Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Now she looked at her current form and bid it fond farewell. Donning a long-sleeved coverall, Vivian went to a safe dug into one of the lab’s inner walls. Only she and the locking mechanism knew the combination, and the lock seemed almost surprised to be asked to open after so many years of holding closed.

  From the safe, Vivian drew the only remaining copy of her greatest failure—her greatest success—the complex array of force fields and transdimensional interlays that was called Lancelot. In the safe there was also a rack upon which Lancelot could be assembled and calibrated. Vivian set this up, her fingers remembering the complex joins she thought she might have forgotten. Then she set Lancelot upon it and touched her index finger to an activation pad. Something like light, although it extended into ranges where the human eye could not see, flowed through the fields.

  Activated, Lancelot did not in the least resemble familiar battle armor. It did not resemble the interstellar fighter she had proposed to the Templars. There had been some problem about that, she recalled, problems that had faded when she had demonstrated what Lancelot could do. New problems had arisen though, problems that had finally led to the project’s termination and the destruction of all copies of the device but this one.

  Vivian knew that she could wear Lancelot for a time before the stress grew too great for her to bear. Within that time she should have achieved her goal. The berserkers were out there, and Lancelot would carry her to them.

  “Brother Angel,” she said, “put one of the spare suits of battle armor on.”

  “Why?”

  “You must come with me. You overheard what the berserker said to me aloud, but did you hear its final orders?”

  Brother Angel’s expression showed uncertainty, and Vivian pressed her advantage.

  “It told me that you were to come with me. They have need of you, of the complex information about the Templar organization you have gathered.”

  “It is time for me to give my report,” Brother Angel said, moving toward the locker where the armor was stowed with almost indecent haste.

  “That must be so,” Vivian said.

  Swiftly, she donned the various pieces of Lancelot’s insubstantial armor. As each piece interfaced with her body, her awareness swelled. Lancelot had the capacity to maintain her body far more efficiently than did any space suit or set of battle armor. She ceased to breathe and did not notice. A slight pressure from her bladder vanished. A sensation of hunger was satisfied. A headache she had not known plagued her was treated.

  As the demands of her physical body were quieted, Vivian’s thinking became clearer, every iota of her mental capacity available to her now. She needed this, for even as Lancelot dealt with her physical needs, it expanded her capacity to sense what was around her. She became aware of the microbes dancing in the air, breeding in the damp of her discarded clothing. She could feel the throb of the power systems that fed the needs of Lake Moon Base. If she tried, she could detect individuals. Brother Angel’s heart rate was up, but his adrenal levels marked his excitement. In a physical therapy lab, General Gosnick paused in the midst of exercises meant to adjust his nervous system to his new legs. A report had come from the base command center. He listened, and his heart rate spiked, his breathing came fast.

  Vivian knew it was time for her to go.

  Her lab possessed its own airlock, another of those many conveniences meant to facilitate her work. She opened it with a thought, doing her best to shut down distractions generated by the increasing awareness of her Lancelot-stimulated senses. This level of stimulation had driven many a talented pilot into insanity. She could handle it . . . for now.

  Vivian moved toward the airlock, her gait smooth and her feet no longer touching the floor. Had there been any present to see, they would not have seen a woman in the most powerful weapons system ever created, but a creature strange and fey, an angel or a winged titan, robed in light and power.

  “Come with me, Brother Angel,” she said. “Lancelot can easily carry us both.”

  When he came to her, Vivian commanded Lancelot to cast a shield over Brother Angel, so that his presence would be undetectable. She reached out with enhanced senses and set a delay on flight decks and weaponry. Pursuit too soon would only endanger the pursuers to no good end, and she did not care to be distracted by the need to prevent injury from the base’s guns. As they were passing through the airlock, Vivian stopped fighting the flood of information Lancelot was feeding her. She let the many individual lives residing in the base flood through her. She gloried in their complexity and diversity. Rather than overwhelming her, the tsunami of Life gave her strength, and Vivian moved into the coldness of the airless void, strengthened and firmer in her purpose. Servant of death? Perhaps.

  She no longer needed any communications channel to know what was flowing through the electronic network within Lake Moon Base.

  The general as saying to an aide, “. . . but we have bigger problems than one scientist gone absent without leave. Long range sensors detect berserker activity two planets out and now approaching rapidly. They must have been shielding themselves behind the planets. Comet Tremaine has been messing up our data field in that direction for months. They took advantage of it.”

  This is not a drill! Berserkers sighted approaching this base. All hands to battle stations. Repeat!

  This is not a drill.

  Vivian was aware of communications on the base as she might have been aware of a fly settling on her arm while she was engrossed with some bit of technical analysis. She registered it, calculated what it would mean to her current course of action, and increased her speed. She wanted to reach the berserkers before the first wave of fighters could be scrambled.

  Vivian sped on through space, Lancelot carrying her and her passenger at speeds so swift that light bent around her, and she felt the illusion of wind in her hair.

  Three berserkers were approaching. They had reached the regions between the sixth planet and the asteroid belt. Two were the equivalent of small, fast fighters. The third was a larger model, a transport capable of interstellar flight, also capable of causing a considerable amount of destruction. Though Lancelot, Vivian reached out and examined the approaching ships. Doubtless the transport contained some chamber meant to carry her if she agreed to accept the berserker’s tempting offer. The transport, then, was where she should direct her attentions. The fighters were between her and it, moving at astonishing speeds.

  Wrapped within Lancelot, spreading her wings on the stellar winds, Vivian thought she knew something of the pleasure the berserkers must take in the freedom non-life gave them. Then she remembered that non-life did not feel pleasure and thought she understood a little better why the efforts to craft android berserkers had failed again and again.

  I could do it, she thought. I could succeed as no one else has managed to succeed. First, though, the transport. That is the way out-system.

  Lancelot brought her in. She traded steps with the hail of asteroids that wove a swiftly moving dance through this part of the Pinball System. Vivian knew she was showing off, but certainly there was no better time to do so.

  Neither the fighters nor the transport had chosen to dance with the asteroids, instead rising and going above the band in which competing stronger and weaker gravity fields had oriented the asteroids. The berserkers slowed as they became aware of Vivian and Lancelot, and she felt the vibrating force as countless energy weapons targeted her.

  There was interest, but she did not sense the surge that would precede a release of death dealing energy. She felt herself being scanned and was flattered when defensive screens snapped into place on all three vessels.

  The transport said, “You have come, and you have brought Lancelot.”

  “I come only on conditions,” Vivian replied. “Not one living thing, from the tiniest microbe to the most complex conglomeration of living cells—in short, nothing at all is to be slain. Not now, and not for as long as I am in the service of the berserkers.”
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br />   “We were prepared,” the transport replied, “for some such condition. I am authorized to make such an agreement. I am not authorized to extend that protection elsewhere.”

  “I understand. If you know my history, this base has been my home for over a century now. Those lifeforms I personally value are there.”

  “You do realize,” the berserker said, “that your fullest cooperation will be needed for us to override our programing and preserve these life-units.”

  “I do indeed. They are hostages against my acting against your interests.”

  Communication with the transport required only the smallest fragment of Vivian’s Lancelot-augmented attention.

  The time had come to act, for Lancelot had carried Vivian here much more swiftly than any fighter could fly. Vivian snaked her awareness along the channel the berserker transport was using to address her. She felt the whisper of its command to the two fighters. They were to defend herself and the transport, but they were not to attack unless the situation changed.

  Vivian smiled a thin smile, and reached out through Lancelot. She let her awareness become something fluid and deadly, a static that seeped like poison into the berserker transport’s electronic veins. This poison was created to slow processing, to numb awareness, to give her merely human self a chance to operate a little faster than berserkers, which moved as swiftly as the will of their complex electronic brains.

  She guided the infection so that it flowed along with commands into the fighters, and when she was sure that the poison had taken hold but that the berserkers had not yet detected their impediment, she struck out with a sword shaped from the glowing force fields of Lancelot’s self. Vivian’s first target was the transport, for the berserkers must not be permitted to flee, carrying with them specific information about what had happened here. Her strike was clean and bright, penetrating between the very atoms of the berserker’s structure, the point of her blade taking her foe in its heart. The wound was mortal, and she knew it, and she knew well what the berserker itself would do when it realized the extent of its injury. She pulled herself and Brother Angel clear of it, cartwheeling back, putting distance between herself and the transport, which even now was triggering its self-destruct system. The procedure was slower than it might have been, but still in-humanly fast. Within Lancelot’s field, Vivian felt Brother Angel begin to struggle.

  “You said you were going to accept their offer!” Brother Angel protested.

  “I lied,” Vivian said. “I’m sure you would agree that lying is a very fitting tactic in time of war. I did not lie about one thing, though.”

  Brother Angel pressed his lips together, refusing to answer. Through Lancelot, Vivian felt his reply in the sudden panic that sent bitter chemical signals flowing through his body.

  “I’m bringing you to them,” she said. “It’s time for you to give your final report.”

  The berserker fighters, only now aware of the crippling static infecting their systems, had not been able to avoid the effects of the transport’s self-destruct as Vivian Lancelot had done. One was caught completely in the transport’s dying blast, taking sufficient damage to trigger its own self-destruct. Lancelot protected Vivian, folding its wings over her to protect her from an explosive force that would have burned her to a crisp with the force of a second sun.

  Despite the violence of the dual explosions, the second fighter’s armor saved it from being destroyed. It knew where its most dangerous enemy was, and it came after Vivian. She dove Lancelot into the asteroid belt. Then, she released Lancelot’s shield, flinging Brother Angel at the berserker as a warrior of long ago might have flung a spear.

  “You wanted Death,” Vivian cried after the traitor.

  “Go to it!”

  The fighter diverted slightly to deal with what it perceived first as menace, then as ally, then as useless. Brother Angel evaporated beneath its fire.

  Wearied now, Vivian let Lancelot take over. Lancelot’s battle hymns sung through Vivian’s veins as the suit teased the fighter into the chase. They dodged through showers of minute stones that strained the fighter’s shields. They dove in and out of the belt’s plane, and the fighter blasted a path for its much larger bulk to follow. They placed their booted feet on a chunk of super-compacted ore and kicked it at the fighter. The fighter diverted its attention to fire at the impromptu missile, and at that moment Lancelot drew its sword.

  The glowing band of force ripped through the berserker fighter’s hull, shredding components, breaking conduits so that fluids flowed and then froze when they met the chill of vacuum. Vivian, hardly Vivian any longer, for Lancelot’s perceptions had overwhelmed her mere organic mind, felt the berserker fighter’s self-destruct sequence trigger. The human fighters were closing now, and she screamed on their communications channels for them to get back, get back. That berserker was going to blow . . .

  It did, evaporating a large chunk of the asteroid belt along with its own hull. Vivian knew that in time the belt would heal itself, as even unliving things did if given enough time. She, however, would not be there to see.

  Lancelot was her greatest success, her greatest failure. In wearing it for this long, she had driven her body and, even more so, her mind beyond the limits a human could survive. Already she could feel her attention fragmenting, unable to cope with the countless impulses flowing into it. While she could still focus, she reached out and touched a command circuit.

  “General Gosnick, this is . . .” She had to pause to remember her name. She was aware of so many things now, and none of them seemed to have priority. “Vivian Travers. The berserkers have been defeated. This base is, for now, secure. However, it is likely that the berserkers will eventually try again to destroy it. Even without me, there is much here to tempt them.”

  “Without you?” the general sounded appalled. “Vivian, if you are injured we can sent a ship for you. Don’t give up!”

  “I am already gone,” Vivian said. “Nor do I dare come back onto the base. Even with Lancelot’s protection, I am so pierced with radiation that I would mean death to those at the base as surely—and not nearly as swiftly—as any berserker. I have instructed Lancelot to take me to Lake, submerge us both in one of the acid pools, and then deactivate. That will end the danger.”

  “Vivian . . . You saved us. I refuse to give up.”

  She heard General Gosnick ordering the fighters to divert to intercept her, felt commands being passed through Lake Moon to have decontamination chambers readied, medical teams standing by. Vivian ordered Lancelot to hurry. Perhaps it was selfish of her, but she had no desire to live with her mind splintered, even if some miracle could restore her body intact. They dove through the burning halo of Lake’s thin atmosphere, heading toward one of the largest and most corrosive of the acid lakes.

  “Vivian! I order you to wait for rescue,” General Gosnick bellowed.

  “There is no rescue for me,” Vivian replied as she slipped beneath the acid lake’s surface, holding forth Lancelot’s sword in final salute. “If you would do me a kindness, remember me, when you do, for what I have always tried to be—a Servant of Life.”

  [*] For the tale of Lancelot and the one who could use it to its full capacity, see the novel Berserker Man by Fred Saberhagen.