Berserker Blue Death

by Fred Saberhagen

  Wilma opened the hatch of the launch, responding to frantic gestures from one of the other boarders who was closely beset by machines.

  The trouble was that as soon as the hatch was opened, the enemy went for it. It was naturally a double door, inner and outer, the EVA airlock.

  The idea came to Domingo that the enemy were using the boarders as bait rather than going all out to kill them quickly, hoping to be able to lure the launch within easy reach to get it to open its entry hatch.

  On the launch, Wilma could see her shipmates jumping around, exchanging fire with the enemy machines, in peril of being scraped off the launch and grappled by them.

  The launch, unless she were to withdraw it from inside the berserker, remained within easy leaping distance of the surviving androids. And the humans’ communications were still being successfully jammed.

  Domingo went after the enemy machine that was closest to the launch. Maybe one of the same kind that killed Maymyo, he thought. He fired and fired at it, bathed it in explosions, but could not seem to do it any effective harm. It had some special, toughened armor. His small handgun projectiles were not enough.

  It had no firing weapon of its own but was destroying things by main strength.

  It somehow disabled the beam projector on the launch.

  Now it wanted to get at the opening hatchway on the launch.

  Domingo was there in time to somehow block its entry or to keep it from getting through the inner door of the EVA hatch.

  The launch started to drift away, uncontrolled, when Wilma gave up her post at the controls to try to get the door closed again.

  The thing was close in front of him, parts of it blurring with movement at invisible speed, a chopping machine into which he was about to be fed like sausage.

  Domingo and the berserker both spun away from the launch. Wilma, trying to reach from inside to help, was drawn out with them, but either Gujar or Iskander lunged into the open airlock and got it closed again from the inside, just ahead of the reaching grapple of a machine.

  Then he, Domingo, was wedged in a crevice somewhere and the berserker android was pounding at him, probing for him with a long metal beam. The weapon driven by those arms could mash him, armor and all, if it caught him solidly and repeatedly, wedged against an anvil as he was.

  Domingo was not trying to get away any longer; he was as well-armed now for this fight as he was ever going to be, and he was fighting.

  Domingo could feel himself being mangled. He spent his last conscious effort firing his weapon one more time, point-blank range against the damnable, the evil thing.

  CHAPTER 10

  There was a time, a long, long time, during which his awareness of his surroundings was no more than barely sufficient to convince him that he was not dead. Dead, slaughtered and gone to one of the legendary hells, one that had been re-created especially for him and repopulated with berserkers. Down there the damned machines were still killing Isabel and the children, and he still had to watch. Then, subtly, a divide was crossed down near the boundary of hell, and Domingo began to be sure that it was human beings and not only machines who had him in their care, though the gods of all space knew there were machines enough surrounding him. He allowed himself to be convinced that these contrivances were purely benevolent, or at least that was the intention of their programming. He had not become the berserkers’ prisoner.

  Lying there with his life no more than a thin bloody thread, he knew that he had survived some kind of a skirmish with the damned killers. But all the details of the event were vague. He had gone after them somewhere, and a fight had broken out—yes, inside their wrecked, spacegoing laboratory— and he had been terribly hurt, though now he was suffering no particular pain. Nothing else about what had happened was at all clear at the moment.

  The thread of life was stronger now. The present, if not the past, was growing a little clearer. Domingo understood that he was lying flat in a bed, on his back most of the time, though once in a while he was gently flipped, for one reason or another. He realized too that there were people coming and going purposefully around him. As a rule the trusty caretaking machines stayed where they were. He had the feeling that the lenses and sensors of these machines were watching him with superhuman vigilance.

  Sometimes Domingo thought that his left leg was no longer where it ought to be, that it was growing out of his body from somewhere other than his hip, sprouting grotesquely from his back or chest. And sometimes he thought that the leg was completely gone. Not that the mere absence of one limb was going to worry him especially. He was still breathing, and the berserkers did not have him. Those were the only two essential requirements of life that he could think of.

  Given those two conditions, he would be able to build on them everything else he wanted. His wants were really simple, though they were not easy. Grimly, half blindly, half consciously, he started trying to make plans again. In time he could and would find the way to the appointed meeting that he was fated to have with Leviathan. That meeting would take place. He would create a way, a possibility, if none existed now.

  More time, long days, passed before Domingo experienced an interval in which he was strong and lucid enough to ask questions.

  His voice at first was no more than a crushed whisper. “What happened? Tell me. What did we bring back?”

  That was the first thing Domingo asked about; and Polly Suslova, wild-haired as usual and looking somewhat excited as she bent over him, was the first person he recognized and the first to whom he spoke coherently.

  Polly’s answer was given in soothing tones, in contrast to her appearance. The only trouble was that the answer was not, as he saw it, very much to the point: “You’ve been hurt, Niles. You’ll be all right now, though.” And suddenly she turned away, reacting as if she were terribly upset by something.

  The second statement in her reply, he felt sure on interior evidence, was still problematical; as for the first statement, he had already figured that out for himself without help. With his memory slowly improving, he could recall something but not everything about the firefight inside the wreck and that last berserker android.

  He had at last begun to hurt, and in a number of places. But the machines around him stared at him with their wise lenses, and listened continuously to his breathing and his heartbeat, and probed his veins and nerves, and kept the pain from ever getting too bad. He accepted the pain as a sign of his recovery.

  The captain never had the least doubt that his recovery was desirable and necessary. Because he had to get well and strong before he could go after Leviathan again.

  And still more time passed before Domingo was able to determine that the hospital in which he was recovering must be the military one on Base Four Twenty-five.

  At about the same time as he understood where he was, Domingo comprehended also that Polly Suslova, more often than not, was still nearby. Like skillfully arranged background music, she had been with him for some time before he recognized her presence, before he was able to ask her those first questions. In fact, it now seemed to Domingo, once more able to think in terms of time and space, that Polly had been more or less in attendance on him ever since he had been wounded.

  Even, if he thought about it, before that.

  For a long time now, ever since the captain had started to regain consciousness, people had been pausing beside him and trying to tell him things, mostly reassuring platitudes about his medical condition. Facts were in short supply. But now, in a strengthening voice, he was able to ask more questions.

  From Polly, from the medical people, from Iskander who came in often and from Gujar who came in once to visit him, Domingo learned, a little at a time, the details he was unable to remember of what had happened to him and the others who had been examining the wrecked berserker. He learned how, after the small commensal berserkers had struck him down, his crew had managed to crunch the enemy’s attacking mobile units, down to the last machine. And how his crew had then got thems
elves and Domingo and the Pearl away from the scene of the battle. By the time they did that their captain had been totally unconscious, barely alive inside what was left of his space armor. They had needed power tools to get him out of the mangled armor, and he had made most of the trip back to base in suspended animation in the Pearl’s sick bay, surrounded by deep-frozen sample cases holding biological samples gathered from the wreck.

  Now in the hospital, Domingo was pleased, he was even more elated than was reasonable, to learn that they had brought back what the Space Force analysts were calling a large amount of very valuable samples and recorded information. Iskander had even managed to bring along the demolished fragments of one of the berserker androids. When Polly saw how greatly this news delighted the captain, she went over it again, telling him in considerable detail how successful their effort had been and how Baza had insisted on salvaging parts of the vanquished enemy for later study.

  When Domingo grew tired, Polly went away to let him rest after assuring him that she’d be back. He was glad to hear that she intended to return, but somehow he had been sure of it already.

  Other human figures continued to come and go around him, all of them being professionally cheerful. Domingo slept again, this time with conscious confidence that he was going to wake up.

  Next time he awoke, he was able to take a steadier notice of his surroundings. He observed that the base hospital was an alert and ready place, but not a very busy one. This hospital had almost certainly never been used to anything like full capacity, even for the casualties of war; and it was not being so used now. In the war against the berserkers there were plenty of human dead, but not that many wounded. And fortunately, wars like those on ancient Earth, of life pitted against life, were virtually unknown.

  Again Domingo probed with questions at the people around him. This time he wanted to know if his crew had gone back to the wrecked berserker after the fight and gathered still more information. None of the hospital staff knew the answer to that one, or wanted to discuss it, and he had to be persistent. It seemed to him that the answer was important, bearing as it did on the reliability and dedication of the people in his crew.

  The answer, unhappily, was no.

  Domingo raged feebly at Iskander when he heard that. And raged again when he was told something he was later able to confirm for himself on the recordings: The main berserker, the damaged hulk, had not, even yet, been totally destroyed. The crew of the Pearl. once their captain was unconscious, had not stayed in the area even long enough to finish the helpless enemy off.

  Iskander raised an eyebrow and accepted the rebuke tolerantly. “Sorry, Niles.”

  “Sorry. That doesn’t help.”

  “It’s done now. There’s no reaction I can demonstrate that will help now, is there?”

  No, there wasn’t.

  Gujar Sidoruk, making his second visit to Domingo in the hospital, assured him: “That piece of junk couldn’t hurt anyone any longer, Niles. Even if some ship did stumble on it, and the chances against that are—”

  Domingo made a disgusted noise. It was a surprisingly loud noise, considering his condition.

  Iskander said soothingly: “It’ll just lie there helpless, Niles, until its power fails eventually and it rots. No one’s going to stumble onto it. Not there.”

  The captain’s voice was weak, but still it was hoarse and harsh. “There’s life out there in the nebula. It’ll go on killing that. It’ll figure out some way to use whatever systems and power it has left, and it’ll kill a little more at least.”

  His visitors of the day looked at one another, a look that said the captain was still woozy from all that had happened to him. In the Milkpail there were cubic light-years of that kind of tenuous life around. It was scattered everywhere in the nebula. And aside from harvesting certain of its odd varieties and some useful byproducts, nobody gave a damn about it. Domingo certainly never had, before now. Berserkers killed that sort of life, of course, en passant, when they encountered it—they were programmed to kill everything—but their main destructive interest was concentrated upon humanity. In the whole Galaxy so far, only intelligent life, synonymous with humanity in its several themes, appeared to offer any serious obstacle to the machines’ achievement of their projected goal, the ultimate sterilization of the universe.

  Gennadius, himself looking a little less grim than the last time the two had met, came to look in on the grim patient. The base commander reported, among other things, that the robot courier that had been dispatched to Four Twenty-five from the Pearl had never reached the base.

  “To nobody’s particular surprise,” Domingo whispered.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Are you hunting Leviathan now?”

  “We’re doing what we can, Niles. We’re doing what we can.”

  Gennadius could also offer Domingo reassurance of a sort on one point. Following the Pearl’s return to the base, he,

  Gennadius, had sent out a Space Force ship to look for the wrecked berserker. But after ten days the ship had come back to report the failure of the search. Again, a result not surprising to anyone who knew the difficulties of astrogation within the nebula.

  Domingo now learned that two standard months had passed since he had been hurt. He had been unconscious or heavily sedated most of the time, while surgeons had begun the process of putting him back together.

  Domingo wanted fresh news of Leviathan, but there was none. At least no one would tell him if there was.

  He also kept coming back, in his thoughts, to the wrecked berserker. Iskander, the others in the crew said, had wanted to stay and finish the berserker off. But he just hadn’t managed to give an order to that effect and make it stick.

  The captain knew from experience that Baza was a daring fighter, cool and unshakable in a crisis. He had seen plenty of evidence also that the man hated berserkers, and he needed no one to tell him what to do. But he was simply not a very good leader, Domingo silently decided now. His chief mate and most faithful friend was unskilled at ordering or persuading others. Though Iskander had been second in command on the Pearl and had nominally taken over when Domingo was knocked out, the others had persuaded him that Domingo needed immediate care.

  Well, all the gods and demigods of the far colonies knew that had been true. The captain had barely survived as it was.

  Nevertheless Domingo crabbed more as his recovery in the hospital proceeded. He made silent, private plans for a reorganization of his crew. It wasn’t easy. He wondered who might do a better job than Baza as his second-in-command. Domingo couldn’t come up with a name.

  But if they’d had their captain in suspended animation when they were ready to leave the wrecked berserker, it would have been all the same to him if they had stayed a little longer with the wreck. They’d had no excuse not to stay. They should have made another effort to wring the last bits of information out of the damned hulk, and then they should have made sure before they left that it was nothing but a cloud of expanding gas…

  Another worry, about something the captain had assumed but never confirmed, now struck him forcibly.

  He voiced the thought at once. “What about the Pearl? Is she all right?”

  “In great shape. Hardly scratched. None of the little bastards ever got near her. She’s been docked here ever since we brought you back.”

  Iskander, visiting again, asked almost timidly if he could take the ship out and use her, scouting.

  Domingo probed him with his eyes. His eyes were among the few parts that had not been damaged. “Sure. But be careful. I’m going to need her soon.” Domingo could see the people around him look at one another when he said that. To them—to some of them anyway—it must have sounded like a joke. Because, he supposed, he must look even worse off than he felt.

  There was something else he had been meaning to ask about, if he could only remember what it was. Oh, yes. He inquired whether there had been any other casualties among his crew. There were certain crew
members’ faces he could not remember seeing among those of his visitors in the hospital.

  Again glances were exchanged among the people standing around his bed before any of them said anything. The consensus appeared to be that he was now probably strong enough to be able to sustain the bad news, and so they told him. There had been one other casualty. Wilma Chanar had died in the grip of that last berserker android before it was demolished.

  “That’s too bad,” whispered Domingo, realizing he was expected to whisper something. It was of course the first he had heard of Wilma’s death, although if his thoughts in the hospital had turned that way at all he might have deduced the fact, or guessed it—that last fight was gradually becoming less of a blank to him. But he had not much feeling left for Wilma, dead or alive. Or for any of the others. He was still anesthetized by earlier and harder shocks. He knew regret at the news, but only numbly, and largely because Wilma was going to be hard to replace on the crew.

  More time passed in the hospital. Day by day Domingo gradually improved, but it was obvious even to him that full recovery was still a long way off. His left leg was really gone, for one thing, almost to the hip. And that was far from being his only medical problem. He admitted, with his new habit of absorption in grim calculation, that his recovery, the first step toward revenge, was going to be even a bigger job than he had thought. At least while he worked at recovering, he could also make plans.

  With growing competence to think about what he learned, he had to begin by seriously taking stock of his own body. Or what was left of it. Regaining anything like full normal function was going to take him even longer than he’d thought. The doctors told him that yes, they were going to have to fit him with a new left leg, some kind of artificial construction. Regrowth, the usual tactic employed when a limb was lost, didn’t look promising in his current general condition, considering, as the doctors said, the overall neurological situation.

  When Domingo heard of the plans to fit him with an artificial leg, an inspiration came to him at once. The more he thought about his idea, the more he grinned. Naturally the people who were around him every day, who hadn’t seen him grinning at anything since his daughter perished, asked him what was up.