Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  THE ANNIHILATION OF ANGKOR APEIRON

  Berserker vs Editor—how could I resist?

  THE BATTLE was a long one for deep space, lasting well over a standard hour, and as fierce as any fight in which the losing side can have no expectation of survival. Commander Ridolfi had fought his heavy cruiser, the Dipavamsa, with a desperate skill that twice in a matter of minutes forestalled instant destruction by the berserker’s missiles, and each member of his crew performed superbly well in making such combat decisions as could be handled slowly enough to let human brains co-operate with their slave computers.

  The human crew of course faced death or worse if they should lose. And the berserker, their unliving foe, faced its own analogue of death and worse-than-death. To lose would mean destruction—which was nothing to a berserker if destruction could bring victory. But destruction in defeat meant certain failure to achieve any further progress toward its programmed goal, the annihilation of all life, whenever and wherever it could be attacked.

  Aboard the Dipavamsa there were only four civilian passengers, including Otto Novotny, who in his long life had never come close to taking part in a battle before and who felt a great deal too old and paunchy for such endeavors now. Nevertheless he was more alert than any of the other civilians, and had begun to don his requisite suit of space armor as soon as the Battle Stations klaxon sounded, while the other three were still wondering aloud if it was only practice.

  Ten seconds later the first berserker missile blew against the cruiser’s defensive screens, a mere kilometer from her hull, and they all knew better.

  DIPAVAMSA WAS FIGHTING for her life several light years from any star, along a trade route where in these last few standard months no unarmed vessels had dared to try to pass. The berserker machine, a sphere some forty or fifty kilometers in diameter, all armor and combat computers and heavy weapons and drive, had waited like a spider in the midst of the net of detectors it had planted in subspace. The region where its detectors existed was conterminous to one in normal space where a strait of hard vacuum bent between two “nebulae, forming a bottleneck only a few billion kilometers wide in which a reasonably fast passage could be achieved. When a manned ship dared to try the strait—heavy cruiser or not—the berserker jumped to the attack.

  Locked together with their armaments of fields and counterfields like grappling ocean ships of old, the contending metallic giants rolled into normal space, there to remain until the issue was decided. After the first enemy missile-blast reverberated through the cruiser’s hull, Novotny thought that the battle would probably be over one way or the other before he could get himself completely into the unfamiliar armor. His efforts were complicated by a sudden lack of artificial gravity; every erg of the cruiser’s energies was suddenly needed for more important things than maintaining a rightsideup.

  But he persevered, working with the same methodical speed with which he usually solved problems of quite a different kind and finally got the armor on. No sooner had he sealed its last seam and begun to wonder what to do next, when Dipavamsa’s hull was breached by blast and beam. Hatches slammed to seal compartments, but the air in their compartment could not be held and Novotny saw the lives of his companions who had been too slow snuffed out like candle flames.

  After that the battle became a scrambling confusion of largely physical effort for the humans who took part in it. For Novotny especially, who had less idea of what to expect than did any of the cruiser’s crew and who was not in as good shape as they were either. Now the berserker chose to hurl some of its auxiliary machines across the narrow no-man’s-land of space to try to board the cruiser. It could use the ship if it could capture it still reasonably intact, and probably it wanted living prisoners.

  PRISONERS of course were useful for interrogation, after which a berserker generally killed them quickly; it was programmed only to pursue death, not suffering, though of course it was quite willing to apply judicious torture to extract information of value in advancing the cause of death. And prisoners were needed for experiments that the berserkers carried on extensively, in an effort to learn what made Homo Sapiens, a species now spread across this part of the Galaxy, such a resistant life-form to their relentless program of sterilization.

  The berserkers were automated warships, made by an unknown race to fight in an interstellar war that had been over ages since; they had outlasted their original enemies and their makers as well, having been programmed and equipped to rebuild and reproduce themselves. Still trying to carry out their originally programmed task, they had made an age-long progress across the spiral arms, leaving nothing living in their wake.

  While following the motions of the Commander’s arms, which were gesturing to shovel suited people from one wrecked-looking compartment to another, Novotny had a chance to look out through the holed hull to catch his first glimpse of the enemy. The monstrous spherical hull of the berserker was visible by the cherry-glow of craters that the cruiser’s weapons had pocked across its armor hide. One crater flared anew while Novotny watched, flamed with some power that seemed to be eating like a cancer into the enemy’s metal bowels. But again the cruiser was rocked and shaken in its turn, Novotny and Commander Ridolfi were picked up by the same invisible hand and slammed together into a bulkhead, saved only by their suits from broken bones.

  Now some of the berserker’s boarding machines, which were a little bigger than men and of divers shapes, managed to get aboard Dipavamsa, and Novotny had a chance to see the enemy at close range. Men, some of whom were hardened veterans, were screaming around him in terror, but his own unconsciously-maintained attitude was that under conditions like these one could hardly spare the time to be frightened. Vaguely he thought of this situation as resembling an impossible editorial deadline—one thing that could never help was panic. He followed as best he could the Commander’s waved and shouted orders, and kept alert. At last he got his own chance to blaze away at the foe, with a small recoilless rifle he had snatched up from a fallen crewman’s hands.

  By that time—as Novotny confusedly understood, from scraps of combat jargon that came into his helmet—Commander Ridolfi had ordered his Second Officer and a picked crew to leave the cruiser in an armed launch that could take shelter among the drifts and waves of nebular material in space nearby, darting through where the bulky berserker could not pass at speed. It was a feigned acknowledgement of defeat, intended to make the enemy think they were abandoning ship, a battle tactic to lure the damaged enemy in where a sharp counterattack might still destroy it.

  Ridolfi himself, as the cruiser’s commanding officer, and Novotny, as more or less useless baggage, were among those who stayed aboard her and tried to fight a delaying action through her corridors. The vacuum around Novotny’s helmet continued to buzz and sing with the strange energies of this battle; he clutched his recoilless rifle and continued to fire it toward the enemy’s boarding machines whenever he caught a glimpse of one of them. He could not have said whether or not his shots were doing any good. He also tried to stay close to Ridolfi’s side; whether he felt in slightly less hopeless danger there, or was hoping thus to improve his chances of being useful, he did not pause to consider. Ridolfi indeed kept snapping orders, but they were meant for members of his crew.

  The two of them were still together, trying to defend the central control room of the ship, when Death struck closer to them than an any moment yet.

  It came very suddenly. One moment Novotny was still looking toward Ridolfi for a hint of what they might try to do next—and the next moment a berserker machine that looked like a cross between a centipede and a crab had thrown itself upon them and they were prisoners. Steel claws that moved with the force of atomic power effortlessly tore Novotny’s rocket launcher away and wrenched the Commander’s sidearm from his hand. The berserker shifted its grip then, holding each pair of human arms helpless with a single claw—and then machine and men went down together in a tangle as a new force slammed at the cruiser from outside. Th
e Second Officer and his picked crew, in their fresh and undamaged launch, had begun their counterattack.

  The crab-centipede was wrecked, sheared almost in two, as the launch sent something like the Angel of the Lord passing almost invisibly through the embattled ship, cutting selectively, passing over fragile human bodies and machinery that it could somehow identify as human property.

  The mass of his late captor, and its tenacious grip which had not relaxed with the destruction of its computer-brain, pinned Novotny in an angle between deck and bulkhead, surrounded by wreckage. Beside him Ridolfi grunted and struggled in similar difficulties. Then they abruptly ceased their efforts to get free, simultaneously ceased even to breathe—another berserker machine was entering the damaged control room.

  If it was aware of them, it did not turn. It moved straight to one of the panels before which a human astrogator normally sat, and with a startling delicacy began to remove the panel from its mounting. Neatly—almost timidly, it seemed—it probed for the panel fasteners, teasing and tickling at them with grasping devices that could have ripped the panel free like so much tissue paper.

  . . . it was working so carefully, and now it almost had what it was after. It reached inside and pulled out . . . very slowly . . .

  . . . a small metal case . . .

  That burst into a flaming snowball even as the berserker oh so gently tugged it free of its connections, a blaze that here in free fall sent out its flames in a sunburst of straight radii, a wad of radiant glory that the enemy instantly hurled away. Without pause the enemy turned to snatch up a small bundle of paper printout that writhed weightlessly across the deck. It shoved this inside itself, door slamming shut protectively across the orifice—and the machine was gone, lunging with inhuman speed out of the room again.

  “Novotny.” The two of them gasped for breath again and once more struggled against the dead claws that held them prisoner. “Look—can you shift your weight this way? Lean on it here, maybe I can get a hand out of this claw . . .”

  After a minute or two of cooperative effort both of them were free. From some comparatively great distance the shocks and slams of battle were still coming to them through the hull. “Novotny, listen to me.” The Commander talked while looking for his pistol, which he at last grabbed from a turning swirl of other weightless debris that drifted in the middle of the room. “It was going after our astrogational databank just then. After that thing that burst into flame?”

  “I saw.”

  “It didn’t get what it wanted, because the bank’s destructor charge worked when it was pulled out. But it must need astrogational information badly, or it wouldn’t have sent a machine after it, before the battle’s even over. Maybe its own banks have been shot up.”

  Novotny moved his head inside his helmet, showing that he understood so far.

  The Commander had his pistol back, held absently in his right hand, and his left hand clamped briefly on Novotny’s suited arm.

  “I believe you have in your quarters something it could use as a substitute. I understand you’re traveling with the whole new edition of Encyclopedia Galactica in microstorage—and the EG gives galactic coordinates for all inhabited systems, right?”

  Novotny agreed again. Now that he had been almost immobile for a little while, his muscles were starting to stiffen from the unaccustomed workout. He could hear the wheezings from inside his own chest, and his body was beginning to feel like so much fluid lead. If they weren’t in free fall he would certainly be dizzy and have to sit down. Decades at a senior executive’s desk had left him too fat and old for this kind of nonsense.

  But he was moving again now, keeping up with the agile Commander as they picked their way out of the ruined control room, which now looked not in fit shape for controlling anything.

  “Then we’ve got to get to your quarters,” the Commander was saying, “while there’s still a chance. You’ve got just the one copy of the encyclopedia there?”

  “Yes.”

  “We must see that it’s destroyed.”

  They had started down a corridor, and there came a glimpse of a machine moving ahead of them, and the vibrations of its massy passage came through the bulkheads to their gripping hands. Taking shelter together in a doorway, they waited for it to get out of their way.

  The Commander kept trying to make contact with his Second Officer by suit radio, but seemed unable to get any reply. Maybe, thought Novotny, it’s only that the space between is far too noisy . . .

  “Commander,” he asked, when there was a momentary opportunity, “What sector are we in now? Of the Galaxy, I mean, in Revised Galactic Coordinates?”

  Ridolfi’s eyes came to full focus on him for what might have been the first time. “Omicron Sector, Ring Eleven—what does it matter? Oh, you mean you want to know which volumes of your set it will be most important to destroy. Good thinking. That damned machine will be too shot up itself to get out of Omicron without help. I don’t think it’ll be able to catch another ship, even if one should come along. It’ll be trying to find an undefended planet nearby, within a light year or two if possible, preferably an inhabited one where there’ll be machines it can take over and some readymade materials that it can use to repair itself.”

  “And my encyclopedia is now the only means by which it can locate such a planet?”

  “That’s the way I read the situation, It can’t just go visiting stars at random, the chance of success is far too small . . . remember that printout it picked up from the control room floor? That was a copy of what we call the Military Information Sheet, which we got when we filed our flight plan. Among other things it contains a list of all the defended planets along our projected course—all the places where we might be able to look for help in case of an emergency. I suppose it’ll go for one of them if it can’t find anything better. But in your reference book it’s likely to get the address of some undefended one . . . the war’s a recent thing in this neck of the galactic woods, remember?”

  Novotny’s face bore a doubtful look, but the Commander was no longer watching him.

  “Coast’s clear, Novotny. Let’s move.” Then the two of them were in motion again, diving and scrambling in free fall. For the moment their luck held; no more berserkers came in sight as they reached the stateroom corridor and swam along it to the door of Novotny’s cabin. The door had been jammed shut by some warping of the battered ship around it, and it took the men an agonizing moment or two to force it free.

  Then they were inside. “Where is it?”

  “There on the table, Commander. Already plugged into the reading machine. But wait.” A new anxiety had come into Novotny’s voice. “I’m not sure that destruction is our wisest move.”

  Commander Ridolfi only looked at him. “Get back.”

  But Novotny had not moved when a third figure suddenly joined them in the little cabin; the crab-centipede’s cousin, which raised a multitude of claws.

  The Commander aimed his gun again, but not at the berserker. He thought his own life and battle now lost anyway, and more important than perhaps damaging one more of the berserker’s machines would be denying it this information on new targets. He aimed at the reading machine that sat like some dull sculpture on the table.

  Novotny reached out deliberately and knocked Ridolfi’s arm aside:

  The berserker, on the verge of killing both of them, hesitated fractionally as it observed their struggle. Did one of these life-units wish to become goodlife, a willing ally of the cause of Death? Such conversions had happened before, more than a few times, and a goodlife could be very useful. And what on the table was so important that a life-unit struggled to destroy it—?

  From the armed launch came the next phase of counterattack. The cabin was nearly ripped apart. The berserker lashed out at Ridolfi, and the Commander saw that his pistol was gone again, before it could be fired, and his arm gone with it almost to the shoulder. The suit will seal itself around the wound, he thought, in sudden massive shock that
made all things seem trivial. He saw the reading machine snatched up from the table in the claws of the berserker, and the launch’s weapons struck again. A fresh gust of escaping atmosphere whirled through the cruiser from a newly-ruptured compartment, and with the last glow of his consciousness the Commander could see stars.

  HIS FIRST FEELING when his wits came back was sheer astonishment at being still alive. Astonishment deepened when he realized that he had somehow been brought on board the armored launch. All four bunks in its tiny sickbay were full of wounded, and men and women and machines were steadily at work, passing back and forth continually in the small space between the bunks.

  The Second Officer came in to report, relief dawning on his face when he saw that Ridolfi was getting up and evidently in shape to resume his command. Shock and loss of blood had been treated, pain blocked, and bandages sealed the wound from which a new arm could one day be made to grow.

  The Second made his report concisely. The launch was now some half a million kilometers within the nebula, its defenses alertly repelling or safely detonating—so far—all the torpedoes that the berserker had sent after it. The battle had ground to a halt, otherwise, in mutual though incomplete destruction. What was left of the cruiser had now been abandoned by both contending forces. Before pulling back deep within the nebula, the launch had dared to delay long enough to follow distress signals and pick up two suited survivors who had, it seemed, somehow been blown clean away from the embattled cruiser in the last stages of the fighting. One of the survivors was Commander Ridolfi himself. The other . . .

  “That makes nineteen people on the air and food,” the Second Officer mused, as they stood looking down at the collapsed shape of Otto Novotny, slumped in total exhaustion in a corner of the small dayroom where there hardly seemed room for his gross form. “Still, we should be able to recycle, and make supplies last until we’re eventually picked up . . .”