Berserker b-1

by Fred Saberhagen

  He croaked again: “—alive.”

  “What?”

  “Johann’s alive. Healthy. See? It’s a freezer.”

  “But we all told the berserker he was dead.” She felt stupid with the impact of one shock after another. For the first time she looked down at Karlsen’s face, and long seconds passed before she could tear her eyes away. “It has hostages. It wants his body.”

  “No.” Nogara shook his head. “ I see, now. But no. I won’t give him to berserkers, alive.” A brutal power of personality still emanated from his broken body. His gun was gone, but his power kept Lucinda from moving. There was no hatred left in her now.

  She protested: “But there are seven men out there.”

  “Berserker’s like me.” Nogara bared pain-clenched teeth. “It won’t let prisoners go. Here. The key . . . ” He pulled it from inside his torn-open tunic.

  Lucinda’s eyes were drawn once again to the cold serenity of the face in the coffin. Then on impulse she ran to get the key. When she did so Nogara slumped over in relief, unconscious or nearly so.

  The coffin lock was marked in several positions, and she turned it to EMERGENCY REVIVAL. Lights sprang on around the figure inside, and there was a hum of power.

  By now the automated systems of the ship were reacting to the emergency. The serving machines had begun a stretcher-bearer service, Nogara being one of the first victims they carried away. Presumably a robot medic was in action somewhere. From behind Nogara’s throne chair a great voice was shouting:

  “This is ship defense control, requesting human orders! What is nature of emergency?”

  “Do not contact the courier ship!” Lucinda shouted back. “Watch it for an attack. But don’t hit the lifeboat!”

  The glass top of the coffin had become opaque.

  Lucinda ran to the viewport, stumbling over the body of Mical and going on without a pause. By putting her face against the port and looking out at an angle she could just see the berserker-courier, pinkly visible in the wavering light of the hypermass, its lifeboat of hostages a small pink dot still in place before it.

  How long would it wait, before it killed the hostages and fled?

  When she turned away from the port, she saw that the coffin’s lid was open and the man inside was sitting up. For just a moment, a moment that was to stay in Lucinda’s mind, his eyes were like a child’s fixed helplessly on hers. Then power began to grow behind his eyes, a power somehow completely different from his brother’s and perhaps even greater.

  Karlsen looked away from her, taking in the rest of his surroundings, the devastated Great Hall and the coffin. “Felipe,” he whispered, as if in pain, though his half-brother was no longer in sight.

  Lucinda moved toward him and started to pour out her story, from the day in the Flamland prison when she had heard that Karlsen had fallen to the plague.

  Once he interrupted her. “Help me out of this thing, get me space armor.” His arm was hard and strong when she grasped it, but when he stood beside her he was surprisingly short. “Go on, what then?”

  She hurried on with her tale, while serving machines came to arm him. “But why were you frozen?” she ended, suddenly wondering at his health and strength.

  He ignored the question. “Come along to Defense Control. We must save those men out there.”

  He went familiarly to the nerve center of the ship and hurled himself into the combat chair of the Defense Officer, who was probably dead. The panel before Karlsen came alight and he ordered at once: “Get me in contact with that courier.”

  Within a few moments a flat-sounding voice from the courier answered routinely. The face that appeared on the communication screen was badly lighted; someone viewing it without advance warning would not suspect that it was anything but human.

  “This is High Commander Karlsen speaking, from the Nirvana.” He did not call himself governor or lord, but by his title of the great day of the Stone Place. “I’m coming over there. I want to talk to you men on the courier.”

  The shadowed face moved slightly on the screen. “Yes, sir.”

  Karlsen broke off the contact at once. “That’ll keep its hopes up. Now, I need a launch. You, robots, load my coffin aboard the fastest one available. I’m on emergency revival drugs now and I may have to re-freeze for a while.”

  “You’re not really going over there?”

  Up out of the chair again, he paused. “I know berserkers. If chasing me is that thing’s prime function it won’t waste a shot or a second of time on a few hostages while I’m in sight.”

  “You can’t go,” Lucinda heard herself saying. “You mean too much to all men—”

  “I’m not committing suicide, I have a trick or two in mind.” Karlsen’s voice changed suddenly. “You say Felipe’s not dead?”

  “I don’t think he is.”

  Karlsen’s eyes closed while his lips moved briefly, silently. Then he looked at Lucinda and grabbed up paper and a stylus from the Defense Officer’s console. “Give this to Felipe,” he said, writing. “He’ll set you and the captain free if I ask it. You’re not dangerous to his power. Whereas I . . . ”

  He finished writing and handed her the paper. “I must go. God be with you.”

  From the Defense Officer’s position, Lucinda watched Karlsen’s crystalline launch leave the Nirvana and take a long curve that brought it near the courier at a point some distance from the lifeboat.

  “You on the courier,” Lucinda heard him say. “You can tell it’s really me here on the launch, can’t you? You can DF my transmission? Can you photography my retinas through the screen?”

  And the launch darted away with a right-angle swerve, dodging and twisting at top acceleration, as the berserker’s weapons blasted the space where it had been. Karlsen had been right. The berserker spent not a moment’s delay or a single shot on the lifeboat, but hurled itself instantly after Karlsen’s launch.

  “Hit that courier!” Lucinda screamed. “Destroy it!” A salvo of missiles left the Nirvana, but it was a shot at a receding target, and it missed. Perhaps it missed because the courier was already in the fringes of the distortion surrounding the hypermass.

  Karlsen’s launch had not been hit, but it could not get away. It was a glassy dot vanishing behind a screen of blasts from the berserker’s weapons, a dot being forced into the maelstrom of the hypermass.

  “Chase them!” cried Lucinda, and saw the stars tint blue ahead; but almost instantly the Nirvana’s autopilot countermanded her order, barking mathematical assurance that to accelerate any further in that direction would be fatal to all aboard.

  The launch was now going certainly into the hypermass, gripped by a gravity that could make any engines useless. And the berserker-ship was going headlong after the launch, caring for nothing but to make sure of Karlsen.

  The two specks tinted red, and redder still, racing before an enormous falling cloud of dust as if flying into a planet’s sunset sky. And then the red shift of the hypermass took them into invisibility, and the universe saw them no more.

  Soon after the robots had brought the men from the life-boat safe aboard Nirvana, Holt found Lucinda alone in the Great Hall, gazing out the viewport.

  “He gave himself to save you,” she said. ”And he’d never even seen you.”

  “I know.” After a pause Holt said: “I’ve just been talking to the Lord Nogara. I don’t know why, but you’re to be freed, and I’m not to be prosecuted for bringing the damned berserker aboard. Though Nogara seems to hate both of us . . . ”

  She wasn’t listening, she was still looking out the port.

  “I want you to tell me all about him someday,” Holt said, putting his arm around Lucinda. She moved slightly, ridding herself of a minor irritation that she had hardly noticed. It was Holt’s arm, which dropped away.

  “I see,” Holt said, after a while. He went to look after his men.

  And so, among men the struggle for power went on whenever the universe would allow it. On at
least one planet a fight for leadership had long ago flared into civil war; and on that planet war and plague and isolation had destroyed civilization and history.

  From afar my mind, powerless to give help, roamed unperceived among the minds of a barbaric people. They were a people who seemed as helpless as the sheep they tended, when there came down upon them one of the ancient bloody wolves of deep space.

  SIGN OF THE WOLF

  The dark shape, big as a man, came between the two smallest of the three watchfires, moving in silence like that of sleep. Out of habit, Duncan had been watching that downwind direction, though his mind was heavy with tiredness and with the thoughts of life that came with sixteen summers’ age.

  Duncan raised his spear and howled, and charged the wolf. For a moment the fire-eyes looked steadily at him, appearing to be a full hand apart. Then the wolf turned away; it made one deep questioning sound, and was gone into the darkness out beyond the firelight.

  Duncan stopped, drawing a gasping breath of relief. The wolf would probably have killed him if it had faced his charge, but it did not yet dare to face him in the firelight.

  The sheep’s eyes were on Duncan, a hundred glowing spots in the huddled mass of the flock. One or two of the animals bleated softly.

  He paced around the flock, sleepiness and introspection jarred from his mind. Legends said that men in the old Earthland had animals called dogs that guarded sheep. If that were true, some might think that men were fools for ever leaving Earthland.

  But such thoughts were irreverent, and Duncan’s situation called for prayer. Every night now the wolf came, and all too often it killed a sheep.

  Duncan raised his eyes to the night sky. “Send me a sign, sky-gods,” he prayed, routinely. But the heavens were quiet. Only the stately fireflies of the dawn zone traced their steady random paths, vanishing halfway up the eastern sky. The stars themselves agreed that three fourths of the night was gone. The legends said that Earthland was among the stars, but the younger priests admitted such a statement could only be taken symbolically.

  The heavy thoughts came back, in spite of the nearby wolf. For two years now Duncan had prayed and hoped for his mystical experience, the sign from a god that came to mark the future life of every youth. From what other young men whispered now and then, he knew that many faked their signs. That was all right for lowly herdsmen, or even for hunters. But how could a man without genuine vision ever be much more than a tender of animals? To be a priest, to study the things brought from old Earthland and saved—Duncan hungered for learning, for greatness, for things he could not name.

  He looked up again, and gasped, for he saw a great sign in the sky, almost directly overhead. A point of dazzling light, and then a bright little cloud remaining among the stars. Duncan gripped his spear, watching, for a moment even forgetting the sheep. The tiny cloud swelled and faded very slowly.

  Not long before, a berserker machine had come sliding out of the interstellar intervals toward Duncan’s planet, drawn from afar by the Sol-type light of Duncan’s sun. This sun and this planet promised life, but the machine knew that some planets were well defended, and it bent and slowed its hurtling approach into a long cautious curve.

  There were no warships in nearby space, but the berserker’s telescopes picked out the bright dots of defensive satellites, vanishing into the planet’s shadow and reappearing. To probe for more data, the berserker computers loosed a spy missile.

  The missile looped the planet, and then shot in, testing the defensive net. Low over nightside, it turned suddenly into a bright little cloud.

  Still, defensive satellites formed no real obstacle to a berserker. It could gobble them up almost at leisure if it moved in close to them, though they would stop long-range missiles fired at the planet. It was the other things the planet might have, the buried things, that held the berserker back from a killing rush.

  It was very strange that this defended planet had no cities to make sparks of light on its nightside, and also that no radio signals came from it into space.

  With mechanical caution the berserker moved in, toward the area scouted by the spy missile.

  In the morning, Duncan counted his flock—and then recounted, scowling. Then he searched until he found the slaughtered lamb. The wolf had not gone hungry, after all. That made four sheep lost, now, in ten days.

  Duncan tried to tell himself that dead sheep no longer mattered so much to him, that with a sign such as he had been granted last night his life was going to be filled with great deeds and noble causes. But the sheep still did matter, and not only because their owners would be angry.

  Looking up sullenly from the eaten lamb, he saw a brown-robed priest, alone, mounted on a donkey, climbing the long grassy slope of the grazing valley from the direction of the Temple Village. He would be going to pray in one of the caves in the foot of the mountain at the head of the valley.

  At Duncan’s beckoning wave—he could not leave the flock to walk far toward the priest—the man on the donkey changed course. Duncan walked a little way to meet him.

  “Blessings of Earthland,” said the priest shortly, when he came close. He was a stout man who seemed glad to dismount and stretch, arching his back and grunting.

  He smiled as he saw Duncan’s hesitation. “Are you much alone here, my son?”

  “Yes, Holy One. But—last night I had a sign. For two years I’ve wanted one, and just last night it came.”

  “Indeed? That is good news.” The priest’s eyes strayed to the mountain, and to the sun, as if he calculated how much time he could spare. But he said, with no sound of impatience: “Tell me about it, if you wish.”

  When he heard that the flash in the sky was Duncan’s sign, the priest frowned. Then he seemed to keep himself from smiling. “My son, that light was seen by many. Today the elders of a dozen villages of most of the Tribe have come to the Temple Village. Everyone has seen something different in the sky flash, and I am now going to pray in a cave, because of it.”

  The priest remounted, but when he had looked at Duncan again, he waited to say: “Still, I was not one of those chosen to see the sky-gods’ sign; and you were. It may be a sign for you as well as for others, so do not be disappointed if it is not only for you. Be faithful in your duties, and the sign will come.” He turned the donkey away.

  Feeling small, Duncan walked slowly back to his flock. How could he have thought that a light seen over half the world was meant for one shepherd? Now his sign was gone, but his wolf remained.

  In the afternoon, another figure came into sight, walking straight across the valley toward the flock from the direction of Colleen’s village. Duncan tightened the belt on his woolen tunic, and combed grass from his hair with his fingers. He felt his chin, and wished his beard would really begin to grow.

  He was sure the visitor was Colleen when she was still half a mile away. He kept his movements calm and made himself appear to first notice her when she came in sight on a hilltop within hailing distance. The wind moved her brown hair and her garments.

  “Hello, Colleen.”

  “Hello, Duncan the Herdsman. My father sent me to ask about his sheep.”

  He ran an anxious eye over the flock, picking out individuals. Praise be to gods of land and sky. “Your father’s sheep are well.”

  She walked closer to him. “Here are some cakes. The other sheep are not well?”

  Ah, she was beautiful. But no mere herdsman would ever have her.

  “Last night the wolf killed again.” Duncan gestured with empty hands. “I watch, I light fires. I have a spear and a club, and I rush at him when he comes, and I drive him away. But sooner or later he comes on the wrong side of the flock, or a sheep strays.”

  “Another man should come from the village,” she said. “Even a boy would help. With a big clever wolf, any herdsman may need help.”

  He nodded, faintly pleased at her implying he was a man. But his troubles were too big to be soothed away. “Did you see the sky flash, las
t night?” he asked, remembering with bitterness his joy when he had thought the sign was his.

  “No, but all the village is talking about it. I will tell them about the wolf, but probably no man will come to help you for a day or two. They are all dancing and talking, thinking of nothing but the sky flash.” She raised puzzled eyes beyond Duncan. “Look.”

  It was the priest, rushing past half a mile from them on his way down-Valley from the caves, doing his best to make his donkey gallop toward the Temple Village.

  “He may have met your wolf,” Colleen suggested.

  “He doesn’ t look behind him. Maybe in the caves he received an important sign from the earth-gods.”

  They talked a while longer, sitting on the grass, while he ate the cakes she had brought him.

  “I must go!” She sprang up. The sun was lowering and neither of them had realized it.

  “Yes, hurry! At night the wolf may be anywhere on the plain.”

  Watching her hurry away, Duncan felt the wolf in his own blood. Perhaps she knew it, for she looked back at him strangely from the hilltop. Then she was gone.

  On a hillside, gathering dried brush for the night’s watchfires, Duncan paused for a moment, looking at the sunset.

  “Sky-gods, help me,” he prayed. ”And earth-gods, the dark wolf should be under your dominion. If you will not grant me a sign, at least help me deal with the wolf.” He bent routinely and laid his ear to a rock. Every day he asked some god for a sign, but never—

  He heard a voice. He crouched there, listening to the rock, unable to believe. Surely it was a waterfall he heard, or running cattle somewhere near. But no, it was a real voice, booming and shouting in some buried distance. He could not make out the words, but it was a real god-voice from under the earth.

  He straightened up, tears in his eyes, even the sheep for a moment forgotten. This wonderful sign was not for half the world, it was for him! And he had doubted that it would ever come.