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And then that voice too was buried, drowned out, obliterated by the explosive violence resulting from
the full-power application of a starship's drive, not only deep within a planet's gravitational well but
almost literally buried within Godsmountain's mass. Suomi, heavily protected by his padded bunk and
bracing himself as well as he was able, was still shaken as if by the jaws of a glacier-beast, flattened
against the bulkhead next to his bunk, then forced away from it again, only saved by his straps from being
smeared against the stateroom's opposite bulkhead. The room's regular lights went out, and
simultaneously an emergency light glared into life above the door.
There followed a sudden cessation of acceleration, a silence and a falling that went on and on. Then the
fall ended with another bone-jarring crash, loud and violent but still far closer to the humanly endurable
on the scale of physical events than was that first detonation drive.
The ship seemed to bounce, crashed again, teetered and rocked, and came at last to a shuddering rest,
her decks tilted at somewhere near forty degrees from the horizontal. Now all was quiet. The screen in
Suomi's stateroom was effectively dead, its surface only flickering here and there with electronic noise.
Suomi unstrapped himself from his bunk and climbed the crazy slope of the deck to reach the door. He
had failed to pick up loose objects before entering combat and breakage in the stateroom had been
heavy, though there were no indications of basic structural damage. The strength of the hull had probably
saved the ship from that.
The stateroom door opened forcefully when he unlatched it, and the dead or unconscious body of a
soldier slid in, trailing broken-looking legs. Suomi stuck his head out into the passage and looked and
listened. All was quiet and nothing moved in the glare of the emergency lights. Here too deck and
bulkheads and overhead were still in place.
He turned back to the fallen sentry and decided that the man was probably dead. Guilt or triumph might
come later, he supposed. Right now Suomi only considered whether to arm himself with the man's
sword, which was still resting peacefully in its scabbard. In the end Suomi left it there. A sword in his
hand was not going to do any good for anybody, least of all himself.
He thumped on the door of Barbara Hurtado's stateroom and when a weak voice answered he opened
the door and climbed in. Amid a kaleidoscopic jumble of multicolored clothes from a spilled closet she
sat in a heap on the floor, wearing an incongruous fluffy robe, her brown hair in wild disarray, leaning
against a chair that must be fastened to the deck.
"I think my collarbone is broken," she said faintly. "Maybe it isn't, though. I can move my arm."
"I'm the one who did it," he said, "Sorry. There was no way I could give you any warning."
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"You?" She raised her eyebrows. "All right. Did you do as much damage to those sons of beasts out
there?"
"More, I hope. That was the idea. Shall we go out and see? Can you walk?"
"Love to go and see their broken bodies, but I don't think I can. They've got me chained to my bunk,
which I guess is why I wasn't killed. The things they were making me do. Always wondered what
soldiers were like and I finally found out."
"I'm going out to look around."
"Don't leave me, Carlos."
Things in the control room were very bad, or very good, depending on your point of view. It was closer
to the drive than the staterooms were, Suomi supposed. Lachaise, strapped into the central, padded
chair, was leaning back with eyes open and arms outflung, showing no wounds but very plainly dead all
the same. Intense localized neutron flux at the moment when the drive's fields collapsed was one
possibility in such disasters, Suomi remembered reading somewhere. Lachaise had perished happily, no
doubt, in blind obedience to his god, perhaps believing or hoping that he really was killing Johann
Karlsen. In the name of glorious death& yes.
Around Lachaise, the priests and soldiers who had been helping and watching him had not been
strapped into padded chairs. Neutrons or not, they now looked like so many bad losers in the
Tournament. This many lives at least had the berserker harvested today. Some of them still breathed, but
none were at all dangerous any more.
The main hatch was still open, Suomi discovered, looking down at it from the control room, but it was
completely choked with broken white masonry and massive splintered timbers; part of the Temple or of
somebody's house perhaps. The ship had come to rest within the city, then. Probably a number of people
had been killed outside the ship as well as in it, but Godsmountain had not been leveled, a lot of its
people were doubtless still alive, and whoever was left in charge should come digging his way into the
ship eventually, probably wanting to take vengeance for the destruction.
With some difficulty Suomi made his way back to Barbara's stateroom and managed to lodge himself in
a sitting position by her side. "Exit's blocked. Looks like we wait together."
He described the carnage briefly.
"Be a good boy, Carlos, get me a pain pill from my medicine chest, and a drink."
He jumped up. "Of course. I didn't think-sorry. Water?"
"First. Then one of the other kind, if everything in my bar isn't smashed."
They were still sitting there together, about half a standard hour later, when after much noise of digging
and scraping from the direction of the entrance hatch, Leros and a troop of armed men, swords in hand
and in full battle gear, appeared in the stateroom's open door. Suomi, who had been listening fatalistically
to their approach, looked up at Leros and then closed his eyes, unable to watch the sword's descent.
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Nothing descended on him. He heard nothing but a faint multiple clinking and jangling, and opened his
eyes to see Leros and his followers facing him on their knees, genuflecting awkwardly on the tilted deck.
Among them, looking scarcely less awed than the rest, was the man in gray, armed now with sword
instead of hammer.
"Oh Lord Demigod Johann Karlsen," said Leros with deep reverence, "you who are no robot, but a
living man, and more, forgive us for not recognizing you when you walked among us! And accept our
eternal gratitude for again confounding our ancient enemies. You have smashed the death-machine within
its secret lair, and most of those who served it also. Be pleased to know that I myself have cut out the
heart of the arch-traitor Andreas."
It was Barbara who-perhaps-saved him then. "The Lord Karlsen has been injured, stunned," she said.
"Help us."
Five days later, the demigod Johann Karlsen, he who had been Carlos Suomi, and Athena Poulson,
both of them in fine health, sat at a small table in a corner of what had been the Temple courtyard.
Shaded from the midday Hunterian sun by the angle of a ruined wall, they were watching the
slave-powered rubble clearing operations making steady progress in the middle distance. There the ship
still lay, fifty or sixty meters from the Temple complex, surrounded by a jumble of smashed buildings,
where it had come to rest after the drive destroyed itself.
Besides the cultists killed inside the ship or executed by Leros later, at least a score of people, most of
them people who had never even known of the berserker's existence, had died in the cataclysm. But still
Suomi slept well, for millions of innocent folk across the planet lived and breathed.
"So, Oscar has explained it all to me, finally," Athena announced. "They promised him a chance, a
fighting chance, to get at the berserker and destroy it if he cooperated."
"He believed that?"
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