Berserker's Star Read online

  Berserker’s Star

  Fred Saberhagen

  CHAPTER ONE

  If the Templar colonel hadn’t warned Harry Silver not to transport anyone from Hong’s World to Maracanda—hadn’t told Mr. Silver he’d better not even think of moving his ship in that direction—Harry might have managed to ignore the young woman and her heartbreaking story. And if Harry had ignored her, he certainly would not have listened to the two men who also claimed a pressing need to get to the same place.

  And if the Space Force captain, bustling along worriedly half an hour after the Templar, hadn’t made a point of looking Harry up to repeat the colonel’s warning almost word for word, Harry might still have turned down his three potential passengers. But as matters stood, with two separate and eminently respectable authorities practically commanding him to stay away from a certain world, he found the temptation to go there all but irresistible.

  That was even before he took into account the chance to make a good amount of money on what amounted to a private charter.

  “I will pay you very well, Mr. Silver, to carry me to Maracanda,” the young woman was saying now. Her voice was small and intense, a good match for her body. So far she had told Harry very little about herself, beyond the fact that her name was Lily Gunnlod, and she was trying to catch up with her husband, who was named Alan, and who seemed to have abandoned her and flown away to get himself into some kind of trouble in a distant solar system.

  Lily was actually claiming that her dear Alan had been kidnapped, carried away by religious fanatics, but Harry had his doubts about that.

  Meanwhile the two men, who had introduced themselves as Mr. Redpath and Mr. Dietrich, claimed to have vital business on Maracanda, and an urgent need to get there quickly. The four people were gathered outdoors on a pleasant evening, while around them the evacuation of Hong’s World moved steadily along, a more orderly process than Harry had expected it to be. Getting a million or so people, the whole population of a sparsely settled planet, onto ships and into space was a sizable job—though, of course, if the population had been a billion or more, it would have been a whole lot worse.

  All four people in Harry’s little group had recently been traveling, and all were wearing slightly different versions of a practical garment, the more-or-less standard coveralls that a lot of people liked to wear on long space flights.

  “It is a matter of life and death to me, Mr. Silver. I tell you my husband has practically been kidnapped.” Over the past several hours Lily Gunnlod had repeated virtually the same words so many times that Harry had lost track. She hadn’t really filled in any details yet, but then he hadn’t asked for any.

  This time she was leaning a little closer, directing her dark and burning gaze right into Harry’s eyes, as if to hypnotize him. He had been stared at before, but not very often as fiercely as this. Somehow he had the impression that all the fine muscles in Lily’s little body must be thrumming like taut wires. The world she wanted to go to was one that Harry didn’t know, had never heard of as far as he could remember. A place called Maracanda, where she was convinced she was going to find her husband.

  Gradually she was filling in a few more details. It didn’t sound like the people she accused of kidnapping her dear Alan had actually tied him up and carried him off. No, the implication seemed to be that her once-faithful husband had been seduced by some strange religious doctrine, his mind warped by the fantastic stories and promises of dangerous cultists. To Harry it sounded like a good bet that one of the dangerous cultists would turn out to be a woman, though, so far, Lily hadn’t suggested anything along that line.

  The home that Lily and her husband had once shared was in a solar system a long way from Hong’s World, on whose surface she and Harry were standing now. Even farther than Maracanda, and in the opposite direction.

  She seemed genuinely young, partly because of her fierce demeanor, and if she hadn’t kept going on about how much she wanted to find her deranged husband, Harry might have allowed himself to find her distractingly attractive.

  Harry, a man of indeterminate age, average height, and wiry build, was standing up straight with his arms folded. He wore lightweight flight boots and his own slightly modified version of simple coveralls. The look of his hands and hairy forearms suggested superior physical strength. His nose had once been pushed slightly sideways and never perfectly repaired. His eyes were dark, his hair moderately short and darkish.

  With thousands of occupied planets in the portion of the Galaxy now settled by Earth-descended humans, some of the planets known to different people by different names, it wasn’t strange that someone could name a world that Harry had never heard of. Or maybe he had heard of it and just couldn’t recall the details. But he had a hazy impression that there was something truly extraordinary about the place.

  He asked the woman now: “Just where the hell is Maracanda?”

  Redpath, one of the eager businessmen who had been waiting their turn to plead, answered for her. “It is in the Aleph Sector.” Evidently Mr. Redpath’s own need to get to Maracanda was so urgent that it had caused him to develop a nervous tic, which kept his eyebrows moving erratically. In general, he had a lean and hungry look.

  Dietrich, the other businessman, was a solidly built fellow now standing behind Lily on her left. From time to time Dietrich nodded his head, as if to assure Harry that the arguments his colleague and Lily were putting up were valid. Mr. Dietrich did not seem nervous at all. What his hard stare seemed to indicate was meanness, though he had hardly opened his mouth since Harry met him. Redpath and Dietrich were wearing modest backpacks strapped over their coveralls, and a similar pack rested at the lady’s feet.

  The four of them were standing on the edge of a broad esplanade leading to the local spaceport, under a pleasant, starlit evening sky in which traces of sunset still lingered. They had formed a compact group because of the pressure of traffic, foot and vehicular, moving steadily round them. Now and then the group shuffled a little this way or that, its members doing what they could to keep out of the busy flow in two directions of people and slow-moving machines. So far the whole process of evacuation was not nearly as noisy as it might have been.

  Harry wanted to make sure that his prospective passengers understood the situation. “I hope you people realize that you don’t need to hire me, or anyone, just to get away safely. The Space Force and Templars have both sworn they’ll get everybody off world in time. In a case like this, I’d be inclined to believe ‘em.”

  “I understand the position,” said Lily Gunnlod. She spoke the common language with an accent that Harry could not quite place. “Both the Templars and the Space Force have strongly urged us to take passage aboard one of the rescue vessels they have so gallantly provided. But the problem is that both organizations insist on carrying us in the wrong direction, farther from Maracanda.”

  “That is our case also,” said Mr. Redpath, lean and nervous.

  Harry still addressed himself to Lily. “That’s because they think it’s dangerous to go where you want to go. They’re probably right. You know, I’ve been warned, twice in the last couple of standard hours, not to take you people there.”

  The three received that news with no surprise at all. The woman surprised Harry, though, when she said: “But I have seen you, Mr. Silver, in a vision. And I know that you are going to help me find my Alan.”

  “Yeah?” That made him pause for a moment. “Visions don’t gain you any points with me, lady. Mystic prophecies have a strong tendency to be wrong.”

  The woman only looked at him, while the twilight wind of Hong’s World blew at her curly hair, under the slowly darkening, perpetually moonless sky. She was being patient, but she seemed to have the attitude that a
ll of Harry’s objections were irrelevant.

  He was almost sure, now, that he was going to try to please little Lily by doing what she wanted. And of course if he was going to Maracanda, he might as well take the two men, too. But experience cautioned that he should first try for more information.

  He said to Lily: “I don’t want to charge you lots of money for a wild goose chase. Tell me more about this missing husband, and what makes you so damned sure that he’s on Maracanda.”

  “I know my dear Alan must be there because I know who his kidnappers are, and what they intended when they lured him away.” Lily’s voice was strong and sure, but with those words, emotion came surging up behind her eyes. It did not seem to be the kind of feeling that brought forth tears. Desperate action would be more likely.

  “Why do you doubt the woman?” asked Redpath, sounding nervous.

  Harry looked at him. “I thought you didn’t know her, or her husband?”

  The lean man blinked. “That is correct. As I have told you, my partner and I encountered the lady for the first time here, only a few hours ago. But I am convinced she tells the truth.”

  On the other side of Lily, Dietrich nodded.

  “If it’s really kidnapping, it sounds like a police matter,” Harry observed.

  Lily was shaking her head. “You don’t know what the police are like on my home world.”

  Harry had to admit that that was true.

  She added: “Besides, even if they were fully competent, they can’t help me here and now.”

  Also true, Harry supposed. Still looking his potential passengers over, he said: “You understand why the Templars and the Space Force are warning me not to take my ship in the direction the three of you want me to go? You do know something about berserkers?” It was hardly possible to be a human in the Galaxy and not know that, but Harry wanted to make the point.

  “I know enough,” the woman answered quickly. Her attitude kept insisting let’s get on with it. The two men nodded.

  Harry wasn’t finished. “Then you understand it’s quite possible that the bad machines have somehow caught wind of the fact that this whole system is being evacuated. So a berserker force might be deploying this way.” The robotic killers could have high expectations of catching a large swarm of human craft, many with little or no armament, only second- or third-rate defensive shields, in disorderly flight.

  The deadly danger posed by a nova sun, the threat that sent all the humans of Hong’s World flying for their lives, would mean nothing but opportunity to berserker machines. They had been created, as an ultimate weapon, by a race about whom little else was known. A race now called the Builders, who had been engaged in a desperate war, at a time when humanity on Earth still lived in caves and fought with clubs.

  Programmed to destroy everything that lived, berserkers were agents and engines of death. Ages ago, these superb weapons had turned on their living creators and reduced the Builders to little more than interstellar dust. But still the weapons themselves raged on and on across the Galaxy, endlessly repairing and reproducing themselves, improving their own design and refining their killing capabilities.

  No death machine had ever been deterred by the prospect of its own annihilation. The only value a berserker’s calculations assigned to its own existence lay in its killing power. The only real loss it perceived in its own destruction was the subtraction of that measure of power from the total available to the cause of death.

  While the four people stood conversing, the businesslike evacuation kept going on around them. So far, the sounds and sights and smells of fear and chaotic confusion were present only in potential. Thanks to the Space Force and the Templars, the two separate organizations for once cooperating smoothly, there were nerves and there was grumbling, but no screaming panic.

  “In this case, Mr. Silver,” said Redpath, “we cannot allow even berserkers to stop us.”

  And Dietrich finally opened his mouth to challenge Harry: “Do they terrify you, Mr. Silver?”

  Harry squinted at the fellow. “They have, in the past. They probably will again. But not when the chance of meeting ‘em’s no greater than it seems to be in this situation. I can accept a reasonable amount of danger—for a reasonable price.”

  It was the first time he had raised the question of payment. The woman promptly named a figure. Redpath and Dietrich exchanged glances, and the lean man said: “We will match that sum.”

  Harry raised his eyebrows. “You’re all willing to pay that much, I guess you’re really serious about it.”

  “I am serious indeed.” Lily prodded: “You have been recommended to us, Mr. Silver. We hear you are a very good pilot.”

  “I am.”

  “And willing to take chances.”

  Harry nodded. “That’s sometimes true as well.”

  Redpath put in: “We have even heard that you are wanted by the Space Force, in a certain other sector of the Galaxy, for stealing a c-plus cannon.” The lean man smiled at Harry when that got a reaction. “Oh, not that we object! If the story is true, it shows a degree of—well, of enterprise—on your part that we in our present situation find very attractive.”

  The Space Force captain a little while ago, when warning Harry against accepting this job, hadn’t brought up the matter of the cannon, doubtlessly because she hadn’t yet been told about it. But it was no idle rumor. In another sector of the Galaxy, not enormously far away by fast starship, certain Space Force officers were much interested in finding Harry Silver, were trying very seriously to charge him with that spectacular theft.

  All three of Harry’s prospective clients were eyeing him fiercely, with varying degrees of what seemed a near impossible mixture of fear, respect, hope, disapproval, and secret admiration. There might have been a hint of blackmail in Redpath’s remark: Do what we ask, or we turn you in to the local authorities. If so, the blackmailer had miscalculated. Whatever authorities might currently remain on Hong’s World had all they could handle just trying to get everyone evacuated, and they were not about to start any kind of legal proceedings in a courtroom that would soon be vaporized.

  Mr. Dietrich seemed to have been the most impressed by the story. “A c-plus cannon,” he marveled quietly, shaking his head. He sounded shocked, not so much by the idea of a crime as by the spectacular magnitude of Harry’s daring.

  Harry stared grimly back at the solidly built man. “It’s a long story, based on a misunderstanding. Explanations never catch up with rumors, but maybe I should give one anyway. Actually, it was the Space Force who installed the cannon on my ship—there was some berserker trouble at the time. When that was over, of course, they wanted the damned thing back. Well, there were reasons why I couldn’t find a good convenient time and place to hand it over.”

  Evidently none of the three before him cared much about his explanation, not even enough to listen to it carefully.

  “You’ve simply got to take us,” the young woman was saying to Harry now, while on either side of her her escort stood nodding their heads earnestly in agreement.

  Meanwhile, all around them the good citizens of Hong’s World, nervous and busy, some with tear-streaked faces but not yet frantic, were still coming and going, on foot and in a variety of slow-moving vehicles. Some were carrying bags and boxes, odd household items, a strange assortment of objects that they hoped to save if there turned out to be room on the evacuation ships. Now Harry thought the people might be stepping up the pace a bit. Many of those who passed kept taking quick glances up at the twilight sky.

  Hong’s World had never possessed any noticeable moons, and where Harry was standing, the local sun had sunk below the horizon half an hour ago. But the sky contained an impressive array of stars.

  There was one very bright star in particular, a white dwarf informally known to the inhabitants of Hong’s World as Twinkler, and actually a distant binary partner of Hong’s Sun. The people who were getting on as fast as they could with their evacuation kept casting nervous
glances up at Twinkler’s cheerful little image. Not that there could be anything remarkable to see in that bright dancing spark—not for several hours yet.

  But everyone knew that peaceful presence was a horrible illusion. Something extraordinary indeed was on its way from Twinkler toward Hong’s World, a vast change sweeping on to engulf this pleasant planet, to end the life of anyone who might still be on it at the time.

  Twinkler had recently undergone a sudden and surprising metamorphosis. The consequences of that change were approaching Hong’s World, the wavefront of a stellar explosion, a deadly eruption of radiation and particles, moving as rapidly as light, more inevitable than sunrise. What was coming would put an end to all sunrises and sunsets when it arrived. But hours would pass before the Twinkler’s soft and mellow image swelled rapidly into a glaring blast of light and other radiation, a blinding, destroying, angel of death. Thanks to the Templars and the Space Force, there was every reason to hope that when it did, there would be no living eyes remaining on this world to register the impact.

  There had better not be. Humans could fight berserkers, and could sometimes even win against them. But no one could fight a nearby sun gone supernova.

  The little star just winked at Harry slightly as he glanced up at it. He knew the twinkle was innocent, simply a common effect of planetary atmosphere, but still Harry’s nerves gave a little nervous twitch each time it happened. Twinkler seemed such a cheerful, bright companion, pure and simple, ready to offer a reliable beacon through this planet’s perpetually moonless nights. Fully deserving of the place it had held in local children’s stories, through the generations since this world was colonized.

  Meanwhile, an intermittent stream of ships kept dribbling up into the sky, from this spaceport and others scattered around the planet. The warning had come in time, because it had been carried by a robotic courier traveling much faster than the blast. If all went smoothly, the great withdrawal would be accomplished in good time.