Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  Further talk, optimistic daydreaming of prosperity to come, was interrupted by the optelectronic brain of their ship breaking in to inform its masters in its usual indifferent voice that it had just detected the presence of several unidentified swift-moving objects, the size of very small ships, materializing out of the dusty nebular background. Whatever these objects were, they had appeared in rapid succession—in nearby space, at a range of only a few hundred kilometers.

  The ship was already presenting its live crew with the appropriate displays, showing the unidentified things as small, dark, mysterious dots upon a false-color background of mottled silver.

  Scurlock, staring without comprehension at the moving dots, demanded: “Whatever in all the worlds—”

  “I’ve no idea,” Carol breathed.

  Nor had their ship offered an opinion. No wonder both organic and inhuman brains were puzzled: on instruments the unidentified objects certainly looked like small ships, but the chance of encountering any traffic at all in space was nowhere very large, and here on the flank of the Mavronari it was astronomically small.

  In only a few seconds the young couple’s puzzlement had begun to turn to alarm. A certain word had popped up unbidden in the back of each of their minds and was refusing to go away. Neither of them wanted to frighten the other, and so neither spoke the word. They moved in silent, mutual consent to clothe themselves rather more formally, until they were fully dressed, with the vague unspoken idea of possibly receiving visitors. Then Scurlock, without giving any reason, suggested getting into space suits. Carol said she didn’t think that was necessary. As a compromise, they checked to make sure that suits and other emergency devices were in the proper lockers, ready for use.

  After that, both human partners sat in their command chairs squinting at a holostage, which had been adjusted to display in its unreal image-space, against an imaged background of black dust, the steadily growing likeness of the nearest unidentified object.

  Carol said, with an air of calm determination, “All right, Scurly, we have to make sense out of this. Is that some military thing?”

  Her companion nodded. “They must be military. That must be it. Maybe an Imatran squadron. That’s about the closest system to where we are now. Or maybe it’s Templar. Or Space Force. One of those.”

  The loosely spread formation of shiplike objects—seven of them now—moving methodically toward the explorer ship was certainly no manifestation of ordinary civilian traffic. So they had to be someone’s military. Had to be … because the only other alternative was too frightful to contemplate.

  Neither Scurlock nor Carol had spoken of that alternative as yet, though it had settled tenaciously in the backs of both their minds, where it was still growing ominously. Instead of talking about it, the couple looked at each other, each seeking reassurance and at the same time trying to give it. Trying with less and less success.

  It was left to the heartless ship to finally say the words, in its finely tuned ship’s voice that sounded only mildly concerned, and would have sounded perturbed to an equally slight degree about anything else that happened to pose a problem. “The seven objects now approaching are identifiable as berserker machines,” the ship remarked.

  There was no immediate reply. Scurlock’s first conscious reaction was an immediate surge of anger at the ship, that its voice in making this announcement should be so calm. Because what the hell did the ship care? It had been designed and built by Solarian humans, Earth-descended folk of the same human species as Scurlock and Carol. And Solarian designers, convinced they had good reason for doing so, saw to it as a rule that their machines never gave the impression of caring much about anything.

  And Scurlock persisted in his quite irrational feeling of what the hell did a ship, any ship, have to worry about anyway? Those berserker machines out there—if indeed that was what they were—did not have as the goal of their basic programming the obliteration of shipsfrom the cosmos.

  No. It was something very different from ships that berserkers were programmed to wipe out. Their object was to expunge life itself from the Galaxy. Human life was a priority, because humans tended to give them a hard time, to interfere with the completion of their task. And the Solarian variety of human life was the killing machines’ favorite target above all others—because Solarian, Earth-descended humanity in particular was as a rule damned obstinately, and even violently, opposed to dying.

  Carol, who of the two human partners was slightly the better pilot, had already got herself into the acceleration couch offering the best access to both the manual and the alpha-wave ship’s controls, and she was now sliding her head into the alphawave coronet. Scurlock, with fingers that seemed to have gone numb with fright, was now fastening himself into the acceleration chair, or couch, next to the pilot’s—getting into a couch, the manuals affirmed, was in these situations more important than trying to put on a space suit.

  Not that either suits or couches were likely to help much in an unarmed ship when berserkers were coming after you. In that respect, Scurlock was sure, whatever counsel the manuals offered was hopelessly optimistic.

  In a moment he could hear himself suggesting in a weak voice that they might try to make their little craft as inconspicuous as possible, to slide and hide behind the nearest fold of nebula and wait, in hopes that they would not be noticed.

  Both human and optelectronic pilots ignored his proposal. This was probably just as well, because neither Scurlock’s nerves nor Carol’s could have endured trying to make such a tactic work. And it seemed a futile suggestion anyway, coming considerably too late, because the oncoming objects were not just approaching but were closing in directly on their ship, proving that they had already been irrevocably noticed.

  Carol murmured something incoherent from the pilot’s couch and melded her mind with that of the ship, trying hard acceleration at right angles to the onrushing formation of killers. The drive responded smoothly, and the cabin’s artificial gravity dealt efficiently with the imposed forces; the polyphase matter webs on the acceleration couches still hung slack, their occupants spared the least physical discomfort.

  But the maneuver was worse than useless. The oncoming objects only changed course accordingly, demonstrating once more that whatever they were, their approach to Scurlock’s and Carol’s ship was not in the least accidental.

  Frantically, again muttering almost inaudibly to herself, the human pilot tried again, with no better result—she and her partner, lover, lay huddled amid the straps and webbing, the latest in polyphase matter but of no more use now than so much spaghetti, of their separate acceleration couches—as if mere straps and webbing of any kind were going to do them any good.

  Still both human partners seemed determined not to utter the dread word. Neither had done so yet, as if the threat could not be real until the name of it was spoken. The fact that their own machine had already named the terror to them somehow did not seem to count.

  For almost a full minute the two terrified people tried to outrun the oncoming objects, getting the best they could out of their own ship, alternating between pure autopilot and a melding control. Carol was a good enough pilot to render the meld of organic and artificial intelligence superior in performance to either mode alone. But perhaps no pilot in this ship in this situation would have been good enough to get away.

  In whichever mode they flew, the enemy followed each change of course, and easily, methodically gained ground. But the unliving enemy still held their fire, as if this time the berserkers were, for some unguessable reason, more interested in bringing about close contact, confrontation, than in dealing sudden death.

  The survey ship was unarmed. But even a fighting Space Force scout, which would have been twice as large and a thousand times as capable in self-protection, would have had small chance indeed against so many machines of the type now closing in. All seven of their pursuers were now clearly visible, each as big as or slightly bigger than the survey vessel, all steadily d
rawing near. Still no weapons had been fired.

  And now Scurlock groaned aloud. His last hopes vanished. An object that could only be the berserker mothership, a drifting continent of metal as black and horrible as death itself, had come into view out of clouds a hundred kilometers in the background, at that range clearly visible to the unaided eye. Simultaneously, on holostage the thing’s magnified image came groping its careful way forward, emerging from heavy dust with the dignity of an evil mountain, and at a speed that somehow seemed unnatural for anything so large and ugly. It slid forward out of the darkness of the Mavronari like the king of demons emerging from some antique vision of hell.

  Long seconds crept by, during which neither person in the doomed cabin spoke. Then the couple turned toward each other, and each read despair in the other’s face.

  “Scurly.” Carol seemed almost choking on her own voice.

  “Yah?”

  “Promise me something?”

  “What?” Though already he knew what. He knew all too well.

  Carol hesitated. For some reason she began to whisper. “If it is berserkers and they kill us quickly, I’m glad we’re together.”

  “So am I.”

  “But if they don’t … do that … I mean, there are stories that if they don’t just kill on sight, it’s because they want something … then I don’t think I can face it … I don’t want to—”

  Carol could not, dared not, put into words just what it was she wanted her husband to do. And if she couldn’t find the words, he wasn’t about to help her do so. Not on this one.

  Once more turning away from her partner, Carol made a last, frenzied attempt to maneuver, to get away; but moments later they were overtaken, their small craft smothered and immobilized in powerful force fields. The autopilot reported with mad, mocking calm that it was no longer able to maneuver.

  The seven attackers, all within a hundred meters now, had the little survey ship englobed, in what had at last become a tight formation.

  She and Scurlock stared at each other. Time seemed to have come to a complete stop.

  Their ship in its unflappable voice relayed to them the news of the next step in the catastrophe: its drive had now been rendered totally dead.

  Nothing more happened until, only moments later, the same voice informed them that an attempt was now being made to open the outer hatch of the main airlock, from outside. There was really no need to tell the two human occupants that, because their unaided hearing now brought them news of the attempt in progress. The whole ship quivered under a titanic hammering, vibrated with a shrieking drill.

  Scurlock, his fingers fumbling even more desperately than before, after several attempts got himself out of his acceleration couch. A moment later Carol had joined him, the two of them standing together in the middle of the cabin’s tiny open deck.

  “If the drive wasn’t dead,” Scurlock said suddenly, in a surprisingly strong voice, “we could switch over to manual and use it to—”

  “But the drive is dead,” Carol whimpered. Evidently the enemy had for some reason not wanted any cowardly or heroic suicides. Maybe it was the unnecessary waste of a perfectly good machine to which the berserkers’ controlling computers made objection. “And we don’t have a weapon of any kind aboard.”

  “I know.”

  “Scurly … even if we had a gun, I don’t think I could do it. Not to you, not to myself.”

  “Neither could I.” That seemed to him the best thing to say now, although he wasn’t sure. “And—and I wouldn’t leave you alone with—berserkers.”

  Suddenly louder sounds coming from only a few meters away made it obvious that the small enemy units—machines, whatever the proper term for them might be—were in the main airlock now. And now abruptly they were visible, if only indirectly. The relentless approach of death was being displayed for the humans with merciless clarity, by their own ship’s brain, upon the little holostage in the middle of the control room. Scurlock had one moment to see clearly an enormous enlargement of a pair of waving grippers, and then the video pickup in the airlock was destroyed.

  “Carol, I love you.”

  “And I love you.”

  Those were words they had seldom said to each other.

  “They don’t have any interest in making people suffer, Carol. It’s going to be quick, whatever they …”

  Scurlock was trying to make it true by saying it. True, the death machines’ fundamental commandment, the goal of their basic programming, was the obliteration of all life wherever they encountered it. There was no requirement that living things be made to suffer; because quick killing was generally more efficient, quick killing was the rule. But exceptions to that rule came up from time to time, situations where the unliving enemy in pursuit of its larger aims required something more from some individual life unit than that unit’s death. Neither person in the small ship wanted to think about those rare exceptions now. But they were going to have no choice, because the noises of intrusion had moved a large step closer. Metal arms and tools were very purposefully scratching, scraping, then pounding at the inner door of their main airlock.

  “Carol—”

  “Yes. Scurly, I love you too.” Her voice sounded abstracted; almost bored.

  There was no more time to talk. The inner door of the airlock was sliding open now. There followed a slight momentary drop in cabin pressure, but no fatal escape of atmosphere; that had already been taken care of, somehow, because the occupants of this ship were going to be kept alive, for the time being.

  And now berserkers were entering their cabin.

  Constructions of dull-surfaced metal came filing in, one, two, three, four of them, walking rapidly one after the other into the control room. They were very little bigger than Solarian human beings, though their shapes were frightfully different from those of humanity as descended upon any planet. And these machines were quite obviously of alien strength and purpose. They came into the control moving more quickly and decisively than any bodies merely human could have moved, or any organic creature of any species. Some of the intruders walked on six metallic legs, and some on only four.

  What was momentarily astonishing was that the invaders appeared at first to take no particular notice of their two new prisoners. The prisoners on their part remained standing as if paralyzed, their four hands clutched together, in the middle of the chamber.

  Like practically every other Solarian in the Galaxy, Carol and Scurlock had all their lives heard stories about berserkers. Some of the stories were true, some fiction, some the wildest legend. There were human worlds whose population had never seen a berserker, but no human world where such stories were never told. The berserkers in the stories always seemed to come equipped with the capability of human speech. And on the very rare occasions when people in the stories and histories came close enough to listen to berserkers and yet somehow survived, they always described the enemy as communicating quickly with human captives, spelling out for the abhorred badlife precisely what was expected of them, what they must do to earn a quick and merciful death, giving at least by implication some indication why their lives were being temporarily spared.

  But these machines, having taken possession of Scurlock and Carol along with their ship, said nothing at all—unless a few peculiar clicks and whistles, issuing from one of the invaders, were intended as communication. If this noise indeed was language, the Solarians could neither recognize it nor respond.

  One facet of the humans’ intense terror, a dread that they were going to be immediately separated, was not realized. But any unreasoning hope that the machines would continue to ignore them quickly vanished. After only a few seconds’ delay, both prisoners were gently seized and searched by deft metallic fingers and grippers that probed and patted impersonally at skin and clothing. Then the two humans were let go, not bound or otherwise physically molested. In another moment all but one of the boarding machines had left the control room, spreading out through the various accessible ba
ys and compartments of the little ship, obviously intent on search and examination.

  Their bodies temporarily free, yet helpless, the two prisoners gazed at each other in anguish. They exchanged a few hopelessly banal words, phatic utterances empty of hope. No doubt their metallic guardian was listening, but it neither punished them for speaking nor commanded them to silence.

  Eventually all of the machines that had spread out to search the ship returned to the control room, where they stopped, standing motionless like so many serving robots.

  “What happens now?” Scurlock abruptly demanded of the world at large. For a moment, only a moment, Carol saw him as a brave and challenging figure, fists clenched, looking at his unliving captors with the courage of despair.

  The machines ignored him. One of them was at a control panel, probing with thin auxiliary limbs, probably tapping into the ship’s data banks.

  Carol sat down again in the pilot’s couch and began to weep.

  The minutes stretched on, and nothing happened. After a time Scurly sat down too, in the couch next to Carol’s.

  Looking out through cleared ports, the captives presently were able to get a better view than before of the berserker mothership. Scurlock commented now on the fact that in the light of the distant Core that hideous bulk showed signs of extensive damage, in the form of cratering and scorching, but it conveyed the impression of being still extremely formidable. Certain projections, he thought, indicated immense firepower. The great hull was generally ovoid, almost spherical, in shape. Sizes and distances were hard to judge in space without instrumentation, and the voice of the survey ship had fallen silent, but from the faint drift of intervening dust he estimated the monster as at least several kilometers in diameter.