ramming prow opened the berserker’s skin. In five seconds of crashing impact, the prow vaporized, melted, and crumpled its length away, the true hull driving behind it until the Solar Spot was sunk like an arrow into the body of the enemy.
Mitch spoke for the last time to the bridge of the Solar Spot, while his men lurched past him in free fall, their suit lights glaring.
“My panel shows Sally Port Three the only one not blocked,” he said. “We’re all going out that way.”
“Remember,” said a Venerian voice. “Your first job is to protect this ship against counterattack.”
“Roger.” If they wanted to give him offensively unnecessary reminders, now was not the time for argument. He broke contact with the bridge and hurried after his men.
The other two ships were to send their boarders fighting toward the strategic housing, somewhere deep in the berserker’s center. The marines from the Solar Spot were to try to find and save any prisoners the berserker might hold. A berserker usually held prisoners near its surface, so the first search would be made by squads spreading out under the hundreds of square kilometers of hull.
In the dark chaos of wrecked machinery just outside the sally port there was no sign yet of counterattack. The berserkers had supposedly not been built to fight battles inside their own metallic skins—on this rested the fleet’s hopes for success in a major battle.
Mitch left forty men to defend the hull of the Spot, and himself led a squad of ten out into the labyrinth. There was no use setting himself up in a command post—communications in here would be impossible, once out of line- of-sight.
The first man in each searching squad carried a mass spectrometer, an instrument that would detect the stray atoms of oxygen bound to leak from compartments where living beings breathed. The last man wore on one hand a device to blaze a trail with arrows of luminous paint; without a trail, getting lost in this three-dimensional maze would be almost inevitable.
“Got a scent, Captain,” said Mitch’s spectrometer man, after five minutes’ casting through the squad’s assigned sector of the dying berserker.
“Keep on it.” Mitch was second in line, his carbine ready.
The detector man led the way through a dark and weightless mechanical universe. Several times he paused to adjust his instrument and wave its probe. Otherwise the pace was rapid; men trained in free fall, and given plenty of holds to thrust and steer by, could move faster than runners.
A towering, multi-jointed shape rose up before the detector man, brandishing blue-white welding arcs like swords. Before Mitch was aware of aiming, his carbine fired twice. The shells ripped the machine open and pounded it backward; it was only some semi-robotic maintenance device, not built for fighting.
The detector man had nerve; he plunged straight on. The squad kept pace with him, their suit lights scouting out unfamiliar shapes and distances, cutting knife-edge shadows in the vacuum, glare and darkness mellowed only by reflection.
“Getting close!”
And then they came to it. It was a place like the top of a huge dry well. An ovoid like a ship’s launch, very thickly armored, had apparently been raised through the well from deep inside the berserker, and now clamped to a dock.
“It’s the launch, it’s oozing oxygen.”
“Captain, there’s some kind of airlock on this side. Outer door’s open.”
It looked like the smooth and easy entrance of a trap.
“Keep your eyes open.” Mitch went into the airlock. “Be ready to blast me out of here if I don’t show in one minute.”
It was an ordinary airlock, probably cut from some human spaceship. He shut himself inside, and then got the inner door open.
Most of the interior was a single compartment. In the center was an acceleration couch, holding a nude female mannikin. He drifted near, saw that her head had been depilated and that there were tiny beads of blood still on her scalp, as if probes had just been withdrawn.
When his suit lamp hit her face she opened dead blue staring eyes, blinking mechanically. Still not sure that he was looking at a living human being, Mitch drifted beside her and touched her arm with metal fingers. Then all at once her face became human, her eyes coming from death through nightmare to reality. She saw him and cried out. Before he could free her there were crystal drops of tears in the weightless air.
Listening to his rapid orders, she held one hand modestly in front of her, and the other over her raw scalp. Then she nodded, and took into her mouth the end of a breathing tube that would dole air from Mitch’s suit tank. In a few more seconds he had her wrapped in a clinging, binding rescue blanket, temporary proof against vacuum and freezing.
The detector man had found no oxygen source except the launch. Mitch ordered his squad back along their luminous trail.
At the sally port, he heard that things were not going well with the attack. Real fighting robots were defending the strategic housing; at least eight men had been killed down there. Two more ships were going to ram and board.
Mitch carried the girl through the sally port and three more friendly hatches. The monstrously thick hull of the ship shuddered and sang around him; the Solar Spot, her mission accomplished, boarders retrieved, was being withdrawn. Full weight came back, and light.
“In here, Captain.”
QUARANTINE, said the sign. A berserker’s prisoner might have been deliberately infected with something contagious; men now knew how to deal with such tricks.
Inside the infirmary he set her down. While medics and nurses scrambled around, he unfolded the blanket from the girl’s face, remembering to leave it curled over her shaven head, and opened his own helmet.
“You can spit out the tube now,” he told her, in his rasping voice.
She did so, and opened her eyes again.
“Oh, are you real?” she whispered. Her hand pushed its way out of the blanket folds and slid over his armor. “Oh, let me touch a human being again!” Her hand moved up to his exposed face and gripped his cheek and neck.
“I’m real enough. You’re all right now.”
One of the bustling doctors came to a sudden, frozen halt, staring at the girl. Then he spun around on his heel and hurried away. What was wrong?
Others sounded confident, reassuring the girl as they ministered to her. She wouldn’t let go of Mitch, she became nearly hysterical when they tried gently to separate her from him.
“I guess you’d better stay,” a doctor told him.
He sat there holding her hand, his helmet and gauntlets off. He looked away while they did medical things to her. They still spoke easily; he thought they were finding nothing much wrong.
“What’s your name?” she asked him when the medics were through for the moment. Her head was bandaged; her slender arm came from beneath the sheets to maintain contact with his hand.
“Mitchell Spain.” Now that he got a good look at her, a living young human female, he was in no hurry at all to get away. “What’s yours?”
A shadow crossed her face. “I’m—not sure.”
There was a sudden commotion at the infirmary door; High Commander Karlsen was pushing past protesting doctors into the QUARANTINE area. Karlsen came on until he was standing beside Mitch, but he was not looking at Mitch.
“Chris,” he said to the girl. “Thank God.” There were tears in his eyes.
The Lady Christina de Dulcin turned her eyes from Mitch to Johann Karlsen, and screamed in abject terror.
“Now, Captain. Tell me how you found her and brought her out.”
Mitch began his tale. The two men were alone in Karlsen’s monastic cabin, just off the flagship’s bridge. The fight was over, the berserker a torn and harmless hulk. No other prisoners had been aboard it.
“They planned to send her back to me,” Karlsen said, staring into space, when Mitch had finished his account. “We attacked before it could launch her toward us. It kept her out of the fighting, and sent her back to me.”
