Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Ahead, the reef still stretched interminably into a sun-dazzled nothingness.

  “What’s in this next pond, Glenna?” Glaus asked, and knew a measure of relief when the gray-haired woman gave a little shake of her head and answered sensibly.

  “Grouper. Some other fish as food stock for them. Why?”

  “Just wondering. What’ll we run into if we keep on going in this direction?”

  “This just goes on. Kilometer after kilometer. Ponds, and bays, and observation stations—I say keep going, because otherwise, they’ll catch us. What do you think we ought to do?”

  Glaus abruptly stopped walking, startling the women. He let the dead man slide down gently from his shoulders. Jen looked at her husband, examined Ino, shook her head.

  Claus said: “I think we’ve got to leave him.”

  Glenna looked down at Ino’s body once, could not keep looking at him. She nodded fiercely, and once more led the way.

  A time of silent walking passed before Jenny, at Claus’s side, began; “If they’re berserkers . . .”

  “What else?”

  “Well, why aren’t we all dead already? They don’t seem very . . . efficiently designed for killing.”

  “These must be specialists,” Claus mused. “Only a small part of a large force—a part Brass Trumpet missed when the rest moved on or was destroyed. Remember, we were wondering if Atlantis was their real target? These are special machines, built for . . . underwater work, maybe. Their ship must have been wrecked in the fighting and had to come down. When they found themselves on this planet, they must have come down to the sea for a reconnaissance, and then decided to attack first by land. Probably they saw the lights of the base before they crash-landed. They know which life form they have to deal with first, on any planet. Not very efficient, as you say. But they’ll keep coming at us till they’re all smashed or we’re all dead.”

  Glenna had slowed her pace a little and was looking toward the small observation post rising in the midst of the pond that they were passing. “I don’t think there’s anything in any of these stations that can help us . . . in fact, I’m just about sure there’s not. But I can’t think of anywhere else to turn.”

  Claus asked: “What’s in the next pond after this?”

  “Sharks . . . ah. That might be worth a try. Sometimes they’ll snap at anything that moves. They’re small ones, so I think our risk will be relatively small if we wade out to the middle.”

  Claus thought to himself that he would rather end up in the belly of a live shark than torn to pieces by an impersonal device. Jen was willing also to take the chance.

  They did not pause again till they were on the brink of the shark pond. Then Glenna said: “The water will be no more than three or four feet deep the way we’re going. Stay together and keep splashing as we go. Claus, hold that hand up; mustn’t drip a taste of blood into the water.”

  And in they went. Only when they were already splashing waist-deep did Claus recall Ino’s blood wetting the back of his coverall. But he was not going to stop just now to take it off.

  The pond was not very large; a minute of industrious wading, and they were climbing unmolested over the low, solid railing of the observation post rising near its middle. Here was space for two people to sit comfortably, sheltered from weather by a transparent dome and movable side panels. In the central console were instruments that constantly monitored the life in the surrounding ponds. Usually, of course, the readings from all ponds would be monitored in the more convenient central station attached to the house.

  The three of them squeezed in, and Glenna promptly opened a small storage locker. It contained a writing instrument that looked broken, a cap perhaps left behind by some construction worker, and a small spider—another immigrant from Earth, of course—who might have been blown out here by the wind. That was all.

  She slammed the locker shut again. “No help. So now it’s a matter of waiting. They’ll obviously come after us through the water. The sharks may snap up some of them before they reach us. Then we must be ready to move on before we are surrounded. It’s doubtful, and risky, but I can’t think of anything else to try.”

  Claus frowned. “Eventually, we’ll have to circle around, get back to the buildings.”

  Jen frowned at him. “The berserkers are there, too.”

  “I don’t think they will be, now. You see—”

  Glenna broke in: “Here they come.”

  The sun had climbed, and was starting to get noticeably hot. It came to Claus’s mind, not for the first time since their flight had started, that there was no water for them to drink. He held his left arm up with his right, trying to ease the throbbing.

  Along the reef where they had walked, along the parallel shore—and coming now over the barrier from the grouper pond—plate-sized specks of brown death were flowing. There were several dozen of them, moving more slowly than hurried humans could move, almost invisible in the shimmer of sun and sea. Some plopped into the water of the shark pond as Claus watched.

  “I can’t pick them up underwater,” Glenna announced. She was twiddling the controls of the station’s instruments, trying to catch the enemy on one of the screens meant for observing marine life. “Sonar . . . motion detectors . . . water’s too murky for simple video.”

  Understanding dawned for Claus. “That’s why they’re not metal! Why they’re comparatively fragile. They’re designed to avoid detection by underwater defenses—on Atlantis, I suppose—that could infiltrate and disable them.”

  Jen was standing. “We’d better get moving before we’re cut off.”

  “In another minute.” Glenna was still switching from one video pickup to another around the pond. “I’m sure we have at least that much to spare . . . ah.”

  One of the enemy had appeared on screen, sculling toward the camera at a modest pace. It looked less lifelike than it had in earlier moments of arms-length combat.

  Now, entering the picture from the rear, was a shark.

  Claus was not especially good at distinguishing marine species. But this portentous and somehow familiar shape was identifiable at once, not to be confused even by the nonexpert, it seemed, with that of any other kind of fish.

  Claus started to say, He’s going right past. But the shark was not. Giving the impression of afterthought, the torpedo shape swerved back. Its mouth opened and the berserker device was gone.

  The people watching made wordless sounds, but Jen took the others by an arm apiece. “We can’t bet all of them will be eaten—let’s get moving.”

  Claus already had one leg over the station’s low railing when the still surface of the pond west of the observation post exploded. Leaping clear of the water, the premiere killer of Earth’s oceans twisted in midair, as if trying to snap at its own belly. It fell back, vanishing in a hill of lashed-up foam. A moment later it jumped again, still thrashing.

  In the fraction of a second when the animal was clearly visible, Claus watched the dark line come into being across its white belly as if traced there by an invisible pen. It was a short line that a moment later broadened and evolved into blood. As the fish rolled on its back something dark and pointed came into sight, spreading the edges of the hole. Then the convulsing body of the shark vanished in an eruption of water turned opaque with its blood.

  The women were wading quickly away from the platform in the opposite direction, calling for him to follow, hoping aloud that the remaining sharks would be drawn to the dying one. But for one moment longer Claus lingered, staring at the screen. It showed the roiling bloody turmoil of killer fish converging, and out of this cloud the little berserker emerged, unfazed by shark’s teeth or digestion, resuming its methodical progress toward the humans, the life units that could be really dangerous to the cause of death.

  Jen tugged at her husband, got him moving with them. In her exhausted brain a nonsense rhyme was being generated: Bloody water hides the slasher, seed them, heed them, sue the splashers . . .

&
nbsp; No!

  As the three completed their water-plowing dash to the east edge of the pond, and climbed out, Jenny took Glenna by the arm. “Something just came to me. When I was tending Ino—he said something before he died.”

  They were walking east along the barrier reef again. “He said smashers,” Jen continued. “That was it. Lead them, or feed them, to the smashers. But I still don’t understand—”

  Glenna stared at her for a moment, an almost frightening gaze. Then she stepped between the young couple and pulled them forward.

  Two ponds down she turned aside, wading through water that splashed no higher than their calves, directly toward another observation post that looked just like the last.

  “We won’t be bothered in here, unless we should happen to step right on one, but there’s very little chance of that,” she assured them. “We’re too big. Of course, of course. Oh, Ino. I should have thought of this myself. They wait in ambush most of the time, in holes or under rocks.”

  “They?” Injury and effort were taking their toll on Claus. He leaned on Jenny’s shoulder now.

  Glenna glanced back impatiently. “Mantis shrimp is the common name. They’re stomatopods, actually.”

  “Shrimp?” The dazed query was so soft that she may not have heard it.

  A minute later they were squeezed aboard the station and could rest again. Above, clean morning clouds were building to enormous height, clouds that might have formed in the unbreathed air of Earth five hundred million years before.

  “Claus,” Jen asked, when both of them had caught their breath a little, “what were you saying a while ago, about circling back to the house?”

  “It’s this way,” he said, and paused to organize his thoughts. “We’ve been running to nowhere, because there’s nowhere on this world we can get help. But the berserkers can’t know that. I’m assuming they haven’t scouted the whole planet—just crash-landed on it. For all they know, there’s another colony of humans just down the coast. Maybe a town, with lots of people, aircraft, weapons . . . so for them, it’s an absolute priority to cut us off before we can give a warning. Therefore, every one of their units must be committed to the chase. And if we can once get through them or around them, we can outrun them home, to vehicles and guns and food and water. How we get through them or around them I haven’t figured out yet. But I don’t see any other way.”

  “We’ll see,” said Glenna. Jen held his hand, and looked at him as if his idea might be reasonable. A distracting raindrop hit him on the face, and suddenly a shower was spattering the pond. With open mouths the three survivors caught what drops they could. They tried spreading Jenny’s robe out to catch more, but the rain stopped before the cloth was wet.

  “Here they come,” Glenna informed them, shading her eyes from re-emergent sun. She started tuning up the observing gear aboard the station.

  Claus counted brown saucer shapes dropping into the pond. Only nineteen, after all.

  “Again, I can’t find them with the sonar,” Glenna muttered. “We’ll try the television—there.”

  A berserker unit—for all the watching humans could tell, it was the same one that the shark had swallowed—was centimetering its tireless way toward them, walking the bottom in shallow, sunlit water. Death was walking. A living thing might run more quickly, for a time, but life would tire. Or let life oppose it, if life would. Already it had walked through a shark, as easily as traversing a mass of seaweed.

  “There,” Glenna breathed again. The advancing enemy had detoured slightly around a rock, and a moment later a dancing ripple of movement had emerged from hiding somewhere to follow in its path. The pursuer’s score or so of tiny legs supported in flowing motion a soft-looking, roughly segmented, tubular body. Its sinuous length was about the same as the enemy machine’s diameter, but in contrast, the follower was aglow with life, gold marked in detail with red and green and brown, like banners carried forward above an advancing column. Long antennae waved as if for balance above bulbous, short-stalked eyes. And underneath the eyes a coil of heavy forelimbs rested, not used for locomotion.

  “Odonodactylus syllarus,” Glenna murmured. “Not the biggest species—but maybe big enough.”

  “What are they?” Jen’s voice was a prayerful whisper.

  “Well, predators . . .”

  The berserker, intent on its own prey, ignored the animate ripple that was overtaking it, until the smasher had closed almost to contact range. The machine paused then, and started to turn.

  Before it had rotated itself more than halfway, its brown body was visibly jerked forward, under some striking impetus from the smasher too for for human eyes to follow. The krak! of it came clearly through the audio pickup. Even before the berserker had regained its balance, it put forth a tearing claw like that which had opened the shark’s gut from inside.

  Again the invisible impact flicked from a finger-length away. At each spot where one of the berserker’s feet touched bottom, a tiny spurt of sand jumped up with the transmitted shock. Its tearing claw now dangled uselessly, hard ceramic cracked clean across.

  “I’ve never measured a faster movement by anything that lives. They strike with special dactyls—well, with their elbows, you might say. They feed primarily on hard-shelled crabs and clams and snails. That was just a little one that Ino gave you, as a joke. One as long as my hand can hit something like a four-millimeter bullet—and some of these are longer.”

  Another hungry smasher was now coming swift upon the track of the brown, shelled thing that looked so like a crab. The second smasher’s eyes moved on their stalks, calculating distance. It was evidently of a different species than the first, being somehwat larger and of a variant coloration. The berserker, put out a sharp and wiry tool and cut its first assailant neatly in half. As it turned back, Claus saw—or almost saw, or imagined that he saw—the newcomer’s longest pair of forelimbs unfold and return. Again grains of sand beneath the two bodies, living and unliving, jumped from the bottom. With the concussion, white radü of fracture sprang out across a hard, brown surface . . .

  Four minutes later the three humans were still watching, in near-perfect silence. A steady barrage of kraks, from every region of the pond, were echoing through the audio pickups. The video screen still showed the progress of the first individual combat.

  “People sometimes talk about sharks as being aggressive, as terrible killing machines. Gram for gram, I don’t think they’re at all in the same class.”

  The smashing stomatopod, incongruously shrimplike, gripped the ruined casing of its victim with its six barb-studded smaller forelimbs and began to drag it back to the rock from which its ambush had been launched. Once there, it propped the interstellar terror in place, a Lilliputian monster blacksmith arranging metal against anvil. At the next strike—imaginable, if not visible, as a double backhand snap from the fists of a karate master—fragments of tough casing literally flew through the water, mixed now with a spill of delicate components. What, no soft, delicious meat in sight as yet? Then smash again . . .

  An hour after the audio pickups had reported their last krak, the three humans walked toward home, unmolested through the shallows and along a shore where no brown saucers moved.

  When Ino had been brought home, and Claus’s hand seen to, the house was searched for enemy survivors. Guns were got out, and the great gates in the sand walls closed to be on the safe side. Then the two young people sent Glenna to a sedated rest.

  Her voice was dazed and softly, infinitely tired. “Tomorrow we’ll feed them, something real.”

  “This afternoon,” said Claus. “When you wake up. Show me what to do.”

  “Look at this,” called Jen a minute later, from the common room.

  One wall of the smallest aquarium had been shattered outward. Its tough glass lay sharded on the carpet, along with a large stain of water and the soft body of a small creature, escaped and dead.

  Jen picked it up. It was much smaller than its cousins out in the pond
, but now she could not mistake the shape, even curled loosely in her palm.

  Her husband came in and looked over her shoulder. “Glenna’s still muttering. She just told me they can stab, too, if they sense soft meat in contact. Spear-tips on their smashers when they unfold them all the way. So you couldn’t hold him like that if he was still alive.” Claus’s voice broke suddenly, in a delayed reaction.

  “Oh, yes I could.” Jen’s voice, too. “Oh, yes I could indeed.”

  1979

  SOME EVENTS IN THE TEMPLAR RADIANT

  To a true scientist nothing is too much to pay for knowledge—life itself is cheap at the price!

  All his years of past work, and more than that, his entire future too, hung balanced on this moment.

  A chair forgotten somewhere behind him, Sabel stood tall in the blue habit that often served him as laboratory coat. His hands gripped opposite corners of the high, pulpit-like control console. His head was thrown back, eyes closed, sweat-dampened dark hair hanging in something more than its usual disarray over his high, pale forehead.

  He was alone, as far as any other human presence was concerned. The large, stone-walled chamber in which he stood was for the moment quiet.

  All his years of work . . . and although during the past few days he had mentally rehearsed this moment to the point of exhaustion, he was still uncertain of how to start. Should he begin with a series of cautious, testing questions, or ought he leap toward his real goal at once?

  Hesitancy could not be long endured, not now. But caution, as it usually had during his private mental rehearsals, prevailed.

  Eyes open, Sabel faced the workbenches filled with equipment that were arranged before him. Quietly he said: “You are what human beings call a berserker. Confirm or deny.”

  “Confirm.” The voice was familiar, because his hookup gave it the same human-sounding tones in which his own laboratory computer ordinarily spoke to him. It was a familiarity that he must not allow to become in the least degree reassuring.