Berserker Base

by Fred Saberhagen

  BERSERKER BASE

  BY

  FRED SABERHAGEN

  In the beginning, in his first minutes of being held captive by the damned machine, Lars Kanakuru had cursed its metallic guts for keeping him alive. The damned berserker machine ignored his curses, though he was sure it heard them, even as it had seemed to ignore the missile he had launched at it from his small oneseater spacecraft. Lars never saw what happened to the missile. But he had seen on his instruments how the damned berserker had extended forcefield arms, reaching out many kilometers for his little ship, and he saw and felt how it pulled him into the embrace of death.

  A COLLABORATION BY

  POUL ANDERSON, EDWARD BRYANT,

  STEPHEN R. DONALDSON,

  LARRY NIVEN, FRED SABERHAGEN

  CONNIE WILLIS, ROGER ZELAZNY

  BERSERKER

  BASE

  TOR

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  This is a work of fiction, All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fiction, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1985 by Fred Saberhagen

  "Prisoner's Base," "Friends Together," "'The Founts of Sorrow," "The Great Secret," "Dangerous Dream," "Crossing the Bar," "Berserker Base" copyright © 1985 by Fred Saberhagen.

  "What Makes Us Human" by Stephen Donaldson copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Howard Morhaim.

  "With Friends Like These" by Connie Willis copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  "Itself Surprised" by Roger Zelazny copyright © 1985 by Omni Publications International Ltd.

  "Deathwomb" by Poul Anderson copyright © 1983 by Davis Publications, Inc.

  "Pilots of the Twilight" by Ed Bryant copyright © 1984 by Ed Bryant.

  "A Teardrop Falls" by Larry Niven copyright © 1983 by Omni Piblications International, Ltd.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  First printing: March 1985

  First mass market printing: June 1987

  A TOR Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 49 West 24 Street New York, N.Y. 10010

  Cover art by Boris Vallejo

  ISBN: 0-812-55327-6 CAN. ED.: 0-812-55328-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  PRISONER'S BASE

  In the beginning, in his first minutes of being held captive by the damned machine, Lars Kanakuru had cursed its metallic guts for keeping him alive. The damned berserker machine ignored his curses, though he was sure it heard them, even as it had seemed to ignore the missile he had launched at it from his small oneseater spacecraft. Lars never saw what happened to the missile. But he had seen on his instruments how the damned berserker had extended forcefield arms, reaching out many kilometers for his little ship, and he saw and felt how it pulled him into the embrace of death.

  Not to quick death. He was not going to be that lucky. Suicide attacks by fanatical humans were perhaps not unknown in this berserker machine's experience, but they must be at least sufficiently rare for it to find their perpetrators interesting. It had evidently decided that he ought to be studied.

  Lars had no sidearm with him in the tiny cabin of his oneseater, nothing that he could use to quickly kill himself. And before he could use the materials on hand to improvise a way to do the job, some kind of gas was being injected into the cabin of his fighter, hissing into his breathing air, and he lost consciousness…

  When his senses returned to him he was no longer inside his fighter ship. Now, with his head aching, he was stretched out on a hard, unfamiliar deck, enclosed in a small, windowless, and apparently doorless cell. Light, faint and reddish, came from somewhere above, and warmed air hissed faintly around him.

  He sat up. Gravity, doubtless artificial, held him with standard, Earth-normal strength. There wouldn't be quite room in the cell to stand erect. Nor room to walk, or crawl, more than a couple of meters in any direction.

  Lars did not rejoice to find himself still alive. It was certain now that he was not going to be killed quickly. He was going to be studied.

  At the same time, he found that the idea of suicide no longer attracted him. It had been a basically alien thought for him anyway.

  So, he had been captured by a berserker machine. Others had survived the experience and had returned to human worlds to tell about it—a few others, benefiting from rare miracles of one kind or another. A very few others, a very few miracles, in all the millions of cubic light years, in all the centuries, across which the human race had had to fight its war against berserkers.

  As a veteran space traveler, Lars could tell almost from the moment of his awakening that he was now in flightspace. There were certain subtle indications of motion, alterations in gravity, inward twinges to go with them. The machine that held him captive was outpacing light through realms of mathematical reality, bearing him across some section of the Galaxy, in what direction he had no way of guessing.

  The human body was never really totally at home in the inhuman world of flightspace. But it had long been a familiar world to Lars Kanakuru, and to find himself in it now was, oddly, almost reassuring. There had been no prospect of help for him in. the particular sector of normal space in which he had been captured. That little fragment of the Galaxy, Lars was certain, belonged to the berserkers now, along with the few planets that it held. One of which had been his home…

  His immediate physical surroundings were such as to allow him to stay alive, no more. He took stock again, more carefully. His spacesuit had been removed, along with all the contents of his pockets. He was still dressed in the coverall and light boots he had been wearing under the spacesuit, standard combat gear of the service to which he belonged.

  Lars was surrounded by dim reddish light, bound in by cramping metal or ceramic—he was not sure which—walls and floor and ceiling. There was air, of course, of breathable content and pressure, through which from time to time there passed a wave of some exotic, inorganic stench. There was, he soon discovered, a supply of water. Almost icy cold, it gushed on demand from a wall nozzle over a small hole in the deck that served as plumbing.

  He thought back over the space battle, the combat mission, that had landed him in this cell. Next time he would do better. He found that he was telling himself that over and over. He couldn't seem to make himself realize that there would be no next time, not for him.

  Then he thought ahead, or tried to. As a rule, berserkers killed quickly; human suffering had no intrinsic value for machines. What berserker machines were programmed to want was human nonexistence. But in his case the time for quick killing had already passed.

  Then Lars tried not to think ahead, because none of the things that were known to happen to berserker prisoners were better than being quickly killed, in fact all of the other things—except, of course, the occasional miraculous rescue—were, in his opinion, considerably worse.

  Think about the present, then. Lars Kanakuru decided that it was quite likely that he was the only living thing within many light years. But then it almost immediately occurred to him thai that could not be exactly true. There would be a horde of microorganisms within his body, as in that of every other living human. He carried a population of a sort along. The idea gave him an odd kind of comfort.

  His mental state, he supposed, was already becoming rather odd.

  There was no way for him in his cruel simple cell to keep track of time. But in time—it might have been hours, or it might have been a day—he slept again, and dreamed.

  In his dream Lars saw a ship's control panel before him, covered with electronic gages, and in the way of dreams he understood that t
his was the control panel of some new kind of fighter craft. He was happy to see this, because it meant he had escaped from the berserker. But his troubles were not over. One of the gages on the panel was a very strange one, for it seemed to be displaying pairs of rhyming words, and it was very important that Lars understand what this meant, and he could not.

  The dream was not really frightening, but still it was incredibly vivid and forceful, and Lars awoke from it sweating, his hands scraping the warm smooth deck. A very odd dream.

  He lay there feeling groggy and apathetic. He drank water, and would have eaten, had any food been provided. Well, he wasn't starving yet. The berserker would feed him when necessary. If it had wanted him dead, he'd be that way already. He dozed again, and awakened.

  And then there came the realization that the machine that bore him was in flightspace no longer.

  Presently, faintly perceptible though the masses of metal that surrounded him, came sounds and vibrations that suggested a heavy docking. He decided that the berserker that had captured him had reached its base. And that meant that soon he should know exactly what was going to happen to him.

  Shortly after he felt the docking, one wall of Lars's cell opened, and a machine came in to get him. The metallic-ceramic body of the mobile unit was shaped rather like the body of an ant, and it was half as large as Lars himself. It said nothing to him, and he offered it no resistance. It brought with it a spacesuit, not his own, but one that would fit him and looked to be of human make. Doubtless the suit had been captured too, sometime, somewhere, and doubtless the man or woman who had worn it was now dead, it bore some faded-looking insignia, but in the faint red light the symbols were hard to read.

  The berserker tossed the suit at his feet. Obviously it wanted him to wear the suit, not puzzle out its provenance. He could have played dumb, tried to give his captor a hard time, but he discovered that he was no longer at all anxious to find death. He put on the suit and sealed himself into it. Its air supply was full, and sweet-smelling.

  Then the machine conducted him away, into airless regions outside his cell. It was not a very long journey, only a few hundred meters, but one of many twists and turnings, along pathways not designed for human travel. Most of this journey took place in reduced gravity, and Lars felt this gravity was natural. There were subtleties you could sense when you had enough experience.

  At about the halfway point, his guide brought him out of the great space-going berserker that had captured him, to stand under an airless sky of stars, upon a rocky surface streaked with long shadows from a blue-white sun, and Lars saw that his feeling about the gravity had been right. He was now standing on the surface of a planet. It was all cracked rock, as far as he could see out to the near horizon, and populated by marching ghost-forms of dust, shapes raised by drifting electrical charges and not wind. Lars had seen shapes similar to those once before, on another dead world. This world was evidently a small one, to judge by the near horizon, the gravity only a fraction of Earth-standard normal, and the lack of atmosphere. The place was certainly lifeless now, and had probably been utterly devoid of life even before berserkers had arrived on it.

  It looked like they had come here to stay. There was a lot of berserker construction about, towers and mineheads and nameless shapes, extending across most of what Lars could see of the lifeless landscape.

  The fabrication wasn't hard to identify as to its origin, or its purpose either. What did berserkers ever build? Titanic shipyard facilities, in which to construct more of their own kind, and repair docks for the units that had suffered in battle. Lars got a good look—when he thought about it later, it seemed to him that matters were arranged deliberately by the machine so that he would be able to catch a very good look—at the power and infernal majesty surrounding him.

  And then he was conducted underground, into a narrow tunnel, the faceplate of his suit freed of that blue-white solar glare.

  A door closed behind him, and then another door, sealing him into a small chamber of half-smoothed rock. Air hissed around him, and then another door ahead of him slid open. Air and sound, and a moment of realization. He was no longer alone. There were other prisoners here, his fellow humans. At the moment of realization Lars was intensely surprised, though later he was not sure why.

  Human voices reached him from just ahead. Human figures, all dressed in space coveralls as he was, looked up. Gathered in a small group were four Earth-descended humans, two women and two men.

  The chamber where they gathered was perhaps ten meters square, and high enough to stand in, not much more. It was barren of furnishings, and the four people were sitting on the stone floor. Three other doors, each in a different wall, led out of it. Two of the other doors were open, one was closed.

  Three of the people got to their feet as Lars approached. One of the women remained sitting on the floor, in an attitude that suggested she was indifferent to anything that happened.

  Lars introduced himself: "Flight Officer Lars Kanakuru, Eight Worlds Combined Forces."

  "Captain Absalom Naxos, New Hebrides Strategic Defense Corps." The captain spoke quickly, as if he might be conveying urgently needed information. He was a hungry-looking, intense man, with jet black eyebrows looking almost artificial on a pallid face, and a thin black stubble of beard that appeared to be struggling to establish itself with only moderate success.

  Lars said: "Glad to meet you. Wish it could be under different conditions…"

  "Don't we all. There's no goodlife here."

  The woman who had got to her feet, younger and better-looking than the other, moved a half step forward. "Pat Sandomierz. I'm just a civilian."

  "Hello." Lars took the hand that she extended. In the background, coming always through the rock, was a noise of machinery, sometimes louder, sometimes faint. Lars assumed that it was corning from the berserkers' mining and manufacturing operations somewhere nearby.

  Pat had truly beautiful gray-blue eyes. She said she had been taken off a passenger liner by an attacking berserker. She was sure that the crew and all the other passengers were dead.

  "I'm Nicholas Opava." The second man in the group gave an immediate overall impression of softness. A naturally dark skin kept him from showing a prison pallor. He radiated hopelessness, Lars thought. Opava said he had been the sole human manning a lonely scientific outpost, from which a berserker had picked him up.

  The remaining woman, Dorothy Totonac, was somewhat older than the other people, and looked withdrawn. It was Pat who gave Lars Dorothy's name; Dorothy had finally gotten to her feet, but seemed disinclined to do more than nod.

  Lars asked how long, the others had beers here. The answer seemed to be no more than a matter of days, for any of them. A mild argument over timekeeping methods had just started, when Lars was distracted by a glance through one of the open doorways. In the adjoining room, about the same size as the one where Lars was standing, there were other living beings gathered, eight or ten of them. But they were not Earth-descended humans.

  Lars reached to take Nicholas Opava by the arm. Lowering his voice automatically, he asked: "Aren't those Carmpan?" For all his spacefaring Lars had never seen the like before. But still he recognized those squarish, leathery Carmpan bodies at first glance; almost any educated human, of any world, would do so. Pictures of the Carmpan were somewhat rare, but everyone had seen them.

  Opava only nodded wearily.

  "We've gotten on quite well with them," Captain Naxos put in, in his businesslike way. "Conditions being what they are, all of us locked up together, they're disposed to be comparatively sociable."

  Lars stood staring at the Carmpan. He saw that something he had heard about them was correct: the shape of their bulky, angular bodies did suggest machinery. But he had never heard the Carmpan mind described as in the least mechanical.

  Besides mental skills that were bizarre by Earthly standards, and sometimes awesome, the Carmpan were famed also for a general tendency to avoid contact with Earth-descend
ed humans. But now one of the Carmpan was coming out of their room, proceeding toward them. The Carmpan's pace was a slow, rolling but not awkward walk.

  "Coming to greet the newcomer, I'll bet," said Pat Sandornierz.

  She was right. The thick-bodied being (two arms, two legs, and was the outer surface all scaly modified skin, or in part tight clothing? Lars couldn't tell) was heading straight for Lars. The other two men, and the two women, retreated minimally.

  "It is not possible to welcome here." The voice, to Lars, sounded surprisingly clear and Earthly, though the mouth and throat that produced it were obviously from somewhere else. "But it is possible to wish you well, and that I and my fellow Carmpan do."

  "Thank you. The same to you." What to say to an alien? "How were you captured?"

  An armlike appendage gestured. The wide unearthly mouth shaped Earthly words with uncanny precision. "Unhappily, my friend. Unhappily." With that the Carmpan turned its back on them slowly, and got wilder way again, retreating to rejoin its fellows. Male or female? Lars couldn't tell. He had heard that the Carmpan themselves rarely became interested in the distinction.

  "I thought they newer talked to us that freely," Lars mattered, watching the retreating back.

  Pat repeated in effect what Captain Naxos had already said: that the Carmpan, constrained by necessity, could be and were being good companions. And yet even the berserker had known enough to provide two rooms, realizing the necessity for a psychological separation between its two kinds of biological specimens.

  Lars was ravenously hungry, and there was food of a sort available, the pink-and-green cakes that some of the rare survivors of berserker imprisonment had described. He could see the Carmpan in their room munching cakes of other colors. After Lars had eaten, his fellow prisoners pointed out to him an individual cell that he could use for sleeping, or for such privacy as was attainable. It much resembled his cell on the berserker craft, except that this one was dug out of rock, and its open doorway had no door. Each prisoner had a similar retreat, with one spare cell still remaining unoccupied. The individual cells used by the Earth-descended prisoners were all located down a little side hall from their common room.