Rogue Berserker

by Fred Saberhagen

  Why bother? thought Harry. But then, no one was ever going to make him the abbot of anything.

  * * *

  Professor Gianopolous was a maverick scientist, an inventor working outside the regular military and industrial organizations, one who had developed a controversial theory of how berserkers might be deceived, and claimed he had constructed a spaceship that would do the job.

  Harry had heard no details of the theory, but that was hardly surprising since Gianopolous was supposedly keeping his great ideas secret while trying to arrange some kind of profitable deal. But certain rumors, that had been passed in a whisper to Harry by the abbot, said that it involved a coding system of fathomless complexity, and required receiving and transmitting a lot of optelectronic signals.

  The cavernous series of rooms was fairly well populated by a selection of Templars of both sexes and the full range of human age, from adolescence upward.

  Entering the library, they had to probe deeply through the traditional hushed silence, into archaic-looking stacks and alcoves, to find the man they sought. He was dressed with a kind of muted flamboyance, a confusing effect exaggerated by the old-fashioned eyeglasses hanging on a cord around his neck. The twist of his thin lips suggested that he might have just bitten into a sour chewing pod. Behind him were what looked like the reserved shelves, containing, in considerable number, old books with permanent printing on their paper. In the foreground were the shelves of modern cybercodex.

  Harry was briefly distracted, and came near being interested, impressed, at the sight of the old books. Volumes of ancient paper, even predating the era of space travel, with each page shimmering in its distinct modern forcefield binding.

  Professor Gianopolous had a large table to himself, on which he had evidently been comparing two such fragile folios side by side. He looked up as if startled when the abbot and Harry approached, and rose to extend his hand when the abbot began to perform introductions. Harry was faintly surprised at the strength of the grip that met his own.

  The professor’s look seemed hopeful. “I have heard, sir, that you are an excellent pilot. That gives me hope that you will appreciate my ship.”

  “I’ve heard that you are an excellent designer and builder. I intend to give it a real try.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  While on his landing approach to the Templar base, Harry had noted a domed structure that was by far the biggest component of the Templar complex except for the main hangar. He had assumed that the huge dome must contain the Trophy Room. Observing the same structure from the ground, he could see that it was separated by fifty meters of covered tunnel from the rest of the installation. The only means of entry from inside the base was through this single interior corridor.

  Statglass ports had been set at intervals into the right wall of the corridor, giving passerbys a view of part of the local proving ground. The view was largely uninformative, because that was the zone where certain tests and experiments deemed too energetic and dangerous for any indoor venue were carried out. As Harry had also noted on his approach, it was an airless wilderness of black sky, almost empty space and grayish rock thousands of cubic kilometers in extent, running along one slab-sided flank of this angular wanderworld. All its borders were clearly marked by navigational aids that stood out boldly on the holostages of ships entering the system.

  * * *

  Striding down an internal corridor between the professor and their host, going to see the show, Harry could see certain indications of high security in place, and he could feel, as always when he was getting close to a Trophy Room, tension in the air. As usual, his own heartbeat quickened.

  He had visited some similar establishments where full-body armor was required on everyone who entered. The rules here were not quite that strict. But as the three men approached the end of the covered corridor, Harry observed a pair of heavily armed young Templars standing guard, at parade rest in full combat armor, helmets closed. They were standing with their backs to the approaching people, facing the doorway leading to the inner lab, focussing their attention in that direction. That door was colored red and surrounded by serious warning signs. Guarding against external attack was not the prime concern of people pulling this assignment. Instead, they were intent on seeing that the dangerous entities being housed and investigated in the lab remained securely inside it. Sentry duty at a Trophy Room was not a job to be performed casually or haphazardly, though the captive bad guys had of course been stripped of all hardware that might qualify as efficient weaponry, and deprived of power beyond the amount required for testing. Testing here was focused on the capabilities of berserker brains; the auxiliary hardware, once definitely separated from anything like an optelectronic brain or control system, was generally looked at elsewhere.

  Briskly returning the guards’ salute, the abbot led Harry and the professor on through the red door and into the domed space, big enough to have housed a village, as privileged guests. Harry looked around in appreciation; he had never before been in a Trophy Room this big. Here and there were details confirming that this structure must once have been a spaceship hangar.

  Darchan was pointing to the far wall of the cavernous room, where the outer hull of the captured courier was displayed—they had gone to the trouble of skinning it like a trophy snake. The length was fifty or sixty meters of scorched and battered metal, the unrolled partial diameter at least half that much. Glowing symbols, laser-painted, outlined the spots from which certain components had been removed.

  Avoiding the lift that would have carried them to the statglass-windowed observation gallery on an upper level, the abbot led his two favored guests to a forcefield platform that gently lowered the three of them right down into the pit. The center of the dome was sunken several meters below the level of the rocky ground outside. The whole dome glowed with gentle light, making the arena ideal for human observation.

  The broad floor was surfaced with some flaky-looking composite material, but Harry had the irrational feeling that it ought to be sand or sawdust, as if in some primitive barroom, or, more likely, a gladiatorial arena. He supposed that the actual flakes, as of some kind of cleaning compound, could serve the same end of easy cleanup and disposal.

  The suggestion was that those in charge expected things to get messy here. Then the cleaning machines would have an easy job of it, simply removing the whole top layer.

  A couple of human techs, or more likely engineers, fitted in protective suits and gloves, their faces protected by clear shields, small tools in their hands, were busily at work on today’s guest of honor. Harry and the other visitors put on shields and gloves before approaching.

  Here, the abbot and his two honored visitors were able to stand almost within arm’s length of the rack on which the most important components of the captured enemy were pinioned. The rack itself was but little bigger than any ordinary dining table, and had been constructed partly of what looked like simple, natural wood. Some of the enemy’s intimate parts exposed on it were crystalline, and some metallic, while yet another category consisted of mere blurry little globs of force, flickering in and out of existence somewhat faster than the human eye and mind could follow.

  This was a much smaller selection of key components, in volume probably not enough to make an adult human body. The collection included no type of hardware that Harry had not seen before, yet he could hardly take his eyes off it. The whole made a brightly lighted display, spread out over a space not more than a couple of meters square.

  In midair, just a couple of meters above the rack, there glowed a full-sized schematic image, showing what had been discovered so far. The inner workings looked infernally complicated. Some components were dark and some were bright, some looked almost familiar in terms of ED human technology, and some did not.

  * * *

  The colonel-abbot felt constrained to apologize once more to his guests for being unable to give them any details as to how this particular enemy unit had been captured—all that wa
s highly classified. He spoke to Harry in an apologetic tone. “I have promised, under oath, you see.”

  Harry once more assured his host that he understood how such things were managed. Gianopolous merely nodded, as if amused at the abbot’s taking such rules and restrictions so very seriously.

  But the civilian Gianopolous felt free to wax enthusiastic regarding the latest interrogation methods.

  Harry groaned inwardly; the inventor was turning out to be one of those people who had to be an expert on everything. They were as wearing as tough guys, though usually easier to shut up.

  Abbot Darchan was going on: “Since the beginning of human history, the interrogation of prisoners has always been considered something of an art. And we are carrying the art to new heights.”

  Gianopolous was reverting to arrogance. “Ah, excuse me, but hasn’t the interrogation of prisoners always come down to threats and punishment?”

  Harry put in: “Not in this game we’re playing now. Nobody’s yet figured out a way to torture a berserker.”

  Gianopolous raised an eyebrow and looked smug; maybe I have, he seemed to be implying. No doubt that I could if I really tried. Anyone want to give me a contract?

  Abbot Darchan was answering the inventor in his own way. “Relying on such crude methods is a mistake. Of course, by those means it is almost always possible to induce any human prisoner to tell you what he believes you want to hear. But the value of information obtained in such a way is rather limited. And of course, as Harry says, threats and punishment are as meaningless to a berserker as to any other machine.”

  “What method do you use here, then? Argument?” The last word bore a load of sarcasm.

  But the abbot accepted the question at face value. “That would hardly do. No, the optelectronic brain is much less subtle, much more vulnerable to direct investigation than the organic brain, which is a thousand times more complicated. The methods we use here come down to basic techniques, carefully applied. The measurement of voltages and other optelectronic qualities, a deciphering of the code of information.”

  Harry was still looking around. “You’ve made this place into a real arena,” he observed.

  “Precisely what it is.” A new aspect of the abbot’s character was coming into view, He seemed to be quietly expressing some real hatred. “Here the dark forces are momentarily given free rein, the chance to be very active. We must know our enemy if we are ultimately going to defeat it—and we must do that, or it will wipe us out. No third outcome is ultimately possible.

  “If you deprive one of these obscenities of its functions gradually, weaken it a little at a time, the hope is that it will never fully realize what’s going on, and it will never employ what powers it can still exert to destroy its own memory, or scramble all the information. Because doing so would deprive it of useful tools when next it had the chance to kill.”

  There was a stirring of movement visible in the upper gallery, a section elevated behind a statglass wall. Harry looked up to see that a class of ten or twelve Templar officer acolytes, people the Space Force would have called cadets, clad in the simple robes/uniforms of Templar novices, with first-year tabs on their uniform collars, had been brought in to stand looking down into the pit from behind a thick statglass barrier. Almost certainly this would be the first time that any of them had been able to get a direct look at the enemy they had sworn to fight.

  Some kind of communication channel was evidently open, because a murmur of restrained conversation came drifting faintly down to the lower level of the broad arena floor where the techs and visitors were standing.

  Great care had already been taken that at this point, the berserker’s circuits had been extensively disconnected, shorted out, disrupted to the point where the remaining central intelligence was stone deaf and blind. Soon that would be remedied.

  Either the instructor above or the abbot below, the latter probably with the thought of monitoring how well his teacher taught, did something that brought the instructor’s voice down from the sealed gallery into the pit.

  ” … basically three ways a berserker can react when it realizes that it’s been captured—or is about to be. Who can tell me what they are? Yes?”

  Harry was watching and listening now. The class, who all appeared to be nearly the same age, looked back, showing the usual assortment of student reactions, from smug to bewildered to absent. Male and female wore their hair in the same simple style. For the males, facial hair was under current rules forbidden.

  The first hand raised was that of a fresh-faced girl. “It can blow itself up.”

  The instructor nodded routine approval. “Yes, or melt itself down, if it incorporates a self-destructor device, as the great majority of them do. You must expect any and all of their machines to be equipped with something of that nature. Today’s subject had one, but our people were skilled enough, and lucky enough to be able to disable it.

  “Self-destruction is possibility number one, and we have to consider it the most likely. But it could be fatal to ignore the other choices an enemy might make.” He nodded toward an eager face. “Yes?”

  This novice was ready with a different answer. “It might play dead.”

  “Correct! As you might expect, they can do that very convincingly. A variation on that theme is to attempt an imitation of some innocent machine, one that is perhaps temporarily out of order.

  “It’s very important to keep that possibility constantly in mind. A berserker having chosen that mode might remain in it for a year, or if necessary for a hundred years, while to a casual examination appearing totally inert. Then, when it detected a substantial life form, preferably a human, within striking range—sudden death.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “I said there were three basic possibilities.” The teacher looked around, but it appeared no one was ready to complete the trio.

  “Option number three is what I like to call the mode of just keeping busy. Keeping its hand in, as it were. Microscopic organisms make up the vast majority of the Galaxy’s living things—there may be ten to the thirtieth power of them on an average habitable planet. And they are to be found in a great variety of environments. If a death machine has the tools to detect them and kill them—and it very likely does—it may simply keep on with simple killing until it exhausts its remaining power, or has sterilized its environment as far as it can reach, or until some better target, like an ED human who is not fully alert, presents itself.”

  Harry’s attention had shifted back to the actual berserker on the rack. The technicians, murmuring a few words of jargon back and forth between themselves, were well along in the process of detaching the separated modules from the rack and fitting them back together in a more compact form. Harry could see where the courier’s brain, or a large part of it, was going to go. Around it a new body was taking shape, vastly smaller and simpler than the massive hardware provided by its original designers. Most of the parts of this new incarnation were of human manufacture, color-coded to show their origin.

  Harry watched as the strange, alien form took shape under the techs’ careful hands. It vaguely resembled a scooter, as yet lacking wheels, of a convenient size for some ED human to be able to stand on and ride. Now the empty rack, on which the half-dissected enemy had been pinioned like some huge exotic insect, was being raised up out of the testing space, to disappear behind a panel in the dome. Harry knew regret that the damned thing could feel no pain, no terror. But maybe it felt something analogous to sickness. He could at least hope for that.

  * * *

  Something the instructor in the upper gallery was saying caught at Harry’s attention, and he looked that way again.

  “The bad machines of course operate their own extensive intelligence and counterintelligence systems; unfortunately, there are always people ready to turn goodlife. The berserkers study Earth-descended humanity at least as intensely as we study them. There’s no doubt they have rooms analogous to this one, where hu
man prisoners are tested. Where the different layers, the different modes of human memory are searched, probably by methods of gradual disassembly similar to …”

  “What is it, Harry?” the abbot was asking, sounding faintly concerned, while the instructor’s voice droned on.

  “Never mind. Nothing.” He took a deep breath, and made an effort, and was standing still again.

  * * *

  One of the most recent refinements of interrogation and discovery technique involved keeping the subject device concentrated on an activity down near its most basic level of programming: finding a way to kill something. There were almost always some life forms within reach, though many of them presented a difficult challenge when the berserker had been deprived of all sophisticated weapons.

  The students’ instructor was trying what was doubtless a standard joke. Smiling at the group, he offered: “Therefore, we need a life form to feed the berserker. Any volunteers?” There was a dutiful titter of laughter.

  One of the acolytes observed: “Sir, that thing our people are putting together looks like it can’t even move.”

  “It will move, adequately for our purposes, when they’ve finished. The technicians are now adding the final touches—there are the wheels—restoring some mobility, of course in a vastly different mode than what the device originally possessed.”

  Two small wheels had appeared, one mounted straight behind the other, as on a children’s scooter. A pair of hardware arms, of a size to fit a human toddler, were also being attached, in the place of steering grips or handlebars. Each arm came equipped with a matching four-fingered hand, also small, reinforcing the impression of a child’s robotic toy.

  “Where will they put the brain?” one of the acolytes was asking.