Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 12 - Berserker Fury

BERSERKER FURY

THE BERSERKER SERIES

By

Fred Saberhagen

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

"The Berserker stories are war stories, but war stories in the tradition ofThe Red Badge of Courage

or All Quiet on the Western Front ."

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—TheBaltimore Evening Sun

"Saberhagen's Berserkers are not only a great literary invention, they also reflect our deep and real

concerns about technology run amok."

—Jack Williamson

"Saberhagen has given SF one of its most powerful images of future war in his Berserker series."

—Publishers Weekly

"One of the most interesting series in modern SF."

—Science Fiction Chronicle

"Fred Saberhagen has proven he is one of the best."

—Lester del Rey

BERSERKER FURY®

Tor Books by Fred Saberhagen

THE BERSERKER SERIES

The Berserker Wars

Berserker Base(with Poull Anderson, Ed Bryant, Stephen

Donaldson, Larry Niven, Connie Willis, and Roger Zelazny)

Berserker Blue Death

The Berserker Throne

Berserker's Planet

Berserker Kill

Berserker Fury

THE DRACULA SERIES

The Dracula Tapes

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The Holmes-Dracula Files

An Old Friend of the Family

Thorn

Dominion

A Matter of Taste

A Question of Time

Seance for a Vampire

A Sharpness on the Neck

THE SWORDS SERIES

The First Book of Swords

The Second Book of Swords

The Third Book of Swords

The First Book of Lost Swords: Woundhealer's Story

The Second Book of Lost Swords: Sightblinder's Story

The Third Book of Lost Swords: Stonecutter's Story

The Fourth Book of Lost Swords: Farslayer's Story

The Fifth Book of Lost Swords: Coinspinner's Story

The Sixth Book of Lost Swords: Mindsword's Story

The Seventh Book of Lost Swords: Wayfinder's Story

The Last Book of Swords: Shieldbreaker's Story

An Armory of Swords(editor)

OTHER BOOKS

A Century of Progress Coils(with Roger Zelazny)

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Dancing Bears

Earth Descended

The Mask of the Sun

Merlin's Bones

The Veils of Azlaroc

The Water of Thought

FRED SABERHAGEN

BERSERKER

FURY

TOR®

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOKNEW YORK

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen

property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the

publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the

author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

BERSERKER® FURY

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175Fifth Avenue

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New York,NY10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web:http://www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 0-812-55376-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card'Number: 97-1157

First edition: August 1997

First mass market edition: December 1998

Printed in theUnited States of America

BERSERKER FURY®

ONE

One smashing impact after another buffeted the little spy ship, the blasts coming so fast some

overlapped. Wave-fronts of radiation hurled by weapon explosions smote like atmospheric shock waves

against sagging defensive fields and melting armor. A few minutes ago, under the first probing phase of

the attack, the ship had quickly lost its disguise, revealing its egg-shaped Solarian hull to the optelectronic

senses of the killer, the berserker computer that was directing the attack from a thousand kilometers

away. Ever since that moment of discovery the onslaught of beams and missiles had come on furiously

and without pause, as if the berserker were enraged and triumphant. As if a computer could feel those

emotions, on having exposed the ship's deception, ferreting out a Solarian artifact inhabited by badlife.

The goal of each and every berserker's basic programming was the destruction of all life in the

Galaxy—with a special effort directed against badlife, defined as those organic units that actively resisted

their own annihilation, the fate ordained for them by the berserkers' programming.

During the thousands of years in which this program of sterilization had been in progress, Solarian

humans had turned out to be the worst badlife of all. And sometime in the early stages of that age-old

project, at an epoch when humans on Earth were dwelling in caves and wielding spears and clubs against

their enemies, the berserkers had eliminated their own organic creators.

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The control cabin of the Solarian ship was crowded with a dozen armored human bodies. Here the

battle stations of the ship's entire crew had been ergonometrically, mathematically arranged for the utmost

in efficiency and comfort. The great majority of the twelve suits of armor were now junk; most of the

human flesh was pulp. The three people who still lived had been saved by armor and by luck, and by the

layers of inertial damping, first inside the cabin, then inside their suits.

The artificial gravity, which in warships was designed for heroic reliability, surged and struggled to

compensate for the pounding of the near-misses, the jolting of solid fragments beating on the hull at bullet

speed and sometimes coming through. A darkness deep as that of death itself obtained inside the cabin

now, but like death itself it failed to register on human eyes. In this ship, with everyone at battle stations,

no human senses perceived the enemy, or any of the surrounding world, save through the filter of

sophisticated symbols, projecting a virtual reality. The head of each surviving crew member was sealed

and shielded inside an eyeless, windowless helmet, a casque combining the functions of protection and

control. The helmets administered modest doses of light and sound, small portions fit for human senses to

endure.

Until now the fight had not been entirely one-sided. Almost, but not quite. The spy ship's beam

projectors were blazing too, aimed at a foe that seemed too big to miss. For a few seconds at a time the

spy ship was able to launch bursts of small missiles at the berserker. Their blasts rocked the enemy of all

life in its charging, zigzag course. But still the death machine came on, closing at a rate of kilometers per

second with the small ship and the three human lives it still contained. The Solarian drive had been

disabled now, and it seemed impossible to try to run away.

The onrushing monster, now less than a thousand kilometers distant, aiming and propelling itself

missile-wise through space, was the size of a hangar that could have accommodated a dozen spy ships. It

was one of the latest generation of a machine race, whose first members had been built and programmed

many thousands of years ago.

Ignoring the Earthly weapons now pounding against its defensive fields and armor, the unliving enemy

kept up its staccato assault on the Solarian ship with beams and missiles, shredding fake mineral

encrustations, the last remnants of the spy ship's failed disguise, gouging and melting holes right through

the solid hull beneath. The possibility of the berserker's own destruction meant nothing to it, as long as it

could advance its programmed purpose.

The fight raged on between the ravaging berserker and the increasingly helpless human spy ship. The

remnant of the livecrew, shell-shocked and shaken in their armor, had almost abandoned any attempt at

choosing tactics, and were depending heavily in their conduct of the fight upon their own computer

hardware. For the last few minutes the Solarian ship had been itself operating in something approaching

berserker-mode, gunlaying systems locked on the one, the seemingly indestructible target, weapons firing

at full capacity.

For the greater part of another minute, a time that seemed almost an eternity to the three who were

compelled to live it, the tactical situation did not change.

But the disparity in size and power and armament was too great. The ship, which still contained three

lives, had not a tenth of the attacker's bulk, and could not nearly match its firepower. On and on the

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unliving killer came, lurching and staggering in its contested passage. Now the damned thing was only

nine hundred kilometers distant. Now only eight. To the three humans still gasping air aboard the Solarian

spy ship, depending on their body armor to keep from being fried, it was an embodiment of death that

looked unstoppable. The ship had taken heavy hits, the crew cabin had already been penetrated by

fragments from more than one shot, and the three sat in their combat chairs surrounded by the armored

corpses of their shipmates.

For tens of light years in every direction, these three Solarian survivors—and their unliving enemy

outside, relentlessly trying to dispatch them—were the only agents of intelligent purpose.

The trio of live humans on the little ship—two men, one woman—following the burned-in rituals of their

training, exchanged terse comments, bits of information, and orders among themselves. But now and

again there came on intercom, from one of them, the sound of a sharply drawn breath, as if by one

suffering an agony of fear.

And again, in an interval between necessary communications, one of the two male voices, that of Spacer

Second Class Traskeluk, was abruptly raised in song, one of the Templar battle chants.

Traskeluk's shipmates paid the outburst no attention. Knowing him as they did, a singing challenge to the

enemy at this moment came as no surprise. And all of them were very busy, struggling with their own

private demons.

Confined at their battle stations, the three survivors in the cabin were unable to see or touch one another

except by means of instruments. Their trio of heads remained muffled in their respective helmets, delicate

hardware that melded their minds with their machinery, keeping them also in indirect contact with all of

their surroundings. They kept up a fretful babble of communication, in which they had long ago

abandoned the prescribed military forms. Off and on Traskeluk continued his ragged song. Somewhere

one of the ship's faithful machines was still recording each utterance of the living crew, keeping a record

of this struggle that no organic ears or eyes would ever read.

All three of those still surviving were junior members of the crew. The spacecraft commander was dead,

so was the co-pilot, so were all the senior officers who would otherwise have taken over.

"Drive's now inoperable. We've been hit again—" That was the other man, Spacer First Class Sebastian

Gift.

"—force fields can't hold—" A woman's voice this time, that of Ensign Terrin. She was, by a small

margin, the ranking person still left alive.

And the whole ship shuddered with yet another impact. There was nothing in the least virtual about the

force that shook the displays in all the helmets.

Their spy ship had been equipped with a lifeboat for emergency use, but now the ship itself, in its

imperturbable voice of superhuman clarity, reported to the three survivors that their lifeboat had been

wrecked, hull stove in by the last incoming hit. Not that it seemed likely to be of much use to them

anyway, in the present situation.

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As the seconds ticked by, out of the terse three-way conversation emerged the form of rationality—a

plan. At last it was the woman, the ranking surviving crew member, who said decisively: "We're bailing

out of this. Prepare to abandon ship."

"We won't last ten seconds out there—" Gift was babbling, almost incoherent.

"Shut up! We've got one thing to try. Someone's got to ride the bike over to the extra courier and drive

it closer—that'll save maybe thirty seconds."

The voice of command made a lifeline into Gift's sealed helmet, breaking the spell of paralysis that sheer

terror was beginning to impose. Like all the other voices, other sounds he heard while at his battle station,

it issued from no visible source in the helmet's virtual displays. At the moment the visuals projected at

close range into his eyes were an orchestration of sheer terror, symbols of the berserker and its weapons

starkly outlined against a starry universe devoid of help or mercy. In a more peaceful epoch, Gift had

chosen for the background of his virtual sky a lovely summer blue, and inside his helmet that color

persisted now, as if in savage mockery.

The voice of the invisible Terrin, quavering once or twice, on the verge of breaking with fear and strain,

still came through plainly. "Nifty, you can best be spared from your battle station. Break out the scooter,

get over to the spare courier. We're going to ride it out of here."

Gift gasped an acknowledgment of the order. He understood that the ensign was sending him out to be

killed. But he was going to be every bit as dead if he stayed here.

In an attempt at disguise similar to that which had failed to protect the spy ship itself, the spare courier

had been coated with material in an attempt to make it look realistically like another piece of space

debris, and then stored in space at a distance of several kilometers.

The full complement of robot couriers that normally rode inside the spy ship had already been used up,

fired off with cargoes of information, in the course of a successful months-long mission.

There came the sound of a muffled impact, much lighter than a hit from a berserker weapon. All three of

the survivors knew a chilling fear that a berserker boarding machine might have got onto the spy ship.

That could mean that the enemy, now computing victory in this skirmish as mathematically certain, was

willing to delay their final destruction in an effort to capture at least one of them alive.

Traskeluk broke off his song. His speaking voice came on, quite rational, making an alternate suggestion.

They could, he said, bring the available robot courier directly into the fight, instead of using it to escape.

They could send it on a kamikaze ramming attack against the berserker.

But that plan was overruled by the ensign, rejected in favor of one that might get all three out of this

alive, and whose success seemed less totally unlikely: All three humans ought to be able to fit their

unsuited bodies inside the one courier. They could make a run for it that way.

Traskeluk did not argue for his own plan. Singing sporadically now in his deep voice, Traskeluk

half-crazily added another verse to the Templar battle hymn, a borrowed portion of some even more

ancient song:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

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He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

Over the preceding twenty seconds of life-and-death combat, the enemy's progress had been slowed

considerably by the spy ship's squandering what were almost its last weapons. Of course a mere slowing

meant very little; a berserker could no more be discouraged than a runaway ground train. Seven hundred

kilometers now. Now only six.

For several minutes now the outcome of the battle had no longer been in any doubt. Enough evidence

was in. The berserker was not going to be stopped, not by anything its present opponent might be able to

do to it; but it had taken hits and it was damaged. It had to be damaged, and if you set a courier on

autopilot—like a smart missile—and tried to ram the damned thing with it, the berserker might be

sufficiently distracted to give the spy ship with its small weapons a chance to get in a decisive blow.

Even using to maximum effect every bit of Solarian hardware still on hand and functioning, the three

humans had lost all reasonable hope that they might prevail against this foe. With perfect timing and a

good share of luck, the best theymight do was to prolong the struggle for a few more minutes.

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;

His truth is marching on.

Spacer Nifty Gift's hands were shaking inside their armored gauntlets, as he turned off the audio coming

on intercom from Traskeluk's position—it was either break off communication, it seemed to Nifty, or go

mad. But still Gift could hear the singer directly, through both helmets, his own and the singer's. And

Gift's raw nerves were screaming. He wanted to bellow at Traskeluk to shut up. The berserker had

probably tapped into their intercom by now, so it could listen to whatever hopeless plans they might be

making. Did the damned fool have to reveal to the enemy how lunatic he was?

Traskeluk's behavior also irritated the woman who was now in command. Ensign Terrin couldn't be

sure, in the midst of all the noise, if he had heard and acknowledged her latest decision or not.

The beleaguered three had already done almost all that they could do, launching their last salvo of

defensive missiles. And it was plain that everything they could do was not going to be enough.

The plan improvised on the spur of the moment by the acting ship commander, Ensign Terrin, was the

only one that offered any chance at all. It seemed to hold open one slim hope for the survival of the three.

One of them was going to have to get aboard the robot courier—there was sufficient room inside for a

man in armor to do that—and then, giving careful orders by voice or keyboard, ride it back to pick up

the other two. Somehow three, jamming their armored bodies into space inadequate for one, would try

to take an interstellar jaunt to safety.

A minimum of two livecrew members were required to maintain effective fire control aboard the spy

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ship, and for tuning what was left of the defensive fields. Each organic brain had an important role to play

in combat, where living thought coupled with optelectronic computation had proven slightly more

effective than either mode of decision-making alone. The ship might have been commanded to fight on in

robot mode—but at the moment that would have been immediately fatal.

With precious seconds draining away, the enemy still came on, drawing a small crowd of human-friendly

robots, built more for spying than for combat. Terrin in the last few minutes had summoned these devices

home, in a tactic analogous to the old Terran one of drafting schoolchildren in the last stages of a war. It

was not at all the kind of job that these robots were good at, but like well-trained children they made no

protest. Relentlessly the berserker smashed out of its way this bumbling swarm of trivial obstacles,

indifferently enduring the ineffective violence of human countermeasures, smart bombs, and booby traps.

Once, twice again it was hit, but nothing stopped it and on it came.

That deadly progress, which had been briefly slowed, was speeding up again. Inside Spacer Gift's

helmet, presented on his instruments, that dread shape seemed to swell up bigger as it came, now blotting

out the Core and half the Galaxy behind it. For centuries the race of Earth-descended humanity had been

battling the berserkers, ancient and lifeless enemies of all Galactic life.

A final terse and hasty exchange of words among the three, and then Spacer First Class Sebastian Gift

was on his way.

"Get going!" Terrin barked.

"Acknowledge!"

Gift sprang into action. At that moment, under the pressure of extreme fear, all his mind could really

focus on was that he was being allowed—no, he was actually being ordered—to get out of the doomed

ship and get away.

Although the crew had already turned over most of the details of fighting to their ship's optelectronic

brain, there still remained urgent business to be accomplished: Destroying certain equipment and

information to keep them from being captured. That could no longer be postponed; it would take time,

and would eventually mean getting out of the soup bowls and climbing about through the ship's various

compartments.

A scooter was local space transportation for one, a compact machine whose size and shape suggested

an Earthly motorcycle without wheels. By this means Spacer Sebastian Gift ought to be able to reach the

courier a full minute before the other two could possibly get there, their bodies propelled by only the

feeble jets of their space armor. Once inside the courier and taking its controls, moving its considerable

bulk gently with its low-power thrusters, Gift would ease it back to pick up the other two, who would be

space-swimming toward it. This would enable all three survivors to get out of the berserker's reach a full

thirty seconds earlier than any other plan would make an escape possible.

The survivors had good reason to hope that the damaged berserker machine would be unable to

overtake the courier once the latter had plunged into superluminal flight.

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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 12 - Berserker Fury

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