TWENTY-NINE

Grabbing a convenient flange of metal with one hand, Hemphill brought his drifting body to a halt, meanwhile holding up his free arm as a signal. Behind him, five spacesuited people strung out in single file caught hold of whatever projections of enemy hardware they could reach, stopping their forward motion. The six of them were near finishing their great climb, even in weightlessness it had certainly seemed like a climb, emerging from a vast interior darkness, into the faint wash of starlight that found its way in through the broad, jagged hole in the enemy's outer hull. Still the fugitives were essentially in shadow, with the Twin Worlds' sun on the far side of the gigantic vessel.

For the past twenty minutes or so, the fugitives had been climbing lightly, precariously, toward this providential escape hatch, working their way up and out, into the ghostly radiance of a hundred billion Galactic suns. For the last part of the ascent, with plenty of light and sufficient handholds, they had been moving with dreamlike ease up one jagged lip of the enormous hole. Now they found themselves some fifty meters above the flat plain of the enemy's flank, on a sharp, jagged pinnacle that was part of the raw edge of the gaping wound.

At several points in their flight so far, the fugitives had felt the monster start majestically to move away from them, the beginning of a slow and steady acceleration, as of some pre-programmed course correction, pervading the whole huge frame. Fortunately the g-force, so far, had been no stronger than Timber's or Prairie's normal surface gravity, and the six people trying to crawl out of the enemy's belly had been able to deal with it. When one direction suddenly became down, it gave them the sensation of climbing a narrow trail along the rim of a mechanical canyon tens of kilometers deep. The canyon's innermost recesses were swallowed in darkness, like the pit of hell.

Then something in the drive or astrogation system had evidently called for a correction, and a change in the direction of acceleration briefly established "down" in the direction the people had been moving. For a long few moments they had to cling fiercely to whatever tiny handholds they could find, like flies traversing some titanic ceiling, while below them the possibility of a long fall stretched out to infinity.

Hemphill had called a halt to give himself and the others a chance to look around. From the vantage point they had now reached, at the very rim of the gaping hole, he had a broad view of the enemy's outer surface, with perhaps a hundred square kilometers of it visible. It made a ghostly, unreal landscape under starlight, vast expanses of smooth metal studded with projections and divided by dark canyons. Here and there long ridges reared like ancient castle walls.

Having scrambled and groped through kilometers of darkness to get to where they were, the six had already begun to get a feel, an inner picture of their enemy's true, enormous size. They had gained an appreciation of this thing that had incidentally captured them, while in the process of fighting off an attacking fleet and killing an entire planet, the very world that half of them called home.

A vast expanse of sky had come into view, and Hemphill and his companions took an additional few moments to study it, assuring themselves of their current position within the solar system. The familiar constellations testified that they had not been carried halfway across the Galaxy during their long term as helpless prisoners.

Other sights, less reassuring, were also visible. The long axis of the enemy's massive body pointed in the general direction of a bright dot of light, one that could hardly be anything but a fairly nearby planet, and no other planet but Timber, even if the color did not seem precisely right.

There was of course no use trying to see or speculate where the Twin Worlds battle fleet might be at the moment. Even the biggest ships, unless actually radiating brightness, would be impossible to spot, without the help of instruments, at any distance beyond a few kilometers.

Hemphill could see, at a considerable angular distance from Timber, faintly radiant clouds, encompassing a sizable volume of space, that impressed him as looking the way the residue of some serious battle ought to look. Depending on their distance within the system, the clouds could easily be millions of kilometers long. They were not conspicuous against the starry background, but to space-trained eyes looking for something out of the ordinary, they stood out unmistakably.

Lee, clinging to a jagged spine of displaced metal close beside him, was looking in the same direction. "What is that?"

"Probably just what it looks like. Particles and gas. It means there's been more fighting while we were locked away."

After a few moments of disorientation, Hemphill got his bearings and took a more serious look at the planet Prairie, on which he had been born.

Another suited figure, just getting its bearings, raised a pointing arm. "There's Timber." The inner world of the pair, at least, was unmistakable, and at no great distance on the scale of solar systems.

"Yes, we've established that. Then that's Prairie over there, isn't it?"

"I don't think so. Doesn't look right."

"Then what is it?"

People tried to make sure of their position. The familiar stars of their home system's sky were clear enough, but even so, there was a general sense of disorientation.

"You're right, that's got to be Prairie. But you're right too, it shouldn't look that way."

People were squinting, tuning faceplates to try to filter out the dull, hazy glare of the Galactic background as they gazed at Timber. "They must have their full planet shields up. That would be natural."

"No." Hemphill was whispering. He had let go of, forgotten, whatever he had been carrying. The object just went drifting away, so someone else had to grab it. "No, that's not just the shields. We've seen Timber with the shields up before, and it didn't look like that."

"Then what?"

"Something else has happened to Prairie. And I think that Timber's shields are gone."

For a moment, with no means of getting anywhere in sight, and in their exhausted state, vague hints of great additional disaster seemed to carry more than their ordinary force.

Hemphill closed his eyes for a long moment. He was not going to be beaten. For some time now, not being beaten had been the foundation of his life.

He opened his eyes, and looked at what was near at hand, in the territory where he might be able to do something that made a difference. "All right, so something else has happened on the planets. Maybe it's dust in the atmosphere. None of that changes our problem, which is, how do we get off this hulk? How can we attract the attention of one of our own ships? Our people have to be out there somewhere."

The first spacer was silently affirming to himself his conviction that the berserker was not yet dead. Though it had finally been outfought, pitted against a collective stubbornness the equal of its own, battered by waves of attackers almost into immobility, the death machine was still deadly dangerous.

The berserker was moving away from a combined fleet of heavier warships, but its object was not a retreat out of the system. If the berserker, its enormous mass closing on Timber with a velocity of kilometers per second, could strike the planet squarely, then tidal waves, ground quakes, and the blotting out of sunlight might kill billions more.

Only the remaining Twin Worlds scoutships could catch it now and try to stop it.

The next period of acceleration started gradually, uncertainly, a function of drive units and control systems no longer able to operate with full precision. The movements caused were only tentative, deprived of all central control, like reflexes in a dying body.

But the system still remembered where its last target lay, and did its best to guide the hurtling mass in that direction.

When new acceleration caused the tail of the monster vessel to acquire the direction down, the six human beings on its surface began a scramble to find shelter.

In a moment all six were clawing their way back into the enormous cave from which they had just escaped. Only a couple of minutes ago, while still just within the thickness of the ruptured outer armor, they had crawled past a long, thick tube that looked identical to a large housing they had examined earlier, a unit that seemed to offer the chance of artificial gravity inside, possibly a vein or artery in the enemy's materials-handling transport system. The great machine must have many components that needed protection against the stress of powerful acceleration.

The outer surface of the tube, thank all the gods, was not heavily protected. What ancient builder could have imagined that armor would be needed here? A few moments' frantic work with hand tools ripped a hole in the side of it, a gap big enough for a human to climb through.

Each fugitive on moving inside the tube entered a domain where artificial gravity neutralized all outside forces, restoring the blessed sense of weightlessness. Outside the tunnel's wall, the g-force was steadily increasing, and the last cadet had to be hauled in by three classmates against a pull that was rapidly becoming more than standard normal.

Drifting inside the broad tube, again with no sense of up or down, Hemphill allowed himself a few deep breaths, despite the fact that his virtual power gauge was beginning occasionally to flicker red.

He remembered to keep his voice calm. "We may be all right for a while."

Lee sent a brief flicker of his helmet lamp down the long tunnel, in the direction that went curving deep into the enemy's body. Nothing was moving down there, nothing especially horrible appeared. "Yeah. As long as no cargo comes flying through this thing to wipe us out."

The interior of the long, smooth tube was a couple of meters in diameter; one of the cadets speculated that large missiles might be fed through it from some interior factory or magazine to a battery of launchers just inside the outer hull. Fortunately, there was no traffic of weapons currently in progress; maybe the launchers had been destroyed, or the connected magazine had been emptied.

"Maybe it's used up all its assets," Zochler offered hopefully.

"We can hope," Feretti grunted.

Safe for the moment in their shelter, the fugitives' next need was for a means of knowing when the acceleration had cut off again, and they could resume their search for something to give them long-term hope. The entrance they had cut in the tube's side provided a window for observation, but acceleration in itself was invisible. They needed to devise some means of testing.

Down on the surface of the planet Timber, the half dozen enemy landers that survived were all seriously damaged, worn down to a fraction of their original strength by waves of Twin Worlds fighting machines. In the course of their raid so far they had killed many thousands of units of intelligent badlife. Following a long-established protocol, the most powerful computer in the group had assumed the role of local battle director. Only a hundred meters of ruin and wreckage, and a semicircle of badlife armored vehicles, separated them from the Citadel's outer wall.

From every direction came a steady overland flow of reinforcements for the human side, in the form of machinery and humans, some of them summoned from the far side of the planet.

The orders transmitted to the landers from their master in deep space had been changed; their mission had altered from reconnaissance, probing attacks, to maximum destruction.

It was the last order that the central processor ever gave.

The central processor had transmitted its prediction of its own impending destruction to all of its auxiliary machines with which it could still make contact. It would be the programmed duty of each unit, operating independently, to fight and kill whatever life they were able to reach, with the usual priority assigned to the intelligent, resisting badlife. Whether the onrushing mass of the berserker in the sky was going to hit the planet or not was still to be determined.

At four million kilometers an hour, the berserker was closing steadily on its remaining major target, the planet advancing at a much slower pace toward the calculated place and moment of impact, which lay only a few hours in the future.

Its refueling process had been interrupted, and the berserker had not been able to take on as much new hydrogen as it had planned. But the onboard reserves of energy, in the form of fuel and otherwise, would be enough to see this fight to a conclusion, one way or another.

A hell of blue flame and disorganization was eating its way into and through the central processor. Among the last concepts it managed to retain was: The species of badlife that infests this system, whatever may have been its recent history, does not, after all, seem entirely ignorant of war. It seems well suited to carry out a stubborn resistance.

Besides, it was necessary to maintain a steady push of acceleration to counter the force of the small ships that were trying to throw the berserker off course.

The six cadets had once again survived. By pushing small objects (mostly scraps of enemy-provided food, dug out of inner coverall pockets) carefully out through the window of their shelter, and noting whether the fragments flew away or drifted near, the cadets were able to tell when the acceleration had ceased. Only a few minutes had passed since they took shelter. The inexorable depletion of their suits' power had progressed more slowly while they remained almost inert, but it still progressed.

The latest fragments of imitation food were drifting tentatively just outside the window. Hemphill drew one more deep breath. "Come on, people. We've got to move again."

Several Twin Worlds scoutships, crashed or landed on the enormous hull, were visible. Estimating distance was difficult in this environment, but Hemphill thought the nearest was between one and two kilometers away.

"Boss, if we can get ourselves to one of those..." Zochler sounded hopeful.

Hemphill was nodding. "We might be able to do ourselves some good." It was conceivable that though the ship was wrecked, its artificial gravity might still be on, and power functioning. Air would be abundantly available, and water and food, when breathing had ceased to be an immediate concern.

"It might even have a lifeboat." If they could cram their six bodies into a boat built for a scout's normal crew of three, that would offer a possibility of their all getting clean away. Of course, if there should not be room enough... but they would ford that stream when they reached it.

Crossing the great plain, it was necessary to avoid long stretches where sheer, featureless flat metal offered no purchase, nothing to grip or kick against for guidance or propulsion. The six people made the best speed they could, while remaining more or less together. If a strong jolt of acceleration should hit them suddenly, it would probably wipe them out against some nearby obstacle, or, at best, wrench the hull away from them and leave them drifting in interplanetary space.

As they progressed, a few more shot-up Twin Worlds scout-ships became visible, their wrecked bodies jammed into angles and crevices across the enemy's monstrous hull.

It struck Lee as amazing that every one of the party had managed to regain the berserker's outer surface. Here they clung on by one means or another against occasional jolts of mild acceleration. Searching the sky for help and meaning, Lee and Hemphill and their companions could see the familiar glow of Timber, not really more than a pinpoint yet, but still too big to be anything not belonging to the Twin Worlds system. Its natural color was still distorted by the drifting reek of battle clouds, and the persistence of defensive forcefields.

The six made the best speed that they could manage, following first a low ridge and then an irregular chain of impact craters across the pockmarked plain. The nearest downed scout-ship sat on the smooth metal surface at an odd angle, but did not appear to be tremendously damaged.

If they could get in, and systems were functioning, there was every reason to hope for protection against g-force, there was very likely to be water, food, and, above all, air, along with a functional system to recharge their suits.

But appearances had been deceiving. The closer they came to their chosen wreck, the worse it looked, especially when they were able to view it from a slightly different angle.

The party straggled to a halt. No one had any comment. "Which way do we go, chief?"

It wasn't a hard choice, and Hemphill pointed toward the nearest of the other downed scouts that were in sight. Now only a few minutes of life remained in any of their suits, a few minutes that might easily be canceled any second, if their captor should hit them with another hard jolt of acceleration.

As they approached their second choice, they could see what was holding this little ship in placethe heat and force of impact had, at a couple of places, welded the lower surface of the scout-ship's hull to that of their great antagonist.

Unfortunately, the hatch ordinarily used by the crew was on the side of the ship partially held against the stranger's hull, with no room for a human body to squeeze in between, and probably no way to open the hatch if it could be reached.

Moving around the compact vessel with some difficulty, it was hard to find anything to hold on toto try the cargo hatch, they discovered that the hatch was entirely gone, along with a good part of the surrounding hull. A hole had been ripped in the small ship's side, offering ample room for entrance into the cargo bay.

As the first cadet went through the airlock, a cry of joy went up, blessed air! One and two at a time, they entered.

The control room and most of the controls were intact, though the drive was ruined.

The young woman, Cusanus, gave thanks to all the gods, when, after hurling herself into the pilot's chair, she discovered that though the artificial gravity had been turned off, it was still operational. In another moment, the scoutship's deck had become a horizontal reference and people were standing on it, while the plain of surface visible through the cleared ports had taken on the aspect of a sloping mountainside. When the great crush came again, they might survive.

A plentiful supply of water remained in the onboard tanks. The automated galley had been damaged beyond repair, but preserved rations, water, and air, were all to be had in abundance.

People gratefully opened their helmets, gulping in plentiful recycled air. The next order of business for most of the cadets was to begin recharging their suits from handy outlets, against the possibility that some new problem would force them out again onto the airless surface.

The only indication of what might have happened to the ship's crew was the fact that the lifeboat was missing.

The holostages remained dark, but some of the communication gear was working. Lee got to work at once, trying to contact other ships.

Looking out across the square kilometers of their enemy's scarred flank, they saw by the apparent motion of the stars along the horizon evidence of some relatively gentle force that was now pushing the berserker sideways.

This was not the powerful push of the berserker's own main drive, but the nudging of several scoutships that had managed to get right up against its hull. The acceleration produced in the huge mass by this means was comparatively weak, variable, and intermittent, but it was definitely there. The enemy tried to correct against this force.

One cadet, recognizing the cause of the perturbation, yelled: "Our people are still fighting!"

"But with scoutships?" Kang Shin wondered.

"You fight with what you've got." Hemphill told him. "If you count the defensive patrols, we've got more scouts by far than any other type of vessel. Using the scouts makes sense when you think about it."

"I'm thinking. But it would seem to mean the admiral's flat-out desperate."

"Up against this tough bastard, I don't doubt that he is."

"And if you were driving your ship on a ramming mission, you'd look for a vulnerable spot to hit, rather than just slamming into this outer hull, judging from what we've seen, it's just a sheer slab of armor."

In fact, it seemed obvious that most of the rammers would be trying to hit the same place, or one of a small number of similar places, huge wounds where the berserker's outer layers of armor had already been blasted and torn and burned away.

Even as the cadets watched, another scout came ramming in, sending jolts of new vibration through their great opponent's battered frame. On approach the little ship was very difficult to see, against the background of the Galactic night. Closing with the enemy at bullet-speed and faster, perhaps taking evasive action, its live crew, if any, there would be no more than one volunteer pilot, would have gone scrambling for the lifeboat with only seconds to go before impact, relying on the autopilots to eject the boat on some survivable trajectory in the fraction of a second just before impact.

The autopilots had not been designed to carry out such an extremely specialized task, and Lee could imagine that programming them for a mission like this would be far from a sure thing.

They would try to resist, reject, even engage in self-destruction, unless the command was properly repeated and reinforced. Some of them might crash their lifeboats on ejection, while others missed the target altogether.

The cadet who had been posted as lookout in one of the cleared ports of the wrecked scout raised a cry.

He had caught sight of someone or something moving across the scarred plain of the enemy's surface, following their own path from the direction of the great damage.

Feretti had taken the weapon's officer's chair, and was making an effort to get some of the scout's surviving armament to focus on the movement. It was a tough job, looking out at the real world through cleared ports, without a holostage to bring in trustworthy, carefully detailed images.

Then Lee, who was standing lookout, let out a yelp of joy. "Don't shoot! It's Random, and he's dragging someone with him. He must be trying to save Dirigo!"

Making radio contact with the robot was not difficult. Random, slowed down by the necessity of dragging along a live captive, while not doing the unwilling client any substantial harm, made slow but steady progress toward the wrecked scoutship that had become a sanctuary, and followed directions to enter through the cargo bay.

The cadets were startled by their first close look at the helpless human the robot had in tow. One of them demanded: "Who's this? Where's Dirigo?"

Random outlined the facts, describing the scene in the theater and the other that followed shortly, deep in the enemy's guts and near the central processor. His optelectronic memory was vivid and precise, and could be played back later on a holostage. Though Random had not witnessed the shooting, he could confirm that Dirigo was dead, and his prisoner a suspect.

The prisoner himself only glowered at his fellow humans, and was disinclined to speak. Based on Random's calmly factual description of this man's behavior, they agreed it would be unwise to set him free in their current circumstances.

The robot also gave its informed opinion that the enemy's central processor was dead.

A scoutship had no compartment that could be readily adapted to serve as a brig, and the six cadets, twice the usual complement of crew, were crowded enough without setting aside one of the few rooms as a prison.

Hemphill decided to use the tiny cargo hold to confine their captive. Huang Gun, fastened into a suit newly recharged with electrical power, its radio selectively disabled, was held pinned at the bottom of the cargo bay, in a forcefield normally used to secure cargo. He was unable to move a limb, but could turn his head inside his helmet to draw water and liquid food from the suit's small reservoirs. He was able to talk with the people he'd been trying to kill, but he had very little to say.

Huang Gun was able to see out of his place of confinement, looking up through his helmet's faceplate, and through the great gash that had been ripped in the side of the cargo bay in the crash.

The musing executioner could not see Timber from where he lay. But a tormenting vision formed all too clearly in his mind: how, on that great ball of rock and soil and gas, badlife by the billions still swarmed and bred. He was morally certain that they were still being born, even on the very threshold of annihilation. They were still fighting, with their fierce determination and their inferior weapons, against what remained of the master's independent landing parties.

But he still had faith in the master. The master would find a way to reach the executioner, his faithful servant, and kill him, and kill them all.

Lee and Hemphill came to the cargo bay and tried to talk to him, but the prisoner resisted interrogation, and they had the robot's dependable word that this man had attempted suicide, in an effort to aid the enemy.

He refused even to identify himself, except to say: "Goodlife."

Hemphill frowned at him. "You're what?"

Huang Gun would not repeat it.

"Goodlife. All right. What in all the hells does that mean?"

Random, who had joined the men, verified the syllables, but offered no interpretation.

Hemphill gave the prisoner a hard look. "Goodlife, hey? Actually you don't look good at all. Well, old man, you may be eager to die, but that's just tough, it isn't going to happen. Somehow we're going to get you off this hulk alive, and eventually down to Timber. People down there are going to want to spend a long time talking to you."

And Lee added: "If you think your life's a burden now, just wait till we get you home."

Most of the six were looking out through the scout's cleared ports, while the monster that they rode expended its last fuel in a final kamikaze charge. Observing from their safe nest of generated gravity, they could see bits of metal, fragments of some other scout-ship, or of the enemy, whisked away, or wedged into a crevice and slowly deformed by the mounting g-force.

Then acceleration abruptly ceased. No human knew it yet, but the last elements of the berserker's drive had failed.

Minutes later, the cadets succeeded in making radio contact with a functioning scout, at a range of only a few thousand kilometers.

An answer to their plea came quickly, half smothered in a torrent of noise. "Say again, where are you?" Captain Ella Berlu and her crew were nearly exhausted, after days of practically continuous duty, but they were up for one more effort.

"We're six cadets, seven people in all, holed up in a crashed scout, on the hull of this damned thing that captured us when it caught our launch. It's almost dead!"

There was a pause. "You're right on the berserker's hull?"

"On the what? Say again?"

"The berserker." There was a pause. "Everyone's calling it that."

Ella and her crew had only a hazy idea of who they were supposed to be rescuing. But such details hardly mattered. The people somehow stranded on the monster were human, and the idea was to get them out.

The cadets' suits had so far served them marvelously well, exceeding their original stress and endurance standards in this cold inferno. But Hemphill and Lee could see already that their suits, however tough and reliable they had seemed in time of peace, were primitive models, not up to the real requirements of space warfare. "To begin with, stronger and longer lasting power supplies."

"Yeah, and certainly some kind of armor, something, so those things' grippers won't be able to just..." He raised both hands, and made slow tearing motions.

While crouched in the cabin of the derelict scoutship, waiting for the promised help to arrive, the two had a discussion about it. They came to quick agreement that they were not armed or armored with anything like the effectiveness of the berserker's own small combat machines.

"Looks like we might possibly make it."

"We'll make it." It sounded like Cadet Hemphill intended to enforce that conclusion by sheer willpower, if necessary. He added: "The next time we fight one of these damned machines, we must have armored suits. Surely that can be done. And better weapons. And a much better power supply, to provide weapons with some punch."

"We'll need stronger weapons not only in our hands, but on our ships."

"More shields, more speed, more of everything."

"We're not doing too badly."

"Yes, we've survived, and yes, we can be proud of that. But the fact is, we've also been lucky. Lucky that the damned thing was damaged before it arrived in the Twin Worlds system. We thought we were perfecting superb weapons, we just didn't know.

"We're not able to do much of anything against this enemy. Not yet." Hemphill raised his hands and looked at them, flexing the fingers and watching them as if contemplating the puny weakness of a human body.

Another inadequacy of the suits was that they were not self-sufficient over extended periods of time; miniaturized hydrogen power lamps had not yet become feasible. The servo power of the limbs was limited by, among other things, how much energy was stored.

Ella Berlu was easily able to land her scoutship, its outer hull all scorched and battered from some earlier skirmish but still functioning, quite close to the downed vessel, and pick up everyone who was still alive.

When Hannah Rymer came out of the little ship to inventory the eager assembly of prospective passengers, and try to figure out where room could be found for them in her own vessel, she paused, staring in confusion at the motionless figure clamped into the ruined cargo bay.

"What's this? Who's this?"

"A prisoner." Hemphill's exhausted voice was terse. "Captain, I'll explain as we get moving. We'd better go."

"I'm assuming the prisoner comes too."

"You bet your life he does. It's very important that he be kept alive. I'll stay behind myself if necessary."

Somehow they got everyone crammed into the functioning scoutship. To save space, the robot Random was left behind, assigned the task of monitoring conditions on the hulk, of watching carefully for any sign of renewed berserker activity, and transmitting reports. Some of the people who had shared a berserker dungeon with the robot felt that leaving Random behind was somehow wrong. But of course Random did not mind in the least.