Berserker Man

by Fred Saberhagen

  "Locked up."

  "Yes, of course." Hana gave her head a rapid little shake, her usual way of expressing the opinion that someone else was being unnecessarily slow. "The prime minister's security people rounded me up near the capital shortly after the Empress was killed. Of course I didn't even know at the time that she was dead. Neither did you. But now they think that we had some connection with it." And she favored Chen with her familiar little conspiratorial smile.

  Chen nodded. The gesture was not really a sign of agreement or belief, only that he understood what she was saying. A few days ago he would have taken at face value just about anything that Hana might have said to him. But no longer.

  As if she sensed some change in him, Hana's own manner now turned mildly accusing. "What've you been doing since you got here, Chen? What're you up to now?"

  Olga, who was hovering near, was looking as if she might at any moment remember that Chen was officially still her prisoner. But before she intervened in the conversation, one of the dragoons who had separated himself from the main group that was still on the next lower terrace came up a nearby stair to Hana. The manner of this soldier's approach was not that of a guard approaching a prisoner, but rather that of a private addressing an officer—in recent days Chen had become familiar with both attitudes.

  "Uhh," said the soldier. It was a tentative sound, made in his throat as he approached Hana hesitantly. Chen had the strong impression that his next word was going to be "Ma'am."

  Hana turned to him with annoyance. "You guys figure it out, can't you? Let me alone for a minute."

  The soldier nodded silently, turned and walked back toward his group, obediently leaving her alone. Hana, as soon as the young man was gone, turned back to Chen and saw how he was looking at her. Quickly she offered an explanation: "Some of them seem to think I'm someone important, just because I was kept locked up in a private cabin—but never mind about that. What's been going on here? Where did these berserkers come from?"

  Chen studied her. Hana's clothes, the only civilian garments on anyone in sight, were worn and dirty-looking. She had evidently not had an easy time of it, traveling the kilometers between here and the Salutai ship at the docks. But the clothes Hana was wearing now had been expensive garments once, not the kind Chen was used to seeing her wear. She had no spacesuit. Neither did any of the dragoons in sight. Of course, so far the Fortress's life support systems were still working beautifully, and no one needed spacesuits. So far.

  "I don't know where the berserkers came from," said Chen.

  "And what've you been doing?"

  He started to open his mouth to tell his old friend Hana about his meeting with the Prince, but the words died somewhere inside him before they could be spoken. "Surviving," he said instead. Definite suspicion had been born.

  Olga, looking increasingly suspicious herself, and ill-at-ease at being so outnumbered by dragoons, was hovering nearer and nearer to Chen and Hana.

  "This is Olga," said Chen, turning to make the belated introduction. "She and I came out here trying to find some heavy weapons."

  "So did we," said one of the two other Templars who had been visible among the diffuse group. Evidently drawn by the sight of familiar uniforms, they had been approaching slowly. Both of them looked worn and shocked. The Templar who had just spoken went on: "But someone's already hauled it all away, what little heavy stuff there really was out here."

  Chen turned back to Hana. "So, the security people grabbed you on Salutai and locked you up. But why did they bring you here?"

  She accepted the question coolly. "They had some idea of confronting the Prince with me, evidently. Trying to make it look as if we had some deadly conspiracy going, and he was in on it—it's all really stupid." She paused. "Of course, now . . ."

  "Now what?"

  "Well. I hate to credit it, but it looks now as if the Prince may have turned goodlife."

  "Prince Harivarman?"

  Chen had been about to ask Hana about Mr. Segovia's face on the communicator screen, but the accusation against the Prince—and coming from Hana herself of all people—had temporarily blasted Mr. Segovia entirely out of Chen's thoughts. Before he could refocus, Hana was off in a different direction.

  "Tell you what, Chen. Let me go down there and talk to these people for a few minutes. I'll see if I can get them to organize themselves a little better, so we can all do something constructive together. Don't you and your friend go away."

  "We won't," said Chen mechanically.

  With a parting smile Hana moved away from them, going down another stair to talk to the dragoons.

  Olga stepped up beside Chen as the other young woman departed. Olga said: "She's supposed to be their prisoner? She doesn't act like one."

  "No, she doesn't," agreed Chen.

  Most of the dragoons were now gathering in one place, making a knot of people on the next terrace down. The two Templars, who appeared to be wandering around rather dazedly, had now rejoined the gathering there. Chen saw that the dragoons were now moving the communicator. Maybe they were hoping for better reception. Hana was embedded in the group, talking to them. At this distance Chen couldn't tell what she was saying, but a couple of the soldiers were now repositioning the communication device so its screen was no longer visible where Olga and Chen were standing.

  "Where'd you meet her?" Olga muttered suspiciously.

  Chen sighed. "On Salutai. Of course. It was a kind of a political club. We were supposed to be working to get Prince Harivarman recalled to power. And now she's trying to tell me that the Prince . . ."

  Chen broke off. His memory had suddenly shown him the tall robot pacing in pursuit of him, with Prince Harivarman's voice calling him, booming from its speakers. The Prince, goodlife. Goodlife. But no, it couldn't possibly be.

  "Huh." It sounded as if Olga disapproved of organization on Prince Harivarman's behalf. Or maybe she was only envious again, of people who had time and opportunity to make up things like political clubs.

  Chen said suddenly: "Come on. Let's move over this way just a little. I want to try to see something."

  The two of them, with Chen for once in the lead, did a little climbing, maneuvering around and behind some structural supports, the titanic bones of the Fortress, that stood exposed here in the immediate vicinity of the firing range. In a few moments Chen had reached a point from which it was possible to see the communicator screen once more.

  "What is it?" Olga asked, hanging on his shoulder from behind. "What's wrong?"

  Chen got one more good look at the communicator's screen, before someone in the group around it turned a control on the device and the screen went blank. But even after that the man's voice still issued from it. At this distance, most of the incoming words were indistinguishable, but the tones of the voice still came through. And Chen was more than ordinarily good at remembering voices.

  "I think I know the man," said Chen, "that one they're talking to."

  "So. Who is it?"

  "His name's Segovia . . . Olga, I don't like this. I think we'd better move on."

  "I'm not crazy about it either," Olga admitted. "There're no weapons here anymore, and those people are all disorganized. They're going to get themselves wiped out, one way or another. All right, come on."

  Olga sounded jumpy, which was natural enough after what they had been through already. She added, as they climbed back to the catwalk: "If I could signal to those two Templars—but maybe I can get them on their suit radios afterwards."

  And she moved off at a quick pace, heading away from the firing pits, with Chen right on her heels. Hana must have been keeping half an eye on the two of them, or else she had someone else doing so, for they had gone only a little distance when Chen heard Hana's voice calling after him.

  Chen said: "Ignore her. Let's keep going."

  Three seconds later a sound, as of a struck gong, reverberated through the structural beam beside his head. It was not quite like any sound that Chen had ever hear
d before, yet there was something hideously familiar in it. For the second time in a few days, he knew that he was being fired on.

  Less frightened than outraged at Hana's treachery, Chen turned and fired back, almost blindly, the carbine throbbing in his hands as it projected missiles. Olga's handgun blasted. Then the two of them ran again. When shots sounded around them they stopped again, crouching behind girders to return fire. Chen caught only quick glimpses of dragoons, and couldn't tell if he had damaged any of them or not. He saw Hana herself appear briefly, back near the pit, then drop out of sight as if she might have been hit.

  Olga was running again and he turned and followed her, putting distance and angles and walls and more girders between themselves and the dragoons. There were shouts behind them, but no more shooting.

  He fled on, following Olga's moving back. He counted the steps of his flight for a while, trying to estimate the distance they had come from the firing range, and then gave up. He had no idea where they were going now. All he was certain of was that now two sets of powerful enemies were after them.

  * * *

  The only faction that wanted to keep them alive—unless he was willing to trust what a berserker had said, calling his name in a Prince's voice—were the Templars, who were still holding out around the base. An intermittent thunder-rumble of fighting from that direction testified that the base was indeed still holding out, that it was the only place where they might find help, and also that trying to reach it might well be suicidal.

  When they had put more than a kilometer between themselves and the range, Chen and Olga stopped for a brief rest, then drove themselves on. Chen worried and worried at the question of why the machine that had pursued him should have called on him in Prince Harivarman's voice. He could come up with nothing that seemed very satisfactory in the way of an explanation.

  All the fountains were still running in the plazas that they passed, though the plazas were empty of people. Very few flyers or groundcars appeared to be in use anywhere in the City, and the temptation to borrow another one was correspondingly reduced. Olga and Chen passed several wrecked vehicles, one of them in particular looking scorched, as if something other than a mere accident had brought it down.

  Here and there people were starting to look out of their doors and windows. Some of the civilians called out questions when they saw Templars passing. Olga called back their ignorance, and advised the questioners to stay in shelter as much as possible. The drinking founts in the plazas and the streets still worked, the air remained normally breathable. For whatever reason, the berserkers were not attempting to destroy all life within the Fortress.

  "He's made a pact with them, that's what he's done," Olga muttered. "A regular damned treaty, to save his neck."

  Chen refused to believe it. Even if the Prince were willing to turn goodlife, why should berserkers care to make a treaty with him, a powerless exile?

  But if they were here, as they were, with a military advantage, which they appeared to have, why were they not slaughtering the human population, expunging life from the Fortress down to the bacteria in the air and in the scattered gardens of imported soil? That was what berserkers did, whenever they had the chance.

  Not this time, though. Something was different about this time.

  Olga wanted to know more about the man on the communications screen. Why had Chen thought the presence of that particular man's face on the screen so important?

  "Because now that man is one of Roquelaure's dragoons, and when I saw him before, he wasn't." Chen paused. It seemed to him that an interior light was dawning. It was an ugly light. "Or at least he didn't have his uniform on then."

  Olga had no immediate reply. Chen wondered if the look she gave him meant she thought that he was crazy.

  Chen tried to explain. "I thought then that he was one of us, our group. Or at least that he was sympathetic to our cause, to get Prince Harivarman set free."

  Olga had evidently given up trying to understand about Segovia. But she had an opinion on the Prince: "They should have kept that man locked up. Instead they let him run around the Fortress wherever he wanted."

  "I know." When Olga looked at him, Chen amplified. "The commander took me along in her staff car to meet him. I think she wanted to see, well, if we might have been in any sort of plot together. We weren't, of course. She took me way out in the boondocks to meet him, into the airless area. Somewhere near the outer surface of the Fortress, it must have been."

  They hiked on, heading in the general direction of the Templar base, but not hurrying to get there or taking the most direct route. They paused to rest fairly often.

  "Why'd you join the Templars, Olga?"

  "Getting away from things." She didn't sound anxious to give details, and Chen didn't press for them. He understood how that could be.

  They had been under way again for only a few minutes when a civilian called to them from an apartment window, wanting to know what news they had. The man told them that the regular broadcast news channels were useless due to some kind of sophisticated jamming, and a thousand rumors were circulating among the people. They gave the man what information they could, and were invited in for food. At that point both Olga and Chen discovered that they were ravenous. And despite their frequent rest stops, the hours of exertion and danger had taken their toll in exhaustion. Feeling like fugitives, the two of them took a welcome chance to sleep, one at a time, in the apartment, keeping their suits on and weapons ready. Like everyone around them, they were still breathing ambient air, which seemed as safe and as steady in pressure as ever.

  * * *

  Several hours later, Olga and Chen were on their way again, passing now through an area of the City that had so far been practically untouched by the fighting. Here the abandoned vehicles looked intact, but there was no use in tempting fate, no need for vehicular speed. During their last rest stop Olga had voiced a vague plan of trying to circle around to the other side of the base and get in that way. But she had had no answers to Chen's questions about details. If he thought about it, he realized they did not really know where they were going. He tried to think about it as infrequently as possible.

  In a plaza larger than almost any other they had passed, they came upon an ancient monument that Olga explained was dedicated to the legendary Helen Dardan. Fountains played at the four corners of the plaza, and in the center the bronze statue of Ex. Helen stood. It was a statbronze statue dominating the plaza, from its place atop a monument with marble steps. Helen the Exemplar, Helen of the Radiant. Helen Dardan, ruler and patron of the Dardanians during the time they had built the Fortress. Helen's time, as Olga explained, was centuries before Sabel's. But everybody knew that.

  Shortly after leaving the plaza of Helen's monument, they came to what had to be the entertainment district. Here as elsewhere in the City most doors and windows were shut, and almost all businesses were closed. One that wasn't had a sign in front proclaiming it the Contrat Rouge. Recorded music wafted bravely out from the relative dimness of the shadowed interior.

  Olga and Chen looked at each other. "Maybe they've got some information in here," she suggested.

  Chen licked dry lips. "Sounds like a good idea. We can find out."

  Inside, the dimly, romantically lighted place appeared at first to be completely empty of human beings. There were only the bartenders, squat, half-witted service robots devoid of any information aside from the service menu. These appeared ready to serve customers, but the humans could all too readily imagine the robots sullenly ready to revolt, to follow those other machines outside.

  Chen suggested: "How about if we have a beer? I've got a little money."

  "I can't see how it's going to do any harm."

  They moved to settle in a booth. "Hey, Olga, look," The optics in the translucent walls produced their bizarre effects.

  Then they both jumped to their feet, weapons at the ready. One other booth, a little distance from their own, was not empty. They moved down the
aisle toward it.

  The sole occupant of the other booth was a woman, hollow-cheeked, brown-haired, and well preserved for her age, which was obviously advanced when one looked at her closely. Her garments were considerably more flamboyant than the clothes most oldsters wore.

  Chen lowered his carbine again. "Hello, ma'am? Are you all right?"

  The lady did not appear greatly surprised to see them, though otherwise she appeared to be alone in the Contrat Rouge. Her smile gleamed up at Chen, easy perfection in a carefully made-up face. "Right enough. Time some customers came around." The voice was careful and clear, that of a performer, but the words ran into each other here and there; the lady, sitting with a glass of dark liquid in front of her, was pretty obviously not on her first drink. "Sit down, kids. Care to join me? I'm Greta Thamar."

  The name meant nothing to either Olga or Chen. But they looked at each other, sat down, and ordered beer from a robot which had been following them since they entered.

  Greta Thamar ordered another drink. The robot waiter looked into her eyes with careful lenses, and went away without acknowledging her order.

  When the beer arrived, almost immediately, her ordered drink was not on the tray with it. Nor did the robot offer explanations.

  The aging lady said: "I'm drinking more than is good for my worn mind." And she laughed. It was quite a young laugh, almost carefree, with something incongruous about it. Now she appeared to notice her companions' weapons and spacesuits for the first time. "You two are in the service, hey?"

  "Yes ma'am," said Olga, and then asked deferentially: "Have there been any berserkers around here, ma'am?"

  "They were here. Oh yes. But I never saw them." Greta Thamar looked vaguely into the distance. "The Guardians wouldn't believe me. But I knew nothing of what Sabel was doing with the berserkers."

  "The Guardians, ma'am?" That was Olga, puzzled. She looked at Chen. Everyone knew that the Guardians had existed centuries ago.

  And Sabel? Chen thought, lowering his beer stein with a grateful sigh. Was that supposed to be a joke, or what? It was his turn now to look at Olga, but he got no help from her.