Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 05 - The Ultimate Enemy

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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy

THE ULTIMATE

ENEMY

THE BERSERKER SERIES

Fred Saberhagen

CONTENTS

The Smile

Pressure

The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron

Inhuman Error

Some Events at the Templar Radiant

Starsong

Smasher

The Game

Wings out of Shadow

THE ULTIMATE ENEMY

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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy

form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in

a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual

persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

An ACE Book

Cover art by Michael Whelan

First Ace printing: September 1979

Manufactured in the United States of America

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Algol,. Summer/Fall 1977.

appeared (as "Berserker's Prey") in Worlds of If, June 1977.

UPD Publishing Corp. First appeared in Galaxy, Feb. 1975.

Inc. First appeared in Analog, Oct. 1974.

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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy

Fred Saberhagen. First appeared in Destinies, May-Aug. 1979.

appeared in Worlds of If. Jan. 1968.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Aug. 1978.

The Flying Buffalo's Favorite Magazine, May-June 1977.

Corp. First appeared in Worlds of If, March-April 1974.

Once more I, Third Historian of the Carmpan race, thankful to

Earth-descended humans for their defense of my world and of

many worlds, have recorded for them a series of my visions.

Relatively unfettered by time or space, my mind has roamed

the Galaxy in past and future to gather pieces of the truth of

the great war of life against unliving death. What I have set

down is far from the whole truth of that war, yet it is true.

Most of the higher intellects of the galaxy will shrink from war,

even when survival depends upon it absolutely. Yet from the

same matter that supports their lives, came the berserkers.

Were their Builders uniquely evil? Would that it were so…

____________________

THE SMILE

The berserker attack upon the world called St. Gervase had ended

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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy

some four standard months before the large and luxurious private

yacht of the Tyrant Yoritomo appeared amid the ashclouds and

rainclouds that still monotonized the planet's newly lifeless sky.

From the yacht a silent pair of waspish-looking launches soon began

a swift descent, to land on the denuded surface where the planet's

capital city had once stood.

The crews disembarking from the launches were armored against hot

ash and hot mud and residual radiation. They knew what they were

looking for, and in less than a standard hour they had located the

vaulted tunnel leading down, from what had been a sub-basement of

the famed St. Gervase Museum. The tunnel was partially collapsed in

places, but still passable, and they followed its steps downward,

stumbling here and there on debris fallen from the surface. The battle

had not been completely one-sided in its early stages, and scattered

amid the wreckage of the once-great city were fragments of berserker

troop-landers and of their robotic shock-troops. The unliving metal

killers had had to force a landing, to neutralize the defensive field

generators, before the bombardment could begin in earnest.

The tunnel terminated in a large vault a hundred meters down. The

lights, on an independent power supply, were still working, and the

air conditioning was still trying to keep out dust. There were five

great statues in the vault, including one in the attached workshop

where some conservator or restorer had evidently been treating it.

Each one was a priceless masterwork. And scattered in an almost

casual litter throughout the shelter were paintings, pottery, small

works in bronze and gold and silver, the least a treasure to be envied.

At once the visitors radioed news of their discovery to one Who

waited eagerly in the yacht hovering above. Their report concluded

with the observation that someone had evidently been living down

here since the attack. Beside the workshop, with its power lamp to

keep things going, there was a small room that had served as a

repository of the Museum's records. A cot stood in it now, there had

been food supplies laid in, and there were other signs of human

habitation. Well, it was not too strange that there should have been a

few survivors, out of a population of many millions.

The man who had been living alone in the shelter for four months

came back to find the landing party going busily about their work.

"Looters," he remarked, in a voice that seemed to have lost the

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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy

strength for rage, or even fear. Not armored against radiation or

anything else, he leaned against the terminal doorway of the battered

tunnel, a long-haired, unshaven, once-fat man whose frame was now

swallowed up in clothes that looked as if they might not have been

changed since the attack.

The member of the landing party standing nearest looked back at him

silently, and drummed fingers on the butt of a holstered handgun,

considering. The man who had just arrived threw down the pieces of

metallic junk he had brought with him, conveying in the gesture his

contempt.

The handgun was out of its holster, but before it was leveled, an

intervention from the leader of the landing party came in the form of

a sharp gesture. Without taking his eyes off the man in the doorway,

the leader at once reopened communication with the large ship

waiting above.

"Your Mightiness, we have a survivor here," he informed the round

face that soon appeared upon the small portable wallscreen. "I

believe it is the sculptor Antonio Nobrega."

"Let me see him at once. Bring him before the screen." The voice of

His Mightiness was inimitable and terrible, and no less terrible,

somehow, because he always sounded short of breath. "Yes, you are

right, although he is much changed. Nobrega, how fortunate for us

both! This is indeed another important find."

"I knew you would be coming to St. Gervase now," Nobrega told the

screen, in his empty voice. "Like a disease germ settling in a

mangled body. Like some great fat cancer virus. Did you bring along

your woman, to take charge of our Culture?"

One of the men beside the sculptor knocked him down. A breathless

little snarl came from the screen at this, and Nobrega was quickly

helped back to his feet, then put into a chair.

"He is an artist, my faithful ones," the screen-voice chided. "We must

not expect him to have any sense of the fitness of things outside his

art. No. We must get the maestro here some radiation treatment, and

then bring him along with us to the Palace, and he will live and work

there as happily, or unhappily, as elsewhere."

"Oh no," said the artist from his chair, more faintly than before. "My

work is done."

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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy

"Pish-posh. You'll see."

"I knew you were coming…"

"Oh?" The small voice from the screen was humoring him. "And

how did you know that?"

"I heard… when our fleet was still defending the approaches to the

system, my daughter was out there with it. Through her, before she

died, I heard how you brought your own fleet in-system, to watch

what was going to happen, to judge our strength, our chance of

resisting the berserkers. I heard how your force vanished when they

came. I said then that you'd be back, to loot the things you could

never get at in any other way."

Nobrega was quiet for a moment, then lunged from his chair—or

made the best attempt at lunging that he could. He grabbed up a long

metal sculptor's tool and drew it back to swing at Winged Truth

Rising, a marble Poniatowski eleven centuries old. "Before I'll see

you take this—"

Before he could knock a chip of marble loose, he was overpowered,

and put into restraint.

When they approached him again an hour later, to take him up to the

yacht for medical examination and treatment, they found him already

dead. Autopsy on the spot discovered several kinds of slow and

gentle poison. Nobrega might have taken some deliberately. Or he

might have been finished by something the berserkers had left

behind, to ensure that there would be no survivors, as they moved on

to carry out their programmed task of eradicating all life from the

Galaxy.

On his voyage home from St. Gervase, and for several months

thereafter, Yoritimo was prevented by pressing business from really

inspecting his new treasures. By then the five great statues had been

installed, to good esthetic advantage, in the deepest, largest, and best-

protected gallery of the Palace. Lesser collections had been evicted to

make room and visual space for Winged Truth Rising; Lazamon's

Laughing (or Raging] Bacchus; The Last Provocation, by Sarapion;

Lazienki's Twisting Room; and Remembrance of Past Wrongs, by

Prajapati.

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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy

It chanced that at this time the Lady Yoritomo was at the Palace too.

Her duties, as Cultural Leader of the People, and High Overseer of

Education for the four tributary planets, kept her on the move, and it

often happened that she and her Lord did not see each other for a

month or longer at a time.

The two of them trusted each other more than they trusted anyone

else. Today they sat alone in the great gallery and sipped tea, and

spoke of business.

The Lady was trying to promote her latest theory, which was that

love for the ruling pair might be implanted genetically in the next

generation of people on the tributary worlds. Several experimental

projects had already begun. So far these had achieved little but severe

mental retardation in the subjects, but there were plenty of new

subjects and she was not discouraged.

The Lord spoke mainly of his own plan, which was to form a more

explicit working arrangement with the berserkers. In this scheme the

Yoritomos would furnish the killer machines with human lives they

did not need, and planets hard to defend, in exchange for choice

works of art and, of course, immunity from personal attack. The plan

had many attractive features, but the Lord had to admit that the

difficulty of opening negotiations with berserkers, let alone

establishing any degree of mutual trust, made it somewhat

impractical.

When a pause came in the conversation, Yoritomo had the banal

thought that he and his wife had little to talk about anymore, outside

of business. With a word to her, he rose from the alcove where they

had been sitting, and walked to the far end of the gallery of statues to

replenish the tea pot. For esthetic reasons he refused to allow robots

in here; nor did he want human servitors around while this private

discussion was in progress. Also, he thought, as he retraced his steps,

the Lady could not help but be flattered, and won toward his own

position in a certain matter where they disagreed, when she was

served personally by the hands of one so mighty…

He rounded the great metal flank of The Last Provocation and came

to a dumb halt, in shocked surprise so great that for a moment his

facial expression did not even alter. Half a minute ago he had left her

vivacious and thoughtful and full of graceful energy. She was still in

the same place, on the settee, but slumped over sideways now, one

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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy

arm extended with its slender, jeweled finger twitching upon the rich

brown carpet. The Lady's hair was wildly disarranged; and small

wonder, he thought madly, for her head had been twisted almost

completely around, so her dead eyes now looked over one bare

shoulder almost straight at Yoritomo. Upon her shoulder and her

cheek were bruised discolorations…

He spun around at last, dropping the fragile masterpiece that held his

tea. His concealed weapon was half-drawn before it was smashed out

of his grip. He had one look at death, serenely towering above him.

He had not quite time enough to shriek, before the next blow fell.

The wind had not rested in the hours since Ritwan's arrival, and with

an endless howl it drove the restless land before it. He could quite

easily believe that in a few years the great pit left by the destruction

of the old Yoritomo Palace had been completely filled. The latest dig

had ended only yesterday, and already the archaeologists' fresh pits

were beginning to be reoccupied by sand.

"They were actually more pirates than anything else," Iselin, the

chief archaeologist, was saying. "At the peak of their power two

hundred years ago they ruled four systems. Ruled them from here,

though there's not much showing on the surface now but this old

sandpile."

"Ozymandias," Ritwan murmured.

"What?"

"An ancient poem." He pushed back sandy hair from his forehead

with a thin, nervous hand. "I wish I'd got here in time to see the

statues before you crated them and stowed them on your ship. You

can imagine I came as fast as I could from Sirgol, when I heard there

was a dig in progress here."

"Well." Iselin folded her plump arms and frowned, then smiled, a

white flash in a dark Indian face. "Why don't you ride with us back to

Esteel system? I really can't open the crates for anything until we get

there. Not under the complicated rules of procedure we're stuck with

on these jointly sponsored digs."

"My ship does have a good autopilot."

"Then set it to follow ours, and hop aboard. When we unpack on

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Saberhagen, Fred - The Ultimate Enemy

Esteel you can be among the first to look your fill. Meanwhile we

can talk. I wish you'd been with us all along, we've missed having a

really first-rate art historian."

"All right, I'll come." They offered each other enthusiastic smiles.

"It's true, then, you really found most of the old St. Gervase

collection intact?"

"I don't know that we can claim that. But there's certainly a lot."

"Just lying undisturbed here, for about two centuries."

"Well, as I say, this was the Yoritomos' safe port. But it looks like no

more than a few thousand people ever lived on this world at any one

time, and no one at all has lived here for a considerable period. Some

intrigue or other evidently started among the Tyrant's

lieutenants—no one's ever learned exactly how or why it started, but

the thieves fell out. There was fighting, the Palace destroyed, the

rulers themselves killed, and the whole thing collapsed. None of the

intriguers had the ability to keep it going, I suppose, with the so-

called Lord and Lady gone."

"Just when was that?"

Iselin named a date.

"The same year St. Gervase fell. That fits. The Yoritomos could have

gone there after the berserkers left, and looted at their leisure. That

would fit with their character, wouldn't it?"

"I'm afraid so… you see, the more I learned of them, the more I felt

sure that they must have had a deeper, more secret shelter than any

that was turned up in the early digs a century ago. The thing is, the

people who dug here then found so much loot they were convinced

they'd found it all."

Ritwan was watching the pits fill slowly in.

Iselin gave his arm a friendly shake. "And—did I tell you? We found

two skeletons, I think of the Yoritomos themselves. Lavishly dressed

in the midst of their greatest treasures. Lady died of a broken neck,

and the man of multiple…"

The wind was howling still, when the two ships lifted off.

Aboard ship on the way to Esteel, things were relaxed and pleasant,

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Saberhagen,Fred-TheUltimateEnemyTHEULTIMATEENEMYTHEBERSERKERSERIESByFredSaberhagenCONTENTSTheSmilePressureTheAnnihilationofAngkorApeironInhumanErrorSomeEventsattheTemplarRadiantStarsongSmasherTheGameWingsoutofShadowTHEULTIMATEENEMYCopyright©1979byFredSaberhagenfile:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incomi...

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