Berserker Kill

by Fred Saberhagen

  Before the Lady Genevieve could move from the spot where she had been standing, Nick’s image was abruptly back upon the holostage. Steadily confronting the lady, who now stood frozen in fear, Hawksmoor now elaborated, succinctly and steadily and quite accurately, on his claim to be a pilot.

  “My lady, I fear your ship is gone. But mine is nearby, it will be docking in a minute, and, I repeat, I am a very good pilot.”

  “My ship is gone?”

  “The ship that brought you here has already been destroyed.

  But mine is coming for you.”

  ” Already destroyed-”

  The cool image on the holostage, projecting a sense of competence, strongly urged-in fact, it sounded like he was ordering-the Lady Genevieve to run for a certain numbered airlock, and gave her concise directions as to which way to move from where she was.

  “You are standing near the middle of the main laboratory deck, are you not?”

  The lady glanced around in search of aid, then looked helplessly

  at

  Hoveler,

  who-wondering

  at

  his

  own

  composure-nodded confirmation.

  Turning back to the holostage, she answered meekly. “Yes, I am.”

  Nick’s image on the holostage issued calm instructions. He would have his ship docked at that lock before she reached it.

  She had better start moving without delay.

  He concluded: “Bring all those people with you, I have room for them aboard. Bring everyone on the station; there can’t be that many at the moment.”

  Meanwhile Hoveler, though dazed by the fact that a real attack was taking place, was remembering the ail-too-infrequent practice alerts aboard the station, recalling the duties he was supposed to perform in such an emergency. His tasks during an alert or an attack consisted largely of supervising the quasi-intelligent machines that really did most of the lab work anyway. It was up to him to oversee the temporary shutdown of experiments and the proper storage of tools and materials.

  Reacting to his training, the bioengineer got started on the job.

  It was not very demanding, not at this stage anyway, and it kept him in a location where he could still watch most of what was going on between the Premier’s bride and one of his best pilots.

  Hoveler used whatever spare moments he had to keep an anxious eye on Acting Supervisor Zador, who the moment the alert had sounded had found herself suddenly in command of local defenses. Obviously Anyuta was not used to such pressure, and Hoveler was afraid that she was somewhat panicked by it.

  Because just about the first thing she did was to reject Hawksmoor, who at least sounded like he knew what he was doing, in the role of rescuer.

  Another message was now coming in on holostage for whoever was in charge aboard the station, and Hoveler could hear it in the background as he dealt with his own job. It was a communication from another craft, a regular manned courier that happened to be just approaching the station. Its human pilot was volunteering to help evacuate people from the facility, which was almost incapable of maneuvering under its own power. He could be on the scene in a matter of seconds.

  “We accept,” said the acting supervisor decisively. “Dock your ship at Airlock Three.” A moment later, having put the latest and soon-to-be-most-famous protocolonist down on the flat top of the console near Hoveler and darting him a meaningful look as if to say You deal with this, she was running after the Lady Genevieve. Hoveler saw Anyuta grab the smaller woman by the arm and then firmly direct her down a different corridor than the one recommended by Nick, but in the correct direction to Airlock Three. At the moment, confusion dominated, with people running back and forth across the lab, and in both directions through the adjoining corridor. Some of the visitors were running in circles.

  In the next moment the acting supervisor was standing beside Hoveler again, her attention once more directed to the central holostage. “Hawksmoor!”

  “Dr. Zador?” the handsome image acknowledged.

  “I am now in charge of the defenses here.”

  “Yes ma’am, I understand that.”

  “You are not to approach this station. We have another vessel available, already docked”-a quick glance at an indicator confirmed that-“and can evacuate safely without you. Take your ship out instead and engage the enemy-”

  “My ship is not armed.” Nick sounded as calm and firm as ever.

  “Don’t interrupt! If your ship is not armed, you will still engage the enemy, by ramming!”

  “Yes ma’am!” Nick acknowledged the order crisply, with no perceptible hesitation. Once more his image vanished abruptly from the stage.

  Annie, what the hell are you doing? Hoveler marveled at the order and response he had just heard, what had sounded like the calm assignment and equally calm acceptance of certain death.

  Certainly something was going on here which he did not understand-but he had no time to puzzle over it now.

  Right now he had no need to understand or even think about what might be happening outside the station’s hull. Dr. Hoveler and Dr. Zador, who were both required by duty as well as inclination to stand by their posts, exchanged a few words about the progress of the general evacuation. Then he felt the need to venture a personal remark.

  “Anyuta.”

  Her attention locked in some technical contemplation, she didn’t seem to hear him.

  He tried again, more formally. “Dr. Zador?”

  Now she did look over at him. “Yes?”

  “You should get off this station with the others. You’re going to get married in a month. Not that I think there’s much chance we’re really going to be… but I can do what little can be done here perfectly well by myself.”

  “This is my job,” she said with what sounded like irritation, and turned back to her displays. Old friend and colleague or not, the acting supervisor wasn’t going to call him by name. Not just now.

  Hoveler, his own workbench already neatly cleared and now abandoned, stayed at his assigned battle station, which was near the center of the main laboratory deck, not far from Dr. Zador’s post. Regulations called for acceleration couches to be available here for the two of them, but, as Hoveler recalled, those devices had been taken away months ago in some routine program of modification, and had never been brought back. The lack did not appear to pose a practical problem because the station would be able to do nothing at all in the way of effective maneuvering.

  In terms of life support, the biostation possessed a full, indeed redundant, capability for interstellar flight, and had visited a number of planetary systems during the several years since its construction. But it had never mounted more than the simplest of space drives, relying on special c-plus tugs and boosters to accomplish its passages across interstellar distances.

  Not that the lack appeared to be critical in this emergency.

  Even had an interstellar drive been installed and ready for use, any attempt to escape by that mode of travel now would have been practically suicidal for a vessel as big as the station starting this deep inside the gravitational well created by a full-sized star surrounded by the space-dimpling masses of its planets.

  Still, with a berserker approaching at high speed, only a few minutes away at the most, some panicked person calling in from the surface of the planetoid was now evidently suggesting to the acting supervisor that even virtually certain suicide was preferable to the alternative, and ought to be attempted.

  To this suggestion Dr. Zador replied, with what Hoveler applauded as admirable calm under the circumstances, that even had the drive capability been available, she was not about to suicidally destroy herself or anyone else. There wasn’t even a regular flight crew aboard the station at the moment.

  Besides, it was impossible for anyone on the station to determine absolutely, with the rudimentary instruments available on board, whether or not the berserker (which according to the displays was still thousands of
kilometers distant) was really coming directly for the station, though its course strongly suggested that it was. The Imatran system contained two or three worlds much larger and vastly more populous than the planetoid, collectively holding a potential harvest of billions of human lives.

  These planets lay in approximately the same direction as the station along the berserker’s path, but scores of millions of kilometers farther sunward.

  The two people whose voluntarily chosen duties decreed that they should remain aboard the research station were able to look into the berserker’s image on a stage-Hoveler, in sick fascination, had increasing difficulty looking anywhere else-and to see the monstrous shape growing, defining itself more clearly moment by moment, coming dead-on against the almost starless background of the middle of the Mavronari Nebula.

  Amid the ever-burgeoning clamor of alarms, there was no chance of putting into effective use such feeble subliminal drive as the station did possess. The propulsion system was basically intended only for gentle orbital maneuvers. Slow and relatively unmaneuverable, the mobile laboratory, even if it could have been got into steady motion, would have no chance of escaping the thing now rushing upon it from the deep.

  The chances were vastly better that a courier like the one now loading, or presumably Nicholas Hawksmoor’s craft, both small and swift, would be able to dodge out of harm’s way.

  Now, at the acting supervisor’s remarkably calm urging, several dozen people, including visitors and most of the station’s workers, were scrambling through the station’s various decks and bays to board the courier vessel that had just docked.

  The voice of the human pilot of that little ship could also be heard throughout the station, announcing tersely that he was ready to get away, to flee at full speed toward the system’s inner planets and the protection of their formidable defenses.

  Beneath the two competing sets of announcements, running and shouting echoed in the corridors. People who had become confused and found themselves going in the wrong direction were one by one turned around and headed in the proper way.

  Acting Supervisor Zador, speaking directly to the courier pilot, repeatedly ordered him not to undock until everyone-everyone who wanted to go-had got aboard.

  “I acknowledge. Are you two coming? This is an emergency.”

  The acting supervisor glanced briefly at her companion. “I know it’s an emergency, damn it,” she replied. “That’s why we two are staying.” Hoveler on hearing this experienced a thrill of pride, as if she had just bestowed on him some signal honor. At the moment he felt no particular fear. For one thing-though no one had yet brought up the point-there was no guarantee that fleeing in the launch was going to prove any safer than staying where they were.

  That was why Hoveler had not pushed harder to get Anyuta Zador to leave.

  Nor had Dr. Zador pressed the bioengineer to flee to safety.

  Obviously she welcomed his assistance.

  Now, outside the lab doors, in the adjoining corridor, the last footsteps had fallen silent. In a few moments the last courier would be gone, and the two Solarian humans were going to be alone-except for whatever feelings of companionship they might be able to derive from metric tons of blue tiles, those myriad sparks of preconscious human life that constituted the station’s cargo and their responsibility.

  Hoveler and Zador exchanged a look and waited. At the moment there seemed to be nothing useful to be said.

  Within a few meters of where they were standing, the frightful shape of the enemy, imaged in the false space of the holostage, was steadily magnified by the rushing speed of its approach.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Never before had the Lady Genevieve faced an emergency even remotely like this one. Until today her short life had been spent mostly near the center of the Galactic region dominated by Earth-descended humanity, in realms of Solarian space that were wrapped in physical security by Templar fleets, by the Space Force, by the local military establishments of a hundred defended systems. In that blessed region berserkers had never been much more than improbable monsters, demons out of fable and legend.

  The lady’s betrothal and wedding, followed by a rapid flow of other events, none of them terrible in themselves, had carried her by imperceptible stages closer to that world of legend, until now she found herself fleeing down a narrow corridor aboard an unfamiliar spacecraft, her last illusion of physical security jarred loose by the sharp elbow of a screaming publicist thrusting her aside.

  Dozens of people, almost everyone who had been aboard the station, including all the visitors, seemed to be in the same corridor, and their frantic activity made the number seem like hundreds or a thousand. What only minutes ago had been an assembly of civilized folk had quickly become a mindless mob, the group first teetering on, then falling over, the brink of panic.

  Bioengineer Hoveler was to remember later that he had seen the Lady Genevieve leave the laboratory at a fast pace, moving among her aides as if she were being propelled by them. As the lady went out the door of the laboratory she was moving in the direction indicated by Dr. Zador, toward the hatch where the little escape ship was waiting.

  At the same time, in some distant region of the biostation, perhaps on the next deck up or down, some kind of stentorian klaxon, an alarm neither of the remaining workers had ever heard before, had started throbbing rhythmically. The two stay-behind observers were able to remember later how the Premier’s young wife, dazed and hurried as she was, seemed to be trying to turn back, in the last moment before she was swept out of the laboratory. It took one of the Lady Genevieve’s bodyguards to turn her around again and drag her on by main force toward the waiting courier. And at the moment of her hesitation the young woman had cried out something sounding like “My child!”

  So now suddenly it’s a child, thought Hoveler. A few minutes ago, that microscopic knot of organic tissue, from which she had so recently been separated, had been only a donation, only a zygote or protochild. But the lady was getting away, and he had no time to think about her or her ideas now.

  The lady herself, even as she momentarily tried to turn back, realized perfectly well that her maternal impulse had no logic to it-to leave her child and her husband’s here was no more than she had expected all along. But now-of course she hadn’t expected a berserker attack-Rationally, as she understood full well, there was no reason to believe that the microscopic cluster of cells, now sealed inside preserving statglass, would be any safer in her small hands than it was here, wherever the technicians had put it. Probably it was already in some storage vault. But still the Lady Genevieve, driven by some instinct, did momentarily make an effort to turn back.

  Then she had been turned around and started out again, and from that moment her thoughts and energy were absorbed in her own fight for survival. None of the people now struggling and scrambling to get through the airlock and aboard the escape ship had ever rehearsed anything like an emergency evacuation. The scene was one of fear and selfishness, but there was really plenty of room aboard the smaller craft, no need to be ruthless.

  Within moments after the last person had scrambled in through its passenger entry, the courier-which of course was going to try to summon help, as well as evacuate people-sealed all its hatches.

  A very few moments after that the courier pilot, his nerves perhaps not quite equal to the situation, anyway making his own calculus of lives to be saved, among which his own was prominent, undocked without waiting for final authorization from anybody, and immediately shot his small craft away in a try for safety.

  Meanwhile the dozens of people who had crowded aboard spread out across the limited passenger space in trembling gratitude, standing and walking in an artificial gravity field reassuringly normal and stable. The passengers moved to occupy the available acceleration couches, which would offer them at least minimal protection should the gravity fail in some emergency. Meanwhile their murmured exhalations formed a collective sigh of relief.

  For the first
minute or two after their vessel separated from the space station, the Lady Genevieve shared elation with her companions aboard the escaping courier. They began to experience a glorious, innocent near certainty that they were safe.

  Lady Genevieve was in the middle of saying something to one of her official companions, perhaps protesting her bodyguards’

  roughness or her publicist’s rudeness in pushing her out of the way-or perhaps she was trying to excuse these people for the way they had behaved-when the next blast came.

  This one made the previous explosion, heard from a safe distance while they were still aboard the station, sound like nothing at all. This one was disaster. In an instant, in the very midst of a conversation, the world of the Premier’s bride dissolved into a blur of shock and horror. Briefly she lost consciousness.

  On recovering her senses, moments later, Lady Genevieve looked about her, peering through a cabin atmosphere gone steamy cold with the instant, swirling fog of sudden depressurization. Gradually remembering where she was, she looked around in hopes of finding a space suit available. But if there was any emergency equipment of that kind aboard, she had not the faintest idea of where to find it.

  Feeling dazed, vaguely aware that her limbs ached and that it was hard to breathe, as if her chest had been crushed, the lady released herself from her acceleration couch. Only at that point did she realize that the artificial gravity was low; it must be failing slowly. Emergency lights still glowed.

  She dragged herself from one side of the blasted cabin to the other, aware as in a dream that she was the only one moving actively about. Other bodies drifted here and there, settling slowly, inertly in the low g toward the deck. Arms and legs stirred feebly on some of the seats and couches, accompanied by a sound of moaning. Meanwhile the Lady Genevieve was able to hear, almost to feel, the air whining steadily out of the punctured cabin, depleting itself slowly but faster than any reserve tanks were able to replenish it.