Berserker Prime

by Fred Saberhagen

  Luon, though physically unharmed like most of the people on or near the flagship’s bridge, was weeping, trying to cope with what was happening as quietly as she could.

  When Gregor crept back to his cabin for a rest, she came in and knelt down sobbing, beside his couch. As if, he thought, she was coming to my deathbed. Well, quite likely that’s exactly where I am now.

  But his granddaughter’s fear and grief, as it turned out, were mainly invested in the young man presumably still locked up in a deep, safe shelter down on Timber. She was never going to see her Reggie again. What would happen to him?

  So far, Gregor himself had not been even scratched or bruised. But he felt very old, and very helpless.

  Such communications as could get through from the ground, from Timber and Prairie both, offered no encouragement. Certainly the messages going the other way could not have done so either. The military infrastructure seemed as helpless and disorganized as the civilian. Naturally everyone on the surfaces of both planets wanted to know what was going on in spacetelescopes gave them a good view of ominous developments. Gradually, as minutes and hours dragged by, it became obvious to planetbound observers that they were watching a truly serious space battle.

  Everyone seemed to be offering advice and encouragement. Almost everyone. From the Joint Chiefs, in conference on Prairie, came little but platitudes. There had been no further word from the president.

  Radigast made one more desperate attempt to contact his commander in chief, and then gave up, grumbling: “Not that the motherless fool would be able to do anything.”

  Gradually the watchers on the ground began to appreciate the magnitude of the disaster. Billions of Twin Worlds citizens on both planets had been kept more or less in touch with the horrors in the sky, but with every passing minute they were demanding more information. Those on relatively distant Timber were a little slower to get the news. It was taking just a little longer for the panic to spread there.

  Nothing that had happened so far was readily understandable to any citizen of the Twin Worlds. Millions on both worlds were trying to watch the battle in the night sky, and a few with telescopes were having some success. The close range view from Prairie was particularly spectacular.

  It seemed all too likely that the stranger was bent on directly attacking the system’s populated worlds. Gregor, indulging his propensity to want to see things for himself, had earlier inspected the deep and elaborate shelter complexes on both worlds, and he could offer Luon some reassurance in that regard.

  The news that their main fleet had been effectively destroyed was being kept from the majority of the public. But only the ground defenses remained to offer protection to the citizens of Prairie.

  “Well, they’re tough. They’re really tough.” Radigast had been on the verge of ordering another maximum effort. But as reports of damage and mechanical failure kept coming in from other ships, he had to put it off for technical reasons.

  Gregor could see him slump. “It would be a motherless joke anyway., I haven’t got much left to fight with. I don’t think we’re going into battle again, at least not for the next few hours.”

  Gregor, stunned and shaken on an admiral’s bridge, had lost track of time. He only knew that he felt utterly exhausted.

  Luon, sitting on the deck with her arms wrapped around her, was saying in a half-dead voice: “In school we saw a historical simulation once, that’s what they called it, it was originally meant as a blood show. A tethered bear, attacked by dogs. Except here the bear is winning, and it seems the dogs are all equipped with rubber teeth.”

  Gregor was reminded of a visit to Huvea, decades ago, when he had toured certain regions of that planet considered by outsiders to be some of the most socially backward in the Galaxy. Some of the people living there actually still pitted live animals against each other in bloody contests, fights to the death.

  That was part of a culture that still put a premium on fighting skills and courage, in human as well as beast.

  He sat shaking his head in disapproval. What kind of school would put on a show like that?

  “But you shouldn’t be watching such things,” he said. As soon as the words came out, he knew how supremely silly they must sound.

  Not all the danger to the ship was distantly outside the hull. Something like hysteria was spreading up and down the chain of command in waves. It would seem for a time that they had it conquered, but then it would burst forth again. Gregor could not comprehend the jargon, the actual bits of information being traded hack and forth, but he recognized the signs. Would it take control, or could it be suppressed?

  The best of the officers and crew were fighting to hold it back. Some ships had to withdraw from the fight, struggling to survive, all the energy they had left devoted to damage control.

  Somewhere in the background, alarms were still intermittently going off. Suits and helmets were required. Ship’s atmosphere had turned unreliable, and gravity stuttered from time to time.

  “Now what in all the hells?” said someone aboard the Morholt.

  People on the ground reported that the thing was beginning to generate decoys, in the form of multiple images of itself. Most of these were not clearly visible from ships in space, but from the viewpoint of people and gunlaying systems on the ground the phony images seemed almost to fill the planet’s sky. At once the Morholt’s remaining gunlaying computer began to try to filter the deception out; presumably the big optelectronic brains on the ground would be doing the same thing.

  Then the attacker closed on the planet again, proceeding steadily, inexorably. This shift was conducted more slowly, giving an impression of residual caution, as if it suspected heavier, short-range weapons might be held in reserve, waiting to strike when it had been lured in closer to the planet.

  Again the beams from the ground reached out, probing, stabbing among the many images. No sooner did they seem to find their proper target than some new deception by the enemy threw them off their aim again.

  Aboard the flagship, a shaken admiral was telling his associates: “Unfortunately, citizens, it is not the case that we have any weapons in reserve.”

  And in a part of Gregor’s mind the old man noted numbly, uselessly, that again Radigast had forgotten to adorn his speech with a single obscenity.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The metal frame of the small space-going launch shrieked like a living thing under intolerable stress. A moment ago, some incomprehensible thing, completely undetected as it came darting out of the distance into nearby space, had clamped down on the outside of the hull with crushing force. Metal screamed and crumpled.

  Just like his eleven fellow passengers, Xenophanes Lee was taken utterly by surprise. They were being attacked but no one had ever taught them to expect an attack like this.

  With the sound of the tortured hull still screaming in his ears, Lee twisted his lithe young body sideways, trying to get a look out through one of the cleared ports on the long wall of the small passenger cabin. The globe of Prairie was conspicuous out there, right next door by spacefaring standards, only a few tens of thousands of kilometers away, the size of a large fist held at arm’s length. The planet was half in sunshine, half in shade, its color distorted, normal bright blue turned sickly gray, a result of the recent full mobilization of defensive fields.

  But Lee had no interest in gazing at the world he had just left. Scrambling with all the energy of his eighteen years, he managed to catch a glimpse of the incredible thing that loomed immediately outside. Some kind of odd shaped ship, about the same size as the little ship in which he rode. The Huveans were attacking, but in a mode like nothing Lee had ever seen or heard or even dreamed about. None of his instructors at the academy, despite their seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the enemy’s hardware and probable tactics, had ever warned their students of anything like this. Now the frightening, bewildering thing that had attacked them, having established its overpowering grip, was holding itself and the small launch co
mparatively motionless. At the academy they had sometimes joked about the possibility of Huvean secret weapons. Here was the thing in reality. What else could it be?

  Lee discovered that if he put his right cheek flat against the port, he could see a little more of his enemy’s surface, glowing in bright sunlight. The statglass surface, allowing no heat transfer, felt as if it were at comfortable body temperature. A pair of what appeared to be great grapples of force-permeated metal had already closed on the forward portion of the launch’s hull, and another pair were closing on the small ship aft. And presently there came new sounds, a rending and crunching transmitted through the hull, suggesting that some kind of extreme violence was being practiced on the airlock’s outer hatch.

  Around Lee, about half of his classmates were out of their seats, with the remainder trying to remain calm. All of them were wearing spacesuits, and most were struggling instinctively to reach their detachable helmets, dig out weapons, or just trying to find out what was going on. Lee’s own trained response had already resulted in his getting his helmet on, and the others were all in various stages of the same process.

  Some of the twelve managed to get their heads and lungs protected only just in time. Hatches and hull were yielding, and explosive decompression filled the cabin momentarily with fog, an obscuration that was gone again in the next moment, along with the remnants of the atmosphere.

  At the moment, incoherent protests, cries of rage and fear, were jamming up the intercom. The pilot of the small ship, who a few moments ago had been transmitting calm words from his private compartment in a veteran voice, trying to be reassuring and prevent panic in the face of an overwhelming attack, had gone suddenly silent.

  Inside the compact passenger cabin, filled to normal capacity, the last holdouts were giving up on remaining calm. Twelve active, spacesuited bodies, trained for emergencies but not for this one, struggled with their gear. All were military volunteers, within a standard year of Lee’s age, and all had just completed a year of schooling in the theory of space combat. At the moment, to the best of Lee’s recollection, their total available weaponry consisted of two small handguns. The pair of cadets who had chosen to pack firearms in their baggage were having some trouble digging them out.

  Kang Shin, Lee’s closest neighbor on his right-hand side, had his helmet’s faceplate glued to a cleared port, trying to see outside. Meanwhile De Carlo, on Lee’s left, was one of those still digging in a duffel bag for one of the small guns.

  For this mission, twelve students had been picked from the class for their proficiency in certain technical skills. They had been on their way to take up their posts in what was expected to be a relatively safe, home guard position, taking over the operation of one of a ring of defensive space stations at a moderate distance from the sun.

  It would then be possible to move the more experienced troops thus relieved from duty, experienced only in military practice, not in war, to a station, farther anti-sunward in the elaborate structure of system defense, and closer to where the real action was expected to take place, in the event of a Huvean attack.

  Without warning the launch’s main electrical power failed, and the cabin lights went dead. No real darkness followed; the Twin Worlds’ sun was too close to permit that. It sent beams of steady brightness probing into the cabin through the cleared ports, sweeping the enclosed space like searchlights with the slow spin of the launch and the mysterious, unimaginable thing that held it captive. Wrenching and banging noises indicated that someone or something, having breached the inner door of the main airlock, was tearing away the pieces.

  Random, the anthropomorphic robot they were bringing as part of a testing program at the station, started to get up out of its seat in the far rear, and then sank back. Its built-in look of alert optimism was of course unaltered. If humans did not know what to do, it would be too much to expect of a machine.

  One after another, the passengers were switching on their helmet lamps. Lee joined them, though he could see no good reason for it. Whatever darkness managed to escape the searching sunbeams would have no corner left in which to hide.

  The very first shock of surprise was over. The babble of voices on helmet intercom was beginning to take the form of coherent words and sentences:

  No Huvean ship or war machine of any kind ought to be able to do anything like…

  The cadet leader, Dirigo, was trying somehow to take charge, stuttering uncertain words on helmet intercom. No one seemed to take any notice.

  Fortunately for the dozen passengers, every one of them had begun the flight wearing their issued spacesuits, wearing a suit was by far the easiest way of carrying it with you. Only Kardec and De Carlo were armed, having chosen to draw sidearms from supply before the group departed from their training base. Barring a boarding by some theoretical Huvean daredevils (a tactic considered by their academy instructors to be highly unlikely though not totally impossible), it was hard to foresee any need for small arms on the space station where they were being sent to form the crew.

  But there was no doubt that something highly unlikely had just happened.

  “The Huveans!” One voice, too changed and shrill for Lee to identify it, came over the wireless communication system that tied them all together through their helmets.

  A mutter of other voices was coming from up in the forward seats. There were Zochler, who always talked a lot, and Du Prel, nervously fingering the rim of his artificial eye. In the compartment’s center section rode Lee, Hemphill, Kardec, Kang Shin, and Ting Wu. In the rear, De Carlo, Dirigo the cadet leader, Feretti, along with the two women in the group, Cusanus and Sunbula. Several people back there were cursing their scheduled enemies, blaming them for this disaster.

  Dirigo had been trying to reach the pilot on intercom, but had had no luck. Unable to talk to the launch’s sole human crew member, he was demanding of the group at large: “Did the pilot get any message off, before?”

  “I don’t know” That was Sunbula, her husky voice easily identifiable.

  The cadet on Lee’s right side, Kang Shin, was denouncing the instructors they had just left behind, for teaching them that grappling and boarding were considered a practical impossibility in space combat. How could the Huveans have been so far ahead of us in everything?

  Two or three other voices, anonymous with strain, argued this proposition tersely and pointlessly back and forth.

  Another rose up, crude and loud: “One thing we can be sure of, this ain’t no motherless practice drill”

  The atmosphere that could have conducted sound was gone, but the sound of rending metal had still reached the cabin, and their ears, through the ship’s structure, in contact with their suits. Now (hat sound abruptly ceased. What next?

  For a long moment there was something close to silence.

  Lee was thinking to himself that any enemy who had taken the trouble to capture a ship instead of simply destroying it could be expected to come aboard his prize. In another moment, he and his classmates were going to lay eyes on the first armed Huvean that any of them had ever…

  But the world was turning into a stranger place than he had ever imagined. Because the first armed boarder that entered through the burst hatchway was not a Huvean at all. Neither was the second, or the third. They could not be, because Huveans after all were human, whereas the shape that had just forced its way in through the ragged opening seemed no more than a crude sketch of humanity, a rough approximation of that familiar form.

  Four limbs and a head, yes. But right there the similarity ended. Some of the bodily projections were too short, or long, or thick, or thin, adding up to an ugly combination of impossibilities.

  Lee’s eyes were riveted in helpless fascination on the first boarder, an individual undressed and apparently unarmed. The sexless metal body advanced through vacuum with an alacrity suggesting utter confidence, though it wore no spacesuit and no helmet. In fact it was wearing nothing at all, and the grippers in which the upper two limbs termi
nated were empty of any tools or weapons.

  Immediately after it, half a dozen similar machines, shapes differing in detail but none of them exactly human, came sliding in neatly, one at a time, through the narrow hatchway.

  Events swiftly departed from those of a practice drill and segued into nightmare.

  One of the boarders, gesturing with a metal arm, was shouting commands at the cadets, telling them they were prisoners. The raucous, half-human sounding speech was coming in on their helmet radios, to breach their intercom’s security should in itself have presented a difficult problem for any enemy. The transmission was smooth and quiet, though the words were not.

  De Carlo, standing toward the rear, had evidently found his pistol at last, for his gloved hand came up with the weapon in it, trying direct resistance to these boarders who brought no guns. But he never got off a shot. Moving faster than Lee’s eye could follow, the second thing to enter the cabin was at De Carlo’s side in only an eyeblink, one gripper fastened on a flange of his helmet, the other holding the wrist of his gun arm.

  What happened next was not quite too fast for Lee to see it clearly, but oh, he wished it had been. In the next instant, the cadet’s arm, suit sleeve and all, was torn from his body. In the instant after that, his helmet with his head still in it parted company from the remainder of him, in a great explosion of blood, sprays of red mist vanishing quickly in newly airless space. Random, the service robot in the cabin’s rear, was out of his seat and lunging forward, only to be caught and held in metal limbs that looked ten times as strong as his.

  Kardec, also toward the rear of the cabin, was perhaps a little faster than De Carlo had been, or the invader that went for him a little more lethargic. He fired one shot, the force-packet glancing from an armored shoulder to puncture the launch’s inner hull. Before he could squeeze off another, the grippers had him. Several voices screamed in Lee’s helmet, as body parts and blood went flying. The lightweight fabric of the suits seemed to offer no resistance to the terrible metal hands.