Berserker Wars (Omnibus)

by Fred Saberhagen

  The approximate center of Solarian territory lay at Sol System, three-quarters of the way out from CORESEC to the Rim, along the great spiral curve of what was still called the Orion-Cygnus arm (after a pair of constellations in old Earth’s night sky). From one point on the roughly outlined sphere of ED dominion, a narrow tendril of exploration went snaking in, a symbol of Earth-descended boldness, to touch and barely penetrate the Core. The snaking indirectness was due to the unusually difficult physics of travel in that part of the Galaxy.

  Within the small part of the Milky Way’s volume through which the ships of Earth had traveled, intelligent life forms were breathtakingly rare. Certainly many more sterile planets had been discovered than those bearing even elementary forms of life. And there were far more of the latter than there were of those on which organic intelligence had actually bloomed. Among contemporary intelligent races, the Solarians were almost uniquely aggressive; not until berserkers entered Earth-descended territory had the killing machines ceased to enjoy their hunting almost unopposed.

  The Carmpan were the unearthly, extraterrestrial, variant of humanity with whom the expanding Solarians had had most contact—and there had been precious little of that. Against berserkers the Carmpan Prophets of Probability had on occasion given great though indirect assistance.

  The other organic thinkers known currently to inhabit the Galaxy were even less well known and understood among Solarians than were the Carmpan. Even more retiring and shadowy than the Carmpan, they appeared utterly repelled by the idea of face-to-face confrontation with their violent Solarian cousins on neutral ground, let alone by the possibility of opening their homeworlds to such visitors.

  Not that these others were really hostile to the strange folk from Sol, under whose shield of protective violence their several races still survived. Nor were they unwilling to express their gratitude.

  Only the distant Builders and their ancient opponents, both their races all but completely invisible behind the barricades of time, seemed to have been similar in mind and behavior to the offspring of Earth. Of the Builders’ organic foes, not even a name now survived—but evidently they too had been combative. There was one word of their language left, a name, qwib-qwib,denoting a kind of machine they had evidently built to hunt out and destroy berserkers. That had proved dangerous hunting—it was uncertain whether in all the Galaxy a single qwib-qwibyet survived. And of the Builders themselves, their own all-too-effective weapons, the berserkers, had left nothing but a few obscure records—video and voice recordings. Those videos had recorded slender, fine-boned beings, topologically like Solarian humans with the sole visible exception of the eye, which in the Builder species was a single organ, stretching clear across the upper face, with a bright bulging pupil that slid rapidly back and forth.

  One statement about the Galaxy was certainly possible to make with confidence—that among its hundred billion stars and planetary systems, a vast number of surprises, happy and otherwise, still awaited the determined explorer.

  Everyone gathered in the ten-cube room today had used similar devices before, though the design was not completely standardized, and some initial confusion arose. Each VR helmet presented its wearer with a visual keyboard, floating in apparent space at the lower left or lower right—the wearer’s choice—of the visual field. The controls were accessible through directed vision and practiced will—no hands necessary. Some users found it easier to manage by means of eyeblinks.

  One of the basic controls managed the scale of the display; the effect produced was as if the wearer’s body were shrinking or swelling to accommodate the wish to explore or observe, at one level or another of physical size.

  The vast majority of the stars appearing in the display were only statistical approximations, artifacts of the VR computer. But information on several million real stars and systems had also been fed in from the standard astrogation models.

  The computer at the moment was using no color or other distinguishing shading to represent berserker territory. In fact, as the slow tide of the long conflict ebbed and flowed, it would have been impossible to delimit that wasteland with anything like up-to-date accuracy. Nor could anyone say with any substantial probability where the damned machines had originated, though the captured records, sketchy as they were, offered a tersely convincing explanation of how they had come into being.

  In this particular display, a somewhat outdated version of their domain of devastation could be marked out, demarcated by tagging the suns of all the worlds known to have been attacked in the era of Solarian civilization. A smaller domain, largely enclosed within the first, represented that of the planets known to have been sterilized of life.

  One of the investigators had now keyed in these presentations, evoking a strategic situation inevitably some years out of date. No one in the group now gathered expected to find in this database much in the way of berserker bases, factories, or strongholds.

  If some person of ordinary height, employing the witchcraft of virtual reality within this chamber, swelled in a moment by a factor of a billion in physical height and width, he or she was still somewhat less than two billion meters (two million kilometers) tall. The observer was now in effect much bigger than the biggest planet, yet in his eyes the scale of the surrounding display, as far as its more distant reaches were concerned, seemed hardly to have changed.

  His body length had now become comparable to the diameter of Sol, a roughly average star. But if the explorer’s objective in using the chamber had been to bring the Galaxy down to a size through which he might hope to climb or swim in a few minutes’ effort, he had really made little headway. The division (in effect) of all the distances involved by a factor of a thousand million still left the expanded human facing mind-cracking immensity.

  “Unless you want to swim in one place all day, you’ll have to grow a lot more than that.”

  Math conquers all—if only numbers are to be evaluated. Eventually, having evoked more multiples, the hopeful swimmer attained a scale on which the Galaxy looked no bigger than a tall building. This did not occur until the would-be observer had magnified his own height to something like a thousand light-years. On this scale any solar system had long since disappeared into the microscopic—or would have done so had the computer not been careful to create beacons.

  Now, moving about within the VR chamber, temporarily free of the restraints of gravity, one got the impression that the whole Galaxy had indeed been made to fit inside. On this scale the three main spiral arms were readily distinguishable, with Sol—thanks to the computer—findable as a tiny blinking beacon well out in the Orion-Cygnus curve.

  Someone made the necessary adjustments to bring the display’s version of the Mavronari Nebula into focus at a handy size. The investigators looked and felt their way around and through the image without coming to any helpful insights.

  Someone remarked that most astronomers and astrogators would ordinarily regard the Mavronari as tremendously dull. There were a hundred other nebulas much like it in known space, and they were of interest only as obstacles to astrogation, save to a few cosmologists. Anyway, whoever had created and updated the display had evidently possessed few details on the subject.

  The small black box that one of the fleet commander’s staff was now loading into the VR mechanism contained information exactly duplicating that in the box which the berserkers had recently stolen from the Imatran archive, or which—in a scenario considered less likely—that machine had quickly read in the archive and then utterly destroyed.

  The computers controlling the display inside the ten-meter cube granted each observer a central viewpoint this time, choosing as a first scene a defense controller’s bunker slightly below the Imatran surface. Then the scenario was run in other modes—at first look none of them very helpful.

  Realtime rolled by as the study continued. Disappointment soon set in once more.

  “Run it again?” asked a software specialist.

  “Yes. No
. Yes, in a minute. But first—” Commodore Prinsep rubbed tired eyes. “Well, people, all I can actually see when I look at this record is what appears to be a very peculiar berserker attack. Unique in its own way. The most recent onslaught upon Imatra was also thoroughly untypical, but the two were unlike in at least one intriguing characteristic—I mean that the attacker of three centuries ago retreated after having shed relatively little blood.”

  There was a murmur of agreement.

  The speaker went on: “Have any of the rest of you yet discerned any additional nontrivial contrasts, or similarities, between the two engagements?”

  “Not I.”

  “Nor I. Not yet.” There was a chorus of similar answers around the circle.

  The commodore pushed at the point relentlessly. “So no one yet has any idea what our contemporary berserkers might have found in this record to cause them to break off their own attack so abruptly?”

  No one did. But one adviser offered: “Viewing the recording certainly brings home the essential strangeness of that raid of three hundred years ago. One sees excerpts, and reads the accounts, of course, but somehow one doesn’t grasp the full peculiarity of the event that way. As you say, sir, it was a mugging, a mass kidnapping, rather than a wholesale murder.”

  “Yes. While, as we all know, wholesale murder is a berserker’s sole aim in life.”

  No one smiled.

  “In a way, such a great peculiarity worries me more than simple slaughter. Because it indicates that there’s something very important that we don’t understand.

  “Dirac’s contemporaries were worried by it too, and so were a number of people in the years immediately following that raid. They were bothered by the oddity, even those who didn’t believe it was all a great plot by the Premier. People theorized that the berserker had taken a whole planetary population of protocolonist tiles in order to raise a vast colony of goodlife humans somewhere, goodlife to be its servants, its fanatical warriors.

  “A lot of people in the years immediately following Dirac’s disappearance spent a lot of time looking at copies of this very record. Gradually, of course, interest declined. If I’d wanted a copy recently I don’t suppose I’d have known where to look for it, except on Imatra.”

  “Speaking of looking for things—” This was Ensign Dinant, an astrogator.

  Prinsep blinked at him. “Yes?”

  “I was wondering: Just where is it now after three hundred standard years? Where is Dirac’s berserker? The machine that wanted to steal a billion protopeople—or whatever the exact number really was—and for all we know, succeeded. It shows up fairly clearly in this display. But I wonder where it’s got to?

  “It’s easy to see, on this record, which way that berserker went, and easy to see that Dirac and his people took the same course, going directly after it. But whatever trail that machine or those ships might have left has faded long ago. After three centuries, Dirac’s berserker could be in a lot of different places. It could be well along in the task of nurturing that goodlife colony—if you subscribe to that theory.”

  The commodore nodded. “After three hundred years I should think it could. I also think that we should be seeing some results. And it needs no profound insight to observe that Dirac himself could be in a lot of places—if he’s still alive.”

  The pudgy Prinsep rapped sharply on his table. “Let me remind you, my friends, my dear counselors: the primary question that we face is still: ‘Why should today’s berserkers be so interested in what happened to either the machines or the badlife Solarians of yesteryear?’”

  “I say they can’t,” Dinant argued stubbornly. “Therefore it’s got to be something else on this recording, something we haven’t noticed so far, that hit them so hard, struck an electronic nerve.”

  Perhaps, another adviser suggested tentatively, the vital clue had something to do with the glimpses the recording afforded of Premier Dirac’s yacht.

  But why should anything at all about that vessel be of any importance now?

  No one could guess. But Commodore Prinsep remained determined to find out. Speaking softly, but making the orders unequivocal, he ordered a team comprising both humans and robots to begin at once a grimly thorough, minutely detailed, expert analysis of the recording.

  Meanwhile his task force went plowing steadily ahead.

  EIGHTEEN

  Havot overheard Superintendent Gazin commenting that the majority of Prinsep’s personal staff were expert computer systems—and sneering that a majority of themseemed to be devoted exclusively to food preparation. Havot was developing a somewhat different idea; he could observe for himself that the organic component of the commodore’s staff, a handful of people who had known the commodore and worked with him for some time, was fiercely loyal. At first Havot had taken this attitude for mere politics on their part. Now he was not so sure.

  And Havot wondered if perhaps the Humanity Office superintendent and his senior agent, were beginning to worry about the fleet’s catching up with some active berserkers after all.

  Talking to Fourth Adventurer, Havot learned something more surprising: the Carmpan professed to see in Commodore Prinsep a tendency to mysticism.

  “Mysticism, Fourth Adventurer?”

  “Indeed, Christopher Havot.” The Carmpan stood looking up at him from its one-meter height, out of a face that by Solarian standards was scarcely a face at all. The non-Solarian gestured with several limbs. “And I make the same statement with reference to you yourself.”

  “Me?” Havot stood there, for once astonished, feeling the foolish grin hanging on his face like a mask. “A mystic? No.” At the same time he felt a surprisingly powerful urge to tell Fourth Adventurer of his experience with the berserker on the Imatran surface. But he held back from making any revelations.

  Actually the commodore was very far from Havot’s idea of what a mystic ought to be—almost as far as he was himself. Prinsep, between his businesslike planning sessions, spent most of his time dealing with nothing more abstract than nibbling grapes, or making out his menu for dinner.

  Perhaps Fourth Adventurer had only been trying to be complimentary. Or he simply had the wrong word, the wrong Solarian concept. The difficulty in matching mental constructs must work both ways.

  The commodore, Havot discovered, did spend a fair amount of time with the only non-Solarian human on his ship. It seemed unlikely that they were fellow gourmets—the Carmpan could be seen consuming Solarian food from time to time, but only after running it through his personal processing device, from which everything emerged as a kind of neutral-looking paste.

  By this time the fleet was well launched on its pursuit of the berserker enemies, whose formation was intermittently in sight ahead. Astern, Imatra’s sun dimmed fast with increasing distance. No more messages from Imatra were likely to catch up—Havot could relax a little.

  At the moment, of course, the key to his fate was Becky. Let her let slip a word to Prinsep, or worse, her own boss, about the information that had come in, and her new lover was certain to see one of the brig’s isolation cells or perhaps deep freeze in an SA chamber until someone decided to let him out.

  And he was well aware that the senior representatives of the Humanitarian Office were still watching him, biding their time, looking for a chance to place him under arrest. They didn’t bother trying to keep him under continuous surveillance; he wasn’t going to run away.

  Concerning Agent Rebecca Thanarat, Havot was considering several courses of action, all of which had certain drawbacks. For the moment he had to be sure, at all costs, that she was in love with him, content with their relationship. Havot smoothly stepped up the pace of his campaign of seduction, keeping in mind that getting her into bed was infinitely less important than winning her total devotion. Frequently, he had observed, the two did not go very closely together.

  Havot tended to believe Rebecca’s assurance that no other copy existed of the incriminating message. But naturally he could not be absol
utely sure. He had disposed of the first paper copy very carefully.

  Like many of the other women who had fallen in love with Havot at one point or another, Becky wanted to know all about his background. He repeated to her with some elaboration his earlier lie that he had worked as a dealer in educational materials. The story had now expanded to make him a former teacher.

  She wasn’t that interested in pursuing details of Havot’s fictitious teaching career. “You were going to tell me how you got into trouble with that awful police department.”

  “Well … it had to do with an abused child.” By now Havot had had the time necessary to prepare a prizewinning narrative. He knew Becky well enough to know how her sympathies could be most easily aroused and enlisted.

  Aboard the several ships of the pursuing task force—now preparing for the first c-plus jump out of the system—the commodore and his chief advisers, including the subordinate ship captains, were gathered in electronic conference, the optelectronic brains of the ships themselves exchanging speech in the form of scrambled signals.

  The leaders summoned into conference by the commodore were military people, except for the Carmpan—who this time courteously declined the honor—and the Humanity Superintendent.

  The planners continued to struggle with the problem of the enemy’s motivation in their sudden withdrawal and flight.

  * * *

  The electronic spoor of the mysterious lone raider of three centuries ago had long since dissipated. But on the old records the course of Dirac’s berserker was easily discernible, and telescopic observations confirmed the fact that today’s powerful but swiftly fleeing force of death machines were indeed staying very close to their predecessor’s vanished track.

  Havot was not usually invited to sit in on Prinsep’s strategic planning sessions. But much of what was said in these discussions soon became common knowledge aboard ship, as did the observed behavior of the contemporary enemy.