Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  After the messenger’s return, some of Dirac’s own crew began making pointed suggestions as to what ought to be done next. People were saying that it was time—past time—to get out of here, board the rescuers’ vessels and go back to the yacht. If the yacht still wasn’t functional, it was time to concentrate on making her so.

  And Dirac seemed to waver.

  At that point Annie, now dressed in armor, as were Hoveler and Scurlock, faced him. “There’s one problem with that plan,” she announced.

  “Yes, Dr. Zador?”

  “Can your yacht carry everybody?”

  The Premier’s heavy brows contracted. “I don’t understand. Assuming the drive can be repaired, there are only a handful of us here.”

  Anyuta Zador’s voice rose slightly. “There are a great many more Solarians here than you seem to realize. Have you room aboard for a billion statglass tiles?”

  For a long moment the Premier stared at her. Kensing, watching them, thought it was as if Annie had just offered the old man something he had been searching for. “You have a point there,” Dirac conceded willingly.

  People who had been suggesting a retreat now glared at Annie, but so far no one argued openly.

  Evidently mention of the tiles reminded the Premier of something else. When he questioned the bioworkers again, they confirmed that the Lady Genevieve had indeed made her donation before the berserker attacked the station.

  The Premier wanted to know: “Where is it now? The tile?”

  Memories were uncertain on that point. Hoveler and Zador were honestly not sure whether the lab’s robotic system had properly filed the First Protocolonist away or not. In any case the scrambling of the station’s electronic wits, which Hoveler acknowledged having done, would keep anyone from immediately laying hands on any particular specimen.

  Gathering his troops around him, Dirac issued a firm order to the effect that there would be no general evacuation of the station until the question of his protochild had been resolved.

  Neither of the surviving bioworkers, having endured so much and done what they had done, all to defend the protocolonists, was ready to abandon them now. And everyone else now aboard the station, with the possible exception of Kensing, was accustomed to taking orders from Dirac.

  Dirac, making sure that regular contact was maintained with Nick back on the Eidolonand having posted sentries at key locations on the station to watch for any berserker counterattack, took time out to watch a video showing his wife’s arrival at the station a few days ago. He saw for himself the publicity opportunity that had turned into a panic as soon as the alert was called.

  The color coding on the tile was barely discernible in some of the views. But with the retrieval system scrambled as it was, that was probably going to be of no help in finding it.

  Hawksmoor had rather quickly made the decision to sabotage the yacht’s drive and then to report it as malfunctioning, limited to low maneuvering power only. Of course he blamed the trouble on the recent enemy action. He’d done a thorough job of the disabling, but not so thorough that he would be unable to quickly put things back in their proper order if and when that became necessary—as he confidently expected that it would, sooner or later.

  But probably not for a long time, Nick computed. Not until after he had managed to provide the Lady Genevieve with the living flesh her happiness demanded. And even after he had somehow arranged matters so he could use all the facilities of the biostation without hindrance, that was probably going to take years.

  He didn’t really want to make all these other fleshly people suffer, to disrupt their lives and in effect hold them prisoner. Especially not here, where they were almost within the grasp of a monster berserker that was probably still half alive. But what choice did he have?

  Nick had to admit that the complexities of the whole situation were beginning to baffle him.

  No, it wasn’t fair, that the burden of others’ lives should thus be placed upon him. He was supposed to be a pilot and an architect, not a philosopher. Not a political or spiritual or military leader. Not … not a lover and seducer.

  He was able to cushion himself against this resentment and uncertainty only by telling himself that his fretting over these insoluble problems offered strong evidence that whatever means his programmers had used in his creation, they had made him truly human.

  NINE

  There was something about that last fragmentary message from Frank Marcus—chiefly the tone—which Nick found himself still pondering.

  When he brought the message to the attention of Dirac and the others, the Premier listened once to the recording and then basically dismissed it.

  “Humans often call upon God, some kind of god, in their last moments, Nick. Or so I’m told. Sad, tragic, like our other losses, but I wouldn’t make too much of it. That’s probably just the death Marcus would have chosen for himself. In fact, in a very real sense I’d say that he did choose it.”

  “Yes, sir.” But Hawksmoor was unable to dismiss the matter as easily as his organic master did.

  There were other pressing urgencies no one could dismiss. During the skirmish just past, the great berserker in crushing Frank’s scoutship had demonstrated that it still possessed formidable short-range weapons, including the force-field grapples that had evidently pulled Frank in to his doom. The remaining small craft and the yacht itself would have to be kept at a safe distance from the berserker; of course no one could say with any confidence just what distance that might be.

  Some of the debris from the space fight remained visible for almost an hour after the boarding, bits of junk metal and other substances swirling delicately in space, caught near the scene by some short-lived balance of incidental forces. But in an hour the last of this wreckage had gone, blown away in the vanishing faint wind of the ships’ joint passage through never-quite-completely-empty space.

  Every day, every hour as the hurtling cluster of objects drew closer to the depths of the Mavronari, the space through which they traveled, still vacuum by the standards of planetary atmosphere, was a little less empty than before.

  Now space within several thousand kilometers in all directions indeed showed void of all small craft and machines, unpopulated by either friends or foes. Nicholas still stood guard faithfully, trying to decide whether he wanted the fleshly people to make themselves at home on the station or not, beginning to ponder what his own course of action was going to be in either case.

  He could keep his post alertly enough now with half an eye, and far less than half a mind. He was free to spend more than half his time with Jenny. Joyfully, as soon as he had the chance, he awakened her with news of victory.

  When Jenny came out of her bedroom again to talk to Nick, walking with him in the cool, dim vastness of the Abbey, she said: “So long as we remain nothing but clouds of light, hailstorms of electrons, all you and I can ever do is pretend to please each other, and pretend to be pleased. Maybe that would be enough for you. It could never be enough for me.”

  “Then, my lady, it cannot be enough for me either. No, Jenny, I want to be with you. I will be with you in one way or another, and I will make you happy.”

  The intensity in the lady’s gaze made her eyes look enormous. “Then the two of us must have flesh. There is no other way.”

  “Then flesh we will have. I swear it. I will bring real human bodies into being for us.”

  “You have said that before. I doubt that you have such power.”

  “If I am allowed to use the resources on board the laboratory station, I do.”

  The Premier had chosen a woman of quick wit for his bride. “You mean the zygotes? The colonists?”

  “One way would be to use those. There seem to be a billion potential bodies there to choose from.”

  The lady frowned. “But they are—”

  “Are what? You mean there are moral objections, they are people? Hardly. More like genetic designs for organic vessels. Vessels we ought to be able to keep emp
ty until we can fill them with ourselves. There must be some way.”

  Genevieve seemed unwilling to let herself believe that it was going to be possible. “Even if we could find a way to do that, it would take years. You mean to grow ourselves new bodies in the artificial wombs—I can’t go back as an infant!”

  “Nor would I choose to experience infancy.” Nick shuddered inwardly. “Nor, I suppose, could adult minds be housed in brains so immature. But there mustbe a way to make that method work. As you are now, you could sleep for ten standard years, twenty years, while the body that would be yours was growing, developing somewhere. You could rest for a century, if there was any reason to prolong your slumber to that extent, and it would be no more to you than the blinking of an eye.”

  “And so could you.”

  “Yes, of course. Except that the Premier is not likely to let merest without interruption for even an hour. And I must heed his orders if we are to survive. It’s far from certain that the berserker is really dead.” Nick paused, considering. “Fortunately, heseems in no rush about hurrying home. He hasn’t given up on finding you; or finding a way to recover you in some sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He seems to be thinking about your child.”

  “Ah. So do I sometimes. But that child won’t be me.” The lady was silent for a little while, and then burst out: “Oh, Nick. If you can do this for me, put me back together, I will be yours forever.” After a moment the lady added, “How will you do it? My—my husband, and the others mustn’t—”

  “Of course they mustn’t find out. If I find a way to do this for you, you’re not going back to him.”

  “I will go wherever you say, do whatever you want.” New hope had been born in Genevieve’s eyes. “And how will you gain access to the artificial wombs?”

  “Access is no problem. There is nothing to keep me out of the circuitry over there. In general, the way things are on the station now, no one pays any attention to those devices, or would be aware of the fact if they were being used. Still, it would be better, of course, to use one or two of the machines that are physically isolated.”

  The Premier soon summoned Nick over to the station. Rather than transport the units in which he was physically stored, Hawksmoor chose to transmit himself by radio across the minor interval of intervening space, a mode of transportation he had sometimes used in the past.

  Zador and Hoveler and Scurlock, all unaccustomed to the presence of recorded people or anthropomorphic programs, were startled when Nick showed up, as a kind of optelectronic ghost, in the station’s circuitry and computers.

  But the Premier was quick to reassure them. “That’s Nick, he’s on our side.” A moment’s pause; seeing that their recently frayed nerves needed more reassurance, Dirac added, “He’s a mobile program, but it’s all right.”

  Nick immediately went to work, at the Premier’s direction, probing the immense complexity of circuits. Nowhere could he find any berserker booby traps or spot any but the most incidental residue of the berserker’s presence. He did not forget the ten-cube and its stored programs.

  He thoughtfully inspected the combat damage in the main laboratory, where an isolated berserker device had been gunned down, and in the nearby corridor, where a few shots had been wasted. It was very fortunate, he thought, that the onboard combat had been so limited. It wouldn’t have taken a great deal of fighting to leave the station’s fragile equipment entirely in ruins.

  The onboard software was generally okay and did not appear to have been tampered with except for a certain serious confusion in the system that was supposed to keep track of the cargo of protocolonists. This was readily explained by Hoveler’s actions immediately after the berserker occupation. Too bad, but it couldn’t be helped now.

  Nick pondered, wondering if there might be some way to turn the scrambling of the inventory system to advantage, for his own private purposes.

  His and Jenny’s.

  Having completed the first phase of an intense inspection, Nick reported to Dirac and asked him, “What do I do next, boss?”

  “She’s here somewhere. You know, Nick?”

  “Sir?”

  Dirac raised eyes filled with an uncharacteristically dreamy expression. “The medics here on board took her genetic record, and they took our child. These things are a part of her, and they are here.”

  “Oh. Yes sir.” The Boss had given Nick a bad moment there. But now Hawksmoor understood.

  The scrambling of the inventory did not discourage Premier Dirac from pushing his search through the genetic records for his lost bride—or at least, as some of his crew muttered, for enough of her genes to do him some good dynastically.

  “If the Lady Genevieve is dead, still, our child is not.”

  The days passed swiftly, and Dirac and his crew established something like a new routine. No new berserker presence was discovered on the station. But the enormous bulk of the enemy, its drive at least partly functional, still hung over everyone’s head, dragging the research station, very slowly in terms of interstellar travel, toward some mysterious destination. Kensing, and doubtless others, had the feeling of living not far below the rim of a slumbering volcano.

  Nick had now been placed in charge of a force of dull-witted serving robots, charged with a continued harrowing, a vigilant inspection and reinspection of the station, to guard against any surprise berserker counterattack.

  And yet no additional berserker presence had been found, except for a couple of what appeared to be small spy devices. The existence of more was considered likely. Even with Nick on the job, there could be no absolute guarantee of security against them.

  Nick, and one or two fleshly human workers, in consultation with Hoveler who had done the scrambling, were now trying to restore a normal inventory function to the station’s brain. The outlook was not bright. Even were they apparently successful, the cargo might still be badly scrambled if the archivist robots had rearranged many of the tiles while the software was down. This seemed a distinct possibility.

  Dirac insisted that this job of restoration be given the highest priority, though with a huge berserker of unknown capability only a few hundred meters distant, many of the Premier’s shipmates would have preferred to concentrate their efforts on other matters, such as repairing the yacht’s drive.

  Nick, on snatching a few moments away from duty to spend them on his private affairs, felt shaken but triumphant when he considered events so far. He wondered at his own daring and success in secretly defying his powerful employer, in the matter of that employer’s bride.

  Not that this adventure with the lady had begun as an act of defiance. Far from it. Hawksmoor, reliving the chain of events in perfect memory, told himself that when he first drove his ship after the courier he had simply, very loyally, been trying to save her. A little later, when it had plainly been beyond his or the medirobot’s powers to save her flesh from death, the next step had seemed to follow automatically.

  Already at that point Hawksmoor had begun to dread the moment when the woman he had come to love would leave him to be restored to her husband. It had taken Nick somewhat longer to let himself be convinced that, since an electronic bride would do the Premier no good dynastically, she would never be going back to Dirac as any kind of political asset.

  The glorious thing, of course, was that—Nick was sure of it!—she was now at least beginning to care for him. Not that she was ready to choose life with him, under the conditions of virtual reality, over having a real body once again. No, he was under no illusions as to that. Before she could choose life with him, he would have to provide her with a body. And he had yet to make sure that a means existed to accomplish that.

  Most of the station’s artificial wombs were on the same deck, actually in the same room. But five or six had been for some reason separated from the rest, scattered about in secluded spots. The possibility of Nick’s being able to use one—he really needed two—of these without being discov
ered was something he would have to determine.

  Nick said to Jenny: “I will find a way of growing flesh, since flesh you must have. I will grow bodies for us. Or,” he added after a moment, “if something should prevent my doing that, I will take them, already grown.”

  That gave the lady pause, if only for a moment. “Take them from where? From whom?”

  “Somehow. Somewhere. From people who would stop us if they knew what we are doing.”

  Now freely roaming about the station’s circuits, Nick discovered the very treasures he needed to accomplish his goal. The station boasted a whole deck, actually somewhat more than one deck, packed with artificial wombs and their support equipment, perhaps a hundred or more of the glass-and-metal devices. All checked out functional, and all were sitting there just waiting to be used.

  Technically, everything in that department seemed to be in perfect condition. Expert systems waited like genies in bottles to be called up, provided with the necessary genetic material, and given their orders to produce healthy human bodies. A full-scale effort along that line, of course, was supposed to take place only when the projected colonizing ship eventually reached its chosen destination.

  Annie Zador, passing along information in all innocence, told Nick something about the most advanced prenatal expert system aboard, the one she and her co-workers had called Freya, after a Norse goddess of love and fertility.

  And relating this point Nick, standing with his beloved companion near the high altar of the Abbey, lost his composure and attempted to embrace her fully. Whether he was really generating or only imagining the appropriate excitement was hard to say, but he was well on the way to undressing his companion before the lady, who at first had seemed joyously eager, suddenly pulled away, crying: “No! All wrong, all wrong!”

  Then, when she had regained control of herself again: “Not this way, Nick. Not like this. One way or another, dear Nicholas, we must be flesh together.”

  Within the next hour, again having some respite from the duties assigned him by Dirac, Nick was again concentrating his consciousness in one of the comparatively remote areas of the biostation, earnestly studying the data banks and the equipment he would have to use to accomplish his and Jenny’s secret project.