Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Ino, his face much relieved, broke out a bottle of something and four glasses. In a little while, all of them drifted noisily outside, unable to keep from looking up, though knowing they would find nothing but the stars to see.

  “What,” asked Claus, “were berserkers doing here in the first place? We’re hardly a big enough target to be interesting to a fleet of them. Are we?”

  “Not when they have bigger game in sight.” Ino gestured upward with his drink. “Oh, any living target interests them, once they get it in their sights. But I’d guess that if a sizable force was here they were on the way to attack Atlantis. See, sometimes in space you can use a planet or a whole system as a kind of cover. Sneak up behind its solar wind, as it were, its gravitational vortex, as someone fighting a land war might take advantage of a mountain or a hill.” Atlantis was a long-colonized system less than a dozen parsecs distant, heavily populated and heavily defended. The three habitable Atlantean planets were surfaced mostly with water, and the populace lived almost as much below the waves as on the shaky continents.

  It was hours later when Glenna roused and stirred in darkness, pulling away for a moment from Ino’s familiar angularity nested beside her.

  She blinked. “What was that?” she asked her husband, in a low voice barely cleared of sleep.

  Ino scarcely moved. “What was what?”

  “A flash, I thought. Some kind of bright flash, outside. Maybe in the distance.”

  There came no sound of thunder, or of rain. And no more flashes, either, in the short time Glenna remained awake.

  Shortly after sunrise next morning, Claus and Jen went out for an early swim. Their beach, pointed out by their hosts as the place where swimmers would be safest and least likely to damage the new ecology, lay a few hundred meters along the shoreline to the west, with several tall dunes between it and the building complex.

  As they rounded the first of these dunes, following the pebbly shoreline, Claus stopped. “Look at that.” A continuous track, suggesting the passage of some small, belly-dragging creature, had been drawn in the sand. Its lower extremity lay somewhere under water, its upper concealed amid the humps of sterile sand somewhere inland.

  “Something,” said Jenny, “crawled up out of the water. I haven’t seen that before on Waterfall.”

  “Or came down into it.” Claus squatted beside the tiny trail. He was anything but a skilled tracker, and could see no way of determining which way it led. “I haven’t seen anything like this before, either. Glenna said certain species—I forget which—were starting to try the land. I expect this will interest them when we get back.”

  When Claus and Jenny had rounded the next dune, there came into view on its flank two more sets of tracks, looking very much like the first, and like the first, either going up from the water or coming down.

  “Maybe,” Claus offered, “it’s the same one little animal going back and forth. Do crabs make tracks like that?”

  Jen couldn’t tell him. “Anyway, let’s hope they don’t pinch swimmers.” She slipped off her short robe and took a running dive into the cool water, whose salt content made it a good match for the seas of Earth. Half a minute later, she and her husband came to the surface together, ten meters or so out from shore. From here they could see west past the next dune. There, a hundred meters distant, underscored by the slanting shadows of the early sun, a whole tangled skein of narrow, fresh-looking tracks connected someplace inland with the sea.

  A toss of Jen’s head shook water from her long, dark hair. “I wonder if it’s some kind of seasonal migration?”

  “They certainly weren’t there yesterday. I think I’ve had enough. This water’s colder than a bureaucrat’s heart.”

  Walking brisky, they had just re-entered the compound when Jenny touched Claus on the arm. “There’s Glenna, at the tractor shed. I’m going to trot over and tell her what we saw.”

  “All right. I’ll start fixing some coffee.”

  Glenna, coming out of the shed a little distance inland from the main house, forestalled Jenny’s announcement about the tracks with a vaguely worried question of her own.

  “Did you or Claus see or hear anything strange last night, Jenny?”

  “Strange? No, I don’t think so.”

  Glenna looked toward a small cluster of more distant outbuildings. “We’ve just been out there taking a scheduled seismograph reading. It recorded something rather violent and unusual, at about oh-two-hundred this morning. The thing is, you see, it must have been just about that time that something woke me up. I had the distinct impression that there had been a brilliant flash, somewhere outside.”

  Ino, also dressed in coveralls this morning, appeared among the distant sheds, trudging toward them. When he arrived, he provided more detail on the seismic event. “Quite sharp and apparently quite localized, not more than ten kilometers from here. Our system triangulated it well. I don’t know when we’ve registered another event quite like it.”

  “What do you suppose it was?” Jen asked.

  Ino hesitated minimally. “It could have been a very small spaceship crashing, or maybe a fairly large aircraft. But the only aircraft on Waterfall are the two little ones we have out in that far shed.”

  “A meteor, maybe?”

  “I rather hope so. Otherwise, a spacecraft just might be our most likely answer. And if it were a spacecraft from Brass Trumpet’s force coming down here—crippled in the fighting, perhaps—we’d have heard from him on the subject, I should think.”

  The remaining alternative hung in the air unvoiced. Jenny bit her lip. By now, Brass Trumpet must be long gone from the system, and impossible to recall, his ships outpacing light and radio waves alike in pursuit of the enemy force.

  In a voice more worried than before, Glenna was saying: “Of course, if it was some enemy unit, damaged in the battle, then I suppose the crash is likely to have completed its destruction.”

  “I’d better tell you,” Jenny blurted in. And in a couple of sentences she described the peculiar tracks.

  Ino stared at her with frank dismay. “I was going to roll out an aircraft . . . but let me take a look at those tracks first.”

  The quickest way to reach them was undoubtedly on foot. The gnarled man trotted off along the beach path at such a pace that Jenny had difficulty keeping up. Glenna remained behind, saying she would let Claus know what was going on.

  Moving with flashes of former athletic grace, Ino reached the nearest of the tracks and dropped to one knee beside it, just as Claus had done. “Do the others look just like this?”

  “As nearly as I could tell. We didn’t get close to all of them.”

  “That’s no animal I ever saw.” He was up again already, trotting back toward the base. “I don’t like it. Let’s get airborne, all of us.”

  “I always pictured berserkers as huge things.”

  “Most of ‘em are. Some are small machines, for specialized purposes.”

  “I’ll run into the house and tell the others to get ready to take off,” Jenny volunteered as they sped into the compound.

  “Do that. Glenna will know what to bring, I expect. I’ll get a flyer rolled out of the shed.”

  Running, Jen thought as she hurried into the house, gave substance to a danger that might otherwise have existed only in the mind. Could it be that Ino, with the horrors in his memory, was somewhat too easily alarmed where berserkers were concerned?

  Glenna and Claus, who had just changed into coveralls, met her in the common room. She was telling them of Ino’s decision to take to the air, and thinking to herself that she had better change out of her beach garb also, when the first outcry sounded from somewhere outside. It was less a scream than a baffled-sounding, hysterical laugh.

  Glenna pushed past her at once, and in a moment was out the door and running. Exchanging a glance with her husband, Jenny turned and followed, Claus right at her heels.

  The strange cry came again. Far ahead, past Glenna’s running figure, th
e door of the aircraft shed had been slid back, and in its opening a white figure appeared outlined—a figure that reeled drunkenly and waved its arms.

  Glenna turned aside at the tractor shed, where one of the small ground vehicles stood ready. They were used for riding, hauling, pushing sand, to sculpt a pond into a better shape, or to slice away part of a too-obtrusive dune. It’ll be faster than running, Jenny thought, as she saw the older woman spring into the driver’s seat, and heard the motor whoosh quietly to life. She leaped aboard, too. Claus shoved strongly at her back to make sure she was safely on, before he used both hands for his own grip. A grip was necessary because they were already rolling, and accelerating quickly.

  Ino’s figure, now just outside the shed, came hurtling closer with their own speed. He shook his arms at them again and staggered. Upon his chest he wore a brownish thing the size of a small plate, like some great medallion that was so heavy it almost pulled him down. He clawed at the brown plate with both hands, and suddenly his coveralls in front were splashed with scarlet. He bellowed words which Jenny could not make out.

  Claus gripped Glenna’s shoulders and pointed. A dozen or more brown plates were scuttling on the brown, packed sand, between the aircraft shed and the onrushing tractor. The tracks they drew were faint replicas of those that had lined the softer sand along the beach. Beneath each saucerlike body, small legs blurred, reminding Claus of something he’d recently seen—something he could not stop to think of now.

  The things had nothing like the tractor’s speed, but still, they were in position to cut it off. Glenna swerved no more than slightly, if at all, and one limbed plate disappeared beneath a wheel. It came up at once with the wheel’s rapid turning, a brown blur seemingly embedded in the soft, fat tire, resisting somehow the centrifugal force that might have thrown it off.

  Ino had gone down with, as Claus now saw, three of the things fastened on his body, but he somehow fought back to his feet just as the tractor jerked to a halt beside him. If Claus could have stopped to analyze his own mental state, he might have said he lacked the time to be afraid. With a blow of his fist he knocked one of the attacking things away from Ino, and felt the surprising weight and hardness of it as a sharp pang up through his wrist.

  All three dragging together, they pulled Ino aboard; Glenna was back in the driver’s seat at once. Claus kicked another attacker off, then threw open the lid of the tractor’s toolbox and grabbed the longest, heaviest metal tool displayed inside.

  A swarm of attackers were between them and the aircraft shed, and the shadowed shape of a flyer just inside was spotted with them, too. As Glenna gunned the engine, she turned the tractor at the same time, heading back toward the main building and the sea beyond. In the rear seat, Jenny held Ino. He bled on everything, and his eyes were fixed on the sky while his mouth worked in terror. In the front, Claus fought to protect the driver and himself.

  A brown plate scuttled onto the cowling, moving for Glenna’s hands on the controls. Claus swung, a baseball batter, bright metal blurring at the end of his extended arms. There was a hard, satisfying crunch, as of hard plastic or ceramic cracking through. The brown thing fell to the floor, and he caught a glimpse of dull limbs still in motion before he caught it with a foot and kicked it out onto the flying ground.

  Another of the enemy popped out from somewhere onto the dash. He pounded at it, missed when it seemed to dodge his blows. He cracked its body finally, but still it clung on under the steering column, hard to get at, inching toward Glenna’s fingers. Claus grabbed it with his left hand, felt a lance. Not until he had thrown the thing clear of the tractor did he look at his hand and see two fingers nearly severed.

  At the same moment, the tractor engine died, and they rolled to a silent stop, with the sea and the small dock Glenna had been steering for only a few meters ahead. Under the edge of the engine cowling another of the enemy appeared, thrusting forward a limb that looked like a pair of ceramic pliers, shredded electrical connectors dangling in its grip.

  The humans abandoned the tractor in a wordless rush. Claus, one hand helpless and dripping blood, aided the women with Ino as best he could. Together they half-dragged, half-carried him across the dock and rolled him into a small, open boat, the only craft at once available. In moments Glenna had freed them from the dock and started the motor, and they were headed out away from shore.

  Away from shore, but not into the sea. They were separated from deep-blue and choppy ocean by a barrier reef or causeway, one of the features that had made this coast desirable for the life-seeding base. The reef, a basically natural structure of sand and rock deposited by waves and currents, was about a hundred meters from the shore, and stretched in either direction as far as vision carried. Running from beach to reef, artificial walls or low causeways of fused rock separated ponds of various sizes.

  “We’re in a kind of square lagoon here,” Glenna told Jenny, motioning for her to take over the job of steering. “Head for that far corner. If we can get there ahead of them, we may be able to lift the boat over the reef and get out.”

  Jen nodded, taking the controls. Glenna slid back to a place beside her husband, snapped open the boat’s small first-aid kit, and began applying pressure bandages.

  Claus started to try to help, saw the world beginning to turn gray around him, and slumped back against the gunwale. He would be of no use to anyone if he passed out. Ino looked as if he had been attacked, not by teeth or claws or knives, but by several sets of nail-pullers and wire-cutters. His chest still rose and fell, but his eyes were closed now and he was gray with shock. Glenna draped a thermal blanket over him.

  Jen was steering around the rounded structure, not much bigger than a phone booth, protruding above the water in the middle of the pond. Most of the ponds and bays had similar observation stations. Glaus had looked into one or two and he thought now that there was nothing in them likely to be of any help. More first aid kits, perhaps, but what Ino needed was the big medirobot back at the house.

  And he was not going to get it. By now the building complex must be overrun by the attackers. Berserkers . . .

  “Where can we find weapons?” Claus croaked at Glenna.

  “Let’s see that hand. I can’t do any more for Ino now . . . I’ll bandage this. If you mean guns, there are a couple at the house, somewhere in storage. We can’t go back there now.”

  “I know.”

  Glenna had just let go of his hand when from the front seat there came a scream. Claws and a brown saucer shape were climbing in over the gunwale at Jenny’s side. Had the damned thing come aboard somehow with them, from the tractor, or was this pond infested with them, too?

  In his effort to help drag Ino to the boat, Claus had abandoned his trusty wrench beside the tractor. He grabbed now for the best substitute at hand, a small anchor at the end of a chain. His overhand swing missed Jenny’s head by less than he had planned, but struck the monster like a mace. It fell into the bottom of the boat, vibrating its limbs, as Claus thought, uselessly; then he realized that it was making a neat hole.

  His second desperation swing came down upon it squarely. One sharp prong of the anchor broke a segment of the brown casing clean away, and something sparked and sizzled when the sea came rushing in.

  —seawater rushing—

  —into the bottom of the boat—

  The striking anchor had enlarged the hole that the enemy had begun. The bottom was split, the boat was taking water fast.

  Someone grabbed up the sparking berserker, inert now save for internal fireworks, and hurled it over the side. Glenna threw herself forward, taking back the wheel, and Jenny scrambled aft, to help one-handed Claus with bailing.

  The boat limped, staggered, gulped water, and wallowed on toward the landbar. It might get them that far, but forget the tantalizing freedom of blue surf beyond . . .

  Jenny started to say something to her husband, then almost shrieked again as Ino’s hand, resurgently alive, came up to catch her wrist. The old man
’s eyes were fixed on hers with a tremendous purpose. He gasped out words, and then fell back, unable to do more.

  The words first registered with Jenny as: “. . . need them . . . do the splashers . . .“It made no sense.

  Glenna looked back briefly, then had to concentrate on boat-handling. In another moment the fractured bottom was grating over rock. Claus scrambled out and held the prow against the above-water portion of the reef. The women followed, got their footing established outside the boat, then turned to lift at Ino’s inert form.

  Jenny paused. “Glenna, I’m afraid he’s gone.”

  “No!” Denial was fierce and absolute. “Help me!”

  Jen almost started to argue, then gave in. They got Ino up into a fireman’s-carry position on Claus’s shoulders; even with a bad hand, he was considerably stronger than either of the women. Then the three began to walk east along the reef. At high tide, as now, it was a strip of land no more than three or four meters wide, its low crest half a meter above the water. Waves of any size broke over it. Fortunately, today, the surf was almost calm.

  Claus could feel the back of his coverall and neck wetting with Ino’s blood. He shifted the dead weight on his shoulders. All right, so far. But his mutilated free hand throbbed.

  He asked: “How far are we going, Glenna?”

  “I don’t know.” The woman paced ahead—afraid to look at her husband now?—staring into the distance. “There isn’t any place. Keep going.”

  Jenny and Glaus exchanged looks. For want of any better plan at the moment, they kept going. Jen took a look back. “They’re on the reef, and on the shore, too, following us. A good distance back.”

  Glaus looked, and looked again a minute later. Brown speckles by the dozen followed, but were not catching up. Not yet.

  Now they were passing the barrier of fused rock separating the pond, in which they had abandoned the boat, from its neighbor. The enemy moving along the shore would intercept them, or very nearly, if they tried to walk the barrier back to land.