Berserker Blue Death

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Looks dead. Damned dead,” said Benkovic, meaning the berserker.

  “It’s not. Not yet. I know.”

  Benkovic said nothing.

  The voice of Elena Mossuril, the mayor of da Gama, came into the launch through a radio relay requesting Captain Domingo to respond.

  The captain ignored the first two calls before answering the third out of irritation. “Niles Domingo here. I’m busy.”

  A brief pause. Then the voice on the radio resumed. “I’m sure you are, Captain Domingo. I must talk to you, though. This is the mayor, Elena Mossuril, and I want you to tell me what you’re doing. Coded transmission and tightbeam, please.”

  “Talk to my acting second. Simeon, take over this conversation.” And the captain concentrated again on his ship. But he listened in to what was being said on the radio.

  Simeon, on the Pearl. explained to the mayor what Domingo was doing and assured her that his ship was standing by, ready to use what weapons she had left.

  Mayor Mossuril in turn urged Chakuchin not to fire at the downed berserker because of the danger of a secondary explosion. He should fire only at landers if they were deployed from the wreck, but none had been observed so far. He gave her assurances that he was not going to fire unless his captain ordered it; and that was the best that she could get.

  The mayor in her deep shelter kept receiving discouraging reports from her tiny ground-based forces. They stated that they were unable to do very much at all about the berserker.

  To begin with, there were no suitable all-terrain fighting vehicles available. With the artificial gravity gone, the surface atmosphere was being lost too rapidly to allow for the practical use of aircraft. And the assault force that was trying to reach the enemy on foot in space armor was bogged down in giant crevasses where the newly fractured and churned land kept slipping and sliding and piling up around them.

  The mayor could hardly blame anyone for moving very deliberately in approaching the downed monster.

  Even if—and this the mayor had not dared try to tell her allies out in space, for fear the berserker could be listening— even if there was a subshelter holding a thousand people almost underneath the thing.

  Simeon’s stock of missiles had been totally used up. All of the heavy weapon systems of the Pearl were virtually exhausted. She continued to move toward da Gama and Leviathan, but would be able to do little or nothing when she got there. It would be a couple of hours before another ship was in a good position to help.

  Simeon and Branwen stayed at their battle stations and kept the ship going as best they could. There were still some light weapons in usable condition.

  The Carmpan groaned in his berth, crying out with the psychic pain of singed and slaughtered Nebulons, and with his own untranslatable interior torment.

  Iskander Baza in sickbay was nearly dead. The stunner at a range of only two meters had done to him what such supposedly non-lethal weapons all too often did.

  And now a blood vessel broke inside the victim’s brain.

  Presently the machines gave up on his heart.

  Minutes passed before any of his used-up shipmates noticed that he had died.

  The launch with Domingo and Spence Benkovic aboard, descending swiftly and smoothly, came to a halt not quite touching the slabs of rock thrown up along the enemy’s broken side. The little vessel came very close to docking against rock, even against the berserker’s hull, but Domingo deliberately avoided solid contact.

  Crisply the captain gave Benkovic his orders: to remain on the launch, to stay on guard and be ready to respond to whatever other orders might come from Domingo.

  Judging from Spence’s quiet, subdued response, and the fact that the simple orders had to be repeated, it was evident that he was in an increasingly odd mental state. But there was nothing to be done about that now.

  As soon as the vessel was practically motionless relative to the ground, the captain in his armor, carrying weapons and tools, slipped out of a hatch and dropped lightly and slowly the few meters remaining.

  The sprawled body of his archenemy towered over him, the broken ribs of the birdcage twisted into fantastic shapes. A gust of almost invisible blue flame played harmlessly from a rent in the berserker’s hull. Another, larger rent nearby, one Domingo had already picked out as a good means of entering the body of his enemy, was dark and quiet.

  After looking the scene over for only a few seconds, Domingo moved on alone. It did not seem particularly strange to him that he was about to carry out yet another boarding, though he supposed it was doubtful whether any other human being in history had invaded active berserkers so many times. The captain knew only that he must seek out the deadly life of this thing that had destroyed his own life, face it somehow in a final confrontation. After having come this far and been through this much, simply to destroy the hardware of it—to blast and burn its physical shape away—would no longer be enough. Whatever he needed to release him had not yet happened.

  There were no immediate death traps ready for him as he went inside Leviathan’s hull. There was no resistance of any kind.

  More openings, some of them conveniently door-sized, were waiting ready-made in front of Domingo, and he moved deeper. As he moved, he took care to drop small radio-relay units at intervals, devices he hoped would keep him in contact with the human world outside.

  Domingo remained on hair-trigger alert as he advanced, expecting at every moment to meet opposition from small maintenance machines at least. In his arms he carried a shoulder weapon connected to a thoughtsight on his helmet. It was much heavier, more powerful, than the handgun he had brought along the first time he boarded a berserker. Grenades, even more potent, hung on his belt. Let the androids come. Even the landers. He was ready.

  A choice of ways lay ever open before him, and at each choice he went deeper still into the vitals of his enemy. And still the berserker had done nothing to dispute his progress. He moved in darkness now except for his suit lights.

  The machinery by which the captain found himself surrounded was unlike any he had encountered aboard either of the two berserker research stations. This equipment was older, different in design and purpose. This was obviously all for weapons and defense. This must have come from a different factory, though there were a few general similarities in design.

  Here there were plentiful signs that a great deal of repair and replacement had been carried out in the course of the centuries. Things had been moved, modified, disconnected and reconnected. There was evidence of a long ongoing effort to keep this engine of destruction in effective operation.

  Domingo aimed his carbine at a fragile-looking device. Then he eased his mind away from the will-to-shoot that would have triggered a blast of destruction.

  “Dead now,” he muttered. “All this part. Where’s your brain? In deeper. In deeper, somewhere. Somewhere in there, you’re still alive.”

  Through misshapen, unmarked corridors, strange tunnels and ducts that no human being had ever seen before, he groped and climbed and walked in the direction of the berserker’s core. His hands were trembling now, he noticed to his surprise. It was the first time his hands had trembled since… since he could not remember when. And the fact that he could not remember worried and puzzled him.

  Meanwhile, down deep in the central core of the death-machine, the innermost surviving circuits still tried to compute some way of sterilizing the entire planetoid, destroying the thousands of badlife that were known to infest it. For the berserker to calculate anything now was very difficult, because its central processors were damaged and starting to fail, and its sensors had been beaten almost blind and deaf. But it was still trying.

  Failing sterilization of the entire planetoid, perhaps it might destroy the underground shelter, crawling with badlife, that it could sense almost underneath its sprawling and half-crumpled bulk.

  And failing even that, it ought to be possible to wipe out of existence at least the single specimen of human badlife ver
min that had now come in contact with Leviathan itself.

  Where exactly was the lone intruding badlife now? There. Approximately. The interior sensors, not meant for this kind of work, gave only the roughest readings. But there, somewhere, quite near a set of automatic doors…

  With the abrupt removal of the artificial gravity field around da Gama, the upper atmosphere was peeling rapidly away, and the resulting depressurization of the lower air had brought on a fast chill as well as a fierce snowstorm. Not all of these changes were yet apparent among the huddled refugees sealed away down in the deep shelter. But one alarming fact was being quickly spread among them by word of mouth: Every exit from the shelter had been caved in or somehow blocked, either by the bombardment of the berserker’s weapons as it approached from space or by the impact of the great mass itself.

  Not that the lack of exits posed any immediate problem of survival for the thousand people who were here huddled underground. Their air supply was still secure. So the authorities in charge of the shelter kept repeating, in voices made as soothing as possible.

  As matters stood at this moment, there was nowhere for the people in the shelter to go anyway.

  Spence Benkovic sat, as he had been ordered, in the launch, gazing numbly out through one of the almost unbreakable windows. The autopilot was holding the launch just slightly above the surface of da Gama. Outside, snow was falling, drifting, accumulating a little here and there, on the rocks only about three meters below where Spence was sitting. A little higher in the howling, dissipating air, more snow was decorating the ancient black of Leviathan’s metallic surface, for the first time in the centuries or perhaps millennia of the machine’s existence.

  Spence was watching the snow. He had gone beyond fear, beyond exhaustion. Only one other thing still bothered him, and if it were not for that, he had the feeling, a very profound feeling, that the best thing he could do would be to sit here and watch it snow forever.

  He wasn’t going to be allowed to do that, though.

  Already the wind was blowing something like a gale. Benkovic could tell by the way the heavy rock outside was stirring and drifting now, mixing with the snow. Soon the atmosphere would begin to howl against the launch, maybe loud enough for him to hear it inside.

  He had seen and heard all this before, somewhere else.

  He watched snow vanish, steaming, in the blue flames that still came twisting out of one of the wounds in Old Blue’s side. The sides of the cavity still glowed, where some kind of a beam weapon, most likely one fired from the Pearl. had probed and probed again.

  Without consciously thinking much of anything, Spence sat in contemplation of that wound that was never going to heal.

  Domingo, still advanced, looked around warily at every step, expecting at every moment to be attacked by landers, androids, or at least maintenance machines. The shape that had killed Maymyo might spring out on him at any moment…

  Nothing sprang on him or at him. Nothing even got in his way. After one minor alarm from a set of automatic doors— the doors had closed sharply, perhaps trying to catch him— his progress had been unopposed.

  The suspicious doors, well behind him now, would not be moving again for any reason. He knew he could no longer be far from his enemy’s brain.

  The captain was aware of the fact when he had reached his goal, though his opponent did nothing to mark the occasion for him. He was standing now in a large and fairly open interior space, enlarged at some time in the past, he supposed, by the removal of parts for use elsewhere, the cannibalization of redundant units for the front line, wherever that had been. There was plenty of room here for small fighting machines to get in and move around, but none of them came at him.

  Deliberately, meticulously, Domingo had left his trail of radio relay devices. He could talk to the world outside if it became necessary. Later on, if he was still able to talk, no doubt he would. But there was another conversation he wanted to hold first.

  Niles Domingo turned his radio off the regular channels and on a short-range mode that the berserker would certainly be able to hear, if it could hear anything. He wished that his hands would stop shaking now, but they did not.

  He spoke to his enemy. “Where’s the lander, Skullface? I want the one that you sent down on the world called Shubra. Bring it out here. Send it against me now.”

  The berserker heard him.

  It had all of its functional maintenance machines at work inside another portion of its hull, preparing the sole remaining unit of its c-plus drive for detonation by a last suicidal application of power. It was now concentrating all its remaining energy and ability on this effort. The best calculations it was still capable of making indicated that here, in the planetoid’s natural gravity, that unit would explode when power was applied, violently enough to cave in at least the roof of the shelter below, hardened or not. Caving in the shelter might well finish off all the badlife inside.

  But the power mains leading to the c-plus unit had been broken in the crash, and there was much work yet for the little maintenance machines to do before that last killing surge of power could be applied. The machines needed more time to do their work. Unless the single badlife invader could be successfully delayed in its presumed mission of destruction, it was improbable that they were going to get it.

  Destroy or delay the invading badlife then, somehow.

  It would have been possible to divert some of the maintenance machines to attack this man, but the berserker decided against that course. The only machines it had available were certainly not meant for combat action. And it was easy to deduce that the life-unit must be heavily armored and armed, if it was here at all. Through battered and straining sensors, the berserker was barely able to perceive the presence of the lone invader. The trap with the doors had had a very low probability of success, but nothing better was available.

  Time was needed. And when the man, the badlife unit, began to ask the berserker questions, a possible means of gaining time presented itself. The berserker knew the badlife language; it could improvise a speaker, a device to make sounds, and it did.

  Domingo heard the machine speak. In a squeaking, inhuman but quite understandable voice it said to him: “I have no landers.”

  “Lying bastard,” he told it, without much feeling in the words. He wanted the heart, the last drop of blood. He wanted reaction, acknowledgment that he had won. He needed to bring the dead soul of the damned thing somehow within his grasp.

  “Liar,” he muttered. “Liar.”

  He tuned the nozzle of his weapon to a fine jet and began burning and blasting one of the consoles holding the berserker’s memory. When the console was open, he started in on the exposed memory units. They were small, no bigger than a fist, and he took them one at a time.

  From one such unit his decoding equipment was able to pick out the coordinates of the hidden repair base that Leviathan had used for centuries. This was treasure. But to Domingo it was still unsatisfying.

  The berserker’s brain had now been fragmented, by combat damage and the captain’s probing, until there was little left of it but mere data banks, incapable of planning or lying. Open books, waiting to be read or written in, indifferent to results and almost powerless to achieve them.

  Domingo grabbed up another unit. This small portion of the machine held in its memory much of the research results from the berserker bioresearch stations. That research effort had finally succeeded in determining the form of the optimum anti-human life weapon—at least insofar as berserker machines were able to determine what that might be.

  In the little image projected by Domingo’s decoder, it looked very much like an ED human. But, Domingo thought, the berserkers had no real hope of developing one of those.

  He dropped the memory unit. His sensitive suit mikes had picked up a sound twanging through the metal that surrounded him, and Domingo spun around, his weapon ready.

  He waited on a hair-trigger, watching and listening, but nothing happened. The
sound had been that of something collapsing, something failing, or just metal cooling and contracting. There was no threat.

  Leviathan would defend this place, its central brain, if it could still defend anything. There was plenty of room here for one of the landers, had there been any still working, to be able to get at an invader. The landers, at least the ones Domingo had seen depicted, weren’t very large machines. When they came down on the surface of a planet or a planetoid to sterilize it, they had to be able to get into some fairly restricted spaces in one way or another. Caves, for example, under overhanging cliffs of rock.

  But Domingo had faced no challenge since boarding Old Blue, except possibly for the puny effort of the doors. It was almost as if he were being welcomed as a friend.

  Was Leviathan really helpless? Or might all the small machines be doing something else?

  “I say again, you lying bastard, bring on your machines. Where are they?”

  Now even the core of Leviathan’s brain was failing rapidly. Domingo’s probing dissection had provided a finishing stroke.

  The malignant purpose of the fundamental programming had now been almost entirely erased. Only the c-plus detonation project was being continued, and that by machines that neither knew nor cared what they were doing.

  What was left of the berserker’s intelligence pondered whether or not to answer this most recently asked question and why.

  Domingo was not waiting for an answer. He forced open another console that almost certainly had part of Leviathan’s brain inside it. Still the final satisfaction of victory, of revenge, eluded him. “Do you remember, damned machine—do you remember a planetoid, a colony, called Shubra?”

  The fading berserker intelligence had now lost, along with much else, the ability to lie. Ongoing damage was steadily consuming everything. But for the moment the ability to answer questions still remained.