Rogue Berserker

by Fred Saberhagen

  Harry only grunted, not wanting to waste time in argument.

  He focused his attention on the pair of medirobots. Crippled Dorry knew where spacesuits were kept, and somewhat clumsily began the process of getting out a pair of them, one child-sized, and bringing them into the hallway.

  Seizing the opportunity for a moment’s private talk with the tame robot, Harry told Dorry that he wanted to keep watch on the inventor. “Also, I have my reasons for not wanting Mister G to be armed.”

  Dorijen accepted the idea calmly. “You are fearful that if he finds a ready means of escape he will immediately take it, without waiting for anyone else.”

  “Exactly. So do whatever you can to prevent that.” He hesitated. “If you can come up with a spare weapon somewhere, better give it to Perdix. We can all feel a little safer that way.”

  * * *

  If the readouts on the coffin-shaped boxes were to be believed, Harry’s wife and child were both in good shape. Both faces were dimly visible, through semitransparent lids. Harry stared at each of them for only a moment. There was no time to spare.

  Harry found the right control and started his son’s revival process. But Becky had to be awakened first, if for no other reason than that her skills as a veteran spacer and combat veteran might be needed immediately. Harry wanted someone standing guard over the kid while he and Dorry finished checking out the Pod‘s lifeboats and launch, to see what the prospects were for a quick, successful getaway.

  Harry’s armored fingers fumbled with the clasp. If there was a lock, it wasn’t very formidable, and his powered gauntlets tore it free. In a moment he had unfastened the outer coffin lid and thumbed the emergency revival button.

  This body also was nude, and Harry could see at a glance that all its major parts were still in place. As had been the case with the members of Cheng’s family, there were no plugs stuck in their wrists and ankles.

  The thick lid eased itself away. Becky’s eyes opened slowly, and her voice lacked any urgency. “Harry. It’s you.”

  “Who were you expecting?” Somehow his voice was warbling all up and down the scale. He heard himself say: “Damn it, woman, you knew me, even in this motherless suit.”

  The crease of a frown appeared in Becky’s forehead. “Looks like someone’s been using it for target practice. Of course I knew you, Harry, I’ve seen you in a lot of strange getups. Harry, don’t cry, I’m all right, my God, where’s Ethan?” Raising her head enough to look around a little, she goggled at the unfamiliar narrow corridor. “I can’t remember anything. Where are we?”

  “You always wanted to ride on a ship that was fixed up in real luxury. Well, see, this is it.” Though she wouldn’t be able to tell it from her immediate surroundings; no gaudy decorations had been wasted on this corridor. There was no time to waste, and Harry was lifting her out of the coffin, hoping she would be able to stand up.

  “Where’s Ethan?” More insistently this time; motherhood was awakening.

  “He’s right over here, in the other bin. His readings are fine, I’ll get him out in a minute. Don’t stand around like that with nothing on. Here’s Dorry, a good robot, she’s got a spacesuit ready for you. Get yourself into it. I’ll do the kid.”

  “All right,” said Becky doubtfully. “Dorry, you look like hell.”

  “Indeed I do, ma’am.”

  Becky was beginning to move, slowly. Harry remembered, all too well, how coming up suddenly out of that deep artificial sleep could hit you, like a combination of drunkenness with a bad hangover. His wife’s voice was sleepy again, luxurious with blissful ignorance. Confusion persisted, but the peculiarity of her surroundings was beginning to sink in. “Harry, what happened to this poor robot? Is this your ship?”

  “Yours and mine. For as long as we need it.”

  “All paid for?”

  “Gods of deep space, is it paid for! I doubt any ship has ever cost like this one—but the rent’s been paid, in advance. And a good down payment on something better.”

  At last Becky was starting to come fully awake, and alarm was naturally setting in. She turned back, resisting Dorry’s gentle two-fingered tug.

  “Harry, these are bloody motherless medirobots, what am I doing in a medirobot? I don’t remember … you know what I think … ?”

  “Tell me later. Or I’ll tell you about it. Right now, will you just get moving?”

  Harry turned to the other lifesaving device, saw that emergency revival was having its effect, and in moments was reaching into the warm interior to deliver a smooth child-body back into the world.

  “Daddy … are you the doctor?” came Ethan’s sleepy murmur. And the five-year-old’s arms went around Harry’s armored neck. Ethan was just as quick at identification as his mother had been, though he could hardly have seen much more than a bulky shape in a strange suit. He must have heard Daddy’s voice on the airspeakers.

  “Today I am your doctor, kid. Daddy’s checking you and taking you home. Got to get you right into your own suit.” Not that the launch had children’s sizes available, but an expert like Becky, once she got her mind together, would be able to fit a child into an adult size so it would at least serve as backup life support, even if the kid could hardly move. Under these conditions, cutting down the five-year-old’s mobility, keeping him in one place, could be a definite advantage.

  Becky wasn’t up to full speed yet. But, working on instinct, she had managed to get her own suit on already. Now she was complaining. “Harry, this suit’s not going to fit him. It’s just way too loose.”

  “You take over, do the best you can. And tell him he’ll grow into it. We’re going home.”

  * * *

  The five of them, four suited humans and Perdix, had just left the service hallway, passing through the doorway into the ornate dining salon, when an elaborate screen, part of the room’s lush decoration, was knocked aside, revealing the asymmetrical body of Harry’s dedicated assassin. The ring that the assassin had taken from him, days ago, was still visible on its right hand.

  Professor Gianopolous squealed and turned to run. The berserker’s monstrous other hand swung through the edge of the falling screen to pulp the inventor’s skull before he had taken a full step, spattering its bone and clever brain over walls and floor and life-units alike.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Gianopolous had gone down dead, the inadequate helmet of his simple suit completely shattered by the assassin’s blow, his headless body twitching.

  Harry had begun the act of swinging the carbine around—no need for an exact physical pointing of the muzzle, but he had to get within a certain angle of the target that his eyes were in the process of locking on. The tip of the muzzle had much less than a meter to go in its swift arc, and he was trying to swing it with all his might, but already he sensed that he was not likely to complete the move in time. Part of his mind noted, in the way it had of tallying useless things, the scars of fresh combat that marked the assassin’s body and its ugly head.

  At the same time, Perdix, reacting to a berserker’s threat with his own robotic speed, had used his right hand to hurl his primitive stanchion-club straight at the killing machine’s head. Before the streaking missile reached its target the left hand of Perdix had drawn from somewhere a heavy pistol—in the dreamlike slowness in which these things seemed to be happening, Harry realized that Dorry must have dug out a weapon from somewhere on the ship and given it to Perdix just as he, Harry, had suggested.

  Scattered around the room behind the assassin were the helpless refugees, noncombatants, frozen by slow time in a variety of awkward poses. All were just starting to react.

  The assassin’s monstrous left hand came up with speedy competence, to strike the thrown metal in midflight, brushing it aside. In the same instant a portal on the assassin’s robust chest flicked open, not far from the spot where a human heart would dwell in living flesh. Fire came hammering out of the cavity at the tame robot, cutting it down, the heavy-caliber handgun sp
inning useless from the hand of Perdix to go flying across the room, falling somewhere near the entrance to the dining salon.

  But the tame robot’s effort had occupied the assassin for just long enough. The pieces of Perdix had not had time to hit the deck, when Harry’s swinging weapon came within the proper angle of the target picked by the direction of his gaze. The last half-dozen forcepackets that his carbine’s charge could throw erupted from the muzzle. At point-blank range, they were enough.

  * * *

  A few seconds later, Harry was shakily advancing upon the shattered remnants of his fallen foe. The assassin had been thoroughly mangled, brain and all. Harry was just in the act of reaching for the monster’s right hand, which was still relatively intact, with some dazed purpose of retrieving his ring, when fresh sounds of movement caused him to look up in alarm.

  But the small group of figures advancing toward him were only people, some of the prisoners that he had rescued. Claudia Cheng was walking carefully in their lead, with Winnie in his misfit suit hobbling beside her.

  Fewer than a dozen people, actually, but they seemed to crowd the Chewing Pod‘s dining salon, elbowing and almost trampling each other in a rush to what they must perceive as safety. Harry sighed and lowered the carbine’s muzzle.

  “We didn’t know about your helper,” someone commented brightly.

  “Helper?” Harry’s mind seemed to have gone blank.

  And at the same moment, someone else: “He just joined us as we were coming in—”

  “Drop the carbine, Silver,” interrupted a taut, familiar voice. “Don’t even think of turning round.”

  Satranji had entered the dining salon at the tail end of the line, joining it so smoothly and quietly that he seemed quite naturally to belong to it. He had Harry—as well as Becky and Ethan, Claudia and Winnie—covered with his own carbine before Harry even knew that he was there.

  Remembering in time that his weapon’s magazine was exhausted, Harry let it fall.

  Satranji told him: “Now you can turn. Time we got acquainted, Silver. We’re going to be taking a long, long trip together. Some of these other good people too—likely my partner will want them all. Oh, by all means you must bring the family. My partner has some special ideas about them.” Then his head turned, with a nervous jerk as a figure appeared beside him.

  The crippled robot Dorry had taken her position there, and, when her former master stared without recognition at her half-disassembled face and body, she addressed him in her usual cheerful voice.

  “No doubt, sir, you would have been surprised to see me, had you recognized me in the other corridor just now.”

  “Gods of space, it’s Dorijen.” And Satranji, helping himself to a second look, then a third, at last seemed satisfied that this had been his robot. “I did just walk past you out there, didn’t I? I thought you were a pile of junk.” His voice turned ugly. “Actually, that’s what you are.”

  Releasing one hand from his weapon, he swung the arm of his servo-powered combat suit, dealing Dorry a casual blow on the side of the head that sent her sprawling. It was a smashing impact that might have knocked bricks out of a wall.

  “How in all the hells did you get here?” Satranji grumbled. He spoke to the robot, without taking his eyes away from Harry for a moment. “But it doesn’t matter. What a ruin. Not worth a shit now. Turned into a piece of crap like all the other bitches.”

  This time Dorry needed longer to get up than she had the time when Harry knocked her down. But her voice still sounded cheerful. “That impact,” she announced to the world, “seems to have clouded my optelectronic senses.” Then she went down on her knees again, groping with her one crippled hand as if in search of something she had lost. “Sensory malfunction,” she murmured softly.

  Satranji still hadn’t really taken his eyes off Harry. “Silver, it’s time we had a little conversation, you and I.”

  “Why not?” Harry tried to sound as cheerful as the robot.

  “Meanwhile you should get yourself out of that heavy suit. You always said the damned things made you uncomfortable.”

  “Sure,” said Harry.

  “Then do it!”

  While checking as best he could as to where his people were, Harry started to release his metal gauntlets from the inside. That would be a reasonable first step in taking off the suit; it wouldn’t look suspicious. The part of his mind that kept on scheming, no matter what, informed him that now he was going to have to throw one of the metal gloves, while he still had servo power in his arms. Not only throw it. He would have to hit the carbine in Satranji’s grip and spoil his aim, or else hit his faceplate hard enough to cloud his vision for an instant. In that instant Harry would have to rush him … it might be a hundred-to-one shot, and that was being charitable. But it was better than nothing at all.

  Some of the ship’s automatic systems, evidently sensing that a small crowd had gathered, were coming on in the salon, and music tinkled in the background, sounding like an ancient piano with keys of ivory and ebony.

  Satranji was still being very watchful. He said: “Now we can have a little drink, and you can tell me about it. Hope you’re not a sore loser, Silver. Someone told me that you like scotch.”

  Harry’s first gauntlet fell to the deck. He was going to have to throw the second.

  * * *

  Becky, with Ethan suited and in tow, was edging, as if unconsciously, a little closer to her man. So were some of the other people, and Harry knew that in the next moment he was about to take his hopeless gamble, and Satranji’s brain would pull the alphatrigger on the carbine, swift as thought, and many of the people in the room would die—

  A fusillade of shots erupted, coming not from Satranji’s weapon, but from behind the goodlife man, near the main entrance to the room.

  The mass of Satranji’s bulky figure was knocked forward, soaring in a low, involuntary leap, hurled in a tottering spin right past Harry before Harry could attempt to dodge. The suited form stopped when it hit a wall, then collapsed in smoking ruin. The third hit on the moving target had torn its armored backpack open, and a secondary interior explosion jerked Satranji’s suit’s four limbs to full extension, and momentarily lighted his faceplate with a baleful inner glow. Within seconds, the air in the room began to fill with smoke, the stench of burning chemicals and flesh.

  From a spot near the main entrance, the slender figure of Dorry the robot came limping slowly forward. The heavy handgun that she had once given Perdix, who had not been able to draw it quite fast enough, was clamped solidly in the grip of her two remaining fingers and a thumb. Dorijen tilted her head as she drew near the fallen man, nearsightedly peering down at him with her one damaged eye.

  Invisible environmental systems had already begun to work, patiently cleaning the large room’s atmosphere, and faint tendrils of smoke were whisked away. There was near silence, broken only by some woman sobbing, and then the robot’s usual cheery voice.

  “It seems that I have killed a human being,” Dorry announced brightly. “A clear case of sensory malfunction, as the result of trauma. Faulty perception assured me that I was firing at a berserker machine.

  “The pistol is empty now, but still—” The weapon dropped from her crippled hand. In the quiet room, everyone heard clearly the soft thud of its landing. “Somehow I could not place Mister Satranji in the proper category. Perhaps in the circumstances you surviving humans will be safer if I no longer carry weapons.” On her last cheerful word, Dorry suddenly sat down, as if her disorientation might be getting worse.

  Harry choked out some response—later he could never remember just what he had said. He looked uncertainly about him, and blinked at the new weapon that had come into his own hands—by reflex he had already snatched up Satranji’s carbine.

  But there was nothing left to shoot.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Harry at last had set his captured carbine down, laying the weapon close against the wall of the small control cabin in the
Chewing Pod‘s functional launch, where either he or Becky could grab it up in a hurry if need be. At the moment his wife was occupying the pilot’s seat, in the last stages of running a quick checklist that so far indicated there was nothing wrong with the small vessel in which all the surviving humans were about to make their getaway. Harry had been concentrating on looking out for trouble, but now it appeared he would be able to give up riding shotgun.

  The launch provided a comfortably furnished passenger space some fifteen meters long and four wide, which in happier times could have been quickly reconfigured to offer several distinctly different flavors of luxury. Now the only concern was that it afforded ample room, and speedy transportation.

  Exchanging scraps of hasty conversation with his wife, while both were engaged in herding people into the launch, Harry had been reminded that she had seen genuine berserkers before. When the kidnappers came for her and Ethan, she had no doubt that she was seeing them again. “That was at first.”

  “At first?”

  Becky went on: “You know, Harry? It was all so horrible … but there was a time when I began to suspect they weren’t real berserkers.”

  “They were real enough. If they seemed a bit clumsy, that was probably just because they weren’t used to trying to keep their victims alive.”

  “Ethan was screaming, just horribly, and then I was screaming too …”

  “It’s all right now, kid. That part’s all over.”

  * * *

  The robot Dorijen was still functioning, or at least capable of purposeful movement, having boarded the launch at the end of the line of surviving humans.

  Ethan and Winnie, both children hampered in oversized spacesuits, had started some kind of game, withdrawing from the terrors of the adult world to something that perhaps made more sense to them.