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Solarian attack, was going to leave him any chance at all.
Landing his shuttle again on the station's flight deck, oblivious for the
moment to any other conflict taking place on board, Dirac was welcomed by
Varvara Engadin and Carol, the latter looking even more than ordinarily
demented and distraught.
"Where's Scurlock?" Carol demanded, looking with wild eyes past the Premier
into the little empty shuttle.
"He decided to stay back there on the berserker. I don't need him. Where's my
wife?"
"She's gone into the ten-cube," Varvara informed him, and paused.
Then she added bitterly: "I thought perhaps you had come back for me."
Dirac at the moment had no interest in what Varvara thought,
or said. He snapped: "I'm going after her. You'd better wait here."
And he stalked on in his armor, toward the ten-cube.
Scurlock had indeed elected to remain with his old protector, the berserker.
He was in his heart glad to be rid of the Premier, and he had no wish at
all to go back out into those other, dangerous places. The machine
had fitted out a snug little anteroom, just inboard from a small private
airlock, a room as big as he needed, and comfortable with properly humidified
air, easy gravity, and a few items of furniture. There was even a
little holostage, offering a means of looking out into space. But
Scurlock wasn't really interested in those.
The little anteroom had another door, in the inboard bulkhead, obviously
leading to regions deeper inside the machine. But that door hadn't opened yet.
Maybe it never would.
When the shuttle docked again at the airlock, Carol got out of it alone and
came into the little room.
Scurlock smiled a twisted smile to see her, and that she was alone. She
smiled back, and even seemed to relax a little. It was almost like the old
days, the two of them all alone with the great berserker. He had the feeling
that the machine was once more going to take care of them.
He had come to realize that it was only when other people came
around that trouble started.
Dirac found, as he had expected, that the ten-cube was firmly in Nick's
control. This time the Premier did not have Loki at his side, but he refused
to let that lack deter him. He pushed on.
He had gone quite a distance inside the Abbey, as far as St.
Michael's chapel in the north transept, when he was brought to a halt by a
startling sight. This was the tomb of Lady Elizabeth
Nightingale, mounting on its top eighteenth-century statues that despite
their nature had somehow escaped Dirac's notice until now, here among
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a thousand other antique images. Skeletal
Death had been carved bursting out of a tomb, drawing back a spear with
which to skewer the cringing Lady Elizabeth.
Meanwhile a stone man, presumably her husband, stretched out an arm to try to
block the blow.
"Father," said a soft voice behind him, and Dirac spun around to discover that
Nick , the optelectronic thing that had once been
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his son, was there, clutching a weapon that the VR circuits molded
visually into a barbed lance very like the stone one wielded by
Death.
"So, you'll never learn!" the Premier snarled, and raised his own
weapon and fired point-blank.
Commodore Prinsep did not want to admit the fact, even to himself,
but he feared that the tenuous link of communication between his party
and their friends back in the station might now have been broken. No more
messages were coming through.
Quite likely the break had not been accidental. The Solarian
expeditionary force had just caught a glimpse, at a range of forty meters or
so, of a mobile machine very much resembling a berserker boarding
device. Havot had snapped off a shot at it, but with no visible effect.
If the enemy's plan had been to trap the small band of human challengers, it
seemed that the trap might well be closing now.
However that might be, the commodore had no intention of trying to
turn back. Instead he continued to concentrate to the best of his
ability upon the original objective: to go after the berserker's
central brain and at all costs to neutralize it.
That was the only way to win. But Prinsep could admit in the privacy of his
own thoughts that it was really a bleak and almost hopeless prospect; anyone
who knew anything about berserkers understood that it would be difficult if
not impossible to disable or destroy the brain without setting off some
final monstrous destructor charge.
At that point, as Dinant now bitterly remarked, all their seeming
success so far would mean very little.
The version of Nick who was still accompanying Prinsep's
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people in suit-mode pressed forward in a fierce search for his hated
father.
Now that he was here on the berserker, one unanswered question that
had lain for centuries in the back of Nick's mind was once more
nagging him insistently: exactly what had happened to Frank Marcus all
those many years ago?
Almost three hundred years had passed since the arrival of
Frank Marcus's intriguing and enigmatic last message, in the brief interval
when he, optelectronic Nick, had been the only conscious entity aboard
the yacht. But the memory of Nick still
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preserved without detectable degradation every word, every tone and shading in
that voice. It had been an odd but very human voice, produced by
mechanical speakers that were driven ultimately by the neurons of an
organic Solarian brain.
Of course, as Nick was well aware, eventually an epoch must arrive, thousands
or tens of thousands of years in the future, when even his memory
would fade.
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And he reflected that such a span of life would be part of what he would
give up if-when-he finally succeeded in his renewed ambition of
equipping himself with a fleshly body.
But the last message from Frank Marcus had never ceased to puzzle him.
Thousands of times he had played back those words and their tones, out of one
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