Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  His desk chimed the melodious notes that meant something was newly available for his amusement Nogara chose to answer.

  “Sir,” said a woman’s voice, “two new possibilities are in the shower room now.”

  Projected from hidden cameras, a scene glowed into life above Nogara’s desk; bodies gleaming in a spray of water.

  “They are from prison, sir, anxious for any reprieve.”

  Watching, Nogara felt only a weariness; and, yes, something like self-contempt. He questioned himself: Where in all the universe is there a reason why I should not seek pleasure as I choose? And again: Will I dabble in sadism, next? And if I do, what of it?

  But what after that?

  Having paused respectfully, the voice asked: “Perhaps this evening you would prefer something different?”

  “Later,” he said. The scene vanished. Maybe I should try to be a Believer for a while, he thought. What an intense thrill it must be for Johann to sin. If he ever does.

  That had been a genuine pleasure, seeing Johann given command of the Solarian Fleet, watching the Venerians boil. But it had raised another problem. Johann, victorious over the berserkers would emerge as the greatest hero in human history. Would that not make even Johann dangerously ambitious? The thing to do would be to ease him out of the public eye, give him some highranked job, honest, but dirty and inglorious. Hunting out outlaws somewhere, Johann would probably accept that, being Johann. But if Johann bid for galactic power, he would have to take his chances. Any pawn in the game might be removed.

  Nogara shook his head. Suppose Johann lost the coming battle, and lost Sol? A berserker victory would not be a matter of diffusing probabilities, that was pleasant double talk for a tired mind to fool itself with. A berserker victory would mean the end of Earthman in the galaxy, probably within a few years. No computer was needed to see that.

  There was a little bottle in his desk; Nogara brought it out and looked at it. The end of the chess game was in it. The end of all pleasure and boredom and pain. Looking at the vial caused him no emotion. In it was a powerful drug which threw a man into a kind of ecstasy—a transcendental excitement that within a few minutes burst the heart or the blood vessels of the brain. Someday, when all else was exhausted, when it was completely a berserker universe—

  He put the vial away and he put away die final appeal from Earth. What did it all matter? Was it not a berserker universe already, everything determined by the random swirls of condensing gas, before the stars were born?

  Felipe Nogara leaned back in his chair, watching his computers marking out the galactic chessboard.

  VI

  Through the fleet the rumor spread that Karlsen delayed because it was a Venerian colony under siege. Aboard the Solar Spot, Mitch saw no delays for any reason. He had time for only work, quick meals and sleep. When the final ram-and-board drill had been completed, the last stores and ammunition loaded, Mitch was too tired to feel much except relief. He rested, not frightened or elated, while the Spot wheeled into a rank with forty other arrow-shaped ships, dipped with them into the first Cplus jump of the deep space search, and began to hunt the enemy.

  It was days later before dull routine was broken by a jangling battle alarm. Mitch was wakened by R; before his eyes were fully opened, he was scrambling into the armored suit stored under his bunk. Nearby, some marines grumbled about practice alerts; but none of them was moving slowly.

  “This is High Commander Karlsen speaking,” boomed the overhead speakers. “This is not a practice alert, repeat, not practice. Two berserkers have been sighted. One we’ve just glimpsed at extreme range. Likely it will get away, though the Ninth Squadron is chasing if.

  “The other is not going to escape. In a matter of minutes we will have it englobed, in normal space. We are not going to destroy it by bombardment; we are going to soften it up a bit, and then see how well we can really ram-andboard. If there are any bugs left in our tactics, we’d better find out now. Squadrons Two, Four, and Seven will each send one ship to the ramming attack. I’m going back on Command Channel now, Squadron Commanders.”

  “Squadron Four,” sighed Sergeant McKendrick. “More Esteelers in our company than any other. How can we miss?”

  The marines lay like dragon’s teeth seeded in the dark, strapped into the padded acceleration couches that had been their bunks, while the psych-music tried to hill them, and those who were Believers prayed. In the darkness Mitch listened, and passed on to his men the terse battle reports that came to him as marine commander on the ship.

  He was afraid. What was death, that men should fear it so? It could be only the end of all experience. That was inevitable, and beyond imagination, and he feared it.

  The preliminary bombardment did not take long. Two hundred and thirty ships of life held a single great trapped enemy in the center of their hollow sphere formation. The enemy did not give a damn if he was trapped because he was dead already and had always been dead.

  Listening in the dark to laconic voices, Mitch heard how the great berserker fought back, as if with the finest human courage and contempt for odds. Could you really fight machines when you could never make them suffer pain or fear?

  But you could defeat machines.

  And this time, for once, humanity had far too many guns. It would be easy to blow this berserker into vapor. Would it be best to do so? There were bound to be marine casualties in any boarding no matter how favorable the odds. But a true combat test of the boarding scheme was badly needed before the decisive battle came to be fought. And, too, this enemy might hold living prisoners who might be rescued by boarders. A High Commander probably did well to have a rocklike certainty of his own rightness.

  The order was given. The Spot and two other chosen ships fell in toward the battered enemy at the center of the englobement Straps held Mitch firmly, but the gravity had been turned off for the ramming, and weightlessness gave the impression that his body would fly and vibrate like a pellet shaken in a bottle with the coming impact. Soundless dark, soft cushioning, and lulling music; but a few words came into the helmet and the body cringed, knowing that outside were the black cold guns and the hurtling machines, unimaginable forces leaping now to meet. Now—

  Reality shattered in through all the protection and padding. The shaped atomic charge at the tip of the ramming prow opened the berserker’s skin. In five seconds of crashing impact, the prow vaporized, melted, and crumpled its length away, the true hull driving behind it until the Solar Spot was sunk like an arrow into the body of her enemy.

  Mitch spoke for the last time to the bridge of the Solar Spot, while his men lurched past him in free fall, their suit lights glaring.

  “My panel shows Sally Port Three the only one not blocked,” he said. “We’re all going out that way.”

  “Remember,” said a Venetian voice, “your first job is to protect this ship against counterattack.”

  “Roger.” If they wanted to give him offensively unnecessary reminders, now was not the time for argument. He broke contact with the bridge and hurried after his men.

  The other two ships were to send their boarders fighting toward the strategic housing, which would be somewhere deep in the berserker’s center. The marines from the Solar Spot were to try to find and save any prisoners the berserker might hold. A berserker usually held prisoners near its surface, so the first search would be made by squads spreading out under the hundreds of square kilometers of hull.

  In the dark chaos of wrecked machinery just outside the sally port there was no sign yet of counterattack. The berserkers’ unknown builders supposedly had not constructed them to fight battles inside their own metallic skins, upon which fact rode the fleet’s hopes for success in a major battle.

  Mitch left forty men to defend the hull of the Spot, and himself led a squad of ten out into the labyrinth. There was no use setting himself up in a command post—communications in here would be impossible, once out of line-ofsight.

  The first man in each searchi
ng squad carried a mass spectrometer, an instrument that would detect the stray atoms of oxygen bound to leak from compartments where living beings breathed. The last man wore on one hand a device to blaze a trail with arrows of luminous paint; without a trail, getting lost in this three-dimensional maze would be almost inevitable.

  “Got a scent, Captain,” said Mitch’s spectrometer man, after five minutes’ casting through the squad’s assigned sector of the dying berserker.

  “Keep on it.” Mitch was second in line, his carbine ready.

  The detector man led the way through st dark and weightless mechanical universe, perhaps last seen by living eyes fifty-thousand years before. Several times he paused, adjusting his instrument and waving its probe. The pace was rapid; men trained in free fall, given plenty of holds to thrust and steer by could move faster than runners.

  A towering, multi-jointed shape rose up before the detector man, brandishing blue-white welding arcs like swords.

  Before Mitch was aware of aiming his carbine fired twice. The shells ripped the machine open and pounded it backward; it was only some semi-robotic maintenance device, not built for fighting.

  The detector man had nerve; he plunged right on. The squad kept pace with him, their suit lights scouting out unfamiliar shapes and distances, cutting knife-edge shadows m the vacuum, glare and darkness mellowed only by reflection.

  “Getting close!”

  And then they came to it. It was a place like the top of a huge dry well. An ovoid like a ship’s launch, very thickly armored, had apparently been raised through the well from deep inside the berserker, and was now clamped to a dock.

  “It’s the launch, it’s oozing oxygen.”

  “Captain, there’s some kind of airlock on this side. Outer door’s open.”

  It looked like the smooth and easy entrance of a trap.

  “Keep your eyes open.” Mitch went into the airlock. “Be ready to blast me out of here if I don’t show in one minute.”

  It was an ordinary airlock, probably cut from some human spaceship. He shut himself inside, and then got the inner door open.

  Most of the interior was a single compartment. In the center was an acceleration couch, holding a nude female mannikin. He drifted near, saw that her head had been depilated and that there were tiny beads of blood still on her scalp, as if probes had just been withdrawn.

  When his suit lamp hit her face she opened dead blue staring eyes, blinking mechanically. Still not sure that he was looking at a living human being, Mitch drifted beside her and touched her arm with metal fingers. Then all at once her face became human, her eyes coming from death through nightmare to reality. She saw him and cried out. Before he could free her there were crystal drops of tears in the weightless air.

  Listening to his rapid orders, she held one hand modestly in front of her, and the other over her raw scalp. Then she nodded, and took into her mouth the end of a breathing tube which would dole air from Mitch’s suit tank. In a few more seconds he had her wrapped in a clinging, binding rescue blanket, temporary proof against vacuum and freezing.

  The detector man had found no other oxygen source near the launch. Mitch ordered his squad back along their luminous trail.

  At the sally port, he heard that things were not going well with the attack. Real fighting robots were defending the strategic housing, where its forcefield brain was buried, miles inside it. At least eight men had been killed down there. Two more ships were going to ram and board.

  Mitch carried the girl through the sally port and three more friendly hatches. The monstrously thick hull of the ship shuddered and sang around him; the Solar Spot, her mission accomplished, boarders retrieved, was being withdrawn. Full weight came back, and light.

  “In here, Captain.” QUARANTINE, said the sign. A berserker’s prisoner might have been deliberately infected with something contagious. Men knew how to deal with such tricks; the machines had tried them before.

  Inside the infirmary, he set her down. While medics and nurses scrambled around, lie unfolded the blanket from die girl’s face, remembering to leave it curled over her shaven head, and opened his own helmet.

  “You can spit out the tube, now,” he told her, in his rasping voice.

  She did so and opened her eyes again.

  “Oh, are you real?” she whispered. Her hand pushed its way out of the blanket folds and slid over his armor “Oh, let me touch a human being again!” Her hand moved up to his exposed face and gripped his cheek and neck.

  “I’m real enough. You’re all right, now.”

  One of the bustling doctors came to a sudden, frozen halt, staring at the girl. Then he spun around on his heel and hurried away. What was wrong?

  Others sounded confident, reassuring the girl as they ministered to her. She wouldn’t let go of Mitch, die became nearly hysterical when they tried gently to separate her from him.

  “I guess you’d better stay,” a doctor told him.

  He sat there holding her hand, his helmet and gauntlets off. He looked away while they did medical things to her. They still spoke reassuringly; he thought they were finding nothing much wrong.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him when the medics were through for the moment. Her head was bandaged; her slender arm came from between sheets to maintain contact with his hand.

  “Mitchell Spain.” Now that he got a good look at her, a living young human female, he was in no hurry at all to get away. “What’s yours?”

  A shadow crossed her face. “I’m—not sure.”

  There was a sudden commotion at the infirmary door; High Commander Karlsen was pushing past protesting doctors into the QUARANTINE area. Karlsen came on until he was standing beside Mitch, but he was not looking at Mitch.

  “Chris,” he said to the girl. “Thank God.” There were tears in his eyes.

  The Lady Christina de Dulcin turned her eyes from Mitch to Johann Karlsen, and screamed in abject terror.

  VII

  “Now, Captain, tell me how you found her and brought her out.”

  Mitch began his tale. The two men were alone in Karlsen’s monastic cabin, just off the flagship’s bridge. The fight was over, the berserker a torn and harmless hulk. No other prisoners had been aboard it.

  “They planned to send her back to me,” Karlsen said staring into space, when Mitch had finished his account. “We attacked before it could launch her toward us. It kept her safe, and sent her back to me.

  Mitch was silent.

  Karlsen’s red-rimmed eyes fastened on him. “She’s been brainwashed, Poet. It can be done with some permanence, you know, when advantage is taken of the subject’s natural tendencies. I suppose she’s never thought too much of me. There were political reasons for her to consent to our marriage . . . she screams when the doctors even mention my name. They tell me it’s possible that horrible things were done to her by some man-shaped machine made to look like me. Other people are tolerable, to a degree. But it’s you she wants to be alone with, you she needs.”

  “She cried out when I left her, but—me?”

  “The natural tendency, you see. For her to—love—the man who saved her. The machines set her mind to fasten all the joy of rescue upon the first male human face she saw. The doctors assure me such things can be done. They’ve given her drugs, but even in sleep the instruments show her nightmares, her pain, and she cries out for you. What do you feel toward her?”

  “Sir, I’ll do anything I can. What do you want of me?”

  “I want you to stop her suffering, what else?” Karlsen’s voice rose to a ragged shout. “Stay alone with her, stop her pain if you can!”

  He got himself under a kind of control. “Go on. The doctors will take you in. Your gear will be brought over from the Solar Spot.” Mitch stood up. Any words he could think of sounded in his mind like sickening attempts at humor. He nodded, and hurried out.

  “This is your last chance to join us,” said the Venerian, Salvador, looking up and down the dim corridors of this
remote outer part of the flagship. “Our patience is worn, and we will strike soon. With the de Dulcin woman in her present condition, Nogara’s brother is doubly unfit to command.”

  The Venerian must be carrying a pocket spy-jammer; a multisonic whine was setting Hemphill’s teeth on edge. And so was the Venerian.

  “Karlsen is vital to the human cause whether we like him or not,” Hemphill said, his own patience about gone, but his voice calm and reasonable. “Don’t you see to what lengths the berserkers have gone, to get at him? They sacrificed a perfectly good machine just to deliver his brainwashed woman here, to attack him psychologically.”

  “Well. If that is true they have succeeded. If Karlsen had any value before, now he will be able to think of nothing but his woman and the Martian.”

  Hemphill sighed. “Remember, he refused to hurry the fleet to Atsog to try to save her. He hasn’t failed yet. Until he does, you and the others must give up this plotting against him.”

  Salvador backed away a step, and spat on the deck in rage. A calculated display, thought Hemphill.

  “Look to yourself, Earth man!” Salvador hissed. “Karlsen’s days are numbered, and the days of those who support him too willingly!” He spun around and walked away.

  “Wait!” Hemphill called, quietly. The Venerian stopped and turned with an air of arrogant reluctance. Hemphill shot him through the heart with a laser pistol. The weapon made a splitting, crackling noise in atmosphere.

  “You were good at talking and scheming,” Hemphill mused aloud, prodding the dying man with his toe, making sure no second shot was needed. “But too devious, to lead the fight against the damned machines.”

  He bent quickly to search the body, and stood up elated. He had found a list of officers’ names, some few underlined, some, including his own, followed by an interrogation point. Another document was a scribbled compilation of the units under command of certain Venerian officers. There were a few more notes; altogether, plenty of evidence for the arrest of the hard-core plotters. It might tend to split the fleet, but—