Rogue Berserker

by Fred Saberhagen

  “We’re on our way to getting the central computer put back together—with just a few small omissions. It’ll occupy that box near the top, where the steering handles would sprout out if there was a human rider.”

  “… mobility will be restricted to just a little low-speed rolling instead of space travel. We have already stripped away courier functions, and are now reenabling the basic brain to move and act, within the limits imposed by the diminished body. The trick is to allow just enough capability to provide us with the data that we’re looking for.”

  The human engineers who had been working hands-on seemed in need of a bit more room, so the abbot stepped back, motioning his two guests with him. This partial reassembly of the machine would give the restored brain more choices, allow it the possibility of planning. The process was quickly accomplished.

  Or was it? The new arms tightly fastened on and so were the small wheels, but it seemed the human engineers were not quite finished after all. One of them was dabbing at the subject with a small stick or brush in one gloved hand, while holding a small flask in the other.

  “What’s he up to?” Gianopolous wondered aloud, forgetting for the moment his pose of omniscience.

  The abbot’s answer came in a low whisper. “He’s painting it with a bit of fresh animal blood, just enough to give it an appropriate scent.”

  The professor’s jaw dropped slightly. “In the name of all that’s chaotic, why?”

  “You’ll see, in a moment.” The abbot looked around. “Now we must get out of here.”

  Suddenly all the humans were evacuating the lower, arena level, getting up out of the pit. A scattering of flashing red lights appeared, and an audio warning began to hoot. The abbot made a point of being the last to leave the level of the arena floor, making sure that he had shepherded everyone else ahead of him.

  In moments they had joined the other watchers in the upper gallery, where students deferentially made way.

  Not until the abbot and his guests had ringside seats was the monster released from the rack, and one of its power cells restored to allow it some physical activity, of course at a vastly restricted level of power and energy.

  “We must not reduce its capabilities too much, of course. Otherwise it will sense its own absolute weakness, and probably play dead. We will learn little or nothing.”

  * * *

  The innocent-looking berserker/scooter swayed upright, a simple gyro mechanism allowing it to balance easily on its two small wheels. Its first controlled movement was a slow turn in place, evidently trying, with partially restored faculties, to take the measure of this new and simplified environment. After that it began to move in a large circle, at a creeping pace. Within half a minute it was slowly making its way around the arena, remaining close to the steady curve of boundary wall, probing the limits of this new world with dimmed-down senses. Only once did it put on a burst of acceleration, evidently testing its capabilities.

  Readings from all the onboard telemetry were continually pouring in. “It’s still trying to orient itself,” the instructor explained. Presumably no sound from the observers’ stations could now reach the arena, or at least none that would register on the subject’s attenuated senses.

  “It will also,” the abbot was saying in a low voice, “be attempting to identify the nature of this unfamiliar environment. And also to deduce some reason for the gaps in its recent memory, and compensate for them as well as possible.”

  The inventor seemed to be growing fascinated despite himself. “Does it realize that it’s a prisoner, undergoing interrogation?”

  The abbot shook his head. “We can hope not. But at this point we cannot be sure.”

  Moments passed. The only sound in the large space was that of the machine’s small wheels on the crisply flaky arena floor. A faint scrape and a rattle, clearly audible in the waiting silence, where one of the reassembled parts perhaps was slightly loose.

  The scooter had completed nearly one full circle of the arena wall, when it abruptly changed course, taking a straight line across the open space, back to the place where it had first recovered its awareness.

  “Now it has some grasp of its new surroundings, and a realization of its diminished powers.” The instructor’s voice had, perhaps unconsciously, fallen to a whisper. “Time for the next step.”

  The teacher was telling his class: “We must present this berserker with a challenge. Set it a difficult task, one that will cause it to mobilize all its computing capacity to solve the problem. The idea is not to leave it with any surplus capacity for planning trickery.”

  “Sir, that sounds difficult.”

  “It is.”

  A panel about two meters wide that had been invisible at the base of the curving wall now slid open. A faint murmur went up from the acolytes when they saw the shape that moved out of darkness to fill the opening.

  The low growl that the animal gave came as no surprise to Harry, but the beast was larger than he had expected.

  Fur had been shaved away in a few places, spots surrounding the brightly colored plugs or probes, of composite material, that had been inserted in several sites on its long skull and along its backbone.

  One of the acolytes was making a sound of sympathy, pity, almost of physical pain. No words were formed, but what those words would have been was plain enough: Oh, the poor animal—

  The abbot immediately frowned, as if he had been expecting this particular objection and had his disapproval ready. “What did you expect, young woman? Feeding it a mouse or a snail, or even a deer, would not gain us much information.” Harry remembered that there was a Templar doctrine, a dogma, of being ruthless in the defense of life.

  Large, hungry cats or similar predators were considered the best distraction, because they posed the crippled berserker a problem, forcing it to concentrate on overcoming a life-unit’s resistance.

  The beast was about the size of a mountain lion, but leaner, some genetic variant. Harry wondered if it had somehow been specially bred for this task. Another Templar sideline that he had never come upon before.

  The comparatively massive predator had begun to stalk the vehicle that so strongly resembled a child’s toy.

  The cat moved forward as if under irresistible compulsion, as if it might find the scent of fresh blood overpoweringly attractive. The hungry predator snarled and continued its advance.

  The berserker did not crave blood, or meat. Its only want was for the fuel to keep it going, and for something less material than that.

  The innocent-looking scooter was somewhat shorter than its live antagonist, and doubtless many kilograms lighter. And the brain controlling the machine was working with a certain disadvantage, in that it could not yet be certain of the strength and toughness of this unaccustomed body that was suddenly all it had to work with.

  The scooter’s two small arms and their child-sized hands, now raised with fingers spread, reminded Harry of the delicate forearms on a T rex. That would not be the only resemblance, and certainly not the strongest, but it was the single characteristic of the scooter that even suggested fearsomeness. The metal joints, and the composite panels sheathing the thing’s flanks had a fragile, rickety look. If it was going to succeed in harvesting the raging, hungry life in front of it, it would have to improvise some weaponry.

  Harry was fascinated. For the moment, the constant pressure of his own loss had been lifted from his mind. What would the damned thing do, what could it do, with the meager tools it had been given? Might it discover some way to drain its modest power supply to produce a terrific electric shock—?

  Maybe it would, but that was not the only idea it had come up with. Reaching down along its own flank, stretching one small arm to its maximum extent, the rebuilt berserker was prying off one of its own thin side panels, that were only loosely attached to the vertical column.

  The animal closed in with a charge. The berserker raised the thin panel in two hands. The movement appeared clumsy, but before Harry co
uld revise his thinking there was a blur of metal under the bright lights, as if a simple steel frame had turned into a sword, and a splash of fresh, hot blood.

  The great cat yowled, and in the next instant it was backing away, moving on three legs while the fourth hung maimed. In the first clash it had been forced on the defensive, its raw wound displaying white broken bone.

  The cadets were gasping, murmuring, calling out. The scooter, the panel swinging swordlike in the two small hands, reversed the direction of its slow retreat. It advanced steadily, relentlessly. No doubt it was studying the movements of its crippled adversary. Then presently it charged again. The broad arena had no corners, only the vast oval offering unlimited possibilities of retreat, but no place to hide.

  The animal sent up a snarling yowl. It might have managed a limping run, attempting escape on only three legs. But its instinct was to fight back.

  The pursuit went on, changing directions. The acolytes were watching, a slightly different expression on each of their twelve faces.

  The scooter rolled closer, cleaving to a curving path. Then it darted in, as quickly as it could move, and struck again. A small cloud of dust and flaky fragments rose up from the fight. The snarling outcry of the beast became a sound like nothing Harry had ever heard before.

  At one point the lion’s powerful hind legs, both still intact, kicked the scooter meters away. Sharp, strong claws tore metal fingers from one of its small hands. But the machine spun back to the attack as soon as its wheels had touched the ground.

  Harry’s original idea about the electric shock might be proven right—if the machine had been allowed the ability to reconfigure itself internally. But one shock did not finish the predator. In another moment it had turned, reduced at last to trying to flee, and was trying to get away, with the innocent-looking scooter snarling after it.

  The best pace that the cat could manage now was more like a crawl than a run.

  And all the while the fight went on, the Templar investigators kept mining data from their probes embedded in the berserker’s brain. One of them kept letting out short bursts of elated murmuring. “Look at that sigma interaction! Got it …”

  The mountain lion turned back once more, snarling bloody froth. Half a minute later it died, twitching and convulsing, the little sword-panel had been used until it broke. Then the machine went in to finish the job with wheels and hands … it was a bloody mess, and two or three of the acolytes were turning away, struggling not to be sick.

  Harry was not at all surprised to see that the little robot jeweler’s hand, even though half of its metal fingers had been broken, was still powerful enough to dig one out of the probes that was still half-buried in the newly lifeless head of the animal. The cat was motionless at last, but the machine’s work was not yet done.

  The child-sized digits, displaying surprising strength, uprooted the thing, producing one more airborne streak of blood. Then the scooter’s body spun, its short arm flashed, hurling the dislocated probe with great accuracy at the nearest spot where its dimmed-down senses had somehow managed to perceive the ultimate horror. The horror of swarming life, intelligent, defiant …

  “Look out!”

  It was fortunate that the warning was unnecessary, because it came a full second too late.

  Every human in the observation gallery had instinctively ducked away. A checkerboard pattern of shockwaves sprang into brief existence all across the broad statglass surface. Over the next few seconds the pattern slowly faded, the tiny squares winking in and out of visibility, to reveal the defensive barrier undamaged.

  In the room behind the barrier, a murmur of discordant prayers went up. Templars shared a strong tendency to be religious, but were not all of the same creed.

  When there seemed to be no more useful data to be derived from the situation, the reactivated berserker was quietly immobilized, by foam sprayed out of nozzles descending from the roof, foam that hardened quickly into a mass that looked as solid as concrete.

  An observer just coming on the scene might have doubted that such a precaution was really necessary. The scooter had collapsed into a startlingly small pile of inert hardware immediately after hurling the probe, having seemingly expended the last of its available power in that effort. Were it not for the streaks and spatterings of blood, it would have regained the look of total innocence, a child’s toy broken and abandoned. But no one would be taking any chances. The first approach to the new pile of concrete would be made only by tame robots, and they would be very careful.

  The cadets were murmuring softly, sobered by the demonstration. That was part of its purpose.

  * * *

  When the three men had moved on out of the Trophy Room, all of them were at first silently thoughtful.

  The abbot was looking expectantly at his guests. He seemed a trifle hurt that neither of them were properly enthusiastic. At last he said: “I think it was a good show, if I do say so myself. I can tell you that we obtained a large volume of data to be analyzed.”

  “It was.” Harry nodded. “A good show.”

  Professor Gianopolous, looking a touch pale, murmured something about the sight of blood affecting him. Then he immediately excused himself to go to his room. If the show had impressed him in any way, beyond making him sick, he was not inclined to reveal the fact.

  The other two watched him out of sight, before slowly starting down the other branch of corridor. Abbot Darchan asked: “What was it you wanted to see Gianopolous about, Harry? If it’s any of my business.”

  “Oh, the project?” Harry found he could be casual. He might have been talking about the last days of someone else’s life. “More or less routine. I’m just going to do a little driving. That’s my usual job. But thanks for the tour, that was quite a demonstration, even if my mind was elsewhere. And thanks for the warning.”

  “Yes, Harry, let me emphasize the warning. You watch your back, my lad. I know you’ve got no nerves, but even so. I admit I’m glad my name is missing from the list. I wouldn’t sleep too soundly if I knew that one of those damned things was on my trail, never sleeping, never resting, calculating day and night on how to get at me.”

  Harry managed a smile for the abbot. He had the feeling it was his first smile in a long time. “That’s where you and I are different, pal.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The abbot, pleading many demands upon his time, was not coming to the hangar to see his visitors off. Harry and Professor Gianopolous, unaccompanied except for a single mildly anthropomorphic robot, were walking another enclosed passageway, this one taking them directly into the giant hangar. The inventor’s robotic personal assistant, named Perdix (Harry wasn’t going to ask where that name had come from) was following its master at three paces’ distance, carrying a fairly substantial amount of baggage. Harry had no porter, but then he didn’t need one. His material burden was quite light, consisting of only one traveling bag, small enough to be easily forgotten, that he had brought with him on the courier from 207GST. It contained a single change of clothes, as well as the few personal articles he had managed to accumulate since going to work for Cheng.

  * * *

  It was not in Harry’s nature to be anything but serious about the job of test pilot. He intended to give the Secret Weapon a thorough looking over before he tried to drive it. Harry hadn’t heard anyone say what the secret ship’s name might be, or even if it had one. But in his own mind he had already christened it with that title.

  If he was satisfied with what the inspection showed him, according to the not-too-demanding standards that had been conveyed to him by the coordinator, Harry and the inventor would soon be departing the Templar base.

  So far, Harry hadn’t mentioned the fact that his sponsor was the Galactic power Winston Cheng, and that Cheng wanted to hire the inventor as a consultant for the tycoon’s private space force. He figured he would get around to it soon enough, and there did not seem to be any driving hurry. Gianopolous could play it cool as well. So f
ar, he had not even hinted that he might be anxious to know who was financing this latest party.

  Fundamentally, Harry had not much hope for the secret weapon. He could not see how disguising any single piece of hardware, no matter how effectively, was going to make any real difference in the outcome of an attempted raid on a berserker base by a tiny squad of hastily organized militia. Trying to startle the bad machines with a secret weapon, or even hitting them with it, wasn’t going to throw them into a panic. Nor were berserkers going to be awed by the reputation of the secret weapon’s inventor. The name of Aristotle Gianopolous had been missing from the enemy’s roster of murders to be accomplished. Certainly they wouldn’t be impressed by how much Gianopolous imagined he knew about everything—to them either genius or charlatan would be just one more errant life-unit, badly in need of reprocessing into safe and satisfactory death. Harry hadn’t mentioned the list to him, and he found it hard to guess whether the inventor would have been relieved or angered by his omission.

  Harry said: “Let’s take a look at what you’re offering.”

  They had reached the vessel, resting in one of about a dozen berths at the Templars’ bustling dock, constructed entirely inside an enormous hangar, vaster even than the Trophy Room, which had once served as hangar before this one was built.

  Harry was thinking that on his arrival in Cheng’s little courier he must have docked within a few meters of the secret weapon without suspecting it was there, or even being aware that its particular berth was occupied.

  The entire lean length of Gianopolous’s ship—looking closely now, Harry could see it must be something like a hundred meters—was covered with a kind of camouflage tarp, which the professor proudly announced was also of his devising. The tarp was made of some intelligent material that deceptively, slowly and continually, changed the appearance of whatever it was covering, and even seemed to change its shape.

  Similar cloaking materials were fairly common, but Harry couldn’t remember seeing any quite as lightweight and convincing as this.