Berserker Kill

by Fred Saberhagen

  Frank Marcus, who must have overheard some similar mutterings, demonstrated little patience with the malcontents. To Dirac he growled: “I’m with you. I signed on to fight berserkers, didn’t I?” And Frank went on fine-tuning his personal sidearms.

  A little later, Kensing asked Frank in private: “What do you think the chances are that we’ll really catch up with the damned thing now?”

  “Actually, having come this far, they’re probably pretty good.”

  “And if we manage to do that, what chance that we’ll really ever be able to communicate with any survivors on that station?

  Can we really believe that anyone there is still alive?”

  “Kid, you better stow that line of talk. The Boss’ll have you fried for mutiny.”

  Since departing the Imatra system, the yacht had gained a great deal of speed relative to ambient normal space. Because each of Dirac’s craft was notably smaller than the berserker-biostation combination, he had been able to get away with small c-plus jumps, and the yacht and its smaller escorts had emerged from each with a slightly greater subluminal velocity.

  The borders of the dark nebula were hard to define with any precision, but by now the Eidolon was definitely within the outer fringes of the Mavronari. The difference between this and normal interstellar space showed on instruments, in a steady thickening of the ambient matter-density. And ahead of the yacht the obscuring material gradually but inexorably grew thicker.

  Now once more the telescopes aboard the yacht were refocused, bringing the fleeing berserker and its captive into clearer view. The chase resumed in normal space. The ambush had cost the Premier not only his two smaller ships, complete with crews, amounting to almost half his fighting strength, but a little time, a little distance, as well.

  Within a matter of hours it became evident that the battered yacht was again gaining on the battered enemy. But the rate of gain was slow, even slower than before the ambush; the human warriors, reluctant and otherwise, aboard the Eidolon were going to be allowed a little breathing space before the looming confrontation.

  Again there was time, a little more time, in which to ponder the persistent mystery: just what benefit was the damned berserker expecting from the prize for which it had sacrificed a chance to commit slaughter on a planetary scale? And just where did the berserker compute that it was taking the biolab and its billion preborn captives?

  As far as anyone on board the yacht had been able to determine by exhaustive search of the available charts and VR

  models, the dark recesses of the Mavronari contained nothing likely to be an attractive goal for either berserkers or human beings. Not that the great nebula had ever been thoroughly explored. It was known to encompass a few isolated star systems, families of planets ordinarily accessible by narrow channels of relatively empty space. But to reach any of those isolated systems by plowing straight through the cloud itself would take any ship or machine an age. The mass of obscuring matter was truly vast, going on at right angles to the direction of the Galactic Core for a discouragingly long way-hundreds of parsecs, many hundreds of light-years. And toward the middle of the nebula the dust densities were doubtless greater. Thousands of years of subliminal travel, at reduced intra-nebular speeds, would be needed to penetrate this gigantic dust cloud from one side to the other.

  But if the enemy was seeking only a hiding place, it was not going to be able to find shelter inside the gradually thickening dust before it was overtaken and brought to bay. Steadily, though with tantalizing slowness, Dirac’s quarry was becoming more and more distinct in the yacht’s telescopes, was coming almost within a reasonable range for using weapons.

  Was the enemy trying to devise another ambush? Fanatically intense efforts at detection could discern no evidence of that.

  Perhaps the berserker’s supply of auxiliary machines had been used up in the previous attempt, or perhaps it was hoarding them for a final confrontation.

  One serpentine metal arm of Marcus the pilot made an inquiring gesture in the Premier’s direction.

  Dirac nodded. “We go.”

  If a new ambush had indeed been planned, it failed to appear.

  Perhaps it was avoided when Frank made one more daring gamble, undertaken with the Premier’s grim blessing; one more jump through flightspace, with everyone else aboard snugged into their acceleration couches, praying or concentrating stoically according to personal preference.

  This time no ambush materialized, and the gamble succeeded.

  When the yacht Eidolon emerged yet again into normal space, those aboard found themselves matching velocities almost perfectly with their fleeing foe, now only a few thousand kilometers distant. The pursuing humans very soon would be in a position where they might if they chose take a meaningful shot at the enemy or receive direct fire from its batteries.

  That moment of possibility came and passed, and neither side opened fire.

  Closing the range still more, the yacht would soon be near enough to assay some force-field grappling of the station the berserker doggedly dragged along. But any attempt to wrench the prize away by grappling seemed foreordained to failure, given the now-damaged condition of the yacht and the evidently tremendous power of the enemy.

  But perhaps the berserker’s power was not overwhelming after all, not anymore. Observers on the yacht, getting their first look at their foe from relatively short range, could see that the enemy’s outer hull, at least, had sustained considerable damage. How much of that damage had been inflicted by the Imatran resistance, and how much before the enemy entered the Imatran system, was impossible to say. But since the berserker had carried out its raid successfully, it still had to be considered very formidable.

  Twice in the space of a few seconds a subtle premonitory quiver of instrumental readings suggested that the enemy was about to fire at the yacht.

  “Shields up!” The command as Dirac gave it seemed half a question, and in any case hopelessly belated-Kensing on hearing it wondered whether the old man was getting rattled.

  But no matter. Frank, along with the autopilot to which his helmet now had him mentally melded, already had the defenses perfectly deployed. And in fact no enemy fire came.

  Now Colonel Marcus, even as he laconically acknowledged Dirac’s congratulations for his skill in getting his ship and shipmates into this situation alive, adjusted his angle of approach to bring the yacht directly behind the towed research station. In contrast to both berserker and yacht, the station’s outer hull had so far revealed no sign of damage.

  The enemy, which at least since the ambush had not been accelerating at all, was maintaining an almost straight course, jogging only slightly on occasion, a simple autopilot kind of maneuver to avoid high-density knots of nebular material. Frank had no difficulty at all in holding the yacht on station directly behind the double mass of the berserker and its captive. Now the actual variation in the yacht’s distance from the station was minimal, no more than a few score meters.

  With the Eidolon in this position, the bulk of the captive station hung directly between the adversaries, and prevented, or seemed to prevent, the berserker from bringing effectively to bear what must be its superior heavy weapons.

  The Premier now ordered: “Get me in contact with them.”

  It was the political aide who objected: “Radio contact with the station? You’re assuming-”

  “Yes, I’m assuming there’s someone still alive aboard that vessel. That’s why we’re here, remember? Now let’s see if they’re able to respond to an attempt at communication.”

  Several people probably thought that a ridiculous idea. But no one said so. “Acknowledge. We’re transmitting. Hello, on the station? Anybody there?”

  The only reply was a trickle of radio noise.

  “No luck. Well, as for the berserker, the way it’s acting, I think we have to assume the damned thing’s dead. It must have taken some heavy shots a few days ago, and had some delayed reaction. If it wasn’t dead, we probably w
ould be by now.”

  Frank, with Dirac’s concurrence, persisted in the tactic of staying as nearly as possible directly behind the towed station, so that its bulk continued to screen the yacht from the foe’s presumably superior potential firepower.

  The third radio attempt had now failed. Dirac nodded, calmly enough. Evidently he had already made up his mind as to the next step. “I’m going over there to see for myself. You’re all volunteers on this mission, and I expect everyone who’s not wounded to come with me. We’ve got enough small craft available. Nick, you take the helm here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Frank, I want you to pilot our armed scoutship.” There was just one such vessel.

  “Right.” Methodically Colonel Marcus got ready to turn over control of the yacht to Nicholas, whose driving would be augmented by the yacht’s own computers.

  Kensing, having extricated himself from his own acceleration couch, stood back to give Frank room while the boxed man skillfully maneuvered his personal containers out of the relatively cramped control room to go rolling with zestful celerity down a corridor, then down a ramp in the direction of the hangar deck where his specially fitted scoutship waited for him.

  Kensing followed, suddenly feeling more afraid than he had ever felt before. It wasn’t clear to him, and perhaps it didn’t matter, whether the fear arose because he was soon going to be killed or because he was soon going to confront the truth about Annie.

  One real scoutship, two couriers, two lightly armed launches, the latter pitifully small-not counting the three unsuitable lifeboats, there were five small craft aboard the Eidolon available for use in a boarding. The craft easily accommodated all of the remaining fit-and fleshly-crew members on the yacht, three or four to a vessel.

  Dirac, who in the course of his career had been accused of many things but probably never of cowardice, was getting ready to drive the second-best small ship himself. This was a slightly modified courier, armed, but with much less combat capability than the military scout Frank was piloting.

  When the arrangements to crew the small craft had been completed, the Premier quickly gave Nicholas Hawksmoor a few specific orders and left him in command of the yacht, supposedly the sole conscious tenant of the Premier’s remaining fighting ship.

  Nicholas Hawksmoor was impressed and somehow moved-and he also felt what he supposed must be a twinge of guilt-when the Premier went off regular intercom to confide privately to him that Nick was the one person he could totally trust not to run away.

  Dirac confessed to Nick that he did not have such complete faith in any of his fleshly folk.

  “Except for Marcus in this case,” the Premier whispered. “And I want the colonel with us on the boarding.”

  Hawksmoor said, “That’s understandable, sir. I think you’ve made a wise decision.”

  As soon as the five small craft were fully crewed, they began to emerge one at a time through the main hatch of the Eidolon’s hangar deck. Immediately upon emerging from the yacht, they deployed in a scattered formation nearby.

  And from that rough formation, at a prearranged time, the tiny flotilla went darting simultaneously into action.

  The little ships approached the silent research station quickly, on widely separated paths, all taking evasive action, though the enemy’s weapons still remained quiet-And then, in the blinking of an eye and a blinding flash of violence, the berserker was inert no longer.

  The scarred hull of the monstrous mothership still remained silent and dark. But a swarm of small fighting machines erupted with weapons flaring from around the bulge of the enemy hull, speeding to intercept the approaching small Solarian vessels.

  Nick, now isolated upon the yacht, his mind operating as always with the optelectronic analogue of nerves, reacted long milliseconds before any of the fleshly humans except Frank, whose mind was already securely melded with his scoutship’s brain. The yacht’s heaviest weapons, or at least the heaviest Hawksmoor dared to employ so near the station, lashed out at the swarm of counterattacking berserker machines, scattering, burning, crushing, wiping one after another of them out of existence.

  In the moments immediately after Dirac had put full trust in him, Nick had briefly toyed with the idea of taking the battered yacht away when only he and his beloved Jenny were left aboard-but he had recognized that as a hopeless dream. Not because he, Nick, would be unable to betray a creator who had been foolish enough to have great faith in him; no, he had already managed to achieve betrayal. Rather, Nick had now become firmly convinced that his only chance of finding happiness with Jenny lay in helping his love regain her fleshly body. And only the bioresearch station, which was superbly equipped for just such experiments, offered any chance of that.

  She was sleeping now, somewhere-as she would perceive it when she wakened-in the Abbey. Nick, as soon as he felt certain that this fight was imminent, had quietly and without asking her permission made sure that his beloved went to sleep. As soon as the combat was over, he would go back to her in the Abbey and knock gently on her bedroom door, and when she opened it for him, tell her of the victory. Had it been possible for Jenny to take any active role in the struggle against the berserker, things would of course have been different.

  During the next minute, Hawksmoor’s organic shipmates fought on grimly in their effort to board the station while he used the yacht’s weapons conscientiously, blasting away with all of his considerable skill at the counterattacking enemy machines. He felt no temptation to turn the heavy weapons against Dirac’s small ship-the berserker must be overcome before any lesser conflicts could be settled.

  Besides, there was obviously a good chance that the berserker itself might eliminate Nick’s rival, despite Nick’s real efforts to protect him. Already one of the small Solarian ships was no longer visible at all, having been blasted by berserker weapons into fine debris. Another had been disabled and was drifting helplessly away. Hawksmoor’s radio

  contact

  with

  the

  expeditionary force kept being disrupted, as was only to be expected, by battle noise.

  At this point, long seconds into the space fight, three of the small human vessels, including the one Dirac was piloting, had survived the enemy counterattack.

  Another of the surviving three was the scoutship, by far the most heavily armed and shielded of the attacking craft.

  From the beginning of the action, Frank’s heavily armed scoutship had drawn the heaviest enemy attention, a concentration of fire and ramming attempts by small kamikaze machines. It was only now, as Nick watched Frank fight his ship, that he realized how far the man in the boxes, an organic brain melded on the quantum level with state-of-the-art machinery, outclassed any purely nonorganic pilot; how he would indeed, almost certainly, outclass Nick himself.

  Here came a pair of infernal berserker devices, hurling themselves in a direct attack upon the yacht!

  In a moment Nick had vaporized them successfully.

  But not before the Eidolon had been hit once more, and some further damage inflicted.

  Meanwhile Frank, joyfully entering battle as if it were his natural habitat, had drawn much of the enemy force away from the other small human craft. His heavily armed scout became the enemy’s chief target, being harried and followed by a swarm of enemy machines, and in a matter of seconds a virtual screen of them had cut him off from the yacht and from the two small, less well armed ships.

  Frank, having assumed the job of flying interference for the actual boarding party, did not try to break through the screen.

  Instead, taking a gamble on being able to get away with the unexpected, he darted in the direction of the mammoth berserker itself. A sharp feint in this direction, and he ought to be able to swing back the other way.

  Nick, observing these maneuvers with some surprise, was doing as much as he could with the yacht’s weapons to help Frank, but Marcus was now entering a position where the yacht’s weapons had an awkward time trying to r
each the berserkers nearest him.

  The difficulty was compounded by the fact that Nick was strongly constrained to avoid hitting the station.

  Moving the yacht might make it possible to support Frank more effectively. But that might also bring the yacht-and Jenny’s all-precious optelectronic life-within the line of fire of whatever heavy weapons the big berserker might be keeping in reserve. In microseconds Nick had decided against any such maneuver.

  During the next few seconds, Colonel Marcus, his scoutship suddenly badly damaged, was being hounded farther away from the station by the pack of his pursuers, though their ranks were now thinned. The scoutship too had been shot up. It no longer mattered whether his aggressive move in the direction of the big berserker had been a feint or not. The remainder of his swarming foes kept after him, harrying his scout ever close to the great machine itself.

  Nick was the only one besides Frank himself who had a chance to see what happened next. And even Nick, despite his speed of perception, was granted only a blurry look at the events.

  Marcus, now finding himself isolated from his comrades in arms, chose, as his past record might have suggested, to adopt ever bolder tactics now that his situation was more desperate.

  He drove right at the massive enemy.

  Perhaps he had counted on being able to pull away at the last moment. What actually happened was that Frank’s little scout, now appearing somewhat fouled in defensive force fields, closed with the berserker’s hull and disappeared. Nick knew, though his angle of view and flaring interference kept him from actually recording it, that the colonel’s ship must have landed, crashed, or been forced down somewhere upon the black, scarred immensity of the enemy hull-around the bulge of both hulls from Nick’s place of observation on the yacht.