Berserker Blue Death

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Three people. Three women. Only one’s still alive. Then I tried to broadcast a warning, but the whole area, the planet and moon and everything, was under some kind of jamming.

  “Then when I took off and looked around for Old Blue again, it was gone. Missed me somehow, coming and going. And there was—this.” Benkovic made an expressive, sweeping gesture encompassing the dead landscape around them.

  Domingo turned away from him, looking in another direction. Gujar, still moving like a sleepwalker, was coming back from his own ship. There were still scraps of white material in his hands. In an alien-sounding voice the bridegroom said that he had made a final identification of the wedding gown fragment as Maymyo’s. There could be no mistake. There had been exotic fibers woven into it, plant material from his own mother’s distant homeworld.

  Benkovic looked sick.

  Domingo was suddenly sitting down, on a snow-drifted rock, staring at nothing. His face inside the clear plate of his helmet was ghastly. Polly Suslova caught him as he fell.

  CHAPTER 3

  Polly had been married once, but her husband had moved on, leaving the two children with her. She and Karl had for the most part enjoyed each other’s company. But now, looking back on their relationship, she had the feeling that she had unintentionally and in some nonphysical sense worn him out.

  The only close relatives Polly now possessed in the universe, besides her two children, were a sister and brother-in-law who were caring for those children now. At present they were all four elsewhere in the Milkpail, riding another colonized rock called Yirrkala, the planetoid from which the flowers for Maymyo’s wedding had been imported.

  As the magnitude of the Shubran disaster became plain, as the reality of the destruction of her friends’ families and homes established itself, Polly’s thoughts were increasingly occupied not with the ruin before her eyes, but with her two children, whom she had not seen for several months. It was not so much anxiety she felt, or overt fear that Yirrkala was also going to be attacked. Rather she felt a vague satisfaction that she had planned the disposition of her children properly, had done a good job of seeing to their safety. They were both still very young and it was difficult being separated from them, but Polly’s job had required her to move to Shubra for half a standard year. She was a specialist in a field that was sometimes less and sometimes more esoteric than it sounded, the relationships of machines with the environments in which they worked. The job also kept her unpredictably busy. Whenever she had thought about it rationally, even before disaster struck, there had been no doubt in her mind that the kids were currently better off with her relatives on Yirrkala.

  Polly had been getting along well enough with the Shubran colonists as she lived among them, but she had made no deep personal attachments on Shubra. Except, as she now had to admit to herself, for one. The destruction of the Shubran colony, devastating though it was, was the second such shock of mass tragedy to hit her in a little more than one day. It found her already somewhat numb. Empathic feelings for the grieving survivors did not strike her with overwhelming personal force.

  Again, with the same one exception.

  She was standing near enough to the captain, and watching him closely enough, to try to catch the inert mass of his suited body when he started to fall. In the failing artificial gravity—fields dying with the blasted generators under the ground—she was successful. Inside his faceplate Domingo looked more dead than alive; pure shock, Polly supposed. She had got the impression that much of his life was wrapped up in his daughter. She eased him to the ground and sent someone else running to the Pearl’s landed launch for a first-aid kit. When the kit arrived, she administered a treatment for shock through one of the inlet valves thoughtfully provided in suits of space armor for such emergencies.

  She watched the victim’s reaction as under the chemical stimulus he began to recover. In the busy minutes immediately following, minutes largely taken up by an intense and futile search for more survivors, Polly stayed with Domingo as much as possible, wanting to keep him in contact with humanity if nothing else. The shock had hit him so intensely that for a time she was worried for his life.

  The captain spoke to no one for almost an hour following his collapse. For the first few minutes he was deeply stunned, almost paralyzed. His crew gave him what modest medical care they could. After that he showed signs of awareness but remained for a considerable time in his state of silent shock. He sat on the ground speechless and essentially alone except for Polly, while around him his few surviving fellow citizens, in the intervals between their futile efforts to find other survivors, acted out their own grief and outrage in various ways.

  The next stage of Domingo’s recovery, when it came, was rapid. And as it progressed, it became—to Polly at least— frightening.

  It began when he broke his hour-long silence. He at last said something. A short statement; none of those near him could quite make out what it was.

  Two or three minutes after speaking those incoherent words, Domingo was on his feet again, brushing aside Polly’s attentions and other people’s questions and issuing harsh orders. He came out of shock, seemingly without transition, into grim, purposeful rage, driving her and the others of his crew to get the Pearl back into space. If there were any survivors here on the planetoid, he told his people brutally, they would have been found by now. Already they had checked out all of the defensive posts, the deep refuges that would have offered the only real chance of survival.

  Another ship’s captain, tears running down his own cheeks, approached Domingo on the ground, stressing the hopelessness, the pointlessness, of any immediate effort to lift their ships. It was too late to retaliate. Amid the shrieking wind, the driving, poisoned snow, the other captain’s voice came over the personal communication channel. “Don’t you understand, Domingo? It’s all over… the berserkers have got away. They’re gone.”

  Domingo glared like a madman at him. “Leviathan hasn’t got away yet. We’ll get it. Get those ships up!” His voice was hoarse, almost unrecognizable.

  And Domingo’s own crew, who a moment ago had been trying to nurse him back to some first stage of recovery, now felt the lash of his words and had to get themselves aboard the Pearl and get ready to lift off.

  Polly at first had the feeling that what he was doing to his crew and the others was wrong and useless, but she did not dare to try to stop him.

  Demanding data, Domingo bullied everyone. He got them moving back to their duty stations, their shipboard instruments. He made them provide him with fresh observations, reports of ionization trails and other recent disturbances in the nebula nearby. These reports indicated that the destroyer machine—the readings confirmed that there had probably been only one berserker—was not long gone, probably no more than a very few hours.

  Domingo raged at them all. The burden of his ranting seemed to be that so much time had been wasted on the ground.

  Someone protested the injustice. “You were in shock, Captain. You were—”

  “You weren’t in shock.” He glared at the questioner. “Were you?”

  They gaped at him.

  “If you could move and I couldn’t, you should have dragged me back on board.”

  They were all back on board now, and working. It was almost as if the still-smoldering pyres and gutted caverns of their homes below had already been forgotten. There was a quotation in Polly’s mind from somewhere, something about letting the dead bury the dead. That was all right, a healthy attitude, but to carry it to this extreme… she continued to observe Niles Domingo worriedly. When he first got to his feet again, she felt relieved that he was recovering from the shock, rebounding from the initial blow more completely if not faster than the others who had suffered tragic losses. But Domingo’s energy had returned to him too suddenly, his grief had been transformed too rapidly and efficiently to rage.

  Polly Suslova was sure that it was a false recovery.

  But so far it was sustained. And it
was pulling the others along with him. They were all bereaved to one degree or another, and almost as shocked as Domingo was. They actually benefitted from being dragooned aboard ship again, shouted at about their duty, hooked by the alpha rhythms of their brains into their crew stations and coerced into giving him reports. The necessity of routine, of following orders, formed a kind of support for them in their own shock; at some level they all understood this, and so far they had submitted to it willingly.

  Such was the compulsion he exerted on the other people of his squadron that all six ships, with all their crew members aboard, had launched obediently within a few minutes of his order.

  The six ships rendezvoused in orbit. From this altitude, their homeworld looked not much different than it had before life was expunged from it. There was a radio silence. This time silence had not been imposed by order; it was just that no one at the moment could find anything to say.

  Then Polly had an exchange of intercom dialogue with the captain.

  She asked him: “Where are we going?”

  The features of Domingo’s face, viewed individually, looked the same as they had before fate in the form of a berserker had struck him down. Yet his face had altered, she thought, all the same. It was as if someone had got in under the flesh with a chisel and had done some carving on the bones.

  He answered her: “Where do you think we’re going? We’re going after that damned thing.” Like his face, his voice had altered. The chisel had worked angles in it, too.

  Someone else broke in: “We can’t…”

  The protest was never finished. Nor was it answered. The captain left it hanging in the air, and told them to get busy. And no one else had yet dared to take up the banner of rebellion.

  Polly wished intensely that she could get a direct, in-person look at the captain’s countenance. She could call up his intercom image before her whenever she liked, but it was not the same.

  The radio silence was broken again. Some voices of dissension, mingled with pure lamentations, were calling in from other ships, questioning this hopeless pursuit.

  Domingo paid little heed to the dissenting voices or to the lamentations, either. He was again busy driving his ship. The few words he spoke to the captains of the other ships conveyed essentially the message: Follow me or not, just as you like. Where else are you going to go ?

  He drove the Pearl out into nebular space again, looking for the berserker’s trail. The five other ships came along. None of their captains—so far—was persuaded that it would be better to give up and turn away.

  Covertly Polly continued to watch his face on intercom whenever she was not fully occupied with her own job. She had given up hope, for the time being, of being able to guess just what was going on inside his head. Continued shock, of course, and grief. But—what form was it taking? What were his thoughts?

  In fact, at the moment the captain’s only conscious thought was simply that his ship ran well. Better than that, it ran superbly. For the time being, for the moment, he was able to lose himself in the beautiful running of his new ship. He was momentarily content, even cheerful. There was no need for him to consider—to consider anything else at all.

  Outside, whitespace flowed by, smooth and at the same time intricate, like ruffling wedding lace.

  I have been so proud of this ship, Domingo thought, serenely watching instruments. Ever since I got it —not long ago, I admit—it’s been everything I ever hoped for in a ship.

  For ten years I’ve wanted a new ship, because—

  “Did you say something, Captain?” That was Polly’s voice on intercom. Had he spoken aloud? He hadn’t meant to.

  “Nothing,” Domingo said. Then he ceased for a time to think at all. He only calculated how to get more speed.

  When he had the problem of speed settled, for the time being, he could think again. He was going to catch up with the berserker, the one that ten years ago… and now again… he was going to catch up with Old Blue.

  Yes. And then…

  But soon it was obvious that the ionization trail was becoming painfully difficult to follow. He was as experienced at trailing as anyone—it was a valuable peacetime skill in the nebula, one ship trailing another just to keep from getting lost, or simply as a game—and he knew that the trails in the nebula sometimes faded, suddenly and inexplicably.

  He heard again from some of his own crew. They were watching the trail too, and his increasingly labored efforts to follow it. Henric and Simeon were now wondering pointedly if it was still possible to go on with any hope of success.

  The captain pointedly ignored their wondering.

  Some of the people on the other ships were less impressed with him than his own crew was. More of those other people were speaking up now, talking reasonably to him and to each other, forming the nucleus for a gentle and sad revolt. The berserker was gone, was the gist of what they said. This wasn’t really a trail any longer. Perhaps some day the damned thing could be hunted successfully and destroyed. But right now they, the survivors, had to take time to come to terms with themselves, with their own grief and loss.

  The reasonable, nonviolent view nearly prevailed. The other ships of Domingo’s squadron were all turning away now, the people aboard them voting that it was time to go to the Space Force for help.

  The Pearl moved on, along the fading trail—some of her crew arguing that the trail had already been lost—with Domingo still piloting.

  “Captain. Where are we going?” This time it was Iskander Baza who said it. The same question had already been asked aboard the Pearl. but now it had a new context and was posed in a practical tone that deserved an answer, if anything practical was going to get done.

  Domingo’s reply was only slightly delayed, as if he were being thoughtful about it. And when it came it sounded perfectly rational. “All right. Set a course for the base, then. For Four Twenty-five. Iskander, you take the helm for a while.”

  Polly breathed a faint sigh of relief. That made sense. Base Four Twenty-five would have help to offer. As much of any kind of help as anyone in the Pearl’s squadron was going to get anywhere right now, as much as the universe could possibly have available for people who had lost all that they had lost. And if the hunt was still to be pursued, the base undoubtedly offered the best chance of obtaining information about where the berserker—Leviathan—had gone now.

  She had not even had a good chance yet to offer the captain her condolences on his daughter’s death. Right now she was afraid to try.

  Domingo’s crew, still suffering from shock, were largely silent as their journey to Base Four Twenty-five began. But as the flight proceeded they began slowly to talk among themselves again. They had all been friends and neighbors once, just yesterday when they had lived in a community together. And they were certainly more than neighbors now. They were survivors together.

  Polly wasn’t sure that Niles Domingo was still a friend and neighbor of the others. All those others were perhaps too involved right now with their own grief and shock to notice the transformation. But Polly doubted that he was even listening to them any longer, that he was even living in the same world with the other people aboard his ship or in his squadron. Some of those people had certainly lost children too, some had lost whole families. But none of them had collapsed the way Domingo had—not yet anyway—or recovered in his way either.

  In what kind of hideous, private world he was living— existing—now, she couldn’t guess, much less try to share the experience with him. But she swore to herself that she would be ready when the chance came to help.

  Base Four Twenty-five was fairly near though in a different system from Shubra, on a planetoid that had remained otherwise uncolonized, and had no commonly used name of its own apart from the base. It was a barren rock, considerably smaller than Shubra, that supported a Space Force installation of modest size and virtually nothing else.

  Base Four Twenty-five was about a day away. It was going to be a long day for them all.
r />   The Pearl glided slowly into one of the row of berths built into the section of the shielded underground docks that was reserved for civilian visitors to the base. Other ships of the ill-fated orphan squadron were coming in behind the Pearl. None of the other ships had been quite as fast as Domingo’s Pearl in getting here, but he had not been deliberately trying to outrace them, and they were already catching up. As the other craft arrived, they entered nearby berths. The crews of all six vessels disembarked, almost together. All of them were moving slowly, a reluctant step at a time; it was as if the act of leaving their ships now might take them yet farther from everything that they had lost.

  The people of the Pearl. first to arrive, were also first to step out. Several Space Force people known to Domingo and to most of his crew had already come into view, standing on the dock, waiting to greet the arrivals sympathetically. The squadron had radioed its grim news ahead.

  At the head of the welcoming committee was the base commander, a man named Gennadius, tall and hollow-cheeked, looking chronically worn down as if by his job. Polly had seen him only once before, at some function a couple of years ago, and she knew that in the past he had fought at Domingo’s side against berserkers. It was obvious now from the commander’s behavior that the two men were old friends.

  Gennadius said “Niles” as the other approached, and followed with a one-word question: “Maymyo?”

  Domingo looked at the tall man in front of him as if he had trouble comprehending the question. “She’s dead,” the captain said at last. It was as if he were talking about someone he had barely known.

  The base commander winced, with a more than social reaction. Polly made a mental note to herself that as soon as she had the chance she would ask this man for advice and assistance in helping the captain.

  Gennadius asked him: “How about you? Come and rest. I want to have the medics look you over.”

  With a gesture Domingo brushed the notion aside. “They can look over some of my people if they want to be looked over. I’m all right. What I want is to get to your operations room and see your current plot.”