Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Thanks. Though I don’t suppose there’s much I can do about it. By the way, aren’t you worried that your boss will see you socializing on jolly terms with me?”

  “Not a bit. He’s directed me to do just that.”

  “Oh. I see. To win my confidence?”

  “And having done so, be witness to some damning admissions from your own lips.”

  “I take it you’re not recording this?”

  “Not yet, but I’m about to start. Ready? … there.” He couldn’t see that Becky had made any overt physical movement to turn anything on. Some alphatriggered device, no doubt.

  Ultimately, Havot felt sure it would be up to the commodore to decide whether martial law should be declared, because Prinsep was camped here with the weapons and the power to do just about anything he liked.

  The fleet commander did take action of a sort. Calling before him the people chiefly concerned, Prinsep, looking vaguely distressed in the presence of Havot and the OH people, considered the question of martial law.

  “I don’t understand this request.” His voice, as usual, was petulant. “What smattering of legal knowledge I possess whispers to me that the purpose of martial law is the control of an otherwise unmanageable population.”

  One of his own aides nodded briskly. “That is correct, Commodore.”

  “Then I really fail to understand.” He stared with watery eyes at the OH people. “What population are you trying to control, anyway? I get the idea, don’t you know, that they’re all dead hereabouts.” The statement concluded with a final little shudder of repugnance.

  At that point Humanity Office Superintendent Gazin, no doubt confident of his target, decided to try a lightly veiled threat. “There is only one proper way to approach the situation, Fleet Commander. Or perhaps for some reason you don’t approve of the Humanitarian point of view in general?”

  Prinsep only blinked at him and looked distressed. “Dear me. But whatever personal feelings I might have in the matter must surely be put aside. No, as a matter of military necessity, Superintendent, our only living witness to the attack must be kept available to the military, for ah, continued debriefing.”

  This was all, as far as Havot could see, political sparring. In fact the commodore and his advisers hadn’t bothered Havot very much with questions so far. And however much Havot might have been willing to help, the fact was that he honestly could give them very little about berserkers. He thought of trying to fabricate some interesting tidbits, just to confirm the commodore’s conviction of his usefulness, but decided that would be too risky.

  Still Havot, despite his earlier forebodings, was convinced that things were now going well for him. Fortune still smiled, the furious Fates were held at bay, and he was content for the time being to wait in his newly assigned cabin, small but adequate, aboard the flagship Symmetry.In a day or two this impressive weapon was going to carry him safely out of the chaos of the Imatran system, whisk him away before any word of his true identity and legal status could arrive in-system and reach the anxious hands of Superintendent Gazin and his HO cohorts.

  Havot had one worry: delay. He doubted very much that the gourmandizing commodore was going to break his neck hurrying after the fleeing berserker fleet. With fine wines and exotic foods to be enjoyed, why risk bringing about a real confrontation with that murderous collection of machines?

  Now, having got through what he could hope would be his last unpleasant confrontation with the superintendent, Havot spent most of his time inspecting one shipboard display or another, or chatting with any crew members who happened to be free. He also took note of the fact that additional Solarian fighting ships kept appearing in-system at irregular intervals of hours or minutes, and attaching themselves to the fleet.

  The continuing buildup of force was impressive. Arguably ominous. But Havot was not personally very much afraid of combat; and he still doubted seriously that Prinsep was the type of leader to make serious use of the strength he was being given.

  He enjoyed arguing this, and other matters, with Becky Thanarat. And of course he took it for granted that she was recording him, even, or especially, when she assured him she was not.

  As for Commodore Prinsep: all right, the man was jealous of his own prerogatives, and able to stand up for his own authority; but to go out and fight berserkers was a different matter. He’d go out and look for them, all right, but doubtless be careful not to come too close.

  So much the better for Havot, who wasn’t particularly anxious to ride into battle against berserkers. Not after his experience with one on the Imatran surface.

  And yet, in the background, the ominous drum roll of preparation continued, hour after hour. Havot could not avoid being interested, drawn to the swift lethal combat scouts, some near spheres, some jagged silhouettes like frozen lightning, which darted past the Symmetryto descend to the Imatran surface, or nuzzled at their mother ships in low orbit.

  A member of the flagship’s crew informed Havot that some of these scouts, having just survived the perils of in-system jumping to intercept the relevant light, were bringing back the eagerly anticipated recordings of the berserker attack he alone had been lucky enough to survive.

  Word drifted out of the fleet commander’s quarters that Prinsep was now inspecting these video records of the recent raid. The OH people had also been given access to them, but evidently had been able to learn nothing offering new fuel for their suspicions.

  To the suspect’s vast relief, he soon learned—from Agent Thanarat, who was showing signs of becoming rather more than sympathetic—that the superintendent had been given permission to search the archives of the fleet, but had found there no evidence connecting Havot with crimes of any kind.

  But Becky also confirmed, matter-of-factly, something Havot had already assumed: more than a day ago the superintendent had dispatched Havot’s fingerprints and other identifying characteristics to one of the sunward planets. Communications were still upset because of the recent attack, but a response might be forthcoming at any time.

  “Why in all the hells has he decided to pick on me?” Havot flared for just a moment—then he worried that the woman might have seen the predator’s claws come out.

  But it seemed that Becky hadn’t noticed anything special in his reaction. She said: “I don’t know. It might be just political; he’s trying to boost the power of the Office any way he can.” They walked on a little farther. “I don’t know,” she repeated. “When I signed up with them, I didn’t think it would be like this.”

  “No?”

  “No. I thought—I believed in what they always claim their objectives are, promoting the values of humanity, and …”

  She fell abruptly silent, and her feet slowed to a stop. Havot was stopping, frozen too.

  Emerging from around the next bend of corridor into their field of view, there walked upon a dozen stubby legs a barrel-shaped non-Solarian creature like nothing either of them had ever seen before. No more than a meter tall, but massive as a large man, dressed in something green and flowing …

  “A Carmpan,” Havot breathed. Then in the next moment he had rallied somewhat. Neither Havot nor Becky, like the vast majority of their fellow Solarians, had ever seen such a creature before except on holostages, where they, or rather skillfully imaged imitations, tended to show up frequently in fantastic space-adventure stories.

  The creature—the Carmpan human—had evidently heard him. He—or she—paused and turned to the two young Solarians.

  “I am called Fourth Adventurer.” The words came tumbling, chopped but quite distinct, from a definitely non-Solarian mouth. “I am male, if this is of concern in how you think of me.”

  The Solarians in turn introduced themselves. Talking freely to both of them, but seeming especially interested in Havot, Fourth Adventurer explained that he had been for some years an accredited diplomat to several high Solarian powers, and for some months now a usually reclusive passenger on the Symmetry.

  F
ourth Adventurer soon invited both Havot and Thanarat to attend, as his guests, the commodore’s next planning session.

  Havot, at least, was intrigued. “I’d love to. If the commodore doesn’t mind.” And indeed it soon appeared that Prinsep had no objection to the young people’s attendance, if the Carmpan diplomat wanted them there.

  Once in the meeting, the Carmpan settled into his specially shaped chair, saying very little but seeming to listen attentively to everything.

  There was only one rational reason, some Solarian proclaimed in a kind of opening statement, for berserkers to withdraw as precipitately as this particular set had done, from a target where their attack had been successful but had not yet been pushed to its deadly conclusion.

  Someone else interrupted: “I don’t see how they could even be sure they’d done as thorough a job as they really had. If they were playing by their own usual rules, they’d have stayed around at least a little longer to make sure that everything was dead.”

  “The only possible explanation is that their early withdrawal somehow gave them the opportunity of eventually being able to harvest still more lives—preferably human lives—here or somewhere else. Or they were convinced it would have that effect.

  “And as we all know, their preferred target of all targets is human life—Solarian human in particular.”

  No one, least of all the listening Carmpan, disputed that point. Berserkers understood very well that only one species of life in the Galaxy—or at least in this part of it—seriously contested the dominance of the killing machines, really gave them a hard time in carrying out their mission. Therefore, in the berserkers’ reversed scale of values, the elimination of one Earth-descended human life was worth the destruction of a vast number of animals or plants.

  But then some other person in the discussion put forward a second possible reason for the enemy’s withdrawal—though this possibility was really a variation of the first. Suppose the berserkers had captured some person or thing on the Imatran surface or had gained some information there—had somehow attained a prize that was to them of overwhelming value. So overwhelming, indeed, that their own advantage demanded that they carry this prize away with them at all costs, and without a moment’s delay.

  “Even if doing so meant leaving behind some human life unharvested.”

  “Even so.”

  Everyone turned involuntarily to look. It must, Havot realized, have been the first time the Carmpan had spoken in council.

  SIXTEEN

  This was the first time Havot had ever been aboard a warship, and he was somewhat surprised at how few people made up the crew of even a ship of the line, as leviathans like Symmetrywere called. Onboard society was rather restricted, but it was interesting.

  Havot’s amusement grew from hour to hour, though he kept it well concealed. He was enjoying the situation. He liked to watch Commodore Prinsep, plump fingers fluttering, agonizing, in consultation with his robot chef, over his choices for tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch. He sat or stood about his office looking timid and seeming to waver, his mind on other things—and actually he did not yield a centimeter on anything of substance.

  So Havot, confident that he still enjoyed the commodore’s protection, was privately more amused than worried by the various maneuvers on the part of his potential persecutors. It appeared to him that he had little to worry about as long as he remained under the protective custody of the fleet commander. His current situation allowed him to lounge about in comfort in the wardroom, the library, or the gymnasium of the warship, or in the small private cabin he had been assigned. This cabin was fairly large, he gathered, by military standards, being about three paces square, big enough for bunk and table, chair and plumbing and holostage. It had probably been intended to house midlevel dignitaries who were visiting aboard or being transported.

  The Carmpan, Fourth Adventurer, was housed in a similar room just down the corridor. And Havot, rather enjoying his constrained but comfortable stay aboard the flagship, and accustomed to feeling like an alien himself, felt some kinship with this other alien, who appeared to be doing very much the same thing.

  Havot soon discovered that none of the Solarians aboard seemed to know the Carmpan’s reason for having joined this expedition, though of course there was a lot of speculation. Fourth Adventurer was evidently too eminent a diplomat for anyone to risk offending, too important to be prevented from doing anything that he was seriously determined to accomplish. A great rarity indeed, a Carmpan traveling on a Solarian vessel far from any of the homeworlds of that race so everlastingly enigmatic to Earth folk.

  Rumors of long standing had it that this race could do strange things with mental contact, telepathic achievement all but completely beyond Solarian capability. In Havot’s mind that added a risk of discovery, a touch of danger. Fascinated, he found himself staring at the non-Solarian whenever the opportunity arose. If the Carmpan had any objection to this intense inspection, he said nothing.

  Fourth Adventurer looked, to Solarian eyes, pretty much indistinguishable from the other Carmpan, real or image-faked, who appeared from time to time on holostage. Some Solarians described their race’s slow and squarish bodies as machine-like, in contrast with their visionary minds.

  A small handful of Carmpan individuals were famous in Solarian annals as Prophets of Probability, and Havot took the next good opportunity to ask Fourth Adventurer the truth about that title—or office, or activity. The young man admitted he did not know how it should be described.

  “I prefer to speak on other topics,” said Fourth Adventurer; and that was that.

  Becky too was curious about their exotic fellow passenger. She reminded Havot of the famous historical scene shortly preceding the legendary battle of the Stone Place, where in all the dramatic re-creations a Prophet appeared, festooned with ganglions of wire and fiber stretching to make a hundred connections with Carmpan animals and equipment around him …

  “Show business,” Havot commented scornfully. But he didn’t know if he was right.

  … and then Fourth Adventurer, at a moment when Becky happened to be absent, looked Havot over even as the Solarian impassively studied the blocky, slablike Carmpan body. At length the non-Solarian diplomat assured Havot that he, the young Solarian, must have been spared death at the hands of the berserkers for some good if still mysterious reason. It sounded to Havot as if the non-Solarian were talking about something like God’s plan, even if the Carmpan did not use those exact words.

  Havot was somewhat disappointed; he wasn’t sure what he had expected from this exotic being, but something more. In his experience, anyone who professed a belief in a God was very likely to be cracked or, more likely, actively out to defraud his listeners.

  But Havot did draw a pleasant, unexpected comfort from the fact that at least one influential person seemed to believe strongly in his, Havot’s, fundamental innocence. One had to keep on meeting new people if one expected to enjoy that attitude; as soon as people got to know one, they tended to lose faith.

  The HO Superintendent, still confidently on board, had demanded and received from Commodore Prinsep—who would not think of refusing any reasonable request by duly constituted authority—access to the recently obtained military recordings of the latest berserker attack. The same records, seized on eagerly by the intelligence analysts aboard, were broken into sections by computer, recombined, examined over and over again.

  Certain facts could be solidly established by the recordings. Among these were the precise direction of the berserkers’ hurried departure, and the strength of the force that had carried out the most recent attack. This fleet had included ten large spacegoing machines, each equipped with a small army of boarding devices, landers, and other infernal gadgets.

  One or two of the berserker motherships and a large number of landers had been destroyed by the ground defenses, which had been greatly, if not sufficiently, improved since the last attack three centuries ago. No single berserker,
not even one the size of Dirac’s, which had dwarfed the more modern units, would have succeeded in this year’s raid. But still this year’s enemy fleet had been too strong.

  The strategists and would-be strategists on board the Symmetryscratched their chins and rubbed their eyes and pondered: what was the significance of the direction of the enemy fleet’s departure?

  “There’s just nothing out that way but the Mavronari … of course it’s possible they deliberately headed out-system in the wrong direction, trying to mislead us as to their ultimate destination.”

  “That’s hardly consistent with their being in such a rush that they couldn’t spare five seconds to clean up one more human life.”

  By means of diligent and clever computer enhancement, tricks performed by the warship’s expert graphics systems, the video record from deep space could be made to show with surprising clarity certain details of the planetoid’s surface during the attack. Details as fine as a rough image of the individual machine, only a little larger than a man, that had been chasing Havot.

  Some of the enhancements of the action on the surface even displayed a barely discernible dot, which all analysts agreed was probably the armor-suited Havot himself.

  Superintendent Gazin and Ariari, his senior agent, also spent some time watching this part of the show over and over, displaying keen interest and suspicion. But the OH representatives must have been disappointed; they saw nothing to suggest overt goodlife activity on Havot’s part.

  The only thing even ambiguously suspicious in the recorded images was the apparent hesitancy of the killing machine that had confronted Havot. And even that could be explained by the fact that it was crippled.

  Havot, on expressing a modest curiosity, was invited by the commodore to take a look at the recording.

  The young man managed to get the seat next to Agent Thanarat at the next showing, and made some further impression on her.

  To the suspect’s relief it proved impossible to derive from the little dancing images any evidence about most of the things he had actually been doing to get himself away from one of the enemy.