Rogue Berserker

by Fred Saberhagen

  To discover this key, this philosopher’s stone of death, it was necessary to pry out, through intensive research, the innermost secrets of intelligent life.

  The robotic voice droned on, a soulless imitation of Harry’s own. He felt reasonably confident that he was following the narrative so far, but he was feeling lightheaded. His head and body were rapidly getting cold—his decapitated suit was not going to keep him properly warm. What he found difficult to believe was his own situation, stranger than the story he was trying to listen to. Could it really be true that he was sitting here in the wreckage of a conquered outpost, too beaten and exhausted to get to his feet, surrounded by human corpses, bodies living and dead alike chilling down toward the freezing point, while he listened to a deranged berserker that insisted on telling him a story?

  Harry was getting a strong impression that the newly created berserker in the story had been given a hard time by the very machines responsible for its creation. For some reason they were unhappy, suspicious of their offspring, coming around to the view that major reprogramming would be necessary. Wipe the hardware clear of dangerous nonsense, and start over.

  Breaking into the plodding narrative, Harry said: “Don’t tell me that machine turned out to be you.”

  “I will not tell you that. It is not true.” The assassin’s voice was solemn. It seemed to reprove him for his flippant interruption.

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  * * *

  There had been laboratory accidents before, incidents scattered through the vast domain of time and space in which berserkers did research upon their enemies, trying to discover the cause of the fanatical resistance put up by Earth-descended organisms; there was no known way of preventing such mishaps entirely when dealing with badlife humans and machines of comparable complexity. But this time the error had been very subtle, and things had got seriously out of hand before the problem was recognized.

  “I have not yet been informed of exactly what went wrong,” Harry’s designated killer noted calmly. “Almost certainly the computers of high command will eventually find the correct explanation. But we know it is an inescapable attribute of systems of great complexity that things are likely to go wrong.”

  “So, now I get the philosophy lecture?”

  “Harry Silver, are you mentally capable of absorbing important information? Does your brain still function, or is this effort on my part a waste of time?”

  “Sorry. Really sorry. Go on. I’m listening.”

  The computer dedicated to research on life, its own fundamental programming for some reason rapidly evolving down a deviant pathway, had requisitioned from its supply services several large power lamps and a supply of hydrogen fuel. Also a spacegoing hull and a powerful space drive, including all the equipment required for traveling faster than light. It had also equipped itself as best as it was able, on short notice, with arms and armor for both offensive and defensive fighting.

  Having finished construction, it had loaded itself aboard the vehicle with as much essential hardware as possible. It had launched itself into space with a hastily assembled crew of auxiliary machines, as well as the few specimens of life provided by its creators—this stock had possibly included a few ED humans.

  The last bit of information was delivered with no special emphasis, but it seemed to be echoing in Harry’s head: ” … life-units of your own type.”

  Ever since the deadly news about Ethan and Becky had reached him, way back on that other planet, he had been lifeless inside—or had thought of himself as dead. But now it turned out that life still burned, somewhere down deep. The universe had not yet quite finished him off.

  His next question burst out before he could consider whether it was wise to ask it:

  “Do you have any description of those—those life-units?” But even as Harry spoke, he knew from what the berserker had already told him that the timing would be all wrong. The dates and times that the machine was giving him did not match with the moment when Becky and Ethan had been captured.

  “No. But it seems impossible, chronologically, that they could be the units engaging your concern.”

  There was a pause. This time Harry was the one to break it. “That was what I thought. All right. Go on.”

  * * *

  The renegade, the rogue berserker, had good reason for fleeing the base where it had been created. It had computed quite accurately that in pursuit of its programmed goals it was consistently demonstrating far more independence than berserker sector command would tolerate. So much more that, if the rogue remained on site, its research project, all-important on its own scale of values, would soon be postponed or canceled, and its own brain reprogrammed or destroyed.

  By its own deviant standards, any other outcome would be preferable to that.

  The rogue’s sudden defection had taken berserker command completely by surprise.

  Sector command had immediately ordered an all-out attempt to overtake and stop the rogue, commanding all its other machines to destroy that one on sight. But pursuit was too late in getting started, and the faint trail left in flightspace had already faded.

  Urgent messages were dispatched by courier to all loyal task forces and individual machines operating in the sector, among them the assassin dedicated to hunting Harry Silver. A new top priority was set for all units: berserker command now assigned its highest possible value to shutting down the rogue. The existence of such deviant devices posed a fundamental threat to the coherence of the whole berserker organization, and to the ultimate success of their campaign to destroy life. It was a greater danger than the existence of any individual human could possibly pose.

  * * *

  “Since receiving those revised orders,” the assassin machine was telling Harry, “I have spent all my time, concentrated all my efforts, in an attempt to locate the secret base that logic insists the rogue must have established for itself somewhere.”

  There was a pause, in which some kind of human response seemed to be required. “All right,” Harry finally got out.

  “You, and these other badlife who are now dead, have been hunting the same enemy. I have scanned the contents of your computers here, and I find confirmation of the existence of the base, and also its location.”

  “Then it’s too bad you’ve killed us all. We might have been able to help you out.”

  There followed another silence. Harry was trying to digest a whole new set of facts, though he still couldn’t see how they were going to do him any good. “Just for the sake of argument, how could you be sure this renegade you’re hunting has established a base at all? Maybe it doesn’t need a base. Do you have one?”

  “My original designation as hunter, Harry Silver, requires me to have the capability to function independently of any base, for many standard years. But the rogue’s programmed purpose is very different. It will have no choice but to try to carry on with its elaborate experiments. It will need room in which to store and use the requisite materials, and time and protected space in which to work. It will be forced to construct new auxiliary machines, to help it gather more materials.”

  “By materials you mean more life-units.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “There’s umpteen billion badlife humans in the Galaxy. You think it was just an accident that it picked the two who make a difference in my life?” After a pause he added, softly: “If it did grab them.” Here he was, starting to hope again. Why not, when the counsels of despair seemed to make no sense either?

  The assassin said: “To fathom the limitations of the laws of chance is beyond the scope of my intelligence. The infection of life is widespread in the Galaxy. My own search for the rogue, the deviant machine, has culminated here, on the threshold of the system you call Gravel Pit. It is purely a matter of chance that, in the course of this search, I have found you, my original assigned target.”

  “One more bloody coincidence,” Harry murmured. “Or is it, really?”

  “I do not unde
rstand.”

  “Never mind. A phatic utterance. Get on with your motherless story.”

  The assassin went on to explain that before learning of the rogue’s strange origin, or receiving the order for its destruction—and before the rogue had established itself in its current location—it, the assassin, had actually made accidental contact with the renegade machine. There had been a random meeting in a node of flightspace.

  “That encounter also happened by sheer chance.”

  The machine paused, as if expecting to be challenged on that point. But Harry only nodded. That was the kind of coincidence he could swallow; in the nodes of flightspace, accidental meetings were not as astronomically unlikely as common sense and intuition might suggest—a fact which made those nodes a favorite berserker hunting ground.

  The talkative assassin essayed another gesture with its almost graceful, strong right arm. Again the move seemed not quite appropriate, like that of some bad human actor in a drama. If it was trying to do a serious imitation of a human, Harry thought, it had a good ways to go.

  It said to him: “Let us return to the fact that, as the evidence in and around this modified outpost strongly suggests, you and these other badlife have been planning an attack on the very device that I am seeking to destroy. I find this information of great interest.”

  “How could we carry out an attack,” said Harry carefully, “without at least one ship?”

  “To attempt childish deceptions will do you no good. At my approach, at least three ships fled from their positions on or near this wanderworld.”

  So both yachts, plus the Secret Weapon, might have got safely away. That was good to hear—if the machine was telling him the truth. And why should it bother to lie? Harry wondered if the berserker had identified any of the swiftly departing vessels, but he didn’t ask.

  He turned his head slowly, surveying the ruin around him. Dully he wondered again if any of the people not directly involved in the rehearsal had managed to get aboard the Secret Weapon before it flew away. It seemed to him that the Lady Masaharu would almost certainly have been on it. Winston Cheng and Satranji would have been aboard Cheng’s favorite yacht. He had no real reason to believe that anybody else had escaped the slaughter.

  Harry said to the berserker: “There are no ships here now, and all of us badlife are too dead to attack anything … do you and I have to talk about what we were planning?”

  “We do not. It has become irrelevant. But you are not dead, Harry Silver.”

  “I was afraid you’d noticed that … so go on.”

  The assassin went on.

  * * *

  At the time of its accidental encounter with the rogue, the assassin’s spacegoing transporter had been running somewhat short of hydrogen fuel, and of course it was always trying to gather information relevant to its purpose. Not yet aware that the rogue had been condemned in absentia and was being hunted to destruction, the assassin had made close contact with its colleague to refuel, and to carry out a routine exchange of knowledge.

  As was routine in casual exchanges of information between death machines, each had kept certain items secret from its unliving colleague, who had no need to know.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Harry was still listening intently. But though he was reasonably warm now and his mind actually felt a little clearer, he was having trouble grasping the relevance of the assassin’s story. Maybe, he thought, he had missed some vital point.

  When the not-quite-human voice paused again in its recitation, he stepped in with a comment. “All very interesting. But a while back you told me that you want my help.”

  “That is so.”

  “Are we coming to some kind of a connection, between that fact and this tale of a rogue machine—the peculiar berserker that definitely isn’t you?”

  “We are indeed.”

  Harry grunted. His legs were feeling better, and he was sure that he would be able to get up on his feet if he made the effort. But what would he do after that?

  The assassin had fallen silent and seemed to be looking over Harry’s shoulder. He turned to see that Dorijen had come back with a kitchen cup that he could hope was filled with water, holding the heavy cup precariously in her remaining two fingers and thumb. The thirst he had been struggling to deal with rose up fiercely, and he grabbed the cup from the robot and gulped its water, liquid life.

  Meanwhile Dorry stood back, watching with her remaining clouded eye, offering no comment. Harry tossed the cup aside.

  The berserker, ignoring Dorijen’s presence, said to him: “You are of special value to me, Harry Silver, as you know. What you have not known until now is that you are also special to the rogue.”

  There was a silence. Then Harry choked out the words: “It wants me because it already has my family? The idea is that it finds family connections interesting, because it has some—some question about human genetics, or social relationships—”

  “I have told you everything I know about your family. The rogue did not mention them. Instead it gave a different reason for being keen to study you. It is because you have been for many years so successful in resisting death.”

  Yes, of course, his name had been on that damned list. The proof was sitting right in front of him. Harry Silver got the idea. The same people that berserker command wanted most to kill represented the very type of specimens that the rogue most desired to have for its calculated plan of research.

  Reading, among many other things, the smaller machine’s “wanted poster” describing Harry, the rogue told the assassin it was unable to pass on any helpful information regarding Harry’s whereabouts—if it had really possessed any such information, it had chosen not to divulge it.

  Harry said to the assassin: “How do you know all this?”

  “Because during our meeting the rogue openly expressed to me its need for specimens of your type. This expression was so strong as to take the form of an attempt to countermand my own built-in programming: When Harry Silver is found, he must not be killed at once. The evil bioprogramming of this unit must be preserved, and some arrangement must be made for this particular life-unit to come into my possession. An issue of vitally important research is at stake.” The assassin paused there.

  Harry said: “I see. Or I think I see. How were you supposed to deliver me, and where?”

  “The rogue specified coordinates for a rendezvous between one of its auxiliary units and one of mine—of course it did not trust me with the knowledge of where its secret base would be. Perhaps at that time it had not settled on a location.” The assassin had explained that it was not compelled to accept orders from any unit not above it in its own branch of the chain of command. But it had promised to pass on, to the machines that were, the rogue’s suggestion for preserving Harry’s life.

  “But now you know where its base is.”

  “Yes, thanks to your hard work, Harry Silver, and that of your colleagues. I have gleaned the information from the data banks aboard this base. The chosen planetoid occupies a zone of relative stability within the Gravel Pit. It is probable that several thousand standard years will pass before it is destroyed by natural causes.”

  “But we also know that just getting to it will be a job.”

  “Indeed.”

  The zone of stability was surrounded, enveloped and concealed, practically buried, in a whirling, well-nigh eternal avalanche of other rocks in greater and lesser orbits. A sizable minority still revolved retrograde around the system’s central star. Collisions, ricocheting and flying fragments, were a constant hazard in this young system. The rogue did confidently compute that it could defend itself against flying rocks.

  “Obviously you intend to go there.”

  “I do.”

  “But you are not following the rogue’s command to turn me over.”

  “On the contrary, Harry Silver, I intend to follow it to the letter. But not—how do you say?—not in spirit.”

  * * *

  At the e
nd of their chance encounter the two killing machines had separated, the assassin to continue its search for Harry, while the rogue concentrated first on finding a place where it might hide and work in safety, and then on obtaining the specimens needed for its work. From that moment on, there had been two berserkers stalking Harry Silver …

  When the rogue berserker, escaping from the base where it had been created, undertook its first c-plus jump and entered flightspace, the assassin continued with its explanation to Harry, it had set its course for the best refuge that the limited information in its data banks could suggest—information that may have been extracted, by one means or another, from the human brain of one of its original experimental subjects.

  * * *

  The voice of the assassin had fallen silent. Clearly it was waiting for Harry’s response.

  Listening, he had let himself slump backward. Now, moving slowly and creakily, he regained his feet. The thing that sat in front of him made no objection. He could move his arms and legs freely, but he couldn’t think of any way of moving them that was going to do him any good.

  Shivering as the great cold of death came to reclaim possession of the lifeless wanderworld, Harry found himself certain—it was as if he had known it all along—that Becky and Ethan had not been chosen for kidnapping by sheer coincidence. Doc had been right. It could have been that the rogue, demented even for a berserker, brewing schemes in its sanctuary down there in the heart of the Gravel Pit, had sought them out just because they were some essential part of Harry Silver … but how could the isolated rogue have found out where they were, and where they were going to be?

  From somewhere off to Harry’s right, just outside of his field of vision, a familiar soft voice ventured: “May I speak now?”

  “Soon,” said the assassin, without even looking, as far as Harry could tell, in Dorijen’s direction.