Rogue Berserker

by Fred Saberhagen

  This section of the rogue’s stronghold was all light and air, with ample room to move around in between the clumps of strangeness. The thing in charge might be trying to create an illusion that maybe, after all, conditions here were not too bad for human guests. Here were walls of solid masonry, with what appeared to be the roofs of low, one-story houses looming just beyond. Harry thought he could see ivy climbing on one wall. He got the impression that this had been built in deliberate imitation of ground-bound Earth-descended architecture, copied from some intercepted video. Not that he could have specified the style at the moment.

  Carbine in hand, Harry moved forward. Once he blasted another thing that moved and did not appear to be alive. That would give away his location, if his immediate enemy was currently in any doubt about it, but it might also serve to assure the rogue that he was still alive and armed, it could not forget him entirely while caught up in the intensity of its struggle with its former colleague.

  In addition there was the fact that just vaporizing more berserker metal provided a kind of satisfaction in itself. Harry fired again, at something that looked delicate and difficult to replace, blasting it to fragments.

  Still his radio was silent. Where had the rogue gone? If it was already dead, he feared that his own chances had died with it.

  “Start talking to me again, damn it! If we can’t do business, I’m going to blow your vitals out!” If only he could locate them. At least his voice was sounding better now.

  Maybe the damned rogue was trying to talk to him but couldn’t. Possibly the assassin had already finished it off. Or the two of them had finished each other—but he couldn’t be that lucky. There was no way he could tell.

  Here was a new doorway, and Harry entered a new chamber, with good ambient light—maybe the landlord had just forgotten to turn them off. On the other hand the superintendent of this laboratory might have some special reason for wanting to illuminate every corner, even during wartime. If the rogue was trying to suggest to Harry that it had nothing to hide, it was going to have to work a little harder at the task.

  For just a moment Harry was sure his time had come. He ducked and dodged aside, just as a small horde of man-sized machines, perhaps twelve or fifteen of them, fighter-shapes and worker-shapes all jumbled together, raced past him, rushing toward the fighting from what he thought of as the rear of the great building, the part he had not yet entered. Harry must have been seen by the machines, but he was totally ignored.

  Watch out, assassin—rogue reinforcements are on their way. And yes, three cheers for the assassin too, for enabling him, Harry, to have a few more minutes of pure freedom, here in the laboratory of the rogue mad scientist. To be fair, three cheers for the rogue as well, for giving the assassin a reason to keep Harry alive and bring him to the ball.

  He thought that one of those rushing past bore a strong resemblance to the assassin’s own prime unit, the same one that had put on Harry’s ring in a mad parody of betrothal. But the moving swarm was past him in the bad light before he could tell whether or not he was simply imagining the likeness.

  There came a burst of static in his helmet, and a strangled syllable of voice, as if one of the berserkers had made an effort to talk to him, but had been immediately cut off by the other. Harry could imagine them dueling over channels of communication; in such a struggle the advantage would seem to belong to the rogue, inside whose crystalline and metal guts Harry roamed, looking for lives to save and monsters he could kill.

  Harry moved forward again.

  * * *

  He traversed more doorways. Still there were no human beings in sight, no life of any kind, or anything to signal unmistakably that life was present. Would the rogue kill all its captives quickly, rather than risk their being rescued? It had told him it was not compelled to kill, and if that was true, what greater heresy could there be for a berserker?

  Harry pressed on, determined to reach the prison cells that his eager imagination kept suggesting must lie somewhere close ahead. Reaching those cages, and turning them inside out to make sure whether his family was there or not.

  Around another corner, and he came upon a few small tanks where algae, or something like them, grew under lamps, making a greenish slime. The discovery of true life, here, brought on an unreasonable surge of hope.

  Even after getting a fairly good look at this installation from space, he was surprised at how large it was. But he was advancing rapidly, and surely there could not be much more to discover before he reached the end.

  In the process he was no doubt creating a diversion, and perhaps this was of some benefit to the assassin.

  His progress jolted to a stop.

  Humanity was at last in sight. No. More accurately, something that had once been humanity.

  It was hanging on a wall.

  Horrible experiments had come into view, the most conspicuous of them mounted on a wall right at his elbow. Harry kept telling himself, over and over: This was once a man—part of a man’s rib cage, likely, straightened and flattened out to fit the mounting space. Judging by the dark, coarse hair, and the big bones that showed white where the raw edges of the piece were oozing blood, it could never have been part of a woman or a child.

  Harry realized that he had stumbled and blasted his way into a berserker Trophy Room, the place where they studied their terrible opponent, the swarming, breeding badlife they could never fully understand …

  This was the work to which the rogue was dedicated. It had already reminded him that it had a job to do, and it was tirelessly efficient in its work. It was not compelled to kill, no, only to study. Only to do this.

  There were other trophies on adjoining walls, but he had no need to force himself to look at experiments the rogue must find intensely interesting. He must not allow himself to get sick as he walked between them, or even to be distracted. He had a job to do.

  * * *

  Since the rogue must consider the lives of its experimental subjects to be of great importance, sensitive material not to be casually wasted, it was not astonishing to discover that somewhere in or near its extensive laboratory the devilish machine would probably have accumulated some kind of collection of spacesuits, of protection shaped and provisioned to match the Earth-descended body.

  Harry’s spirits momentarily surged up. He told himself that it wouldn’t be hoarding suits unless it was hoarding prisoners too.

  Here there was even a spare helmet that would fit Harry’s suit. He weighed it in his hand, then tossed it back into storage—if his current helmet was shot away, and somehow his head did not go with it, he would know where to come for yet another one.

  Here was a bank of lockers, that would not have looked too out of place in a room adjoining some peaceful gymnasium on Earth or Esmerelda. The boarding machines that had pillaged ships for the life that they contained might well have also gathered up the means of keeping their new specimens alive.

  Child-sized spacesuits were rare, almost to the point of nonexistence, in military craft and installations. But such gear was common enough in civilian ships, that also made use of cribs and other equipment designed for carrying infants around in conditions that required people to wear spacesuits. There were boxlike carriers that could be passed on from one human or robotic hand to another.

  That compartments and containers would be not only closed but locked was perhaps the strongest evidence yet that other purposeful entities, besides the rogue and its auxiliaries, moved with some freedom in these rooms. Harry shot away the lock on one of them, pulled the door open, and here indeed were suits.

  Wrenching open more of the lockers, rifling them as fast as his armored hands could move, Harry reminded himself that by all reports Ethan as well as Becky had been encased in some kind of spacesuit when the berserker boarding machines hauled them out of the boarded ship and into their own machine. The same had been true of Winston Cheng’s great-grandson, whose suit just might conceivably be here, a special outfit recognizable by
its design and dimensions.

  * * *

  He still had several lockers to go, when his sensitive airmikes picked up a faint sound from behind him. Harry whirled, weapon ready to fire at the speed of thought. A long-haired, bearded man, his lean body stark naked and punctuated at wrists and ankles by what appeared to be some kind of inserted optelectronic terminals, came stumbling around a corner, only to brake to a stop, gesturing surrender, at the sight of Harry’s suited form.

  Three steps behind the first man, a nude woman, hair long and matted, her limbs similarly marked or mutilated, came stumbling into view. Five or six more people in the same condition came tottering behind her. The connections on all their arms and legs, as if waiting for strings to be attached, gave them the look of crude ghastly puppets.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The eyes of the first man to round the corner stayed fixed on Harry, and his hairy lips were stuttering, trying to form words. But it was as if he might have forgotten how. Just behind him, the first woman to appear had fallen to her knees, her arms outstretched in the general direction of their rescuer. Other members of the small group were stopping, paralyzed, as they came around a corner, all of them staring at Harry’s armored figure.

  All the people Harry had seen so far were naked, and all were fitted with jacks or plugs already mortised into their bodies, in a way that left them free to move about, and seemed to be causing no serious pain or inconvenience. Harry assumed that the idea was to make it easier for the machine to follow reactions, and perhaps apply a stimulus now and then.

  At last a few clear syllables spilled from the lead man’s mouth. “Who—? How—?”

  Harry muttered something obscene and pointless. Then his airspeakers rasped out: “Who else is with you? How many people are locked up here?”

  No one seemed able to give him a coherent answer. But one man finally came forward and got out a few words that made sense on a certain level. “I was betting it would be the Space Force who came for us. That’s you, isn’t it? You’re not Templars, or local?”

  By “local,” of course, the man meant from the armed service of some solar system within a few light-years. Meanwhile an especially haggard-looking older woman had come to stand looking at Harry over the speaker’s shoulder. “Where are the others?” she demanded. “How many are with you?”

  “I’m it, lady. The rescue party, the one-man gang. I did have some help getting here, but you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  As Harry spoke he was pushing people out of his way, trying to see past them, looking back in the direction from which they were all coming. “I’ll answer questions later. Right now I’m looking for one special woman and one special child. Tell me, who else is here? This can’t be all of you.”

  The woman was staring past him in the opposite direction, back along the way Harry had come. She said: “I can’t believe you’re alone, we heard a lot of what sounded like fighting.” Suddenly she seemed to remember her nudity, and tried to cover her body with her arms.

  “Someone tell me, damn it, is this all of you? Are there cells back that way? More people still locked up?” Harry had turned his suit lamp on again, and was using it to try to probe the more distant and shadowy reaches of the rogue’s domain.

  Around him people were babbling, trying to convince themselves that they had been set free. Ignoring Harry’s questions, they started complaining not about the gruesome plugs that had been stuck in their arms and legs, but mostly about poor food and the conditions in their cells, as if Harry might be their cruise director. It was all noise that brought him no useful information. None of them seemed to have the faintest idea of the horror that had overtaken their fellow captives, disassembled into tapestries on a wall.

  Precious seconds were sliding by. Before Harry could decide on his next move, the voice of the rogue was once more resounding in his helmet.

  It seemed to have at least temporarily prevailed in the techno-battle, somehow wrested control of the channel that Harry’s radio was tuned to. It was speaking to him clearly, calm as ever. It started to give Harry the precise numbers that he had asked for.

  He cut the berserker off. “Never mind the motherless body count. I want to see all the people that you’re holding, with a priority on one woman and one child in particular. Get ‘em out here, right away.”

  “You will already have observed, Harry Silver, that there are certain units of life which cannot readily be moved.”

  “I don’t mean those.” He couldn’t bring himself to contemplate the possibility that Becky and Ethan might already be hanging on a wall. He couldn’t ask this monster if among its decorations were two who had once been his woman and his child.

  The rogue gave him an answer on the question he had been afraid to ask. “The two people you want are not here.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “The life-unit Satranji claims to be holding your woman and your child as his prisoners. I have been unable to verify his claim. But he has vowed to turn them over to me as part of our agreement.”

  That was a stunner. Harry needed a moment to reorganize his thoughts. “How can he be holding them? Where? And where is he now?”

  “I do not know.” The rogue’s voice had taken on a new tone, odd for any machine, even odder for a berserker, suggesting that it viewed Harry with suspicion. As if it wasn’t sure he could be trusted with all these priceless materials. “As for the life-units you see before you, what will you do with them if I allow you to take them away? Few or none of them will be of any particular value to you, Harry Silver.”

  He made a savage gesture with his weapon, so that the bewildered folk around him, hearing only his end of the conversation, shrank back. His voice was hoarse. “Few or none of them are carrying a carbine that can blow all this priceless machinery of yours into little atoms. Do what I tell you, you motherless junkpile!”

  Now a couple of the people in Harry’s group, caught up in the time-honored tendency of victims to identify with their kidnapper, appeared to be losing some of their enthusiasm for freedom. One or two actually seemed on the verge of timidly retreating in the direction of their cells.

  Harry snarled and waved the carbine. “Where the hell do you think you’re going? Get back here. Then go take a walk around that other corner, way down there, and have a good look at what’s hanging on the wall.”

  People milled around, uncertain if he really wanted them to do that or not.

  “Very well, Harry Silver,” said the rogue’s voice smoothly. “You may remove my entire remaining stock of viable life-units. In return, I ask only that you help me to lure the one called Del Satranji into one of my cells. I find him very highly desirable as a subject of study.”

  “Just like me.”

  The rogue adopted a judicious tone. “True, there are resemblances, but notable differences as well. I do take a less conciliatory attitude with Satranji, largely because he is not threatening my valuable equipment with an efficient weapon.”

  “And don’t forget who is.”

  “I forget nothing, Harry Silver. It is true that I find goodlife and badlife equally interesting. The contrast leads to a question that vitally concerns me: What is the best means of turning one into the other?”

  It seemed to be stalling him, and he wasn’t going to allow it. “The question that better concern you is figuring out some way to get my woman and my child to safety. Then we can argue about all this. I’m not going to be distracted.”

  * * *

  The berserker’s voice, no longer at a blasting volume, was not nearly as smooth and manlike as the assassin’s. But Harry began to think he could detect gradual improvement.

  The rogue continued the process of feeding Harry bits and morsels of information, none of it immediately useful, while Harry worked his way cautiously back in the direction from which the prisoners had come. The further he went, the more horror kept coming into view, walls and tables alive, or almost alive, with the rogue’s experi
ments on organs and tissues that Harry had to believe were human. The folk who had been let out of confinement followed him, naked pilgrims walking into territory where they had never been, reacting to the displays with muted horror, and in some cases with disbelief.

  How long the rogue had been collecting prisoners, and where they had all come from, were matters to be discussed another day. Some of this previous crop of specimens had been taken carefully apart, and Harry had seen various segments of their bodies hooked up with an assortment of machines. In some of the disconnected portions, blood still flowed, impelled by cleverly designed pumps, nerves and muscles still went on about their business, responding to stimuli. There were muscles that spasmed, as if they might be in great pain, lacking any lungs or voices to scream it out.

  The rogue gave the impression of being interested in the attention that Harry was paying to its collection. “If you like, I can provide you with interesting data on each specimen.”

  Harry called the berserker a filthy name. “What I want is to see every motherless person that you’re holding who is still intact. Cough ‘em up, or I start shooting.”

  “The last of my viable specimens are now on their way to meet you. Meanwhile, I wish to know everything that you can tell me about the assassin machine. What has it promised you? Was it able to summon reinforcements before launching this attack?”

  Harry struggled to get control of himself.

  “Harry Silver, it was you who demanded to have speech with me.”

  Harry got himself under control. Now that he was negotiating with the enemy, it was only reasonable to expect that he would have to give something to get something. He told the rogue he couldn’t be sure about the reinforcements, but he supposed that the assassin had tried.

  * * *