Berserker - Brother Assassin Part 1

Fred Saberhagen.

Berserker.

Brother a.s.sa.s.sin.

PART ONE.

LIEUTENANT DERRON ODEGARD LEANED BACK IN HIS contour chair for just long enough to wipe his somewhat sweaty palms on the legs of his easy-fitting duty uniform, and to s.h.i.+ft minutely the position of the padded headset on his skull. He performed these nervous actions without taking his eyes from the tangled green pattern on the wide, slightly curved viewscreen before him; then he leaned forward again and resumed his hunt for the enemy.

After only half an hour on watch he was already bone-tired, feeling the weight of every one of his planet's forty million surviving inhabitants resting crus.h.i.+ngly on the back of his neck. He didn't want to bear the burden of responsibility for any of those lives, but at the moment there was nowhere to set it down. Being an officer and a sentry gained a man a bit of material comfort and allowed him a bit less regimentation when he went off duty-but let a sentry make one gross mistake on the job, and the entire surviving population of the planet Sirgol could be tumbled into nothingness, knocked out of real-time and killed, ended so completely that they would never have existed at all.

Derron's hands rested easily and lightly on the molded controls of his console; there was a good deal of skill, though nothing like love, in his touch. Before him on the screen, the green, tangled cathode traces s.h.i.+fted at his will, like tall gra.s.ses pushed aside by the hands of a cautious hunter. This symbolic gra.s.s through which he searched represented the interwoven lifelines of all the animals and plants that nourished, or had flourished, upon a certain few square miles of Sirgol's land surface, during a few decades of time, some twenty thousand years deep in the prehistoric past.

Surrounding Derron Odegard's chair and console were those of other sentries, a thousand units all aligned in long, subtly curving rows. Their arrangement pleased and rested the momentarily lifted eye, then led the gaze back to the viewscreen where it belonged. Concentration was further encouraged by the gentle modulations that sometimes pa.s.sed like drifting clouds across the artificial light, which flowed from the strongly vaulted ceiling of this buried chamber, and by the insistent psych-music that came murmuring in and out of headsets, airy melodies now and then supported on an elemental, heavy beat. In this chamber buried below many miles of rock, the air was fresh with drifting breezes, scented convincingly with the tang of the sea or the smell of green fields, with various reminiscences of the living soil and water that the berserkers' bombardment had wiped away, months ago, from Sirgol's surface.

Again, the traces representing interconnected life rippled on Derron's viewscreen as he touched the controls. In the remote past, the infraelectronic spy devices connected to his screen were moving at his command. They did not stir the branches nor startle the fauna in the ancient forests they surveyed.

Instead they hovered just outside reality, not interfering, avoiding most of the nets of paradox spread by reality for man or machine that traveled in time. The spy devices lurked just around the local curves of probability from real-time, able to sense even from that position the lines of powerful organization of matter that were life.

Derron knew that his a.s.signed sector, nearly twenty thousand years back, was somewhere near the time of the First Men's coming to Sirgol, but he had not yet seen the trace, unmistakably powerful, of a human lifeline there. He was not looking for humans especially. What mattered was that neither he nor any other sentry had yet observed the splash of disruptive change that would mean a berserker attack; the gigantic machines besieging the planet in present-time had perhaps not yet discovered that it was possible here to invade the past.

Like a good sentry in any army, Derron avoided letting his own moves become predictable as he walked his post. From his seat in remote physical comfort and relative physical safety, he monitored the signals of one spy device after another, ranging now a decade farther into the past, then five miles north; next two years uptime, then a dozen miles southwest. Still no alien predator's pa.s.sage showed in the lush symbolic gra.s.s that grew on Derron's screen. The enemy he sought had no lifeline of its own, and would be visible only by the death and disruption that it broadcast.

"Nothing yet," said Derron curtly, without turning, when he felt his supervisor's presence at his elbow.

The supervisor, a captain, remained looking on for a moment and then without comment walked quietly on down the narrow aisle. Still without lifting his eyes from his screen, Derron frowned. It irritated him to realize that he had forgotten the captain's name. Well, this was only the captain's second day on the job, and the captain, or Derron, or both of them, might be transferred to some other duty tomorrow. The Time Operations Section of Sirgol's Planetary Defense Forces was organizationally fluid, to put it mildly.

Only a few months ago had the defenders realized that the siege might be extended into time warfare.

This sentry room, and the rest of Time Operations, had been really functional for only about a month, and it had yet to handle a real fight. Luckily, the techniques of time warfare were almost certainly entirely new to the enemy also; nowhere else but around the planet Sirgol was time travel known to be possible.

Before Derron Odegard had managed to recall his captain's name, the first battle fought by Time Operations had begun. For Derron it began very simply and undramatically, with the calm feminine voice of one of the communicators flowing into his earphones to announce that the berserker s.p.a.ce fleet had launched toward the planet several devices that did not behave like ordinary missiles. As these weapons fell toward the planet's surface they vanished from direct observation; the sentry screens soon discovered them in probability-s.p.a.ce, falling into the planet's past.

There were five or six objects-the number was soon confirmed as six-dropping eight thousand years down, ten thousand, twelve. The sentries watching over the affected sectors were alerted one after another. But the enemy seemed to understand that his pa.s.sage was being closely followed. Only when the six devices had pa.s.sed the twenty-one-thousand-year level, when their depth in the abyss of time had made observation from the present practically impossible, did they stop. Somewhere.

"Attention, all sentries," said a familiar, drawling male voice in Derron's headset. "This is the Time Operations commander, to let you all know as much as I do about what's going on. Looks like they're setting up a staging area for themselves down there, about minus twenty-one thousand. They can shoot stuff uptime at us from there, and we probably won't be able to spot it until it breaks into real-time on us, and maybe not until it starts killing."

The psych-music came back. A few minutes pa.s.sed before the calm voice of a communications girl spoke to Derron individually, relaying orders for him to s.h.i.+ft his pattern of search, telling him in which dimensions and by how much to change his sector. The sentries would be s.h.i.+fting all along the line, which meant that an enemy penetration into real-time was suspected. Observers would be concentrating near the area of the invasion while still maintaining a certain amount of coverage everywhere else. The first enemy attack might be only a diversion.

These days, when an enemy missile dug near the shelters, Derron rarely bothered to take cover, never felt anything worse than the remotest and vaguest sort of fear; it was the same for him now, knowing that battle was joined, or about to be. His eye and hand remained as steady as if he knew this was only one more routine training exercise. There were advantages in not caring very much whether death came now or later.

Still, he could not escape the hateful weight of responsibility, and the minutes of the watch dragged more slowly now than ever. Twice more the imperturbable female voice changed Derron's search sector. Then the Time Ops commander came back on to confirm officially that an attack was launched.

"Now keep your eyes open, boys," said the drawling voice to all the sentries, "and find me that keyhole."

At some time deeper than twenty thousand years in the past, at some place as yet undetermined, the keyhole must exist-an opening from probability-s.p.a.ce into real-time, created by the invasion of the six berserker devices.

Had men's eyes been able to watch their arrival directly, they would have seen the killing machines, looking like six stub-winged aircraft, materialize apparently from nowhere in a spot high in Sirgol's atmosphere. Like precision fliers, the machines exploded at once out of the compact formation in which they had appeared to scatter in six separate directions at multisonic speed.

And, as they separated, the six immediately began seeding the helpless world below them with poison.

Radioactives, antibiotic chemicals... it was hard to tell from a distance of twenty thousand years just what they were using. Like the other sentries, Derron Odegard saw the attack only by its effects. He perceived it as a diminution in the probability of existence of all the life in his sector, a rising tide of moribundity beginning in one corner of that sector and was.h.i.+ng slowly over the rest.

The six machines were poisoning the whole planet. If the First Men were on the surface at the time of this attack, it would of course kill them; if they landed later they would wander baby-helpless to their deaths in a foodless, sterile world. And, if that happened, the descendants in present-time of the First Men, the entire surviving population, would cease to exist. The planet and the system would be the berserkers' for the taking.

The rising odds on world death spread up through prehistory and history. In each living cell on the planet the dark tide of nonexistence rose, a malignant change visible on every sentry screen.

The many observed vectors of that change were plotted by men and computers working together in Time Operations' nerve center. They had a wealth of data to work with; perhaps no more than twenty minutes of present-time had pa.s.sed from the start of the attack until the computers announced that the keyhole of the six enemy flying machines had been pinpointed.

In the deeper catacomb called Operations Stage Two, the defensive missiles waited in stacks, their blunt simple shapes surrounded by complexities of control and launching mechanism. At the command of Operations' computers and their human overseers, steel arms extended a missile sideways from its rack, while on the dark stone floor beneath it there appeared a silvery circle, s.h.i.+mmering like a pool of troubled liquid.

The arms released the missile, and in the first instant of falling it disappeared. While one set of forces propelled it into the past, another sent it as a probability-wave up through the miles of rock, to the surface of the planet and beyond, into the stratosphere, straight for the keyhole through which the six devices of the enemy had entered real-time.

Derron saw the ominous changes that had been creeping across his screen begin suddenly to reverse themselves. It looked like a trick, like a film run backward, like some stunt without relevance to the real world.

"Right in the keyhole!" yelped the Time Ops commander's voice, drawling no longer. The six berserker devices now shared their point of entry into real-time with an atomic explosion, neatly tailored to fit.

As every screen showed the waves of death receding, jubilation spread in murmurous waves of its own, up and down the long curved ranks of sentry posts. But caution and discipline combined to keep the rejoicing muted. The remainder of the six-hour s.h.i.+ft pa.s.sed in the manner of a training exercise, in which all the i's were properly dotted and the f s crossed, the tactical success made certain by observations and tests. But beneath the discipline and caution the jubilation quietly persisted. Men who were relieved on schedule for their breaks pa.s.sed one another smiling and winking. Derron smiled like everyone else when someone met his eye. To go along, to show the expected reaction, was socially the easiest course. And he did feel a certain pride in having done a good job.

When the s.h.i.+ft ended without any further sign of enemy action, it was certain that the berserkers' first venture into time warfare had been beaten back into nonexistence.

But the d.a.m.ned machines would come back, as they always did, thought Derron. Stiff and sweaty and mentally tired, not bothering to smile this time, he rose from his chair with a sigh of relief to make room for the sentry on the next s.h.i.+ft.

"I guess you people did all right today," said the replacement, a touch of envy in his voice.

Derron managed one more smile. "You can have the next chance for glory." He pressed his thumbprint into the appropriate place on the console's scanner, as the other man did the same. Then, officially relieved, he walked at a dragging pace out of the sentry room, joining the stream of other members of his s.h.i.+ft. Here and there another face appeared as grim and tired as he knew his own must look. But once they had pa.s.sed through the doors that marked the area of enforced quiet, most of the men formed excited groups and started to whoop it up a little.

Derron stood in line to turn in his recording cartridge with its record of his s.h.i.+ft activity. Then he stood in another line, to make a short oral report to one of the debriefing officers. And after that he was free. As if, he thought, freedom had any meaning these days for a citizen of Sirgol.

A huge pa.s.senger elevator, one of a string that worked like buckets on an endless belt, lifted him amid a crowd of others out of the deeper caves of Operations to the housing level of the buried world-city. At this depth there were still miles of rock overhead.

The ideal physical environment of the sentry room was not to be found on Housing Level or at any other place where maximum human efficiency was not considered essential at all times. Throughout most of Housing Level the air tended to be stale at best, and at worst it was burdened with unpleasant odors. The lighting along most of the gray street-corridors was no better than it had to be. In most public places decoration was limited to the ubiquitous signs and posters, which, in the name of the government, exhorted the people to greater efforts for victory or promised them that improvements in living conditions were on the way..Here and there, such improvements were slowly being made. From month to month, the air became a little fresher, the food a little more varied and tastier. Given the practically limitless power of hydrogen fusion to labor for them upon the mineral wealth of the surrounding rock, it seemed that the besieged planet garrison might sustain itself indefinitely, in gradually increasing comfort.

The corridor in which Derron now walked was one of the main thoroughfares of the buried world-city.

His bachelor officer's cubicle was one of the housing units that, along with shops and offices, lined its sides. The corridor was two stories high and as wide as an ordinary main street in some ordinary minor city of the late lamented surface world. Down its center were laid moving belts, ridden in either direction by people who had to go farther than they could conveniently walk. Derron could see pairs of white-uniformed police rus.h.i.+ng past on the belts now, checking the dog tags of travelers. Planetary Command was evidently cracking down on work evaders.

As usual, the broad statwalks on either side of the moving strips were moderately crowded with an a.s.sortment of people. Men and women in work uniforms monotonously alike were going to their jobs or leaving them, at a pace neither hurried nor slow. Only a group of children just set free from some schoolroom were displaying any excess of energy. A very few adults and young people, off duty, strolled the walks or stood in line before the stores and places of amus.e.m.e.nt. Those businesses still under some semblance of private management seemed on the average to do a brisker trade than those wholly operated by the government.

One of the shorter queues of customers was the one before the local branch of the Homestead Office.

Like the other small offices and shops, it was an area part.i.tioned off by wire and gla.s.s to one side of the wide corridor. Standing in front of the Homestead Office on the statwalk, Derron looked in at the lethargic clerks, at the display of curling posters and somehow shabby models. The displays depicted, in colors meant to glow impressively, a number of plans for the postwar rehabilitation of the planet's surface.

APPLY NOW FOR THE LAND YOU WANT!.

Of land there was no shortage. Substances breathable and drinkable, however, might be hard to find.

But the Homestead a.s.sumption was that someday-after victory, of course-there would be a good new life for all on the surface, a life nourished and protected by the new oceans of air and water that were to be somehow squeezed from the planet's deep rock or, if need be, brought in from the giant outer planets of the Sirgol system.

To judge by their uniform insignia, the people standing in the short line before the Homestead office were of all cla.s.sifications and ranks. But at the moment they were all displaying what an earlier age might have called a peasant patience. With eyes that hoped and wanted to believe, they fed their gaze on the models and the posters. Derron had stopped on the statwalk mainly to look at these people standing in line. All of them had somehow managed to forget, if indeed they had ever allowed themselves to grasp the fact, that the world was dead. The real world, the one that mattered, had been killed and cremated, along with nine out of the ten of the people who had made it live.

Not that the nine out of ten, the statistics, really mattered to Derron. Or, he thought, to anyone else. It was always only the individual who mattered....

A familiar face, a beloved face, came into Derron's thoughts, and he pushed it wearily away and turned from the believers who were waiting in line for a chance to strengthen their belief.

He began to walk toward his cubicle once more; but when he came to a place where the corridor branched, he turned on impulse to follow the narrow side pa.s.sage. It was like an alley, dark and with few doors or windows; but a hundred paces ahead it ended in an arch that framed the living green of real treetops. At this time of day there would not be many people in the park.

He had not taken many steps down the side corridor before he felt the tremor of an explosion come racing through the living rock surrounding him. Ahead, he saw two small red birds streak in alarm across the green of the trees. He kept on walking without hesitating or breaking stride, and had taken three more paces before the sound came, dull and m.u.f.fled but heavy. It must have been a small missile penetration, fairly close by. From the besieging fleet in s.p.a.ce the enemy threw down probability-waves that sometimes got through the defenses and the miles of s.h.i.+elding rock and then turned into missiles and so into explosions in the vicinity of the buried shelters.

Unhurriedly, Derron continued walking to the end of the pa.s.sage. There he halted, leaning with both hands on a protective railing of natural logs while he looked out over the dozen acres of park from a little balcony two levels above the gra.s.s. From the dome of "sky" six levels higher yet, an artificial sun shone down almost convincingly on gra.s.s and trees and shrubbery and on the varicolored birds in their invisible cage of curtain-jets of air. Across the park there tumbled a narrow stream of free fresh water; today its level had fallen so that the concrete sides of its bed were revealed halfway down.

A year ago-a lifetime ago-when the real world had been still alive, Derron Odegard had not been one to spend much time in the appreciation of nature. Oh, a hike now and then in the fresh air.

But he had been concentrating on finis.h.i.+ng his schooling and in settling down to the labors of the professional historian. He had centered his life in texte and films and tapes and in the usual academic schemes for academic advancement. Even his hikes and holidays had taken him to places of historic significance.... With an effort that had become reflex, he forced the image of the woman he had loved once more from his thoughts.

A year ago, a historian's career had been a prospect filled with excitement, made electric by the first hints from the physicists that the quirks of Sirgol's unique s.p.a.ce-time might prove susceptive to manipulation, that humanity on Sirgol might be granted a firsthand look at much of its own past. Only a year ago, the berserker war had seemed remote; a terrible thing, of course, but afflicting only other worlds, light-years away. Decades had pa.s.sed since the Earthmen had brought warning, and Sirgol's planetary defenses had been decades in the building, a routine part of life's background for a young man finis.h.i.+ng his schooling.

It occurred to Derron now, as a trivial truism, that in the past year he had learned more about history than he had in all the years of study that had gone before. Not that it was doing him any good. He thought now that when the last moment of history came on Sirgol, if he could know that it was the last, he would try to get away to one of these little parks with a small bottle of wine he had been saving. He would finish history by drinking whatever number of toasts history allowed, to whatever dead and dying things seemed to him most worthy of mourning.

The tension of the day's watch was just beginning to drain from his fingers into the hand-worn bark of the railing, and he had actually forgotten the recent explosion, when the first of the wounded came stumbling into the park below.

The man came out of a narrow, gra.s.s-level entrance, his uniform jacket gone and the rest of his clothing torn and blackened. One of his bared arms was burnt and raw and swollen. He walked quickly, half blindly, among the trees, and then like an actor in some wilderness drama fell full length at the edge of the artificial brook and drank from it ravenously.

Next from the same entrance came another man, older, more sedentary in appearance. Probably some kind of clerk or administrator, though at the distance Derron could not make out his insignia. This man was not visibly wounded, but he moved into the park as if he were lost. Now and then he raised his hands to his ears; he might be deaf, or just wondering if his head was still there.

A pudgy woman entered, moaning in bewilderment, using first one hand and then the other to hold the flap of her torn scalp in place. After her another woman. A steady trickle of the suffering and maimed was flowing from the little entrance at gra.s.s level, spilling into the false peace of the park and defiling it with the swelling chorus of their querulous voices.

From somewhere down the pa.s.sages were heard authoritarian yells, and then the whine and rumble of heavy machinery. Damage Control was on the job promptly, for rescue and emergency repair. The walking wounded were obviously being sent to the park to get them out from underfoot while more urgent matters were handled. By now there were a couple of dozen sufferers wandering over the gra.s.s or lying on it, their groans demanding of the trees why the missile had gotten through today, why it had had to come to them.

Among the wounded there walked a slender young woman of eighteen or twenty, clad in the remnants of a simple paper uniform dress. She stopped, leaning against a tree as if she could walk no farther. The way her dress was torn...

Derron turned away from the railing, squeezing his eyes shut in a spasm of self-disgust. He had suddenly seen himself, standing here like some ancient tyrant remotely entertained by others' pain, condescending to l.u.s.t with a critical eye. One of these days, and soon, he would have to decide whether he was really still on the side of the human race or not.

There was a stairway handy, and he hurried down to the ground level of the park. The badly burned man was bathing his raw arm in the cool running water, and others were drinking. No one seemed to have stopped breathing or to be bleeding to death. The girl looked as if she might fall away from her supporting tree at any moment.

Pulling off his jacket as he went to her, Derron wrapped her in the garment and eased her away from the tree. "Where are you hurt?"

She shook her head and said something incoherent. Her face was pale enough for her to be in shock; he tried to get her to sit down. She would not, and so the two of them did a little off-balance dance while he held her up. She was a tall, slim girl, and under normal conditions she would be lovely... no, not lovely, or anyway not pretty in the ordinary way. But good to look at, certainly. Her hair, like most women's these days, was cut in the short simple style promoted by the government. She was wearing no jewelry or makeup at all, which was a bit unusual.

She soon came out of her daze enough to look down with bewilderment at the jacket that had been wrapped around her. "You're an officer," she said in a low blurry voice, her eyes focusing on the collar insignia.

"In a very small way. Now, hadn't you better lie down somewhere?"

"No.... I've been trying to get home... or somewhere. Can't you tell me where I am? What's going on?"

Her voice was rising.

"I believe there was a missile strike. Here now, this insignia of mine is supposed to be a help with the girls, so sit down at least, won't you?"

She resisted, and they danced a few more steps. "No. First I have to find out... I don't know who I am-or where, or why!"

"I don't know those things about myself." That was the most honest communication he had spoken to anyone in a considerable time. More people, pa.s.sersby and medics, were running into the park now, adding to the general confusion as they tried to help the wounded. Becoming gradually more aware of her surroundings, the woman looked wildly around at all this activity and clung to Derron's arm.

"All right, young lady, since you seem determined to walk, I'm going to take you to the hospital. There's one not far from here, just down the elevator. Come along."

The woman was willing enough to walk beside him, holding his arm. "What's your name?" he asked her as they boarded the elevator. The other people aboard stared at the dazed woman wearing his jacket.

"I... don't know!" Finding her name gone, she became really frightened. Her hand went to her throat, but no dog tag depended there. Many people didn't like to wear them and disregarded the regulation requiring it. "Where are you taking me?"

"I told you, to a hospital. You need some looking after." He would have liked to give a wilder answer, for their staring fellow pa.s.sengers' benefit.

Down at Operations Level, he led the woman off the elevator. A few more steps brought them to an emergency entrance to the hospital complex. Other casualties from the explosion, stretcher cases, were arriving now, and the emergency room was crowded. An elderly nurse started to take Derron's jacket off the young woman and what was left of her own clothing peeled away with it. She squealed faintly, and the nurse rewrapped her with a brisk motion. "You just come back for this jacket tomorrow, young man."

"Gladly." And then the pressure of stretcher bearers and other busy people around him was so great that he could' do no more than wave good-bye to the woman as he was forced slowly out into the corridor.

He disentangled himself from the crowd and walked away smiling, almost laughing to himself about the nurse and the jacket, as if it had been a great joke. It was a while since he had had a thought that seemed worth smiling at.

He was still smiling faintly as he ducked into the Time Operations complex to pick up the spare jacket that he kept in his locker in the sentries' ready room. There was nothing new on the bulletin board. He thought, not for the first time, of applying for a transfer, to some job that didn't require sitting still for six hours of deadly strain a day. But it seemed that those who didn't apply were just about as likely to be transferred as those who did.

Naturally, the woman's husband or lover would probably show up before tomorrow to claim her. Of course-a woman like that. Well, he would hope someone showed up for her-a sister or a brother, perhaps.

He went into the nearby officers' gym and got into a handball game with his old cla.s.smate Chan Amling, who was now a captain in the Historical Research Section. Amling was not one to play without betting, and Derron won an ersatz soft drink, which he preferred not to collect. The talk in the gym was mostly about Time Operations' first victory; when someone brought up the subject of the missile strike, Derron said no more than that he had seen some of the wounded.

After showering, Derron and Amling and a couple of others went to a bar on Housing Level that Amling favored. Major Lukas, the chief historical psychologist in Time Operations, was established there in a booth, holding forth on the psychic and other attributes of some new girls at a local uplevel dive called the Red Garter. There were some areas in which private enterprise still flourished with a minimum of governmental interference.

Amling bet with the others on darts, on dice, and on something having to do with the Red Garter girls.

Derron wasn't listening too closely, though for a change he was smiling and joking a little. He had one drink, his usual maximum, and relaxed for a while amid the social noise.

In the local officers' mess he ate his dinner with a better appet.i.te than usual. When at last he reached his cubicle, he kicked off his shoes and stretched out on his cot and for once was sound asleep before he could even consider taking a pill.

After coming stiffly awake in the middle of the night, then getting undressed and going properly to bed, he still awoke somewhat ahead of schedule and feeling well rested. The little clock on his cubicle wall read oh-six-thirty hours, Planetwide Emergency Time. This morning none of the aspects of Time weighed on him very heavily. Certainly, he thought, he had enough of that mysterious dimension at his disposal to let him stop at the hospital for a while before going on duty.

Carrying yesterday's jacket over his arm, he followed a nurse's directions and found the woman seated in a patients' lounge, which at this time of the morning she had pretty much to herself. She was planted directly in front of the television, frowning with naive-looking concentration at Channel Gung-Ho, as the government's exhortation channel was popularly termed. Today the woman was wearing a plain new paper dress and hospital slippers.

At the sound of Derron's step she turned her head quickly, then smiled and got to her feet. "Oh, it's you!

It's a good feeling to recognize someone."

Derron took the hand she was holding out. "It's a good feeling to be recognized. You're looking much better."

She thanked Derron for his help, and he protested that it had been nothing. She turned off the television sound and they sat down to talk. He introduced himself.