarians alike. The planners could afford to be patient. It was necessary only to outlast the few Solarians still on the station—those violent, weapon-carrying beings living in such perilously close proximity to the artificial wombs. For a time the all-important goal grew more and more likely of attainment.
Then suddenly, without warning, upsetting all calculations, more Solarians had come threading their way out of the nebula in a badly damaged warship, bringing with them confirmation of an approaching berserker presence in nearby space. Now mobilization was necessary, preparations must be made to fight off these potential attackers.
The whole situation, long fraught with possibilities for disaster beyond calculation, suddenly became vastly more complicated and dangerous.
The damaged seedship computers, working sometimes on the verge of breakdown, continued to do the best they could.
In its first contact with Solarians, the seedship had deliberately passed itself off as a berserker. First, because it would have been difficult to convince suspicious humans that it was anything else. Later, it preferred not to reveal to the handful of organic aliens what an advantage they had in controlling all the artificial wombs.
If the Solarian aliens were willing to accept their captor as a berserker and still to maintain communication with it, then the seedship would humor them. To try to argue them into the truth seemed to carry the risk of unguessable complications. And it was possible to make the hopeful computation that in a few years, a few decades, a few centuries at the most, they would all be conveniently dead.
And thus, more or less gradually, the deal between Dirac Sardou and the alien machine had evolved.
Through discussions between Dirac and his unliving counterpart, their plan for establishing a cooperative colony had evolved—each partner in the scheme planning to double-cross the other as soon as possible.
Up to the time when the commodore's band of refugees arrived at the bioresearch station, the seedship brain had been uncertain about the value of the treacherous, brutal Premier as any kind of long-term ally. Of course the Builders' machine had had little choice; the man had firmly established himself as leader of the small surviving group of humans. And alliance was at least a possibility, with any known entity other than a berserker.
In fact the seedship's archives held records of certain Builder individuals who had equaled or surpassed Dirac in the capacity for violence and personal ambition. There was no reason to assume that Dirac was more closely typical of human leaders than those Builders had been of their own race.
In any case, the ship had trouble coming up with a better plan for using these aliens, or learning more about them.
But now other and perhaps more satisfactory human partners had become available, in the form of the fleet commander and his associates. The Builder ended by telling them that he would bring out the reserve fighting machines the ship had been hiding, and depose Dirac.
Hawksmoor had listened to the story with a sympathy for those beleaguered Builder programs.
In Nick's opinion, any advanced computer or advanced program ordinarily felt intrinsically more comfortable dealing with another computer or another program than with a fleshly person. The Builders' creation was surely no exception to this rule.
Nick could sympathize with his program counterparts aboard the seedship, though now from the vantage point of what he considered to be his own dual nature, he judged them rather colorless.
Another question that occurred to Nick was this: Had the Builders ever experienced any ethical, moral, or social problems with the idea of making electronic recordings of themselves? Well, he wasn't going to raise the point just now; there seemed to be plenty of other problems that would have to be considered first.
Captain Carpenter resumed the story. The seedship's plans for retreating to some hidden sanctuary, and building its colony with the help of Solarian equipment, had to be put on hold as soon as it received convincing evidence—from listening to Solarian communications, or from its own observations—that the bad machines might be about to appear.
At that point, feeling some computer analogue of desperation, the seedship computers had awakened Frank Marcus.
An array of other Solarian people were also being kept frozen in the seedship's archives—those who had been sent to it by Dirac in the belief that he was placating a great berserker.
At the moment Frank was taken prisoner, he had already been half convinced that the machine he was fighting was no berserker.
The seedship's brain continually reconsidered the possibility of reviving the sole remaining qualified Builder, and when (s)he was checked out healthy, relieving itself of command.
But the last time the seedship controller had revived a Builder, shortly before the first raid on Imatra, he/she promptly got himself killed by the Solarian humans; and now it had only one mature Builder left. No margin remained to accommodate another error.
If the seedship was ever to make an open and serious partnership with Solarians, it would not want to be perceived as guilty of slaughtering the young that they were making at least some effort to preserve.
For centuries now the seedship had been trying to protect its own most vital secrets from the Solarians, even while struggling to learn theirs. But ultimately it would rather reveal its true nature to these intruders than kill them off. They were not necessarily its mortal enemies, but berserkers were.
The seedship had now spent three hundred years studying the alien species who called themselves Solarians. But for any machines to study any of the Galactic varieties of humanity was extremely difficult, and the seedship was extremely reluctant to reach any firm conclusions without still more study, now that additional subjects were at last available.
The seedship knew it must to make a deal with the quarrelsome Solarians—or with one faction among them, if they were divided in deadly earnest.
But now, with real berserkers coming to the attack, time for hesitation had run out.
As had the time for explanations.
"Battle stations, everyone. We must at all costs defend the bridge," said Captain Carpenter.
One of the seedship's service machines was already bringing Kensing battle armor, tailored to his Solarian shape and size. Prinsep and Havot, Nick and Tongres and Dinant, readied their arms.
Reports from the Builders' auxiliary machines were now coming in rapidly, and Carpenter ordered immediate translation of all messages. The news was grim: more berserker machines had landed on the Phoenix and were even now fighting their way inboard.
Carpenter remained in command on the bridge, while on the captain's orders Prinsep swiftly deployed his people to guard the passageway through which they'd entered. Their armored forms took shelter as best they could in niches and corners, and behind hastily mobilized service robots.
In moments the enemy was upon them, in the form of bizarre shapes darting forward at inhuman speed. In a hail of fire and force, fighting side by side with the Builders' defensive robots, they tried to protect the bridge and other vital installations against the boarding machines.
Kensing, his senses ringing with the violence of battle, saw Nick in suit-form on his right fighting until a swiftly advancing berserker caught him and crushed the suit to scrap. On Kensing's left, Havot and at least one other Solarian went down, to be dragged off by friendly service machines, whether bound for medirobots, or simply for disposal as dead flesh, Kensing could not tell.
And then, quite suddenly, the shooting stopped again. Prinsep was saying in his helmet radio that an all clear had been sounded, and Sandy Kensing realized that he himself was still alive.
Still, for long moments, he had trouble breathing. Until word came that contact with the station had been restored . . . and yes, Annie was still there. She was still alive, and for the moment safe.