Berserker Blue Death

by Fred Saberhagen

  When one of the base medical people tried to be firm with him, Domingo pulled his arm away with a flourish that seemed to threaten violence. “Let me see the plot!”

  Gennadius, with a much more modest gesture, called the doctor off. Then he led his old friend Domingo toward the operations room. Polly and a few others followed. Others of the bereaved crews sat down exhausted where they were, milled around lamenting afresh or accepted medical examination.

  The operations room, on the next level above the docks, was a large ovoid chamber, perfectly lighted, big enough for forty or fifty people to gather inside it at one time. In the approximate center of this chamber there was a computer model, itself the size of a small room, illustrating the explored portions of the Milkpail.

  A color key for the model was displayed nearby. After Polly had studied it for a few moments, she understood the essentials of the presentation. This was evidently what Domingo had called the current plot, indicating where within the Milkpail Nebula berserker attacks had recently been reported, and which additional colonies and installations were now considered to be at high risk. The model also showed the locations to which the battlecraft at Gennadius’s disposal, about twenty of them in all, had been dispatched, in an effort, Polly supposed, to try to intercept the enemy’s next attack. She couldn’t interpret all the symbols on the plot; for one thing, she was unable to tell just how many ships of which kind were supposed to be where.

  One wall screen in the operations room showed the scene down in the visitors’ dock, where it appeared that three or four additional ships were now arriving, more or less together. Polly did not recognize them. Someone standing near her in operations said that they came from Liaoning. Having arrived home to find that their world had been destroyed, they had turned here to the base as the Shubrans had.

  Domingo handed over to Gennadius the recording on which Old Blue could be identified as the attacker. Then he demanded that the base commander tell him his plans for hunting down the berserker that had destroyed the Shubra colony.

  “I’ll have to take a good look at this first,” Gennadius said wearily, juggling the recording in his hand, “There might be some useful information, even if it doesn’t help us immediately. We’ll do an analysis.”

  “Piss on your analysis.” That expression was, by local custom, a much uglier way of swearing than to profane the names of half-forgotten deities and demigods. Polly had never before, in the months she had known the captain, heard him use this kind of language. It disturbed her to hear it now, more than she could logically explain.

  Again he demanded of the commander: “I want to know what you’re going to do about Leviathan.”

  Gennadius stood solidly, with folded arms. “I’m going to run my command. To give as much protection as I can to the people in this district. I appreciate how you feel, Domingo—”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. But my prime function is not to hunt Leviathan. It’s not the only berserker around, you know.”

  Domingo was silent. The base commander (Polly got the definite impression that he was making allowances for his bereaved friend) went on in a tired, methodical, soothing voice, explaining his current plans. From what Polly, who was no military expert, could understand of it, his basic strategy seemed to be more defensive than offensive. He wanted to detail the Pearl. with other ships from Shubra and Liaoning, as soon as they and their crews were ready to go out again, to guard duty over other colonies. There were perhaps twenty more Milkpail colonies still out there, potential targets for the berserker enemy. Gennadius intended to get as many armed ships as possible, including those of the bereaved colonists, out there to protect them.

  Domingo said, in his new hoarse voice: “At least you think those other colonies are still there. Still in existence. You don’t really know.”

  “That’s right.” Gennadius, under strain himself, no longer sounded like an old friend. But he was still trying. “As far as I know, they’re still alive. Will you help them stay that way?”

  Domingo spoke in the same voice as before, with no more or less expression. “Say there are twenty places to be guarded. If I take the Pearl to do patrol duty at one of them, I have one chance in twenty of encountering Leviathan at the next attack. That’s not good enough.”

  “Not good enough.” Gennadius repeated the words, as if trying to understand what they might mean. “Not good enough for what? What are you proposing instead?”

  “My ship goes along with your fleet, when you set out to hunt Leviathan.”

  “It’s not going to work that way, Domingo.”

  “Then I hunt the damned thing alone.”

  “That would not be wise.”

  Domingo’s monotonous voice pointed out that the Sirian Pearl was undoubtedly his ship, his private, personal property to do with as he chose. He was not going to have his ship assigned to guard duty anywhere. Speaking slowly and calmly, as if explaining to an idiot, he said that he intended to take the Pearl in pursuit of Leviathan, by himself if necessary. He felt confident, with a little preparation, of being able to follow and find the berserker anywhere in the nebula.

  Some of his own crew looked doubtful when they heard that announcement.

  The base commander meanwhile gazed off into the distance, as if trying to calculate something, or maybe to invoke some exotic technique of self-control.

  Polly tried to remember the version of interplanetary law obtaining in this sector. She thought it was technically true that even now, in this state of emergency with colonies being crushed like anthills under an iron heel, the military had no right, or had only a very doubtful right, to give orders to a civilian captain or to the mayor of a colony. But anyone as grown up as Domingo ought to know that being technically in the right could lead to disaster; Domingo of course would know that, if he were in his right mind now.

  Gujar now joined the group in the operations room. The huge, bulky man looked totally exhausted.

  The bereaved bridegroom was completely on Domingo’s side in the argument; Gujar wanted to press on with the chase, too. But the ship he had been piloting was not his own, and the woman who owned it was going to use it to get out of the Milkpail right away; she was giving up. Gujar was unhorsed.

  Gennadius had returned to the argument with Domingo: “All right, maybe technically I can’t give any of you orders right now. But I tell you I need help. And I would strongly suggest that you and anyone else who’s looking for a fight should take the Pearl and whatever other ships you have, and provide some cover for people out there who need it badly. Leave the hunting to us.”

  “You’ve just told us that the Space Force doesn’t plan to do any hunting.”

  “I’ve said nothing of the kind. Let us do it in our own way.”

  But Domingo wouldn’t listen. When one of the officers in the background thought aloud that the Pearl would have no chance alone against Leviathan, he turned on the woman and argued, without anyone being able to prove him wrong, that the Pearl was the equal in nebular combat of anything the Space Force had locally available; and in fact superior to many of their ships.

  He argued too that his own ship was probably superior to any of theirs in this one task, hunting down and destroying a rogue berserker like Leviathan. Domingo had designed the Sirian Pearl himself, and at enormous expense had had her built—at the Austeel yards—primarily for that very purpose.

  “Really?” asked someone who didn’t know him, and therefore didn’t believe it.

  “For ten years I’ve wanted a ship that—” He broke off that sentence and plunged into technical detail. The Sirian Pearl also had superb new weapons systems on board. Since the events of ten years ago, Domingo had been planning and working to equip himself with a ship that would not have to run from anything it might encounter in the Milkpail.

  Someone grumbled in a low voice that in the Milkpail, at least, it was still insane to go out with only one ship, whatever she was like, against any berserker, let alone that o
ne.

  Iskander Baza put in: “Leviathan may have taken a lot of damage in those raids; it must have taken some.”

  Domingo argued also that his ship had speed; it had beaten all of the other ships here to the base, although most of them had started for it sooner. And it had, in himself, a veteran commander. And, he told the military people again, he was not convinced that they intended ever to hunt this enemy seriously, hunt it to the death.

  The response from Gennadius was stony silence. Domingo and his crew left the operations room. Polly stayed close to him and watched him glowering as he paced the corridor outside.

  He looked around at her and at the four other people of his own crew. “We’re not lifting in the next ten minutes. But I am going after Leviathan as soon as I can get a hint of where to look for it. Those of you who don’t like that idea had better drop off the crew right now.”

  Iskander stood beside his captain, looking at the others, as if such a suggestion could not possibly apply to himself. There was no question that he was on the crew, no matter what.

  “I’m staying on,” said Polly, and wondered at herself, though not as much as she would wonder later. Simeon and Wilma looked at each other, then both tentatively signed assent. Right now there were not a whole lot of choices about what else to do, where else to go.

  There was a pause, then Poinsot sighed. “I’m dropping out, Domingo. You have to play it the way you see it. But so do I. I can still see some kind of future life for myself. I’ve still got people, my sister and her kids, who are going to need me.”

  Polly recalled that Henric’s brother had been on Shubra too, in Ground Defense, but the brother’s family had been visiting elsewhere.

  “Drop out, then,” said the captain.

  Henric walked away. Gujar Sidoruk came out of the operations room, swearing at Gennadius, at the commander’s refusal to order a general hunt for Leviathan immediately. In a minute Gujar had officially signed on the crew as Poinsot’s replacement.

  CHAPTER 4

  Four days after the attack on Shubra, the entire crew of the Sirian Pearl was still at Base Four Twenty-five, as were a number of the people from the crews of the other Shubran ships. The rest of the Shubran survivors had taken their ships out to patrol as Gennadius had requested, putting aside their own grief to help guard some of the twenty or so other colonies that still survived within the nebula.

  Domingo still refused to consider doing that. He calculated that flying guard duty around a colony somewhere would give him at the most one chance in twenty of encountering Leviathan, and that was not enough.

  Polly had the impression that Gennadius thought the captain would come round in a little while and be willing to take the Pearl out on a defensive mission. But Domingo did not come round. Too full of vengeance to care about helping others, he waited at the base, along with those who were too shattered to care what happened to the other colonies, and a few other people who were too obsessed with the idea of immediately starting to rebuild, regaining what they themselves had lost. The military would shelter them all as refugees as long as necessary, feed them and provide them with spare clothing, but they could not remain its wards indefinitely. Eventually even the shattered ones would all have to go somewhere else. live again somewhere else, do something else with the remainder of their lives. It would be a matter of starting over, essentially from scratch.

  After the first three days at the base, a few of the Shubran survivors had approached their mayor, wanting him to take some initiative in finding a place or places away from the base for his few remaining citizens to settle, at least temporarily.

  But Domingo had no interest now in making that kind of effort. There was now only one subject that had any attraction for him at all.

  He gave Gennadius a strange smile when the base commander raised the matter of resettlement. Domingo answered: “A place to live? What does ‘to live’ mean?”

  Gennadius looked at his old friend rather grimly for a few seconds, then turned and walked away.

  Domingo called after him: “What’s new on the operations plot?”

  The question got no answer.

  Polly wanted to take Niles Domingo in her arms, to let him weep away some of the bottled grief that seemed to be driving him coldly and quietly insane. But he gave no indication of wanting to be in anyone’s arms for any reason; and trying to picture him shedding tears made her want to giggle nervously. She had never seen a human being who looked less likely to weep than Domingo did now.

  She waited for some change, for better or worse, in his condition.

  Polly had been able to piece together Domingo’s story, more or less, from scraps of conversation and from talk overheard, both at the base and earlier on Shubra. He had arrived in the Milkpail about twenty standard years ago as a very young man, accompanied by his timid young bride, a girl named Isabel. By all accounts he had loved Isabel deeply. Then about ten years ago his wife—she had never got over being easily frightened—had died in some kind of ship crash. Polly had never heard whether that disaster had been somehow related to berserkers or simply an accident. Two of Domingo’s three young children had died in that crash, too. He had not remarried. When Polly first met him a few months ago he had been a kindly man, though somewhat remote from everyone except his surviving daughter.

  Kindly was not the word that came to her mind now when she looked at him or listened to him. Grim. certainly. There were probably more ominous variations on that word that would fit his present condition even more exactly, but right now Polly had no inclination to try to find them.

  At least the refugees at Base Four Twenty-five had plenty of room. The visitors’ quarters here at the base were extensive, because in more normal times they got a lot of use. But now everyone who still had a home had gone scrambling to defend it, and the remaining refugees had the place practically to themselves.

  For her own use, Polly had chosen a small single room next to the one where Domingo had indifferently allowed himself to be billeted. She saw little or nothing of him during the nights, but everything was quiet next door, as far as she could tell. So quiet that she began to doubt that he was ever there.

  Worried about Domingo on the first night after their arrival at the base, Polly had gone next door to look in on him, planning to make up a reason for the visit as required. Her brisk tap on his door remained unanswered, even when she repeated it. She called his name, then tried the door, which was unlocked. He was not in the little room at all. One of the flight bags he’d had with him on the ship was sitting unopened on the narrow bed. There were no other signs of occupancy.

  Polly thought for a moment and found her captain in the next place she looked for him. He was back in his ship, wide awake, hunched over some instruments in the common room. On a wall screen a copy of that last surviving Shubran ground-defense recording was being played back, reenacting the destruction of his life. The ugly angular shape that was Leviathan came drifting in slow motion across the screen, dragging its blue glow under magnification that was still not enough to let it be seen very clearly. Weapons flared on the berserker, and beneath it the landscape exploded into dust. This was evidently before the landers had been dropped, the smaller machines that must have dug out and sterilized the small shelters like Maymyo’s, for there was no sign of those devices here. The scene ran for only a few seconds, then automatically started over again. And yet again, as Polly watched, Domingo kept studying it intently, critically, as if the recorded onslaught represented no more than an engineering problem. Meanwhile the Pearl’s computer was working away in busy silence, constructing a colored holographic model of the whole nebula, one that Polly recognized as a smaller version of the plot on display in the operations room.

  When she came into the room, Domingo took his eyes from the screen just long enough to glance at her for identification purposes. “What is it, Polly?” he asked her absently.

  She delayed answering the question, but the captain didn’t even notice. T
he screen and model in front of him had immediately reclaimed his attention. Eventually it did dawn on him again that she was there, watching. He looked up again, with more awareness in his eyes this time. “What is it?”

  The excuses she had been mulling over, all suitable for dropping in on a friend in the next room, suddenly did not seem adequate to justify breaking in on a ship’s captain in the middle of a combat-planning session.

  So Polly blurted out part of the truth: “I was worried about you.”

  That at least appeared to get the captain’s full attention. Was that expression on his face intended to be a smile? He said: “Don’t. There’s not enough left of me to worry about.”

  “I don’t believe that—I see a lot of you still there.”

  He had no real reply to that. He grunted something and sat waiting.

  She said: “You’re still determined to go after that berserker.” It was hardly a question.

  The captain nodded abstractedly. He was still looking at her, but his attention was already slipping away again.

  Indicating the model, Polly asked: “Is that going to be a big help?”

  His eyes returned to the holographic construction, and this time they stayed on it. He sat back with folded arms. “I think it will.”

  She moved a little closer to him and sat down on one of the built-in padded benches. “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s just a matter of trying to get into Leviathan’s brain and predict what he’s going to do next.” Domingo made that task sound almost easy. His eyes were still aimed at the model, but she had the impression that his gaze was focused faraway.

  He had said he . What he’s going to do. Polly filed that information away for the moment. She asked: “Is there any way I can help you?”

  Eventually his eyes came back to her. Sizing her up, he nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “Yes. Of course you can help. When the time comes, I’ll need help. I’ll need a good crew. But right now… right now it’s just a matter of my getting this modeling done as accurately as I can. I think I prefer to do that myself. I want to know it perfectly.”