Berserker Fury

by Fred Saberhagen

  NINETEEN

  Admiral Naguance, his helmet off at the moment but carefully "within reach, put down his morning cup of coffee on the arm of his combat chair. He was something of a connoisseur, and usually insisted on grinding his own coffee beans.

  He was enjoying his morning brew on the bridge in the presence of several members of his staff, with an elaborate holographic display scrolling out before the group.

  When he had everyone's attention, Naguance announced that he was now going to open the orders that had been handed him by Yamanim before the Venture had lifted off from Uhao. Breaking open the thick paper envelope, closed with a heavy official seal, the admiral extracted a single sheet of paper, and gave it a mere glance: He had already been told by the field marshal, word for word, what the message was going to be.

  He now recited it, aloud, to his listening staff of officers, and called for comments.

  For several minutes Naguance discussed his orders, and the plan he and Admiral Bowman had agreed on for implementing them, with his assembled staff. Naguance had made sure all these people—making a point of including the majority of his staff who didn't know him very well as yet—knew he wanted them present for this discussion.

  "How widely do you plan to separate our two carriers, Admiral?"

  Hearing the numbers, when the admiral gave them precisely, the questioner looked doubtful. "Sir, is there a possibility of communication problems, if we're that far apart?"

  "In battle there is a virtual certainty of communication problems, even if you're within shouting distance. But if we stay close together, in effect we give the enemy one big target."

  Another of his aides spoke up, when asked for comments. "Sir, I must protest against the tactic of dividing our fleet."

  Naguance took the criticism in stride. "I've been thinking about this. For an outnumbered force to divide, in the face of the enemy, certainly flies in the face of all classical military doctrine. But in this battle we are not using battleships. Our striking power, you see, lies not in our large ships directly, but in the squadrons of small ships they can launch. And those squadrons can be concentrated even though their bases are separated."

  Many people had been surprised when Yamanim chose Naguance to take over for Admiral Yeslah, who had been knocked out of action by a mysterious skin disease. "Not that he isn't competent. But…"

  The two men were opposites in many ways. Still, Naguance had been chosen by Yamanim, at the hearty recommendation of Yeslah himself.

  Early in the game Bowman had realized that his only logical course, given the shaky state of communication between his flagship and Naguance's, was to relinquish effective command of the operation to the junior admiral, who was closer to the enemy, and had two effective carriers under his direct control. Accordingly he had sent a courier to Naguance, authorizing him to take the lead.

  The orders Naguance had just opened were from Yamanim, and ran in accord with what was generally known as the Principle of Calculated Risk: "Which you shall interpret to mean avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, by such exposure, greater damage on the enemy."

  "That seems to mean we should try to punch them without getting punched in return. A nice plan, if we can bring it off. Well, after Port Diamond, we can't stand to take a great many more punches."

  Before being alerted that combat was imminent, the crew of the Venture, like those of the other ships in the task force, had been passing the time in various amusements, some gambling, some composing letters home that would, after the censor had seen them, be sent in microform when courier space happened to be available.

  Back on Fifty Fifty, Warrant Officer Tadao, the guide who'd given Jory Yokosuka her tour of the parked warships, was now busy getting ready to perform his primary job, that of communications gunner on an underslugger. He was aboard his spacecraft, running through his preflight checklist, making sure he had the equipment he would need, and in good working order. But in the back of Tadao's mind he kept remembering how eagerly the woman journalist had looked inside every type of small ship she could get near. How eager she'd been to get her hands in everything, even wanting to try a helmet on. Cute gal too, but tougher, more aggressive than he would like a woman to be if he was living with her. Take her as a crew member, though, if she had the training.

  To her, Tadao thought, he must have sounded like a real expert. But he felt like anything but an expert now. It now seemed to him that his brief training had been just sufficient to let him understand that he wasn't really ready for this. Nor were most of his shipmates, nor most of the people in his squadron, with a couple of exceptions among the leaders.

  Not that he would have voiced these complaints and objections to any correspondent, or any other civilian. That would have made him sound like he wanted out of this situation—and he didn't. His place was here, with his crew, all of them driving beside their comrades in the other ships. That was just the simple truth, and it had nothing to do with anyone trying to be heroic.

  The raw question still kept coming up in his mind, forcing itself to his attention: How in hell did people, mere human beings of flesh and blood like himself, think they'd ever be able to go into a fight, one on one, against machines, machines whose design and manufacture had been perfected over the centuries with only one relentless purpose in the computer minds of the greater machines that made them. And that purpose was to kill Solarians…

  One human advantage in fighting against machines, especially when groups of ships and machines are involved, is that members of a human team, whether in the same ship or not, tend to know, even with zero time allowed for overt communication, what other team members are going to do.

  He knew, intellectually, that it had been demonstrated over and over, that flesh and blood people could indeed hold their own in such a battle, hold their own and sometimes more than that. With the best machines humanity could devise to help them, they even had some theoretical advantage.

  With the best machines humanity could devise—yeah, that was the key. What was actually available to fight with was far from the best.

  Too many corners had been cut, in the name of economy. The belief had grown too strong that the homeworlds were simply unassailable. The hardware the human defenders would have to use today was a long way from the best.

  She'd been trying to learn what it was like when you strapped your armored body into that combat chair, and pulled the helmet on. And Tadao had tried, and then had given up, and told her that there was really no way to describe it.

  She'd asked him wistfully: "I wish I could go out on a patrol."

  "Sorry, no chance," he'd answered automatically.

  Certainly the world inside the stewpot was quite different from that perceived by the usual well-defined and separated senses operating in what the world had long considered a normal human skull. In the stewpot, sight and sound and even touch were blended and blurred. Some said the sensations were dreamlike, and others called them indescribable. A fairly large number of people were unable to endure the experience at all, and the dropout rate was high in the early stages of training.

  Virtually the same experiences were available to ground-bound civilians, in the form of games. Virtually: that was the key word. When you knew it was a game, the experience could never be anything like the same as when you knew that the integrity of your own skin depended on the outcome.

  Admiral Naguance remained determined to get in the first space-to-space blow against the enemy.

  He now found himself in absolute control of the fleet of Solarian ships that had been designated Task Force Sixteen. Nominally he remained under the orders of Admiral Bowman, but Bowman, whose flagship formed the heart of Seventeen, was a goodly distance away, and wisely refrained from trying to manage Sixteen's tactics from afar.

  Right now, Naguance's force was maneuvering in flight-space, more or less in formation, escort ships protectively surrounding Stinger and Venture
. His task force, poised to deliver a punch as soon as the target showed itself, was now out a day's travel or so from Fifty Fifty, the outpost he was trying to guard.

  Task Force Seventeen, built around the rebuilt carrier Lankvil, and under the direct command of Admiral Bowman, was maneuvering at a somewhat greater distance from the oncoming berserker carrier force. Lankvil was carrying one squadron of fighters, two of hardlaunchers, and one of under-sluggers, some seventy-five small warcraft in all.

  Admiral Bowman, in command of the whole operation, wanted to hold Lankvil's striking power in reserve—he had been stung before, during the Azlaroc battle, by committing all his forces and then finding his own force open to counterattack.

  Scout ships from both Solarian task forces were kept in space continually, working in calculated search patterns. The search went on around the clock, except when space "weather," in the form of nebular disturbances on a cosmic scale, made the odds prohibitive against success. The Gulf was known for its calm weather as a rule, but breathtaking storms of matter and energy were not unheard of.

  Even when conditions were at their best for search, the problem of finding even a large fleet of ships or machines, in the immensity of space, could easily be compared to that of locating the proverbial needle in the haystack.

  But the task was not completely hopeless. Superluminal travel left traces, in flightspace and above, as does any rapid passage through normal space. There were what some called shock waves, disturbances that sometimes propagated faster than the ship or machine that caused them, and traveled in advance of it.

  Space here in the Gulf was emptier than most of the volume of the Galaxy; but still this stretch of barrenness between Galactic arms contained enormous amounts of thin gas, along with occasional dust clouds, dark matter in its many forms. These intrusions offered concealment to moving machines, and at the same time tended to retain the trails left by the passage of ships or of machines.

  Word came in to Naguance and his staff that Lankvil, too far away for them to see her; was being hit with a savage attack.

  On the bridge of the flag carrier Venture, a dozen Solarian bodies, bulked up with armor, lay strapped into combat chairs with ligatures of polyphase matter.

  He was in occasional contact with Fifty Fifty by courier. But a courier needed several days to reach Port Diamond from here, and one coming in the other direction might well take twice as long, if it ever succeeded in finding the fleet at all. Messages of unusual importance were often sent redundantly.

  The individual units of Task Force Sixteen were, as on any long cruise, popping back into normal space from time to time to keep in touch with each other, and to make sure of their course, speed, and location.

  Naguance's intention, which he'd made plain enough to all hands once they were in space, was to try to strike from the flank at the advancing enemy carrier task force, as soon as he could determine the enemy's exact location. As far as Naguance knew, he might be facing as many as six carriers. But the numbers arrayed against him made no essential difference; he was going to have to hit them anyway.

  And then the word that Task Force Sixteen had been waiting for arrived, in the form of a courier from another scout ship.

  Deciding what was an acceptable degree of accuracy in scouting reports was simply a judgement call. Of course the target of both task forces was generally the same; but it was hard to be certain, in the heat of battle, just how many enemy fleets there were.

  Naguance, given a free hand, decided to believe the reports before him, and to strike with everything he could get off his decks.

  Naguance launched his first attack, led by a squadron of undersluggers from Stinger, as soon as he felt confident that his scouts had in fact located the berserker carriers. This happened before the berserkers attacking Fifty Fifty had had time to get back to their motherships.

  Meanwhile, the berserker leadership had so far observed nothing to make it doubt the accuracy of its earlier strategic computations. It had no reason to expect that a well-organized Solarian force would be waiting to ambush the machine fleet on its way to seize Fifty Fifty. Certainly the berserker computers did not even suspect that their enemy knew when they intended to arrive, and in what strength. Their calculations still called for them to take the Solarians in general, and those on Fifty Fifty in particular, by surprise.

  As usual, when two or more squadrons were to be launched in one attack, an attempt was made to achieve coordination.

  Undersluggers, the slowest of the three types of attacking spacecraft, lifted off first, expecting to be overtaken en route by friendly hardlaunchers and fighters.

  The hardlaunchers were second into space, followed by the fighters that were supposed to protect them as well as the undersluggers on their way to the target and back again. If fighters found no enemy fighters to engage, they could go in and strafe the target with their comparatively light weapons, and draw defensive fire away from the bombers with their deadly important loads.

  But circumstances simply delayed some of the fighting spacecraft, and prevented others from finding the enemy at all. Whole squadrons, with surprising frequency, failed to locate the targets they were seeking. Coordination remained a mere ideal, impossible of attainment. Searching for a moving target multiplied a ship's chances of getting entirely lost.

  Venture began by launching two squadrons of hard-launchers and one of undersluggers. These were followed quickly by ten units of Fighter Squadron Six, meant to serve as escorts to keep berserker interceptors away from the hard-launchers and undersluggers. But the fighters lost contact with the small craft they were supposed to be protecting, cruised in sight of the enemy carriers without seeing a single enemy fighter in space, and then, with combat assets dwindling rapidly, had to come home and repower. A small ship could cruise only a few hours in combat mode, with shields and fields deployed. It would be suicidal to risk encountering the enemy in any other mode.

  First to liftoff from Stinger was Underslugger Squadron Eight, whose obsolete spacecraft were all demolished by enemy fighters and defensive fire. Only a couple of them even succeeded in getting close enough to a berserker carrier to make a serious attack.

  Stinger like its sister carrier launched ten fighters as escorts—but these fared even worse than their unhappy colleagues from Venture. Stinger's ten fighters failed to close with the enemy at all, stretched the limit of their combat range, ran out of power completely when their reserves were drained by a dangerous wrinkle in flightspace, and were left drifting helplessly. At least they had regained normal space, and most of the pilots survived until picked up by friendly craft.

  Stinger also launched two squadrons of hardlaunchers— and these looked for the enemy in vain. Many landed on Fifty Fifty to repower and then returned to their carrier.

  This was the first real experience of combat for the vast majority of the men and women making up these crews.

  Underslugger Eight, from the carrier Stinger, had no trouble at all in finding the enemy. The squadron commander was named Nordlaw, and his small ship was among the first Solarian craft to disintegrate under fire from a berserker Void. Nordlaw and his two livecrew mates were among the first to die.

  Ensign Bright was flying the rearmost ship in the same squadron's formation, an underslugger coming in on the port side of a huge berserker carrier. To launch his missile Bright had to use the manual release, the electrical connections having been shot away.

  For one fleeting moment Bright contemplated driving his ship on a suicide crash into the enemy. But some interior voice vetoed that move, and in another instant he was working as hard as ever to stay alive.

  Bright launched his torpedo, then drove his small craft skimming breathtakingly close to the black-hulled leviathan at which he'd aimed his missile. He could feel his small ship shudder as the defensive fields of the enemy tried and were just too slow to focus on and crush the speeding intruder.

  And then the huge berserker was behind him, and he had done his d
uty for humanity, and now he could focus on trying to keep himself alive, for his wife and child back on Uhao.

  He thought that his heavy missile had found a way through the enemy defense and struck its target, but it was impossible to be sure.

  And then the world exploded around him.

  When his craft was hit for the last time, Bright suffered a sharp impact and fiery pain, just above his left elbow. For a moment he thought his chances of survival had fallen to nothing at all. But grimly he kept fighting for his life, doing the things that his survival training had impressed upon him must be done in this situation.

  He looked at his arm. Beyond the basic shock and pain he felt an eerie series of burning touches; in a moment Bright realized that he was feeling the loose fragment of enemy ordnance that had hurt him, as it rattled around inside his armor. The piece was still hot enough to inflict superficial burns.

  Bright had no choice but to take his helmet off, to learn his own physical situation. If cabin integrity still held, he could still breathe. He was going to have to fly his spacecraft and deal with his immediate environment at the same time. Putting the ship on autopilot gave him a few moments in which he might be able to turn his attention elsewhere without disaster.

  Looking around inside the tiny cabin, his own two human eyes now blinking in the dim reddish emergency lights, he saw at once that his two shipmate gunners had been killed. A large globule of blood came drifting toward him in midair, in the near absence of gravity.

  He realized that he was bleeding inside his armor, and whatever little medtech devices were still functioning as components of his suit were getting busy. There was nothing else he could do now for his wound. At least the piece of shrapnel had cooled to a bearable temperature.

  The helmet had to go on his head again. He dared not leave the situation to the autopilot a moment longer.