Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  Nicholas Hawksmoor was impressed and somehow moved—and he also felt what he supposed must be a twinge of guilt—when the Premier went off regular intercom to confide privately to him that Nick was the one person he could totally trust not to run away.

  Dirac confessed to Nick that he did not have such complete faith in any of his fleshly folk.

  “Except for Marcus in this case,” the Premier whispered. “And I want the colonel with us on the boarding.”

  Hawksmoor said, “That’s understandable, sir. I think you’ve made a wise decision.”

  As soon as the five small craft were fully crewed, they began to emerge one at a time through the main hatch of the Eidolon‘s hangar deck. Immediately upon emerging from the yacht, they deployed in a scattered formation nearby.

  And from that rough formation, at a prearranged time, the tiny flotilla went darting simultaneously into action.

  The little ships approached the silent research station quickly, on widely separated paths, all taking evasive action, though the enemy’s weapons still remained quiet—

  And then, in the blinking of an eye and a blinding flash of violence, the berserker was inert no longer.

  The scarred hull of the monstrous mothership still remained silent and dark. But a swarm of small fighting machines erupted with weapons flaring from around the bulge of the enemy hull, speeding to intercept the approaching small Solarian vessels.

  Nick, now isolated upon the yacht, his mind operating as always with the optelectronic analogue of nerves, reacted long milliseconds before any of the fleshly humans except Frank, whose mind was already securely melded with his scoutship’s brain. The yacht’s heaviest weapons, or at least the heaviest Hawksmoor dared to employ so near the station, lashed out at the swarm of counterattacking berserker machines, scattering, burning, crushing, wiping one after another of them out of existence.

  In the moments immediately after Dirac had put full trust in him, Nick had briefly toyed with the idea of taking the battered yacht away when only he and his beloved Jenny were left aboard—but he had recognized that as a hopeless dream. Not because he, Nick, would be unable to betray a creator who had been foolish enough to have great faith in him; no, he had already managed to achieve betrayal. Rather, Nick had now become firmly convinced that his only chance of finding happiness with Jenny lay in helping his love regain her fleshly body. And only the bioresearch station, which was superbly equipped for just such experiments, offered any chance of that.

  She was sleeping now, somewhere—as she would perceive it when she wakened—in the Abbey. Nick, as soon as he felt certain that this fight was imminent, had quietly and without asking her permission made sure that his beloved went to sleep. As soon as the combat was over, he would go back to her in the Abbey and knock gently on her bedroom door, and when she opened it for him, tell her of the victory. Had it been possible for Jenny to take any active role in the struggle against the berserker, things would of course have been different.

  During the next minute, Hawksmoor’s organic shipmates fought on grimly in their effort to board the station while he used the yacht’s weapons conscientiously, blasting away with all of his considerable skill at the counterattacking enemy machines. He felt no temptation to turn the heavy weapons against Dirac’s small ship—the berserker must be overcome before any lesser conflicts could be settled.

  Besides, there was obviously a good chance that the berserker itself might eliminate Nick’s rival, despite Nick’s real efforts to protect him. Already one of the small Solarian ships was no longer visible at all, having been blasted by berserker weapons into fine debris. Another had been disabled and was drifting helplessly away. Hawksmoor’s radio contact with the expeditionary force kept being disrupted, as was only to be expected, by battle noise.

  At this point, long seconds into the space fight, three of the small human vessels, including the one Dirac was piloting, had survived the enemy counterattack.

  Another of the surviving three was the scoutship, by far the most heavily armed and shielded of the attacking craft.

  From the beginning of the action, Frank’s heavily armed scoutship had drawn the heaviest enemy attention, a concentration of fire and ramming attempts by small kamikaze machines. It was only now, as Nick watched Frank fight his ship, that he realized how far the man in the boxes, an organic brain melded on the quantum level with state-of-the-art machinery, outclassed any purely nonorganic pilot; how he would indeed, almost certainly, outclass Nick himself.

  Here came a pair of infernal berserker devices, hurling themselves in a direct attack upon the yacht!

  In a moment Nick had vaporized them successfully.

  But not before the Eidolonhad been hit once more, and some further damage inflicted.

  Meanwhile Frank, joyfully entering battle as if it were his natural habitat, had drawn much of the enemy force away from the other small human craft. His heavily armed scout became the enemy’s chief target, being harried and followed by a swarm of enemy machines, and in a matter of seconds a virtual screen of them had cut him off from the yacht and from the two small, less well armed ships.

  Frank, having assumed the job of flying interference for the actual boarding party, did not try to break through the screen. Instead, taking a gamble on being able to get away with the unexpected, he darted in the direction of the mammoth berserker itself. A sharp feint in this direction, and he ought to be able to swing back the other way.

  Nick, observing these maneuvers with some surprise, was doing as much as he could with the yacht’s weapons to help Frank, but Marcus was now entering a position where the yacht’s weapons had an awkward time trying to reach the berserkers nearest him. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that Nick was strongly constrained to avoid hitting the station.

  Moving the yacht might make it possible to support Frank more effectively. But that might also bring the yacht—and Jenny’s all-precious optelectronic life—within the line of fire of whatever heavy weapons the big berserker might be keeping in reserve. In microseconds Nick had decided against any such maneuver.

  During the next few seconds, Colonel Marcus, his scoutship suddenly badly damaged, was being hounded farther away from the station by the pack of his pursuers, though their ranks were now thinned. The scoutship too had been shot up. It no longer mattered whether his aggressive move in the direction of the big berserker had been a feint or not. The remainder of his swarming foes kept after him, harrying his scout ever close to the great machine itself.

  Nick was the only one besides Frank himself who had a chance to see what happened next. And even Nick, despite his speed of perception, was granted only a blurry look at the events.

  Marcus, now finding himself isolated from his comrades in arms, chose, as his past record might have suggested, to adopt ever bolder tactics now that his situation was more desperate.

  He drove right at the massive enemy.

  Perhaps he had counted on being able to pull away at the last moment. What actually happened was that Frank’s little scout, now appearing somewhat fouled in defensive force fields, closed with the berserker’s hull and disappeared. Nick knew, though his angle of view and flaring interference kept him from actually recording it, that the colonel’s ship must have landed, crashed, or been forced down somewhere upon the black, scarred immensity of the enemy hull—around the bulge of both hulls from Nick’s place of observation on the yacht.

  Nor had the scout’s final fate been visible to any of the other surviving humans. The small handful still alive were at the moment totally absorbed in the problems of keeping themselves in that state, and getting aboard the station.

  With the scoutship’s disappearance, the enemy fire stopped.

  A great many—perhaps all—of the small enemy machines that had come out to counterattack had been destroyed. Any that might have survived had ceased to oppose the boarding, had withdrawn out of the range of the yacht’s still-formidable guns.

  For a moment there was s
ilence. Bright stars, dark nebula, looked on imperturbably from all directions.

  Hastily checking the yacht’s various systems for damage, Nick found the drive still functional. In a moment the temptation to cut and run away had risen again. Hawksmoor considered abandoning the Boss and all who had left the yacht with him, seizing the opportunity to get away cleanly with Jenny. Still arguing against any such rash decision was Nick’s basic programming of obedience to Dirac and the equally fundamental commands that he serve and protect humanity—both still were very strong.

  But again, he thought his final decision not to desert rested on the fact that the station still offered the only hope of reestablishing Jenny in the fleshly body she so fanatically demanded.

  Despite considerable losses suffered by the human side, the boarding action now appeared to be succeeding in its main objective. Two small Solarian craft were attaching themselves to hatches over there, reestablishing a foothold on the station. But Nick observed that the victory gave every indication of turning out to be Pyrrhic. Only these two craft had survived this sharp clash.

  Nick was presently able to reestablish radio contact with Dirac.

  One of the Premier’s first questions was “Where’s the scoutship? How did Marcus come out?”

  “He went down somewhere, it looked like, on the far side of the big berserker. I wouldn’t count on him, sir, for any more help.”

  “Damn it. Any more bandits in sight?”

  “Negative, sir. They went out of my sight along with the colonel.”

  “All right. Stand by, Nick. We’re docked here now, and we’re going in.”

  “The best of luck, sir.” And at that moment, Nick was sure he meant it.

  Frank Marcus was down, but not yet dead.

  On finding his scoutship surrounded and harassed by a number of the foe, he had continued to fight aggressively. Triumphantly he had radioed word back—a signal that never got through—that he thought he had succeeded in breaking the back of the opposition by small machines. The number actively engaged against him had diminished to almost nothing. He had won for his shipmates the chance to land on the station virtually unopposed.

  But now the scout with Frank inside was down, smashed down by grapples of overwhelming force upon the enemy’s black, scarred hull. Still, Frank was not dead. The colonel came out of his wrecked ship fighting, having survived where no being entirely of flesh could have done so, his mobile boxes making him almost as agile and armored as a berserker.

  It was time, and past time, for a retreat. But there was no way to retreat, and just staying where he was, until the berserker got around to looking for him, was pointless. He doubted very much that anyone was coming to his rescue.

  That left him with the option of going forward. At least he wasn’t finished fighting yet.

  He hadn’t gone far before he saw the chance, the possibility, of being able to do some more damage before the finish came. Ahead of him, as he clawed his way forward across the berserker’s outer hull with his eight metallic limbs, Marcus now perceived a weakness, a place where his huge opponent’s outer armor had been blown or ripped away in some fight thousands of years in the past.

  It was just moments later, when he was in the act of actually entering the berserker, pushing ahead with his own boarding operation, that Frank suddenly understood, was perfectly convinced, that time and luck had run out at last. This was one daring effort that he was not going to survive. The realization did not interfere with his smooth flow of effort; if he had tried he couldn’t have thought of any better way to die.

  Naturally he had not come out of his little ship unarmed. Once inside the great berserker, near anything it thought important, he could still distract the enemy, make it pay a price. Show it that wiping out life from the universe was never going to be an easy job. Force the damned thing to divert part of its computing capacity and its material resources to finish him off. And maybe in the process he could give his fellow Solarians a chance to rob it of its prize, the bioresearch station it so badly wanted. Maybe Dirac and the rest would even be able to finish it off altogether.

  Marcus indeed managed to get inside the hull. Then he had not far to go, in his one-man lunge for some outlying flange of the enemy’s vitals, before he encountered heavy opposition.

  Only Hawksmoor, alertly guarding his post aboard the Eidolon, received any of the last radio message Colonel Marcus sent. Only part of the message came through, and that in somewhat garbled form. And the last words that Nicholas, listening closely on the yacht, was able to hear from Frank were “Oh my God. Oh. My. God.”

  The two surviving small Solarian vessels had by now attached themselves to modest beachheads on the large hull of the biostation—itself small by comparison with the looming bulk of the berserker only a few hundred meters beyond it.

  Dirac and those who were still alive and functioning with him—Kensing among them—were preparing, under the umbrella of Nick’s potential firepower, to enter simultaneously two of the station’s airlocks.

  The boarders had to confront the possibility that the hatches might be booby-trapped or barricaded. Actually the station’s outer skin appeared scorched or dented here and there, as if by near-miss explosions. But as far as could be ascertained from outside, the airlocks were intact. All indications were that the mating outer doors had functioned perfectly.

  Now the Premier and his companions, wearing armor and carrying the best shoulder weapons available, climbed out of their acceleration couches and made their way one at a time through the small airlocks of their own craft and into the station’s larger chambers, where there was room for several to stand together. Kensing moved among them, as eager and terrified as the rest—but his yearning to find Annie quenched his terror.

  On entering the station’s lock, they immediately discovered that the artificial gravity was still functioning at the normal level. Indications were that the internal atmosphere was normal also. But no one moved to open his or her helmet.

  “Go ahead. We’re going in.”

  Someone standing beside Kensing worked the manual controls set into a bulkhead. And now the station’s inner door was cycling.

  Kensing waited, weapon leveled, mind almost blank, his will holding the alphatrigger trembling on the edge of fire.

  EIGHT

  The planetoid Imatra was ringed by the orbits of a score of artificial satellites, and several of these metal moons bristled with sophisticated astronomical equipment. Similar devices were revolving close to the larger members of the local planetary system. Now all of these instruments in orbit, as well as many on the ground, had been pressed into service, all focused in one direction. They provided anxious observers with some bizarre views, coming in from approximately ten light-days away.

  The images received were at best spotty with distance, and incomplete as a result of interference from the Mavronari’s outer fringe. Nor were the pictures nearly as detailed as the viewers could have wished. But under diligent interpretation they did indicate that the Premier and his pursing force had indeed—ten days earlier—managed to catch up with the fleeing enemy.

  The additional fact that the encounter had been violent was suddenly revealed by the ominous spectra of weapon flashes. There were also the resulting briefly glowing clouds. Some kind of fierce though small-scale engagement was, or had been ten days ago, in progress.

  Several of the worried observers in the Imatran system speculated that these flares and flashes limned an enemy attempt to ambush the pursuing yacht and its escorting ships. How successful the attempt had been, there was no way to be sure from this distance.

  None of these observers from a distance detected anything, beyond the mere fact that Solarian ships had met the enemy, that could be construed as real encouragement to supporters of the Solarian cause. And some of the once-glowing clouds that were the aftermath of battle persisted, expanding enough to block any possible view of later events—assuming the chase had gone on to an even greater distance,
beyond the site of the battle scene currently unfolding.

  One of the few things that those who watched from Imatra were able to say with certainty was that there had been no detectable attempt at communication with their system by any of the Premier’s ships, and no sign that any of those vessels had turned back.

  More days passed with no new developments, no news. None of Dirac’s ships came back in triumph, and if any had tried to turn back from a defeat, they had evidently been destroyed in the attempt. And if any had launched a robot communications courier, that too had been destroyed or had somehow gone astray. The people in the Imatran system lacked any means of confirming or elaborating on what they thought their telescopes had shown them.

  Whether the Premier’s whole squadron, including his yacht, had been wiped out or not was impossible to determine. One could only try to estimate the probabilities. There was not much to go on, really; just those final signals suggesting a space fight, if you knew where to look for them, and even those tenuous traces were fading day by day, hour by hour. Already it was impossible to record anything meaningful beyond the fact of those little glowing clouds, which one could assume to be the flame and smoke of distant battle. An ambiguous signal at best. And soon there would be nothing at all worth putting into memory.

  “Well, we do have fairly good records of this whole unfortunate business. But the point is, are we sure we really want to be diligent about preserving them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that as soon as all the directly interested worlds understand that not only Lady Genevieve is missing, but now Premier Dirac himself—”

  “How can we be blamed for that? In all honesty, how can we be blamed in either case?”

  “Well, I foresee we areprobably going to be blamed by some people—unjustly, of course, but there it is—at least for the Lady Genevieve’s being lost.”