Part 13 (2/2)

Harry, in addition to his other tasks, had been given the job of calibrating the weapons that the human partic.i.p.ants in the attack were going to carry-another step on the checklist. This process involved tuning up the coded signals that would be exchanged between suits and weapons, and were supposed to distinguish friend from foe, a procedure that a.s.sumed added importance if and when it came to firing them in alphatrigger mode. Similar guns were built into several of the berserker-killing machines.

Another item on the checklist was to make sure all weapons were fully charged.

Doc, the only medic accompanying the a.s.sault team, had finally been forced to proceed with a task he had been putting off, that of getting checked out on the armored suit he would be required to wear.

Looking dubiously at the unpowered ma.s.s of inert metal, he asked Harry: ”Can we depend on this when the fighting starts?”

”It's about that time when I always get the feeling that I can't depend on anything. But you know what?

So far I've usually been wrong. Now, have you at least read the manual?”

Harry had been prepared to insist that he was going in with the primary a.s.sault team, and he was well satisfied that neither Cheng nor Lady Masaharu had any idea of a.s.signing him to any other job.

The great access of physical strength provided by the servo-powered suits was fun, in a way, exhilarating, but it too required some getting used to. Some equipment had already been damaged, and with some difficulty replaced. Miniature hydrogen lamps mounted in backpacks powered the suits' limbs, giving the wearer a kind of weightless feel, to which some people tended to become addicted.

Well, some might, but Harry wasn't having any. Dealing with the complicated hardware over the course of many years had made him something of a connoisseur. He had started out hating the stuff, but gradually had come to feel something like affection for some of it. Solid, dependable weapons and other combat gear had saved his skin more times than he liked to count. Still, for almost all his life he had believed that a man had to be crazy to go looking for a fight. And that went double if you were contemplating an attack on berserkers.

Louise Newari, standing among the majority of people who were soon to be evacuated, said to Harry: ”So now you have gone crazy.”

”Yeah, that's about it.”

Thinking about people who fought brought Satranji to mind, as a prime example-though maybe Del was just the man to pilot Chen into the inferno that he sought.

Harry had never particularly enjoyed even wearing a s.p.a.cesuit, or doing anything that made wearing a s.p.a.cesuit necessary. People tended to show surprise when he told them that, and he had never quite understood why.

Piloting in itself was almost always fun, but the way to do it was from the comfortable interior of a well-built s.h.i.+p. He had to admit, though, that the suit and other gear he had been issued on this base were well constructed; Winston Cheng's builders and armorers knew what they were about.

Gianopolous, still trying to find a way to get off the wanderworld and back to the safety of a laboratory somewhere, was not in on the final briefing. The Lady Masaharu, moving about in her own distinctive set of armor with what seemed perfect familiarity, was engaged with all the others on a last rehearsal of the plan: Once the raiders had ridden Gianopolous's tricky s.h.i.+p in past the outer defenses, the fierce protective barriers that must be presumed to exist on any berserker installation, the plan called for them to go for its inanimate heart with a commando crew of humans and machines.

Striking as swiftly as the machines housing their human bodies could be driven by human thought, optelectronic relays, and fusion power, they would destroy or disable or find a way to dodge whatever fighting machines opposed them. They would go on to locate the prison cells. Of course, such cells also could only be presumed to exist; the idea that any prisoners were, or ever had been, held at this hypothetical base was still only speculation, possibility grafted onto possibility, half wishful and half born of fear and horror.

The lady was going on: ”Very well then, suppose we've reached our goal. We occupy the interior of the enemy base, and inside it there is more than a dense ma.s.s of machinery, there is s.p.a.ce enough to move around. Suppose by that time we have discovered evidence of human life. What next?”

”The welfare of the prisoners will come first. What that will mean in specific details we won't know until we get there.” It might mean anything from quick mercy killing to joyous homecoming.

”All right. Next?”

”We have to somehow disarm any destructor charges that the enemy might have in place. We have to look for evidence of them, at least.”

The review went on. Presumably by the time any actual prison cells were reached, the surprised and thwarted enemy would have made some effort to summon help. If berserker reinforcements were available somewhere relatively nearby, so they could reach the scene in, say, a standard hour or less, the game of Operation Rescue would be up-but there was no use trying to take that into their calculations.

The speaker paused, looking from face to face. ”Then-a.s.suming some useful number of us are still alive at that point-we will gather, for the purpose of evacuation, whatever other life we can discover there.

Of course giving priority to the human. And, naturally, highest priority to the family of Mister Winston Cheng. And that of Harry Silver.”

To talk of rescue and evacuation is all pure fantasy, insisted an interior voice of reason in Harry's ear.

The only likely scenario is that all three of our s.h.i.+ps will be blasted into clouds of atomic particles, a few seconds after the base defenses pick us up. But Harry had given up on the voice of reason some time ago. Despite the fact that Louise Newari would like him to listen to it.

When the crew had finished talking their way through the rehearsal there was a pause. Everyone was staring at a holographic model of their objective, a blurry image that was the best the machines could do with the spa.r.s.e information available. There had been no point in trying to create any detailed mockup of berserker defenses, or to model the base itself in any detail. The recon images were simply not good enough to let the planners do much more than guess any of the details. About all they could be sure of was the chain of half a dozen domes, smoothly graduated in size.

Sooner or later, in an anticlimax to the final planning session, someone murmured: ”When you spell the whole thing out in detail, it begins to sound insane.”

Logic insisted that as the hours and days went by, the chances must be steadily declining that any human prisoner would be found alive-and that any that might be found would still be recognizable by their next of kin.

There were no public discussions of that last possibility, and none were needed.

But eventually someone raised the point.

The answer was: ”Not really. Our chances can't actually be getting smaller-not if they were zero to begin with.”

On one occasion, years ago, Harry had been perfectly sure that Becky was dead. That had turned out to be all a mistake, an illusion brought on by an ordinary accident. But now Harry wanted to be done with illusions. He wasn't going to let Winston Cheng's crazy fatalism, that sometimes sounded like optimism, trick him into believing that the woman he loved could be miraculously resurrected one more time. The universe didn't work that way. Unless the universe itself turned out to be some kind of an illusion. Which, when Harry thought about it, would be all right with him.

If you thought about a problem coldly and logically, then all illusions concerning it were supposed to pa.s.s away. Well, weren't they? Harry had never yet been able to think about his own tragedy with any clarity.

The shock had simply been too numbing, overwhelming. And now, when at last he was able to look clearly at the grim reality, he saw . . .

”What do you see, Harry?”

”I see myself.”

”I don't understand . . .”

”I see myself turning into a kind of goodlife.”

”What?”

He had seen himself looking for death, embracing death. Not the warmly dead embrace of a s.e.x robot.

Worse than that. He had become a death-seeking device of flesh and blood . . .

The rehearsal on the base was interrupted by a message from thes.h.i.+p of Dreams .

Winston Cheng, looking exalted, and at the same time hollow-eyed and very old, was making a final speech to the a.s.sembled human members of his secret task force. Harry thought that the tyc.o.o.n actually looked ill, but at this point that hardly mattered.

Del Satranji, occupying the pilot's chair aboard the yacht, was now and then visible in the background.

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