Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  He had a thought, and couldn’t see any harm in speaking it aloud. “Maybe it’s letting us talk because it wants to listen.”

  Annie nodded immediately. “That idea had occurred to me.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “What harm can we do by talking? Neither of us knows any military secrets.”

  Meanwhile, the invading machines were not standing idle. One at least of them remained in sight of each prisoner at all times. Others worked intermittently, probing with their own fine tools into the station’s controls and other machinery; whether their intention was to make alterations or simply to investigate, Hoveler found impossible to determine.

  Eventually the humans, growing restless and being allowed to roam about the station at will though under guard, were able to observe machines on other decks as well, some of them digging into various kinds of hardware there. Privately Hoveler estimated the number on board the station to be about a dozen in all.

  Since the first minutes of their occupation, the boarding machines had had nothing to say to their new captives.

  The number of hours elapsed since the boarding lengthened at last into a standard day. Zador and Hoveler were spending most of their time on the more familiar laboratory deck. They were there, in the midst of a low-voiced conversation, when Annie broke off a statement in midsentence and looked up in astonishment. Hoveler, following her gaze with his own, was likewise struck dumb.

  A man and woman he had never seen before, ragged scarecrow Solarian figures, had suddenly appeared in front of him. The newcomers were staring with odd hungry eyes at Hoveler and Zador.

  It was left to Hoveler himself to break the silence. “Hello.”

  Neither of the newcomers responded immediately to this greeting. From the look of their shabby, emaciated figures, the expression on their faces and in their eyes, Hoveler quickly got the idea that a clear answer was unlikely.

  He tried again, and presently the two new arrivals, urged by repeated questioning, introduced themselves as Carol and Scurlock.

  Annie was staring at them. “How did you get aboard? You came—from the berserker?”

  They both nodded. The man mumbled a few words of agreement.

  Zador and Hoveler exchanged looks of numbed horror, wondering silently if they were beholding their own future.

  The more closely Hoveler studied the newcomers, the more his horror grew. Scurlock was unshaven. The hair of both was matted and dirty; their dress was careless; garments were unfastened, incomplete, unchanged for far too long. Carol was wearing no shoes, and her shirt hung partially open, her breasts intermittently exposed. Evidently that wasn’t normal behavior in whatever society they’d come from, for Scurlock, who at moments appeared vaguely embarrassed, now and then tried to get her to cover up. Still, the pair appeared to have been allowed free access to food and drink—they were indifferent to what Zador and Hoveler offered them from one of the station’s serving robots. And they showed no signs of overt, serious physical abuse.

  But the blank way the newcomers, especially Carol, looked around the lab, their halting silences, their appearance—these things suggested to Hoveler that eccentric if not downright crazy behavior was to be anticipated. Obviously Carol and Scurlock were long accustomed to the berserkers’ presence, because for the most part they simply ignored the omnipresent machines.

  Hoveler caught himself hoping silently, fervently, that the pair would not do anything to damage the lab’s machinery.

  As if that now mattered in the least.

  The pair settled in, helping themselves to one of the number of empty staterooms, which they occupied with a guardian machine. Between themselves, the biolab workers soon agreed that both of the newcomers, particularly Carol, must have become unbalanced under the strain of some lengthy captivity. This tended to make the sporadic intervals of conversation with them extra rich and strange.

  Annie asked: “Do you mind telling us how you were captured? And where?”

  “We were taken off a ship,” Scurlock said by way of partial explanation. Then he looked at the station’s two original occupants as if he were worried about their reaction to this news.

  “How long ago?”

  Neither Carol nor Scurlock could say, or perhaps they wanted to keep this information secret.

  Annie Zador turned to a ‘stage and began calling up news of missing ships, trying to find out from the station’s data banks if any vessels had disappeared locally within the past few months. The banks provided a small list of craft recently vanished within the sector, but Carol and Scurly seemed strangely disinterested in cooperating. They did admit they’d been working with a small, unnamed ship taking a survey for the Sardou Foundation; no, they’d no idea what the berserker might be doing with their ship now. In fact they couldn’t remember when they’d seen it last.

  Next the bioworkers tried, with only small success, to trade information about backgrounds. Neither Carol nor Scurlock sounded quite rational enough to state clearly how long they had been the berserker’s prisoners. No, they hadn’t formed any opinions as to why it had now brought them aboard the station.

  “Does the berserker have any other people aboard?” Zador asked suddenly, thinking of a new tack to try. “Any goodlife, maybe?”

  “Weare goodlife,” Carol announced clearly, with an apprehensive glance at the nearest listening machine. Two of her listeners recoiled involuntarily. The ragged, dirty woman sounded very emphatic, if not entirely sane.

  Her companion nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “We are,” he agreed. “What about you?”

  There was a silence. Then in a small, firm voice Anyuta Zador said: “We are not.”

  The machine appeared to take no notice.

  Slowly Scurlock began to pay more attention to the new environment in which his metal master had established him. “What is this place, anyway?” he demanded.

  Hoveler began to explain.

  The dirty, unkempt man interrupted: “I wonder what our machine wants it for?”

  “Your machine? You mean the berserker?”

  “Call it that if you want. It asked us an awful lot of questions about this … place … before it brought us here.”

  As Zador and Hoveler listened in mounting horror, Carol added: “I don’t see what use a cargo of human zygotes is going to be. Ugh. But our machine knows best.”

  Hoveler, his own nerves thoroughly frayed by now, could not completely smother his anger. “Your machine, as you call it, seems to have computed that you’re both going to be very helpful to it!”

  “I am certainly going to help,” Carol agreed hastily. For once her speech was clear and direct. “We are. We just don’t know howas yet. But the machine will tell us when the time comes, and we’re ready.”

  “We’re ready!” agreed Scurlock fervently. Then he fell silent, aware that both Hoveler and Zador were looking at him in loathing and contempt. “Badlife!” he whispered, indulging his own disdain.

  “We are goodlife.” Carol, once more looking and sounding unbalanced, had suddenly adopted an incongruous, schoolteacherish refrain and manner.

  Zador snapped at her: “Who’s arguing with you? All right, if you say so. You’re goodlife. Yes, I can believe that readily enough.”

  Hoveler heard himself adding a few gutter epithets.

  Carol let out a deranged scream and sprang at Annie in a totally unexpected assault, taking the taller woman by surprise and with insane strength driving her back, clawing with jagged nails at her face.

  Before Annie went down, or was seriously injured, Hoveler stepped in and shoved the smaller woman violently away, so that she staggered and fell on the smooth deck.

  “Let her alone!” Scurlock in turn shoved Hoveler.

  “Then tell her to let us alone!”

  The quarrel trailed off, in snarling and cursing on both sides.

  Hours later, an uneasy truce prevailed. Hoveler and Zador, talking privately between themselves, were developing strong suspicions
that Scurlock and Carol might actually have sought out the berserker in their little ship and volunteered as willing goodlife.

  “Do you think it’s waiting for us to do the same thing?”

  Zador raised her head, “I wonder if it’s listening?”

  “No doubt it’s always listening. Well, I don’t give a damn. Maybe it’ll hear something it doesn’t want to hear for a change. What really frightens me,” the bioengineer continued, “is that I think I can understand now how people come to be goodlife. Did you ever think about that?”

  “Not until now.”

  * * *

  There were intervals when it seemed that Scurlock, at least, was trying to come to terms with the other couple. Carol seemed too disconnected to care whether she came to terms with anyone or not.

  Scurlock: “Look here, we’re all prisoners together.”

  Hoveler nodded warily. “Has the machine given you any idea of what it plans to do with you? Or with us?”

  “No.” Then Scurlock put on a ghastly smile: “But Carol and I are going to play along. That’s the only course to take in a situation like this.”

  Meanwhile, in the hours and days immediately following the theft of the station, all of the various bases, populous cities, and settlements upon the habitable planets of the Imatran system were frantic with activity. Much of it utterly useless, all of it too late to save the station. Word of the berserker attack had of course been dispatched at light speed to the authorities who governed the system’s sunward worlds. The news had reached those planets within a few hours of the event. Hastily they had dispatched what little help they had readily available toward the ravaged planetoid.

  Following established military doctrine, a unified system command was at once set up, and under its aegis the big worlds coordinated their efforts as thoroughly as possible.

  There would be no more in-system fighting—if for no other reason than because the Imatrans had nothing else in space capable of challenging the victorious enemy. The captured station was being ruthlessly, inexorably, but carefully, gently, hauled away.

  Within a few hours after the beginning of the raid, all that remained in the Imatran system as evidence of the outrage was a modest number of dead and wounded, scattered marks of damage on the surface of the planetoid, some swiftly fading electromagnetic signals, including light waves …

  A small amount of debris drifting in space, wreckage from human ships and small berserkers, the result of the brief, fierce combat.

  And a number of recordings, affording reasonably complete documentation of the outrage.

  THREE

  In a dream that seemed to her both prolonged and recurring, the Lady Genevieve beheld the image of her rescuer continuing to drift before her eyes. The suited figure, faceless inside his protective space helmet, had the shape of a tall man, ruggedly strong, who held out his arms in an offer of succor from disaster, of salvation from—

  From everything, perhaps, except bad dreams.

  And her rescuer’s voice, issuing from his suit’s air speaker, had spoken his name to her again, just before …

  Yes, Nicholas Hawksmoor. That was his name.

  Lady Genevieve aboard the dying courier had been welcoming her rescuer. In pure joy of life triumphant she had spread out her arms to embrace the superbly capable, the blessed and glorious Nicholas Hawksmoor. For just a moment he had given her an impression of hesitation, of surprise. And then his armored arms had come round her gently, carefully, returning the hug.

  A moment later, pushing herself back to arm’s length from the tight embrace, Genevieve had demanded eagerly: “Can you get me out of here? I don’t have a suit, you see. It seems there are no suits aboard.”

  Again his voice—Nick’s voice, the voice she remembered from the holostage—issued from the suit’s air speaker. “That’s quite all right, my lady. I can get you out safely. Because—”

  And then—

  As she recalled the flow of events now (however much time had passed) from her present place of safety (wherever that might be), it seemed to the Lady Genevieve that the whole world had exploded at that point.

  She now even had her doubts that that last remembered explosion had been quite real. But very real and convincing was her present sense, her impression, that after that moment the course of her rescue had somehow gone terribly wrong.

  Only the fact that these memories of wreckage and explosions seemed remote kept her now from being still utterly terrified.

  The embrace, with her body clad only in the shreds of the white dress, pressed against the suit’s unfeeling armor. And with the courier’s smoky atmosphere steadily bleeding itself thin around them. Then the last explosion. Yes, very real, as convincing as any memory of her entire life.

  And following the last explosion, dreams. A whole world of peculiar dreams, dreams evolving into a strange mental clarity, true vision bringing with it terror. And now she was living that experience again—unfocused and unshielded terror, the helpless sense of onrushing death, the certainty of obliteration.

  But this time, for the Lady Genevieve, the period of clarity and terror was mercifully brief.

  Again unconsciousness claimed her for an indeterminate time. A blackness deeper than any normal sleep, like the complete cessation of existence.

  Then she was drifting, carrying up out of nothingness with her the single thought that the courier, really, had somehow been demolished, with her still aboard. An event of some importance, she supposed. But now it seemed remote from her.

  Then, finally, blessedly, real awareness of her real surroundings. Her present environment, gratefully, was one which proved by its mere existence that she had been rescued, brought to a place of safety. She occupied a bed, or rather a narrow berth, which seemed, from several background indications, to be aboard a ship. Close above her, passing only a few centimeters from her face, moved the thin, efficient, obviously inhuman, tremendously welcome metal arms of a medirobot, which must be in some way taking care of her.

  And there, only a little farther away, just beyond the clear sanitary shield guarding her berth, loomed the handsome face of the volunteer pilot—his was one name Jenny was never going to forget—Nicholas Hawksmoor. Hawksmoor was looking down at her anxiously.

  With considerable effort the Lady Genevieve, while remaining flat on her back, managed to produce a tiny voice. For whatever reason, she found it really difficult to speak, to put any volume of air behind the words.

  “Where am I?” she asked. The unexpected problem with her speech was almost frightening, but not really. Not now. Now that she was saved, all medical difficulties could be solved in time.

  Hawksmoor leaned closer, and replied at once, and reassuringly, “You’re safe, aboard my little ship. I call her the Wren.I got you out of that courier just in time.” He hesitated fractionally. “You remember being on the courier?”

  “I remember getting away from the research station on it. Of course, how could I not remember?”

  “And you remember me?”

  “Nicholas Hawksmoor, architect and pilot. Very good pilot, I must agree.” Still, every word she spoke required an unnatural effort. But she wanted to talk. She thought she wasn’t really tired.

  “That’s right.” He sounded relieved, and encouraging.

  “What do your friends call you? Nick?”

  “My friends?” For whatever reason, that question seemed to unsettle her rescuer momentarily. “Yes, yes, Nick will do nicely. What do your friends call you?”

  “Jenny.”

  “Yes, of course. Naturally they would. Jenny. Do you know, that name reminds me of something?”

  “Of what?”

  “A poem. A verse. Maybe I’ll sing it for you later.”

  She tried to turn her head and look about her. The white wall from which the arms of the medirobot protruded was part of a general constriction that kept her from moving very far in any direction. All the walls, white or glassy, of the couch, in which her body was
sunken almost as in a bathtub, kept her from seeing very much.

  Struck by a sudden thought, the lady asked, “How are the other people?”

  “Those on the courier?” Nicholas sighed unhurriedly. “I couldn’t do anything for them, I’m afraid. Most of them were dead anyway, or nearly dead, before I got there. And besides, I had equipment enough to get only one person out.”

  Again, she drifted mentally for a little while. She hadn’t thought that everyone else was nearly dead. That wasn’t really how she remembered the situation. But …

  “I don’t hurt anywhere,” she murmured at last. Now, each time she spoke, obtaining air and forming it into words seemed a little easier than the time before. Now it was as if … something … were being progressively adjusted for her comfort. People said that shipboard medirobots were very good, though she had never had to prove it for herself before.

  Her companion was tenderly solicitous. “Well, I’m glad. You shouldn’t hurt. You absolutely shouldn’t after all that’s … after all that’s been done for you. You’re going to be all right.”

  And once again it seemed that it was time to sleep.

  Back on the Imatran surface, all of the minor local authorities, the petty political and military leaders, had survived the attack in good shape. This happy circumstance was not the result of any special defense or precaution undertaken on their behalf as individuals, for no such favoritism had been shown. The truth was that nearly all the ordinary citizens and all of the numerous visitors currently on the planetoid had also come unharmed through the disaster.

  Not because of the effectiveness of the planetoid’s defenses, which had not actually been fully tested. Rather, the high rate of survival could be laid to the enemy’s tactics. It really appeared that this particular berserker had passed up the opportunity for mass slaughter, that its only goal had been to snatch away the biolab.

  An hour after the last shot had been fired, everyone on the planetoid was finally allowing themselves to think that the berserker was not coming back—at least not right away. The local authorities, now emerging stunned from their several shelters, had already received enough reports from the more distant regions of Imatra to confirm that the only real damage had been done, the only casualties sustained, in the immediate vicinity of the ground-based defenses, which had been thoroughly knocked out. In some of those areas the local devastation had been complete, though sharply limited in geographical extent.