Berserker Fury

by Fred Saberhagen

  Bright's wounded left arm was not totally disabled. And the crablike little medirobot inside his suit was giving him something that hopefully might control the pain, while letting him retain function. And now he was going to have to abandon his spacecraft, before the old ship blew up.

  Bright hitched himself around in his combat chair and made sure, before making his own escape from his ruined ship, that both of his gunners were quite dead.

  No doubt about it. Bright could see how the personal armor of both had been punctured in several places, the incredibly tough metal bent in like so much skin. One gunner's helmet was turned toward him, and the dead face inside the statglass plate, now that he had a good look at it, was the greatest shock of all. Bright had never seen human death before— as a reservist recently called up, today was his first experience of combat—but the sight was unmistakable.

  His mind half-numbed with shock, an arm going numb with his suit's automatic first aid, he got out of his chair, his body unthinkingly running through drilled-in emergency procedures. A moment later he was out of the wreck. Searching the sky around him, orienting himself with some difficulty, he soon realized that he must be drifting somewhere near the middle of the scattered berserker fleet.

  The faceplate of his armor could be adjusted to provide mild magnification, and he tried that. With all the pyrotechnics nearby, the residue of violence only slowly fading, he needed a full minute before he believed he had himself oriented.

  He was still alive, but far from safe. The trouble was that there were berserker machines in every direction, none of them, thank God, very close. Over there was the direction his squadron had come from. Fifteen undersluggers, simply boring in, because their human pilots had mastered no better tactics. Coming straight on, until…

  Nowhere in all the sky could Bright discover any evidence that anyone else in his squadron had survived. There were the puffy, glowing gas clouds that surely marked the end of several. But it was equally certain, his determination and his hopes assured him, that at least a small handful of them must have come through alive—after doing serious damage to the enemy. They'd be heading back to the Stinger now, with a victory to report.

  But nothing that Bright could see suggested that the battle was over—or even that any of the enemy carriers had been seriously hit. What a seat he was going to have for the rest of the show!

  Staring in the direction in which, if his attempt at orientation was not hopelessly wrong, he thought the biggest berserker machines were cruising, Bright could make out movement, could pick out an individual machine or two in every direction where the background was bright enough to show up a dark machine by contrast.

  Gradually, he realized that the scenery, in almost every direction, was spectacular indeed. Faint glowing swirls, and here and there the pitiless black background showing through.

  And there was something moving. He recognized a berserker, much smaller than a carrier, probably a scout of some kind. And it was coming in his general direction.

  A drifting space suit presented an immediately recognizable shape. The enemy would be sure to spot him, sooner or later.

  Fortunately, there was something he could do to change the odds. Bright caught sight of a chunk of wreckage the size of a garage door. The general look of the thing identified it as Solarian hardware. Once it had been part of some hapless ship—very likely his own, though in current circumstances he was unable to recognize it. For a minute or two he maneuvered awkwardly, prodigally spending the energy of his suit's tiny thrusters, to get the object between his suited body and the prowling berserker. The jagged slab of wreckage was full of holes and provided only a partial screen—he could only hope that the enemy's attention would be concentrated on matters it considered far more important than the occasional badlife survivor.

  Gradually, as he clung to the metal fragment, his attention became focused on the twisted fragment, which included one side of the pilot's cockpit. Instruments, mostly broken, studded the outer surface. Among the projections Bright recognized the business end of a small optical telescope, meant to bring amplified images into the pilot's helmet.

  Bright moved to examine the telescope and discovered that it was still functioning. If he could no longer do anything to affect the outcome of the battle, at least he might be able to see what was going on.

  In progress at the moment was yet another farlauncher attack. The heavy spacecraft had to be land-based, and therefore must have come out from Fifty Fifty. After a preamble of maneuvers, which at Blight's distance from the action seemed to be carried out in slow motion, the attack itself was over in a few seconds. Bright clearly saw explosions bracket two berserker carriers. He thought that a third giant machine, barely visible in the background, was getting the same treatment, but it was too far away to be sure.

  After the farlaunchers had disappeared again into flight-space, he could discern no evidence of damage to the enemy.

  At least, he thought, the Strongholds, unlike Bright's own squadron and some others, seemed to have been able to withdraw without suffering many casualties themselves.

  Ensign Bright was willing to bet that not a single Solarian crew had failed to do their best to press an attack home, once they had got within range of the enemy.

  But not a single crew had succeeded.

  A scout ship that had succeeded, at great peril, in driving in a circle entirely around the enemy fleet, now sent word to Admiral Naguance that the berserker carrier force was strengthened by the presence of one battleship.

  Naguance received the message coolly; he didn't really think that one battleship more or less was going to make much difference, the way this battle was developing. A quick study of recon recordings identified this machine as the one which had been assigned by Solarians the code word Hate.

  The Solarian admiral and his staff, in hasty conference, pretty much decided to ignore the hate if possible, planning no attacks on that machine unless and until it gave some indication of getting them within range of its devastating weapons, including some C-plus cannon.

  If that ever happened, they would be forced to concentrate on it in self-defense.

  "Meanwhile, we are going to keep after those carriers. As soon as our hardlaunchers and undersluggers get back, we'll get them ready to lift off again."

  Each operator of an inflight control system adopted some system, that he or she personally found effective, of assigning image symbols to various objects. The first class of objects to be represented in an operator's system were those comprising his or her own hardware. Then other parts of the ship, and fellow crew members, all of which were less intimately connected to the operator. The subjective universe inside the helmet took on different characteristics for each human who entered it. Your ship itself, your weapons waiting to be taken up and used. Some operators liked to use images of their own two hands, moving faster than human flesh and bone could ever move, grabbing up different objects and smiting or parrying with them.

  Moving out further and further from psychological center, one next had to consider the way in which the world of Galactic and Universal distance, one might call it the neutral world, surrounding the ship, was to be presented inside one's helmet. Next choice was of the method of displaying other ships, carrying other crews into the fight beside your own. At best you could perceive the individual images or allied ships quite clearly when you focused on them. Of course in the blur of combat, the fog of war, when space and time themselves were torn and stretched, first the fine details and then everything tended to be lost. More than one small ship and berserkermachine had been blasted entirely out of the universe in which it had been built.

  Every human crew member saw, heard, and reacted in a slightly different way to the information pouring through helmet and organic senses to the brain. Some individual differences made the operator more effective, and were encouraged. But the many subjective universes all had many elements in common, mostly those that were generated by machines. And another way
of perceiving the enemy, when the far-ranging optelectronic senses of your ship teased out a distant presence and then locked on. Many humans chose to tag berserkers with vivid skull, or skull and crossbone, images. One legendary operator had grafted onto the enemy a graphic of the face of a hated superior officer. The stunt had provoked a burst of official condemnation and new regulations.

  There was the final preflight checklist to go through, human voices talking back and forth, and the ship's voice prompting, requiring some answers, and answering other questions in turn. Some quality in the optelectronic voice, a kind of metallic twang, rendered it astringently clear, and at the same time unmistakably distinguishable from any of the humans.

  Then came the time of greatest tension, waiting for the order to lift off. Commanders at every level agonized over timing at every stage of a mission. Launch too soon, and the enemy might well be unfindable, out of reach. Delay your launch too long, and the berserkers would hit you first, catch your warbirds on the ground or on the deck. And none of the decisions at this level could be left entirely to the combat computers.

  So far, everything had followed the routine of one of his training flights—there had been all too few of those. Oh, of course he'd had plenty of simulator time, which was supposed to be the same but never really was, and all too little time in space. Shortage of instructors, shortage of good equipment.

  The notice that they were lifting off, when it came, was given in the human voice of the spacecraft commander.

  Then rendezvous in nearby space, with the other ships of the squadron; and then cruising out, following the squadron leader. All of course while guided by the presentation inside the helmet. No way, really, to distinguish this from a training exercise in virtual reality. But his gut and his heart understood the difference.

  Fame was fleeting. Not many people on Uhao, or on Earth, or anywhere else for that matter, were still following the career of that heroic Spacer Nifty Gift, the so-far-unsuspected betrayer of his comrades. There would be no stories on the news to reveal to the man who sought him where Nifty could be found today. Or at least that was the way the situation looked to Traskeluk. A newer hero with an even wilder story to tell—Traskeluk himself—had taken over first place in the popular mind.

  And like Gift before him, Trask soon discovered that when he put on civilian clothes, he tended to disappear.

  The truth was—as he had been managing to find out, starting with some well-timed help from good old Mother R— the truth was that Gift had started for Earth as everyone had assumed he would, but for some reason had turned back when he got to a transport hub in low Earth orbit.

  From that point, practically on the planet where his family lived, Gift had turned around and come right back to the planet from which he'd started.

  He hadn't come back hitching a ride on military transport, though there was plenty of such traffic from Earth to Uhao. Nothing so plebeian as that for Mr. Nifty now—if he'd done so, he couldn't have brought his girlfriend along. The conditions of his return flight had been rather more upscale.

  Now why would good old Nifty bounce around in such an unusual fashion? Security hadn't seemed to care what the wounded hero did; no reason for them to be suspicious. Of course, there was no rule saying that Gift, or anyone else, had to go home if he didn't want to spend his leave that way. And it couldn't have been that Nifty was attempting to shake off pursuit; he'd made the turnaround before he could possibly have learned that all his shipmates were not dead after all.

  It had already occurred to Traskeluk to wonder if security might have routinely put a tracer on him too. But where and how did they attach such things? Of course they would allow for the fact that a man changed his clothes at fairly frequent intervals. Therefore it ought to be attached right to his body somewhere…

  He stopped, looking down at his left hand. Of course, the new arm. That might very well have been the place they picked to plant their little toy. Suppose, before Maal had ever worked on it, security had had the medics install some kind of tracer? They might have built it right in. Traskeluk was envisioning some almost microscopic speck. That would be all the size they needed. If so, possibly Maal had inadvertently dug it out again. But he couldn't be sure of that.

  He shot a glance at the icon in the upper left of his field of vision, and looked away again. The problem of a tracer—if it was a problem—was too vague to worry about. Whether it was there or not was not going to make a damn bit of difference to Cedric Traskeluk. Nifty Gift was going to see the man who was about to kill him, and then he was going to die, and that was all there was to that.

  Commander R, genius in some matters, seemed to be rapidly getting in over her head in this. She gave the security agent a piercing look and asked: "You put on the tracer without the subject's knowledge?"

  "Ma'am, it wouldn't be much good if they knew about it."

  TWENTY

  One hundred and seven small berserker machines—the defenders could count them quite accurately as they drew near—their numbers about equally divided between bombers and fighters, came sweeping in out of space to attack Fifty Fifty.

  The gear Jory was operating from inside her bunker picked up an accurate count from the defensive network. The number was not as large as had been predicted—which probably meant that a sizable force was being held in reserve.

  For several hours now, the defenders' early-warning robots had been waiting out at the maximum range of effective radio, and they had been instructed as to where and when to look with special diligence for an attack. The prediction based on Hypo's information was right on the money, and the early-warning system, before the berserker fighters wiped it from the sky, provided its master with a clear, accurate count of bandits.

  The attackers had made their approach to the atoll in a series of risky, high-speed C-plus jumps, leaving their carriers still at a distance measured in light-years.

  The Vals, the Voids, the Killers, all were coming on now in microjumps, mere tens or units of kilometers as they closed swiftly on their target, their drives burning up space in the vicinity of the atoll. Until they were within a thousand kilometers or so, their slick unmarked bodies had driven forward at an effective velocity not quite outpacing light. There was no sun-sized physical body anywhere nearby, so they could get away with that. Each type of attacking machine was holding a tight formation, making it possible, at least at intervals, for units to communicate with each other.

  Down on the ground, several meters under the artificially hardened surface, Jory could see and hear quite well, through the information being fed to the little stage before her by her own robots' eyes and ears. She saw how the berserker fighters, the Voids, moved protectively near the deliverers of death, in a position from which they could rush quickly to intercept any new swarm of Solarian interceptors that might come out to interfere. Ideally, she understood, escort fighters on either side would try to hold friendly bombers encased in a kind of englobement pattern, themselves remaining ready to challenge anything the enemy put up in an effort to knock the bombers, out of action.

  The swarm of outdated Solarian interceptors had already been pretty well disposed of.

  It always amazed Jory, when she thought about the technical difficulties, that either humans or machines could ever find anything as small as a planet or an atoll, when interstellar distances were involved. For returning war machines to find something as small as the carrier they needed was even chancier.

  The defenders had been ready, and Jory's recorders had been allowed to tap into the available information. The bomber machines, the equivalent of Solarian farlaunchers, and thirty-six hardlauncher equivalents, were in two formations, each a V of vees.

  She had been just beginning to learn how to get comfortable in government-issue body armor, melded with a special helmet owned by her employer, which allowed her to plug in her recorder-operator's headset. Now she was huddled in her sheltered position, which offered a little psychological security at least. Nash, in
a burst of something like gallantry, had refused to allow a woman to join him in the most exposed observation post.

  She was still sharing her shelter with several other people, and the place was now crowded by the presence of a military damage-control party, ready to rush out with their own distinctive equipment when the need arose.

  This shelter was a sanctuary set aside for what the military considered nonessential folk, those who were not commanding gun-laying systems, or maintaining defensive force fields or power flows, only huddling down. From hour to hour the cast of characters tended to change, with different people running in and out.

  Meanwhile, Jory's dog-sized recorder robot, and a couple of even smaller machines, were darting about on the surface, focusing their specialized senses on sound and movement.

  Her earlier intention of naming her robot Pappy had somehow never got off the ground. There were a couple of reasons, the least important of them being Nash's predictable displeasure. Many people thought it bad luck to assign a "human" name to any kind of a machine. Not that Jory herself was in the least superstitious about anything, of course. But this was war, and war was—different.

  Stricter penalties than any Colonel Shanga might enforce were in effect for not wearing a helmet; over the last two hours, atmospheric oxygen had been deliberately drained away from the atoll's surface, in an attempt to minimize fire damage from the blasts of heat that were sure to come.

  There was a certain tragic angle to that decision, or at least a lot of people would view it as tragedy, and Jory wasn't sure how the military censors were going to allow her to report it. A few of the awkward, mutant birds, and other breathing life, had been removed first, but most were going to die. A selected remnant of the birds, a breeding stock, were being kept alive in a deep freeze, somewhere underground. The decision to remove the oxygen had been made late in the game, and the safety of wildlife had been well down on the defenders' list of priorities. As the underground machinery worked at its task of sucking oxygen out of the thin air, there appeared a scattering of weird, dead birds, all across the landing field and the surrounding terrain.