Berserker Blue Death Read online

  It said, in its squeaking, erratic voice: “I remember that.”

  “The day that you destroyed life on that planetoid, you sent down some of your small lander machines to make sure—remember? Remember? To make sure that you had done a thorough job. You sent one lander to a particular cave—”

  The relevant memory units were still intact and were quickly examined. The berserker responded: “No.” The voice of the life-unit was changing, becoming ragged, too. Its breathing was hard inside its helmet.

  “—in a particular cliff. Your lander went there and killed a particular young human being. It—”

  “No.”

  “—it killed, it…” Domingo could hear the pulse beating in his ears. He could hear his own breathing

  inside his helmet. He wondered if something was happening to his heart. “What do you mean, ‘no’?” He wondered if he was going to hyperventilate and fall helpless here in the face of the enemy. No. He would not.

  The berserker said: “In the attack on Shubra I employed no landers. I had none available. The last had been destroyed on the colony of Liaoning.”

  “You lie.”

  “No.” The captain drew a deep breath. It was almost a sob. “Ten years ago,” he said. “More like eleven. You killed a transport ship.” He named the ship. “You left no survivors. My wife was on that, and my children. Can you know, can you understand—”

  “When and where?” Domingo gave the information. “No. I did not destroy that ship.”

  “Lying bastard.”

  “No. Accidents are common.”

  There was a metal sound again, a clanging somewhere off in the middle distance. Again Domingo spun around, ready to fire. Again there was nothing to aim at. He turned up the sensitivity on his suit microphones. Ah, something. A steady working, murmuring…

  “You lying bastard, lying, lying…” He was almost in tears. “ Where are your small machines?”

  “They are at work preparing a—” There was a pause, then the same unemotional voice resumed. “Preparing a c-plus detonation that will—that will cave in the roof. Of the badlife shelter. The badlife shelter below. The shelter below the—”

  “Stop them!” Pause again. “The effort has been. Has been stopped. The life-units…” That was all. There was no more. The distant murmuring had stopped. Domingo, suspicious, began ransacking what was left of his enemy’s brain. “Damned treacherous… I don’t believe you yet.” Only silence answered him. “Not an accident, that transport ship. No.” He paused. “An accident?” The machine no longer answered him. He probed and probed, but he could find no evidence that it was still alive at all. Stray voltage and current here and there within its brain, charges not yet dissipated. Memory of this and that. If he were to probe long and hard enough, he might be able to find the memories he wanted. Where would he find the dead damned soul?

  No landers were here now. No landers had been sent down on Shubra. No landers… The c-plus drive unit. He would look at that, to be sure. He thought he knew where that would have to be, on a berserker built like this. It took the captain a minute or two to get there, climbing through the unfamiliar hardware. The c-plus unit when he found it was surrounded with little maintenance machines. All of them were now immobile. Domingo stared at them for some time, then with his fine-tuned weapon he burned them, one at a time, into permanent immobility. Just in case. He made his way back to the central chamber housing the now-dead brain and sat there. No landers had come down on Shubra. His hands were shaking worse than ever now.

  CHAPTER 24

  Down one of the long, sloping half-open aisles that converged on the place where Domingo waited, through one of the passages never meant for humans and clogged now with machinery dislodged and broken in Leviathan’s dying crash, the captain saw a new light. It was bright and it came waving shadows ahead of it with its own approaching motion. He suppressed the urge to cry out. Instead he stepped back silently, the weapon that had been slung over his shoulder coming up smoothly into his two-handed grip.

  For a moment wild suspicion returned. But the approaching shape was too small to be that of a lander.

  Maybe an android, it was the right size for that… But it was not an android. Instead the light-bearing shadow became a shambling human figure, wearing space armor belonging to the Pearl.

  Spence Benkovic stumbled to a halt when he saw the captain leveling a heavy weapon at him. For a moment there was silence. Then Benkovic said on the short-range radio: “I came to find you. I had to see what you were doing.”

  “Your orders were to stay on the launch.” But the rebuke was no more than mechanical. “I couldn’t do that,” Benkovic said simply. “I had to see what you were doing here.” They looked at each other. Domingo said: “I was wondering about you, too. About why you signed on my ship. The real reason.”

  “It was like I couldn’t keep away. I had to come along to see what you were doing. What you were going to find out.”

  “Are you goodlife, Spence? Is that it?” Benkovic’s face inside his helmet, plainly visible in the center of Domingo’s light, showed nothing but bewilderment. Whatever he had been expecting from Domingo, it wasn’t that at all. “Goodlife? What the hell kind of a thing is that to say?” But the protest was weak. Benkovic appeared to be on the verge of laughing or crying.

  “Are you?”

  “Nothing like that, Captain. No, nothing like that.” Spence gestured toward the components of the disassembled brain that were lying at Domingo’s feet. “Is it dead now?”

  “It’s been dead all along, Spence. Now it’s pretty well turned off.” Benkovic nodded. There was silence, for a moment, as if there might be nothing more to be said between the two men. Then mechanical sounds came echoing from somewhere within the nearby metal caverns as before. Spence grabbed for the holster at his belt, then realized that he had come here unarmed. He looked down, perhaps marveling silently that he should have forgotten such a thing; or perhaps he knew the reason for his forgetfulness. Then again only tiredness showed in his face.

  Domingo hadn’t turned or raised his weapon this time. Now he said: “Pretty well turned off, but it still talked to me there for a while. I got some truth out of it. There aren’t any landers here. This berserker hasn’t had any landers or androids for months.”

  The other was looking at him. Looking and listening intently, like someone hoping for a message that would mean rescue.

  “Not since Liaoning,” Domingo said. “Not since before Shubra.”

  Branwen Galway, groaning, semiconscious, lay in her berth aboard ship. She’d had to abandon her battle station because her mind seemed to be fogging up again. She knew she needed medical help. She was going to hang on somehow and do what she had to do until she got it. She was going to shoot Spence Benkovic if he came through her door again.

  Fourth Adventurer was still living, but almost inert.

  Simeon, virtually alone now on the Pearl. was himself on his last legs. Duty held him to his post.

  Back in the central cave of the devastated berserker, Benkovic sat down slowly on a projecting ledge of metal that had been designed for some totally different purpose. Presently he let his helmeted head fall forward into his hands.

  The captain remained standing. Even in the light natural gravity, he swayed. The mechanical sounds out in the caves of machinery had stopped, but there was still a roaring in his mind. A rushing and a roaring, like a prolonged explosion. It seemed to have been going on forever, like the space battle with Leviathan. He could feel it all, everything, catching up with him at once.

  His weapon no longer pointed at Benkovic, but still the captain held it in both hands. His hands holding the heavy carbine were shaking more than ever, uncontrollably.

  “Tell me what happened on that day.” Domingo’s voice, asking the question, sounded like that of a man trying to memorize a line that he was going to have to deliver in a play.

  Spence raised his head and nodded, making his helmet light bob up and
down. He didn’t look at Domingo at all now, but instead gazed off into the shadowed recesses of the ruined machinery.

  “What I told you before, a lot of that was true,” he said. “The first part of the story I told everybody, that was true.”

  “Tell me again. The whole thing now. I want to know all the truth.”

  Once more Benkovic nodded. He spoke as if he were remembering something from long years before, or maybe even from an earlier lifetime. “There at the wedding, after the alert was called, I ran along with everyone else and got into my ship. I didn’t have any idea then…” The recital stalled.

  “Go on.”

  Spence went on. He described how, when the other ships lifted off, he too had launched from Shubra in his one-seater battler, headed back for the moon.

  From space he had seen the relief squadron, led by Domingo, depart for Liaoning.

  “Then I sort of wished I’d gone with you. Wanted t’be in on the action, y’know? But by then it was too late.”

  “Go on.”

  At that point, Benkovic said, he had changed the objective of his own flight, deciding to do some scouting on his own. He had radioed first to his three women companions on the moon, telling them to go into the shelter and lie low.

  The moon’s orbit brought it within only the outer limit of the effective range of the Shubran ground defenses. But Spence had had no reason when he made the call to expect that there was really going to be a berserker attack on Shubra almost at once. So presumably the women would be just about as safe in the little shelter on the moon as they would have been taking flight in a ship or coming down to take shelter on the planetoid—that last assessment had turned out, grimly, to be all too accurate.

  “I should have gone back and picked them up in a ship, I guess. Got ‘em the hell outta there. But I didn’t.” He shrugged. “Everybody else should have done something different, too.”

  “Go on.”

  After making the call to warn his girlfriends, Benkovic had zoomed away for a few hours, scouting. He’d had no success, even though he was a good pilot. Anyone could testify to that.

  “And I’ve never been afraid to do things.” Spence raised his head all the way and looked around him

  when he said that, as if to say that his presence here on this boarded berserker justified that claim.

  Giving up on the fruitless scouting expedition, he had returned to within visual range of Shubra in time to see Leviathan in the process of attacking the colony.

  “You told all of this before.”

  “Yeah. And up to that point, up to what I’m telling you now, everything I told you before was the truth.”

  “And now. Tell me the rest of the truth.” Domingo was still on his feet. He was resting his weapon on the

  machinery in front of him, trying to stop the trembling in his hands. “Yeah. I want to do that.” Spence’s voice fell lower and lower. He swayed as if he might be going to topple from where he was sitting. “God, what a ride you put us through, chasing this thing. I can still feel it. It’s all still coming at me.”

  Domingo waited.

  “What really happened. Yeah.” Benkovic paused for a long time. “But it’s like none of that part is real.”

  “It was real enough. It was as bloody real as anything. Go on.”

  Benkovic went on. Actually, as he related the story now, he had not seen the berserker send down any small machines to devastate the individual defensive outposts. But he had assumed that Leviathan had landers and androids; they were practically standard equipment on large berserkers. “And I never guessed… I’d be here finding out different.”

  “Go on.”

  Benkovic wasn’t sure now how long he’d drifted in space in his little one-seater, watching the slaughter, the destruction, from a safe distance, far beyond the orbit of the moon. But eventually Leviathan had completed its programmed task and had departed the vicinity of Shubra, leaving nothing but smoking ruin on what a few hours before had been an inhabited surface.

  Benkovic had returned to his moon to find his colony destroyed by a few touches of the enemy weapons with only one of his women still alive. He had given her what help he could. She was seriously injured but seemed likely to survive, and he had left her there alone in the charge of the medical robot, which was about the only useful machine to have survived the attack.

  Fascinated as always by destruction, he had then flown down to the Shubran surface.

  “I could see that just about everything was ruined. There were no radio signals. I told myself that when I landed I was going to see if there were any survivors—anyone I could help. That’s what I kept thinking most of the way.

  “Then I saw—I really started to see—what had happened. I don’t know. All gone. Destruction. That kind of thing. It turns me on in some way… you know? I guess you don’t know.”

  “Tell me. I want to hear.”

  “You already know, don’t you? I’m so bloody tired now. So damned… there’s no way out. But first I’ll tell you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “At last I picked up one little local radio signal, because I was so close; it never got out to anywhere else because of all the ionization around. A distress call. I followed it, and answered. She said… who she was.”

  “My daughter.”

  “Yeah—it was Maymyo. I don’t know if she knew my voice. I don’t think so. I never said who I was. But she gave me enough directions so I could find the cave. The airlock was still holding. She—she saw me outside. When she was sure it was a man and not a machine talking to her, she let me in.”

  “The door, the big door to the cave, was blasted open.”

  “I did that, later. With the cannon on my little battler. To make it look like berserkers, see.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  “I told her that the attack was over, but she wouldn’t believe me at first. I don’t think she knew who I was, even then. She was in a kind of daze. Combat fatigue. I don’t think she was hurt otherwise. Maybe a little concussion.”

  “Like Galway.”

  “Yeah… yeah. Then it came over me what I had to do.

  “I told her to take her armor off, and she did. Just like that. She was in a total daze, following orders. I told her to take her armor off, and then that white dress, and then to lie down. Then she struggled, but I…

  “Then—after—I thought I couldn’t just leave her. Because, you know, she’d probably remember.” There was a pause long enough for two breaths. Domingo could hear them distinctly on the radio. Then Benkovic concluded: “And if she remembered, she’d tell.”

  Having said that, Benkovic nodded sagely. He appeared to be considering the human condition, himself as an example of it.

  “You killed her.”

  Benkovic looked up. “I couldn’t just leave her. Yeah.” It was a simple truth; he looked afraid of it. But he was not really frightened of Domingo’s gun. He looked yearningly at the big bore of the carbine as it leveled steadily at his helmet.

  Domingo was still sitting there when Polly and Gujar came in.

  There were other people with them, people from the crew of Gujar’s ship, and they were going through the motions of trying to rescue Captain Domingo, not really expecting to find him or anyone else in Leviathan’s guts alive.

  The new arrivals took note of Benkovic’s headless body but were not much surprised. They assumed that the berserker had somehow killed him.

  Simeon, Fourth Adventurer, Branwen Galway—all of them had already spoken to the rescuers on radio, and all three welcomed them back to the ship a little later when they came bringing Domingo with them. But none of the crew members who had stayed aboard the Pearl could tell the tale of what had passed between Benkovic and Domingo on the wreck.

  Niles Domingo was to tell that story once, to one person only, and much later in his life.

  The captain and Polly Suslova were side by side, more or less in each other’s company, as they left the dead berserker o
n their way to find her children.

  Domingo looked around him before he left, as if he had never seen this place until this moment.

  BAEN® Books

  by

  Fred Saberhagen

  The Berserker Series

  The Berserker Wars

  Berserker Base (with Poul Anderson, Ed Bryant, Stephen Donaldson, Larry Niven, Connie Willis, and Roger Zelazny)

  Berserker: Blue Death

  The Berserker Throne

  Berserker’s Planet

  The Dracula Series

  The Dracula Tapes

  The Holmes-Dracula Files

  An Old Friend of the Family

  Thorn

  Dominion

  A Matter of Taste

  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 T

  he 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

  Other Books

  A Century of Progress

  Coils (with Roger Zelazny)

  Earth Descended

  The Mask of the Sun

  A Question of Time

  Specimens

  The Veils of Azlaroc

  The Water of Thought

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Baen® Books

  Berserker Blue Death Copyright © 1985 Fred Saberhagen

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