Berserker Base

by Fred Saberhagen

  Perhaps it dreamed. The universe about it was a simple one, aflow with energies; it had to be monitored for deviations from the random, for order. Order was life—or berserker.

  The mass of the approaching star distorted space. When space became too curved, 100101101110 surrendered its grip on the c-plus-excited state. Its velocity fell to a tenth of lightspeed, and 100101101110 began to decelerate further. Now if was not dreaming.

  At a million kilometers, life might show as a reflection band in green or orange or violet. At a hundred kilometers, many types of living nerve clusters would radiate their own distinctive patterns. Rarely was it necessary to come so close. Easier to pull near a star, alert for attack, and search the liquid-water temperature band for the spectra of an oxygen world. Oxygen meant life.

  There.

  Sometimes life would defend itself. 100101101110 had not been attacked, not yet; but life was clever. The berserker was on hair-trigger alert while it looked about itself.

  The blue pinpoint had tinier moons: a large one at a great distance, and a smaller one, close enough that tides had pulled it into a teardrop shape.

  The larger moon was inconveniently large, even for 100101101110. The smaller, at 4 x 105 grams, would be adequate. The berserker fortress moved on it, all senses alert.

  Hilary Gage had no idea what to expect.

  When he was younger, when he was human, he had organized Channith's defenses against berserkers. The berserkers had not come to Channith in the four hundred and thirty years since Channith became a colony. He had traveled. He had seep ravaged worlds and ruined, slagged berserkers; he had studied records made by men who had beaten the killer machines; there were none from the losers.

  Harvest had bothered him. He had asked that the monitoring station be destroyed. It wasn't that the program (Singh, at that time) might revolt. Gage feared that berserkers might come to Harvest, might find the monitoring station, might rob the computer for components… and find them superior to their own machinery,

  He had been laughed at. When Singh asked that his personality be erased, Gage had asked again. That time he had been given more make work. Find a way to make the station safe.

  He had tried. There was the Remora sub-program, but it had to be so versatile! The stroke had come before he was fully satisfied with it. Otherwise he had no weapons at all.

  The berserker had come.

  The beast was damaged. Something had probed right through the hull—a terrific thickness of hull, no finesse here, just mass to absorb the energies of an attack—and Gage wondered if it had received that wound attacking Channith. He'd know more if he could permit himself to use radar or neutrino beams; but he limited himself to passive instruments, including the telescope.

  The two-hundred-year project was over. The berserker would act to exterminate every microbe in the water and air of Harvest. Gage was prepared to watch Harvest die. He toyed with the idea that when it was over, the fortress would be exhausted of weapons and energy, a sitting duck for any human warfleet… but the monitoring station on the moon had no weapons. For now, Hilary Gage could only record the event for Channith's archives.

  Were there still archives? Had that thing attended to Channith before it came here? There was no way to know.

  What did a berserker do when the target didn't fight back? Two centuries ago, Harvest had been lifeless, with a reducing atmosphere, as Earth itself had been once. Now life was taking hold. To the berserker, this ball of colored slimes was life, the enemy. It would attack. How?

  He needn't call the berserker's attention to himself. Doubtless the machine could sense life… but Gage was not alive. Would it destroy random machinery? Gage was not hidden, but he didn't use much energy; solar panels were enough to keep the station running.

  The berserker was landing on Teardrop.

  Time passed. Gage watched. Presently the berserker's drive spewed blue flame.

  The berserker wasn't wasting fuel; its drive drew its energies from the fabric of space itself. But what was it trying to accomplish?

  Then Hilary understood, in his mind and in the memory-ghost of his gut. The berserker machine was not expending its own strength. It had found its weapon in nature.

  The violet star fanned forward along Teardrop's orbit. That would have been a sixty-gravity drive for the berserker alone. Attached to an asteroid three thousand times its mass, it was still slowing Teardrop by .02 G, hour after hour.

  One hundred years of labor. He might gamble Harvest against himself… a half-terraformed world against components to repair a damaged berserker. Well?

  He'd studied recordings of berserker messages before he was himself recorded. But there were better records already in the computer.

  The frequencies were there, and the coding: star and world locations, fuel and mass and energy reserves, damage description, danger probabilities, orders of priority of targets; some specialized language to describe esoteric weaponry used by self-defending life; a code that would translate into the sounds of human or alien speech; a simplified code for a brain-damaged berserker…

  Gage discarded his original intent. He couldn't conceivably pose as a berserker. Funny, though: he felt no fear. The glands were gone, but the habit of fear… had he lost that too?

  Teardrop's orbit was constricting like a noose.

  Pose as something else!

  Think it through. He needed more than just a voice. Pulse, breath: he had recordings. Vice-president Curly. Barnes had bid him goodbye in front of a thousand newspickups, after Gage became a recording, and it was there in his computer memory. A tough old lady, Curly, far too arrogant for goodlife, but he'd use his own vocabulary… hold it. What about the technician who had chatted with him while testing his reflexes? Angelo Carson was a long-time smoker, long overdue for a lungbath, and the deep rasp in his lungs was perfect!

  He focused his maser and let the raspy breathing play while he thought. Anything else? Would it expect a picture? Best do without. Remember to cut the breathing while you talk. After the inhale.

  "This is goodlife speaking, for the fortress moon. The fortress moon is damaged."

  The fan of light from Teardrop didn't waver, and answer came there none.

  The records were old: older than Gage the man, far older than Gage in his present state. Other minds had run this computer system, twice before. Holstein and Singh had been elderly men, exemplary citizens, who chose this over simple death. Both had eventually asked to be wiped. Gage had only been a computer for eighteen years. Could he be using an obsolete programming language?

  Ridiculous. No code would be obsolete. Some berserkers did not see a repair station in centuries. They would have to communicate somehow… or was this life thinking? There were certainly repair stations, but many berserker machines might simply fight until they wore out or were destroyed. The military forces of Channith had never been sure.

  Try again. Don't get too emotional. This isn't a soap. Goodlife—human servants of the berserkers—would be trained to suppress their emotions, wouldn't they? And maybe he couldn't fake it anyway… "This is goodlife. The fortress moon"—nice phrase, that—"is damaged. All transmitting devices were destroyed in battle with… Albion." Exhale, inhale. "The fortress moon has stored information regarding Albion's defenses." Albion was a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. His imagination picked a yellow dwarf star, behind him as he looked toward Channith, with a family of four dead planets. The berserker had come from Channith; how would it know? Halt Angelo's breath on the intake and, "Life support systems damaged. Goodlife is dying." He thought to add, please answer, and didn't. Goodlife would not beg, would he? and Gage had his pride.

  He sent again, "I am—" Gasp. "Goodlife is dying. Fortress moon is mute. Sending equipment damaged, motors damaged, life support system damaged. Wandering fortress must take information from fortress moon computer system directly." Exhale—listen to that wheeze, poor bastard must be dying—inhale. "If wandering fortress needs information not stored, it must br
ing oxygen for goodlife." That, he thought, had the right touch: begging without begging.

  Gage's receiver spoke. "Will complete present mission and rendezvous."

  Gage raged… and said, "Understood." That was death for Harvest. Hell, it might have worked! But a berserker's priorities were fixed, and goodlife wouldn't argue,

  Was it fooled? If not, he'd just thrown away anything he might learn of the berserker; Channith would never see it; Gage would be dead. Slagged or dismembered.

  When the light of the fortress's drive dimmed almost to nothing, Teardrop glowed of itself: it was brushing Harvest's atmosphere. Cameras whirled in the shock wave and died one by one. A last camera, a white glare shading to violet… gone.

  The fortress surged ahead of Teardrop, swung around the curve of Harvest and moved toward the outer moon: toward Gage. Its drive was powerful. It could be here in six hours, Gage thought. He sent heavy, irregular breathing, Angelo's raspy breath, with interruptions. "Uh. Uh? Goodlife is dying. Goodlife is… is dead. Fortress moon has stored information… self-defending life… locus is Albion, coordinates…" followed by silence.

  Teardrop was on the far side of Harvest now, but the glow of it made a ring of white flame round the planet. The glow flared and began to die. Gage watched the shock wave rip through the atmosphere. The planet's crust parted, exposing lava; the ocean rolled to close the gap. Almost suddenly, Harvest was a white pearl. The planet's oceans would be water vapor before this day ended.

  The berserker sent, "Goodlife. Answer or be punished. Give coordinates for Albion."

  Gage left the carrier beacon. The berserker would sense no life in the lunar base. Poor goodlife, faithful to the last.

  100101101110 had its own views regarding goodlife. Experience showed that goodlife was true to its origins: it tended to go wrong, to turn dangerous. It would have been destroyed when convenient… but that would not be needed now.

  Machinery and records were another thing entirely. As the berserker drew near the moon, its telescopes picked up details of the trapped machine. It saw lunar soil heaped over a dome. Its senses peered inside.

  Machinery occupied most of what it could see. There was little room for a life support system. A box of a room, and stored air, and tubes through which robot or goodlife could crawl to repair damage; no more. That was reassuring; but design details were unfamiliar.

  Hypothesis: the trapped berserker had used life-begotten components for its repairs. There was no sign of a drive; no sign of abandoned wreckage. Hypothesis: one of these craters was a crash site; the cripple had moved its brain and whatever else survived into an existing installation built by life.

  Anything valuable in the goodlife's memory was now lost, but perhaps the "fortress moon's" memory was intact. It would know the patterns of life in this vicinity. Its knowledge of technology used by local self-defensive life might be even more valuable.

  Hypothesis: it was a trap. There was no fortress moon, only a human voice. The berserker moved in with shields and drive ready. The closer it came, the faster it could dodge beyond the horizon… but it saw nothing resembling weaponry. In any case, the berserker had been allowed to destroy a planet. Surely there was nothing here that could threaten it. It remained ready nonetheless.

  At a hundred kilometers the berserker's senses found no life. Nor at fifty.

  The berserker landed next to the heap of lunar earth that goodlife had called "fortress moon." Berserkers did not indulge in rescue operations. What was useful in the ruined berserker would become part of the intact one. So: reach out with a cable, find the brain.

  It had landed, and still the fear didn't come. Gage had seen wrecks, but never an intact berserker sitting alongside him. Gage dared not use any kind of beam scanner. He felt free to use his sensors, his eyes.

  He watched a tractor detach itself from the berserker and come toward him, trailing, cable.

  It was like a dream. No fear, no rage. Hate, yes, but like an abstraction of hate, along with an abstract thirst for vengeance… which felt ridiculous, as it had always felt a bit ridiculous. Hating a berserker was like hating a malfunctioning air conditioner.

  Then the probe entered his mind.

  The thought patterns were strange. Here they were sharp, basic; here they were complex and blurred. Was this an older model with obsolete data patterns? Or had the brain been damaged, or the patterns scrambled? Signal for a memory dump, see what can be retneived.

  Gage felt the contact, the feedback, as his own thoughts. What followed was not under his control. Reflex told him to fight! Horror had risen in his mind, impulses utterly forbidden by custom, by education, by all the ways in which he had learned to be human.

  It might have felt like rape; how was a man to tell? He wanted to scream. But he triggered the Remora program and felt it take hold, and he sensed the berserker's reaction to Gage within the berserker.

  He screamed in triumph. "I lied! I am not goodlife! What I am—"

  Plasma moving at relativistic velocities smashed deep into Gage. The link was cut, his senses went blind and deaf. The following blow smashed his brain and he was gone.

  Something was wrong. One of the berserker's brain complexes was sick, was dying… was changing, becoming monstrous. The berserker felt evil within itself, and it reacted. The plasma cannon blasted the "fortress moon," then swung round to face backward. It would fire through its own hull to destroy the sick brain, before it was too late.

  It was too late. Reflex: Three brains consulted before any major act. If one had been damaged, the view of the others would prevail.

  Three brains consulted, and the weapon swung away.

  What I am is Hilary Gage. I fought berserkers during my life; but you I will let live. Let me tell you what I've done to you. I didn't really expect to have an audience. Triple-redundant brains? We use that ourselves, sometimes.

  I'm not life. I'm not goodlife. I'm the recording of Hilary Gage. I've been running a terraforming project, and you've killed it, and you'll pay for that.

  It feels like I'm swearing vengeance on my air conditioner. Well, if my air conditioner betrayed me, why not?

  There was always the chance that Harvest might attract a berserker. I was recorded in tandem with what we called a Remora program. I wasn't sure it would interface with unfamiliar equipment. You solved that one yourself, because you have to interface with thousands of years of changes in berserker design.

  I'm glad they gave me conscious control of Remora. Two of your brains are me now, but I've left the third brain intact. You can give me the data I need to run this… heap of junk. You're in sorry shape, aren't you? Channith must have done you some damage. Did you come from Channith?

  God curse you. You'll be sorry. You're barely in shape to reach the nearest berserker repair base, and we shouldn't have any trouble getting in. Where is it?

  Ah.

  Fine. We're on our way, I'm going to read a poem into your memory; I don't want it to get lost. No, no, no; relax and enjoy it, death-machine. You might enjoy it at that. Do you like spilled blood? I lived a bloody life.

  BERSERKER BASE

  "… it's not a berserker. Not…"

  "What?" The face of Naxos looming over Lars, demanding answers, was the first thing that Lars saw when his perception returned to his immediate surroundings. He was pinned flat on his back, but not by berserkers this time. Naxos and Dorothy Totonac were holding down his arms, while Pat hovered over them all.

  Lars repeated what he had just discovered: "Not a berserker. This machine we're riding in." There was no doubt that they were riding in it, spaceborne—the artificial gravity wavered crazily, so that his body sometimes rose right off the deck, along with those of the people who were trying to restrain him. To Lars, who now had a more-than-intellectual feeling for just how badly damaged their transportation was, the sensation was terrifying.

  "You're crazy," Naxos told him flatly.

  "No, I'm not. It was a berserker, but it isn't now. Tell you the de
tails later," Lars raised his voice. "Gage, say something reassuring to these people."

  The breathy, wheezy voice came from a speaker somewhere nearby: "I'm busy. But I'll try to think of something; meanwhile you'd better all keep those suits on." Lars, who had partially removed his, scrambled to get it on again and sealed.

  Gage's 'very human-sounding voice (which was after all a human voice recorded) went on: "I'm going to open a door for you people; I think you'll be marginally safer if you go through it."

  And nearby a hatchway opened.

  Lars led the way. The others hesitated, then scrambled after him as if afraid of being left behind. Here was a room barely big enough to hold them all, a cell of the kind so many berserkers had, ready to carry goodlife or unwilling prisoners when such were computed to be useful.

  Those who had expected to meet their host here looked around uncertainly.

  Pat nudged Lars. "If he's human., where is he?"

  "He's recorded. A computer program."

  She blinked at him. Slowly understanding came. "God."

  "'But be was a human being once, and he still composes poetry. The Carmpan or some of their more gifted allies could reach him, telepathically, through verse. They kept trying to bring him into touch with me directly, and it almost drove me crazy—"

  The disembodied voice of Gage returned, explaining tersely how he had managed their getaway. His landing had been unopposed. The central berserker brain of the base, overworked with tactical decisions, had not investigated this strange damaged fighting unit as closely as it might have otherwise.

  Nor did it take note that the telepathic prisoners were being spirited away. Then, with the third of his tripartite brain that was still more or less pure berserker. Gage had signaled the repair facility that his most urgent repairs had been completed—as indeed the most urgent of them had—and that he was spaceworthy.