than that of light.
Almost instantly after Mitch had felt the slugs’ ghostly passage, one red dot began to expand and thin into a cloud, still tiny in the viewing sphere. Someone gasped. In a few more moments the flagship’s own weapons, beams and missiles, went into action.
The enemy center stopped, two million miles ahead, but his flanks came on, smoothly as the screw of a vast meat-grinder, threatening englobement of the first line of human ships.
Karlsen did not hesitate, and a great turning point flickered past in a second. The life-fleet hurtled on, deliberately into the trap, straight for the hinge of the jaws.
Space twitched and warped around Mitchell Spain. Every ship in the fleet was firing now, and every enemy answering, and the energies released plucked through his armor like ghostly fingers. Green dots and red vanished from the sphere, but not many of either as yet.
The voices in Mitch’s helmet slackened, as events raced into a pattern that shifted too fast for human thought to follow. Now for a time the fight would be computer against computer, faithful slave of life against outlaw, neither caring, neither knowing.
The viewing sphere on the flagship’s bridge was shifting ranges almost in a flicker. One swelling red dot was only a million miles away, then half of that, then half again. And now the flagship came into normal space for the final lunge of the attack, firing itself like a bullet at the enemy.
Again the viewer switched to a closer range, and the chosen foe was no longer a red dot, but a great forbidding castle, tilted crazily, black against the stars. Only a hundred miles away, then half of that. The velocity of closure slowed to less than a mile a second. As expected, the enemy was accelerating, trying to get away from what must look to it like a suicide charge. For the last time Mitch checked his chair, his suit, his weapons. Chris, be safe in a cocoon. The berserker swelled in the sphere, gun-flashes showing now around his steel-ribbed belly. A small one, this, maybe only ten times the flagship’s bulk. Always a rotten spot to be found, in every one of them, old wounds under their ancient skins. Try to run, you monstrous obscenity, try in vain.
Closer, twisting closer. Now!
Lights all gone, falling in the dark for one endless second—
Impact. Mitch’s chair shook him, the gentle pads inside his armor battering and bruising him. The expendable ramming prow would be vaporizing, shattering and crumpling, dissipating energy down to a level the battering-ram ship could endure.
When the crashing stopped, noise still remained, a whining, droning symphony of stressed metal and escaping air and gases like sobbing breathing. The great machines were locked together now, half the length of the flagship embedded in the berserker.
A rough ramming, but no one on the bridge was injured. Damage Control reported that the expected air leaks were being controlled. Gunnery reported that it could not yet extend a turret inside the wound. Drive reported ready for a maximum effort.
Drive!
The ship twisted in the wound it had made. This could be victory now, tearing the enemy open, sawing his metal bowels out into space. The bridge twisted with the structure of the ship, this warship that was more solid metal than anything else. For a moment, Mitch thought he could come close to comprehending the power of the engines men had built.
“No use, Commander. We’re wedged in.”
The enemy endured. The berserker memory would already be searched, the plans made, the counterattack on the flagship coming, without fear or mercy.
The Ship Commander turned his head to look at Johann Karlsen. It had been forseen that once a battle reached this melee stage there would be little for a High Commander to do. Even if the flagship itself were not half-buried in an enemy hull, all space nearby was a complete inferno of confused destruction, through which any meaningful communication would be impossible. If Karlsen was helpless now, neither could the berserker computers still link themselves into a single brain.
“Fight your ship, sir” said Karlsen. He leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair, gazing at the clouded viewing sphere as if trying to make sense of the few flickering lights within it.
The Ship Commander immediately ordered his marines to board.
Mitch saw them out the sally ports. Then, sitting still was worse than any action. “Sir, I request permission to join the boarders.”
Karlsen seemed not to hear. He disqualified himself, for now, from any use of power; especially to set Mitchell Spain in the forefront of the battle or to hold him back.
The Ship Commander considered. He wanted to keep a Boarding Coordinator on the bridge; but experienced men would be desperately needed in the fighting. “Go, then. Do what you can to help defend our sally ports.”
This berserker defended itself well with soldier-robots. The marines had hardly gotten away from the embedded hull when the counterattack came, cutting most of them off.
In a narrow zigzag passage leading out to the port near which fighting was heaviest, an armored figure met Mitch. “Captain Spain? I’m Sergeant Broom, acting Defense Commander here. Bridge says you’re to take over. It’s a little rough. Gunnery can’t get a turret working inside the wound. The clankers have all kinds of room to maneuver, and they keep coming at us.”
“Let’s get out there, then.”
The two of them hurried forward, through a passage that became only a warped slit. The flagship was bent here, a strained swordblade forced into a chink of armor.
“Nothing rotten here,” said Mitch, climbing at last out of the sally port. There were distant flashes of light, and the sullen glow of hot metal nearby, by which to see braced girders, like tall buildings among which the flagship had jammed itself.
“Eh? No.” Broom must be wondering what he was talking about. But the sergeant stuck to business, pointing out to Mitch where he had about a hundred men disposed among the chaos of torn metal and drifting debris. “The clankers don’t use guns. They just drift in, sneaking, or charge in a wave, and get us hand-to-hand, if they can. Last wave we lost six men.”
Whining gusts of gas came out of the deep caverns, and scattered blobs of liquid, along with flashes of light, and deep shudders through the metal. The damned thing might be dying, or just getting ready to fight; there was no way to tell.
“Any more of the boarding parties get back?” Mitch asked.
“No. Doesn’t look good for ’em.”
“Port Defense, this is Gunnery,” said a cheerful radio voice. “We’re getting the eighty-degree forward turret working.”
“Well, then use it!” Mitch rasped back. “We’re inside, you can’t help hitting something.”
A minute later, searchlights moved out from doored recesses in the flagship’s hull, and stabbed into the great chaotic cavern.
“Here they come again!” yelled Broom. Hundreds of meters away, beyond the melted stump of the flagship’s prow, a line of figures drifted nearer. The searchlights questioned them; they were not suited men. Mitch was opening his mouth to yell at Gunnery when the turret fired, throwing a raveling skein of shellbursts across the advancing rank of machines.
But more ranks were coming. Men were firing in every direction at machines that came clambering, jetting, drifting, in hundreds.
Mitch took off from the sally port, moving in diving weightless leaps, touring the outposts, shifting men when the need arose.
“Fall back when you have to!” he ordered, on Command radio. “Keep them from the sally ports!”
His men were facing no lurching conscription of mechanized pipefitters and moving welders; these devices were built, in one shape or another, to fight.
As he dove between outposts, a thing like a massive chain looped itself to intercept Mitch; he broke it in half with his second shot. A metallic butterfly darted at him on brilliant jets, and away again, and he wasted four shots at it.
He found an outpost abandoned, and started back toward the sally port, radioing ahead: “Broom, how is it there?”
