The Ultimate Enemy

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Sea Mother, this is Brass Trumpet. Predators here, and we’re going to try to turn them. Hold your place. Repeating… .”

  One repetition of the substance came through, as the four were already hurrying back to the house. As soon as they got in they had played back the automatically recorded signal; and then when Glenna had at last located the code book somewhere, and they could verify the worst, they had played it back once more.

  Sea Mother was the code name for any humans who might happen to be on Waterfall. It had been assigned by the military years ago, as part of their precautionary routine, and had probably never been used before today. Brass Trumpet, according to the book, was a name conveying a warning of deadly peril—it was to be used only by a human battle force when there were thought to be berserkers already in the Waterfall system or on their way to it. And “predators here” could hardly mean anything but berserkers—unliving and unmanned war machines, programmed to destroy whatever life they found. The first of them had been built in ages past, during the madness of some interstellar war between races now long-since vanished. Between berserkers and starfaring Earthhumans, war had now been chronic for a thousand standard years.

  That Brass Trumpet’s warning should be so brief and vague was understandable. The enemy would doubtless pick it up as soon as its intended hearers, and might well be able to decode it. But for all the message content revealed, Sea Mother might be another powerful human force, toward which Brass Trumpet sought to turn them. Or it would have been conceivable for such a message to be sent to no one, a planned deception to make the enemy waste computer capacity and detection instruments. And even if the berserkers’ deadly electronic brains should somehow compute correctly that Sea Mother was a small and helpless target, it was still possible to hope that the berserkers would be too intent on fatter targets elsewhere, too hard-pressed by human forces, or both, to turn aside and snap up such a minor morsel.

  During the hours since that first warning, there had come nothing but noise from the communicator. Glenna sighed, and reached out to pat her man on the arm below the sleeve of his loud shirt. “Busy day with the crustaceans tomorrow,” she reminded him.

  “So we’d better get some rest. I know.” Ino looked and sounded worn. He was the only one of the four who had ever seen berserkers before, at anything like close range; and it was not exactly reassuring to see how grimly and intensely he reacted to the warning of their possible approach.

  “You can connect the small alarm,” Glenna went on, “so it’ll be sure to wake us if another priority message comes in.”

  That, thought Glaus, would be easier on the nerves than being blasted out of sleep by that God-voice shouting again, this time only a few meters from the head of their bed.

  “Yes, I’ll do that.” Ino thought, then slapped his chair-arms. He made his voice a little brighter. “You’re right about tomorrow. And over in Twenty-three we’re going to have to start feeding the mantis shrimp.” He glanced round at the wall near his chair, where a long chart showed ponds, bays, lagoons and tidal pools, all strung out in a kilometers-long array, most of it natural, along this part of the coast. This array was a chief reason why the Sea Mother base had been located where it was.

  From its sun and moon to its gravity and atmosphere, Waterfall was remarkably Earthlike in almost every measurable attribute save one— this world was congenitally lifeless. About forty standard years past, during a lull in the seemingly interminable berserker-war, it had appeared that the peaceful advancement of interstellar humanization might get in an inning or two, and work had begun toward altering this lifelessness. Great ships had settled upon Waterfall with massive inoculations of Earthly life, in a program very carefully orchestrated to produce eventually a twin-Earth circling one of the few Sol-type suns in this part of the Galaxy.

  The enormously complex task had been interrupted when war flared again. The first recrudescence of fighting was far away, but it drew off people and resources. A man-wife team of scientists were selected to stay alone on Waterfall for the duration of the emergency. They were to keep the program going along planned lines, even though at a slow pace. Ino and Glenna had been here for two years now. A supply ship from Atlantis called at intervals of a few standard months; and the last to call, eight local days ago, had brought along another husband-and-wife team for a visit. Glaus and Jenny were both psychologists, interested in the study of couples living in isolation; and they were to stay at least until the next supply ship came.

  So far the young guests had been welcome. Glenna, her own children long grown and independent on other worlds, approached motherliness sometimes in her attitude. Ino, more of a born competitor, swam races with Glaus and gambled — lightly — with him. With Jenny he alternated between half-serious gallantry and teasing.

  “I almost forgot,” he said now, getting up from his chair before the communicator, and racking his arms and shoulders with an intense stretch. “I’ve got a little present for you, Jen.”

  “Oh?” She was bright, interested, imperturbable. It was her usual working attitude, which he persisted in trying to break through.

  Ino went out briefly, and came back to join the others in the kitchen. A small snack before retiring had become a daily ritual for the group.

  “For you,” he said, presenting Jen with a small bag of clear plastic. There was water inside, and something else.

  “Oh, my goodness.” It was still her usual nurse-like business tone, which evidently struck Ino as a challenge. “What do I do with it?”

  “Keep him in that last aquarium in the parlor,” Ino advised. “It’s untenanted right now.”

  Glaus, looking at the bag from halfway across the kitchen, made out in it one of those non-human, non-mammalian shapes that are apt to give Earth people the impression of the intensely alien, even when the organism sighted comes from their own planet. It was no bigger than an adult human finger, but replete with waving appendages. There came to mind something written by Lafcadio Hearn about a centipede: The blur of its moving legs… toward which one would no more advance one’s hand … than toward the spinning blade of a power saw .”. .

  Or some words close to those. Jen, Glaus knew, cared for the shapes of non-mammalian life even less than he did. But she would grit her teeth and struggle not to let the teasing old man see it.

  “Just slit the bag and let it drain into the tank,” Ino was advising, for once sounding pretty serious. “They don’t like handling … okay? He’s a bit groggy right now, but tomorrow, if he’s not satisfied with you as his new owner, he may try to get away.”

  Glenna, in the background, was rolling her eyes in the general direction of Brass Trumpet, miming: What is the old fool up to now? When is he going to grow up?

  “Get away?” Jen inquired sweetly. “You told me the other day that even a snail couldn’t climb that glass —“

  The house was filled with the insistent droning of the alarm that Ino had just connected. He’s running some kind of test, Glaus thought at once. Then he saw the other man’s face and knew that Ino wasn’t.

  Already the new priority message was coming in: “Sea Mother, the fight’s over here. Predators departing Waterfall System. Repeating …”

  Glaus started to obey an impulse to run out and look at the sky again, then realized that there would certainly be nothing to be seen of the battle now. Radio waves, no faster than light, had just announced that it was over. Instead he joined the others in voicing their mutual relief. They had a minute or so of totally unselfconscious cheering.

  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 Glaus, “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 w
ith 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, Glaus 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, Glaus 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 was 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.” Glaus 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 Glaus 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,” Glaus 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 briskly, they had just re-entered the compound when Jenny touched Glaus 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 fix 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 Glaus 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 had 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 of recall, his ships outspacing 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, and 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 Glaus 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 Glaus 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 Glaus, 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-sounded, 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, Glaus right at her heels.

  The strange cry came again. Far ahead, past Glenna’s running figure, the 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 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 th
e motor whoosh quietly to life. She leaped aboard too. Glaus 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.

  Glaus 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 saucer-like body, small legs blurred, reminding Glaus of something 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 Glaus 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 Glaus 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. Glaus kicked another attacker off, then threw open the lid of the tractor’s toolbox. He grabbed the longest, heaviest metal tool displayed inside.