Berserker Prime

by Fred Saberhagen

  “You must arm yourself.” The door of a small cabinet in the wall popped open in front of Huang Gun; inside the cabinet he saw a pistol.

  The master’s voice went on. “I have no more mobile machines available with which to defend myself, or you. You must not die until the essential task has been accomplished.”

  “I understand.” He took the weapon from the cabinet and weighed it in his hand.

  The tools that Hemphill and his companions had taken from the maintenance robot were not designed for breaking through walls, but they were good enough to get the job done. In a few minutes the humans had penetrated into Huang Gun’s former cell, discovering it empty. The outline of another door, closed and sealed, showed in one of the inner walls.

  It seemed natural for Hemphill to have assumed command, to go on giving orders. “Before we do anything else, we’ve got to deal with our power problem. The reserve in all our suits is dangerously low.”

  Training had taught them one way to deal with this difficulty. The solution was for one person to share almost all the remaining power in his suit with others, furnishing each with enough to allow several additional hours of moderate activity.

  Hemphill was beginning to say something about drawing lots, when Dirigo immediately interrupted. In a voice that had somehow acquired authority, he repeated his earlier offer informing his classmates that he had been a total failure as leader, from the time the trouble started until now. but now he was going to make up for it.

  When someone began a protest, Dirigo squelched it. “I haven’t pulled rank since the trouble started, like a lot of things I haven’t done. But now I’m giving the rest of you an order: Step up here one at a time, charge up your suits from mine, and move out!”

  “What about you?” Lee demanded.

  Dirigo was shaking his head inside his helmet. “I’ll search these rooms, examine whatever equipment I can find, looking for a source of power. If I find anything I’ll let you know at once. If you haven’t gone too far, you can come back and recharge. Or, I’ll charge my suit to overload capacity and come out to join you.”

  The others were looking at Hemphill. He thought a bit, then nodded. “Agreed. The rest of you, let’s move.” He pointed at one of the side walls. “We’ll try breaking through here first. I think the outer surface of this grand hotel lies in this direction.”

  “What about the robot?” Lee wanted to know.

  “Random comes with us. We’re going to need all the help that we can get. If you need him desperately, Dirigo, call and we’ll send him back.”

  After a round of quick handshakes, Dirigo, with some half-formed idea of bringing himself good luck, included Random in the series, the volunteer went through another door, beginning his lonely local exploration.

  As soon as Hemphill and his crew succeeded in making a hole in the wall at his chosen spot, explosive decompression filled the chamber with temporary fog and Lee, who had happened to be nearest the opening, was slammed into it, stuck in it, by the pressure of escaping air.

  Quickly the others chopped and drilled, creating another hole nearby. When the available air was allowed to flow, it exhausted itself very quickly, and Lee could move.

  On the other side of the wall, beyond the sheltered territory they had once shared with the unknown spy, the artificial gravity cut off. Darkness and vacuum and vertigo closed in. For most of the cadets, the change was almost comforting, bringing back an environment they had grown accustomed to in training exercises. So far, everyone was coping with it well.

  The bright red spark of warning on Dirigo’s virtual gauge, displayed inside his helmet, assured him that he had only a few minutes’ breathing time remaining. His life, and very possibly the lives of his comrades, depended on what he could discover in that interval.

  He was bold in his investigations, using up his last morsels of stored power, cutting through more doors, trying to find another wall thin and weak enough to penetrate with a couple of simple tools that the others had left him.

  He had been engaged in this operation for less than a quarter of an hour when he was surprised to find a door that opened for him at the first touch, did someone, or something, want him to come this way?

  Moving through the door, which closed itself behind him, Dirigo found himself standing in the last place he would ever have expected to discover aboard this combination of automated, crew-less super-battleship and prison. He had found a theater, a neatly designed and well-furnished little auditorium, airless according to his suit gauge, but with the gravity still turned on at something very close to standard level. There was no doubt this chamber had been meant for use in comfort by breathing beings.

  Not for ED humans, no. None of the hundred or so seats, arrayed in neat rows half surrounding a broad, dark dais, were of quite the right shape to accommodate the sons and daughters of Earth in any comfort.

  Even as he looked around, Dirigo was getting on the intercom, transmitting a terse report of what he had discovered. As he talked, he moved around the theater, continuing to look for something, anything, that might offer some kind of usable source of power. As soon as he started to step up on the broad platform, something somewhere behind the scenes turned on, perhaps triggered by his presence.

  Quickly he moved back several steps from the holostage, which had suddenly become a virtual window into a vaster hall. Ranks of beings filled the background there, and one person stood forward at the image of a lectern. He, or she, was tall, slender, and fine-boned, the most obvious deviation from ED shape being the single eye that stretched across the speaker’s face, its bright bulging pupil sliding back and forth like mercury balanced on a knife blade.

  Dirigo in alarm started to say something, then fell silent, abruptly convinced that he was watching a recording. The figure at the lectern opened its mouth, amid loose folds of saffron skin, and waved its arms. Whether it was clothed or not was hard to tell.

  In the airless room, he could not hear the speaker’s voice, but the vigor of speech and gestures indicated a bold oration. She, or he, was displaying charts now, three-dimensional arrays of stars and planets that appeared near him as he spoke, and at which the speaker gestured violently.

  Meanwhile, Hemphill and the others, half drifting and half climbing through narrow spaces amid a jumble of strange objects, were trying to work their way toward the surface of the vast machine. Recalling the path they had followed on coming aboard, they knew that their dungeon had to be reasonably close to the monster’s outer hull. But that exit had been solidly closed, and none of the tools in their captured kit were of any use in trying to force it open.

  Hemphill had sent Random scouting ahead, the robot using its built-in light, allowing the humans to conserve the power in their suits as much as possible.

  When the strange message from Dirigo came in, telling them he had found a theater, it seemed to Hemphill that the man was almost certainly delirious from anoxia, and even if a real theater existed, that in itself offered no salvation. To turn back with the whole party would be a horrible mistake.

  On the other hand, Dirigo might be on the verge of making some additional discovery that would change the entire situation.

  The robot was useful to Hemphill’s party, but he thought it was not essential. After a quick conference with his companions, he sent Random back to Dirigo, with orders to help him in any way it could.

  Finally, repeated all-out attacks from the Huvean fleet, joined by the remnant of Twin Worlds ships, had left the berserker seriously damaged.

  “God, we really hit it that time!” A scream of joy. “We really hit it!” The gunnery people were firing the Morholt’s last heavy weapon. Other members of the crew were bellowing in hoarse triumph. But the celebration was slightly premature.

  The enemy was still hitting back.

  It was hard to aim the Mukunda’s sole remaining beam projector, with the drive shuddering and the stabilizers knocked out, but the remaining people and machines of gunnery were giving i
t the best they had.

  The battle had swayed to and fro, across substantial intervals of interplanetary space. The great destructor had for some time now been passing in a screaming curve, at thousands of kilometers per second, closer to Prairie, the planet it had already sterilized, than to Timber, the one where it had dropped its landers, and where the process of stamping out life had scarcely got underway as yet. But there was no doubt that the goal of its latest maneuver was to arrive at Timber at high velocity, meeting the advancing planet head on.

  Lee and his companions in one place, and the single badlife and goodlife, each in another, felt a faint vibration, some new impact.

  Ella Berlu and her crew were discussing scoutship tactics. So far they had not been caught up in the real fighting, but soon they would be heading into it.

  Who had first come up with the idea, or issued the order, was uncertain, one of those facts lost in the fog of battle. But a number of scoutships had already tried ramming the great beast, the idea was to set the autopilot, and get the crew off in a lifeboat before impact, but none had been able to get within a hundred kilometers without being vaporized. And most of the lifeboats had been toasted too.

  Radigast’s flagship wasn’t going to attempt any ramming, not as long as there was anything else that he could do with it. Besides, it could hardly move.

  The unplanned lull in the fighting dragged on. Minutes stretched out into hours, with the opposing forces drifting apart, humans and machine alike marshaling all their energies just to stay alive.

  Everyone on the bridge of the Mukunda, including the first spacer, had been hurt, wounded in some way.

  But Homasubi was not totally disabled, and like his Twin Worlds counterpart he refused to leave his battle station. “Remind me, there is something I wish to say to Admiral Radigast, when next we have the opportunity….”

  The two flagships of the united force were now very close to each other. After issuing what he considered the necessary commands, for another attack to finish the enemy off, the first spacer offered his counterpart something very close to an apology.

  Before he had finished, the admiral was shaking his head.

  “No need for that, First Spacer. You have been, sir, a very model of bloody courtesy all along. And by the way, let me congratulate you on your tactics. You’ve got more fleet left than I did, after it hit me for the first time.”

  “It is I who should congratulate you, Admiral Radigast, for having weakened it sufficiently to permit us to gain a small measure of success. Also, my personal congratulations on your having survived two rounds of combat with, a rather formidable antagonist.

  “I must admit that when I first arrived in this system, and began to believe that I had grasped the situation, my thoughts regarding you and your fleet were ungenerous, and, as I see now, completely mistaken. I felt a greater confidence than ever in Huvean superiority. I assure you solemnly, all traces of such disrespect have been purged from my heart and mind.”

  “That’s good. That’s good…” The admiral’s voice was growing faint. “what’s that motherless mother up to now?”

  Both sides were being granted a breather, by circumstances. For the moment, neither could find an effective way to do the other damage, and both had serious need of a respite.

  Meanwhile, the cloud of surviving scoutships was still thickening, as more and still more came trickling in from the farther reaches of the outer defense sphere. Whatever today’s final result might be, Twin Worlds humanity would not be utterly wiped out.

  Gradually, Lee and Hemphill and their determined classmates were somehow making headway, getting farther and farther from the compartment where they had been confined. Lee was thinking that they must have come several kilometers by this time.

  But where they were going was somewhat more difficult to say.

  Their training exercises, on the techniques of searching an abandoned ship, had never lasted more than a standard hour.

  In contrast, this trek went on and on, people standing or drifting in a cramped alien space, surrounded by bulky objects of unknown purpose. This environment was totally unfriendly to any human presence, free-falling in an airless dark. The shapes of structure and machinery loomed around them, dim in the faint reflection of the robot’s distant lamp, and for the most part incomprehensible.

  Hemphill had announced his plan. They should move, or try to move, parallel to what seemed to be the inner surface of the outer hull. “If this thing is as big as it looked, we sure don’t want to go any deeper into it than we have to.”

  With great excitement, one of them at last halted in the slow scramble forward, and called out that a star was visible. After a moment, others were able to see it too.

  “How can you be sure?” There was only the tiny spark of steady light.

  More than one star had now appeared in Lee’s field of vision, a small cluster glimpsed through a distant opening with jagged sides. The escapees began to follow a faint beam of distant starlight. This served as their guide, kept them going in something like a straight line through their enemy’s mysterious metal guts. Those pinpoint images looked blessedly steady, and reassuringly free of any doppler-shifting, either red or blue. A different look would have meant that their captor had accelerated strongly when its prisoners were still AG-protected, and they might already be lost, vanished from the ken of searchers, at some heartbreaking distance from home.

  Suddenly Dirigo’s voice was coming in again on the intercom. The earlier message had been something of a shock, but not to compare with this one: “Hemphill? Lee, do you guys read me? I’ve found the spy who looks through little holes. He’s got one of our suits, and he must be on our intercom.”

  That was all. People took turns trying to reply, but nothing more was heard from Dirigo.

  In another minute one of the party was asking, in a voice that hoped the answer would be now, whether they should all turn back to try to help out their abandoned comrade.

  Lee was trying to imagine the effort it would take to turn your back on starlight, and descend into hell, but he wasn’t being asked to make that choice.

  Hemphill was shaking his head. “I still say he may be delirious. If he strikes it lucky in the next few minutes, managed to tap into some power, or some air, he may pull through. If he doesn’t, well, whatever or whoever he’s found won’t matter much. He’ll be dead before any of us can get back to him.”

  After a moment Hemphill added: “I’ve already sent the robot back, and there are six lives here, only one back there. Besides…”

  He let his words trail off. There was no need to spell it out: If the six of them were to spend their remaining suit power going back down into hell, they would never have enough left to once more regain the surface.

  Some of the berserker’s damaged defensive fields were displaying ripples, columns of brightness like marching searchlight beams

  In the latest round of fighting, the Twin Worlds remnant had missed the worst of it, being simply unable to get into the action in time. Still, they had been hit again, and about all that was now left of the Twin Worlds fleet were a few hulks, still drifting, still managing to keep the surviving members of their crews alive for the time being.

  “The enemy’s weapons are better than anything we have. But still we have enough to get the job done, using up our fleet in the process.”

  The Huvean fleet had taken a terrific pounding too, just as the Twin Worlds’ forces had, but some Huvean vessels, including the first spacer’s flagship, were still at least partially functioning when the shooting stopped.

  The human pilots of some small ships, both Twin Worlds and Huvean, did their best to carry out deliberate ramming attacks, with at least marginal success.

  The flare of battle was showing over the murky horizon, like distant lightning. The great berserker had been fought almost to a standstill, weakened, prevented from any further exercise of its weapons of mass extermination.

  The battle fleets of two Earth
-descended nations had been used up in the process, along with the ground defenses of two planets. Humanity had suffered billions of dead and wounded, and more than half of the Twin Worlds civilization, once so proud of its advanced development, lay in ruins.

  The flagship of Admiral Radigast was out of missiles and almost out of hope. But still, against all odds, sheltering some live crew, and one heavy beam projector. The Morholt had to be pushed by the Mukunda, into a position where it could serve as a gun platform in the last duel with this berserker.

  With its drive units all but completely dead, it could do little more than drift.

  Both fleet commanders were trying to get the remnants of their forces between the enemy and Timber.

  Just when it seemed it might be able to last a little while longer, Radigast’s dreadnought finally vanished in a last explosion.

  Some of the crew were got off at the last minute, and were carried to relative safety aboard a Huvean vessel not in much better shape, but many others, including the admiral, perished with their ship.

  And now the first spacer was putting himself and his fleet between the berserker and the remaining homeland of the people who had so recently been his bitter enemies.

  Zarnesti, the PO, took this as a crowning blow to the honor of his people and his government, and found it necessary to commit suicide in an attempt at expiation. Zarnesti had taken a robot and a pistol to his cabin with him, the robot to perform the cleanup that would probably be necessary. Huvean robots were generally instructed not to interfere in such cases.

  Zarnesti’s civilian superior, abandoning any pretense of working in the sick bay, had withdrawn to her assigned small cabin. Homasubi let her go, for now, he was content that she and her junior colleague should both be out of his way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  During the assault on Prairie, the nuclear explosion of a heavy warhead against the berserker’s hull, at a site already somewhat weakened by ancient damage, had torn a gap in forcefield protection and solid metal too. Other badlife weapons, including a mobile, computer-guided, atomic pile, programmed to trace escaping gas, to probe for weakness, had found the spot.