Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  The three of them, all keeping moving while they talked, discussed the situation with Simeon and Wilma and Gujar back aboard the Pearl.As Iskander had said, it looked as if Domingo’s instinctive decision to board the wreck might be justified.

  From the ship, Wilma’s voice came sharply, interrupting the discussion: “We’re starting to get some readings that indicate activity aboard that piece of junk.”

  The captain’s voice snapped back: “What sort of activity? What do you mean?”

  “It looks to me like physical movement. By objects approximately the size of people, making sudden starts and stops. It’s not you; we can distinguish your movements from this other stuff.”

  The faces of Polly’s shipmates were hard for her to see inside their helmets. Domingo’s voice came calmly: “If there were any independently functioning, programmable machines still here, I think they would have let us know already. What you’re detecting might be drifting bits of stuff.”

  “Might be. It’s hard to read anything accurately under these conditions. But to be on the safe side maybe you’d better get back to the launch.”

  “Scratch that. This whole operation is some distance from the safe side, anyway. We’re going on with what we’re doing.”

  Polly heard her captain’s fearless indifference, swallowed and went on with what he wanted her to do. Iskander naturally was doing likewise.

  The radio voice came again, relayed from the ship. “All right, acknowledge. We’ll continue to stand by.” The three people who were still aboard the Pearlwould be ready to provide what help they could for the three boarders in case of trouble; or, in the worst case, they ought to be able at least to get away with the ship and carry the news of a disaster. The people on the ship also had the task of recording data as it was transmitted from the trio of explorers.

  Exploration proceeded as rapidly as was feasible.

  Like her two companions, Polly jumped and jetted and clambered about the wreckage at a speed that she would have thought utterly reckless had it not seemed even greater folly to spend more time here than absolutely necessary. Still, she was sure that they were not going to be able to explore the entire hulk.

  The explorers were undoubtedly accumulating a lot of raw information. How much usefulness that information had, if any, would have to be determined later. Hand-held video units recorded whatever passed in front of them. Faceplates in armored helmets expanded the spectrum in which the human eye could see, even as they protected the eyes from overloading brightness.

  Drifting and clambering through this ruin filled with disorienting shapes and unfamiliar objects, Domingo saw no recognizable weapons and no vast stores of power such as would have been required to energize most types of the space-warfare weapons with which he was familiar. In this portion of the berserker too, some of the things he was finding looked like lab equipment. In fact, a lot of it looked like that. Yes, it had to be.

  But what was all the rest of this? The components of a miniaturized factory for the production of some kind of biological materials, as Polly had already suggested?

  Still, the only discovery Domingo really felt confident about as yet was that most of this was not weaponry, or direct support for weaponry, at least not any type with which he was familiar. He grew more certain of that the more he saw. There was no question that there had been some weapons on this thing once; on a berserker there always were. But the armament, especially if it were limited in quantity, would have been mounted on or just inside the outer hull, and very little of that hull was left. He hadn’t yet taken a close look at the remnant of surface that still existed, thinking secrets more likely to be found inside.

  It was amazing that any machine, even a berserker, could have taken a beating like this and still function well enough to propel itself this far.

  The strength of malevolent purpose …

  He moved around a shattered bulkhead, finding his way into yet another bay. Here were massive cylindrical objects—field generators, he thought, and of some complex kind. Not the usual type of generators that were used to create defensive fields or artificial gravity for human ship or inanimate killing machine. No, these were intended for something else … and they were clustered together oddly, as if in an effort to produce some kind of heterodyning …

  And what had all thisbeen, here, inside? Tanks, pipes, equipment for doing something chemically. Producing something, in quantity, he supposed. Beyond that it was very hard to guess.

  The problem of determining functions was only partially a result of the extensive damage and the alien design. Difficulty also lay in the fact that there was simply too much volume here, too many things, too much material for three harried, frightened people to assimilate or even to record on video in any endurable length of time.

  Vibrations in the berserker’s framework had been perceptible to the explorers ever since they had left their launch. Now the rumbles and shudders were growing stronger and running almost continuously through the enemy’s metal bones, for all Domingo knew presaging another and finally catastrophic blast.

  Now, every time Domingo touched a solid part of the berserker, his grip was shaken.

  Instruments attached to the captain’s suit registered another increase in the flux of radiation. No one spoke up about the increase, but everyone must have made the same observation he had. The readings were still within tolerable limits for the suits, but Domingo feared that they were high enough to make it hard for his people to concentrate on the job at hand.

  The captain himself had no trouble concentrating. What he was doing was necessary. He looked around him, making an urgent effort to get some overall sense of where he was, to form a picture of what this entire structure must have been like before the Space Force weapons had blown half of it away. This unit didn’t seem like a ship, in the sense of something built primarily for travel or combat. It was, to begin with, he thought, more like some kind of space station, built to stay more or less in one place, working on some job. And the body of the station—call it that—was heavily compartmentalized, or at least it had been before it had been wrecked. The implication, as Domingo saw it, was that different experiments, or possibly different production lines, would have been going on in the separate compartments.

  He and the two people with him had as yet explored only a comparatively small portion of this unit. The whole berserker was perhaps twice the cross-section and eight or nine times the volume of the Pearl.But so far Domingo had seen no evidence that it had ever held any human prisoners. Not Earth-descended, not Carmpan, not of any of the other known themes among the several recognized varieties of living Galactic intelligence. There was no trace recognizable of the life-support systems that would have been necessary to keep such prisoners alive. Nor were there signs of any cells, rooms or passageways where living victims might once have been held. Nor even of anything that looked like animal cages.

  He called his two fellow explorers on radio and questioned them. They had seen nothing of the kind, either.

  “Cages?” Polly asked. “Why should there be cages?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed a possibility.”

  Iskander, drifting closer from a distance, had a comment. “It’s not a prison, not an ark and not a zoo. But it issome kind of developmental lab. I’ll bet my next chance to own a ship on that.”

  Domingo was keeping his hands busy while he conversed, putting fragments of drifting material into a sample case. He answered: “I don’t know that I’d be willing to go that far. But this is certainly not a fighting unit. We’ve been through enough of it now to be sure of that.”

  Iskander, hovering close to his captain in effective weightlessness, seemed to shrug inside his armor. “So far we’ve given it a light once-over only. But I suppose you’re right, Cap.”

  “Assume I am correct.” Domingo snapped shut his sample case. “Then why was this unit traveling with a berserker raiding party?”

  “Probably berserkers have their logistic prob
lems, too. Maybe they’re moving their laboratory from one planetoid or system to another … how should I know?”

  Polly put in: “I’ve got a bigger question for both of you. Why are berserkers cultivating life? Are they experimentally trying to produce new forms?”

  In the reflected glow of the launch’s searchlights, she could see Domingo’s face inside his helmet; the captain seemed to be staring at the question as if his life depended on it. At last he answered. “I don’t know. But it would be a good idea to find out.” He looked around at the other two, who at the moment were both close to him. “And meanwhile, while we’re sitting around thinking things over, it’ll be a good idea for us to continue to survive. I think we’ve got enough information for a start. Let’s get ourselves back into the launch.”

  No one argued with that decision or hung back from its execution. And a moment after they had closed the hatch of the launch behind them, they were heading out of the berserker’s belly and back toward the Pearl.

  CHAPTER 9

  A matter of minutes later, the Pearl‘s entire crew was safely back inside the ship, and the ship had been withdrawn to what Domingo considered a prudent distance, nearly a hundred kilometers from the drifting wreck.

  The captain called his crew into a conference. Everyone was wearing shipboard coveralls now, while out in the ventral bay three suits of space armor, along with the launch, were still undergoing a thorough precautionary sterilization.

  Some of the sample cases brought back to the Pearlhad already been processed through the sickbay diagnostic machines, where they had been discovered to contain microbial cultures. Those cases had been resealed by remote control and were being saved in sickbay for further investigation when they could be taken to a real laboratory.

  Gujar said thoughtfully: “It’s really simple.”

  “How’s that?” Polly asked.

  “Berserkers aren’t intrinsically interested in science.”

  Domingo nodded. “Agreed.”

  “And producing new forms of life is against their basic programming, which is to kill. So if they’re experimenting with biology, producing some modified forms of life—that’s the suggestion, isn’t it?—they have an overriding reason for doing so. It’s part of an effort to achieve some larger goal.”

  It was Wilma’s turn to nod. “Of course. And their goal is no doubt their usual one, of wiping out ED humanity. We’re their big stumbling block, probably all that stands in the way of their sterilizing the whole Galaxy. We have been, ever since they met us.”

  “Exactly. And so the most likely interpretation of all this bioresearch material is that it represents a serious attempt to produce—what? An antihuman poison?”

  Polly said: “There are a lot of poisons around already that can kill people. It wouldn’t take any great amount of research to find out about them. I don’t think it’s that. But … an antihuman something, certainly. Maybe a virus?”

  The captain was thinking very intently. “Historically, down through the centuries, they’ve already tried a number of times to use disease organisms against us. But that kind of tactic has never worked very well for them, as far as I know. People have been doing research on human diseases a lot longer than berserkers have; we’re ahead, and we’re not about to let them catch up.”

  “But suppose they have caught up?” Iskander wondered. He appeared to find possibilities of amusement in the idea.

  “Well, we can feed what information we’ve been able to gather so far into the computer, along with that hypothesis, and see what we get.”

  Wilma and Simeon got started doing that while the others watched.

  Simeon was ready to continue the discussion as he worked. “I assume you’ve all heard about the Red Race.”

  “Sure.” Iskander raised his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me they’re involved.”

  Chakuchin ignored that dry joke; the Red Race, the berserkers’ original targets, had been dust and radiation as long as the Builders themselves or perhaps a short while longer. “Then no doubt you’ve heard about the qwib-qwibtoo.”

  “Sure. So what?” In that lost age, sometime before the beginning of ED history, the Builders’ opponents, with almost their dying effort, had constructed machines that were designed and built and programmed to do nothing but seek out and destroy berserkers. Or so went the theory most favored by present-day ED historians. Unfortunately for the Red Race and for Galactic life in general, the qwib-qwibmachines had appeared on the scene too late to cope successfully with the berserkers.

  “Legendary,” said Iskander, smiling faintly.

  “Like Leviathan itself.” Domingo was not smiling. “But whether something is legendary or not is not the point. Simeon’s point, as I see it, is that the berserkers might now be doing something analogous to what the Red Race did with machines. I mean they might now have turned to creating life—not necessarily just microbes—to wipe out life where other means have failed them.”

  For the next few seconds each of the six people thought her or his own thoughts in silence. Then their ship interrupted their meditations with a report.

  Their main onboard computer was ready to confirm that the material presented to it for analysis was almost certainly from some kind of facility engaged in biological research. But it was not prepared to deliver a quick estimate of the berserker’s probable purpose in working with such material. Instead the computer suggested that the job should be given to some larger computer, if the delay that would necessarily involve was tolerable.

  Domingo said to it harshly: “We’ll do that as soon as we have the chance; for now, keep working.”

  The computer acknowledged the order with a simple beep—the captain did not care for unnecessary anthropomorphism in any of his machines—and presumably kept on working.

  Polly, speculating on what she had seen today, remarked: “There may, of course, be other berserker space stations like this one somewhere.”

  “If the computer should ask me about that possibility, I’ll tell it so.”

  But the computer was silent on that point. What it did ask for presently was more information, in particular more samples of various materials from the wreck.

  “Such samples are difficult to obtain. What kind of answers can you give me without more data?”

  “None reliable.” The voice of the machine was very clear and quite inhuman.

  “Keep working anyway.” The captain looked round him at his crew. “Second watch, back to your stations. First watch, take two hours at ease.”

  After his crew had dispersed, Domingo stayed in the common room alone, considering. He felt that events so far had justified his instinct. His intuition, hunch or whatever you wanted to call it, fueled by his great hatred of Leviathan, had guided him correctly, at least up to a point. His intuitive judgment now appeared to be backed up by the calculations of the ship’s computer. He had been led to something of great value. Now he was torn between wanting to return to the wreck and extract still more information from it and wanting also to hurry with the news of his discovery back to Base Four Twenty-five, where the information he already had gained might be used to forge a new weapon against Leviathan.

  In a way, he was still as far as ever from coming to grips with his chief enemy. But now one of its allies was here before him, helpless. For the moment at least, he held a once-in-a-lifetime advantage, and such an advantage must not be wasted.

  Finally Domingo decided to search the wreck some more. He could not shake the intuition that there was more to be gained from it; and whatever information might still survive aboard it was being steadily incinerated.

  The Pearlwas certainly not equipped to do much more than she was already doing in the way of collecting and preserving materials, including some probably dangerous items. But she had the space and the equipment to do a little more. And there was much more to be seen and photographed aboard the enemy, in limited time. If only the six humans on the scene now could find and salvage what absolutely must
be preserved …

  Again Domingo called for volunteers. This time he wanted to bring four people, himself included, in the launch.

  Iskander as usual was the first to raise his hand, a languid, minimal gesture. This time Wilma and Gujar, evidently feeling it was their duty to accept a proper share of the risks, both volunteered to come along. That was enough to make four searchers. Polly kept her hand down on this occasion and stayed with Simeon aboard the Pearl.Neither she nor Chakuchin made any pretense of being at all eager to join the boarding party; nor did Wilma appear surprised to see that her husband was staying behind.

  The Pearlonce more approached the wreck, to stand by at the same distance as on the previous effort. The launch, with the chosen four inside, cast off.

  When the boarding party reached the near vicinity of the berserker, they once more measured the radiation flux and reported that it had now fallen off a little. Domingo paused at the lip of the wound to check the communications relay, which was still in place and still working. Again the launch was maneuvered inside the berserker and moored there, in the same place as before. This time Wilma stayed in the pilot’s seat of the little vessel, ready to maneuver it close to any of the spacesuited searchers who might need assistance. The other three volunteers got out of the launch and separated, once more exploring individually. They reported that the rumbling and shuddering of the enemy’s frame, so pronounced earlier, had largely subsided.

  Polly, now in the pilot’s seat aboard the Pearl, had just received another call from the ship’s computer, which was protesting that it still lacked enough data for the problem it had been asked to solve. She had given the machine permission to reduce temporarily the amount of time it spent working on that problem. And now she was on her radio, listening intently to the conversation of the boarding party among themselves.

  “I don’t see anything more here than what you described,” Gujar was reporting via his suit radio. “I don’t—”