Berserker Fury Read online

  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 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.

  Gift had already undone the catch on his control helmet and slipped it off. With a practiced grab that was almost a continuation of the same motion, he seized the helmet of his suit armor from its nearby rack and pulled it on.

  Immediately upon his disconnection from his combat station, a clear and pleasant light had sprung alive inside the cabin, illuminating heretofore invisible devastation. As Gift's space helmet clicked into place, mating seamlessly with the neck of his armored suit, he took one last direct look, through his statglass faceplate, at his shipmates alive and dead. When seen directly, the two who were still alive, sealed away in armor as they were, their suits all splashed with others' blood, looked no more animated than the rest. The silent majority were only slumped suits of armor. Two had died in spectacularly horrible fashion, each body and its protective suit all twisted and torn together, flesh and metal intermingled.

  With the appearance of the berserker, the normal world had dissolved into a kind of nightmare, and none of this could really be happening. And yet it was.

  Gift noticed with a shock of horror that his own suit was as red and bloody as the rest.

  Now moving like a sleepwalker, Spacer Gift also unplugged from its nearby console, and carried along with him, a recorder unit, the only copy of the last information compiled by the spy ship's computers. Those computers were already being melted down with destructor charges.

  Averting his eyes hastily from the worst, Gift undid the restraints holding him in his combat couch, and levered himself out. A moment later he was heading for the hatch connecting with the compartment where the space scooter waited.

  Inside the control cabin of the spy ship there were now only two people still alive. Two breathing figures, sharing space with nine broken and unbreathing dolls and one empty chair. Armored suits bound into chairs, control helmets in operation making their heads mere blobs of silver haze. They were counting down the seconds that passed before they followed Gift.

  Now a fresh clangor of alarms filled what was left of the cabin atmosphere with useless noise, and somewhere air was leaking with a steady shriek.

  Sealed into his combat armor, Spacer Gift slid into the compartment where the scooter was stored, and breathed a profound sigh of relief when he saw the little vehicle appeared to be still undamaged. In another five seconds he had opened the proper hatch and dragged the scooter out into space with him. Step out of your ship in this quadrant of the Gulf and your armor turned brilliant with the light of many thousand suns, all of them near enough to be distinguished individually, against the background of the vastly greater star clouds beyond—and beyond those, the galaxies.

  He drew a deep breath, freed from the confines of the ship.

  Out here, space was a great emptiness crammed with light. The glowing void of space painted a scintillating surface upon Gift's armored suit, which immediately began to ping and groan, resonating with the gusts of radiation that combat sent washing through the local area. No suit could protect him for long against blasts of such intensity.

  The firing went on. Gift's armor rang and shook, under the impact of blasts of virtual particles, newly hatched from vacuum, evoked by the close proximity of space-bending violence.

  He had hesitated momentarily on the way, without fully realizing that he had done so. A powerful shoulder weapon of rifle-stock design was riding in a kind of scabbard attached to the bulkhead just above the scooter. Gift hesitated momentarily, then left the rifle in its holster, certain it would be useless against the monster that pursued. Of course the enemy, in its relentless quest for knowledge of the badlife and their ways, might possibly have dispatched small fighting machines to close with the Solarian ship and board it, and against those small machines the carbine would probably be effective. But Gift feared that carrying it would slow him down.

  Sebastian Gift was darkly handsome, lean and nervous, wiry and stooped when standing in full gravity, yet somewhat taller than the average. A young man, like so many in the military, with all the agility of youth. Despite Gift's bulky armor he leapt—or came as clos
e to leaping as was possible under the conditions—astride the space scooter, which would be able to convey his suited form the necessary few kilometers in less than a minute.

  A transponder on the courier fed the scooter its tight-beam beacon as soon as he called for it. Grimly he oriented himself, using nearby nebulae and the almost-unmistakable glory of the Galactic core as landmarks. Once he was sure he had the scooter headed in the right direction, he commanded full acceleration. He experienced the fierce inertial pressure only dimly as it was moderated by the damping fields within his suit. Rapidly the spy ship dwindled behind him, becoming no more than a dull dot against a fiery background.

  Gift tried not to look over his shoulder at what might be coming after him. His imagination could already picture, all too well, the several possibilities. If he turned, it was unlikely that he would be able to actually see anything coming even if it was, and even more unlikely that he could react in time to anything he saw, so indeed the effort was quite useless. Still he could not keep from turning his head, looking out through his helmet's faceplate for the berserker or one of its auxiliary machines, though he knew that it must be still many seconds, many kilometers, away. And finally he caught a glimpse of the thing that was about to kill them all—not the hull itself, of course, not at this distance, but rather the halo of flaring force fields the enemy was dragging with it, limned by the small impacts of Solarian missiles. There was no doubt that the death machine drew closer with every second that passed.

  Gift had calculated at the start of his dash that he had perhaps one full minute to reach the spare machine and bring it back.

  The deep space environment surrounding the embattled ship, here in the vast gap between two arms of the Galaxy, was spectacular, though at the moment the living, organic participants were paying it no more attention than were the machines. The drama was being played out several thousands of light-years from Earth, and hundreds from any habitable planet, in the full light of the bright but vaguely defined starbank making up the far side of the great near-emptiness known to Earth-descended humanity as the Gulf of Repose.

  Again the man, now thoroughly alone in space, shuddered at the idea that the berserker might be making an effort to capture him and his shipmates alive. Outside the double cocoon of ship and control helmet, riding the scooter far from the womb-like cabin, he felt exposed. Once more he struggled with the impulse to look behind him, and this time he was successful in fighting it down.

  And now the courier, embodying what seemed the only remaining possibility of survival, was just ahead.

  TWO

  Only an hour ago the spy ship, with its full complement of a dozen crew members still alive— still complaining, making jokes, some asleep in their cabins, some immersed in their routines of work, and with no enemy in sight—had been going about its stealthy, intricate business while attempting to maintain its disguise as a mere chunk of rock. Of course rocks as big as spaceships were rare indeed at this distance from any solar system, and any berserker coming in detector range would likely be suspicious. In retrospect it was easy to conclude that the idea of trying to rely on a disguise had been hopeless from the start.

  Even when they were discovered, the technique by which the ship and crew had been spying on berserker activity ought not to have been immediately apparent to the enemy—at least the people who made up the crew, and those who had sent them here, could hope their own activities and purposes would not be obvious.

  And then the berserker, coming head-on out of flight-space in their direction, had shown up on the warning system. If there were going to be any survivors, they could ponder the question of whether that had been sheer bad luck, or something else.

  Ever since the moment when the berserker machine had appeared on the spy ship's sensors, in the form of a ragged blob much different from the smooth routine shapes of berserker message couriers (which were, in a sense, the spy ship's natural prey), the tactical situation had been desperate. And from that moment until now, the crew of Earth-descended humans had been fighting for their lives. For the great majority, including all three who had thus far survived, it was the first experience of real combat.

  And now to Spacer Nifty Gift, at this moment in the act of braking his scooter with its forward thrusters, it seemed an age ago, though it was less than a standard day, that he and other members of the spy ship's crew had argued and speculated among themselves on what they would do if they ever found themselves about to be captured. Suicide in such a case was the choice of many, and it was encouraged if not strictly required by somewhat ambiguous regulations. Else there had been no deathdream hardware installed in each crew member's head. One crew member's favorite position in the argument had been that someone should be chosen ahead of time, to shoot first his shipmates and then himself.

  The question had come up in training, and in planning sessions, but had never really been resolved. That sort of thing could hardly be removed from the realm of individual choice. And the men and women of the unnamed spy ship's crew had their deathdreams to rely upon.

  Now the robotic courier was swelling up to its full size in front of Gift, even as he slowed the scooter. Wrapped in its own disguise, the courier looked, at least to Solarian eyes, like spongy rock, for all the world like an age-old fragment of some demolished protoplanet. The spacer braked his scooter's drive by reversing its small jets. There hadn't been time to program the rudimentary autopilot.

  With his closing velocity slowed to a walking pace, Spacer Gift was just in the act of reaching out to try to grab some handhold on the rugose camouflage surface of the courier's hull, when a near-miss blast from one of the berserker's minor weapons wounded him. The killing machine must have somehow spotted the darting scooter from more than a hundred kilometers away, and had spared one shot for him.

  And just at the moment when it had seemed that the universe was about to grant him a reprieve from doom, treacherous reality instead thrust at him with a white-hot lance, impaling the left side of his body on what felt like a spike of fire.

  For a moment a horrible illusion registered in Gift's shocked brain: His eyes and nerves seemed to be telling him that his left hand and forearm were completely gone. But a moment later his senses reassured him on that score—at least his armor—though one sleeve was punctured—was still basically all in one piece. He realized that there was no way as yet to be sure of the seriousness of the wound; the only thing certain right now was that the function of his left hand was suddenly much impaired.

  Just before that numbing blast, Gift and his scooter had come almost to a complete halt relative to the robot courier. The emergency escape device he had been sent to fetch was now slowly rotating, near at hand, almost within arm's reach. Under the rough coating of plastics and composites, imitations of nature that made up half its seeming bulk, was a slender bullet shape some twenty meters long and no more than three broad at its thickest point. Spacer Gift kicked himself free of the scooter and in the same movement hurled himself at the courier, uttering a sob of terror. Using both arms, he caught a projection of the hull, some stuff that looked like dried mud, in a clanging embrace. With some relief he realized that he still had some movement in the fingers of his left hand, despite the pain. He could still use them, if he must, to keep himself alive. Mean-while the space bike, abandoned and already forgotten, had gone spinning slowly away into infinity.

  One of the thousand procedures drilled into space combat crews in training was how to find the entrance to a disguised Solarian ship. Reading the subtle markers, tearing chunks of dried plastic foam away with his armored hands, Gift quickly located the small, inconspicuous hatch in the smooth metal curve beneath the foam. Getting the hatch open, then trying to figure out how he would get his armored body in through the opening—it was going to be a tight fit—he found himself agonizing intensely over what he was going to do next. But there was no time to think, no time, just do what must be done…

  And in another moment Gift had succeeded
in dragging his body, bulky with its damaged armor, in through the awkward opening. The promise of shelter within, however illusory, seemed all the greater because the interior was as dark as a berserker's gut. He pulled the hatch shut tightly, and even with the movement of his arm the shadow of a question crossed his mind: Why was he bothering to shut the hatch? Open or closed wasn't going to matter, simply going back toward the fight, a couple of klicks through normal space.

  The interior, obviously never intended to carry passengers, was basically a cylinder of space sandwiched between two cylinders of metal less than a meter apart, the inner and outer hulls. A single dim interior light had come on automatically as Gift entered. Even as he reached for the awkward control panel just inside the hatch, and found himself disconcertingly upside down relative to the panel—here in this bare-bones environment there was no artificial gravity—the realization pounded him that rescuing his comrades would mean moving this vessel a distance of several kilometers straight toward the onrushing berserker, back in the very direction from which he had come.

  If he continued to follow Ensign Terrin's orders—somehow, without Gift's planning it, what should have been a simple and automatic response to orders had turned into a question—if he now drove the courier back to try to help his shipmates, he would be putting himself practically in the grip of the God of Death.

  And that realization was followed in a moment by another. The question had already answered itself. Going back there, moving his own body squarely into the path of irresistible, onrushing death, was something he clearly could not do. The fact that he was already wounded had little to do with the decision, but the decision had already been reached—and how blessedly simple it had turned out to be! That understanding left him quivering inwardly with sheer relief.