Starhammer by Christopher Rowley Read Free Book Online

slaughtered?"
    "I was running as fast as I could. He started out in the shrubbery, I sensed it then. That's what tipped me off. If he hadn't paused to take some poor fool girl's scalp out there I would have missed him completely. He probably would have killed twenty of your top forty and gotten clean away. Arnei Oh has been at the top of this game for years."
    "Game? Are you mad?"
    "Game, Mr. Baltitude. I take it that you don't much concern yourself with how these things go on, since they mostly do take place down on the ordinary rent levels. Perhaps you should follow the newscasts more closely. There's a war on out there, these crazies versus the rest of the universe. That's the way they like it."
    "Daddy, you're wrong, completely wrong. Now will you please get me a medic, I want some painkillers!" pleaded Melissa Baltitude. "This hurts terribly!"
    Slowly Baltitude backed away, and then he turned and strode off toward the ambulances.
    Jon got to his feet. "Well, Miss Baltitude, I think I'll be getting along now. I don't think this conversation is going anywhere. So, good night then."
    "But I don't even know your name."
    "Iehard. Operative Ex-five Double One. Tell your daddy to complain directly to my section head, whose name is Copter Brine." Jon turned and stumbled off to the ambulances.
—|—
    In the control chamber of the great machine, the Keeper progressed through a utilities check. Although the crew was unaccountably absent, the machine's routines went on undisturbed.
    As it had every so often in the eons of loneliness, the Keeper noticed discrepancies in some sections. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the engineering complex enemy cells still diverted energy, in quite extravagant quantities, from the engineering section power grid. That perennial problem necessitated recharging the energy banks far more frequently than the original maintenance program had ordained. The Keeper had been forced to change programming levels in the effort to find a way around the problem. The Keeper had even grown additions to its own intelligence in the effort. None of the changes had been easy.
    The energy drain to engineering was frustrating. The Keeper did not have a real pain-pleasure circuit. In this, its programmable capacities were much less than those of other machines of its own era. It did have a node of dissatisfaction, however, related to failures in execution of prime programs. And over the eons the node of dissatisfaction had grown. The Keeper now had a very great urge to leave the Control Chamber and to go down to the Engineering section and find the annoying enemy cells that diverted so much energy, and render them permanently inoperative.
    That idea returned ever more frequently to the forefront of operations in the spherical computational area set inside its massive batrachianoid skull. Unfortunately, the prime program forbade the Keeper's leaving the control chamber before the crew, or its replacement, returned to duty. Eternal vigilance, that was the program's watchword. It was enough to make the Keeper snap its mechanical jaws in sheer frustration.

CHAPTER THREE
    Jon Iehard awoke from the usual set of nightmares: Hut 416 and huge, giggling pinhead guards and silent mass killers who wreaked awful havoc while he fought helplessly to prevent them. It was always the same. Sometimes he thought he might be better off if he didn't bother with sleep.
    Around him, his grungy little apartment seemed stale and even messier than usual. An empty booze bottle stood in the middle of a nest of dirty glasses. A pile of movie modules decorated the carpet along with the clothes he'd discarded last night.
    He moved, and groaned. His chest hurt like hell. He checked the timepiece. It was six thirty. The engineers would be lifting the filters soon for dawn. Throwing back the covers, he turned the TV on with an audible and examined the instacaf situation.
    With a hot mugful, he came back in time to see Blankette Va Vroe, the mayor with the