Berserker Blue Death

by Fred Saberhagen

  Domingo chose weapons, issued firing orders and observed results.

  The berserker installation still fought back, but ever more feebly. After another exchange or two against Domingo’s missiles and beam weapons, the enemy defenses were obviously crumbling, and the Pearl moved in closer still.

  There were a few seconds of relative calm in which Fourth Adventurer issued a further report on Nebulon affairs. The prisoner had just been freed, but while in captivity had been the subject of horrible experiments, and the Carmpan had the impression that she or he might now be close to death, madness or both.

  Soon after that the Carmpan was able to report that the main destructor charges on the installation had been effectively disabled.

  Now the Pearl moved even closer to the enemy.

  Presently the berserker’s last defensive shields had been wiped out of space. Two more hits by beam-projector pulses on weapon clusters along its perimeter and the last of its return fire stuttered to a halt. At the moment the weapons of Domingo’s ship looked powerfully impressive.

  Domingo called a cease-fire. A few moments later, with his ship gradually approaching the ruin below, the captain announced that he planned to board the enemy to look for information, clues to the location of Leviathan. He asked for one or two volunteers to accompany him.

  No immediate answer came, at least not audibly. Simeon found himself having to repress hysterical laughter.

  Iskander and Branwen finally volunteered to come along. There was something so utterly new and mad about this enterprise that the woman felt herself unable to resist it; and if she were going to learn any secrets about Domingo, this seemed like the most likely way to go about it.

  Domingo decided that now, facing a defeated enemy, was a good time to practice fast-boarding techniques.

  The Pearl rushed closer to the target planetoid, pulling back only at the last moment from a final ramming impact against the rock and metal of the enemy.

  The launch, carrying the three boarders, came flying out of the ventral bay almost like a stone from a sling. The idea was to minimize the time of the little ship’s exposure in space to enemy fire. But this turned out to be a practice run; nothing struck at the launch. It appeared that this particular enemy had nothing left with which to strike.

  The three invaders left the launch. The little craft, running on autopilot, hovered near the planetoid’s surface. Lugging heavy weapons and explosives, the three quickly got themselves down to the surface, which was still glowing with the heat of their own bombardment.

  Protected by their armor, they quickly approached and crossed the broken outer ramparts of the enemy installation. Moving in, they blasted open doors and burned great holes through bulkheads. They were determined to leave them-selves a clear and unblockable line of retreat as they forced their way in to the mysteries below.

  The berserker had been unable to destroy itself or its central computing units or even to kill its prisoner, but some of the commensal machines of the base were still active. The small maintenance machines, lacking in weapons, speed and tactics, tried to carry out harassing attacks but were blasted out of the way with relative ease.

  The insubstantial bodies of the Nebulon attacking party, presumably including the rescued prisoner, came fluttering and wavering around the boarding party, then passed on, up and out to freedom.

  “Good-bye, perhaps forever,” Iskander muttered, waving an arm toward the Nebulons, struggling to be funny. But the attitude no longer seemed to come naturally to him. He was giving a feeble imitation of his usual self.

  This station was not as big, or the underground portion of it as elaborate, as the boarders had somehow been expecting. There were no large docks in sight. Certainly this could never have served as a major repair or construction base even for small fighting machines, let alone the huge killers of Leviathan’s class.

  What appeared to be biological research gear, much of it intact or almost so, came into the boarders’ view as soon as they had penetrated underground. And here, as on the enemy unit they had previously boarded, the invading humans discovered a collection of complex field generators. These devices no doubt had served to create the prison walls and bars within which the Nebulon had been confined for study and experimentation.

  Finally, a small chamber containing what had to be the central brain of the base was uncovered. “Some interesting-looking data banks here, Cap.” After that effort Iskander ceased to probe or even to talk. It was as if he had run out of energy.

  For this expedition Domingo had equipped himself with hand-held gear that was supposed to be able to read most berserker data storage systems. A good portion of his wealth had gone to buy it. He clamped cables onto the memory units he could reach and connected the device to his headlink. He stood taking readings with intense concentration while his two crew members stood guard beside him.

  “This unit…” the captain said finally and paused. A few moments later he spoke again. “What’s been going on at this facility… the machines here have been trying to determine what would be the most effective, the most deadly anti-ED human life form that could possibly be created.”

  The others waited, listening.

  Domingo said: “The suggestion seems to be that this life form would be an ED human itself.”

  Back aboard the Pearl. Simeon was saying: “Get them on the radio.”

  “Right. The message?” Spenee Benkovic sounded weary to the verge of collapse.

  “If you have to send it in the clear to get through, do it. Tell them our deep detectors have picked up a shape at a range of two hundred million kilometers. Like a jagged birdcage with a skull in it. There’s even a hint of blue flames. Leviathan is here.”

  CHAPTER 21

  When the message from the Pearl came in, Branwen moved as fast as she could. But from the first step, Domingo was already ahead of her in the mad scramble to regain the launch, and Iskander was right at her side.

  As she passed the memory units that Domingo had begun to disassemble, she hastily grabbed up some of the components he had been testing. Domingo, who a moment ago had been fascinated by the same bits of hardware, had dropped them instantly the moment word came that Old Blue was now actually on the scene, within his reach.

  Iskander too ignored everything else when he heard that. Branwen caught a brief glimpse of Baza’s face inside his helmet and was struck by the strange look he was wearing, wooden and almost lifeless.

  Half a dozen of the small memory units were under Branwen’s left arm as she leaped and ran, shoving pieces of berserker aside, following the captain.

  The captain did not turn back or even look behind him to see if his two crew members were still with him. It occurred to Branwen that Domingo was actually ready to leave them here if they could not keep up with him in his rush to get back to his ship and come to grips with his archenemy.

  The three humans, moving with practiced speed in low gravity, went bounding and plunging back through the passageway they had blasted open.

  They were within meters of regaining the surface when a slab of rock the size of a spaceship came slowly toppling toward them—perhaps the battered berserker brain that ran the base had been able to organize one last attempt upon their lives. But in the low gravity the humans easily avoided the falling mass. Metal and rock jumped and shuddered beneath their feet as it came down.

  Moments later all three were in the clear. Branwen, burdened with her collection of possibly priceless hardware, had trouble keeping up with the two men now, although she considered herself as skillful as anyone at getting around in space armor. Iskander, having raced ahead of her, turned back once, wordlessly, to see that she was not falling hopelessly behind. Domingo did not turn back at all.

  The three of them were running and bounding now across the planetoid’s surface, still radiant with heat. The eerie landscape of the rocky mass surrounded them, marked with long shadows and the stark white light of the small but nearby sun. The sky beyond the sun w
as mottled white with distant clouds of nebula and devoid of any other stars.

  Now one artificial star had come into being overhead and was brightening quickly. The autopilot had been randomly maneuvering the launch, and now in response to Domingo’s radio command it was bringing the little vessel quickly down to the boarding party.

  There was another movement nearby, this one of almost invisible entities skimming across the planetoid’s airless rocky surface. Branwen had expected that the former prisoner and the original Nebulon rescue party would be long gone by now. But two shimmering shapes, coming almost within reach of the three running, suited humans, appeared as evidence that their new allies had not entirely abandoned the field. She wondered if one of the formless flickerings might be Speaker. Without the Carmpan on hand, there was no way to tell.

  The Spacedwellers moved near the three who ran, as if to keep their heavy partners company. The almost immaterial presences, fading in and out of visibility, were reassuring even though the creatures were unable to communicate more directly.

  The launch was down now, the autopilot opening a hatch as it skimmed the planetoid’s surface just ahead of the three who ran across it. As the ED humans hurled themselves into the vessel, Branwen muttered a private vow that she would seek, as soon as possible, another means of communicating with the Spacedwellers; it was not good to be totally dependent on the Carmpan for all messages, and it was all too easy to foresee times when such dependence might be downright fatal.

  Once the boarders were sealed into the launch, good radio contact with the Pearl was once more available. Now they could hear Benkovic, back on the ship, still wondering aloud if the Nebulons were somehow responsible for the arrival of Leviathan.

  “If I believed that,” Domingo announced, “I’d see they got a reward. I hope you’re moving the ship our way?”

  “Yes, sir. About twenty seconds to pickup.”

  Meanwhile Domingo, his headlink firmly on, was driving the launch as fast as possible to rejoin the Pearl.

  Branwen, after clamping herself into a combat chair and hooking up her headlink, was trying to catch a glimpse of the famous blue glow through the cleared viewports of the launch. But Leviathan was still too far away to be directly visible in whole or part.

  Fortunately for Domingo and those with him, the Pearl had already been maneuvered in quite close to the planetoid.

  And with Benkovic at the helm she now came speeding in even closer to pick up the launch carrying the boarders.

  Leviathan was already opening up with ranging fire, probing at the Pearl’s defensive shields. Before the pickup could be made, the launch rocked as it was struck by the wavefront of a weapons blast, a surge of particles and electromagnetic waves. In comparison to this, the just-conquered base had been firing popguns. The intensity was such that Branwen could feel the impact of the near miss in her bones, even in her combat chair and in the absence of atmosphere to help transmit a shock.

  The Carmpan was murmuring something hopeful on the radio, in the intervals between the brisk comments of the two pilots of the swiftly approaching vehicles. Just at the awkward moment of retrieval of the launch, as Branwen understood Fourth Adventurer’s commentary, the Nebulons would be busy creating a valuable distraction. They feinted an attack on Leviathan, which provided enough of a diversion to enable the ED humans to get back aboard their ship.

  Branwen was the first out of the launch into the ship’s ventral bay, and from there went scrambling immediately toward her battle station. There seemed to be no good place to put down the memory units she had brought along, and so she kept them with her.

  Domingo arrived at his own combat station just in time to take over the helm from Spence before the real in-earnest action started.

  As the captain made the headlink connection to his helmet, the ship was already in swift motion, and the space around her flamed with combat. Leviathan’s weapons were very much heavier than those the berserker station had used to defend itself, and, according to all early indications, they were also better aimed and synchronized.

  Now the whole ED human component of the crew were crouching at their stations, doing their best to draw upon the energies of spacetime, channeling power approaching that of suns. Mindlink networking shared out pictures of the interlocking systems in operation among the human minds; operating this ship meant, among other things, playing an intricate game as a member of a skilled team.

  The Carmpan reported that the Nebulons were now ready to make another effort at attacking. Word had spread somehow among their people of the new allies who rode within a heavy metal casing and effectively fought the dead-metal killers; reinforcements were pouring in to the swarm of Spacedwellers, and Speaker reported new hope among them of being able to overcome what they considered their ancient enemy.

  “And mine, too. Mine first of all. But I’ll take all the help that I can get.”

  The Pearl withstood the enemy’s first ranging fire and the jolts of even heavier weapons that followed almost immediately. But Branwen had the gut feeling that the defenses were not holding with any great margin of safety; she could tell because just now sustaining them was her assignment. She heard and saw and felt the weapons of the human ship struck back, without as yet doing any observable damage.

  The Pearl had now become a swiftly moving, evasive target. Domingo was maneuvering his ship away from the sun but not yet directly toward his enemy. For a period of minutes he took the Pearl dancing in and out of the maze of planetoids and dust rings. Clever enemy missiles pursued her on her twisting course, and she dodged them, but her object was not to get away. The captain was stalking Old Blue now, even as the great berserker was stalking him:

  Again, on the captain’s order, the Pearl struck back. This time with full power.

  When the haze of ionization spread around Old Blue by the latest bombardment had partially cleared, it could be seen that the enemy too remained essentially undamaged. Against this tough opponent, the new missiles, the new beams, were not performing as well as had been hoped and expected.

  It was at moments like this that Branwen Galway felt most intensely alive; they were what kept her coming back into space.

  But now there ensued a brief lull in the actual fighting. Evasive action continued. Briefly the instruments on the humans’ ship lost track of Leviathan.

  Had the enemy fled the system? No, now the bizarre birdcage shape, licked with blue fire, was back again. Domingo made a sound of relief and satisfaction. Once more the humans’ computers worked to lock Old Blue in their sights.

  “It’s playing ‘possum,” Simeon said. “Wants us to come after it. It’s afraid we’ll get away otherwise. If it just chases us we might be too small and fast for it to catch.”

  “It’s not afraid of anything,” said Benkovic.

  Neither was the captain, evidently. Domingo was sliding toward his enemy again, having got the angle of approach he wanted, one that would allow him to maneuver his ship in and out of relative concealment.

  The dead shape of a battered planetoid now loomed up close to the Pearl coming between the combatants and cutting off their direct view of each other. Which way to dodge around the obstacle?

  Just when everyone aboard Domingo’s ship was most intent on which way the captain would turn next, distraction came. Another shape was showing on the remote detectors, that of a machine or ship coming through the clouds at the edge of the cleared space, almost behind the Pearl as she faced her known enemy. Did it mean berserker reinforcements?

  That possibility hadn’t really occurred to Branwen until now. She knew that Leviathan, due to some trick of programming or randomly selected tactics, generally fought alone as a solitary rogue rather than attacking in concert with other death machines.

  The range was too great for the IFF transponder to be useful, but a closer look at the ominous new shape proved it to be that of a Space Force ship.

  The captain muttered grimly: “Gennadius. For once he’s on hand when I
can use him. With his whole fleet, I hope.”

  Eagerly the Pearl’s instruments probed the nebula in the area surrounding the new arrival. But there was no fleet to be seen there, only the one ship. A steadier look confirmed that it was indeed Gennadius’s cruiser.

  Where was Leviathan now? Still out of line-of-sight…

  Gennadius had good detectors too, and was already trying to establish tightbeam communications. Some of the beam from the Space Force cruiser managed to get through this space still ringing with weaponry.

  In an encoded message the commander promised aid to the embattled Pearl. Gennadius assured her captain and crew that he too was skilled at trailing and tracking. He had had no success in reassembling his scattered fleet or even in making contact with any of its other components. Instead, after the storm had passed, Gennadius had followed the one trail that he had been able to find, and that trail had led him here to the Sirian Pearl. And to the enemy.

  Simeon found himself breathing more easily. Now, with two first-class fighting ships and three themes of humanity working together, Leviathan’s enemies appeared to have a good chance of winning in this particular fight. He could sense how morale aboard the Pearl. which had been numbed and wavering, went up slightly.

  After another half-garbled three-way conference call, including Speaker, straining electronic communications to the limit and calling upon the Carmpan’s mental ability, the two ships closed on the foe from opposite sides as the Nebulons simultaneously began an infiltration of the defensive fields of Old Blue.

  “Here we go.” Captain Domingo said it unnecessarily.

  Simeon, before focusing the total abilities of his mind on tactics and fire control, took a last look at the intercom image of Branwen. If he had been expecting to get a look from her in return, he was disappointed. She was already concentrating utterly on her instruments.

  Old Blue maneuvered as if it were trying to shake free of the double attack but failed to do so. Fighting ships screamed toward the death machine from two sides. But did they have it trapped, or did it have them? The Pearl’s shields were taking hits at a rate that made Simeon wonder if the enemy might have received reinforcement, too. But evidently not. Leviathan must have been keeping some of its heavy weaponry in reserve through the first exchanges of blows, probably trying to get its smaller opponent to come closer or to put too much reliance on its shields.