Fred Saberhagen - Berserker Death

Berserker Death

Table of Contents

The Berserker Wars

STONE PLACE

THE FACE OF THE DEEP

WHAT T AND I DID

MR. JESTER

THE WINGED HELMET

STARSONG

SOME EVENTS AT THE

TEMPLAR RADIANT

WINGS OUT OF SHADOW

THE SMILE

METAL MURDERER

PATRON OF THE ARTS

Berserker Blue Death

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

Berserker Kill

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

PART TWO

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

BERSERKER DEATH

FRED SABERHAGEN

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

International.

Berserkers® is a registered trademark of Fred Saberhagen

A Baen Books Megabook

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-9886-0

Cover art by Jeff Miller

First Megabook printing, February 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH (www.windhaven.com)

Printed in the United States of America

Baen Books by Fred Saberhagen

Rogue Berserker

Berserker Man(Megabook)

Berserker Death(Megabook)

The Dracula Tape

Vlad Tapes

Pilgrim

The Black Throne

(with Roger Zelazny)

AUTHOR'S NOTE

For more information about Fred Saberhagen

and this series see:

www.berserker.com

The Berserker Wars

MESSAGE BEGINS

REPORT ON THE PRIVATE ARCHIVE OF THE THIRD HISTORIAN

A File Which Presents the History of the Galaxy in Twenty Pages

Transmission Mode: Triplicate Message Torpedoes

Code: Trapdoor XIII

TX Date: 7645.11.0

From: Archivist Ingli, Expedition Co-ordinator

To: Chief Co-ordinator, Earth Archives

cc: Defense Co-ordination Central

Hal: We're here, surrounded by friendly Carmpan of whom we rarely see more than one or two at a

time, and then usually only with some partial or symbolic physical barrier between us. Everything is going

pretty much as expected, we have experienced nothing really contrary to the experience of a thousand

years' occasional and arm's-length contact with the race. By the way, it's beginning to look, to me at

least, less and less coincidental that our first meeting with the Carmpan coincided almost exactly with the

beginning of the Berserker War. I'll have more to say on this point presently.

Let me first describe what I consider to be our main achievement so far on this mission. To begin with,

the structure in which we are living and working is best described as a large, comfortable library, and we

have been given free access to great masses of information in several kinds of storage systems. (I hope,

by the way, that the exchange team of Carmpan researchers on Earth are being treated as well as we are

here.) Much of this mass of stored data is, as we expected, still unintelligible to us and so far useless. But

quite early in the game our hosts pointed out to us, for our special attention, an alcove containing what

we've come to call the private archive of the Third Historian. Having looked at the files therein, my

colleagues and I agree unanimously that they were very probably compiled and largely written by the

same Carmpan individual who used that name (or title) as signature to the messages he composed and

sent to our ancestors some generations ago, when the Berserker peril was even greater than it is today.

Since a copy of this report is going directly to the military, Hal, bear with me when I pause now and then

to insert a paragraph or two of history. We can't reasonably expect that all the readers over there are

going to know as much of it offhand as we do.

Up until now, almost all of the information that we have ever had directly from the Carmpan on any

subject—Berserkers, the Builders, the Carmpan themselves, the Elder Races, almost everything—a very

great proportion of this information, I say, has come to our Solarian worlds through long-distance

communications signed by this one individual, for whom we still have no other name than Third Historian.

He—or she, the Carmpan language does not readily distinguish sexes, and they usually appear to care

not much more about sex than we do about blood types—was active centuries ago, and to my

knowledge no new Third Historian message has been received on the Solarian world for centuries.

So we still know next to nothing about the Third Historian—or indeed about any Carmpan

individual—as a person, and it appears to me unlikely that this present Expedition is going to find out

much about him. We do of course ask questions, particularly since being shown the private archive that is

marked in several places with his signature. Our questions are answered in the usual obscure ways, about

which more below. Even the significance of the number in his name or title is still unknown to us. It does

seem certain that more than three individuals must have occupied the post of Chief Historian—assuming

there is such an official post among the Carmpan—during such a very long history as their race boasts.

Or would boast if they were at all given to boasting.

When I asked directly, I was told that the Third Historian is still alive. This surprised me somewhat,

though the life-span required, considerably less than a thousand standard years, would not be utterly out

of the question even for one of our own comparatively perishable species. However, when I asked

urgently to see him, or at least to be told where he is now, I was informed just as unequivocally that the

Third Historian is now dead. One of the enclosures with this message is our own recording of this

particular question-and-answer session.

Let me digress just a little more from the important contents of the TH's private files, to remark that in

the short time we've been here we've had more face-to-face (if that's the right way to put it; you know

what I mean) contact with the Carmpan than have any other group of Solarian humans in history. As you

are well aware, we were very eager for this chance. On the long voyage out here we managed to

convince ourselves that with goodwill on both sides (a requirement that I certainly feel has been met) we

were going to do a lot better at communicating with the Carmpan than any other of our race has ever

done. We were going to dig a lot of Galactic history out of them, complete with hard facts, dates,

numbers, the kind of thingwe like to call history. We would dig up information that must be available to

them even if they consider it valueless, and bring it home with us. Not only that, we would at last meet a

Carmpan or two who really wanted to learn about us through our own conscious attempts at

communication; and, boy, were we ever going to communicate withthem.

Need I add, that so far it hasn't worked out quite that way? That so far our formal conference sessions

are dominated, whatever we Solarians try to do, by the Carmpan spiritual (?) and sociological

abstractions? (Military readers, see my monograph onDrifts and Tones in Carmpan Communications

; someone at the Archives will be glad to furnish you with copies.) That's just the way in which our

gracious hosts here insist on looking at the Universe. I find I must set down the cliche once again, and

then I swear that I will ban it from all later messages: The Carmpan mind is very, very different from our

own.

Of course the communications we have been directing to the Carmpan while in general conference form,

to our way of thinking, a clear and concise outline of the history of our Solarian variant of the human race,

from our origins on Earth through our later phases of expansion and development to the present, when

we are the dominant life form on more than a thousand major planets in more than seven hundred

systems, not to mention all the natural and artificial extrasystemic habitats, enjoying a blessed variety of

political and economic organizations while managing to co-operate quite well, most of us, most of the

time, in the thousand-year Berserker War.

I frankly don't know what our hosts think of this presentation we make about ourselves. There are

moments when I believe they knew it all already, knew more than we have told them, down to the last

detailed production statistic, through their own far-ranging mental activities. And, again, there are times

when I believe they just don't care, don't know and aren't interested, are going through the motions of

listening to us only out of politeness. They do express thanks when we pause after shoving information at

them, as they express thanks for so much else that our race has done. But there is no substantive

comment on what we tell them. There are no questions that sound eager.

That's how things stand now. We are here, and being very well treated, and we like our hosts. And they

like us and are glad to have us here, even if it would be strictly inaccurate to say that they enjoy our

company. And it is somehow implied that they have done, are doing, will do, something important for us.

That's how things stand now, how they stood the moment we arrived. Actually we could just have sent

them an electronic greeting card and accomplished just as much.

Except of course for one thing. Our presentation of our own history evidently had at least one good

effect, that of showing our hosts what we think a history ought to be. It may have decided them to show

us quickly the one file in the library that comes closest to our ideal. It was approximately one standard

day after our own history presentation, which came about one standard day after our arrival, that we

were led to the personal file of the Third Historian. I think I have mentioned that the alcove containing the

Third Historian's file and carrel occupies only a very small portion of this library. It's quite a comfortable,

self-sufficient artificial world, by the way, that seems to have been built with Solarian comfort and

convenience in mind. The gravity, atmosphere, lighting, furnishings, color schemes, and so on, are very

pleasant by our standards. Green plants are abundant. And the Carmpan information-handling systems,

let me interject here, work better than ours do, once we know precisely what we want to ask of them.

Details on request, when we get home. The idea so commonly held among Solarians that we are

technologically superior to the Carmpan seems to me to be justifiable only on a very selective basis.

Back to my main subject. While the private writings of the Third Historian we have discovered here are

more obscure and difficult to translate than we would like, certainly more so than his famous public

transmissions to our ancestors centuries ago, yet they are vastly more accessible to Solarian

understanding than any other Carmpan literary-historical work that I have ever encountered in a lifetime

of study; I exclude of course documents on the level of mere maps and catalogues, which in their rare

appearances have often had practical if limited application.

If we had come here completely unacquainted with the Third Historian, it would still have been obvious

to us from his private archive that he was—or is—intensely interested in two things. The first of these, for

whatever reason, is our own race. As in his earlier public messages, he repeatedly expresses Carmpan

gratitude for our leadership, our victories, and our losses in the long and terrible war against what he so

often calls "the unliving enemy." To me the impression is inescapable that much of the material in this

private archive consists of drafts of messages intended for us but never sent; that these reiterations of

thanks must be for our benefit.

The second great interest of the Third Historian, as evidenced in his old public messages as well as in the

newly discovered material, is the Berserkers. Briefly, our most important find within his private archive is

an electronic document (I am of course enclosing a recording of it herewith) that purports to be a digest,

a capsule, or perhaps an outline, for nothing less than a history of the whole inhabited portion of the

Galaxy for as far back as the Carmpan have been able to keep records—and their history, we should

recall, has been shown to extend into the tens of millions of years at least. Everything we have learned

here tends to support the accepted belief that the Carmpan mental probing can span more than half the

Galactic diameter; and that this mind-probing is as accurate for the purposes to which the Carmpan put it

as it appears to be useless for any of the military, commercial, or hard (in our terms) research functions to

which we have always yearned to be able to apply it.

I had hoped when I began to compose this message to be able to include with it a full if tentative

translation of the History Document (hereafter abbreviated HD) found in the Third Historian's private

archive. Without the episodic appendix (see below) it could be printed out in twenty pages; it's really that

short. But unfortunately the longer I study HD with an eye to making a translation, the more I realize how

obscure it is—somewhat in the sense of poetry, I mean, and you, Hal, know what trying to translate

poetry can be like. Layer upon layer of suggested meaning, that to me is at best barely perceptible, is

packed beneath a surface narrative that in itself could be translated in a number of possible ways. Here

we have Drifts grafted upon Tones, and vice versa. Information is packed not only in layer upon layer,

but in the interference patterns, or in something analogous to such patterns, that are formed by the

relationships between the layers, between each layer and all the other ones. I fear I am not making myself

clear. In future messages I mean to go into much more detail about this hologram-like though

non-physical system.

Here let me digress to mention one fact definitely confirmed by the surface narrative in HD. This is that

the Builders were a warlike race for a long time before they created the Berserkers. There is convincing

evidence that before the fateful experiment the Builders had fought at least four long, desperate interstellar

wars, resulting in the complete extermination of at least four other races. These four early victim-races are

unfortunately identified in HD only in the Tones-Drifts system of sociological-spiritual (religious?)

notation. Whether any translation at all of this passage into a Solarian tongue is possible without assigning

the races completely arbitrary names and identities (e.g., One, Two, Three, Four) is still in doubt, though

I have spent two days working on that simple-seeming question with our own ship's computer.

Parenthetically: I am assured by our hosts that as much time as we might like is available to us on

Carmpan computers which our hosts assure us have much more capacity than the shipboard one we

brought along. The only problem lies in instructing their computers in what we want. I have no great

hopes for being able to do this, as so far it seems all but impossible to explain our way of thinking to the

Carmpan themselves. Whether their data processing machinery works on a system of Drifts and Tones I

have not yet been able to ascertain, but I have assured myself that it certainly does not work like ours.

A second hard fact confirmed by HD about the Builders: They were a race designed to roughly the same

physical pattern as Solarian humanity, though somewhat more slender and fine-boned, having originated

probably on a lighter planet than Earth. There is a suggestion that the female tended to be fiercer in

combat than the male, and it is certain that she was somewhat larger. There was in each individual one

cyclopean eye, and paired external sexual organs (of the same sex) so that copulation must commonly

have been carried on in duplicate, as it were. The Builders spoke through sound waves as we and the

Carmpan do, but their creations the Berserkers were never furnished with the language code as far as

can be determined, or indeed with any other means of distinguishing their creators from the other life

forms of the Galaxy included in their general programming to hunt down and destroy all life. Of course

there may have been some system meant to save the Builders from the general slaughter, a system that

failed to operate properly and was never replicated in the later models of the Berserkers as they rebuilt

and reproduced themselves. On the other hand, the original Berserkers may have been activated at such

a distance from their creators' home worlds that the death machines were not thought by their builders to

represent a danger to them. At any rate, we have found nothing here to contradict the accepted

hypothesis, based on old evidence, that the Builders did at last fall victim to their own creations.

It is certain that the Builders no longer exist. The Third Historian speaks of them inevitably in the past

tense, something he does in the case of no race that is now known to be still alive. The scraps of

recordings that we have found here, showing the Builders' appearance and containing samples of their

speech, do not differ substantially from other such old recordings that I have seen before, and for all I

know all of these may be duplicated in Solarian archives somewhere. (None of us on the Expedition

roster are specialists in Builders' History. An unfortunate oversight, perhaps, but if such a specialty exists

it would be a very limited one indeed.)

Copies of all the fragmentary Builder recordings here will be sent with our next message. How the

Carmpan obtained them is uncertain, since our hosts would not ordinarily have access to the battlefield

wreckage of Berserkers from which our own material has been gleaned. Most of these fragments are

excerpts, each lasting only a few seconds, of what if interpreted in Solarian terms would be considered

political speeches, delivered amid mass chanting rallies of Builders male and female. There is one

fragment like nothing that I personally have seen before, though some other members of the expedition

assure me that they have: a scene of Builders performing what might be a dance, or alternatively the

application of some kind of rhythmical torture apparatus to an unusually large female. (I need not belabor

here the obvious point that all of these interpretations should be considered tentative.) The voices in the

recordings, as in fragments of Builder records found elsewhere, are clicking and whining sounds,

probably not reproducible by either Solarian or Carmpan vocal organs.

And there is one more fragment, very different from all the rest. In it, members of another race,

heretofore unknown to us, appear briefly. Some expedition members have suggested that this may be our

only record of the Builders' nameless but undoubtedly very formidable opponents in their final war, the

people whose destruction could not be accomplished without such a desperate gamble as the creation of

the Berserkers. Expedition members who favor this interpretation point out similarities between this

Builder recording and certain Solarian propaganda art from the past. It shows beings rotund and red,

thick-limbed almost to the point of having no limbs separate from the body at all; all this in high contrast

to the Builder physique. This Red Race is named, if at all, only in a sort of marginal note (using the

Drift-Tone system, of course) that was doubtless added by the Third Historian himself. Translation, as

mentioned above, is still pending.

Nowhere in any document that we have so far inspected in this library are values given for the size of the

domain of any race, in terms of numbers of worlds, strength of fleets, population figures, and so on; even

precise physical locations are very rare. We know of course that the Carmpan are perfectly capable of

interstellar navigation when it suits them, that they have built and designed ships whose autopilots work

perfectly with any of the commonly used systems of interstellar co-ordinates.

Nor have we found any clue as to how many intelligent races, branches living or dead of Galactic

humanity, the Carmpan know about. As I have already suggested, one of the most striking things about

this library is the paucity of numbers, of quantitative measurements of any kind. A starfaring race who

(with the well-known exception of their Prophets of Probability) prefers to do without mathematics,

without even counting, must remain to our minds, to put it mildly, something of a paradox. And I am

coming to think that there is that in the essence of what the Solarian mind finds paradoxical that demands

repeated expression in the thoughts and minds of the Carmpan and their allies or cousins the Elder Races.

(Note to my military readers: The name 'Carmpan' itself, as many of our race today do not realize,

derives not from any word by which they call themselves, but rather from the location where our species

and theirs first encountered each other.)

We members of the expedition have of course discussed, or tried to discuss, these translational and

other difficulties with our unfailingly polite and attentive hosts. As nearly as we can make out from their

replies, they believe that the number of intelligent races existing in the Galaxy, for example, is something

one simply should not try to know—or if known, it should not be expressed. Despite great efforts on

both sides, I have trouble understanding why. To know and express that number would be either sin, or

bad form, or maybe sloppy scientific thinking, on the grounds that there is no way one can be sure

enough of its value. Maybe a little of all three.

But, I press on, a true, worthy answer does exist, does it not, if it can be discovered?

Yes, I am told. But the true answer involves—somehow—the Core region of the Galaxy, or perhaps

something (someone?) located (dwelling?) at or very near the center of the Core. "All exact counting of

races should be done there," is an exact translation of what one of our hosts said to me. I would be hard

put to explain to you which one said it. We are still having a lot of trouble telling one Carmpan from

another. But I asked him—or her—more questions, trying to pin down the identity of this thing or person

properly in charge of numbering races at the Core. There was no satisfactory answer; only a single word,

which I take to signify a complex structure of some kind.

Following this, our hosts made a joint statement, which I quote in translation as well as I am able. They

wished, they said, to "express great sadness over the fate of those intelligent races, diverse branches of

Galactic humanity despite all diversity of physical form, however many of them there may have been or

may yet be, who have been exterminated by the Builders or the Berserkers or any other cause, those

known to us and those who lie in the distant reaches of the Galaxy-beyond-measurement, still unknown

to Carmpan and to brave Solarian alike. The loss of these races means that much (creative work, of

some form) will have to be accomplished (by some unspecified agents) before the Galaxy can be judged

complete and worthy."

That passage was so relatively easy for me to understand, that I believe someone among the Carmpan

must have expended an extraordinary amount of time and effort on it in advance, and that it was then held

ready until the proper moment for its utterance should arrive. Is it possible that the Third Historian himself

is among those we meet and speak with every day? I seriously think it is possible, and at the same time I

doubt that we shall ever know. He could inhabit any of those slow, squarish Carmpan bodies, so

incongruously machinelike in appearance for beings whose own constructed machinery is so subtle, who

try to avoid the grossly material in any form . . . actually, as I think I mentioned in passing above, we

seldom get a really good look at any of the Carmpan here, though we are often physically close to each

other and frequently converse. The rooms in which we most often meet are all niches and alcoves and

low partitions, with enough screens of live greenery to make us feel that we are in a garden instead of

riding a deep-space artifact at a high fraction of the speed of light. The interior lighting is perfect, as I

think I have mentioned, for Solarian eyes, and we can view the Carmpan and even touch them on

arrangement, to satisfy our curiosity. But at the same time privacy is rarely more than an arm's length

away for anyone, and they frequently resort to it, retreating round a corner or behind a hanging vine. We

of course do not intrude upon these temporary retreats. Personally I find myself also retreating sometimes

in the midst of a conversation, gazing out through fresh green leaves of some kind—I am no botanist—or

a fountain's spray, enjoying the whole arrangement more than I would have suspected.

I am rambling. Back to the History Document. What it presents of the Carmpan view of the physical

universe contains no surprise. The Universe just above the galactic level (yet higher levels are implied but

not described) is seen as organized in terms of clusters or groups of galaxies. None of us in the

expedition are astronomers or cosmologists enough to know if the details of this organization as the

Carmpan describe it differ substantially from those mapped out by our own scientists. Actually the Third

Historian uses this physical description only as a background for a question in which he is genuinely

interested: Are there Berserkers, of independent origin, in galaxies other than our own? And, if so, will

the living races of those other megasystems be able to raise up some analog of Solarian humanity to

successfully fight off the unliving foe? This passage, with its understated implication that we are universally

rare stuff indeed, makes me feel, I confess, vaguely uncomfortable.

It was shortly after reading this disturbing passage for the first time that I approached our hosts to

question them on a more personal level: The Third Historian, in some of his early direct communications

to our people, has stated that he "sets down" the "secret thoughts" of Solarian men and women who were

at all times parsecs away from him, as well as being in some instances removed by hundreds of years of

time even when correction is made for all possible relativistic effects. When my hearers affirmed this, I

asked whether any of the Carmpan now present were capable of reading our secret thoughts, and if so,

were they? The answer was quick and emphatic denial, the most definite response I think I have ever had

to any question here. "You and we are too close together," they informed me, "for anything like that."

In HD the Third Historian is also greatly intrigued by another question, related to the one discussed a

paragraph above: May there ever have been, in the remote past of our own Galaxy (the context makes it

plain he is talking about a billion years or more), other Berserkers,independent of those now existing?

He adduces a statement which must be meant as evidence to support this idea, though I cannot

understand it (again, see enclosed recording.) I am haunted by this suggestion, and it makes me wonder if

some of the Elder Races still extant may possibly be of comparable age. It is to me an awesome thought

that some races may have survived a Berserker peril more than once.

Another member of our expedition has very recently reported what we all consider to be a remarkable

find (see her own report enclosed herewith). In a corner of the library far removed from the archive of

the Third Historian she has discovered a record of what are described as "multi-species life constructs"

that antedate even the Carmpan themselves by millions of standard years. I interpret "life-construct" to

mean a living thing composed of other living things. If we are reading this correctly it is odd that HD does

not mention such creations. But perhaps it does, perhaps life-constructs and much else are concealed in

the Drifts and Tones amid the layers of meaning.

Here I begin to ask myself another question. It is not a new question among Solarian historians, but here

it takes on a new sharpness. Did the Carmpan know the Builders, or know of them, before the Builders

plunged into their final war and decided upon their Frankenstein's creation? Conventional history holds

that they did not; had the Carmpan known of the Berserkers when that awful construction was first

accomplished, the gentle, peaceful Carmpan could hardly have failed to send immediate warning to the

races who were thereby placed in imminent peril. But really there is no evidence that the Carmpan did

not send such warnings. To some they may have come too late; some may have been unable to profit by

them, some may have disbelieved. It would be consistent with the Carmpan nature that such warnings

might have been sent on a purely subliminal level of communication if such exists. I think it may. Could it

have been at least in part a Carmpan influence that caused an increase in belligerence on many Solarian

worlds simultaneously, provoking a military buildup in those decades just before the first Berserker

radio-voices came drifting in to our detectors from the deep?

And there is the fact that the Carmpan and Solarian branches of humanity met for the first time very

shortly before the first Berserker onslaught on one of our worlds was sustained. Even on the relatively

short time-scale of Solarian history the two events, the two meetings, were virtually simultaneous. What

are the odds that this was only chance? When one day I am able to meet a Carmpan Prophet of

Probability I mean to ask him to calculate the odds.

I have not yet faced our hosts with this suggestion: That that famous first contact between our two races,

long assumed by Solarians to be a natural result of our aggressive exploration, was really timed by the

Carmpan for their own reasons; that they had known of us for a long time preceding; that we were

picked, chosen, adopted, when the time was ripe, brought onto the Galactic stage to play a role just

when our ferocity and our armaments were needed in the service of all Galactic life.

If this suggestion is true, still it is far from clear to me that the deception is something we ought to blame

the Carmpan for. They did not create the Berserkers nor launch them in our direction. We would still

have had to fight the Berserkers if we and the Carmpan had never met. Ought we to blame them for not

warning us clearly and directly? We were, and are, the suspicious and mistrustful ones, who really

needed no warnings to be on our guard. Probably we would not, on that first memorable day of violence

between us and the unliving foe, have returned the Berserkers' fire a microsecond sooner, whatever the

Carmpan might have whispered to us beforehand.

And yet I, like most Solarians, continue to feel that the Carmpan presence, their influence, has helped us

all through the war. Through them we have learned not only of the Elders but of other races much more

helpless. We would still have fought, of course, for our own survival, our own temples and our gods. But

it was good, it was better, to know that we were fighting for others also, for the cause of all life in the

Galaxy.

When the war began a thousand years ago—may our own lifetimes see a final victory—the belief was

widespread among our Solarian people that the Carmpan, even dedicated to peace as they assuredly

were, would be forced by events to take up arms. After all, to refuse to enter a war against Berserkers

Fred Saberhagen - Berserker Death

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