Berserker Kill Read online

  She and Scurlock stared at each other. Time seemed to have come to a complete stop.

  Their ship in its unflappable voice relayed to them the news of the next step in the catastrophe: its drive had now been rendered totally dead.

  Nothing more happened until, only moments later, the same voice informed them that an attempt was now being made to open the outer hatch of the main airlock, from outside. There was really no need to tell the two human occupants that, because their unaided hearing now brought them news of the attempt in progress. The whole ship quivered under a titanic hammering, vibrated with a shrieking drill.

  Scurlock, his ringers fumbling even more desperately than before, after several attempts got himself out of his acceleration couch. A moment later Carol had joined him, the two of them standing together in the middle of the cabin’s tiny open deck.

  “If the drive wasn’t dead,” Scurlock said suddenly, in a surprisingly strong voice, “we could switch over to manual and use it to-”

  “But the drive is dead,” Carol whimpered. Evidently the enemy had for some reason not wanted any cowardly or heroic suicides.

  Maybe it was the unnecessary waste of a perfectly good machine to which the berserkers’ controlling computers made objection.

  “And we don’t have a weapon of any kind aboard.”

  “I know.”

  “Scurly… even if we had a gun, I don’t think I could do it. Not to you, not to myself.”

  “Neither could I.” That seemed to him the best thing to say now, although he wasn’t sure. “And-and I wouldn’t leave you alone with-berserkers.”

  Suddenly louder sounds coming from only a few meters away made it obvious that the small enemy units-machines, whatever the proper term for them might be-were in the main airlock now.

  And now abruptly they were visible, if only indirectly. The relentless approach of death was being displayed for the humans with merciless clarity, by their own ship’s brain, upon the little holostage in the middle of the control room. Scurlock had one moment to see clearly an enormous enlargement of a pair of waving grippers, and then the video pickup in the airlock was destroyed.

  “Carol, I love you.”

  “And I love you.”

  Those were words they had seldom said to each other.

  “They don’t have any interest in making people suffer, Carol.

  It’s going to be quick, whatever they…”

  Scurlock was trying to make it true by saying it. True, the death machines’ fundamental commandment, the goal of their basic programming, was the obliteration of all life wherever they encountered it. There was no requirement that living things be made to suffer; because quick killing was generally more efficient, quick killing was the rule. But exceptions to that rule came up from time to time, situations where the unliving enemy in pursuit of its larger aims required something more from some individual life unit than that unit’s death. Neither person in the small ship wanted to think about those rare exceptions now. But they were going to have no choice, because the noises of intrusion had moved a large step closer. Metal arms and tools were very purposefully scratching, scraping, then pounding at the inner door of their main airlock.

  “Carol-”

  “Yes. Scurly, I love you too.” Her voice sounded abstracted; almost bored.

  There was no more time to talk. The inner door of the airlock was sliding open now. There followed a slight momentary drop in cabin pressure, but no fatal escape of atmosphere; that had already been taken care of, somehow, because the occupants of this ship were going to be kept alive, for the time being.

  And now berserkers were entering their cabin.

  Constructions of dull-surfaced metal came filing in, one, two, three, four of them, walking rapidly one after the other into the control room. They were very little bigger than Solarian human beings, though their shapes were frightfully different from those of humanity as descended upon any planet. And these machines were quite obviously of alien strength and purpose. They came into the control moving more quickly and decisively than any bodies merely human could have moved, or any organic creature of any species. Some of the intruders walked on six metallic legs, and some on only four.

  What was momentarily astonishing was that the invaders appeared at first to take no particular notice of their two new prisoners. The prisoners on their part remained standing as if paralyzed, their four hands clutched together, in the middle of the chamber.

  Like practically every other Solarian in the Galaxy, Carol and Scurlock had all their lives heard stories about berserkers. Some of the stories were true, some fiction, some the wildest legend.

  There were human worlds whose population had never seen a berserker, but no human world where such stories were never told. The berserkers in the stories always seemed to come equipped with the capability of human speech. And on the very rare occasions when people in the stories and histories came close enough to listen to berserkers and yet somehow survived, they always described the enemy as communicating quickly with human captives, spelling out for the abhorred badlife precisely what was expected of them, what they must do to earn a quick and merciful death, giving at least by implication some indication why their lives were being temporarily spared.

  But these machines, having taken possession of Scurlock and Carol along with their ship, said nothing at all-unless a few peculiar clicks and whistles, issuing from one of the invaders, were intended as communication. If this noise indeed was language, the Solarians could neither recognize it nor respond.

  One facet of the humans’ intense terror, a dread that they were going to be immediately separated, was not realized. But any unreasoning hope that the machines would continue to ignore them quickly vanished. After only a few seconds’ delay, both prisoners were gently seized and searched by deft metallic fingers and grippers that probed and patted impersonally at skin and clothing. Then the two humans were let go, not bound or otherwise physically molested. In another moment all but one of the boarding machines had left the control room, spreading out through the various accessible bays and compartments of the little ship, obviously intent on search and examination.

  Their bodies temporarily free, yet helpless, the two prisoners gazed at each other in anguish. They exchanged a few hopelessly banal words, phatic utterances empty of hope. No doubt their metallic guardian was listening, but it neither punished them for speaking nor commanded them to silence.

  Eventually all of the machines that had spread out to search the ship returned to the control room, where they stopped, standing motionless like so many serving robots.

  “What happens now?” Scurlock abruptly demanded of the world at large. For a moment, only a moment, Carol saw him as a brave and challenging figure, fists clenched, looking at his unliving captors with the courage of despair.

  The machines ignored him. One of them was at a control panel, probing with thin auxiliary limbs, probably tapping into the ship’s data banks.

  Carol sat down again in the pilot’s couch and began to weep.

  The minutes stretched on, and nothing happened. After a time Scurly sat down too, in the couch next to Carol’s.

  Looking out through cleared ports, the captives presently were able to get a better view than before of the berserker mothership.

  Scurlock commented now on the fact that in the light of the distant Core that hideous bulk showed signs of extensive damage, in the form of cratering and scorching, but it conveyed the impression of being still extremely formidable. Certain projections, he thought, indicated immense firepower. The great hull was generally ovoid, almost spherical, in shape. Sizes and distances were hard to judge in space without instrumentation, and the voice of the survey ship had fallen silent, but from the faint drift of intervening dust he estimated the monster as at least several kilometers in diameter.

  Before the first hour of their captivity had passed, most of it in a terrible silence, Carol had already started to crack under the strain. She was withdrawing in
to a staring silence, letting remarks by her companion go unanswered.

  “Carol?”

  No answer. Slowly the young woman, staring at nothing in a corner of the cabin, raised a white knuckle to her mouth. Slowly she bit on it until blood started to appear.

  “Carol!” Scurly lurched unsteadily to his feet and grabbed her hand, pulling it away from her teeth.

  She raised wild eyes, a stranger’s eyes, to stare at him.

  “Carol, stop it!”

  Suddenly she burst into tears; Scurlock crouched beside her, awkwardly trying to give comfort, while the berserkers looked on impassively.

  For the next few hours the machines continued to watch their captives-you could see a lens turn now and then on one of the metal bodies-and no doubt they listened, but for the time being they did nothing more. The prisoners were allowed to move about unhindered in the control room and the sleeping cabin next to it.

  To sit, to stand, to lie down, to use the plumbing.

  Eventually, one at a time and by degrees, they fell asleep.

  A time arrived when Scurlock found himself in the control room, looking at the ship’s chronometer, wondering why the numbers displayed seemed to convey nothing. He tried to remember, but for the life of him could not, just what day and hour the clock had shown him the last time he had looked; that had been at some unguessable interval before the berserkers came.

  Carol

  was

  sleeping

  now.

  He

  had

  just

  left

  her

  sleeping-unconscious might be a better word for her condition-in the other room.

  Slowly Scurlock went about getting himself a cup of water from the service robot. He had to walk directly past one of the berserkers to do so, and he actually brushed the machine-their metal legs crowded the little room. He knew it could flick out a limb at any moment and kill him, and slow human sight would never see the impact coming, any more than he would see a bullet. Let it come, then, let death come.

  But it did not.

  Slowly he went about getting another cup of water, carrying it into the sleeping cabin, offering his human companion-who was sitting up again-a drink.

  The idea of food, in either of their minds, was going to have to wait for a little while yet.

  As was the idea of hope.

  Eventually in Scurlock’s mind-which was never going to be quite the same mind that it once had been-the numbers on the chronometer started to make sense again. With dull shock he remembered certain things and noticed that the hours since the invasion seemed to have added up to a standard day.

  He noticed too that Carol was intermittently biting her knuckles again. Blood was drying on her fingers. But he didn’t think he was going to stop her anymore.

  With the passage of time, the first shock of terror had begun to relax its grip. The sentence of death had already been passed, and yet it seemed that life somehow went on.

  Scurlock and Carol passed long periods sitting together, clinging together, on one of the beds or ordinary couches. From time to time Carol would suddenly give vent to a burst of peculiar laughter. Whenever this happened, Scurlock stared at her dully, not knowing whether she had gone completely out of her mind or not. Now and then he saw her doze or caught himself awakening with a shock from a deathlike sleep.

  An hour came when she leaped up from an almost-catatonic pose, shrieking at the top of her voice in a sudden fit. “What does it want from us? What does it want?” Then, hurling herself at one of the machines, she hysterically attacked it with her bare hands, knuckles already bleeding. “What do you want? Why don’t you kill us? Kill us!”

  The machine moved one leg, adjusting its balance slightly. That was all. A moment later Carol had collapsed, sobbing, on the dull deck, at the metal feet of the impassive thing.

  Still there were intervals in which the couple talked to each other, sometimes fairly rationally, often feverishly, between long stretches of helpless silence.

  During one of their more rational exchanges, Scurlock said,

  “I’ve got an idea about why it doesn’t talk. Suppose that this is one very old berserker. Suppose that maybe, for some reason-I don’t know why-it’s been stuck in the Mavronari for a long time.

  That could happen, you know, to a ship or a machine. Maybe it’s been a very long time in there, struggling to get out of the nebula again. Or it went in on the other side, and it’s been struggling to make it all the way through.”

  After a long pause, in which she might have been thinking, Carol responded: “That’s possible.” What sent a chill down Scurlock’s neck was that at the moment she didn’t even seem to be frightened anymore.

  When she said nothing further, he went on: “In that case, if it’s really been in there for thousands of years, it might never have learned any Earth-descended languages. Those sounds it was chirping at us earlier could have been Builder talk.”

  “What?” She really didn’t seem to know what he was talking about; the terribly bad part was that she didn’t seem to care.

  “You remember Galactic history, love. Long ago there was a race we Solarians now call the Builders, because we don’t know any better name for them. The people who built the first berserkers, created them as ultimate weapons to win some crazy interspecies war, around the time we were going through our Neolithic Age on Earth-maybe even before that.

  “And then something went wrong with the plan, the way plans do go wrong, and the berserkers wiped out the Builders too, along with their nameless organic enemies, whoever they were. I remember learning somewhere that their speech, the Builders’

  speech, was all clicks and whistles.”

  Carol had had nothing to say to that. Only a few minutes had passed since Scurlock had last spoken, and both prisoners were dozing-in Scurlock’s case, trying to doze-in adjoining couches when suddenly one of their guardians spoke, for virtually the first time since coming aboard.

  And what the machine uttered-in a clear machine voice, not all that different from the voice of the now-silent survey ship-were distinct Solarian words. Scurlock was snapped out of his somnolent state by hearing: ” ‘I’ve got an idea about why it doesn’t talk.’”

  “What?” He jumped to his feet, glaring wildly at the machines, at Carol, who appeared to be really sleeping on the next couch.

  The same machine said, in the same accurate enunciation, but slightly louder: ” ‘ All clicks and whistles.’ ”

  That phrase brought Carol, whimpering, starting up from sleep.

  Scurlock grabbed her by the arm and said, “That’s what it wants from us! To listen to us, to learn our language.”

  And at once the mimicking tones came back: ” ‘ That’s what it wants from us. To learn our language.’ ”

  Carol, as if she had been shocked at least momentarily out of her withdrawal, reacted with rational horror: “We don’t want to help it, for God’s sake!”

  “Love, I don’t think we’re going to have much choice. It may be offering us our only chance to stay alive!”

  For a long moment the two humans were silent, staring into each other’s faces, trying to read each other’s eyes.

  ” Love,” essayed the machine, tentatively.

  But at the moment no one was listening. Suddenly Scurlock burst out: “Carol, I don’t want to die!”

  “No. No, I don’t want to die either. Scurly, how did we… how could we ever get into this?”

  “Easy, easy, love. We didn’t ask to get into this. But now we’re in it, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do, that’s all.”

  ” Easy, easy, love,” said a berserker’s voice. ” That’s all.”

  There were hours and days in which the machines encouraged speech by separating the two humans, holding them in different rooms so that the only way they could keep contact with each other was by calling back and forth.

  Somehow refusing to play along never seemed like a real opti
on. In the data banks of the captured ship, as Scurlock pointed out to Carol, the berserkers had available a tremendous amount of recorded material, radio communications of a variety of kinds, from several worlds and several ships, in all the languages with which the captured couple were familiar, and some more besides.

  And now their lifeless captor was beginning to play various recordings it had taken with their ship, and to mimic the sounds of human speech existing on those recordings. This, Scurlock argued, proved that resistance on their part would be futile.

  “So the point is, love, it doesn’t really depend on us to learn.

  Even if we don’t talk to it, it can analyze the language mathematically, use the video material as a guide. It can find out whatever it wants to know without our help.”

  And again he said, “No one’s going to come looking for us, you know. Not for a long time, months. And if they do, and find us-tough luck for them.”

  Carol never argued. Mostly she just stared. Sometimes she chewed her favorite hand.

  And now the machines that held them prisoner began to prod them relentlessly to talk and keep on talking. Whenever a period of silence lasted longer than about a minute, the berserker used some of its newly learned speech to command them to keep on speaking. When that failed, it administered moderate electric shocks to keep them going, a machine gripping both of a human’s hands at the same time. Thus it kept at least one of them awake at all times, shocking them and talking to them in its monotonous, monstrously patient voice.

  A pattern emerged and was maintained of one prisoner sleeping while the other talked-or more precisely, was interrogated.

  Physical and mental exhaustion mounted in both prisoners, despite the intervals of deathlike sleep.

  Time passed in this mode of existence; just how much time, Scurlock could not have guessed. Once more he had forgotten the chronometer, never thought to look at it when he was in the cabin talking to berserkers; sometimes the thought of time briefly crossed his mind in the brief interval after he had been released, but before he sank onto his bunk in the darkened sleeping cabin, and unconsciousness descended. He thought that perhaps the ship’s clock, like its drive, had been turned off.