Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  Frank in turn, after having watched Nick handle a ship and a computer for a while, readily admitted that Nick was pretty good at handling complex machines, and that he—or “it,” as Frank always said—would probably be good at fighting berserkers, though so far Nick lacked any experience along that line. Frank gave the impression of realistically appraising the artifact’s competence, in the same way he coolly and capably estimated the relative usefulness and weakness of other software and machines.

  Colonel Marcus was, thought Kensing, less ready to evaluate people.

  But when the question arose as to whether Nick and those like him could ever, should ever, be considered human beings, Marcus had only quietly amused contempt for anyone who seriously proposed such an idea.

  The Premier’s pursuit of the berserker had now lasted approximately two standard days, and was steadily gaining ground. But before anyone expected an actual encounter, combat flared again.

  The visible berserker and its captured prize were still far out of weapons range. But a terse verbal warning of suspected trouble ahead came from the yacht’s own brain, interrupting yet another session of the planning council. “There is a ninety percent probability of combat within the next forty seconds.”

  Kensing, with the sudden feeling that Annie in one way or another was very close to him, leaped from his chair and dashed for his battle station. A moment later he was almost bumped off his feet by Frank Marcus’s train of boxes, clumsy-looking no longer, outspeeding Kensing’s running legs and others.

  The signal from the early warning system was quickly confirmed. Berserker hardware, in the form of small units deployed across flightspace as well as normal space, lay in wait for Dirac’s squadron. The encounter was only a few seconds away and could not be avoided. The enemy devices, their presence partially masked by dust and by their own shielding, surrounded the faintly crackling trail of the fleeing raider and its catch. These were intelligent mines, brilliant weapons waiting with inhuman patience to blast or ram, ready to destroy themselves against the hulls of any pursuers.

  Until this moment the pursuing force had come hurrying, almost blinded by its own speed, right along the trail, flickering from one space mode to the other and back again; the urgency of the Premier’s quest had demanded exactly that. Fortunately Frank had had time to take the pilot’s chair. At the moment when the enemy must have calculated that their ambush would be detected, and flightspace as well as normal space seemed to ignite in one great explosion, the yacht instead of veering off went hurtling, jumping forward with an appearance of even greater recklessness than usual.

  The pilots of the other two Solarian ships were doing their best to stay with Frank in some kind of a formation and to deal with their deadly enemies as they came within effective range. Some of the ambushing machines could be avoided or bypassed, but the remainder had to be faced and fought.

  The crew of the yacht, many of them like Kensing raw newcomers to actual combat, had the impression that the Eidolonwas being flattened and at the same time turned inside out. The hulls of all three ships rang with the impact of radiation. For the first few moments, total destruction of either humans or berserkers seemed the only possible outcome.

  At the point the enemy had chosen for the ambush, where his trail passed through constricting fringes of nebula, the average density of matter grew marginally greater, and the Solarian squadron, all three ships now embedded in normal space, skidded and splashed to a halt inside this fimbriation. Their formation, never all that well maintained, quickly broke up in tactical maneuver, the enemy’s trail for the moment necessarily ignored.

  The two smaller ships accompanying the Premier’s armed yacht were racked up quickly in this fight. The people on the Eidolon‘s bridge saw one of these vaporized quickly, and the other, in a matter of seconds, so badly damaged that the surviving captain radioed his intention to limp back to Imatra if possible.

  Dirac, shouting on radio, did his best to forbid that, but whether or not his orders got through he could not tell. Almost immediately he and the others on the yacht’s bridge saw the damaged vessel destroyed.

  SEVEN

  Two out of three of the Premier’s ships had been destroyed. The yacht itself had sustained at least one hit, and there were dead and wounded on several decks, smoke in the corridors, air escaping and compartments sealed off. But, once the Eidolonhad shaken free of the enemy’s swarm of brilliant weapons, neither Dirac nor his ace pilot even considered abandoning the chase and turning back to Imatra.

  In the moments of respite that followed, everyone but the seriously wounded was issued and fitted with weapons for close quarters, alphatrigger or eyeblink helmets and the associated gear. The most innovative of these weapons projected cutting beams that savaged ordinary armor, but let soft flesh alone, and rebounded harmlessly—or almost harmlessly—from any properly treated surface. The code embodied in the coating’s chemistry could be readily changed between one engagement and the next, to lessen the chances of the enemy’s being able to duplicate it successfully.

  The realization crossed some remote part of Kensing’s mind that this could work out to be an excellent career move. As a defensive systems engineer, he would benefit from the actual combat experience he was accumulating.

  People, one at a time, were being visited at their battle stations by a service robot, to get their armored spacesuits coated with the right combination, fresh from the paint mixer. Other maintenance robots made their way through rooms and corridors, spraying the stuff on most of the interior surfaces.

  Kensing, now fully suited and armored as were most of the other crew members, waited at his battle station ready to assist with damage control or repelling boarders. He heard Frank, in the pilot’s seat, grunt something to the effect that in the circumstances it would now be as dangerous to turn back as to press on.

  As far as Sandy Kensing knew, Premier Dirac had no more previous experience of actual space combat than Kensing did himself. However that might be, the Premier went on as usual calmly issuing orders—calmly consulting as necessary with Colonel Marcus or other experts before he did so. And as usual his commands were accepted, instantly and without comment. Kensing had noticed that this man only rarely and inadvertently intruded his orders into realms where he was not competent to give them.

  Frank Marcus gave the impression of enjoying every moment of the fight. As soon as he had a few seconds to spare, he called for some kind of sidearms to be brought to him and connected to one of his boxes. “In case we do get to the hand-to-hand.”

  Kensing was busy for a time, overseeing attempts at damage control. The wounded were being cared for in one way or another. There were a number of dead, but not enough seriously hurt survivors to fill all the five still-available medirobot berths.

  And still the ship moved on.

  Kensing assumed there might now very well be some people aboard who objected to continuing the mission; but if so, they were keeping their reactions to themselves. They were private, silent, cautious—because they knew their master would consider disobedience, or even too fervent protest, as mutiny, as treason—and here in space, in the face of the enemy, the law might well justify a ruthless reaction.

  Kensing did overhear a couple of anonymous potential protestors asking each other quietly, off intercom, just how in hell the Premier proposed to be of any help to the captives on the stolen station, even assuming those people could be still alive—and even if the enemy could be overtaken.

  Frank Marcus, who must have overheard some similar mutterings, demonstrated little patience with the malcontents. To Dirac he growled: “I’m with you. I signed on to fight berserkers, didn’t I?” And Frank went on fine-tuning his personal sidearms.

  A little later, Kensing asked Frank in private: “What do you think the chances are that we’ll really catch up with the damned thing now?”

  “Actually, having come this far, they’re probably pretty good.”

  “And if we manage to do that, w
hat chance that we’ll really ever be able to communicate with any survivors on that station? Can we really believe that anyone there is still alive?”

  “Kid, you better stow that line of talk. The Boss’ll have you fried for mutiny.”

  * * *

  Since departing the Imatra system, the yacht had gained a great deal of speed relative to ambient normal space. Because each of Dirac’s craft was notably smaller than the berserker-biostation combination, he had been able to get away with small c-plus jumps, and the yacht and its smaller escorts had emerged from each with a slightly greater subluminal velocity.

  The borders of the dark nebula were hard to define with any precision, but by now the Eidolonwas definitely within the outer fringes of the Mavronari. The difference between this and normal interstellar space showed on instruments, in a steady thickening of the ambient matter-density. And ahead of the yacht the obscuring material gradually but inexorably grew thicker.

  Now once more the telescopes aboard the yacht were refocused, bringing the fleeing berserker and its captive into clearer view. The chase resumed in normal space. The ambush had cost the Premier not only his two smaller ships, complete with crews, amounting to almost half his fighting strength, but a little time, a little distance, as well.

  Within a matter of hours it became evident that the battered yacht was again gaining on the battered enemy. But the rate of gain was slow, even slower than before the ambush; the human warriors, reluctant and otherwise, aboard the Eidolonwere going to be allowed a little breathing space before the looming confrontation.

  Again there was time, a little more time, in which to ponder the persistent mystery: just what benefit was the damned berserker expecting from the prize for which it had sacrificed a chance to commit slaughter on a planetary scale? And just where did the berserker compute that it was taking the biolab and its billion preborn captives?

  As far as anyone on board the yacht had been able to determine by exhaustive search of the available charts and VR models, the dark recesses of the Mavronari contained nothing likely to be an attractive goal for either berserkers or human beings. Not that the great nebula had ever been thoroughly explored. It was known to encompass a few isolated star systems, families of planets ordinarily accessible by narrow channels of relatively empty space. But to reach any of those isolated systems by plowing straight through the cloud itself would take any ship or machine an age. The mass of obscuring matter was truly vast, going on at right angles to the direction of the Galactic Core for a discouragingly long way—hundreds of parsecs, many hundreds of light-years. And toward the middle of the nebula the dust densities were doubtless greater. Thousands of years of subluminal travel, at reduced intra-nebular speeds, would be needed to penetrate this gigantic dust cloud from one side to the other.

  But if the enemy was seeking only a hiding place, it was not going to be able to find shelter inside the gradually thickening dust before it was overtaken and brought to bay. Steadily, though with tantalizing slowness, Dirac’s quarry was becoming more and more distinct in the yacht’s telescopes, was coming almost within a reasonable range for using weapons.

  Was the enemy trying to devise another ambush? Fanatically intense efforts at detection could discern no evidence of that. Perhaps the berserker’s supply of auxiliary machines had been used up in the previous attempt, or perhaps it was hoarding them for a final confrontation.

  One serpentine metal arm of Marcus the pilot made an inquiring gesture in the Premier’s direction.

  Dirac nodded. “We go.”

  If a new ambush had indeed been planned, it failed to appear. Perhaps it was avoided when Frank made one more daring gamble, undertaken with the Premier’s grim blessing; one more jump through flightspace, with everyone else aboard snugged into their acceleration couches, praying or concentrating stoically according to personal preference.

  This time no ambush materialized, and the gamble succeeded. When the yacht Eidolonemerged yet again into normal space, those aboard found themselves matching velocities almost perfectly with their fleeing foe, now only a few thousand kilometers distant. The pursuing humans very soon would be in a position where they might if they chose take a meaningful shot at the enemy or receive direct fire from its batteries.

  That moment of possibility came and passed, and neither side opened fire.

  Closing the range still more, the yacht would soon be near enough to assay some force-field grappling of the station the berserker doggedly dragged along. But any attempt to wrench the prize away by grappling seemed foreordained to failure, given the now-damaged condition of the yacht and the evidently tremendous power of the enemy.

  But perhaps the berserker’s power was not overwhelming after all, not anymore. Observers on the yacht, getting their first look at their foe from relatively short range, could see that the enemy’s outer hull, at least, had sustained considerable damage. How much of that damage had been inflicted by the Imatran resistance, and how much before the enemy entered the Imatran system, was impossible to say. But since the berserker had carried out its raid successfully, it still had to be considered very formidable.

  Twice in the space of a few seconds a subtle premonitory quiver of instrumental readings suggested that the enemy was about to fire at the yacht.

  “Shields up!” The command as Dirac gave it seemed half a question, and in any case hopelessly belated—Kensing on hearing it wondered whether the old man was getting rattled.

  But no matter. Frank, along with the autopilot to which his helmet now had him mentally melded, already had the defenses perfectly deployed. And in fact no enemy fire came.

  Now Colonel Marcus, even as he laconically acknowledged Dirac’s congratulations for his skill in getting his ship and shipmates into this situation alive, adjusted his angle of approach to bring the yacht directly behind the towed research station. In contrast to both berserker and yacht, the station’s outer hull had so far revealed no sign of damage.

  The enemy, which at least since the ambush had not been accelerating at all, was maintaining an almost straight course, jogging only slightly on occasion, a simple autopilot kind of maneuver to avoid high-density knots of nebular material. Frank had no difficulty at all in holding the yacht on station directly behind the double mass of the berserker and its captive. Now the actual variation in the yacht’s distance from the station was minimal, no more than a few score meters.

  With the Eidolonin this position, the bulk of the captive station hung directly between the adversaries, and prevented, or seemed to prevent, the berserker from bringing effectively to bear what must be its superior heavy weapons.

  The Premier now ordered: “Get me in contact with them.”

  It was the political aide who objected: “Radio contact with the station? You’re assuming—”

  “Yes, I’m assuming there’s someone still alive aboard that vessel. That’s why we’re here, remember? Now let’s see if they’re able to respond to an attempt at communication.”

  Several people probably thought that a ridiculous idea. But no one said so. “Acknowledge. We’re transmitting. Hello, on the station? Anybody there?”

  The only reply was a trickle of radio noise.

  “No luck. Well, as for the berserker, the way it’s acting, I think we have to assume the damned thing’s dead. It must have taken some heavy shots a few days ago, and had some delayed reaction. If it wasn’t dead, we probably would be by now.”

  Frank, with Dirac’s concurrence, persisted in the tactic of staying as nearly as possible directly behind the towed station, so that its bulk continued to screen the yacht from the foe’s presumably superior potential firepower.

  The third radio attempt had now failed. Dirac nodded, calmly enough. Evidently he had already made up his mind as to the next step. “I’m going over there to see for myself. You’re all volunteers on this mission, and I expect everyone who’s not wounded to come with me. We’ve got enough small craft available. Nick, you take the helm here.”
<
br />   “Yes, sir.”

  “Frank, I want you to pilot our armed scoutship.” There was just one such vessel.

  “Right.” Methodically Colonel Marcus got ready to turn over control of the yacht to Nicholas, whose driving would be augmented by the yacht’s own computers.

  Kensing, having extricated himself from his own acceleration couch, stood back to give Frank room while the boxed man skillfully maneuvered his personal containers out of the relatively cramped control room to go rolling with zestful celerity down a corridor, then down a ramp in the direction of the hangar deck where his specially fitted scoutship waited for him.

  Kensing followed, suddenly feeling more afraid than he had ever felt before. It wasn’t clear to him, and perhaps it didn’t matter, whether the fear arose because he was soon going to be killed or because he was soon going to confront the truth about Annie.

  One real scoutship, two couriers, two lightly armed launches, the latter pitifully small—not counting the three unsuitable lifeboats, there were five small craft aboard the Eidolonavailable for use in a boarding. The craft easily accommodated all of the remaining fit—and fleshly—crew members on the yacht, three or four to a vessel.

  Dirac, who in the course of his career had been accused of many things but probably never of cowardice, was getting ready to drive the second-best small ship himself. This was a slightly modified courier, armed, but with much less combat capability than the military scout Frank was piloting.

  When the arrangements to crew the small craft had been completed, the Premier quickly gave Nicholas Hawksmoor a few specific orders and left him in command of the yacht, supposedly the sole conscious tenant of the Premier’s remaining fighting ship.