Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Maybe not. The accumulators in the weapon system have some pop left in them. Maybe enough to burn one more small boat—”

  Skorba waited until the lifeboat was within a hundred meters, and then tried.

  “We hit it!”

  Not with full power, this time, though. The target was not vaporized. Solid debris clanged off the yacht’s hull an immeasurable fraction of a second after the explosion at close range.

  Relief on the bridge was shortlived. Within a minute after the blast, the goodlife leader was back on intercom, gleefully taunting her enemies with the claim that a berserker boarding machine had been on the lifeboat, and had managed to reach the yacht intact.

  The four badlife survivors stared at each other, not knowing whether to believe the claim or not.

  Skorba reached out and switched off the intercom, cutting off their triumphant enemy in mid-sentence.

  A few moments later a new noise intruded on the bridge, coming from outside the same hatch through which the refugees had entered, and where the ineffectual battering had earlier taken place. Growing steadily louder, it suggested to Tanya the highspeed whine of power tools.

  Minutes passed. Wirral completed the job of reconnecting the control circuits for the shields and drive. There was no rejoicing; those systems were going to remain useless as long as the power was cut off.

  At irregular intervals the yacht’s hull sang under the impact of wavefronts of radiation, as weapons flared aboard the berserker and the swindlers’ ship, transmitting violence far beyond the human scale. On the display stages it was easy to see that gradually—but only gradually—the berserker was asserting its mastery over its powerful but relatively clumsy opponent. Only a combination of especially good defensive shields and a formidable offensive weapon could have allowed the three terrified humans on the other ship to survive combat as long as this.

  The sound of power tools eating at the hatch had ceased for the time being. The four people on the bridge of the yacht could think of nothing to do but wait. And talk to each other, from time to time.

  Wirral, still resentful, demanded of Skorba. “How did you discover these marks we picked out were really good-life? How long have you known?”

  “The idea crept up on me gradually,” he answered drily, and glanced at Tanya. “You know how that is.”

  She was silent.

  He went on: “I wasn’t entirely sure until I went with the old lady to Damaturu. Some things she said when we were alone in the launch clinched it for me. I knew then we weren’t going to be coming back with real gems.” He showed a lopsided grin. “I think she was contemplating recruiting me for the cause.”

  “Still you came back,” Tanya said.

  “I had my reasons.”

  “What reasons?” demanded Wirral incredulously, scowling at him. “You knew there was a real berserker coming, and you still came back?”

  “You don’t believe I’d do that.”

  “No, I don’t. So you couldn’t have known they were really goodlife until later. All right, you’re off the hook on that one, pal. About not telling us.”

  Once more Skorba looked at Tanya. He asked: “Can you see now why she invited both of us on the voyage?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Wherever we got off, we’d talk about our trip, spread the word of her presence. She wanted to make sure me people who were planning to swindle Lady Blanqui knew her exact location in the Cluster, just where she was traveling in her small unescorted ship. So the goodlife knew we were after the Lady—probably they arranged somehow to warn the real one off.”

  “And they also knew,” said Tanya, “somehow, that your ship was carrying the hardware they wanted for their god, for the berserker.”

  There was a lull in the conversation. All was quiet except for the distant, ghostly ringing of the hull under an avalanche of radiation.

  “Why aren’t we trying to do something?” Hinna demanded suddenly.

  The others looked at her. “What would you suggest?” asked Wirral.

  “How about trying to get the power lamps turned back on?”

  “The only place to do that is in the engine room. But we’re unarmed, and—”

  “If only we had weapons—!”

  There was a dull, despairing silence, suddenly broken.

  “Of course!” Tanya shouted at her shipmates.

  The three of them goggled at her, ready to hear anything.

  “We’re all idiots!” she screamed at them. “Any ship owned and outfitted by goodlife, by people who equip themselves with handcuffs, is going to have weapons on board. Isn’t it?”

  “All right!” Hinna shouted back. “But where are they? The goodlife have them all.”

  “Are you sure? I’ll bet they don’t. What’s the most likely place aboard ship to store weapons, for people who want to have them handy? How about the bridge?”

  Hinna sat motionless for a moment. Then she flew to pull open storage cabinets next to the one in which she had found the emergency toolkit. Neatly stowed on racks inside the first receptacle she opened were several handguns, along with two or three shoulder weapons, and some dark, fist-size lozenges. The latter were labeled with warnings about the danger of explosions, and some of them came equipped with protruding wires.

  Wirral and Skorba sprang from their chairs to go through the treasure eagerly.

  Skorba, checking a shoulder weapon’s charge, murmured: “I don’t know how much good this stuff is going to do against a berserker’s boarding machine. But now we’ve a chance. There are things we can try.”

  Outside the hatch through which the badlife had entered the bridge die sounds of assault resumed. Battering, crunching impacts alternated with the noise of power drilling. Beyond the hatch in the opposite bulkhead, all was silent.

  “We’re not going to be able to keep a boarding machine locked out,” said Skorba.

  “Then we’ll have to welcome it in.” Wirral began to gather up the explosive lozenges, tugging at their wires, frowning at their labels.

  The assaulted hatch was not going to hold much longer. Merciless smashing impacts, driven by far more than human strength, were starting to bend in the heavy metal.

  “Welcome it in,” Wirral repeated, “while we get out.” He seated himself again in the captain’s chair, this time with grenades clustered in his lap. Once more he opened the control console.

  Skorba crouched beside him. “Use this,” he volunteered, and handed over his media machine. “If it hasn’t saved us by now, it isn’t going to.”

  The other man accepted the offering, then hesitated. “If we put a booby trap here on the master controls,” he muttered. “We won’t be able to use the ship afterward.”

  “Anywhere on the bridge might have same effect, and using the ship afterward is the least of our worries. This’s the only place they’re certain to put their hands on. Hurry!”

  The women watched while the two men, evidently both experienced in such matters, worked together. In less than a minute several of the explosive lozenges, wired together, were hidden beneath the captain’s chair. The improvised detonator, a small component Skorba had extracted from one of the firearms, was concealed just under the casually arranged communication device.

  Skorba made the last connection and then with great delicacy pulled his hands away. Very carefully Wirral edged himself out of the chair.

  “That’s it,” he whispered. “All we can do now.” He turned and gestured toward the silent hatch, in the opposite bulkhead from the noisy one.

  Everyone moved that way. It represented the only possible way out. Trying to flee into the lifeboat bay would be suicidal, because that compartment had been open and airless since the boats were launched.

  Already the hatch being attacked by the boarding machine was on the point of giving way. Now Wirral, standing clear of the aperture and with an armed grenade in hand, jerked open the hatch opposite.

  The enemy had not left his escape route unguarded.
At once a silent flare of gunfire splashed in across the bridge, a beam that broke things open and made them smoke. The badlife were all standing back and no one was hit.

  Skorba and Wirral flipped grenades out through the opening.

  The double explosion reverberated through whatever compartment or corridor lay beyond, cleansing it with fire.

  An instant later Wirral, gun in hand, had plunged out recklessly. Hinna scrambled immediately after him, and Skorba after her. Tanya, last to evacuate the bridge, found herself almost falling into a scorched compartment filled with stinging fumes from the grenades, littered with broken furniture and machinery. A crumpled, bloody body on the deck, dimly recognizable as that of Yero, stirred feebly and cried out for its mother. Even as Tanya cleared the opening she could hear the other hatch, behind her on the far side of the bridge, give way at last under the berserker’s onslaught.

  Skorba slammed shut the hatch the instant she was through it. She scrambled to her feet, trying to help him—but there was no way to bolt or lock the door from this side.

  Four seconds later an irresistible mechanical arm struck the portal from the bridge side, banging it fully open, hurling away both of the humans who had been trying to keep it closed.

  And at that same moment one of the goodlife, rushing to take full control of the ship, must have grabbed up Skorba’s communication device from where it lay across the captain’s chair obstructing the captain’s console.

  Even for the four who had fled into the next compartment, the blast was deafening and stunning.

  The man-shaped berserker was blown through the hatchway it had just started to open, launched like a projectile into the bulkhead opposite. There it was stopped, smashed in a crushing impact, because that bulkhead was backed up by the hard strength of the ship’s outer hull.

  Amid a renewed clamor of ship’s alarms, Tanya went crawling about dazedly. Yero was now lying still. Parts of the broken boarding machine still twitched, and Skorba was trying to incinerate them with a shoulder weapon.

  Having realized that she herself was still alive, she sank for a time into unconsciousness.

  The lapse must have been brief. Tanya regained her senses to find that her three companions were still alive. But the fight had left the Golden Hind permanently crippled, without lifeboats, drifting helplessly in the immediate presence of a berserker which was undoubtedly going to gobble it up as soon as it had completed some more urgent business.

  The dazed survivors crawled about, deafened, shocked, in a compartment half-choked with fumes.

  Skorba kept grabbing his surviving shipmates one after another, shaking them, reassuring them that the goodlife were all dead, and help was on the way.

  Wirral, his voice totally exhausted, said: “You’re babbling. There’s still the berserker, the big one. As soon as it’s finished stripping our old ship of the hardware it wants, it’ll come after us. It won’t forget us.”

  Skorba looked at his own wrists, each still clasped by a metal cuff. “What time is it?”

  “Time? Were you hit in the head? What does the time matter?”

  “I tell you help is on its way. It’ll be here any moment now.”

  “You ‘re delirious.”

  “No.” Skorba looked about, and coughed. “Let’s try to get to the lounge. Maybe the fumes won’t be so bad there.”

  Helping one another through smoke-choked corridors, amid a ceaseless babble of alarms, the four surviving badlife made their way back to the lounge. Here one, at least, of the display stages was still functioning. Skorba tried to establish communication with the ship’s electronic brain, but could elicit no response.

  Hinna was rubbing her bandaged arm. “When it comes for us I don’t want to be taken alive.”

  “It’s not coming for us. Look.”

  On the stage had suddenly appeared three new shapes, those of sizable spacecraft approaching from three different directions. New violence erupted, vastly greater than before.

  “What—?”

  “They’re Templar fighters,” Skorba said, “from Damaturu.”

  Around him the others stared, afraid to believe. The swindlers’ old ship drifted, inert but free, defensive shields still flickering, not quite dead. The damaged berserker was surrounded, trapped, being pummeled from long range. It tried to fight back but was outgunned. The hull of the yacht sang a rising polyphonic paean of shielded radiation.

  “They’re fighters, all right,” admitted Wirral. “How do you know they’re Templars? How d’you know where they’re from?”

  “Because I ordered them.”

  “You what? When? How?”

  “When I was on Damaturu. Have you ever been there, in the plaza near the Templars’ tower? When I had a chance to play tourist, I stood there and aimed my media machine at those big antennas and sent them a signal. I packed in our coordinates here, and enough information to give them a good idea of the situation.”

  “The Templars wouldn’t launch three ships on the strength of one message coming in from a stranger, out of the blue!”

  “It didn’t exactly come from a stranger—it had the identity code of one of their agents attached to it.”

  “One of their agents?”

  “Me.” Skorba paused.

  Skorba’s old comrades stared at him as if he had suddenly revealed himself to be a robot. Tanya began to giggle strangely; under ordinary circumstances such a sound would have been considered unhealthy. Skorba looked at her, then continued: “You wondered why I came back when I knew the Lady was a fake, and there was a real berserker coming. I was hunting it, that’s why. So I was sure the Templars had launched.” He paused. “Reasonably sure.”

  Tanya was letting herself slide into hysterics. She did a thorough job of it, devoting several minutes to the task and creating a lot of noise.

  Beginning to recover, she listened to some more of Skorba’s explanations. “You see, my gadget had been steadily emitting a beacon signal since shortly after the Golden Hind left Malawi. That was its real purpose. The Templars gave it to me when I volunteered to work for them.”

  “Why’d you do that?” asked Hinna in a small dreamy voice.

  “Because,” the pudgy man said, “I don’t like berserkers. One of them once—did something—to someone I. . . .”

  He shook his head and faced back to Tanya. “All the chatter between myself and Wirral about the device was mainly to draw attention away from our imitation berserker, standing mere by the hatchway like a clothing dummy.

  “And the signal was rather special, consisting of tagged neutrinos. They’re not shielded by the hull of an ordinary ship like this one.”

  “And no one realized you were transmitting a signal like that?”

  Skorba shook his head patiently. “Everyone detected it. That was my intention.”

  “We picked up the signal in space near Malawi,” Wirral said. “So we knew Skorba had managed to get himself aboard the yacht. We had an easy time following her and closing in.”

  Skorba resumed. “I’m sure our hostess picked up the signal too. But she wasn’t going to say anything about it to her passengers. She must have been delighted to realize that she had me actually on board—one of the swindling scoundrels whose vessel she was trying to trap. All she had to do was cruise along, waiting for my pals in their fake berserker to home on my signal.

  “Once safely away from Malawi, the real goodlife radioed to their master what was happening. It must have followed the yacht at a distance, ready to pounce on the fake berserker as soon as it showed up. The real berserker was hanging back at extreme range to avoid detection, so the pouncing took several hours.

  “And shortly after I came back from Damaturu, three Templar warships were in space following my signal too.”

  * * *

  Up through the deck of the lounge, audible above the continuous alarms, came the familiar sounds of a launch docking.

  Minutes later, on board a Templar launch, and on their way to safety, th
e four survivors got plenty of clean air to breathe, and medical attention. Another launch was removing survivors from the other ship.

  A Templar officer in white space-combat gear informed the survivors from the yacht that her people had come looking for a berserker as quickly as they could after getting Skorba’s message and checking his verification code. She was sorry it had taken them so long to close in, but they had been compelled to hang back at long range until they were sure they had the berserker surrounded.

  “Where’s the berserker now?” asked Tanya.

  “We’re somewhere near the middle of it.” The killing machine now existed only as a radiant and swiftly expanding nebula of gas.

  The officer looked at Skorba with grudging admiration. “I admit I didn’t think you were going to pull it off. By the way, the real name of the old woman who commanded this yacht was Dala Clonmel. She and the rest of the good-life with her had quite a reputation and a record. So do you and your pals, I know—but I expect we can arrange to let you walk away after debriefing.” Templars had neither authority nor interest concerning criminals other than goodlife.

  “Thanks,” said Skorba numbly.

  The officer switched her attention to Tanya. Now her tone was more cautious. “I don’t believe you’re someone we were expecting to find on board the yacht, ma’am. Who are you?”

  Tanya didn’t answer right away.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  Tanya laughed again. When she spoke, her words were hard to understand. “How do I know you’re really Templars?”

  Her hysterics were coming back.

  1995

  THE BAD MACHINES

  The humanoids were born in the aftermath of World War II, when Jack Williannson, along with nnany others, realized much to his chagrin, that technology and science could become tools for wreaking terrible destruction. Until the power of nuclear fission was demonstrated in the horrible immolation of Hiroshima, nobody had truly grasped the full implications of our burgeoning scientific knowledge. For all of Jack’s adult life, science had been a source of benevolent change. Hiroshima changed that.