Rogue Berserker

by Fred Saberhagen

  “It’s about that time when I always get the feeling that I can’t depend on anything. But you know what? So far I’ve usually been wrong. Now, have you at least read the manual?”

  Harry had been prepared to insist that he was going in with the primary assault team, and he was well satisfied that neither Cheng nor Lady Masaharu had any idea of assigning him to any other job.

  * * *

  The great access of physical strength provided by the servo-powered suits was fun, in a way, exhilarating, but it too required some getting used to. Some equipment had already been damaged, and with some difficulty replaced. Miniature hydrogen lamps mounted in backpacks powered the suits’ limbs, giving the wearer a kind of weightless feel, to which some people tended to become addicted.

  Well, some might, but Harry wasn’t having any. Dealing with the complicated hardware over the course of many years had made him something of a connoisseur. He had started out hating the stuff, but gradually had come to feel something like affection for some of it. Solid, dependable weapons and other combat gear had saved his skin more times than he liked to count. Still, for almost all his life he had believed that a man had to be crazy to go looking for a fight. And that went double if you were contemplating an attack on berserkers.

  Louise Newari, standing among the majority of people who were soon to be evacuated, said to Harry: “So now you have gone crazy.”

  “Yeah, that’s about it.”

  Thinking about people who fought brought Satranji to mind, as a prime example—though maybe Del was just the man to pilot Chen into the inferno that he sought.

  Harry had never particularly enjoyed even wearing a spacesuit, or doing anything that made wearing a spacesuit necessary. People tended to show surprise when he told them that, and he had never quite understood why.

  Piloting in itself was almost always fun, but the way to do it was from the comfortable interior of a well-built ship. He had to admit, though, that the suit and other gear he had been issued on this base were well constructed; Winston Cheng’s builders and armorers knew what they were about.

  * * *

  Gianopolous, still trying to find a way to get off the wanderworld and back to the safety of a laboratory somewhere, was not in on the final briefing. The Lady Masaharu, moving about in her own distinctive set of armor with what seemed perfect familiarity, was engaged with all the others on a last rehearsal of the plan: Once the raiders had ridden Gianopolous’s tricky ship in past the outer defenses, the fierce protective barriers that must be presumed to exist on any berserker installation, the plan called for them to go for its inanimate heart with a commando crew of humans and machines.

  Striking as swiftly as the machines housing their human bodies could be driven by human thought, optelectronic relays, and fusion power, they would destroy or disable or find a way to dodge whatever fighting machines opposed them. They would go on to locate the prison cells. Of course, such cells also could only be presumed to exist; the idea that any prisoners were, or ever had been, held at this hypothetical base was still only speculation, possibility grafted onto possibility, half wishful and half born of fear and horror.

  The lady was going on: “Very well then, suppose we’ve reached our goal. We occupy the interior of the enemy base, and inside it there is more than a dense mass of machinery, there is space enough to move around. Suppose by that time we have discovered evidence of human life. What next?”

  “The welfare of the prisoners will come first. What that will mean in specific details we won’t know until we get there.” It might mean anything from quick mercy killing to joyous homecoming.

  “All right. Next?”

  “We have to somehow disarm any destructor charges that the enemy might have in place. We have to look for evidence of them, at least.”

  The review went on. Presumably by the time any actual prison cells were reached, the surprised and thwarted enemy would have made some effort to summon help. If berserker reinforcements were available somewhere relatively nearby, so they could reach the scene in, say, a standard hour or less, the game of Operation Rescue would be up—but there was no use trying to take that into their calculations.

  The speaker paused, looking from face to face. “Then—assuming some useful number of us are still alive at that point—we will gather, for the purpose of evacuation, whatever other life we can discover there. Of course giving priority to the human. And, naturally, highest priority to the family of Mister Winston Cheng. And that of Harry Silver.”

  To talk of rescue and evacuation is all pure fantasy, insisted an interior voice of reason in Harry’s ear. The only likely scenario is that all three of our ships will be blasted into clouds of atomic particles, a few seconds after the base defenses pick us up. But Harry had given up on the voice of reason some time ago. Despite the fact that Louise Newari would like him to listen to it.

  * * *

  When the crew had finished talking their way through the rehearsal there was a pause. Everyone was staring at a holographic model of their objective, a blurry image that was the best the machines could do with the sparse information available. There had been no point in trying to create any detailed mockup of berserker defenses, or to model the base itself in any detail. The recon images were simply not good enough to let the planners do much more than guess any of the details. About all they could be sure of was the chain of half a dozen domes, smoothly graduated in size.

  Sooner or later, in an anticlimax to the final planning session, someone murmured: “When you spell the whole thing out in detail, it begins to sound insane.”

  Logic insisted that as the hours and days went by, the chances must be steadily declining that any human prisoner would be found alive—and that any that might be found would still be recognizable by their next of kin.

  There were no public discussions of that last possibility, and none were needed.

  But eventually someone raised the point.

  The answer was: “Not really. Our chances can’t actually be getting smaller—not if they were zero to begin with.”

  * * *

  On one occasion, years ago, Harry had been perfectly sure that Becky was dead. That had turned out to be all a mistake, an illusion brought on by an ordinary accident. But now Harry wanted to be done with illusions. He wasn’t going to let Winston Cheng’s crazy fatalism, that sometimes sounded like optimism, trick him into believing that the woman he loved could be miraculously resurrected one more time. The universe didn’t work that way. Unless the universe itself turned out to be some kind of an illusion. Which, when Harry thought about it, would be all right with him.

  If you thought about a problem coldly and logically, then all illusions concerning it were supposed to pass away. Well, weren’t they? Harry had never yet been able to think about his own tragedy with any clarity. The shock had simply been too numbing, overwhelming. And now, when at last he was able to look clearly at the grim reality, he saw …

  “What do you see, Harry?”

  “I see myself.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  “I see myself turning into a kind of goodlife.”

  “What?”

  He had seen himself looking for death, embracing death. Not the warmly dead embrace of a sex robot. Worse than that. He had become a death-seeking device of flesh and blood …

  * * *

  The rehearsal on the base was interrupted by a message from the Ship of Dreams.

  Winston Cheng, looking exalted, and at the same time hollow-eyed and very old, was making a final speech to the assembled human members of his secret task force. Harry thought that the tycoon actually looked ill, but at this point that hardly mattered.

  Del Satranji, occupying the pilot’s chair aboard the yacht, was now and then visible in the background.

  No one in the common room seemed to be listening very intently to this pep talk. They had heard it all before, and it was time to get on with doing things.

  The old man was promising e
veryone more extravagant financial rewards for full success, and offered good reasons why he did not intend to accompany the initial assault force in their landing. Age and debility perhaps made any other excuses unnecessary.

  “I know my physical limitations. I’d just be in your way. And quite likely I would die without knowing whether anything had been accomplished. But I do mean to follow closely on your heels. And be assured that if you do not survive, I will not either.”

  The old man also promised to stand by the people who were fighting for him.

  Then he gave an order to his pilot, and Ship of Dreams edged away, taking its position at the agreed distance.

  * * *

  The clangor of a full alarm caught everyone in the common room totally by surprise. Harry’s first thought was: What a crazy time to pick for the first test of the system.

  People looked at each other for a long, blank second.

  There came a punishing shock to the fabric of the wanderworld, briefly overwhelming artificial gravity, so several people were knocked down and had to pick themselves up from the deck.

  Someone demanded: “What the hell was that?”

  “What was—”

  Instinct born of experience had started Harry turning, reaching for his carbine, when another lurch in the artificial gravity sent them all staggering again.

  There had been some concern about stray debris from the Gravel Pit, two hours away by superluminal ship, straying at high velocity as far as 207GST. “One of those motherless rocks has got through the screens and hit us—”

  But somehow Harry knew, this time it wasn’t just a rock, motherless or not.

  People were screaming on helmet intercom, human voices filling the whole range of frequency and terror.

  The whole rocky fabric of the wanderworld was shuddering with what had to be repeated weapons impacts, masking the lighter tremor that meant the sudden reflex launching of a superluminal courier.

  The second thought that occurred to Harry was that the Space Force might have discovered Cheng’s secret enterprise, his private battle fleet which was definitely illegal under several statutes, and were moving to close him down—but no. And it certainly wouldn’t be the Templars. Within moments, Harry knew that his first and worst assumption was correct.

  The armored fingers of Harry’s right-hand gauntlet were closing on the butt of the carbine, but he knew that anything he might be able to do with it would be much too little and too late.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  If Harry had not been buttoned into a full suit of armor, with his helmet on, the concussion might well have cost him an eardrum or two.

  Harry wished he had had the chance to distribute a few more shooting irons to his colleagues. Not that it would have been likely to do them a hell of a lot of good. The main entry hatch, leading directly into the lobby just outside the common room, was blasted violently open from outside. Harry’s eyes and mind registered the stark image of one anonymous person inside going down at once, almost cut in half by fragments. In the next second, berserker boarding machines came pouring in, across the lobby floor and a moment later into the wide common room itself.

  From the first crash of the break-in, Harry had never doubted that these were real berserker boarders. Traditionally such machines were built to the approximate size of ED humans, the better to cope with ED hatches, passageways, and controls. No paddies this time, and no fakes—you might as well mistake a house cat for the carnivore used as berserker fodder in the Trophy Room.

  Some specific but not enormous number of them were coming in, too fast for him to count, through the main airlock leading to the dock—which might well have been left unlocked, or even with one of the double doors standing open, as it had been most of the time. Nobody had wanted to take the time to think about defense, let alone spend time and effort on that line.

  The enemy bodies came in only a narrow range of sizes, but there was considerable variation among them in shape, and also in the weapons with which they were equipped.

  In the midst of deafening blasts and crashes, Harry’s thumb was releasing the safety on the force-packet carbine. The weapon was already fully charged—he liked to keep all of his tools that way—and fate granted him almost a full second in which to shoot the nearest berserker three times, smashing it to rubble, before another machine was suddenly in his face, not dealing death but simply trying to take his weapon away from him. The sound of gunfire peaked around him—he was not the only badlife who had been armed and almost ready.

  Harry knew from experience that in a good strong suit and with a bit of luck he might almost be able to hold his own in this kind of wrestling bout—depending, of course, on just what model of killing machine he had to face. His current foe was beginning the match with more arms than Harry had at his disposal, but almost at once Harry was able to even the odds a bit, getting a double grip on one appendage and breaking it off close to the root. The enemy paid no attention to the loss, but in the next instant some other human being had shot it, finishing it off.

  Force-packets from his fusion-powered carbine pulverized and melted the charging machine that got in their way. Fragments of berserker metal went flying back, while other pieces continued forward with the impetus of its charge.

  Any man or woman who really knew how to use an armored suit could augment effective human bodily strength to a level very close to that of a berserker machine of human size—but no suit could enable a man or woman to match this enemy’s speed. Or its coordination.

  Still, Harry had prevailed in the first round of the fight. As the timeless sequence of the combat unfolded, the suspicion flashed through his mind that while he was doing his best to blast and wreck the machines around him, they were only trying to disarm him.

  Two more assailants were immediately coming after him. He fired at darting forms, moving with machine-tool speed, and missed.

  Human bodies, some already dead and some still living, went flying this way and that. Screams echoed on the intercom, and there were sounds that Harry could not identify.

  Flame flared around his helmet, the glare and heat both baffled by his statglass faceplate. Harry and one of the other assault team members who proved to have a knack for this sort of thing, both got their weapons working briefly, and some shattered berserker parts mingled with the other flying debris.

  * * *

  The action in the common room, and up and down the nearby sections of corridor, was fiercely fought, punctuated by violent explosions. There came a moment when Harry had one of the common room’s cleared viewports in his field of vision, long enough to be able to see that the Secret Weapon had vanished from its berth at the nearby dock. An entire ship couldn’t have been vaporized that quickly, not without someone noticing the blast, so it must have somehow managed to get away just ahead of the attacker’s arrival. Who would have been aboard? The Lady Masaharu almost certainly, probably at the controls. There might not have been anyone else, as far as Harry could remember.

  The modest hold of the Secret Weapon had just been freshly packed with special, undoubtedly illegal, robots, designed and built in one of Cheng Enterprises’ many workshops, especially to kill berserkers. Whether that hardware was going to work as designed or not, it seemed highly unlikely now that it was ever going to do anybody any good.

  * * *

  There was no time to sight, but at point-blank range it would have been difficult to miss. The white glare would have blinded Harry, or burned his face off, without his statglass helmet, and the blast in the confined space might have destroyed his ears.

  Something moving too fast for Harry to really see it grabbed the barrel of his carbine. Unable to knock it away, or pull it from his servo-powered grip, it bent the weapon’s stubby barrel and tore free its connections to the power supply in his suit’s backpack.

  Some of Harry’s teammates were fighting just as hard as he was. Others had been demolished before they could get moving, and one or two had tried to surrender�
��without success.

  Harry got a good look in through someone’s faceplate as the person died, or seemed to die. Doc had at last run out of good advice to offer.

  Harry caught a quick glimpse of the bulbous tip of a berserker firearm, a shiny knob in which he thought he could sense destruction swelling. But death did not leap out at him. Instead, grippers of enormous power were starting to close upon his arms and legs.

  With a surge of effort, exerting the maximum power of his suit, he tore his body free of the enemy’s grasp. His suit could help him move, but it couldn’t provide him with any place to go. Conscious of the painful slowness of mere flesh and blood, he went scrambling, reaching, diving, rolling over a littered deck, trying to pick up a replacement weapon. He had almost reached the locker in which a box of grenades ought to be waiting for him—

  Just as his fingers touched the stock of a spare carbine, a berserker’s grip closed on his left ankle. At the same time Harry’s helmet rang like a gong, its statglass faceplate reverberating under the impact of a direct hit, vibrations dwindling away to nothingness in half a second. But the plate had saved his face.

  Another impact smote his torso. Heavy suit and all, his body went whipping and hurtling through the breathable, carefully humidified air, now fogging with debris and escaping gases.

  Blows that would have crushed the life out of an unsuited gorilla knocked Harry down. He was just congratulating himself on managing to hang on to the new carbine when it was gone, somehow torn cleanly from his grip.

  He kept expecting some fatal impact to puncture his own suit, come right in through armor and fabric to find the ribs and heart, but so far he was still alive, despite an endless ongoing barrage of incidental and glancing blows, from flying fragments of debris and waves of heat, all of which his armor was capable of deflecting. He had the sensation of being pounded with heavy hammers. Nothing like this could just go on and on. But it did.