Berserker Fury Read online

  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 of The Red Badge of Courage or All Quiet on the Western Front."

  —The Baltimore 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

  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)

  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 BOOK NEW 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

  Copyright © 1997 by Fred Saberhagen

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  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 the United 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.

  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 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.

  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 ano
ther 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;

  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 they might 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?