Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

“It was like I couldn’t keep away. I had to come along to see what you were doing. What you were going to find out.”

  “Are you goodlife, Spence? Is that it?”

  Benkovic’s face inside his helmet, plainly visible in the center of Domingo’s light, showed nothing but bewilderment. Whatever he had been expecting from Domingo, it wasn’t that at all. “Goodlife? What the hell kind of a thing is that to say?” But the protest was weak. Benkovic appeared to be on the verge of laughing or crying.

  “Are you?”

  “Nothing like that, Captain. No, nothing like that.” Spence gestured toward the components of the disassembled brain that were lying at Domingo’s feet. “Is it dead now?”

  “It’s been dead all along, Spence. Now it’s pretty well turned off.”

  Benkovic nodded. There was silence, for a moment, as if there might be nothing more to be said between the two men.

  Then mechanical sounds came echoing from somewhere within the nearby metal caverns as before. Spence grabbed for the holster at his belt, then realized that he had come here unarmed. He looked down, perhaps marveling silently that he should have forgotten such a thing; or perhaps he knew the reason for his forgetfulness. Then again only tiredness showed in his face.

  Domingo hadn’t turned or raised his weapon this time. Now he said: “Pretty well turned off, but it still talked to me there for a while. I got some truth out of it. There aren’t any landers here. This berserker hasn’t had any landers or androids for months.”

  The other was looking at him. Looking and listening intently, like someone hoping for a message that would mean rescue.

  “Not since Liaoning,” Domingo said. “Not since before Shubra.”

  Branwen Galway, groaning, semiconscious, lay in her berth aboard ship. She’d had to abandon her battle station because her mind seemed to be fogging up again. She knew she needed medical help. She was going to hang on somehow and do what she had to do until she got it. She was going to shoot Spence Benkovic if he came through her door again.

  Fourth Adventurer was still living, but almost inert.

  Simeon, virtually alone now on the Pearl, was himself on his last legs. Duty held him to his post.

  Back in the central cave of the devastated berserker, Benkovic sat down slowly on a projecting ledge of metal that had been designed for some totally different purpose. Presently he let his helmeted head fall forward into his hands.

  The captain remained standing. Even in the light natural gravity, he swayed. The mechanical sounds out in the caves of machinery had stopped, but there was still a roaring in his mind. A rushing and a roaring, like a prolonged explosion. It seemed to have been going on forever, like the space battle with Leviathan. He could feel it all, everything, catching up with him at once.

  His weapon no longer pointed at Benkovic, but still the captain held it in both hands. His hands holding the heavy carbine were shaking more than ever, uncontrollably.

  “Tell me what happened on that day.” Domingo’s voice, asking the question, sounded like that of a man trying to memorize a line that he was going to have to deliver in a play.

  Spence raised his head and nodded, making his helmet light bob up and down. He didn’t look at Domingo at all now, but instead gazed off into the shadowed recesses of the ruined machinery.

  “What I told you before, a lot of that was true,” he said. “The first part of the story I told everybody, that was true.”

  “Tell me again. The whole thing now. I want to know all the truth.”

  Once more Benkovic nodded. He spoke as if he were remembering something from long years before, or maybe even from an earlier lifetime. “There at the wedding, after the alert was called, I ran along with everyone else and got into my ship. I didn’t have any idea then …” The recital stalled.

  “Go on.”

  Spence went on. He described how, when the other ships lifted off, he too had launched from Shubra in his one-seater battler, headed back for the moon.

  From space he had seen the relief squadron, led by Domingo, depart for Liaoning.

  “Then I sort of wished I’d gone with you. Wanted t’be in on the action, y’know? But by then it was too late.”

  “Go on.”

  At that point, Benkovic said, he had changed the objective of his own flight, deciding to do some scouting on his own. He had radioed first to his three women companions on the moon, telling them to go into the shelter and lie low.

  The moon’s orbit brought it within only the outer limit of the effective range of the Shubran ground defenses. But Spence had had no reason when he made the call to expect that there was really going to be a berserker attack on Shubra almost at once. So presumably the women would be just about as safe in the little shelter on the moon as they would have been taking flight in a ship or coming down to take shelter on the planetoid—that last assessment had turned out, grimly, to be all too accurate.

  “I should have gone back and picked them up in a ship, I guess. Got ‘em the hell outta there. But I didn’t.” He shrugged. “Everybody else should have done something different, too.”

  “Go on.”

  After making the call to warn his girlfriends, Benkovic had zoomed away for a few hours, scouting. He’d had no success, even though he was a good pilot. Anyone could testify to that.

  “And I’ve never been afraid to do things.” Spence raised his head all the way and looked around him when he said that, as if to say that his presence here on this boarded berserker justified that claim.

  Giving up on the fruitless scouting expedition, he had returned to within visual range of Shubra in time to see Leviathan in the process of attacking the colony.

  “You told all of this before.”

  “Yeah. And up to that point, up to what I’m telling you now, everything I told you before was the truth.”

  “And now. Tell me the rest of the truth.” Domingo was still on his feet. He was resting his weapon on the machinery in front of him, trying to stop the trembling in his hands.

  “Yeah. I want to do that.” Spence’s voice fell lower and lower. He swayed as if he might be going to topple from where he was sitting. “God, what a ride you put us through, chasing this thing. I can still feel it. It’s all still coming at me.”

  Domingo waited.

  “What really happened. Yeah.” Benkovic paused for a long time. “But it’s like none of that part is real.”

  “It was real enough. It was as bloody real as anything. Go on.”

  Benkovic went on. Actually, as he related the story now, he had not seen the berserker send down any small machines to devastate the individual defensive outposts. But he had assumed that Leviathan had landers and androids; they were practically standard equipment on large berserkers. “And I never guessed … I’d be here finding out different.”

  “Go on.”

  Benkovic wasn’t sure now how long he’d drifted in space in his little one-seater, watching the slaughter, the destruction, from a safe distance, far beyond the orbit of the moon. But eventually Leviathan had completed its programmed task and had departed the vicinity of Shubra, leaving nothing but smoking ruin on what a few hours before had been an inhabited surface.

  Benkovic had returned to his moon to find his colony destroyed by a few touches of the enemy weapons with only one of his women still alive. He had given her what help he could. She was seriously injured but seemed likely to survive, and he had left her there alone in the charge of the medical robot, which was about the only useful machine to have survived the attack.

  Fascinated as always by destruction, he had then flown down to the Shubran surface.

  “I could see that just about everything was ruined. There were no radio signals. I told myself that when I landed I was going to see if there were any survivors—anyone I could help. That’s what I kept thinking most of the way.

  “Then I saw—I really started to see—what had happened. I don’t know. All gone. Destruction. That kind of thing. It turns me on in
some way … you know? I guess you don’t know.”

  “Tell me. I want to hear.”

  “You already know, don’t you? I’m so bloody tired now. So damned … there’s no way out. But first I’ll tell you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “At last I picked up one little local radio signal, because I was so close; it never got out to anywhere else because of all the ionization around. A distress call. I followed it, and answered. She said … who she was.”

  “My daughter.”

  “Yeah—it was Maymyo. I don’t know if she knew my voice. I don’t think so. I never said who I was. But she gave me enough directions so I could find the cave. The airlock was still holding. She—she saw me outside. When she was sure it was a man and not a machine talking to her, she let me in.”

  “The door, the big door to the cave, was blasted open.”

  “I did that, later. With the cannon on my little battler. To make it look like berserkers, see.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  “I told her that the attack was over, but she wouldn’t believe me at first. I don’t think she knew who I was, even then. She was in a kind of daze. Combat fatigue. I don’t think she was hurt otherwise. Maybe a little concussion.”

  “Like Galway.”

  “Yeah … yeah. Then it came over me what I had to do.

  “I told her to take her armor off, and she did. Just like that. She was in a total daze, following orders. I told her to take her armor off, and then that white dress, and then to lie down. Then she struggled, but I …

  “Then—after—I thought I couldn’t just leave her. Because, you know, she’d probably remember.” There was a pause long enough for two breaths. Domingo could hear them distinctly on the radio. Then Benkovic concluded: “And if she remembered, she’d tell.”

  Having said that, Benkovic nodded sagely. He appeared to be considering the human condition, himself as an example of it.

  “You killed her.”

  Benkovic looked up. “I couldn’t just leave her. Yeah.” It was a simple truth; he looked afraid of it. But he was not really frightened of Domingo’s gun. He looked yearningly at the big bore of the carbine as it leveled steadily at his helmet.

  Domingo was still sitting there when Polly and Gujar came in.

  There were other people with them, people from the crew of Gujar’s ship, and they were going through the motions of trying to rescue Captain Domingo, not really expecting to find him or anyone else in Leviathan’s guts alive.

  The new arrivals took note of Benkovic’s headless body but were not much surprised. They assumed that the berserker had somehow killed him.

  Simeon, Fourth Adventurer, Branwen Galway—all of them had already spoken to the rescuers on radio, and all three welcomed them back to the ship a little later when they came bringing Domingo with them. But none of the crew members who had stayed aboard the Pearlcould tell the tale of what had passed between Benkovic and Domingo on the wreck.

  Niles Domingo was to tell that story once, to one person only, and much later in his life.

  The captain and Polly Suslova were side by side, more or less in each other’s company, as they left the dead berserker on their way to find her children.

  Domingo looked around him before he left, as if he had never seen this place until this moment.

  III Berserker Kill

  PROLOGUE

  The ship was more intelligent in several ways than either of the people it was carrying. One task at which the optel brain of the ship excelled was computing the most efficient search pattern to be traced across and around the indistinct, hard-to-determine edges of the deep, dark nebula. Most of the time during the mission the ship drove itself without direct human guidance along this self-selected course, back and forth, in and out among the broad serrations, the yawning, million-kilometer chasms in the clouds of interstellar gas and dust that made up the Mavronari.

  The only reason that such ships weren’t sent out crewless to conduct surveys without direct supervision was that their intelligence was inferior to that of organic humanity when it came to dealing with the unforeseen. Only breathing humans could be expected to pay close attention to everything about the nebula that other breathing humans might find of interest.

  A man and a woman, Scurlock and Carol, crewed the survey ship. The couple had known for months that they were very right for each other, and that was good, because being on the best of terms with your partner was requisite when you were spending several months in the isolation of deep space, confined to a couple of small rooms, continually alone together.

  Carol and Scurlock had been married shortly before embarking on this voyage, though they had not been acquainted for very long before that. By far the greater proportion of their married life, now totaling approximately a standard month, had been spent out here nosing around the Mavronari Nebula.

  The ship was not their property, of course. Very, very few individuals were wealthy enough to possess their own interstellar transportation. It was a smallish but highly maneuverable and reasonably speedy spacecraft, bearing no name but only a number, and it was the property of the Sardou Foundation, wealthy people who had their reasons for being willing to spend millions collecting details about some astronomical features, certain aspects of the Galaxy, which most Galactic citizens found highly unexciting.

  At the moment the young couple and their employers’ ship were many days away from the nearest inhabited planet, even at the optimum pattern of superluminal jumps and journeying in normal space at sublight velocity that the survey craft could have managed. Not that such remoteness from the rest of humanity had particularly concerned either Carol or Scurlock, up to now.

  Scurlock was rather tall and loosely muscled, with pale eyes and long lashes that made him look even younger than he really was. Carol was of middle height, inclined to thinness, and had several physical features suggesting that some of her ancestors had called old Earth’s Middle East their home.

  Both young people tended to be intense and ambitious. But just now both were in a light mood, singing and joking as they made the observations of nebular features comprising today’s work. Some of the jokes were at the expense of their shipboard optel brain, the very clever unit that was cradling their two lives at the moment, assuming responsibility for piloting and astrogation during most of the voyage. But no offense was taken; like other ships, this one never knew or cared what its human masters and passengers might be making jokes about.

  One of the secondary objectives of this mission, politely but firmly impressed upon the couple by their employers, was to discover, if possible, some practical new means of ingress to the nebula, an astrogable channel or channels, as yet uncharted, leading into the Mavronari. The existence of such a passage would greatly facilitate interstellar travel between the inhabited worlds existing on one side of this great mass of gas and dust, and other worlds, now largely unknown but possibly habitable, that might lie somewhere within the nebula or on its other side. Any such discovery would be of great interest to the Sardou Foundation, and not to it alone.

  As matters now stood, most of the worlds known to exist on the other side of the Mavronari had never even been thoroughly explored by Solarians, largely because of the difficulty of getting at them by going all the way around.

  But the discovery of a new passage was only a secondary purpose, no more than an intriguing possibility. The fundamental objective of this mission was the gathering of astronomical data, radiation patterns, particle types and velocities, from the deep folds and convolutions between nebular lobes, regions not susceptible to ready observation from the outside.

  Since departing on this mission, Carol and Scurlock had frequently expressed to each other their hope that a successful performance would lead them upward and onward, financially and socially, ultimately to one of the several goals they had established for themselves.

  * * *

  The Galactic Core, eerily bright though thousands of light-years distant, a ba
ll of dull though multicolored incandescence all mottled and muted by clouds and streaks of intervening dark matter, appeared through the cleared ports first on one side of the little ship, then on the other, as the small craft proceeded about its work with—as usual—only minimal human supervision. Now and then one of the human couple on board took note of how the Core cast their ship’s shadow visibly upon some dark fold of the great Mavronari, clouds silvered on this side as if by moonlight.

  Gazing at that tiny moving shadow and that immensely greater darkness just beyond the silvering, Carol was drawn away from near-poetic musings by a sudden shudder that ran through her slight frame.

  It was a momentary, subtle event. But Scurlock, being close to his partner in more ways than one, took notice. “What’s the matter?”

  She ran brown fingers through her straight dark hair, cut short. “Nothing. Really nothing. Just that sometimes, looking out, I get a momentary feeling that I can really sense how far away everything is.”

  Her companion became soberly thoughtful. “I know what you mean. How far away and how old.”

  After a shared moment of silence, of the ship’s controlled drifting, it was time to turn quickly to matters of light and life. Once more, as they often did, the couple discussed their own wish for a child in the light of Premier Dirac Sardou’s colonization scheme, in which the Sardou Foundation, largely a creation of the Premier himself, was heavily involved.

  “I don’t know how people can do that. I wouldn’t want to doom any kid of mine to any scheme like that.”

  “No, I agree,” Scurlock immediately concurred. Not that he particularly wanted to have a child under any circumstances, any more than Carol did.

  Carol would have been surprised if he had not agreed. They had had this conversation before, but there seemed to be purpose, and there was certainly reassurance, in repeating it. Talk drifted to other subjects. Meanwhile, with a watchful steadiness born of habit, the couple kept an alert eye on the course adjustments made now and then by their autopilot, and also made a point of directly taking some instrument readings for themselves. They were making sure—although the autopilot was really better at this than they were—that their ship did not stray too deeply into the outlying tendrils of the nebula. The region they were currently exploring was still hard vacuum by the standards of planetary atmosphere, but matter, in the form of microscopic and near-microscopic particles, was seeded through it thickly enough to dangerously impede ship movement. It would be damned inconvenient, and perhaps much worse than inconvenient, to find themselves enclosed by dust arms anywhere near their present position, enfolded by some slow-looking swirl of thin gas half the size of a solar system, trapped so that their little craft would lose all chance of dropping back into flightspace and returning them briskly to their homeworld in a mere matter of days.