Berserker Fury

by Fred Saberhagen

  For once, automatically obeying orders, yielding to the demands of duty, was plainly not possible. Therefore he was going to have to follow some other course of action.

  It seemed to Gift that his mind had in some sense abandoned ship. It was now standing apart and watching, helpless to make choices, unable to interfere, while his trained body took over and swung into action. And it was a revelation to discover that his body, one-handed and awkward but still effective, seemed to have no purpose in all the world save that of saving its own skin.

  Gift's armored fingers were pressing contacts on the panel, powering up the courier's drive. He had to struggle with the elementary flight controls, which in their very simplicity seemed baffling. For some reason Gift seemed to have almost forgotten whatever scanty training he had had with such devices.

  Compelled to look back once more toward the ongoing nightmare—his body insisted on seeing what was happening— Gift used what magnification he could wring out of the inadequate flat-screen presentation, which was all he had available. In a moment he sucked in his breath sharply. There were Traskeluk and Ensign Terrin, both of them somehow still alive. At first, on the small screen and at the distance, he could barely pick them out, could not tell which was which, but there unmistakably were the two small, dark forms outlined against a glowing gas cloud at an astronomical distance in the background.

  A moment later he was able to distinguish Traskeluk, by the rifle he had now slung on his back. Trask was never happier than when he had a weapon in his hand, and on his way out of the doomed ship must have picked up the rifle Gift had chosen to leave behind. Terrin, like Gift, would probably have considered it only an extra burden and a waste of energy and time.

  Two figures space-swimming on tiny suit-jets in Gift's direction, moving at a hopelessly lethargic pace—how small and slow mere humans were! The monster coming after them was going to overtake them in the next few seconds, catch them, and eat them up.

  The radio in Gift's helmet crackled. If it was a real message, he couldn't make it out, through all the local noise. Not an unusual problem in combat. The noise might represent some final plea now coming through from one of his surviving shipmates, a few words urging him to hurry, or cursing him for not having done the job already. But—and the cold realization chilled him—it might be some fake message sent by the berserker itself, trying to lure him closer. Most likely his shipmates, if they were still alive, were maintaining radio silence, in hopes that the berserker might somehow fail to detect their fleeing figures.

  If the message was a berserker trick, then it would certainly be a mistake to try to answer.

  Now came a screeching blast of noise, as if weapons from both sides had detonated together, cutting all signals off.

  A moment later the veil shrouding communications lifted again, just long enough for Gift to hear screams on the radio. He could see nothing clearly, but here was sharp, plain testimony that at least one of his comrades still survived. That one small chance, at least, remained for saving at least one of them.

  Communication between Gift and his two remaining shipmates had been seriously disrupted by the noise of combat, and everything Gift could now see and hear from his new position in the courier indicated that the berserker was eating his two surviving shipmates alive, or at least was about to do so. That looked and sounded like Traskeluk's rifle flaring—he saw the enemy at close range now.

  Gift couldn't stand to watch.

  But then there was no reason why he should. Because everything that was going to happen now had already been decided.

  Gift's suit radio was buffeting his brain with a din of destruction that seemed to go on endlessly. Outside the courier's hull, which was not much more than paper-thin, and almost useless as a barrier, the robot fight still raged. Weapons were slamming, explosive contacts made on metal and on nerves alike, and the two humans who had just left the spy ship went tumbling and spinning in their space armor.

  Damn it all, the fight had to be over! There could be very little left of the spy ship by this time. But his eyes told him that part of the hull, at least, was still intact, some of the Solarian weapons still firing.

  Back there, those last two remaining survivors were now gone, vanished into a blur of deadly pyrotechnics. All of his shipmates were dead, but he was still alive.

  Gift could picture Traskeluk, who had great physical strength and quite a temper, facing the end of his life with anger, taking it out on somebody, mutinously striking down the smaller woman.

  Time passed.

  Spacer Gift became aware, belatedly, of the strange silence that now engulfed him. Then he realized that he must have turned his radio off, long seconds or even minutes ago.

  Then he looked around him, turned his head as best he could, wedged in as he was beside the control panel on the courier. Around him in the confined volume there was almost nothing to be seen. His bulky suit fit with very little leeway into the space between two concentric hulls, on a machine that was not meant to carry a livecrew, or even a single passenger, except in the most dire emergency. Essentially there were no furnishings aboard, not even a chair or a lamp. There was of course no life support, no gravity. At least he was not bound to stay in some fixed location. With his suit radio patched into the panel, he could command the courier by voice orders from anywhere inside.

  The drive had needed only a few seconds to power itself up. The courier was now fully awake in all its optelectronic senses. Its precisely limited intelligence was waiting to be told where to go. Gift realized, remotely, that he could still do the very thing Ensign Terrin had ordered him to do, be the hero everyone expected him to be, rush back at four or five Gs to confront death, on the chance that two people might still be alive and looking to be picked up, and they could try to cram themselves, all three, into this space.

  Except that nothing had changed—he really couldn't make himself do that.

  At the crucial moment of his last chance, Spacer Gift found himself still unable to face the virtual certainty of death. What use was a deathdream when you felt like that? And what he feared even more than obliteration was the prospect of becoming a berserker's captive, being skinned alive for crumbs of information, whose real value to either side in the war might well be nothing at all. Everyone had heard the stories, and no one denied that some of them were true. A captive could be tortured like a mouse in some incomprehensible experiment, part of the enemy's never-ending quest for understanding of the human condition.

  This discovery concerning his own nature came upon him very suddenly. It was like yanking a door open and confronting beyond it an alien and totally unexpected shape. Facing such a fate Was an impossibility, like willing oneself to pass through a brick wall. Whatever faint chance Terrin and Traskeluk might still have to save their lives depended absolutely on his bringing the courier back to them. But now he had discovered that their chances and their lives counted for very little with him.

  Staring at the flat little panel just before him, an area on the inner hull not much bigger than a human face, and marked with glowing indicators, Gift found some of the symbols there confusing and others unintelligible. For some reason, probably some technician's oversight, the controls were labeled in a language that few people on the spy ship's crew would have been able to understand, and that Gift himself understood but poorly.

  It would have taken him only a moment to punch in a command for a different language. But for some reason, a reason Gift later found beyond his understanding, he did not do so.

  Even with the control panel labeled in the wrong language, the basics were clear enough. Gift didn't switch, as Terrin had ordered him to do, into the local maneuver mode. Nor did he use the keyboard or voice entry to command the courier into a kamikaze attack. Instead, his fingers, even as he watched them, were putting the unit into emergency lifeboat service. There is no artificial gravity in here, he reminded himself. Nothing to protect your body from acceleration. You must remember to keep the subject
ive value very low. Again Gift had the strong impression that his body was simply remembering and taking care of everything necessary to save itself, without any conscious decision on his part.

  His precious flesh and blood, it seemed, had taken over direct control of his behavior, turning him away from abstractions called orders and responsibility, setting him running for safety. It seemed to Gift that his body had betrayed him—but it had saved its own life, and therefore his existence, in the process. Moral objections, concepts called rules and duty, were so much alien vapor—this was about sheer physical life or death.

  It was as if he, Spacer Sebastian Gift, were watching, from some position of separation, the behavior of his body.

  The decision had been made, and he was safely sealed inside the courier. The scene where the combat had taken place was fading, the radio uproar in his helmet had died away. The place where he had almost died was shrinking rapidly behind him…

  He could feel, through the thin metal surrounding him, the ongoing fine vibration that confirmed what the panel told him, that the courier's main drive had come awake. And then, only a moment later, came the inward twitch that meant that he and the vessel that bore him were now in flightspace. Acceleration, in the usual sense, had become meaningless.

  And a wave of faintness came over the survivor as he realized that he was still alive. And the berserker was behind him now, behind him by more kilometers than a man could cover in a lifetime's walking.

  Spacer Gift understood intellectually that the courier's autopilot, designed for efficient interstellar flight, was perfectly capable of getting him to Port Diamond, or to Fifty Fifty, or any of a number of other safe ports, in a matter of a few days.

  But Gift's flight had not been under way for more than ten minutes before he began to be nagged by the feeling that something was wrong with the autopilot. Or maybe it was the drive that had a defect. And now—he was holding his breath, and listening—it seemed to him that he could hear a certain strange, small noise from inside the inner hull, at about the spot where the autopilot ought to be. He turned up the contact mike on his suit, put his helmet against the inner hull, and tried again to listen to it.

  After a while he thought: Something odd there, yes. But it was hard to be sure.

  In the back of Gift's mind an idea was slowly developing: That the other two survivors of the berserker fight were not here with him because of some terrible, unlucky error made by this courier's autopilot. Some glitch in the machinery had switched to lifeboat mode, had jumped the ship into flightspace before he'd ordered it to do so; he'd heard stories of such things happening. Whatever had happened to Terrin and Traskeluk, the hardware on which all three survivors depended was at fault.

  It was utterly, mathematically impossible, of course, for Gift to do anything now to correct the error. Turning around and going back for the lost would be quite impossible. The courier's simple astrogation system could never be induced to return simply to its starting point.

  A quarter of an hour after first becoming aware of the strange noise, Spacer Gift was working with great difficulty in the cramped space—difficulty, because he was slowly losing all remaining function and sensation in his left hand. Despite this handicap, he had located and dug out a small set of emergency tools, and had removed a panel from the curved inner hull, methodically trying to locate the deadly problem.

  The more Nifty Gift looked at the readings on his little multimeter, the more strongly they suggested to him that something about the drive must be marginally off. Even though he couldn't remember exactly what the readings were supposed to be.

  Yes, he decided, a minor mechanical failure of some kind had probably caused the drive to kick in prematurely. Some quantum effect in the fine circuits. Such things could happen, purely by accident, everyone knew that. Instead of going back for Traskeluk and the woman he had been carried light-years away, with no prospect of being able to get back. He, Nifty Gift, had been as helpless as any of his shipmates. That must be the correct explanation for what had happened.

  Like all the most troublesome glitches, the fault would probably turn out to be something that could not be made to repeat itself on demand.

  Now and then Gift tried with his right hand, compulsively but without much effect, to scrape away some of the dried brownish stains still clinging to the outside of his armor—he immediately knew what it was: the blood of some of his fellow crew members, spattered on him without his knowledge before he'd left the dying ship.

  Astrogating manually—Gift's brief training, several years ago and almost forgotten, regarding how to manage that in case of emergency, came back—touching up the programs in the drive and astrogation units with the aid of a small computer, remembering to keep the subjective acceleration low at every point; there was no reason why he could not make his way home in this now-uncomplicated situation, barring a chance encounter with another berserker. And the chances of that were remote indeed.

  For the three or four standard days (subjectively the time he spent sandwiched between the inner and outer hull was much longer than that) of Sebastian Gift's journey toward his home, a passage his tinkering seemed to have delayed only marginally, the man alone in space indulged in luxurious thoughts of what he was going to do when he got back to his familiar quarters on Uhao, or back to Earth, his home planet. More accurately, he tried to do so. He was really too uncomfortable to get much fun out of any kind of luxurious thought.

  He moved his body as much as he could, trying to ease the growing cramps that seemed to afflict all the large muscles of his arms and legs and torso, one or two groups at a time.

  He thought the thin metal of the outer hull was bending, denting, slightly with the pressure of his armor, the way he was wedged in. He didn't think that was going to have much effect upon his flight.

  He turned over in his mind the situation regarding his family, back on Earth. He didn't really want to think about such matters now, but he had no choice.

  To give himself something else to think about, he tried to play chess in his mind. When the game refused to progress, the mental board wiping itself clear every minute or so, he did his best not to think at all.

  He tried not to worry about his wounded hand and arm, and in that effort he succeeded fairly well. Fingers, and even whole limbs, after all, could be replaced.

  Desultorily he scraped at the old bloodstains on his armor, in the places where he could reach them with his good hand. But eventually he decided he might as well let them stay.

  Sleep came seldom to Nifty Gift during his sojourn in the courier, and when it did come it was troubled with a full load of ugly dreams. More than once it seemed that Traskeluk and Terrin were with him on the courier, their armored bodies crowding his, until he could no longer breathe. The sensation of endless falling brought on by the lack of gravity engendered a deep anxiety. His armor clanged against either the inner or outer hull every time he moved any part of his body more than five or six centimeters.

  Once he woke from a dream on the verge of shouting, trying desperately to get Traskeluk to hush his roaring battle song. He awoke to eerie, almost perfect silence. There was only his own breathing, and the faintest possible scraping of metal against metal.

  Spacer Gift was bringing home with him some good information, compiled by the spy ship's receivers and computers before they died—but of course he wouldn't be able to tell the debriefing officers whether the two humans who had been so unluckily left behind would have succeeded in blowing up the spy ship, or activating their deathdreams, before they were taken alive by the berserkers.

  There were moments when Gift almost decided he couldn't even be sure whether the two had got out of the spy ship or not.

  Gift found himself rehearsing the story he was going to tell the authorities when they questioned him, as they always questioned everyone who came back from a mission. After such close contact with the enemy, the debriefing would certainly be intense. He wanted to get his memory as clear as poss
ible, to confirm the chain of events in his own mind, so he would not forget anything of importance.

  Trouble was, his memory already seemed a little hazed regarding some of the important parts. Well, maybe those details weren't really so important.

  Gift wondered whether he might actually have seen the spy ship go up in a killing blast, in which there could have been no survivors. There were moments when the image was vividly before him.

  The last useful bit of intelligence, regarding the massive impending berserker attack that was aimed at Fifty Fifty as a springboard for an assault on Earth, had been recorded on board one of the ED ship's robot couriers, which had then, just before the spy ship was destroyed, been fired off at superluminal velocity toward the spy ship's base.

  The spy ship and its crew had been in charge of an extensive network of robotic spy devices, which had succeeded in reading the information from a berserker courier device—or a series of such couriers, plying a route between an enemy fleet and its distant headquarters.

  No more than half a dozen times, in the course of a war extending over a double handful of centuries, and many thousands of light-years, had clever Solarians enjoyed the great good fortune of being able to physically capture a berserker courier machine with its information content intact, and subject to their scanning.

  Once or twice, after concluding a detailed examination, the Solarian spy masters had tried to send such a device on its way, hoping the enemy would never realize that the information it carried was compromised, and would act on it. Results were not sufficiently clear-cut to be able to say whether the procedure had succeeded or not.