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determining on an unremitting attack.
At last, after a long run of bad luck, the determination of leaders and fighters alike had them in a position
where they were ready to take advantage of superb good luck when it came. The enemy lay for the
moment exposed to a barrage of deadly punches.
Early journalistic reports credited the heavier land-based Solarian ships, the Stronghold farlaunchers
coming out from Fifty Fifty, with doing most of the damage to the enemy in fact, they had inflicted no
real damage at all.
Ensign Bright, still alive, still strong enough to wave vigorously with his good arm, was picked up by a
Solarian patrol craft, a long-range ship coming out from Fifty Fifty, on the day after the big battle, after
spending approximately one full day in space. What remained of the enemy fleet had withdrawn hours
ago they were heading back across the Gulf, with Solarian task forces in cautious, tentative pursuit.
Fortunately, he hadn't beentoo close just near enough to have a ringside seat at a comparatively
safe distance from the doomed machine, asPestilence , code name for the fourth berserker
carrier, burned and finally exploded.
One never knew whether a given big berserker was carrying human prisoners or not logic suggested
that the chances were very small, because such a situation was really rare berserkers were
single-mindedly devoted to killing people, not making them uncomfortable. But legend thought otherwise,
and the situation did come up from time to time. Well, ifPestilence had had any live victims in its
grip, they certainly hadn't come through all that alive.
THIRTY-THREE
Some berserker fighters, Voids, getting back into defensive position a few minutes too late to save their
last carrier, observed the little spaceship's liftoff from the flight deck. Most of these orphaned killers, all of
them doomed themselves, assumed that a small craft lifting from a berserker must be under berserker
control, while a substantial minority of the Voids' computer brains were quite as confused as organic
pilots in their place would have been, so that they found it impossible to compute any decision regarding
the small ship. It got away unscathed.
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"I never saw the like before," the escaping Templar told his new shipmate, in one of his more lucid
moments. "It looked almost exactly like a man might have convinced me except where its arm was
broken, I could see the hardware spilling out."
Flower was hardly listening. She was punching commands into the autopilot, not knowing or caring
where she was telling the yacht to carry her, as long as it got her away somewhere.
The fourth berserker carrier blew up, its fragments vanishing irrecoverably into a tricky local fold of
spacetime, some four standard hours after the other three, and seventeen hours, after being first hit by
Solarian missiles.
And with that the Battle of Fifty Fifty was effectively concluded.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had been beaten back yet again the heart of Solarian humanity
was still beating, and home could still be defended at something of a distance.
Compared to other great, decisive battles of Solarian history, the casualties in the battle of Fifty Fifty
were very small, almost trivial except of course when considered from the viewpoint of the individuals
and the units directly concerned. In this sense too it must be counted as a defeat for the berserkers. The
Solarians officially lost 307 people killed, and 147 small ships, in addition to one carrier and one vessel of
the destroyer class.
Some experts described the site of the battle, the environment out in the middle of the Gulf, as being
subject to cyclical changes analogous to those of day and night upon a planetary surface. Certain great
thin gas clouds tended to go through regular phases. This under the right conditions afforded ship captains
and admirals certain opportunities to maneuver free from all but the unluckiest chance of enemy
observation.
Pulsations from variable stars washed through nebulae of varying density, and synchronized pulsars
played a part in creating cyclic changes with a period of hours. Those stellar objects produced heavy
microwave transmissions, but almost all of their radiation was absorbed inside the gas.
Thus heavy disturbances in the interstellar medium could propagate in a periodic way, driven by pulsar
beams. Mere humans and machines remained to some extent at the mercy of forces that reduced to
insignificance anything that they might do.
Both sides naturally tried hard to predict how this "weather" was going to be days in advance. But
chaotic behavior in the gasses and dust clouds made it impossible to tell more than a couple of standard
days ahead.
In one of these periods of diminished visibility, causing confusion in the radar wavelengths as well as
visual, an interregnum that was expected to last for several hours, the Solarian fleet retreated toward
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Galactic east (i.e., roughly toward Port Diamond and Earth), rather than risk a direct encounter, at
comparatively close range, with the berserker battleships that were still believed to be somewhere in the
region. Those battlewagons were probably faster, in either kind of space, than any of the big carriers on
either side.
Still, all of the human recon efforts during the course of the battle of Fifty Fifty turned up no more than a
single battleship, theHate , though several times cruiser-class machines were mistakenly
identified as dreadnoughts.
Intelligence intercepts those that had been made before the enemy's last code change, or else as soon
as the new code was broken confirmed that berserker command had made a strategic decision to keep
those ships of the line little more than spacegoing gun platforms well in the rear. In fact no battleship
on either side ever saw action during the entire battle.
The berserker units that had been so fortunately (from the point of view of Life) kept in reserve could, if
brought forward in time, have done a superb job in reducing the land-based defenses of Fifty Fifty,
pounding the place into a lifeless, steamy fog bank of little particles. But before they would have been [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]