Perhaps it dreamed. The universe about it was a simple one, aflow with energies; it had to be monitored for deviations from the random, for order. Order was life—or berserker.
The mass of the approaching star distorted space. When space became too curved, 100101101110 surrendered its grip on the C-plus-excited state. Its velocity fell to a tenth of light-speed, and 100101101110 began to decelerate further. Now it was not dreaming.
At a million kilometers, life might show as a reflection band in the green or orange or violet. At a hundred kilometers, many types of living nerve clusters would radiate their own distinctive patterns. Rarely was it necessary to come so close. Easier to pull near a star, alert for attack, and search the liquid-water temperature band for the spectra of an oxygen world. Oxygen meant life.
There.
Sometimes life would defend itself. 100101101110 had not been attacked, not yet; but life was clever. The berserker was on hair-trigger alert while it looked about itself.
The blue pinpoint had tinier moons: a large one at a great distance, and a smaller one, close enough that tides had pulled it into a teardrop shape.
The larger moon was inconveniently large, even for 100101101110. The smaller, at 4 x 1015 grams, would be adequate. The berserker fortress moved on it, all senses alert.
Hilary Gage had no idea what to expect.
When he was younger, when he was human, he had organized Channith’s defenses against berserkers. The berserkers had not come to Channith in the four hundred and thirty years since Channith became a colony. He had traveled. He had seen ravaged worlds and ruined, slagged berserkers; he had studied records made by men who had beaten the killer machines; there were none from the losers.
Harvest had bothered him. He had asked that the monitoring station be destroyed. It wasn’t that the program (Ras Singh, at that time) might revolt. Gage feared that berserkers might come to Harvest, might find the monitoring station, might rob the computer for components…and find them superior to their own machinery.
He had been laughed at. When Singh asked that his personality be erased, Gage had asked again. That time he had been given more makework. Find a way to make the station safe.
He had tried. There was the Remora sub-program; but it had to be so versatile! Lung problems had interrupted his work before he was fully satisfied with it. Otherwise he had no weapons at all.
And the berserker had come.
The beast was damaged. Something had probed right through the hull—a terrific thickness of hull, no finesse here, just mass to absorb the energies of an attack—and Gage wondered if it had received that wound attacking Channith. He’d know more if he could permit himself to use radar or neutrino beams; but he limited himself to passive instruments, including the telescope.
The two-hundred-year project was over. The berserker would act to exterminate every microbe in the water and air of Harvest. Gage was prepared to watch Harvest die. He toyed with the idea that when it was over, the fortress would be exhausted of weapons and energy, a sitting duck for any human warfleet…but there were no weapons in the Harvest system. For now, Hilary Gage could only record the event for Channith’s archives.
Were there still archives? Had that thing attended to Channith before it came here? There was no way to know.
What did a berserker do when the target didn’t fight back? Two centuries ago, Harvest had been lifeless, with a reducing atmosphere, as Earth itself had been once. Now life was taking hold. To the berserker, this ball of colored slimes was life, the enemy. It would attack. How?
He needn’t call the berserker’s attention to himself. Doubtless the machine could sense life…but Gage was not alive. Would it destroy random machinery? Gage was not hidden, but he didn’t use much energy; solar panels were enough to keep the station running.
The berserker was landing on Teardrop.
Time passed. Gage watched. Presently the berserker’s drive spewed blue flame.
The berserker wasn’t wasting fuel; its drive drew its energies from the fabric of space itself. But what was it trying to accomplish?
Then Hilary understood, in his mind and in the memory-ghost of his gut. The berserker machine was not expending its own strength. It had found its weapon in nature.
The violet star fanned forward along Teardrop’s orbit. That would have been a sixty-gravity drive for the berserker alone. Attached to an asteroid three thousand times its mass, it was still slowing Teardrop by .02 G, hour after hour.
One hundred years of labor. He might gamble Harvest against himself…a half-terraformed world against components to repair a damaged berserker.
He toyed with the idea. He’d studied recordings of berserker messages before he was himself recorded. But there were better records already in the computer.
The frequencies were there, and the coding: star and world locations, fuel and mass and energy reserves, damage description, danger probabilities, orders of priority of targets; some specialized language to describe esoteric weaponry as used by self-defensive life; a code that would translate into the sounds of human or alien speech; a simplified code for a brain-damaged berserker…
Gage discarded his original intent. He couldn’t conceivably pose as a berserker. Funny, though: he felt no fear. The glands were gone, but the habit of fear…had he lost that too?
Teardrop’s orbit was constricting like a noose.
Pose as something else!
Think it through. He needed more than just a voice. Pulse, breath: he had recordings. Vice-president Curly Barnes had bid him goodby in front of a thousand newspickups, after Gage became a recording, and the speech was in his computer memory. A tough old lady, Curly, far too arrogant to pose as Goodlife, but he’d use his
