Winston Cheng's visits to the wanderworld were never more than two days apart, and there was at least one standard day when he dropped in twice. Harry didn't see much of the old man during most of these appearances, but thought that Cheng was starting to look grimly, quietly frantic. Not that Harry was paying much attention to the behavior of other people; he had enough trouble trying to organize his own.
On some of his drop-in visits Cheng got no farther than the dock, or the enclosed platform just inboard from there, an air-filled space where everyone could take helmets off and converse in relative comfort. There the tycoon stood or sat talking to the Lady Masaharu, never penetrating any farther into the base, before he jumped back on the ship that had brought him, or another that was standing by, and hurried away again. Doubtless there were business matters that needed his personal attention, even more than usual when he was forced to marshal extra resources to prepare and supply his striking force. Once he told Harry that he wanted to give, as much as possible, the impression of maintaining his regular activities. At other times Cheng walked through very nearly the whole base, looked at everything there was to be seen, talked to everyone, and prolonged his visit for several hours.
Mostly the old man arrived in one or another of his fast business couriers, but there came a day when Cheng arrived aboard his favorite armed yacht, Ship of Dreams, and abruptly ordered Del Satranji to drop everything else that he was doing to take over as his personal pilot.
As Harry heard the story later, Satranji seemed almost stunned. He immediately protested that he wanted to be involved directly in the fighting.
Cheng assured him that he would be. "I can assure you, my friend, that by staying close to me you will see all the action anyone could possibly want."
The pilot had tried further argument, everything short of threatening to quit. But Satranji's toughness, in a matter like this, had to crumble when it ran into the old man's. Cheng closed the discussion by saying Satranji could follow orders, or he could pack his things and leave, and an immediate decision was required.
There was one slight hitch involving the robot Dorijen. Be it wife, chattel, or assigned to some other category, Cheng would not have it on his yacht, and Satranji was forced to put his robot into storage on the base.
Now, at last, the nature of the secret weapon could be revealed to the whole assault team and their support people.
Cheng said to the assembled crew, or as many as could be gathered at one place at one time: "The secret weapon I have been talking about is, as you will see in a few days, indeed a ship. Not a very large vessel, or especially heavily armed. But it has, from our point of view, one outstanding attribute: it can disguise itself as a Type-B berserker."
That made an impression on Harry, and the vast majority of his other listeners, and drew a murmur.
The old man went on: "The disguise is not only visual, but extends to identification codes and signals. It can carry a combat crew of six humans, and has a cargo bay that can hold several tons of machinery, such as small assault vehicles. If all goes well, it will enable us to reach the enemy base before the enemy knows we're anywhere around."
Harry raised his eyes abruptly, to give Cheng a searching stare. It was Lady Laura who met Harry's gaze, and her lips silently formed the one word: later.
Winston Cheng continued briefing his team. He was convinced that the mission's chance of success depended very heavily on deception, on being able to fool the defenses of the enemy base. To trick casual human observers ought to be comparatively easy—but to deceive the real thing, with all its IFF capabilities, over a span of approach time that might equal a full minute or even more, would pose a tremendous challenge.
Minutes after the meeting broke up, Lady Laura told Harry privately: "Naturally, Mister Silver, it will have occurred to you that this vehicle, or something like it, could have been used in one or both of the abductions. That the identifiable berserker hardware recovered in one case might have been deliberately seeded in nearby space in an attempt at deception."
"Naturally. Except I still don't know why anyone would want to do it."
Cheng stepped in. "I assure you, we have considered the possibility, however faint. But we have solid evidence that the ship we are about to purchase was in dock on the day I lost the people dear to me; and very recently I have learned that the Templars were testing the same ship when your family was taken. To the best of our knowledge, no similar craft exists anywhere."
Cheng's investigation had still not been able to discover any connection existing between their families before the kidnappings, nor could Harry remember anything that might have formed one. Whatever association existed must have been forged during the few days that had passed between crimes. The only alternative seemed to be that the second set of kidnapping victims had been chosen purely at random, a coincidence so monstrous as to be a practical impossibility. (Harry remembered the caution about coincidence that he had recently received from Doc.)
No matter what explanation was tried, puzzling questions remained. The fact of the first meeting between Cheng and Harry, even if berserkers had learned of it as soon as it took place, would seem to give them no reason to go out of their way to pick on Harry's family. Human tycoons and pilots were holding meetings all the time, a habit they shared with much of the rest of their restless race.
Endless speculation was possible, but no certainty, except for this: something—or someone—had deliberately selected Becky and Ethan as targets, in the process effectively destroying Harry's life.
Again and again, Harry found himself calling up a mental image of Satranji, who was no longer on the base, but spending all his time aboard the Ship of Dreams . . .
Harry was scanning that mental image again when another, very different possibility drifted into Harry's consciousness. The thought was an ugly one indeed, and Harry didn't quite know what to do with it. Did he find himself here on this forsaken wandering rock, preparing for death in a berserker fight, because he had been deliberately set up, his life ruined, by Winston Cheng himself?
But no. That seemed insane. Imagine the old man as ruthless as a forceblade, still he would not collaborate for a moment with the very berserkers he had dedicated himself to destroy. Cheng's sincerity was very convincing—no, that was too mild a word. Say instead maniacal. Would Captain Ahab work out a deal with Moby Dick, feed the great white whale fresh victims, just to get a certain harpooner signed on for a voyage? And would Moby Dick be likely to cooperate?
Crazy as it seemed to suspect Cheng, were the alternatives really all that much better? Once more, what were the odds that the enemy had selected the two sets of kidnap victims purely at random?
Harry could hear himself making small sounds of anguish in his throat. Every once in a while it all started to come over him like this. He had to squeeze his eyes shut, and bring up his hands to his head, as if to hold his brain together. Never mind the logic, never mind the reasoned search for answers. What had happened to Becky and to Ethan was still beyond the limit, outside the domain of things that he could think rationally about.
Winston Cheng, convening in the common room a meeting of all the humans who could be gathered at short notice, told them that he and his coordinator had decided to make an all-out effort to recruit Professor Aristotle Gianopolous, designer and builder of the fake berserker Winston Cheng wanted to use in his raid, as a consultant.
A quarter of an hour after getting his instructions, Harry was alone in one of Cheng's standard couriers, driving the ship toward the Templar base where he would collect the secret weapon.
Obeying a sudden impulse, Harry programmed in an unscheduled stop en route, allowing his machinery to pick the exact point in normal space, specifying little more than that it must be light-years away from anything and anyone. After days of the constant pressure of people in a small space, he needed time, a little time at least, just to be alone.
Following his inner prompting further, he even put on a spacesuit, something that he almost never did except when absolutely necessary, and went out briefly through the courier's airlock. Why was he doing this, just for the nonexistent fun of it? Just to enjoy the feeling of being so extravagantly isolated from other human beings, from every form of Galactic life?
And from life's remorseless enemy as well.
He stared for a few moments at the naked Universe, then, as usual, had to turn away from it, sheltering his gaze against his ship, a curve of mostly metal only a couple of meters from his face. Looking at his dim reflection in the faint brightness of a protective forcefield, clinging to the smooth ship's metal flank. Harry caught a glimpse of his own reflected face, mildly distorted.
His nose looked even worse than usual.
The two of them had been lying in bed somewhere when Becky asked, seemingly out of nowhere: "Why didn't you ever get your nose fixed, Harry?"
"What's wrong with my nose?"
"What's wrong with it? It's bent around until it's pointing at your ear."
"Come on. That is a slight exaggeration. Anyway I like my face the way it is."
"Why, for God's sake?"
"I need it to remind me of a couple of things." He shifted his position.
Becky knew the signs of when a line of questioning ought to be abandoned. She had moved closer and kissed her Harry on the arguable nose. "If you like it that way, then I do too."
"Feels straighter already."
If you started to cry inside your helmet it could create a minor problem. But actually he wasn't going to start. Not even close. He had already gone way beyond anything that tears might do to him or for him.
The Templar base commanded by Emil Darchan was perhaps the most important one the order had established in this sector of the Galaxy, and for it, for reasons doubtless similar to Cheng's, the Templars too had chosen a wanderworld, free of gravitational or political allegiance to any solar system.
WW 132CAB was reasonably located, fairly readily accessible to convenient nodes of flightspace travel. Outside the boundaries of any solar system, the Order was free to run its own shop in its own way, not having to contend with the laws or sensitivities of any planetary or system government.
The capabilities of base defense here were very serious, in sharp contrast with those on WW 207GST. Harry, though he was more or less expected, needed a quarter of an hour to negotiate his way in on approach. In the meantime he was free to look around, and his ship's scopes showed him interesting things.
The base as a whole was a sprawling installation, covering several square kilometers of airless rock. Harry could see another huge domed structure that he assumed would be the Trophy Room, a research facility where all the Templars fighting and working in this sector of the Galaxy conveyed any items of berserker hardware that they were able to find, steal, or collect in the aftermath of combat. This particular Trophy Room was generally acknowledged to be one of the best maintained by any organization in the known Galaxy. Members of the Order were justly proud of this establishment, claiming that neither the Space Force nor any local authority could boast its equal. Information gleaned by the work in its laboratory and on its proving ground was distributed freely, not only to other Templar forces, but to the Space Force and any local government that wanted to be in the loop.
Material for the Trophy Room scientists and engineers to work on was hard to come by. Harry had heard it estimated that, during the centuries of their bitter war against ED humanity, something like a thousand berserkers had been destroyed for every one captured with any of its vital systems still intact.
Harry brought his ship in for a landing, heading as directed for the main hangar, which hospitably opened the doors of a vast forcefield airlock in the surface of its enormous dome.
Harry had announced his arrival from half an hour out, and the abbot, his tall figure arrayed in the full robes of office, was waiting on the dock to welcome him.
"Harry! You're looking great!"
Harry, being shaken in a double grip, then pounded on the shoulder, doubted that. The smile on his own face felt strange, but it was there. "Hello, Emil."
The abbot looked pretty much unchanged since Harry had seen him last. Generally energetic, and somewhat excitable. Perhaps the flowing white hair was just a little longer, and the bright pink face, despite its owner's apparently robust health, a little closer to looking apoplectic.
"Welcome to our base."
"It's looking great too."
It was the first time Harry had seen the place, though at their last meeting, six or seven standard years ago, the abbot, then newly appointed, had invited Harry to pay him a visit at any time. The buildings and fixtures were a mixture of old and new design. Some of the equipment had a venerable look, while some was absolutely state-of-the-art.
Harry's old friend promised him a tour of the entire base before he left.
"That would be great. We'll see if there's time."
When the initial greetings and comments had been got out of the way, the abbot proclaimed: "Harry, you come at a most opportune time!" The abbot's voice was pleasant to listen to, though it was not the vocal equipment you'd want to have if you were inclined to sing. "You must see what we have, at this minute, in the Trophy Room! Beyond a doubt, one of the most important projects ever undertaken at this base! Or, quite possibly, at any other."
The man's enthusiasm was contagious. Almost against his will, Harry found a corner of the dark cloud lifting from his mind, himself getting interested. "Then I can't wait to see it. What's going on?"
"A berserker courier, my friend! What do you think of that? An entire courier!" The two words came out in a dramatic whisper. "Some of our enthusiastic young people have recently captured one with its data storage practically intact."
The abbot's mood dimmed for a moment. "It is true that we lost one scoutship, and three members of our boarding party were killed, may the First Cause bless them, in disabling the destructor system."
"A full-sized courier?" Harry stared. Even snaring smaller messengers intact was considered something of an achievement.
"I promise you. One of a precise type I have not seen before, almost the equivalent of a new species."
"That is impressive."
"One of our very skillful young officers commanded the interception team, and everything worked beautifully. It happened just—well, I shouldn't tell even you precisely where. Highly classified, you know."
"I understand."
"But all in good time. Before we go to the Trophy Room we must have a talk. Come, come along to my cell! Have you eaten recently?"
"Yeah. I'm okay."
The abbot frowned conspiratorially, and lowered his voice a notch. "Then how about a little nip of something to warm the blood?"
"Well. You know me. I'm not likely to say no to that."
A visit from an old friend was a social occasion, offering a good excuse to break out a private and semiofficial bottle of brandy.
With Abbot Darchan talking almost steadily, and now and then gripping Harry by the arm again, they walked past meeting rooms and storerooms and what looked like schoolrooms, some empty and some occupied with busy classes. Harry saw, with no great surprise, that what the inhabitants of this abbey called a cell was actually—at least in the head man's case—a suite of rooms, small in number and size but running somewhat to luxury.
He could see no evidence that anyone was cohabiting with Darchan, though in this branch of the Order long-term, monogamous sexual relationships—between real people, of course—were quite acceptable. The religious symbols on the walls, forming quite an eclectic collection, all looked to Harry like valuable works of art. But all this was still remote, making only a slight impression; other matters still dominated Harry's mind, and the memory of Winston Cheng's palace was still reasonably fresh.
So it was with the brandy. The taste was everything it should have been, but in Harry's current mental state it afforded no real enjoyment. The Templars had so far failed spectacularly in their centuries-old mission, to rid the Galaxy of berserkers—but on the other hand they had done a lot to keep the bad machines from succeeding in their own effort. And in other ways the Order had done humanity some favors. The grapes pressed to yield the wine distilled to make this drink had doubtless been grown at Templar vineyards, maybe in some cavern on this wanderworld, or on another, most likely beneath a finely tuned spectrum of artificial light. As Harry recalled, it had not been alcohol that was Emil's weakness in his unhallowed secular civilian days. It was probably a good thing for the abbot's career that he had never met Dorijen.
Harry stared into his glass, swirling the contents around. He was thinking that this was the first real drink he could remember having since he had sampled Winston Cheng's scotch during their first never-to-be-forgotten meeting. Thinking that Becky had never been much of a drinker, though she would have one now and then . . .
Abbot Darchan had put his sandaled feet up on an antique hassock, and was letting out a sigh of contentment. "By Karlsen's mustache, Harry, it must be—what? Eight standard years? Ten?—since we've had a chance to talk."
"Yeah. It's been way too long."
"It has indeed." Here the abbot began to reminisce about some battle in which both of them had taken part. Presently he was making an effort to date events by that standard.
"I seem to make it seven years," Harry announced. He had been computing silently, by the use of other landmarks in his life, that the battle must have taken place a year before he and Becky had finally tied the knot, almost two years before Ethan was born. Even the calendar now seemed to revolve around the key dates of his demolished life.
". . . probably you are correct," the abbot was saying. "But good to see you, in any case, however long it may have been. By the way, that's a classy little ship you're driving. Yours?"
"No, just borrowed for the trip."
"You have no other crew, no passengers?"
Harry grunted something. The courier he had just docked was no more than a fairly representative sample of Cheng's extensive fleet, and probably not recognizable as belonging to the tycoon. "If all goes according to plan, I'll be sending that one back where it belongs on autopilot, and driving a different one away from here." He pushed aside his empty glass, and with a shake of his head declined a refill.
"Oh?"
"You sound surprised. I came here with the idea that my employer was buying a ship from Professor Gianopolous, and the professor was here already, more or less expecting me."
"Oh, the great man, the famous inventor. Aristotle." The abbot's tone gave the name more than a touch of irony. "Yes, he's here, all right. He's been waiting, though I wasn't sure just who or what he was expecting. As you probably know, we've been holding talks regarding this ship he boasts of as his invention. But you, Harry? You're going to work for him?" The abbot seemed to think that a dubious, unlikely proposition.
"Not for him, exactly. There's a kind of joint project being planned. I know, it looks like one of us is scraping the bottom of the barrel."
The abbot took a moment to consider. "Well, he's certainly not scraping the bottom of anything, not if he came up with you. I suppose your joint project is somehow going to employ his experimental ship . . . he brought the vessel here to offer us a demonstration, wanting us either to buy it, or invest in his ongoing work. Or both."
Harry sipped brandy. "You've tested the ship?"
"Yes."
"That was a nice short answer. Fairly extensive testing?"
"Yes, over a period of several days. But under a pledge of confidentiality. I'm afraid I can't discuss any of the results with you."
"All right. But you decided not to buy it."
"That is correct. The professor failed to be entirely convincing in his presentation . . . but I suppose I shouldn't discuss that either." Darchan waved a hand in a vague gesture. "Well, I won't pry into the nature of what seems a rather confidential project. Whatever the reason you're here, I'm glad to see you."
"Same here."
The abbot had paused as a new thought struck him. "And not just for old times' sake." He slapped his forehead theatrically with an open hand. "Great spirits of space, how could such a thing have slipped my mind? We had a bulletin come in—it wasn't that many days ago—from the Superior General's office. Your name was on a list and it caught my eye."
"Oh?" Harry was thinking that it was probably some old criminal charge. Right now he simply didn't care, except to be wary of the possibility that legal entanglement could loom up interfering with the way he planned to spend the next few days. He fully expected them to be the last days of his life.
The abbot had swiveled his comfortable chair to face the workstation in the corner of the room, and was rummaging optelectronically through reams of data, ghostly images of things and people flickering on a battery of small screens and stages, most of them evaporating again as fast as they appeared. Harry got up and moved to stand looking over one robed shoulder.
"Hah! Here we are."
Now Emil was getting a printout, while he went on talking. What he was saying and what Harry saw on the printout had nothing to do with criminal charges after all.
Abbot Darchan leaned back in his chair, and spoke in a voice that might have put across a sermon. "The Lifeless Ones, the servants of death, have thought up a new trick. They're custom-building assassin machines, each one dedicated to seeking out and killing a particular human being. The focus is on people they describe in a code that translates out as 'superbadlife.' There are about a hundred names on the list that someone in our order managed to intercept. Yours is prominent among them."
"I'm impressed," said Harry slowly. "I'm honored." He really was. In fact the news brought him about as close to enthusiasm as anything could have done these days. No human authority had ever awarded him a medal, and he doubted that any ever would, but this was better—insofar as anything, these days, could be truly better than anything else.
In the next moment, bleak realization was setting in. Of course this listing might easily have been the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It might have been the fact that killed his family, providing the enemy with a special reason to target them. That could mean that looking for any human goodlife traitors in the game was only wasted effort. There was no need for any malign intelligence, human or artificial, to be discovered lurking in the systems of Cheng Enterprises.
Harry had to force his attention back to the abbot, who was still nodding. " . . . yes, you should be impressed. Unfortunately, the machine we've got strung out on the trophy rack now has nothing directly to do with your designated assassin. We've dissected out the brain of a courier, as I said before, along with a few attached support devices. One that happened to be carrying a few scraps of useful information."
"Mind if I take a more thorough look at the list?"
"Of course not! I'm sorry, here."
Harry sat down with the printout in hand—suddenly his hand was slightly unsteady—and scanned it slowly, taking time to focus briefly on each name. He recognized one or two.
The name of Winston Cheng was indeed there, and so was that of Del Satranji, who wanted so badly to find a berserker that could offer him a real challenge. That he would succeed in that quest now seemed a good bet. Missing, however, were all the other members of the rescue expedition. Nor was Abbot Darchan himself among those who had been granted special status by the enemy; in fact Harry could not be sure that any of the people here marked for destruction were Templars. He thought in passing that that must irritate the Order.
Of course there was no way to be sure that this list was comprehensive. It might be only one installment of some kind of periodic bulletin. Prime targets for this standard month. Machines, fulfill your quotas.
Harry pondered for a few moments. Then he asked: "These dedicated assassin machines—do they go after their target's family members?"
The Templar looked thoughtful. "Good question. I haven't had any information on that point yet, but I shouldn't think so. The bad machines are very practical, as you know. The purpose here is to eliminate a dangerous life-unit, not to inspire him or her to seek revenge—but you don't have any family, as I recall."
There was a slight pause. It seemed that the news of the second kidnapping, at least, was still being effectively suppressed. "Right, I don't." Harry continued staring at the list. "One thing I don't have to worry about."
Escorting Harry on their way to visit the Trophy Room, the abbot detoured a few steps to the base library, saying there was another visitor who also wanted to observe the courier's interrogation. The additional visitor turned out to be the person Harry had actually come to this Templar base to see.
The abbot told Harry that before his arrival on base, Professor Aristotle Gianopolous had rather huffily declined the abbot's first invitation to visit the Trophy Room.
"I'm surprised."
"So was I. The implication seemed to be that we Templars and our investigations couldn't possibly tell him anything about berserkers that he didn't already know. Well, I'll try a little gracious coaxing."
Why bother? thought Harry. But then, no one was ever going to make him the abbot of anything.
Professor Gianopolous was a maverick scientist, an inventor working outside the regular military and industrial organizations, one who had developed a controversial theory of how berserkers might be deceived, and claimed he had constructed a spaceship that would do the job.
Harry had heard no details of the theory, but that was hardly surprising since Gianopolous was supposedly keeping his great ideas secret while trying to arrange some kind of profitable deal. But certain rumors, that had been passed in a whisper to Harry by the abbot, said that it involved a coding system of fathomless complexity, and required receiving and transmitting a lot of optelectronic signals.
The cavernous series of rooms was fairly well populated by a selection of Templars of both sexes and the full range of human age, from adolescence upward.
Entering the library, they had to probe deeply through the traditional hushed silence, into archaic-looking stacks and alcoves, to find the man they sought. He was dressed with a kind of muted flamboyance, a confusing effect exaggerated by the old-fashioned eyeglasses hanging on a cord around his neck. The twist of his thin lips suggested that he might have just bitten into a sour chewing pod. Behind him were what looked like the reserved shelves, containing, in considerable number, old books with permanent printing on their paper. In the foreground were the shelves of modern cybercodex.
Harry was briefly distracted, and came near being interested, impressed, at the sight of the old books. Volumes of ancient paper, even predating the era of space travel, with each page shimmering in its distinct modern forcefield binding.
Professor Gianopolous had a large table to himself, on which he had evidently been comparing two such fragile folios side by side. He looked up as if startled when the abbot and Harry approached, and rose to extend his hand when the abbot began to perform introductions. Harry was faintly surprised at the strength of the grip that met his own.
The professor's look seemed hopeful. "I have heard, sir, that you are an excellent pilot. That gives me hope that you will appreciate my ship."
"I've heard that you are an excellent designer and builder. I intend to give it a real try."