Berserker Blue Death

by Fred Saberhagen

  Whatever the reason for its peculiarities, it still seemed to Polly that one berserker, any berserker, just because it had acquired a name, ought not to be necessarily more frightening than another. Not that she had ever actually fought any of them, but… and whatever type of a machine it was that they were chasing, it was certain that it had already been seriously damaged; and that was reassuring.

  Domingo had the six people of the crew divided into two watches now: three driving the ship, manning the weapons and studying the computer-modeled trail while the other three rested and slept and talked and waited for their turns on duty. In this way the hunt kept going hour after hour, one standard day after another.

  The captain seldom slept or rested now. Polly, watching him, saw the chiseling of his face grow sharper; otherwise he seemed unaffected by lack of rest.

  The folds of nebula flowed ever more thickly around the Pearl. This did not slow the progress of the ship, already limited by the need to find a trail and stay with it. But it did raise the possibility of ambush.

  Gujar, operating the forward detectors on his watch, excitedly called in a sighting, and Iskander at the helm slowed forward progress. But the sighting proved to be a false alarm.

  When the object appeared at close range it was seen to be a peculiar thing, some kind of natural life-construct, with stalactite-like formations protruding from it in all directions. It throbbed, faintly and slowly, with the working of the life within it. Not a single organism, the instruments indicated, but some kind of a composite form. The thing, or creature, or life-swarm, or whatever it was, appeared next on the close forward detectors and finally on the direct-viewing screens. Then it drifted by the Pearl at a range of only a few kilometers. It was vastly bigger than the ship. There was no indication that it was aware of the ship at all.

  Relative to the nebular material immediately surrounding it, the object was moving at a significant fraction of the velocity of light, a speed that any ship or machine of equal size would have found practically impossible to attain.

  No one on the ship had seen or even heard about anything like it before. At any other time the humans would have turned aside eagerly to investigate. But not now.

  When the living conglomerate was out of sight, Simeon and Wilma made a tentative and ill-advised attempt to persuade the captain to turn around and go back to Base Four Twenty-five. They argued that the crew of the Pearl could now report to the Space Force what they had found regarding the berserkers and consider they had done a creditable job. Gennadius would thank them.

  Domingo did not thank them for the suggestion.

  The truth was that most of his crew, everyone but himself and Iskander, were growing increasingly uncomfortable in this weird place. Even to people who were more or less at home in the uncanny environment of the Milkpail Nebula, this thickening, curdling, mottled whiteness, engendering new monsters, was extraordinary. Among the uncomfortable majority the opinion was subtly gaining strength that it was, or ought to be, the job of the Space Force to carry on with this kind of pursuit.

  Domingo was inflexibly opposed to any change of course and overrode the hints of opposition. He even touched in passing on the laws of mutiny. In port a crew might, and his usually did, have the right to vote on big decisions. In deep space the captain’s word was law, and the law applied with redoubled force when the berserker enemy was near.

  The captain did agree to send off one of their two expensive robot couriers, directed to Base Four Twenty-five, before he continued his pursuit of the damaged berserker.

  The courier departed silently, carrying word of their discoveries, their present location and their intentions to Base Four Twenty-five. They hoped. The chance that it would succeed in getting there was hard to calculate.

  Now there was only one usable courier left aboard. Here in clouds where radio was hopeless, it represented the only possible means of communication with the rest of humanity.

  The pursuit of the wounded berserker resumed. More hours passed, adding up to another day. Tension grew aboard the ship as the trail became stronger, more clearly defined than it had ever been. Whatever was leaving the trail was undoubtedly closer ahead now than ever before. Sizable bits of debris, even fist-sized chunks of this and that, began to show up in the scans still being telemetered in from the outrider robots.

  “That’s berserker stuffing.” Domingo said it softly, with obvious enjoyment.

  A powerful blast centered somewhere ahead sent a silent but more-than-detectable Shockwave through the white nebula.

  Chakuchin made a relieved sound. “It’s blown itself up. That’s it.”

  “We’ll see.” Domingo’s intensity did not alter.

  Inside the Pearl. whose forward velocity, even here within the buffeting whiteness, could be conveniently expressed as a fraction of the speed of light, the enormously slower Shockwave could be studied on the detectors for some time before it engulfed the ship.

  But whatever might be, or might have been, at the center of the shock to cause it still could not be seen.

  Domingo ordered acceleration. And more acceleration. Particles of matter, molecule-sized, pinged dangerously against the shielding fields that so far were managing to protect the hull from microcollisions at relativistic speeds. Indicators glowed with warning signals.

  The captain ordered: “Give up the trail. Head for the center of that shock.” The location of the center could be determined from the automatic recording of the event.

  “Double alert for an ambush. Just in case.”

  On the screens of the forward detectors, the image of an object considerably bigger than the Pearl took shape and rapidly solidified. It was angular, irregular and metallic, about at the upper limit of size for effective travel within the nebula.

  “Hold your fire!” the captain ordered sharply.

  Whatever kind of a machine it was ahead of them, it was not Leviathan. The shape was as jagged as Leviathan’s, but still totally wrong for that, if any of the descriptions and recordings of the monster were correct. Polly heard the captain sigh, a sound that might have come from the lips of a disappointed lover.

  The second most obvious characteristic of the object they had just caught up with was the remarkable amount of fresh damage that it had sustained. The ruin looked too genuine and extensive to be any kind of trick. As they approached the wreck ever more closely there was hard radiation, too, wild and irregular in both intensity and kind, but always enough of it to suggest that there might be a small-scale nuclear meltdown in progress somewhere on the enemy.

  It appeared that secondary explosions, delayed battle damage—or more likely a deliberate destructor charge, set off in anticipation of capture by the forces of life—had left this particular berserker unit, whatever it was exactly, drifting in a helpless condition.

  The humans aboard the Pearl observed the enemy warily from a thousand kilometers’ distance; then from a hundred; and then again from ten.

  Simeon said, with the air of someone trying to establish an assertion as undoubted fact: “Now we’ve got to go back and report.”

  Polly, watching on her intercom, saw Niles Domingo’s eyes turn to the big young man, one image glaring at another. The captain squelched Chakuchin’s effort immediately: “We can’t. We’ll lose it if we do. Do you expect that we, or anyone else, will be able to find the way back to it again in this fog?” In another day or so the trail they had followed would have been completely dispersed by random drifting and other natural movements. There were currents in the nebula; it was at least as dynamic as an ocean of water on the surface of a planet.

  “All right, then I suppose we finish it off. We have our missiles armed.”

  “They’d better be. But don’t use any of them just yet.”

  “But what else can we do?” Chakuchin paused, as if realization had just come to him. “Are you expecting to send some of us over to board that thing? It may just be waiting to use its main destructor charge until something living comes
close enough to be wiped out in the blast.”

  “I think it’s already used whatever destructor charges it had left. And I’ll lead the boarding myself, if that’s what’s bothering you. Can I talk two other people into suiting up with me? If not, I’ll go alone. Polly, what about you?” The captain’s eyes looked out from the little intercom screen and into hers. “We could use your technical expertise.”

  “I’ll go,” Polly heard herself agree at once. Then she trembled, thinking of her children. But she could not unsay what she had said. Not to Niles Domingo. She could silently curse the unasked-for fate that bound her to him, but it was her fate still, and she would not have changed it had she had the power.

  Iskander, as usual, had not much to say, but he was plainly ready, even eager, to go where his captain led.

  Gujar repeated Simeon’s suggestion: “We could just fire away at it…”

  But Domingo was silent this time, and this time the suggestion died without argument. The objections to it were too plain. Self-destruction was doubtless what the berserker had wanted to achieve, but something had gone wrong with the destructor charges.

  That it had tried to destroy itself when capture by its enemy seemed imminent at least suggested that there was still something aboard that might constitute a valuable secret, perhaps even a clue to where the berserkers attacking the Milkpail colonies had their repair and construction base.

  Conceivably there might even be human prisoners still living on that wreck. That there could be seemed doubtful, but berserkers did take prisoners sometimes for the information that could be gained from them, for living bodies and living minds on which to experiment.

  Domingo was continuing to study the helpless-looking enemy, switching rapidly from one instrument of observation to another and back again. This was not Leviathan in front of him, but it represented the only immediate chance he had of getting closer to Leviathan. He mused aloud in his newly intense voice: “This is too damned strange. It’s not like any berserker I ever saw or heard of before now. We can’t miss the chance, we’ve got to go over there and see what we can find out from it.”

  Simeon suggested: “We’ve still got one courier. Let’s send it off first, at least. Tell people where we are. Get some help out here.”

  Iskander shook his head. “I don’t think so. If we launch our last robot courier here, we don’t know that it’s going to be able to find Base Four Twenty-five. Or that it’ll ever be picked up by the Space Force anywhere. I’d say myself that the odds are pretty poor that a courier message from us here is going to get through.” He smiled faintly. “Besides, couriers are expensive.” It was the punch line of a standing joke.

  Gujar said: “I agree. We might need the courier worse later on. I’d even say it’s chancy as to whether we’ll be able to find our way out of this ourselves; at least in any comfortable period of time.”

  And Domingo again: “Maybe a courier would be able to find its way to the Space Force somewhere. And if it found them, they might not be too busy to come and look at this thing. And if they did decide to come, and they did find their way here and saw it, they might be smart enough to realize its value. Or they might not. No, thanks. We’re going to handle this ourselves. Even if they did agree it was valuable, they might still decide it would be better to fire away.”

  There was general agreement among the crew. People out here in the Milkpail depended, often enough, on the Space Force for their very lives. They also tended not to be overly impressed with that organization’s abilities and accomplishments.

  Simeon wavered. “Well, if you put it that way…” Wilma was silent.

  “I do put it that way. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Inside the cramped ventral bay where the Sirian Pearl carried her only launch—a small craft that also served as her only lifeboat—Niles Domingo, Polly Suslova and Iskander Baza were clambering into the bulbous suits and helmets of space armor. They were speeding up the procedure by calling checklist items back and forth.

  Polly saw Iskander watching her as if he found something very amusing in her way of managing the checklist. She gave him a sharp look in return, and he turned away.

  As soon as they had their suits on and tested, the three of them gathered up personal weapons and kits of tools and entered the launch, carefully maneuvering their mechanically enlarged bodies, one after another, through the tight hatchway of the smaller vessel.

  The launch was a cylindrical craft, half as long as the Pearl herself but not much bigger in diameter than the height of a tall man. Its hatches were sealed now, and the bay around it evacuated. Then the ventral doors of the bay were opened to space. With Domingo in the pilot’s seat of the launch—his armored helmet had a built-in headlink—the small vehicle separated from the Pearl and drove toward the damaged berserker.

  Normally the controls of the launch, like those of the larger ship, were operated through a direct linkage to the electrical activity of the human pilot’s brain. The system used on the launch was less sophisticated than that aboard the Pearl. but adequate for the less complicated craft.

  One advantage of the launch was its real viewports, through which people inside could look out. In one direction, nearly astern now, hung the Pearl. her gun hatches open, her weapons ready. In almost the opposite direction, suspended against an endless background of distant white billows and luminous pastel columns, the enemy machine was a construction of dark gray planes and angles, torn by blackened holes, lighted from time to time by fitful internal fires—none of which were blue.

  The berserker was substantially bigger than the Pearl. and through the viewports it appeared subjectively enormous as the three humans in the launch got their first direct look at it. The enemy loomed even larger as Domingo drove closer. Still, the launch’s radar instruments assured its crew that the machine ahead was by no means of an unusual size for a berserker. It rotated slowly in the eternal sleet of this nebular space, spurting more fumes and debris from ragged, open wounds, emitting an occasional flare of light in one color or another. Polly, looking at the broken, uneven outline the berserker presented, decided that almost its entire outer hull was gone. And yet it had continued functioning, at least well enough to retreat this far after the battle.

  The enemy unit appeared to be taking no notice of the Pearl. or of the more closely approaching launch. Possibly it was now completely blind and deaf. Possibly that last explosion, whose Shockwave the Pearl’s instruments had detected at a distance, had originated in a successful destructor charge, and the berserker’s electronic brain, or brains, with their possible secrets, had now been totally destroyed.

  Of course it was also possible that the enemy still had additional destructor charges aboard, only waiting to be set off. Or that it still possessed other weapons and was now aware of human presences nearby and was biding its time, calculating how to optimize the last chance it would ever have of carrying out its prime programmed directive.

  “Ever get this close to one of them before?” Polly asked the question in a small voice and of no one in particular. Crew stations on the launch were not separated; all three people aboard were riding in the same small compartment. The captain, seated at her elbow, was continuing to ease the launch nearer to the foe at a speed of only a few meters per second.

  Wordlessly Domingo shook his head. He seemed to be indicating that he had no time for questions now; Polly bit her lip.

  “I was, once,” Iskander murmured. Polly turned her head and looked at him, but he was not looking at her, and he offered no details.

  The central thought in Domingo’s mind right now was that this was not Leviathan in front of him. Still, it was one of the enemy, the only one of the enemy that had yet come within his grasp. The sight of the ongoing damage aboard, the nuclear and chemical reactions eating away at it, offered him a definite, savage satisfaction. The feeling was mingled with an urgent worry that the information he had hoped to find here, the knowledge that would somehow give him
an advantage, lead him to his true foe, was being destroyed before his eyes in the same fires.

  He willed the launch forward more quickly. The safety fields of his chair shielded him and his shipmates from even feeling the acceleration, but they all saw on instruments how sharply the craft responded.

  The storm of radiation, which had to be emanating from somewhere within the enemy, grew stronger as they neared the hulk. Still the armored suits ought to be sufficient to shield them from the radiation when they went out as boarders, unless the flux should increase by a considerable factor even above its present level.

  They circled the enemy once in the launch, at a distance of no more than half a kilometer. Then Domingo drove his little craft closer again, slowing at the last moment, without warning taking them right inside the damaged hull, as Polly muffled a gasp. The launch entered the enemy’s hull through a great rent that had been torn either by some Space Force weapon or by a secondary explosion. The hole was so big that it seemed to Polly that half of the pastel sunset billows making up the nebular sky outside were still visible after they had entered. But she still found herself holding her breath, with the sensation that gigantic jaws were about to close on her and crush her.

  Inside the enemy’s battered hulk, patches of heated, glowing metal were visible in every direction. When the glow of the hot metal was augmented by that from the nebula outside, there was enough light to keep the bowels of the berserker from being really dark. Not satisfied with this erratic illumination, Iskander sent searchlight beams stabbing out from the launch. The lights, playing back and forth at varying angles, revealed more twisted metal along with other objects, shapes and textures, some of which remained unidentifiable. At places inside the berserker, the continually outgassing fumes from internal damage were thick enough to interfere with vision, even with the launch’s searchlights on.