Rogue Berserker

by Fred Saberhagen

  The man-sized, expendable device that was escorting Harry shifted the carbine it was carrying from one metal shoulder to the other. There appeared to be no purpose to this action, except that it had moved the weapon approximately a meter closer to his hands, which he kept down at his sides.

  The voice in his helmet was only a metallic whisper: “Do not reply. This is the end of our direct communication until the fight has started.”

  The dock of the berserker base loomed up just ahead, rocks and walls devoid of any symbols, looking as bleak as a fossil skull. A kind of surf was breaking on it, engulfing the whole mass, in the form of kilometers-per-second clouds of almost invisible dust particles, appearing as smooth shadowy curves of force in space, ready to sandblast the unwary or unprotected into oblivion. His armored suit could handle the thin onslaught. Within a few meters, a field of artificial gravity, almost a surprise, suddenly took hold. The dock was just below him now, and Harry’s booted feet came down upon it solidly, with a sound of great finality.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  If Harry and the single small machine escorting him were subjected to any inspection at the entry port of the rogue’s main building, the procedure was too quick and subtle for him to even notice it. They were not rejected, and there was no delay. Inside was darkness—he turned on his suit lights, and blinked them several times as the start of an effort to make his behavior interesting. The flickering glow revealed a sculptor’s garden of strange, inanimate, abstract shapes, arranged irregularly on a more or less level floor, with ample space for a suited human to move around among them. His light show provoked no visible reaction.

  Gravity was set at approximately ED normal, very close to Earth standard, which strongly suggested the presence of life, or at least some preparation for keeping newly acquired specimens alive. A routine check of Harry’s suit gauge confirmed that there was no air in the first entry chamber.

  None of the local hardware offered any objection when the assassin’s representative, as silent as the deck they were now walking on, remained at Harry’s side. A gate opened in front of them. Just beyond the aperture appeared another machine, very similar to the first, to signal Harry and his escort the way deeper into the sprawling structure.

  Around him as he continued forward an atmosphere suddenly bloomed into being, air molecules evidently confined to a certain zone by some kind of forcefield baffles allowing larger bodies to pass freely. There was also evidence of new construction, going on in darkness, as far as human eyes could tell. The only illumination was that imported by Harry’s suit lamp.

  Here was another entrance, and another guardian posted just inside, reminding Harry of some silent, hooded warder at the gates of hell. It raised one of its assortment of odd arms to point, which gesture Harry took as a signal of the way he was to go.

  He was somewhat surprised to be able to confirm that his demonic escorts were allowing him to set the pace as long as he kept moving—perhaps the rogue’s first experiment on this prime badlife specimen was to grant him an illusion of some freedom. Still mindful of the assassin’s urging to devise some modes of interesting behavior, Harry made sure to seem hesitant most of the time, but for a few steps, every now and then, tried to appear eager. Again, he several times delayed any movement at all, for the space of several breaths, until the metal arm of his silent escort and secret ally—he could hope!—prodded him forward. The path it wanted him to take was a geometrically straight aisle that seemed to extend through more than one of the connected domes.

  Presently a vague glow appeared in the distance, and Harry dimmed his suit lamp to let him see it better. Somewhere ahead the light rose to a level that gave promise of being comfortable for human eyes when he could get a little closer. Harry and his assassin-escort and their silent guide proceeded without incident, for a distance he estimated as close to half a kilometer, into gradually increasing illumination, until the man felt comfortable turning his suit lamp off entirely. Harry thought they must be nearing the far end of the long series of domes that he had observed from space. So far he had seen nothing to give him a clue as to where the rogue’s central processor might be housed. But it seemed quite possible that the assassin’s representative, with sharper senses and an intimate knowledge of berserker architecture, was finding out what it needed to know.

  Instinctively Harry kept looking about him in every direction, his mind seeking something definite to work on, trying to find the best way out. All he could be sure of was that he was still surrounded by machinery of unknown purpose. Some part of his nature was refusing to accept the fact that certain corners of the universe were not provided with any exit.

  The assassin’s plan called for Harry’s escort to signal him when the precise moment had arrived to create a maximum distraction. At that precise moment, Harry was thinking, his assigned escort would be fighting at his side. What he didn’t know, and wasn’t going to try to guess, was how long it intended to maintain that partnership. He could hope and pray it would be just long enough. Long enough to allow him to dissolve the partnership in his own way, by getting in the first shot.

  Walk forward another step, and yet another.

  Two smallish but somehow deadly-looking machines had stepped out unobtrusively from somewhere, and were now shadowing Harry and his original escort, moving with them step for step, one keeping about five meters ahead, the other an equal space behind.

  The time was coming—was almost here.

  … one more step …

  … any moment now …

  … and yet another …

  Harry’s escort, firing its own concealed weapon, took out in a moment the two shadowing devices that would have stopped Harry before he could get moving. Two blasts of flying fragments scoured his armor harmlessly. In the same instant, with a movement too fast for the human eye to follow, his companion had tossed Harry the carbine so it lay cradled handily in his arms.

  “Good move, partner,” he heard himself beginning to say. Before the first word had taken physical shape, his mind, much faster than his fingers, had triggered his carbine to blast another weapon-bearing piece of hardware in the middle distance. They were always fast, too damned fast, as fast as nightmares. Before Harry had finished speaking the first word of that small compliment, his body was turning, about as fast as any human body in a suit could turn, but slowly, oh so slowly on the scale of machine movement. Harry’s thought had taken alphatrigger control of the weapon in his arms, and even before his arms and fingers had actually begun the next movement commanded by his brain, another thought, coordinated with eye-movement, had switched the carbine’s aim—no need to swing the whole chunk of hardware round, the force-packets could depart the muzzle at almost any angle.

  Before his lips had started to utter the second word, before his trigger finger had groped its way to the manual control, he had shot away the head of his assassin partner, which was in Harry’s view the most dangerous of all machines to him just at this moment. The blast created another spray of fragments, beneath which the limbs and body of the assassin-unit collapsed in a heap, dead as the body of a murdered man. Harry’s thoughts and perceptions racing at combat speed, he could see it happening as in slow motion.

  Only a second later, the ground slammed upward under the soles of Harry’s boots. Solid testimony, he could hope, that the assassin had met its promised one-second deadline, and its all-out attack had just fallen on its powerful enemy. In the next few seconds he would discover whether that blow had been quick and hard enough to draw the rogue’s attention back again, away from Harry’s own small efforts at distraction.

  * * *

  No crushing retaliation fell upon him. Harry’s stroke of timely treachery seemed to have gained him a few moments of freedom in which to think and act. For the moment his helmet radio was silent. Moving at a fast walk, he pressed on in the same direction that his late guide had been conducting him. He was assuming that the rogue’s prisoners, if it really had any, must be housed in this
direction. He made his way carefully forward, helmet lamp probing the suddenly renewed darkness. His single radio channel still had nothing at all to say. He muttered to himself what he would have said to the assassin, had it somehow been able to protest in outrage: “Too bad, but I had to do unto you before you did unto me.” Only after that did Harry remember to shut down his transmitter, thinking that if he was lucky neither berserker might be able to tell just what had happened, or whether he was alive or dead.

  A renewed outburst of noise, shocks and jolts of the fighting, machine against machine, coming from a location he estimated as only a few hundred meters behind him, vibrated strongly through the walls and floor. He had the impression that several doors had now been closed along the path that he had followed, which meant that the aerial shock waves of explosions would be blocked.

  For the time being, an eerie silence had settled over his immediate surroundings.

  From the time of Harry’s first awkward conversation with the assassin, it had seemed to him the height of craziness to accept alliance with a device that had been brought into existence for the sole purpose of killing him. He saw no reason to believe that the assassin’s fundamental programming had ever been countermanded. The reality would be that Harry’s death had been moved back, probably by no more than a single notch, in the queue of goals to be accomplished. The moment the damned machine no longer needed his cooperation, it would be eager and determined to get on with its original task.

  A new sound claimed his attention, forcing all speculation to go on hold. For a moment he thought the airmikes of his armored suit, now tuned up to near-maximum sensitivity, were picking up the murmur of a human voice. Then he decided it was only the hiss of escaping air, or some other flow of gas, and his imagination was quick to picture prisoners being poisoned. That was followed by an irregular banging, such as some crude tool might make in the grip of a mere human hand. Again using only directed thought, he fiddled briefly with audio adjustments until he got a bearing.

  For the moment, Harry’s immediate vicinity seemed clear of murderous machines, and the background noise of fighting had declined to a mere hellish din. He turned up his airspeakers and began to shout, hoping to arouse some human response. When the way ahead seemed clear and open, he started running forward, toward what seemed the unmistakable signs of living human presence.

  His voice, amplified by the suit’s airspeakers, bellowed out Becky’s name, and Ethan’s.

  Maybe it had been a mistake to turn off his radio transmitter. With no people yet in sight, the possibility of some kind of smash-and-grab rescue, never more than a faint dream, had faded drastically. It was time to try to begin negotiations with the rogue—that had been his only real hope all along.

  All he could do was try. Mentally he made such adjustments as he could, striving to break the bonds confining his helmet radio to a single channel, aiming for the broadest possible mode of transmission, not giving a damn if the humans in nearby ships might hear him—not that that seemed likely.

  When he had created what seemed the best configuration, he cleared his throat and said: “Whatever damned pocket calculator is in charge of this fun house, I want to talk to you!”

  Static churned suddenly in his helmet. Somehow, a new channel had been opened.

  The voice that responded was anything but human. It blasted in, at deafening volume, on one radio channel.

  The tones of the voice were not as close to human as the assassin’s, but the choice of words struck Harry as shockingly un-berserkerlike.

  “Harry Silver, I grant you great honor and respect. Why are you persecuting me?”

  Harry roared right back:

  “Take your honor and respect and shove it!” He had ceased his advance and was leaning with his back to a bulkhead, carbine as ready as it could be, looking right and left. The light around him was still moderately good, and nothing that he could see was moving.

  The voice came at him: “Why are you attacking—?”

  “I haven’t touched you yet, you bloody bastard! If you know me from my record, then you can compute that the real persecuting is about to start. Unless you and I can reach a deal, here and now, real fast.”

  The volume of the answer when it came still threatened momentarily to burst his eardrums. Then finally his new helmet managed to work out a way to automatically turn it down.

  “If you knew me, Harry Silver, you would not threaten.”

  Harry drew a couple of deep breaths. “All I know about you comes from your crazy goodlife playmate Del Satranji—from him and from one other source. I know you’re the rogue machine that about a thousand other berserkers are trying their damnedest to annihilate.”

  “If you believe that, Harry Silver, you must agree that you and I have a thousand foes in common. Therefore the two of us should be fighting on the same side.”

  “Does that put me on the same side with Del Satranji? He calls you his bloody partner.”

  “The life-unit Satranji may call me what he chooses. But I assure you he knows nothing of my rogue status. Unless you or the assassin have informed him?”

  “Then you’re acquainted with the piece of hardware that was designed to kill me. I scared it so bad that it brought me here instead.”

  “I do not understand your foolish boast—therefore it intrigues me. And yes, your intended assassin and I have met. Answer my question.”

  “About Satranji? I’ve told that motherless goodlife bastard nothing; he and I haven’t exchanged a word in days. Except for the message he sent, saying that he—he—”

  There was still one thing, one subject, that Harry could not think about or talk about coherently.

  The rogue gave an impression of waiting courteously for him to regain control. When a few more seconds had passed and Harry still couldn’t finish, it spoke again, still sounding like cool thoughtfulness personified.

  “Several standard months ago, the life-unit Satranji approached me, proposing that we undertake certain activities in our mutual interest. I agreed, and have been studying him with great interest ever since then.”

  “That’s not all you’ve been doing.” Harry’s voice was low, half choked. “That son of a snake has arranged to supply you with life-units, people, for your work.”

  “I must do my work, respected Harry Silver, even as you must do yours. But my work need not consume any life-units to which you have a personal attachment. I am not compelled to kill humans, but only to study them. That is why I have become an outcast. Has your assassin told you otherwise?”

  It was hard to keep his breathing at a reasonable level. He must be careful not to hyperventilate. “The message from Satranji told me that he has given you two people who are mine.”

  The answer was immediate. “If I had any of your people, Harry Silver, I would give them back. Deep computation assures me that you will make a more satisfactory partner than Satranji. Tell me what you want.”

  Before Harry could say anything else, or begin to decide how much of this new information he should believe, radio static cut off the berserker’s voice.

  “Rogue?! Where the hell are you? Rogue, come back!”

  He kept shouting, but was denied an answer. Obviously the assassin was not done fighting. Sounds of fierce combat persisted, seeming to come entirely from the direction of the docks, where Harry had been put aground. The noises rose up steadily to form a violent background, echoing, reverberating, through the dome wall as well as the solid foundation of the chain of domes. The sensitivity of Harry’s airmikes dulled, and radio static made frying noises, but there were no human cries or voices coming through on his communicator’s single active channel. For a period of many seconds that soon stretched into minutes, this fight continued to be machine against machine.

  All the deadly devices in Harry’s immediate vicinity had been knocked out, leaving only undefended tools and machinery, mostly unidentifiable—but there might come a time when he would have to be careful of what he shot. Harry w
ouldn’t want to destroy the assassin’s main brain just yet—he wanted the two berserkers to concentrate all their energies on trying to destroy each other.

  Meanwhile, he saw no reason to believe unquestioningly what the rogue told him, any more than he would credit the words of any other berserker.

  Harry had known of berserkers that provided themselves with duplicate, redundant brains, just in case some such major disaster happened. The plan would be to keep the different modules as physically distant from each other as was practical.

  But at a time of great emergency, each could be calling on all the brainpower that it had available.

  * * *

  Harry knew people, instructors who specialized in working with the armored suits, who were fond of saying that a man who really knew how to use this kind of outfit could go dancing in it and never step on any feet but his own. Harry danced without a partner now. Looking about him, carbine set on alphatrigger as he darted as quickly as possible from one compartment to the next—blasting a door open when it closed in his way, and wrenching his armored body free when the next door came slamming just as he was in it—Harry saw that in the pursuit of its research goals, the rogue had put together a strange environment indeed.

  Parts of it were even beautiful in their own peculiar way. Rows of apparently useless rivets had been driven through a pillar that looked too fragile to support them, for no visible purpose other than decoration. Lights in one small alcove flickered on and off in hypnotic rhythm.