Rogue Berserker

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Lift it,” Gianopolous suggested. When Harry only looked at him, he smiled his superior smile, and made an encouraging gesture. “Go ahead.”

  Harry tried and promptly succeeded, his one-handed effort meeting amazingly little resistance. When he raised one edge of the lightweight camouflage, his hand briefly turned into a lumpy projection of the composite material of the dock. Looking beneath, he finally got a good look at the secret weapon. Pulling the covering farther away, he gawked some more. The vessel had been specially built and equipped to look externally very much like one of the smaller standard models of berserker spacecraft.

  It took a real mental effort for Harry to make himself reach out and touch the hull, while trained-in instinct was clamoring for his body to back away.

  Meanwhile, the inventor’s assistant, Perdix, had started rolling up the camouflage, bringing the entire small ship into clear view. With robotic neatness Perdix was folding and packing it into a compact bundle. Perdix was vaguely male, nothing nearly as lifelike as Dorijen.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Harry muttered. “We can hope. Where’s the entry hatch?”

  Gianopolous smirked. “Bet you can’t find it.”

  “Bet I’m not going to play games.”

  That got rid of the smirk for the time being. The look of restrained and noble suffering that replaced it was almost as irritating.

  The entrance to the main airlock was indeed quite cleverly concealed, in the space between two squat imitation beam-projector turrets. Once admitted to the ship’s interior, Harry went through the accessible compartments, looking things over. He maintained a fairly rapid pace, but he was thorough, and in no hurry. All of the weaponry currently installed appeared to be fake, boiler plate and quaker cannons installed to aid the engineering of the overall design. As long as there was no need to use it, this hardware could also provide a convincing imitation of standard berserker gear. But with Winston Cheng’s resources, what was lacking ought to be readily suppliable. Again, as always, there was the nagging question of how much time battle preparation was going to take.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, when Harry had finished a preliminary inspection of the entire vessel, he told Gianopolous: “Very convincing. But you must find it a little dangerous to drive around in this thing. Every time you enter an inhabited system, the automated defenses must—”

  “Ah, but you see, it doesn’t have this appearance, visually or on any observer’s holostage, when I, as you put it, drive around. It won’t look like this when you and I deliver it to your mysterious patron.”

  Harry frowned. “What will it look like?”

  “Nothing that would interest any ED defense. Come back to the control room, I’ll show you.” Now Gianopolous’s triumphant look was back, that of a master of secret knowledge.

  Harry was soon given a brief look at how the special shape-changing equipment worked.

  It really was impressive. Very much so. What had looked, and even felt, like solid elements of the hull had now shifted into new shapes and new positions, changing visual size and contour and even the texture of their surfaces. No more a Type-B berserker, but a nondescript, more or less standard model courier or utility boat. The apparent type was now one barely capable of interstellar travel, that would be riskier and slower in that mode than the vessels humans usually employed.

  Then, in less than a standard minute, Gianopolous and his well-trained cadre of onboard computers orchestrated the shift back to berserker shape. Inside the control room and the crew quarters, the only visible change was in certain readings on the flight instruments. These assured the humans inside that the transformation was complete. Harry opened a hatch and went out of the ship and stood on the dock to confirm the transformation, which from that viewpoint certainly looked convincing. In the middle distance, a small assortment of Templars had paused in whatever they were supposed to be doing, to watch the show.

  Harry went back in through the hatch, to confront the silent, beaming triumph of the man now occupying the pilot’s chair.

  “The illusion will hold for any kind of radar, for … ?”

  “Of course. For any test, for any probe the enemy might use, short of actual physical contact.”

  “You can do the conversion both ways while in flight?”

  “Of course.” Gianopolous, his spirits fully recovered, was ready once more to sing the praises of his own invention: “Otherwise I have the devil’s own time, I can tell you, approaching any Templar base with it. Each time one must go through a slow, painstaking process of convincing the defenses I’m not what I appear to be. Same goes for the Force, of course. All automated defenses insist the shape is that of a berserker, no matter what identifying signals I present.”

  Harry let himself down slowly on the copilot’s couch. The foundation of some of his recent thinking had shifted, leaving him looking at things from a different viewpoint. His mind was suddenly too busy with important things to care whether the inventor smirked or not. “I take it you haven’t actually tried sneaking up on any berserkers yet.”

  Gianopolous was content to answer that with a mysterious smile. But naturally he would have recorded any such encounter, had it taken place—and he would certainly be boasting of it.

  * * *

  Eventually Harry had concluded his preflight check, and the two of them were getting ready to lift off from the Templar base. In the dome overhead, the inner curtain of the enormous forcefield airlock scrolled back.

  A minute later, the ship was outside the dome and they were on their way, with Harry in the pilot’s seat.

  Apart from the familiar pilot’s and copilot’s chairs, and attached helmets, the control room had an idiosyncratic layout. It also contained a fair amount of equipment that Harry at first glance could not identify.

  “That, of course, will be the real test, Harry. The moment of truth. But there are some valid preliminary experiments that could be made.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Not, of course, by approaching any machine that realized it was being held in captivity—like the little drama we just witnessed in the Templar temple. That would undercut the validity of any results that might be achieved.”

  The inventor paused briefly, sighing. “Until very recently, Harry, I had nursed hopes of persuading the Templars to graciously provide me with a fully active berserker for such a test.”

  Harry was staring at him. Then he shook his head. “Don’t hold your breath until that happens. If I know Templars, Darchan and his people are never going to risk turning any active berserker loose, letting it get out of their control. No. But just possibly, if you had asked for some crippled, disabled unit, something like what we saw today …”

  “No. Out of the question. It would be utterly useless for my purposes.”

  * * *

  Not only was Harry by nature disinclined to salesmanship, but he realized it would be difficult to do any recruiting without letting the subject know what kind of operation he would be consulting for. Harry decided that if a reasonable chance came up during the drive to 207GST, he would put in a good word for Cheng as an employer. If not, he would leave the salesmanship to those back on the base who were psychologically better equipped to handle that kind of thing.

  Gianopolous was showing signs of optimism for a change. He seemed glad, perhaps even a touch eager, to give Harry a tour of his special ship. Emil Darchan was a skilled pilot in his own right. And Harry was interested in finding out why the abbot, after making a series of inspections and flight tests, all presumably aided by a crew of Templar experts, had decided not to grab the secret weapon for his own organization.

  Maybe, Harry thought, despite Emil’s protests of secrecy, he should have tried to pump his old friend for more information.

  But at the moment he had to deal with the inventor. Harry never cared for trying to find things out by dropping subtle hints. “Why didn’t the Templars want this ship?” he asked bluntly.

  Professor Gi
anopolous was unperturbed. “Oh, I wouldn’t say they didn’t want it.”

  “Well, they didn’t take it.”

  Gianopolous was silent.

  Harry found it irritating to be ignored. “Did they ever make you an offer? Or maybe they thought you were asking too much?”

  Now the inventor turned on him with a haughty look. “Harry, look—are you empowered by your employer to conclude a deal, including the financial terms?”

  “No, not at all. I’m just a test pilot.”

  Gianopolous smiled his superior smile. “Then, with all due respect, I prefer to reserve my discussion of money matters until I can talk to the people who make decisions.

  “As for the Templars, let’s just say there were were certain difficulties, or the Templar bureaucrats believed there were. In the end, we could not agree on terms. Who can fathom the ways of a bureaucracy?”

  Harry let it go at that. He was thankful that negotiation was not his job. The man seemed disinclined to talk about anything except how great his ship was, and how great he was to have invented it. How much of all the spouting had any relation to the truth would not be easy to determine.

  * * *

  Gianopolous was proud of his creation—as well he might be, Harry thought. “What you see is actually the easy part of the transformation—it’s in the communication codes, the identification of friend or foe, where I have surpassed all previous human efforts.”

  Harry grunted. If someone could really fake a Type-B berserker as effectively as this—then he didn’t see why it should be impossible for someone to imitate a Type A as well. Maybe, with a somewhat greater effort and investment, to convincingly fake an entire berserker attack.

  “Anything wrong, Silver?”

  “I’m not sure …” Then Harry asked suddenly: “This ship won’t imitate a Type A, will it?”

  Gianopolous drew himself up, as if Harry had asked whether all this noble hardware could make popcorn. The inventor sounded vaguely injured. “As a matter of fact it can—I was planning to demonstrate that later.”

  “Sorry if I forced your hand,” Harry muttered, staring at the bulkhead in front of him.

  “What is it, Silver?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. Just let me think for a minute.” Now looming foremost in his thoughts was a small pile of scrap parts, fragments retrieved near the place where Becky and Ethan had been grabbed. Even if this ship could somehow have been fitted with real weapons, used to imitate a real berserker for the purpose of his family’s kidnapping, whoever worked the scheme must also have been able, somehow, to commandeer a squad of genuine berserker boarding machines, or impeccable imitations, to do the actual kidnapping.

  It was maddening. Here and there, now and then, a couple of pieces of the puzzle looked like they might fit together. But still none of it really made sense.

  Harry swept his gaze around the modest interior space of the control room. If a squad of such near-anthropomorphic killers had ever been aboard this vessel they were certainly gone now. Well, he was going to be conducting a thorough inspection of the ship, as a purchaser’s test pilot had every right to do. He wasn’t going to find a berserker, but there might be … something.

  He had the sensation of edging close to some kind of revelation. It stirred unsettling hopes, even while the nature of what that epiphany might be remained obscure.

  He pressed Gianopolous: “And this is your only model? I mean, you don’t have another working prototype anywhere? Like a berserker boarding machine, for instance?”

  The inventor seemed remotely hurt by the suggestion. “No, sir, I do not. If you had any conception of the amount of time, effort, and expense that have gone into the creation of this ship, you would not ask.”

  “And no one else is building anything like this—doing this kind of thing.”

  “That no one else is imitating berserkers successfully seems a safe bet, my friend. No one else in this sector of the Galaxy, certainly, or in either of those adjoining.” Gianopolous paused. “Your patron will not be able to buy this more cheaply from anyone else. Indeed, I think he will not get even a poor imitation elsewhere at any price.”

  Harry grunted. Saving his patron money had been about the furthest idea from his thoughts.

  Gianopolous seemed to enjoy the idea of getting acquainted with Harry, who in his own offbeat way was also something of a minor celebrity, and he seemed to want to adopt Harry as an ally. The inventor was also glad to have a more or less sympathetic ear into which he could pour his disappointment and outrage over the cool reception that all the major organizations had so far given him and his ideas. Harry had finally revealed the identity of their sponsor, though not the specific nature of the planned project, and the revelation had boosted his passenger’s self-esteem to a new level. A deal with Winston Cheng, when it could be publicly announced, would serve as powerful vindication for the scorned inventor.

  “Hah. I have been assured so often that what I have already done is quite impossible, that anyone else would have been discouraged.”

  Everyone who knew Harry knew that he, too, tended to fit the model of the eccentric outsider. And such was his reputation.

  * * *

  Perhaps they had been traveling for an hour or so when Harry, nagged by a sense of duty unperformed, finally came out with his sales pitch—if his half-hearted effort could be called that. He had already revealed his sponsor’s name—the coordinator had assumed he would have to do that, once matters had progressed this far.

  “I can tell you this much. It’s likely that Winston Cheng is going to try to talk you into taking a job with him. As some kind of a consultant.”

  “Ah.” Though Gianopolous tried to conceal it, he gave the impression of being pleased at being invited to play in such a big league. Or maybe it was just the vision of vast amounts of money about to come his way. He asked: “You’ve heard this from the great man himself?”

  “That’s right. Matter of fact I’ve talked to him several times in the last few days.” That certainly made an impression, though Gianopolous was struggling not to show it. Harry didn’t bother to explain that talking to the great man was no marvelous sign of favor. Cheng might have some reputation as a recluse, but in this emergency he talked freely to everyone who might be of help. Nodding, he assured the professor: “Your name came up more than once.”

  The inventor announced, as if he were gracefully granting some concession, that he was glad to have Harry traveling with him aboard his ship, that he felt confident they could reach an agreement on the final details regarding sale of his ship, and that he might be willing to accept the rather mysterious job offer from Harry’s employer.

  Harry was a superb pilot, and perhaps even Gianopolous was content to have Harry drive his special ship rather than preferring to settle the pilot’s helmet on his own head.

  “You know, Silver, I think the maneuverability is actually improved with you at the controls.” Gianopolous sounded faintly surprised. But for someone in whose importance he was gradually beginning to believe, like Harry, he was willing to condescend to be gracious.

  Harry made a sound indicating insincere surprise. “People tell me I sometimes have that effect. Well, it’s not hard to drive. It’s a good ship.”

  The inventor offered what he probably intended to be a winning smile, but his face wasn’t quite designed for that. “The truth is, though I do well enough at the controls when I put my mind to it, I don’t really enjoy the job. Often I prefer to just turn on the autopilot, tell my ship where I want to go, and sit back to take a nap or think about something else.”

  Harry mumbled something. He often preferred to use that method himself. It would almost always get you where you wanted to go, and usually without too much delay. But for the sake of speed and efficiency at all times, and to improve the chance of survival in a variety of unusual conditions, space combat being the classic example, it was better to have a skilled human brain in the control loop as well.

  Gia
nopolous didn’t want to let it drop. “The truth is, Silver, I’m subject at times to a touch of space sickness. Especially when the ports are cleared in flightspace—you won’t mind if we keep them closed?”

  Harry looked up. “There are one or two tests that will require a brief clearing. I’ll let you know, and you can clear out of the control room.”

  “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Still Harry had never heard the inventor refer to Cheng’s prospective purchase by any name other than “my ship” or “my invention.” Harry found this vaguely disturbing, and in his own mind had christened the vessel with his own private choice, Secret Weapon. Not imaginative, but practical. He had yet to try the name on anyone else.

  Crew quarters on the Weapon were fairly small, even for a small ship, but still the cabin space was more than adequate for two people. Any Templars or other visitors who might have been hinting that they could use a ride somewhere had been blandly ignored, and Harry was misleading about the direction he was going next.

  Gianopolous expressed his relief that there were going to be no additional passengers. He said he didn’t want any more Templars poking their noses aboard, trying to copy this ship’s secrets without paying for them.

  “You think they want to do that?” Harry asked.

  “A lot of people would.” For a moment the inventor looked gloomy. “Too many people have seen it already.”

  Harry paused in his inspection of an empty locker. “I thought you said only a couple of Templars had been aboard—was there anybody else?”

  “No—oh no. In my work I use robot assistants exclusively. The memories of all but Perdix were wiped clean afterward.”

  Harry glanced across the cabin at Perdix, who was waiting with a robot’s usual perfect imperturbability, and had no comment.