Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 11 - Berserker Kill

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BERSERKER'S

KILL

THE BERSERKER SERIES

Fred Saberhagen

Tor books by Fred Saberhagen

THE BERSERKER SERIES

The Berserker Wars

Berserker Base (with Poul Anderson, Ed Bryant, Stephen

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

Berserker: Blue Death

The Berserker Throne

Berserker's Planet

THE DRACULA SERIES

The Dracula Tapes

The Holmes-Dracula Files

An Old Friend of the Family

Thorn

Dominion

A Matter of Taste

A Question of Time

Seance for a Vampire*

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*

OTHER BOOKS

A Century of Progress Coils (with Roger Zelazny) Earth

Descended The Mask of the Sun The Veils of Azlaroc The Water

of Thought

[* Forthcoming]

FRED SABERHAGEN

BERSERKER KILL

TOR

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or

events is purely coincidental.

BERSERKER KILL

portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10010

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

ISBN: 0-312-85266-5

First edition: October 1993

Printed in the United States of America

PROLOGUE

The ship was more intelligent in several ways than either of

the people it was carrying. One task at which the optel brain of

the ship excelled was computing the most efficient search

pattern to be traced across and around the indistinct,

hard-to-determine edges of the deep, dark nebula. Most of the

time during the mission the ship drove itself without direct

human guidance along this self-selected course, back and forth,

in and out among the broad serrations, the yawning,

million-kilometer chasms in the clouds of interstellar gas and

dust that made up the Mavronari.

The only reason that such ships weren't sent out crewless to

conduct surveys without direct supervision was that their

intelligence was inferior to that of organic humanity when it

came to dealing with the unforeseen. Only breathing humans

could be expected to pay close attention to everything about the

nebula that other breathing humans might find of interest.

__________________

A man and a woman, Scurlock and Carol, crewed the survey

ship. The couple had known for months that they were very right

for each other, and that was good, because being on the best of

terms with your partner was requisite when you were spending

several months in the isolation of deep space, confined to a

couple of small rooms, continually alone together.

Carol and Scurlock had been married shortly before embarking

on this voyage, though they had not been acquainted for very

long before that. By far the greater proportion of their married

life, now totaling approximately a standard month, had been

spent out here nosing around the Mavronari Nebula.

The ship was not their property, of course. Very, very few

individuals were wealthy enough to possess their own interstellar

transportation. It was a smallish but highly maneuverable and

reasonably speedy spacecraft, bearing no name but only a

number, and it was the property of the Sardou Foundation,

wealthy people who had their reasons for being willing to spend

millions collecting details about some astronomical features,

certain aspects of the Galaxy, which most Galactic citizens found

highly unexciting.

At the moment the young couple and their employers' ship

were many days away from the nearest inhabited planet, even at

the optimum pattern of superluminal jumps and journeying in

normal space at sublight velocity that the survey craft could have

managed. Not that such remoteness from the rest of humanity

had particularly concerned either Carol or Scurlock, up to now.

Scurlock was rather tall and loosely muscled, with pale eyes

and long lashes that made him look even younger than he really

was. Carol was of middle height, inclined to thinness, and had

several physical features suggesting that some of her ancestors

had called old Earth's Middle East their home.

Both young people tended to be intense and ambitious. But just

now both were in a light mood, singing and joking as they made

the observations of nebular features comprising today's work.

Some of the jokes were at the expense of their shipboard optel

brain, the very clever unit that was cradling their two lives at the

moment, assuming responsibility for piloting and astrogation

during most of the voyage. But no offense was taken; like other

ships, this one never knew or cared what its human masters and

passengers might be making jokes about.

One of the secondary objectives of this mission, politely but

firmly impressed upon the couple by their employers, was to

discover, if possible, some practical new means of ingress to the

nebula, an astrogable channel or channels, as yet uncharted,

leading into the Mavronari. The existence of such a passage

would greatly facilitate interstellar travel between the inhabited

worlds existing on one side of this great mass of gas and dust, and

other worlds, now largely unknown but possibly habitable, that

might lie somewhere within the nebula or on its other side. Any

such discovery would be of great interest to the Sardou

Foundation, and not to it alone.

As matters now stood, most of the worlds known to exist on

the other side of the Mavronari had never even been thoroughly

explored by Solarians, largely because of the difficulty of getting

at them by going all the way around.

But the discovery of a new passage was only a secondary

purpose, no more than an intriguing possibility. The fundamental

objective of this mission was the gathering of astronomical data,

radiation patterns, particle types and velocities, from the deep

folds and convolutions between nebular lobes, regions not

susceptible to ready observation from the outside.

Since departing on this mission, Carol and Scurlock had

frequently expressed to each other their hope that a successful

performance would lead them upward and onward, financially

and socially, ultimately to one of the several goals they had

established for themselves.

The Galactic Core, eerily bright though thousands of

light-years distant, a ball of dull though multicolored

incandescence all mottled and muted by clouds and streaks of

intervening dark matter, appeared through the cleared ports first

on one side of the little ship, then on the other, as the small craft

proceeded about its work with-as usual-only minimal human

supervision. Now and then one of the human couple on board

took note of how the Core cast their ship's shadow visibly upon

some dark fold of the great Mavronari, clouds silvered on this

side as if by moonlight.

Gazing at that tiny moving shadow and that immensely greater

darkness just beyond the silvering, Carol was drawn away from

near-poetic musings by a sudden shudder that ran through her

slight frame.

It was a momentary, subtle event. But Scurlock, being close to

his partner in more ways than one, took notice. "What's the

matter?"

She ran brown fingers through her straight dark hair, cut short.

"Nothing. Really nothing. Just that sometimes, looking out, I get a

momentary feeling that I can really sense how far away

everything is."

Her companion became soberly thoughtful. "I know what you

mean. How far away and how old."

After a shared moment of silence, of the ship's controlled

drifting, it was time to turn quickly to matters of light and life.

Once more, as they often did, the couple discussed their own

wish for a child in the light of Premier Dirac Sardou's

colonization scheme, in which the Sardou Foundation, largely a

creation of the Premier himself, was heavily involved.

"I don't know how people can do that. I wouldn't want to doom

any kid of mine to any scheme like that."

"No, I agree," Scurlock immediately concurred. Not that he

particularly wanted to have a child under any circumstances, any

more than Carol did.

Carol would have been surprised if he had not agreed. They

had had this conversation before, but there seemed to be purpose,

and there was certainly reassurance, in repeating it. Talk drifted

to other subjects. Meanwhile, with a watchful steadiness born of

habit, the couple kept an alert eye on the course adjustments

made now and then by their autopilot, and also made a point of

directly taking some instrument readings for themselves. They

were making sure-although the autopilot was really better at this

than they were-that their ship did not stray too deeply into the

outlying tendrils of the nebula. The region they were currently

exploring was still hard vacuum by the standards of planetary

atmosphere, but matter, in the form of microscopic and

near-microscopic particles, was seeded through it thickly enough

to dangerously impede ship movement. It would be damned

inconvenient, and perhaps much worse than inconvenient, to find

themselves enclosed by dust arms anywhere near their present

position, enfolded by some slow-looking swirl of thin gas half the

size of a solar system, trapped so that their little craft would lose

all chance of dropping back into flightspace and returning them

briskly to their homeworld in a mere matter of days.

Further talk, optimistic daydreaming of prosperity to come, was

interrupted by the optelectronic brain of their ship breaking in to

inform its masters in its usual indifferent voice that it had just

detected the presence of several unidentified swift-moving

objects, the size of very small ships, materializing out of the dusty

nebular background. Whatever these objects were, they had

appeared in rapid succession-in nearby space, at a range of only a

few hundred kilometers.

The ship was already presenting its live crew with the

appropriate displays, showing the unidentified things as small,

dark, mysterious dots upon a false-color background of mottled

silver.

Scurlock, staring without comprehension at the moving dots,

demanded: "Whatever in all the worlds-"

"I've no idea," Carol breathed.

Nor had their ship offered an opinion. No wonder both organic

and inhuman brains were puzzled: on instruments the unidentified

objects certainly looked like small ships, but the chance of

encountering any traffic at all in space was nowhere very large,

and here on the flank of the Mavronari it was astronomically

small.

In only a few seconds the young couple's puzzlement had

begun to turn to alarm. A certain word had popped up unbidden

in the back of each of their minds and was refusing to go away.

Neither of them wanted to frighten the other, and so neither

spoke the word. They moved in silent, mutual consent to clothe

themselves rather more formally, until they were fully dressed,

with the vague unspoken idea of possibly receiving visitors. Then

Scurlock, without giving any reason, suggested getting into space

suits. Carol said she didn't think that was necessary. As a

compromise, they checked to make sure that suits and other

emergency devices were in the proper lockers, ready for use.

After that, both human partners sat in their command chairs

squinting at a holostage, which had been adjusted to display in its

unreal image-space, against an imaged background of black dust,

the steadily growing likeness of the nearest unidentified object.

Carol said, with an air of calm determination, "All right, Scurly,

we have to make sense out of this. Is that some military thing?"

Her companion nodded. "They must be military. That must be

it. Maybe an Imatran squadron. That's about the closest system to

where we are now. Or maybe it's Templar. Or Space Force. One

of those."

The loosely spread formation of shiplike objects-seven of them

now-moving methodically toward the explorer ship was certainly

no manifestation of ordinary civilian traffic. So they had to be

someone's military. Had to be… because the only other

alternative was too frightful to contemplate.

Neither Scurlock nor Carol had spoken of that alternative as

yet, though it had settled tenaciously in the backs of both their

minds, where it was still growing ominously. Instead of talking

about it, the couple looked at each other, each seeking

reassurance and at the same time trying to give it. Trying with

less and less success.

It was left to the heartless ship to finally say the words, in its

finely tuned ship's voice that sounded only mildly concerned, and

would have sounded perturbed to an equally slight degree about

anything else that happened to pose a problem. "The seven

objects now approaching are identifiable as berserker machines,"

the ship remarked.

There was no immediate reply. Scurlock's first conscious

reaction was an immediate surge of anger at the ship, that its

voice in making this announcement should be so calm. Because

what the hell did the ship care? It had been designed and built by

Solarian humans, Earth-descended folk of the same human

species as Scurlock and Carol. And Solarian designers, convinced

they had good reason for doing so, saw to it as a rule that their

machines never gave the impression of caring much about

anything.

And Scurlock persisted in his quite irrational feeling of what

the hell did a ship, any ship, have to worry about anyway? Those

berserker machines out there-if indeed that was what they

were-did not have as the goal of their basic programming the

obliteration of ships from the cosmos.

No. It was something very different from ships that berserkers

were programmed to wipe out. Their object was to expunge life

itself from the Galaxy. Human life was a priority, because

humans tended to give them a hard time, to interfere with the

completion of their task. And the Solarian variety of human life

was the killing machines' favorite target above all others-because

Solarian, Earth-descended humanity in particular was as a rule

damned obstinately, and even violently, opposed to dying.

Carol, who of the two human partners was slightly the better

pilot, had already got herself into the acceleration couch offering

the best access to both the manual and the alpha-wave ship's

controls, and she was now sliding her head into the alphawave

coronet. Scurlock, with fingers that seemed to have gone numb

with fright, was now fastening himself into the acceleration chair,

or couch, next to the pilot's-getting into a couch, the manuals

affirmed, was in these situations more important than trying to

put on a space suit.

Not that either suits or couches were likely to help much in an

unarmed ship when berserkers were coming after you. In that

respect, Scurlock was sure, whatever counsel the manuals offered

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