Rogue Berserker

by Fred Saberhagen

  Some portion of Harry’s mind still functioned, in a way. At least a few people at Space Force headquarters, he realized, must now be aware of both kidnappings. There were some shrewd folks there, and they would undoubtedly be trying to discover some kind of link—and some kind of link there had to be.

  As far as Harry could see, his meeting with Winston Cheng, their brief consultation on the subject of Kidnapping One, formed the sole connection between himself and the tycoon. It was also the only link between their two families. But why should a simple meeting have provoked a copycat crime? There must be some hidden depth to the series of events, some links in the chain that Harry could not yet see …

  For a moment he literally couldn’t see anything at all, because the world was turning gray in front of him, and it seemed that he was likely to pass out. He tried to tell himself that it was all a bad dream, and soon he would come out of it.

  While he was waiting to wake up, Harry stumbled and stuttered: “How could that have happened? They were home on Esmerelda …” Of course no world was ever totally safe; but everyone liked to think that their own chosen sanctuary might be the glorious exception.

  “They weren’t snatched there,” his friend’s reluctant voice was telling him.

  “Then where? What … ?”

  Patiently, Aragon repeated the few sketchy details that he’d been handed. The local authorities at the site of the kidnapping had managed to reconstruct a partial record of Becky’s actions over the preceding few days. People she had talked to on the trip said she spoke of having suddenly, unexpectedly, come into a substantial sum of money. No one could remember her saying anything about just where this inheritance had come from. But Harry was nodding vaguely; this part of the story did not astonish him. He was aware that his wife had a couple of elderly grandparents, and Becky had given the impression that the old folks could be well off.

  Hank and his companion were shoving several printouts under Harry’s nose.

  “Harry. This is what we got. This is all we know.”

  He read it, trying to make sense. According to the report, or the message, she and the boy had taken ship to come to see Harry, planning to surprise Daddy with the good news that suddenly they had lots of money! And wasn’t that wonderful!? Knowing Becky, Harry thought she had probably used up half the windfall, whatever the amount, just in celebration and travel. It was just the kind of impulsive thing she was likely to do. And what made her think she could be sure of finding him, when his business kept him on the move …

  Somewhere in the course of their travels, changing ships at a system that served as a minor transport hub, she and Ethan had boarded a small shuttle. Just a simple ordinary vessel, one that would have seemed no more dangerous than any of a thousand others … but before the simple journey was half over, something, some damned thing, darting from the outer darkness of deep space had pounced on it …

  Harry could remember vividly the recordings shown him by the old man, Cheng, driven into a controlled craziness by his own grief. Harry wasn’t sure at what moment he had decided to sit down on the ramp, or exactly why it had seemed like the thing to do. But here he was, his bottom on the ground. The people who had come to inform him of the end of the world were standing over him awkwardly, looking down at him across a gulf. Some kind of shadowy world might still be going on, up there where these other people lived. But the universe that Harry inhabited had come to a crashing halt.

  The two men standing over him talked at him for a while longer without his really hearing anything they said. Then Hank Aragon had him by one arm, and was tugging. “Harry. Come on, old man. On your feet. I’m sorry, God how sorry. You’ve got to walk a bit.”

  Why there should be any need for him, or anyone, to walk was beyond Harry’s understanding. But then, if someone wanted him to stand up, why not? Getting to his feet again was a difficult process, the details hard to work out; and when he had accomplished the move he found it didn’t make a bit of difference. Emptiness, light-years deep, still stretched out from him in every direction …

  * * *

  He was walking, and there were people at his elbows, guiding him. Now and then the men who were with him spoke, but the words just went by Harry, leaving no impression. At last he did hear someone say they were going to the spaceport’s operations building. Harry couldn’t imagine why, but he went along because it made no difference.

  It turned out there was some kind of a medic on duty in operations, a nurse. After the people with Harry had talked to her, and she had tried to talk to him, she bared his arm and gave him a shot of something …

  * * *

  As soon as Harry could move and think again, and even talk a little, he had no problem in deciding what action he ought to take. His only remaining goal in life was to find out exactly what had happened to his wife and son, recover them if possible or die in the attempt.

  The shot in the arm had brought him out of it a little, enough to realize that hours had passed since he was hit with the shock of the bad news. He was wondering dully why none of the news vultures had yet managed to track him down, when he received another message, this one bearing all the remembered earmarks of a note from Winston Cheng.

  The nightmare was going on. Another echo from the recent past. Like something coming true that had been predicted in a dream. He had never known while he was dreaming it just how bad a nightmare, and how endlessly long, it was going to turn out to be …

  Hank Aragon had been spending the whole day hovering near, and now he closely watched Harry’s face as Harry pulled the little capsule open. “Not more bad news? Is it?”

  “No.” Harry’s voice was clear and firm. He could answer that question with flat confidence, even before he’d read the message. The truth was that nothing that could happen anywhere, in the Galaxy or beyond, nothing imaginable, was going to register as bad news with Harry Silver. Because Harry Silver had already been destroyed.

  It took him a couple of readings before the meaning of this latest note came through. In a sense, one strange little sense, the news was even good. It was about as good as anything could be to a dead man, because it fell right in with what Harry had already decided he was going to have to do.

  Harry—

  Have just learned of your tragedy. The courier bringing this message is at your disposal. Can we talk again?

  Winston Cheng

  Harry still had the prepaid reply form that Cheng had given him, and without even waiting for the relative numbness brought on by the medic’s shot to start to wear off, he took advantage of it. The words seemed to form themselves, while Harry only had to watch his hand do the writing.

  Personal to Winston Cheng—

  If offer still open, I accept.

  Silver.

  Then he crumpled the form and threw it away. No sense in sending a message when he was going to be on the courier himself.

  Just before boarding one of Winston Cheng’s ships for the third time, Harry, meaning to study en route whatever data he could obtain, called up a standard news source to show him all available information about recent kidnappings in this sector, in which robots of any kind had played some part, while screening out the common types of paddy robbery. Only a few such crimes fit the narrowed classification, and in none of them was there any suggestion of berserker action. He tried a second newsorg, and then a third, all with the same result.

  Before even leaving the operations building, Harry had hastily requested and signed forms disposing of his leased ship, and had received and read an urgent letter from one of Becky’s elderly grandparents, who, still very much alive, had learned that something bad had happened to her grandchild, but had not been able to discover exactly what. It was a polite message, with overtones of desperation, and Harry answered that he was investigating and would talk to them later.

  Then, following a kind of instinct to see that loose ends were tied up, he dispatched a message to a caretaking agency on Esmerelda regarding his small property
there. That last communication went much more slowly and inexpensively. Now there was no one and nothing that he had to worry about.

  * * *

  None of the civilian crew of the half-familiar courier ship were people Harry had met before, but they were all respectful, and attentive to his wishes. Without surprise he noted that he seemed to be the only passenger.

  As soon as the courier was under way, Harry retired to the elegant, small suite assigned as his cabin. There he began to study such evidence as was so far available, from the Space Force and the sources connected to Winston Cheng, regarding what had happened to his family.

  The available facts were meager, but they were enough. A brief study left Harry with no room for reasonable doubt: Becky and Ethan, joyfully proclaiming that they were on their way to join Daddy, had been among a group of half a dozen people, all passengers on the same small shuttle, who had been mysteriously carried off. Harry could recognize that, according to witnesses, the technique of abduction was practically identical with that earlier employed to snatch Winston Cheng’s people. Again, a Type-A berserker, coming seemingly out of nowhere, had struck, and got away.

  There was one notable variation, this time. The nearby ship that had recorded the incident was lightly armed, and had succeeded in getting one turret into action and potting one of the enemy boarding machines before return fire shut the turret down. Semi-intact wreckage had been retrieved from nearby space, and identified as true berserker technology, providing convincing proof that the odd incident had not been faked.

  Again, none of the local authorities as much as mentioned the similar tragedy that had so recently befallen the Cheng family. Harry took this as a sure sign that the first crime was still being kept under wraps.

  Again, as in the earlier kidnapping, no ransom demand had been made on any of the victims’ relatives. In this case there seemed no reason to think that any of them were spectacularly wealthy.

  The list of witnesses to the latest outrage included one combat veteran who gave every indication of being a shrewd observer. He and all the others were unanimously convinced that they had seen a genuine berserker in action.

  * * *

  This time the indications were even somewhat clearer that the escaping kidnapper’s destination had been the peculiar solar system called the Gravel Pit.

  Harry kept staring at the words before him, trying to force them into making sense. So, Becky and Ethan had been carried off to the same crazy place that had already swallowed up Winston Cheng’s granddaughter and great-grandson. The Gravel Pit, the solar system considered by most travelers as too dangerous to enter, where neither Space Force nor Templars thought it worth their while to risk lives and expend precious resources in a hopeless search for a berserker base that might or might not exist—where one of the wealthiest humans in the Galaxy was already planning a secret attempt to rescue people who, if they were lucky, had already been dead for many days.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The courier, a good solid ship with nothing spectacular about it, went clipping along in flightspace, bypassing all the monstrous magnitudes of normal space and time, the domain of Einstein where relativity was still in charge. For some reason the statglass ports in the control room had been left fully cleared, as if neither of the two humans aboard, both space veterans, would admit for a moment the possibility of being turned queasy by an occasional deep look into nothingness. In ordinary circumstances the sight might have bothered Harry enough to make him turn the glass opaque. But in his current mental state it was going to take something much worse than the sight of raw flightspace to have any effect on him at all.

  Since coming aboard, Harry had been wandering the confined spaces of the ship, not knowing what he was looking for or why. On entering the control room, he had let himself down into the copilot’s chair, but only because it had seemed the handiest seat available. He wasn’t doing anything, not even thinking clearly, just waiting for this ride to be over.

  The captain-pilot wasn’t quite sure yet how to deal with this special passenger, who had to be important in some way the captain had evidently not figured out. He touched a pilot’s helmet hanging on its umbilical. “Care to take the helm for a while, Mister Silver?”

  Harry roused himself from a dark place. “No, thanks.”

  The captain cleared his throat. “Sir, now we’re securely spaceborne, it’s time I leveled with you. We’re not really going to the destination listed on our flight plan.”

  That awoke some interest. “Oh?”

  Deferentially, the courier’s captain explained that the planet name in Winston Cheng’s latest message had actually been a code word. Their true destination this time was not one of Cheng’s palaces, or corporate headquarters. Instead, they were traveling directly to an operational base of some kind that Cheng Enterprises had established within a couple of hours’ flight time from the Gravel Pit.

  “It seems like there’s something pretty hush-hush going on around there,” the captain offered, then paused, looking closely at his passenger.

  Harry shook his head and puffed out breath. He had signed on for a technical operation, and it was time he began to get a grasp of practical details. “What solar system?” he wanted to know.

  “None. We’re headed for a wanderworld. The address is WW 207GST.” The captain went on to give Galactic coordinates.

  The term “wanderworld” was generally applied to rocky masses that were large enough to be in some way interesting and attractive to humanity, but were currently free of gravitational attachment to any solar system, though some of these Galactic vagrants showed signs of having spent long periods of their early history, sometimes hundreds of millions of standard years, as members of systemic families. Like other bodies of its type, WW 207GST could be thought of as a citizen of the Galaxy. Many were of suitable dimensions for suited ED humans to walk on them in natural gravity and reasonable safety, though the lack of solar heating generally kept any atmosphere that might be present in a firmly frozen state.

  Harry reflected that with the sprawling empire of interstellar real estate that Winston Cheng had at his disposal, it wasn’t surprising that the old man had been able to come up with a handy rock on which to establish a secret operational base of his own, from which to launch the secret effort that he liked to call a rescue expedition. Of course secrecy would be important; let the Space Force catch wind of his plan, and they would certainly try to close it down.

  The onboard data bank revealed that wanderworld WW 207GST was currently plowing through space at a modest few score kilometers per second relative to the nearest stars, in the general direction of the Gravel Pit. In another thousand standard years or so it might even be in a position to apply for membership in that chaotic system. Meanwhile, it was tens of light-years distant from any of Cheng’s major business operations, or any of the worlds on which he maintained a publicly acknowledged residence.

  * * *

  The courier captain, no doubt in the belief that he was being subtle, warily refrained from trying to pump Harry for information on the mysterious happenings on WW 207GST. But it was obvious that the captain knew the big boss was planning something very much out of the ordinary there, and he was curious about it.

  After a while he asked Harry: “Have you met the Lady Masaharu?”

  Harry was taking a break in his restless, compulsive wandering. They were sitting in the courier’s little galley, and the captain had a mug of something hot in front of him.

  “Once,” Harry admitted.

  “Then you probably know she’s Winston Cheng’s chief personal assistant.”

  Harry didn’t answer.

  “She’s on 207GST right now. And he depends a whole lot on the lady.”

  Harry, whose attention had already started to drift away again, looked up, faintly curious. There were certain things it would be good to know about Cheng, as they got ready for what was to come. “I take it they’re not married.”

  “To each other?
” The courier captain seemed to find that amusing. He confirmed that she was Winston Cheng’s most trusted associate, and had been with him for some great but uncertain number of years. “Lady Laura’s never married anyone, as far as I know.” As for the old man himself, it was more or less common knowledge that the last of his succession of wives had enjoyed an amicable separation and settlement some years ago.

  The captain went on, providing Harry with what he evidently considered juicy inside information, obviously in hopes of getting similar material in return. Maybe, thought Harry, the man was spying for some rival corporation.

  “The only people old Cheng seems to care much about are his granddaughter and her kid. They spend a fair amount of time with him. Oh, Masaharu’s usually at his side—except when he’s in bed. Sleeping is one thing they don’t seem to do together.”

  Harry was getting tired of it. “So where are you watching all this from—under the bed?” That earned him a lengthy period of silence.

  * * *

  The silence had hardly started to erode before the courier in its preliminary approach to the clandestine base made contact with an early warning system. Looking at the display as it came through on instruments, Harry could see it was a very simple and primitive one.

  He slightly adjusted the fit of the copilot’s helmet on his head. The perception was vaguely perturbing. “That’s all the eyes they have?” he asked the world in general. Not that he really gave a good damn about defense anymore, but where there was one deficiency there were likely to be others; and he wanted the mission being planned to be technically first rate.