Berserker Fury

by Fred Saberhagen

  The dish antenna intended to receive urgent information from returning scouts was one of the first objects blown up when the berserker attack came in.

  Only the mounded, rounded top of Jory's dugout was higher than the nearby revetments.

  Every minute or so she daringly, against orders, stuck her head up on the surface to take one more look around.

  Meanwhile, the defensive force fields, powered and energized by generators buried underground, sunk as deep as the roots of the atoll itself went down in normal space, helped to bind together and stabilize the whole atoll. Their fields damped explosions, slowed shock waves, screened out a sleet of radiation, drew the energy from, and lowered the temperature in, flashes of searing heat. Thus tender human flesh might be enabled to endure.

  Back in the snugness of her shelter Jory watched, in utter fascination, the first appearance of the enemy, not directly, but on a holostage.

  This, at last, was real. She vividly recalled having the same thought during her previous combat experience. Then too she had been aware of the same hard-edged look and feel of reality.

  Alternately she knelt or crouched on the hard floor of the shelter, shifting awkwardly from one cramped position to another. When the explosions began in earnest, up above, some of the near-misses pelted her armor with bits of hard material spalled off the interior walls of the shelter.

  The little holostage in front of her, on which she watched, melded, and directed what was going on, was as crowded as a three-ring circus, with feed-ins coming from several robots at once; and she fretted that perhaps she ought to be out on the surface. It was essential that she have the most direct view possible of what was happening up there, if the recording she put together was going to be anything more than merely mechanical.

  A couple of her shelter-mates were hanging over her armored shoulders, eyes riveted on her stage. The others found other ways to keep busy. Maybe some had left the shelter for some reason, through a connecting tunnel or up the passage leading to the war above.

  For most of her life Jory had been subject to a chronic fretting that technology, and other things, conspired to keep her at one remove from reality. The nature of reality chronically concerned her. This was one reason, she supposed, why she had chosen a profession that consisted largely of asking questions.

  For days before the berserkers came, the defensive satellites, of which she estimated that ten or twelve were visible at any one time, had already been orbiting at blurring speed around the small, dense atoll. Now they shifted into faster, tighter paths. Their movements suggested to Jory depictions of subatomic particles quantum-jumping, their images taking on almost the aspect of solid celestial rings.

  Now Jory, watching intensely from the ground, had barely time to catch a glimpse of these last-second defense adjustments before the first explosions jarred the world. Maybe before the attacking machines were in range of human eyesight. The stentorian mechanical voices that had been calling everyone to battle stations at last fell silent.

  No doubt the machines that were fighting on the other side emotionlessly took note of the fact that their onslaught had failed totally to achieve surprise.

  Even after the first wave of enemy spacecraft had begun to hit their targets on the ground, the surviving Solarian fighters that were still spaceborne continued to do their best to mix it up with them, and with audacity and determination shot up several bomber machines. Wave fronts of radiation jarred the hurtling fighters, the darting enemy, and on the ground knocked armored running figures sprawling.

  Such success as the Solarian livecrew ships enjoyed endured for only a few more seconds. And then the doughnut-shaped Void fighters of the enemy, falling on their prey like raptor birds, had closed with the ground-based Solarian clunkers, taking most of the pressure off the bomber machines.

  Quickly most of the inferior Solarian vehicles were being blasted out of space. There went one, lost in a glorious streak of flame; and there went another and another, winking out in explosions of a brightness that was momentarily painful, even through the filtering faceplate of combat armor. Jory winced.

  A few of the clunker pilots, protected by their personal armor, survived the ruin of their spacecraft. Some were swept clean away from the atoll in currents of thin nebular material, lost to their friends and to their enemies alike. Several of their suited forms showed up in Jory's images, drifting down with apparent lightness through the mottled irregular gravity of the atoll. And one or two of these, as she discovered later, had actually made survivable landings somewhere on the surface, out of sight of the landing field.

  Those less fortunate were subjected to some ground fire, aimed at them in the belief that the armored figures being feathered down to the surface on their own force fields were berserker machines, the first landers of an invasion force.

  On top of that, one of the Void fighters diverted itself from fatter targets to strafe the falling humans. A ground observer saw a helpless pilot die, and her voice came over the defense intercom, cursing the enemy. Jory, caught up in her own job, cursed also—she had just missed getting a good recording of the event.

  In the next minute, a cheer went up in hundreds of voices, many of them audible in Jory's headset, when ground fire, skillfully directed by computers melded with human minds, brought down another and then yet another of the attacking machines.

  Colonel Shanga's defensive force fields, reaching out into space for hundreds of kilometers, continued to slow down the incoming bombers, as well as the missiles that they launched, to the point where human eyes could follow their movements with little difficulty. Meanwhile, other enemy units became visible only in the streaking explosions that marked their destruction.

  The apprentice journalist so far was coming through without a scratch, and managing to do her job in a satisfactory way.

  Whammo! Whammo! Whammo!

  Jory cowered down, her ears and teeth, her very bones, aching with sympathetic vibrations. Reflexively she tried to put her hands over her ears, and through the sensors in her armored gloves felt only the smooth, curved sides of her helmet.

  Meanwhile, she could gather from snatches of conversation heard on intercom that Nash himself, sticking to his relatively exposed position, had been wounded in the arm or shoulder.

  Jory, on the private intercom used by Nash's team, heard him groaning and muttering. She thought he sounded too energetic, too full of pride and anger, to have been badly hurt.

  The sky, as modeled on her little stage, was full of streaks and fiery blossoms, of colors and intensities that wanted to hurt the eye, even through a statglass faceplate. Here and there a ghost of airborne flame suggested that the self-replenishing atmosphere still held enough oxygen to support burning.

  A moment later, some giant's hammer, underground, came smiting upward against Jory's suited feet, threatening to launch her armor-weighted body into the thinned-out air. Some kind of a near hit. She staggered and swore and got back to her work.

  The ground-based Solarian fighters had failed dismally to stop the attack, but they had done their best to blunt its force. Other factors also worked to that end. Many lives were saved by the warning received many days ago. The humans had been given priceless time to dig in, with force fields and hardened emplacements, and this prevented a major disaster.

  With the exception of a score of live pilots who had vanished with the wreckage of their doomed, inadequate fighters, Solarian casualties were light. No more than a dozen of the ground defenders had been killed outright.

  Some facilities on the atolls, including a repair dock for small spacecraft, and the tight-beam antenna for courier down-loadings, were extensively damaged, but other important sites, including most of the deep shelters, were left practically untouched.

  The Solarians remained for the most part entrenched, more than half buried in the hardened ground, while they fired back as best they could. On the displays, the antiship fire they put up sometimes looked like an almost continuous sheet o
f flame. They inflicted serious casualties on the wave of small berserkers.

  "We can take satisfaction," the young journalist was now saying into her recorder, (meanwhile feeling pride in the steadiness of her voice) "in the fact that every Solarian spacecraft had already been launched, with a full crew—some of them hours, some only only minutes—before the berserkers swept in. The attackers are going to be absolutely denied one of their important goals, one which the defenders here think they had computed as exceedingly probable: They will catch not a single Solarian fighter or bomber still in its launching cradle. Nor is a single one of the livecrew members still on the ground and vulnerable to this assault. They are all in space, where they have every chance to fight back."

  That was what she had been told, and she could at least hope that it was true. How many of the young crew members who had gone to meet the enemy were dead by this time was another question she would have to try to answer.

  Death had come out of the sky and snapped its jaws at the Solarian defenders on the ground. But the human volunteers, three thousand of them and more, were still dug in on

  Fifty Fifty, with no intention of moving out. They had no intention of dying, either, though they were still defiantly occupying the enemy's chosen target. When the enemy finally came, the dominant emotion of these people was relief that their long wait was over. They fought back with everything they had, even as the world around them erupted with blasts, flames, and murderous vibrations.

  A roaring berserker machine, one of the biggest taking part in the attack, hit by fire from a heavy gun, disintegrated in the upper atmosphere, which on this peculiar world lay only a couple of hundred meters above land surface.

  Blast followed blast. It seemed to Jory now that she could hear her mother shouting at her, and for a moment her self-possession wavered. Then it settled back. I'm dealing with this, thought Jory Yokosuka, in brief self-congratulation on her own aplomb, and then went back to a selfless concentration on operating her equipment. She was doing this through hand controls under the armored fingers of her suit, as well as giving verbal orders to her robots through a kind of headset, a less compulsive version of the arrangement worn by the live combat fliers-spacers, which plugged into the helmet of her armored suit, and left most of the operator's face covered only by the armor's faceplate.

  Ka-slaam, ka-slaam!

  The attack went on, minute after minute. The enemy machines were circling at high speed in the sky, diving, retreating, climbing, and coming back. Now some people in the shelters, civilians as well as military, began to react to the ongoing strain of bombardment by rushing wildly out of their shelters for no good reason, firing shoulder weapons into a sky more weirdly streaked and color-stained than any sunset on a volcanic planet. The gesture relieved a need for action, but was ineffective; it hardly seemed possible that any of the many incoming missiles were going to be hit and detonated by small-arms fire.

  And then Jory's equipment went totally dead. There must have been a hit nearby, a blow that had hardly registered in her awareness. Maybe the last one of her active robots had been wiped but.

  The young woman stared blankly at the dark, lifeless stage for a moment, then ripped off the wire optelectronic fiber connection to her helmet, abandoned her relatively secure position underground, and rushed out, scrambling through the little tunnel, climbing the steep hardened stairway to the surface. This was at least partly because of her ongoing wish to see directly what was happening. Evidently some splinter or splash of energy had penetrated her little shelter and found a vital spot in the equipment.

  Once her head rose above the level of the ground, an avalanche of noise, like nothing she had ever heard before, forced its way right inside her helmet and seemed to be lifting it off.

  Her dog-sized robot, its hindquarters melted into bubbling slag, stared at her through one lens that was still turning in its immobilized head.

  Almost at once her eye fell on a fallen object, lying not ten meters from where she stood. It was a dead man, his armor wrapped on arm and leg with Templar tokens, lying like a bundle of discarded laundry. The body lay half out of a small shelter, which had been ripped open by some kind of blast.

  TWENTY-ONE

  If the small yacht he was riding on had a name, Gift hadn't heard it yet, and didn't want to. Nor did he really want to be told the identity of the Teacher, the ship's owner that Gavrilov, with an air of awe and mystery, mentioned every once in a while. Nifty envisioned some crabbed old patriarch, head of some idiotic peace cult on whatever remote planet they were now bound for. Nifty expected it was going to be unpleasant there, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as facing Traskeluk—or a court-martial, either, come to that.

  Gift's only real problem now was that he still couldn't tell where they were going. He tried talking to the ship several times, when the other man was out of the compartment, but Gavrilov had the controlling codes, and had blocked the vessel's opt-electronic brain from discussing any astrogational matters.

  Gift was used to ships where the human crew took some active part in every aspect of the voyage. The autopilot and the other machines were generally reliable, of course, more so than humans in many ways. But… still it made him uneasy.

  They were still in deep space a long way from any solar system, the yacht's autopilot still following whatever course had been punched in by Gavrilov. Gift was wondering whether he should be worried—this was turning out to be a longer trip, involving more C-plus jumps, than he had expected. Possibly that was because they were taking evasive action, against what seemed to Gift the even remoter possibility that they were being followed.

  Flower, acting as if it were a matter of course, had moved into the little cabin with her Nifty—it was quite a comedown from the quarters they had enjoyed aboard the luxury liner.

  But Flower was no help to him in finding out where they were bound. She seemed perfectly willing to let Gavrilov make all the important decisions.

  "He knows what he's doing, Nifty. He's been involved in this kind of thing for a long time."

  "What kind of thing?"

  "What he's doing for you now. Getting people out of the military, when they don't want to be in it any longer."

  "Oh."

  Unless Gift could obtain access to the instruments—and Gavrilov was making certain he could not—there was no possible way for him to tell where he was being taken. Unless he was willing to really make an issue of it, there was no way to pressure Gavrilov into telling him.

  What the hell, thought Nifty Gift. Once you decide to trust someone, then trust them, until they prove you wrong. If Gavrilov and his mysterious Teacher and whoever else was backing him want to play the cloak-and-dagger business, let them. Maybe they knew what they were doing.

  Several times in the course of this voyage Gift felt an urge to confess to Flower the reason why he was so afraid of Traskeluk.

  He said to her once, "There's some things I did I'm really sorry for. One thing in particular."

  "What was that?"

  He didn't answer directly. "When I ran away from the berserker, it was because I was trying to stay alive."

  "Why else?"

  Gift, when he thought about it, understood that he had deserted long before he met Gavrilov, or even Flower. He'd made that decision many days ago, in deep space and in the face of the enemy. No, it was more like he hadn't made any decision at all. It had just popped into existence, the first time he'd confronted a berserker.

  Gavrilov, tired of his continued hints that he wanted to be told which planet they were going to, told Gift at last: "We're headed for a place called Paradise."

  Gift thought for a moment. "Never heard of it."

  The other was silent.

  "Maybe it's called by some other names as well?"

  Gavrilov shook his head.

  "Paradise."

  "That's our name for it."

  Now Gift shook his head, in disgust. "You're not just driving me around in a big loop and bring
ing me back to Uhao? Some really clever maneuver of that type?"

  "No. I'm not doing that. When I say Paradise, I'm not talking about the weather." And nothing more could be got out of him.

  At first Gift had been convinced that the worst purpose his new companions had in mind was to help him to desert.

  Gift said, in announcing his decision to desert, "I've paid my dues—let someone else get shot at for a while."

  "You said the Space Force was going to give you a desk job."

  "That's what they told me."

  She and Gavrilov both understood that he was afraid of berserkers—not that they thought any the less of him for that. They were both afraid of berserkers too—but in their case, it was the way that some people feared God. Well, all the-gods of space knew that he was as scared as any of them. Only Flower, who had been with him longer, thought she understood Gift's motives better than he did himself. She wanted to convince herself that he was reluctant to fight those nice machines any longer.

  The hours went by, growing into days. The ship continued piloting itself, toward whatever destination Gavrilov had punched in. Days ago the world of Uhao had shrunk to nothing on the holostages (Gift was the only one who had bothered to observe the process), had become a lovely blue Earthlike dot, and presently had disappeared when they dodged into flight-space for a long jump.

  Flower dabbled around, day after day, in the yacht's various cabins, playing games much of the time, keeping busy at this and that. She seemed happy and proud to be with Gift the military deserter, and at the same time nervous.