Berserker Blue Death

by Fred Saberhagen

  Running one last time through the operator’s checklist of her armored suit—quite unnecessarily, but it gave the mind something to do—Polly knew terror, remembered her children and asked herself why she was doing this. The answer to that question was not hard to find—Domingo had asked her to do it. But that answer, she reflected, was the kind that did you no good when you had found it.

  Now that the launch was completely inside the berserker, their communications with the Pearl were almost entirely cut off. Radios stuttered and rasped with static. Domingo had been expecting this problem. He got around it by maneuvering the launch back to the lip of the wound through which they had entered the enemy’s carcass and pausing to set up a small robotic relay station there. He had to get out of the launch in his armored suit to do so.

  Waiting for him inside the launch, Polly and Iskander held their craft in position. They were too busy watching for signs of enemy activity to talk, beyond the minimum of necessary communication, or even to look at each other. But the metal body of the enemy around them, dead or dying, still had not reacted to their presence. Polly could begin to breathe again.

  The EVA lock cycled; Domingo came back in. Sitting in the pilot’s seat again, the outer surface of his suit frosting over lightly with the cold it had brought in, he exchanged a few words with the Pearl, confirming for himself that communications had now been solidly reestablished.

  Next, driving the launch very slowly, he moved it deeper inside the largely hollow body of the enemy and with a magnetic grapple secured the prow of the small craft to a central projection within the ruin.

  Then Domingo once more unfastened himself from his seat and stood up, drifting. The artificial gravity in the launch had not been turned on, conserving that much power against sudden need. He said: “You both know what we’re looking for. Keep in contact with each other at all times.”

  “One more thing,” said Baza. “We’re locking up after us. Don’t want any mice getting in while we’re out.” Iskander grinned mirthlessly. “Hatch reentry code will be Baker Epsilon Pearl. Okay?”

  The two people with him acknowledged the code. Now the three explorers were ready to begin serious investigation. Domingo disembarked first and looked around before the others came out. Then he beckoned them. Baza, last one out of the small vessel, closed and sealed the hatch. Then the three separated, moving away from the launch in three different directions.

  On first touching the metal bones of the berserker, Polly could feel, through the gauntlets covering her hands, how those structural members quivered faintly with the ongoing throb of some machinery. Everything here was not totally dead. But the hulk seemed basically stable, and getting around inside it proved not to be difficult, at least at the start. When necessary the boarders used the small jets on their armored suits to maneuver. But most of the time, in the effective absence of gravity, they were able to scramble readily from one handhold or foothold to another. Each member of the party carried sample cases and nets, means of gathering samples of gas, of debris, of anything that looked like it might represent a clue as to the purpose of this huge construction.

  Repeatedly Domingo’s voice came on the suit radios of his two companions, urging them to hurry the investigation, not to waste a moment. It was possible that secrets were being destroyed around them every minute. Polly wondered, but at this late juncture hesitated to ask, how they would be able to recognize a real secret when one appeared.

  Already Iskander was jabbing boldly with a long, telescoping staff at some wreckage near the launch. “Someone else ought to look at this,” he said on his suit radio. “This looks to me like biochemistry lab equipment. Maybe your hunch is right, Cap. About there being something here worth finding out.”

  Polly, pushing aside incomprehensible alien debris, went to join Baza. The stuff he was digging into looked to her like industrial equipment, pieces from some kind of factory.

  Domingo had started his own search some distance away. Over suit radio he informed the others that he had already come upon the remnants of similar equipment.

  The three of them, all keeping moving while they talked, discussed the situation with Simeon and Wilma and Gujar back aboard the Pearl. As Iskander had said, it looked as if Domingo’s instinctive decision to board the wreck might be justified.

  From the ship, Wilma’s voice came sharply, interrupting the discussion: “We’re starting to get some readings that indicate activity aboard that piece of junk.”

  The captain’s voice snapped back: “What sort of activity? What do you mean?”

  “It looks to me like physical movement. By objects approximately the size of people, making sudden starts and stops. It’s not you; we can distinguish your movements from this other stuff.”

  The faces of Polly’s shipmates were hard for her to see inside their helmets. Domingo’s voice came calmly: “If there were any independently functioning, programmable machines still here, I think they would have let us know already. What you’re detecting might be drifting bits of stuff.”

  “Might be. It’s hard to read anything accurately under these conditions. But to be on the safe side maybe you’d better get back to the launch.”

  “Scratch that. This whole operation is some distance from the safe side, anyway. We’re going on with what we’re doing.”

  Polly heard her captain’s fearless indifference, swallowed and went on with what he wanted her to do. Iskander naturally was doing likewise.

  The radio voice came again, relayed from the ship. “All right, acknowledge. We’ll continue to stand by.” The three people who were still aboard the Pearl would be ready to provide what help they could for the three boarders in case of trouble; or, in the worst case, they ought to be able at least to get away with the ship and carry the news of a disaster. The people on the ship also had the task of recording data as it was transmitted from the trio of explorers.

  Exploration proceeded as rapidly as was feasible.

  Like her two companions, Polly jumped and jetted and clambered about the wreckage at a speed that she would have thought utterly reckless had it not seemed even greater folly to spend more time here than absolutely necessary. Still, she was sure that they were not going to be able to explore the entire hulk.

  The explorers were undoubtedly accumulating a lot of raw information. How much usefulness that information had, if any, would have to be determined later. Hand-held video units recorded whatever passed in front of them. Faceplates in armored helmets expanded the spectrum in which the human eye could see, even as they protected the eyes from overloading brightness.

  Drifting and clambering through this ruin filled with disorienting shapes and unfamiliar objects, Domingo saw no recognizable weapons and no vast stores of power such as would have been required to energize most types of the space-warfare weapons with which he was familiar. In this portion of the berserker too, some of the things he was finding looked like lab equipment. In fact, a lot of it looked like that. Yes, it had to be.

  But what was all the rest of this? The components of a miniaturized factory for the production of some kind of biological materials, as Polly had already suggested?

  Still, the only discovery Domingo really felt confident about as yet was that most of this was not weaponry, or direct support for weaponry, at least not any type with which he was familiar. He grew more certain of that the more he saw. There was no question that there had been some weapons on this thing once; on a berserker there always were. But the armament, especially if it were limited in quantity, would have been mounted on or just inside the outer hull, and very little of that hull was left. He hadn’t yet taken a close look at the remnant of surface that still existed, thinking secrets more likely to be found inside.

  It was amazing that any machine, even a berserker, could have taken a beating like this and still function well enough to propel itself this far.

  The strength of malevolent purpose…

  He moved around a shattered bulkhead, finding his
way into yet another bay. Here were massive cylindrical objects— field generators, he thought, and of some complex kind. Not the usual type of generators that were used to create defensive fields or artificial gravity for human ship or inanimate killing machine. No, these were intended for something else… and they were clustered together oddly, as if in an effort to produce some kind of heterodyning…

  And what had all this been, here, inside? Tanks, pipes, equipment for doing something chemically. Producing something, in quantity, he supposed. Beyond that it was very hard to guess.

  The problem of determining functions was only partially a result of the extensive damage and the alien design. Difficulty also lay in the fact that there was simply too much volume here, too many things. too much material for three harried, frightened people to assimilate or even to record on video in any endurable length of time.

  Vibrations in the berserker’s framework had been perceptible to the explorers ever since they had left their launch. Now the rumbles and shudders were growing stronger and running almost continuously through the enemy’s metal bones, for all Domingo knew presaging another and finally catastrophic blast.

  Now, every time Domingo touched a solid part of the berserker, his grip was shaken.

  Instruments attached to the captain’s suit registered another increase in the flux of radiation. No one spoke up about the increase, but everyone must have made the same observation he had. The readings were still within tolerable limits for the suits, but Domingo feared that they were high enough to make it hard for his people to concentrate on the job at hand.

  The captain himself had no trouble concentrating. What he was doing was necessary. He looked around him, making an urgent effort to get some overall sense of where he was, to form a picture of what this entire structure must have been like before the Space Force weapons had blown half of it away. This unit didn’t seem like a ship, in the sense of something built primarily for travel or combat. It was, to begin with, he thought, more like some kind of space station, built to stay more or less in one place, working on some job. And the body of the station—call it that—was heavily compartmentalized, or at least it had been before it had been wrecked. The implication, as Domingo saw it, was that different experiments, or possibly different production lines, would have been going on in the separate compartments.

  He and the two people with him had as yet explored only a comparatively small portion of this unit. The whole berserker was perhaps twice the cross-section and eight or nine times the volume of the Pearl. But so far Domingo had seen no evidence that it had ever held any human prisoners. Not Earth-descended, not Carmpan, not of any of the other known themes among the several recognized varieties of living Galactic intelligence. There was no trace recognizable of the life-support systems that would have been necessary to keep such prisoners alive. Nor were there signs of any cells, rooms or passageways where living victims might once have been held. Nor even of anything that looked like animal cages.

  He called his two fellow explorers on radio and questioned them. They had seen nothing of the kind, either.

  “Cages?” Polly asked. “Why should there be cages?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed a possibility.”

  Iskander, drifting closer from a distance, had a comment. “It’s not a prison, not an ark and not a zoo. But it is some kind of developmental lab. I’ll bet my next chance to own a ship on that.”

  Domingo was keeping his hands busy while he conversed, putting fragments of drifting material into a sample case. He answered: “I don’t know that I’d be willing to go that far. But this is certainly not a fighting unit. We’ve been through enough of it now to be sure of that.”

  Iskander, hovering close to his captain in effective weightlessness, seemed to shrug inside his armor. “So far we’ve given it a light once-over only. But I suppose you’re right, Cap.”

  “Assume I am correct.” Domingo snapped shut his sample case. “Then why was this unit traveling with a berserker raiding party?”

  “Probably berserkers have their logistic problems, too. Maybe they’re moving their laboratory from one planetoid or system to another… how should I know?”

  Polly put in: “I’ve got a bigger question for both of you. Why are berserkers cultivating life? Are they experimentally trying to produce new forms?”

  In the reflected glow of the launch’s searchlights, she could see Domingo’s face inside his helmet; the captain seemed to be staring at the question as if his life depended on it. At last he answered. “I don’t know. But it would be a good idea to find out.” He looked around at the other two, who at the moment were both close to him. “And meanwhile, while we’re sitting around thinking things over, it’ll be a good idea for us to continue to survive. I think we’ve got enough information for a start. Let’s get ourselves back into the launch.”

  No one argued with that decision or hung back from its execution. And a moment after they had closed the hatch of the launch behind them, they were heading out of the berserker’s belly and back toward the Pearl.

  CHAPTER 9

  A matter of minutes later, the Pearl’s entire crew was safely back inside the ship, and the ship had been withdrawn to what Domingo considered a prudent distance, nearly a hundred kilometers from the drifting wreck.

  The captain called his crew into a conference. Everyone was wearing shipboard coveralls now, while out in the ventral bay three suits of space armor, along with the launch, were still undergoing a thorough precautionary sterilization.

  Some of the sample cases brought back to the Pearl had already been processed through the sickbay diagnostic machines, where they had been discovered to contain microbial cultures. Those cases had been resealed by remote control and were being saved in sickbay for further investigation when they could be taken to a real laboratory.

  Gujar said thoughtfully: “It’s really simple.”

  “How’s that?” Polly asked.

  “Berserkers aren’t intrinsically interested in science.”

  Domingo nodded. “Agreed.”

  “And producing new forms of life is against their basic programming, which is to kill. So if they’re experimenting with biology, producing some modified forms of life—that’s the suggestion, isn’t it?—they have an overriding reason for doing so. It’s part of an effort to achieve some larger goal.”

  It was Wilma’s turn to nod. “Of course. And their goal is no doubt their usual one, of wiping out ED humanity. We’re their big stumbling block, probably all that stands in the way of their sterilizing the whole Galaxy. We have been, ever since they met us.”

  “Exactly. And so the most likely interpretation of all this bioresearch material is that it represents a serious attempt to produce—what? An antihuman poison?”

  Polly said: “There are a lot of poisons around already that can kill people. It wouldn’t take any great amount of research to find out about them. I don’t think it’s that. But… an antihuman something, certainly. Maybe a virus?”

  The captain was thinking very intently. “Historically, down through the centuries, they’ve already tried a number of times to use disease organisms against us. But that kind of tactic has never worked very well for them, as far as I know. People have been doing research on human diseases a lot longer than berserkers have; we’re ahead, and we’re not about to let them catch up.”

  “But suppose they have caught up?” Iskander wondered. He appeared to find possibilities of amusement in the idea.

  “Well, we can feed what information we’ve been able to gather so far into the computer, along with that hypothesis, and see-what we get.”

  Wilma and Simeon got started doing that while the others watched.

  Simeon was ready to continue the discussion as he worked. “I assume you’ve all heard about the Red Race.”

  “Sure.” Iskander raised his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me they’re involved.”

  Chakuchin ignored that dry joke; the Red Race, the berserkers’ origin
al targets, had been dust and radiation as long as the Builders themselves or perhaps a short while longer. “Then no doubt you’ve heard about the qwib-qwib too.”

  “Sure. So what?” In that lost age, sometime before the beginning of ED history, the Builders’ opponents, with almost their dying effort, had constructed machines that were designed and built and programmed to do nothing but seek out and destroy berserkers. Or so went the theory most favored by present-day ED historians. Unfortunately for the Red Race and for Galactic life in general, the qwib-qwib machines had appeared on the scene too late to cope successfully with the berserkers.

  “Legendary,” said Iskander, smiling faintly.

  “Like Leviathan itself.” Domingo was not smiling. “But whether something is legendary or not is not the point. Simeon’s point, as I see it, is that the berserkers might now be doing something analogous to what the Red Race did with machines. I mean they might now have turned to creating life—not necessarily just microbes—to wipe out life where other means have failed them.”

  For the next few seconds each of the six people thought her or his own thoughts in silence. Then their ship interrupted their meditations with a report.

  Their main onboard computer was ready to confirm that the material presented to it for analysis was almost certainly from some kind of facility engaged in biological research. But it was not prepared to deliver a quick estimate of the berserker’s probable purpose in working with such material. Instead the computer suggested that the job should be given to some larger computer, if the delay that would necessarily involve was tolerable.

  Domingo said to it harshly: “We’ll do that as soon as we have the chance; for now, keep working.”