Berserker Fury

by Fred Saberhagen

  "A man's first duty is to his honor!" Maal began to recite in a singsong voice. "Then to his clan, then to his immediate family. Father first, then…"

  "Of course." Cedric tuned out, having heard it all before.

  The lethal device, as finally installed, provided a mechanical clawing power of deadly capability, as well as pulses of lethal heat and radiation that lay waiting to be unleashed, buried in the fingertips of Traskeluk's innocent-looking left hand. The mechanical clawing, Maal insisted, was perfectly in keeping with tradition, as well as very appropriate for a traitor who had abandoned his comrades to the berserkers. There was also available a one-shot detonation, what Maal called the shotgun blast.

  There appeared to be no outward sign that the client was now equipped with a single-blaster, a kind of high velocity shotgun that would fire once, powerfully enough to devastate almost any target, once Traskeluk could get himself within reach. He flexed the fingers.

  Maal peered at him as if reading his mind. "I think that even if your man is in armor when you catch him, he will not escape you. If you happen to be in armor at the time, you can slip off your left gauntlet. Hey?"

  No medical expertise was required for this operation on the artificial limb—any more than a blacksmith needed to be a veterinarian to shoe a horse.

  In a matter of a couple of hours, Maal, with the help of a specialized robot of his own, and a set of advanced tools, had installed the weaponry of vengeance. The job was skillfully done, the flap of artificial skin invisibly reattached. On the homeworld, the cousin had done this sort of thing frequently.

  Spacer Traskeluk stood up and flexed his fingers, examined his hand. The tingling that had bothered him during the operation had subsided almost instantly once the probing was over. The absence of any residual soreness seemed eerie. Just as before the operation, he had faint sensation in the artificial-nerve network running through the polymer skin of his left hand and forearm, as if it were covered by a thick invisible sleeve.

  Cedric was startled at how fast the work went, and how easily his cousin accomplished what had sounded like extensive changes. "That's all you're going to have to do? It seems like there should be more."

  A startling grin. "What more would you like? What I am doing will be more than enough. Believe me."

  Cedric was suddenly struck by the idea that his cousin must have done very similar installations on numerous occasions. The clients couldn't all be family members. Revenge must be a substantial business, and no doubt crime was even more substantial. And without a doubt there were men who just liked the feeling of walking around with a thunderbolt or two concealed up their sleeves.

  "Now I think that we must do at least one test, to make sure that the whole installation is properly under your control. Which mode of operation would you like to test first? Not the shotgun, of course; that will rather ruin all the rest of my work if it goes off."

  The radiation didn't sound like a good bet for testing, either, to Cedric. "How about the claws?" he offered.

  "Very well, good choice." Maal looked about him, right and left, as if hoping his eyes would light on a suitable subject. Then he snapped his fingers. "I know, I have a dog. Penned up. Vicious beast, and I am thinking of getting rid of it anyway. You will really get the feel of the gear better with a live subject."

  "No thanks," said Cedric immediately.

  His cousin fixed him with a look. "If you are shy of mangling an animal, what will you do when the man stands before you?"

  Something clicked in Cedric's brain. The man is right. He allowed himself to be led around behind the workshop, where a large, dark furry shape snarled and barked ferociously inside a painfully small area behind a fence. The animal was going to be killed anyway. Trask imagined that it was Gift who now stood before him…

  Still he momentarily hesitated. Impatiently Maal opened a latch and loosed a furry, snarling whirlwind, and Cedric had to grab for its throat in self-defense…

  The dog's throat was closed completely in midsnarl, the artificially powered fingers crushing flesh and bone alike. The weight of the leaping animal threatened for a moment to cost Traskeluk his balance, but with a staggering effort he managed to keep his footing.

  He thought he could feel the life go out of the heavy, furry body that dangled in his grip.

  Other functions were necessarily left untested. When the icon was properly manipulated, by direct nerve impulse control, the artificial fingers began within two seconds to generate intense heat. It was a searing surge of power that could turn steel red-hot, or-burn away a man's flesh in no time at all. Another possibility, controllable through the icon, was an armor-piercing explosive charge.

  "But remember, cousin, if you use that, you will have no hand left. No body left, either, unless you are careful to point the fingers all away from you at detonation."

  Traskeluk's whole visit to his cousin had taken only part of one day.

  When all the details were taken care of, he paid Maal for the work—there was a ritual limit on the amount that a weapons maker could charge a kinsman in such a case.

  Traskeluk had his ritual killing machine. Now all he had to do was get close enough to Shifty Gift to put his new tools to good use.

  While the Solarian defenders dug in on Fifty Fifty had been cramming in all the battle preparations possible before the expected onslaught, back on Earth the high authorities, up to and including the premier, in their various offices or shelters, were grappling with strategic problems.

  A cabinet meeting had been called by the premier, which certain key members of Earth's parliament were also expected to attend. The lawmakers were showing up now in the cabinet room, along with the heads of departments. Some were young, some old, some businesslike, some abstracted; all were worried. One or two, who in the past had talked privately of trying to come to terms with the berserkers, were silent on the subject now. The reception their colleagues had earlier given that suggestion had convinced them that to bring it up again could be dangerous.

  There was some discussion of what the Carmpan—one of the few non-Solarian intelligent races known to exist in the Galaxy—might have meant by their recent pronouncements. They had been quite enigmatic, as most of their statements were. This was not the purpose of the cabinet meeting, but it was a question in which everyone was interested.

  The Carmpan talk regarding historical parallels seemed particularly hard to interpret.

  The premier had instructed one of her most trusted aides to find out, if possible, what historical parallel the non-Solarians had in mind.

  "It's something specific they're urging us to do?"

  "Well, they are entreating us—if that's the right word— to keep on fighting, even if things look bad. They're always urging us to do that; not that we'd have much choice anyway. Our common enemy is not someone with whom you can negotiate and make a treaty. No, today's statements from the Carmpan strike me as something new. It's more as if they think they've actually succeeded in steering events a certain way."

  "Steering? How?"

  "I have no clue as to how. Steering the course of history into a kind of track, as it were, that will make it easier for us to push the train of events the way we want them to go."

  Blank faces regarded one another from their respective holostages.

  "We're tracking some parallel series of historical events."

  "That's the idea, yes."

  "Well, if it's something out of Carmpan history, forget it. That's always been a closed book to Solarians. Oh, they've let us into their archives. But still…"

  Admiral Bowman had earlier appeared in person in the cabinet room to confer, and to plead the case for Hypo. But, as the premier reminded someone who asked, by today Bowman was back on his flagship in deep space.

  The premier herself, plainly dressed, her silver hair tied simply back, came in to preside.

  In recent months she had spent a great deal of time in the underground shelter from which she was conducting today'
s meeting. It was not her preference to live like this, but what could one do? The cabinet room here was a physical double of the one in her normal aboveground office, except of course the windows were not quite the same. This one, reached by twisting tunnels, was somewhere beneath the Alps—very few people knew exactly where.

  A brilliant array of flowers and plants were in view on the full-sized holostage with her, the idea being to lend her image an air of confidence. All these living, growing things were becoming something of a personal trademark. They served now to remind the premier and her audience that not only humanity but all of Galactic life was dependent on her care.

  The artistic composition was quite skillful. Some of the flowers were actually elsewhere, and others had no physical existence outside of a data bank of graphic images.

  When it came time for speech making, the world was going to see the premier standing, or alternately seated at her ease, upon a balcony, behind her a clear Alpine sky, a sky confidently free of defensive force fields.

  On certain days—but not today—she preferred to project a military, besieged look to her fellow Earth-descended humans, on remote worlds, who in a few days or weeks would be watching this recording.

  She was in fact about to issue a general plea to Solarians everywhere to rally round and defend the Cradle Planet. That help would be important; but only if the coming battle of Fifty Fifty could be won.

  Should it be lost, no help could come from elsewhere in time to save the Earth.

  The secretary of war, himself technically a civilian, was on hand to represent the military's point of view.

  A number of the other important people who were taking part in the conference had also been trying out the latest in deep-secret shelters. Some might be speaking from those places now. None of them much liked the idea of going deep underground, and none were sure that it would do them any good, if and when the berserkers eventually descended in force on the homeworld.

  The premier herself personally disliked the idea, though here she was, under the Alps. "The planet is only thirteen thousand kilometers thick, after all. How deep can you dig? Have you already gone more than halfway through?"

  "No, ma'am." The answer was delivered with sober patience.

  "If everyone in this room is blown up, won't our successors carry on with at least as much success as we have demonstrated?"

  And alternate shelters were proposed, elsewhere in the home solar system.

  Within a few days after the berserker attack on Fifty Fifty, word had reached Earth of Hypo's success at predicting the circumstances of that assault.

  "Yamanim was right. His crazy genius, Commander R, and her machines were right."

  And the premier, fortunately for her political future, was demonstrated to have been right in deciding to trust the estimates from intelligence; and the enormous expenditure of effort and hardware on the new information-gathering system was apparently justified.

  Back on Uhao, deep in Hypo's workroom, people and machines were as busy as ever.

  "So the organization must be in your organic brain," a machine was commenting softly to its human controller.

  "Never mind my organic brain. What does my brain have to do with our problems?"

  And so the work went on.

  The cryptanalyst computers, their talent unsurpassed in their comparatively narrow field, were deep in an attempted analysis of the randomizing procedures their berserker counterparts seemed to employ in making their periodic changes of code.

  One of the machines, taking a more constructive tack, remarked to its human overseer that theoretically, it might someday be possible to predict what the next version of the berserker code would be before it actually came into being.

  " 'Someday' isn't very helpful. Is there anything you can do along that line right now?"

  "Right now such an achievement is impossible."

  "I know, I know. That's what I thought. Keep working!"

  Most people who knew anything about the cryptanalyst computers had great faith in them. It was supposed to have been a Carmpan (not himself allowed inside the Hypo room) who once had said, "Paradoxically, our unliving allies are—"

  "We prefer to use the word inorganic," Mother R had corrected softly.

  "Whatever. Our inorganic allies, it would seem, are paradoxically more trustworthy than the living when it comes to fighting those pure machines, berserkers."

  But that someone should think that Hypo's computers were alive raised a suspicion of that person's attitude toward berserkers.

  "Nonsense. Our human cryptanalysts work continuously with the machines, they observe individual idiosyncrasies; they tend to unconsciously equate mere quirks and eccentricities with life."

  "Nonsense, you think? Well, maybe."

  Another event had cast another person under some suspicion of berserker sympathies—this time not directed at a computer program. One of the more timid souls in strategic headquarters on Earth—in fact one of the premier's personal advisers—had recently put forward a suggestion that the space atoll called Fifty Fifty be evacuated. It was a small, exposed outpost, hard to defend against a superior force. According to this point of view, all Solarian forces should be pulled back much nearer Earth, preferably entirely within Sol System, where they could concentrate on playing a purely defensive role. A logical extension of this strategy—if one can call it a strategy—is that Port Diamond might as well be written off too.

  The timid soul who came up with this proposal was promptly transferred Earthward, to a different and less important job. At least he had not advocated abandoning Earth herself. No one above him in the chain of command gave his ideas any serious consideration—except as basis for review of his security clearance.

  Meanwhile, out on Fifty Fifty, a voice, impressing Jory as remarkably calm for that of an organic human, informed everyone that a wave of enemy bombers and strafers had been detected no more than a few minutes away.

  Jory had just taken off her armor in hopes of getting in a shower, and now had to scramble back into the suit without even taking time to put on the coverall first. The inner lining of the armor itself was soft, and would be kind to her bare body— she hoped. .

  Everything that the atoll could put up in the way of fighters had scrambled, long minutes ago, to try to intercept. After giving the fighters priority to get clear, other spacecraft moved to their launching pads, and up, simply to escape being sitting targets.

  Looking around the empty field, the defenders congratulated themselves on the fact that there would not be a single functional warship on the ramp or in any of the docks when the berserker raiders arrived. The few relics that remained on the ground would be a waste of enemy ammunition.

  Some technicians who had finished their assigned jobs ahead of time had then, on their own initiative, fabricated one or more imitation fighters, having no other purpose than to draw enemy fire when the expected attack swarmed in.

  Waiting on the ground was suspenseful and difficult. Though not, as she recalled, as difficult as being out in space and getting shot at.

  Everyone was in armor now and at a battle station. Nash's people, some of whom were wearing borrowed armor, had all their fine equipment up and running, or ready to go. They were focusing on what they considered would be the prime berserker targets.

  Jory marveled at how calm everyone around her seemed to be. Not for the first time she observed how calm, like fear, was contagious.

  A few minutes' flight time from the atoll, an extended dogfight between Solarians and berserkers had erupted. Some radio message to that effect came in from an intermediate distance.

  The search phase and the dogfight phase combined lasted for several standard hours, though the latter was soon over. It was an unequal contest between the outmoded small livecrew ships sent out to defend the Fifty Fifty outpost, and the incoming raiding force of up-to-date small berserker machines.

  On the ground, the minutes passed slowly, with little actual news availab
le. Everyone helped to pass around a slow continuous dribble of rumors. Contact had been made with the main berserker fleet, then lost again. The main battle was going to be elsewhere. People huddled in shelters, or stood in ground armor squinting into space, waiting for the first sight or signal of the returning crews.

  It was time for them to be arriving now. But ominously few were coming back, and those who did get back were late, their ships more often than not seriously damaged.

  As knowledgeable folk had predicted, the berserker fighter machines generally outclassed the obsolescent ships in which the human pilots defending this sector were forced to ride and fight, and mowed them down ruthlessly.

  People grumbled and swore at the sad fact that this level of Earth's defenses, so near the homeworld, had been allowed to deteriorate so greatly. Someday we would have new machines, the best weapons.

  "Yeah, someday."

  Nash's people fretted. So far they had no action to record. But Nash himself was in good spirits, and if he had any fear for his personal safety, it didn't show.

  Within an hour or so of their departure, the first survivors of the dogfight were beginning to limp home. Eventually a count revealed that fourteen out of twenty-six fighter pilots had been lost, along with their ships, in their first sorties against the approaching berserker fleet. Only two of the fighter ships that made it back to the docking facilities on Fifty Fifty could be made fit to fly again; and at the moment there was no chance to repair anything. The enemy the fighters had failed to stop—whose numbers they had not managed to appreciably diminish—were right on their tails. The dogfight protracted itself while the raid was going on.

  A few minutes after the enemy departed, a signal was transmitted recalling all defensive fighters, but only six came in to land—these were in addition to the four that had crash-landed back on the atoll while the attack was still in progress.