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 a.s.sault 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 a.s.sured 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, andShip 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sumption was correct.

The armored fingers of Harry's right-hand gauntlet were closing on the b.u.t.t of the carbine, but he knew that anything he might be able to do with it would be much too little and too late.

THIRTEEN.

If Harry had not been b.u.t.toned into a full suit of armor, with his helmet on, the concussion might well have cost him an eardrum or two.

Harry wished he had had the chance to distribute a few more shooting irons to his colleagues. Not that it would have been likely to do them a h.e.l.l of a lot of good. The main entry hatch, leading directly into the lobby just outside the common room, was blasted violently open from outside. Harry's eyes and mind registered the stark image of one anonymous person inside going down at once, almost cut in half by fragments. In the next second, berserker boarding machines came pouring in, across the lobby floor and a moment later into the wide common room itself.

From the first crash of the break-in, Harry had never doubted that these were real berserker boarders.

Traditionally such machines were built to the approximate size of ED humans, the better to cope with ED hatches, pa.s.sageways, and controls. No paddies this time, and no fakes-you might as well mistake a house cat for the carnivore used as berserker fodder in the Trophy Room.

Some specific but not enormous number of them were coming in, too fast for him to count, through the main airlock leading to the dock-which might well have been left unlocked, or even with one of the double doors standing open, as it had been most of the time. n.o.body had wanted to take the time to think about defense, let alone spend time and effort on that line.

The enemy bodies came in only a narrow range of sizes, but there was considerable variation among them in shape, and also in the weapons with which they were equipped.

In the midst of deafening blasts and crashes, Harry's thumb was releasing the safety on the force-packet carbine. The weapon was already fully charged-he liked to keep all of his tools that way-and fate granted him almost a full second in which to shoot the nearest berserker three times, smashing it to rubble, before another machine was suddenly in his face, not dealing death but simply trying to take his weapon away from him. The sound of gunfire peaked around him-he was not the only badlife who had been armed and almost ready.

Harry knew from experience that in a good strong suit and with a bit of luck he might almost be able to hold his own in this kind of wrestling bout-depending, of course, on just what model of killing machine he had to face. His current foe was beginning the match with more arms than Harry had at his disposal, but almost at once Harry was able to even the odds a bit, getting a double grip on one appendage and breaking it off close to the root. The enemy paid no attention to the loss, but in the next instant some other human being had shot it, finishing it off.

Force-packets from his fusion-powered carbine pulverized and melted the charging machine that got in their way. Fragments of berserker metal went flying back, while other pieces continued forward with the impetus of its charge.

Any man or woman who really knew how to use an armored suit could augment effective human bodily strength to a level very close to that of a berserker machine of human size-but no suit could enable a man or woman to match this enemy's speed. Or its coordination.

Still, Harry had prevailed in the first round of the fight. As the timeless sequence of the combat unfolded, the suspicion flashed through his mind that while he was doing his best to blast and wreck the machines around him, they were only trying to disarm him.

Two more a.s.sailants were immediately coming after him. He fired at darting forms, moving with machine-tool speed, and missed.

Human bodies, some already dead and some still living, went flying this way and that. Screams echoed on the intercom, and there were sounds that Harry could not identify.

Flame flared around his helmet, the glare and heat both baffled by his statgla.s.s faceplate. Harry and one of the other a.s.sault team members who proved to have a knack for this sort of thing, both got their weapons working briefly, and some shattered berserker parts mingled with the other flying debris.

The action in the common room, and up and down the nearby sections of corridor, was fiercely fought, punctuated by violent explosions. There came a moment when Harry had one of the common room's cleared viewports in his field of vision, long enough to be able to see that theSecret Weapon had vanished from its berth at the nearby dock. An entire ship couldn't have been vaporized that quickly, not without someone noticing the blast, so it must have somehow managed to get away just ahead of the attacker's arrival. Who would have been aboard? The Lady Masaharu almost certainly, probably at the controls. There might not have been anyone else, as far as Harry could remember.

The modest hold of theSecret Weapon had just been freshly packed with special, undoubtedly illegal, robots, designed and built in one of Cheng Enterprises' many workshops, especially to kill berserkers.

Whether that hardware was going to work as designed or not, it seemed highly unlikely now that it was ever going to do anybody any good.

There was no time to sight, but at point-blank range it would have been difficult to miss. The white glare would have blinded Harry, or burned his face off, without his statgla.s.s helmet, and the blast in the confined s.p.a.ce might have destroyed his ears.

Something moving too fast for Harry to really see it grabbed the barrel of his carbine. Unable to knock it away, or pull it from his servo-powered grip, it bent the weapon's stubby barrel and tore free its connections to the power supply in his suit's backpack.

Some of Harry's teammates were fighting just as hard as he was. Others had been demolished before they could get moving, and one or two had tried to surrender-without success.

Harry got a good look in through someone's faceplate as the person died, or seemed to die. Doc had at last run out of good advice to offer.

Harry caught a quick glimpse of the bulbous tip of a berserker firearm, a shiny k.n.o.b in which he thought he could sense destruction swelling. But death did not leap out at him. Instead, grippers of enormous power were starting to close upon his arms and legs.

With a surge of effort, exerting the maximum power of his suit, he tore his body free of the enemy's grasp. His suit could help him move, but it couldn't provide him with any place to go. Conscious of the painful slowness of mere flesh and blood, he went scrambling, reaching, diving, rolling over a littered deck, trying to pick up a replacement weapon. He had almost reached the locker in which a box of grenades ought to be waiting for him- Just as his fingers touched the stock of a spare carbine, a berserker's grip closed on his left ankle. At the same time Harry's helmet rang like a gong, its statgla.s.s faceplate reverberating under the impact of a direct hit, vibrations dwindling away to nothingness in half a second. But the plate had saved his face.

Another impact smote his torso. Heavy suit and all, his body went whipping and hurtling through the breathable, carefully humidified air, now fogging with debris and escaping gases.

Blows that would have crushed the life out of an unsuited gorilla knocked Harry down. He was just congratulating himself on managing to hang on to the new carbine when it was gone, somehow torn cleanly from his grip.

He kept expecting some fatal impact to puncture his own suit, come right in through armor and fabric to find the ribs and heart, but so far he was still alive, despite an endless ongoing barrage of incidental and glancing blows, from flying fragments of debris and waves of heat, all of which his armor was capable of deflecting. He had the sensation of being pounded with heavy hammers. Nothing like this could just go on and on. But it did.

While the brawl endured, it seemed, like most fights, to be taking place in some domain outside of time.

But the decisive action could have been wound up in less than a minute, except that for some reason the enemy was holding back a bit.

It flashed through Harry's mind that everyone else on the wanderworld was dead, there might not be another human being alive, within light-years. But there were plenty of voices, and deadly purpose.

He was disarmed, and a machine was holding him down, flat on the deck. But- What was that across the room? A heavy handgun lay there, almost within reach of some human's lifeless hand.

With another explosive effort, Harry's muscles triggered his suit's servos into exerting a greater surge of power than his latest captor had been expecting.

Harry tore free yet again after being captured. He went rolling across the deck, grabbing up the handgun and then shooting from the hip. A reaching mechanical arm was blown loose at its shoulder.

Two more of them were stalking Harry, no, three. They were still coming after him, but not to kill. By now Harry was certain that they wanted him alive.

If he could somehow claw his way down to the magazine on the lower level of the base, where heavy ammo for ship's ordnance had been stored, and some still was, he was going to take a bunch of d.a.m.ned machines with him, on one climactic ride into glorious nothingness- The stalking, the shooting and the killing, dragged on for several minutes in real time. As the process wore on, Harry had ample confirmation of the fact that, for whatever mysterious reason, the attacking enemy was being somewhat selective in the methodical way it went about killing off these upstart badlife.

After he was at last effectively pinned down, rigorously bound in place then left unattended, Harry was aware that the noise had effectively died down, and all the shooting ceased.

Opening his eyes, he could see that the broken-in airlock door leading out to the dock had managed to reseal itself, providing an explanation for the fact that he was still able to breathe.

It didn't take Harry long at all to realize that some very effective manacles now bound his limbs-big, solid clamps, not little plastic strips. His hands, wrists crossed, were immovable in front of him, and his legs seemed to have been fastened to the deck.

It seemed that, after all, he was not the only human within light-years who was still breathing. The additional survivor, having been somehow peeled out of his or her heavy armor, without being quite finished off, lay on the deck a couple of body lengths away from Harry. The human body was still moving feebly, like some half-smashed insect.

The interior of the common room was no longer recognizable. The repeated gunfire in the confined s.p.a.ce had wrought terrible damage, removing several interior bulkheads and wrecking all kinds of equipment. Life-support systems were struggling to maintain atmosphere inside of walls cratered and riddled with wild force-packets.

One machine, while standing guard near the violated main entrance hatch, now resealed by some automatic repair system, also set to work like a busy housekeeper, using intense local bursts of ultraviolet light to sterilize the inside of all the rooms of microorganisms. Harry could detect the beam by the way some materials fluoresced under the ultraviolet.

Looking out one of the cleared ports, he could see only one s.p.a.cegoing berserker machine drifting around out there, presumably the same one that had disgorged the very efficient boarding party. To Harry, who thought he knew the usual types, this one did not appear to be a really sizable warcraft.

Specialized in some way, yes, he felt quite sure of that. But specialized for what?

A wave of faintness came over him, so he thought that maybe the air was going. Let it go . . .

. . . but in a few moments he was starting to recover. Somebody, something, wanted him to go on breathing for a while. And he was doing that. Winston Cheng's team had been decisively beaten, but not quite annihilated. Harry still breathed. The sound of his own breathing was about the only thing his battered ears still registered.

And in fact, as he gradually realized, he wasn't dying. Not yet. He was still essentially unhurt, though two-thirds of his helmet had been ripped or cut away, leaving his head exposed. The energetic and careful enemy had managed to bore several holes through laminated statgla.s.s a couple of centimeters thick, without destroying his face or even marking it. It was as if the machine had been determined to get a better look at Harry's countenance, and it hadn't trusted anything but direct contact to make sure.

Very early in the fight, Harry's battered brain seemed to recall, he had caught a glimpse of the world outside the station, the empty dock testifying that theSecret Weapon , the inventor's pride and joy, might have got away. Total absence suggested not complete annihilation, but clean escape. All well and good, if true. The next question was, what had happened to the two motherless armed yachts that had supposedly been standing by?

And, come to think of it, what about the courier that ought to have been here to carry away support personnel? As far as Harry could recall, it had been somewhat delayed, and he couldn't remember that it had ever reached the base. So, it had very likely been blasted on its way in. A more hopeful possibility was that while still on its approach it had somehow detected serious trouble ahead, and successfully got away.

It was quite possible that the attacking berserkers were still unaware of the existence of those ships, if the yachts had managed to pull out a couple of microseconds before the onrushing killers got the base clearly in their sights. But of course Harry couldn't really be sure about theSecret Weapon . From the position in which he had finally been pinned down, he could no longer see anything that might be going on out on the docks.

Starting to emerge again from the fog of battle, surrounded by ruin and wreckage, Harry was momentarily uncertain just where his captors had set him down. But the cleared ports provided easy orientation. For all the violent action he had been through, all the effort and gunplay, he seemed to have wound up still in the common room-or what was left of it-within a couple of strides of the spot where he had been standing when the fight started.

Loud banging and sc.r.a.ping noises, along with sounds of rending metal, came drifting down the corridors from other portions of the habitable s.p.a.ce, suggesting that the invaders were industriously searching every chamber and pa.s.sageway. Where they encountered bars or locks they would be breaking in. What were they looking for? Primarily for life, of course. Just part of their usual routine; they would be probing fiercely for niches and crannies where anything from a human to a bacterium might be able to hide. As always, berserkers had their tools of destruction handy: flame-throwers, chemicals, projectors of ultraviolet or heavier radiation, to destroy anything that looked or smelled like life, to leave the chambers carved from the rock of the wanderworld sterile, and if possible uninhabitable.

Slowly Harry's attention was drawn back to his single fellow survivor, who was still lying on his/her back in a nearby tangle of wreckage. Well, of course it didn't make sense to call either of them survivors. The methodical enemy would soon enough get around to finishing them both.

Stretching his neck to peer over a jumble of fallen equipment, Harry could see just enough to tell that the other survivor was helmetless, like Harry himself. He couldn't be sure if his fellow victim still breathed or not.

Harry debated with himself as to whether he should try calling out, but decided against it. Rousing his companion to consciousness, if that proved possible, would not be doing him/her any favor. But presently there came evidence that life persisted; Harry could hear an occasional harsh breath through the ongoing din of cleansing and destruction.

In the next moment, Harry thought his own time had come. One of the sterilizing teams suddenly appeared, a trio of inhuman shapes studded with flaring nozzles, and was approaching him. They picked up Harry together with his ma.s.sive fetters, moved him slightly and carefully, just enough to get him out of their way while they scorched the deck where he had been, then set him carefully down again. He wasn't going to be killed just yet. Soon a machine would be coming around to ask him questions.

From his new position he was able, by stretching his neck again, to look out through the port beside the battered main entrance, and see the entire dock. Now his earlier impression of emptiness was solidly confirmed. Not one of the berths was occupied. In the middle background, at an estimate maybe no more than a hundred meters distant from the dock, drifted the armed berserker transporter that had so decisively carried in the landing party.

There was still no sign of the courier that had been due to arrive. And it was definite now, that the ship so finely crafted by the eccentric inventor had totally disappeared. Either theSecret Weapon had really got away, or it had been very swiftly captured and removed. Or else totally destroyed.

It seemed likely to Harry that Winston Cheng, and whoever had happened to be with him aboard the Ship of Dreams -Satranji, almost certainly, likely the Lady Laura, maybe a few others-had managed to get away unscathed. But it was impossible to believe that Cheng would simply cut and run in search of safety. The old man had already been determined on a suicide mission in search of his beloved people, and berserkers had never yet frightened anyone away from suicide. Satranji was a different case, but he had shown himself to be a danger freak, always looking for some bigger risk to take. The idea of simply escaping would probably not appeal to him either.

Harry couldn't be sure of what had happened to the others, the support people and his colleagues, partners in the a.s.sault team that was now never going to a.s.sault anything. Some of them were lying dead in this very room, but others might not be. Dazedly he realized that one or more of the people he was unable to account for might, if they were properly suited, be taking cover in some remote, dark and airless corner of the extensive century-old excavations. After all the noise, they'd be huddling with eyes squinted shut and fingers in their ears. Well, good luck. If they refrained from trying to use their helmet radios, he supposed they might extend their lives by a few more minutes, or even hours.

His own radio capabilities had been completely wiped out, along with three-quarters of his helmet, but outside of that all the suit's systems seemed still to be functioning. Except for the ruined helmet, his new suit of heavy armor still retained all its essential parts. Only an hour ago this equipment had been new and solid-but no more. It was somewhat scratched and dented, a good match for the way his body felt inside.

There was another reference point, now that he thought to look for it. One of the advertising holoshows built into the wall, and normally suppressed during the present occupancy, had somehow been jarred into activity by all the violence. It was going through one of its routines with the usual computer-generated cheerfulness.

The words appeared to come floating out into s.p.a.ce, clinging near the wall in an illusion of three-dimensionality: Where do you plan to spend your next vacation? Isn't it about time you gave thought to the idea of trying something different?

As Harry watched, he wondered what guidelines Cheng's systems used in targeting potential consumers.

Somehow the limited optelectronic brain inside the ad had detected his breathing presence, and was trying to size him up as a prospective customer. He wondered vaguely what means Cheng's inanimate sales force generally employed.They've got me wrong , he thought,my purchasing power has gone way down . Other offers flicked by, running the gamut from chewing pods to heavy industry. Cheng seemed to have a lot to advertise. There was an implication, though not a direct offer, that the companionship of s.e.x robots would be available in certain of Cheng's resorts. It seemed that the robotic sales force was sh.e.l.l-shocked.

Meanwhile, the noises of the ongoing search had moved on, until he could barely hear them. In the new quiet, as it became possible to begin to think again, Harry took note of the fact that some of the holograms used in battle planning were still visible on a flickering stage. A demonstration of grand futility.

Even as Harry watched, the image flared up one final time and then went out.

It was d.a.m.ned strange, but the one scene most demanding to be thought about at the moment was Harry's memorable encounter, many days ago, with the paddy in the alley, way back on Cascadia. Part of his mind was busy making useless comparisons between that encounter and this current one.

Paddy, way back in the dark alley all those long weeks ago, had been a stuffed nursery plaything compared to what faced him now. Paddy's grippers were childish toys by contrast with the clamps of force and steel now binding Harry's limbs, even servo-powered as they still were, into immobility.

Looking around, he was able to recognize a few berserker parts, now only burned and twisted wreckage that mingled with the other debris of the battle. Harry felt a certain faint satisfaction from recognizing part of this as his own handiwork.

Soon enough, one machine or another would be coming around to ask him questions. He would tell that machine as little as he could, though if it got really insistent he would probably wind up telling it everything. Sooner or later one of them would kill him. Harry almost felt impatient. At the moment there was not a single unit of the enemy directly in sight-a shifting of shadows in the uncertain light suggested movement somewhere down one of the side corridors, as if the enemy machines might be holding a conference there-but none of that mattered in the least. He wasn't going anywhere.

Again Harry's mind seemed to be drifting, awareness of his immediate surroundings fading out and coming back, which he supposed was not a bad thing for someone in his situation. It would not be at all surprising if the air was getting a little thin; with his helmet smashed, he no longer had a gauge to let him know.

While he waited for Death, in the mechanized and efficient guise it had put on for him, to come and finish the day's work it had so promisingly begun, Harry was shocked to hear a few words in a human voice.