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Berserker Death
Table of Contents
The Berserker Wars
STONE PLACE
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
WHAT T AND I DID
MR. JESTER
THE WINGED HELMET
STARSONG
SOME EVENTS AT THE
TEMPLAR RADIANT
WINGS OUT OF SHADOW
THE SMILE
METAL MURDERER
PATRON OF THE ARTS
Berserker Blue Death
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
Berserker Kill
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
PART TWO
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
BERSERKER DEATH
FRED SABERHAGEN
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any
resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
The Berserker Wars
copyright © 1981; "Stone Place" copyright © 1967; "The Face of the Deep" ©
1967; "What T and I Did" © 1967, "Mr. Jester" © 1967, "The Winged Helmet" © 1969, "Starsong" ©
1979, "Some Events at the Templar Radiant" © 1979, "Wings out of Shadow" © 1979, "The Smile" ©
1979, "Patron of the Arts" © 1967;
Berserker Blue Death
copyright © 1985;
Berserker Kill
copyright
© 1993; all by Fred Saberhagen. "The Adventure of the Metal Murderer" © 1979 by Omni Publications
International.
Berserkers® is a registered trademark of Fred Saberhagen
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Megabook
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-7434-9886-0
Cover art by Jeff Miller
First Megabook printing, February 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH (www.windhaven.com)
Printed in the United States of America
Baen Books by Fred Saberhagen
Rogue Berserker
Berserker Man
(Megabook)
Berserker Death
(Megabook)
The Dracula Tape
Vlad Tapes
Pilgrim
The Black Throne
(with Roger Zelazny)
AUTHOR'S NOTE
For more information about Fred Saberhagen
and this series see:
www.berserker.com
The Berserker Wars
MESSAGE BEGINS
REPORT ON THE PRIVATE ARCHIVE OF THE THIRD HISTORIAN
A File Which Presents the History of the Galaxy in Twenty Pages
Transmission Mode: Triplicate Message Torpedoes
Code: Trapdoor XIII
TX Date: 7645.11.0
From: Archivist Ingli, Expedition Co-ordinator
To: Chief Co-ordinator, Earth Archives
cc: Defense Co-ordination Central
Hal: We're here, surrounded by friendly Carmpan of whom we rarely see more than one or two at a
time, and then usually only with some partial or symbolic physical barrier between us. Everything is going
pretty much as expected, we have experienced nothing really contrary to the experience of a thousand
years' occasional and arm's-length contact with the race. By the way, it's beginning to look, to me at
least, less and less coincidental that our first meeting with the Carmpan coincided almost exactly with the
beginning of the Berserker War. I'll have more to say on this point presently.
Let me first describe what I consider to be our main achievement so far on this mission. To begin with,
the structure in which we are living and working is best described as a large, comfortable library, and we
have been given free access to great masses of information in several kinds of storage systems. (I hope,
by the way, that the exchange team of Carmpan researchers on Earth are being treated as well as we are
here.) Much of this mass of stored data is, as we expected, still unintelligible to us and so far useless. But
quite early in the game our hosts pointed out to us, for our special attention, an alcove containing what
we've come to call the private archive of the Third Historian. Having looked at the files therein, my
colleagues and I agree unanimously that they were very probably compiled and largely written by the
same Carmpan individual who used that name (or title) as signature to the messages he composed and
sent to our ancestors some generations ago, when the Berserker peril was even greater than it is today.
Since a copy of this report is going directly to the military, Hal, bear with me when I pause now and then
to insert a paragraph or two of history. We can't reasonably expect that all the readers over there are
going to know as much of it offhand as we do.
Up until now, almost all of the information that we have ever had directly from the Carmpan on any
subject—Berserkers, the Builders, the Carmpan themselves, the Elder Races, almost everything—a very
great proportion of this information, I say, has come to our Solarian worlds through long-distance
communications signed by this one individual, for whom we still have no other name than Third Historian.
He—or she, the Carmpan language does not readily distinguish sexes, and they usually appear to care
not much more about sex than we do about blood types—was active centuries ago, and to my
knowledge no new Third Historian message has been received on the Solarian world for centuries.
So we still know next to nothing about the Third Historian—or indeed about any Carmpan
individual—as a person, and it appears to me unlikely that this present Expedition is going to find out
much about him. We do of course ask questions, particularly since being shown the private archive that is
marked in several places with his signature. Our questions are answered in the usual obscure ways, about
which more below. Even the significance of the number in his name or title is still unknown to us. It does
seem certain that more than three individuals must have occupied the post of Chief Historian—assuming
there is such an official post among the Carmpan—during such a very long history as their race boasts.
Or would boast if they were at all given to boasting.
When I asked directly, I was told that the Third Historian is still alive. This surprised me somewhat,
though the life-span required, considerably less than a thousand standard years, would not be utterly out
of the question even for one of our own comparatively perishable species. However, when I asked
urgently to see him, or at least to be told where he is now, I was informed just as unequivocally that the
Third Historian is now dead. One of the enclosures with this message is our own recording of this
particular question-and-answer session.
Let me digress just a little more from the important contents of the TH's private files, to remark that in
the short time we've been here we've had more face-to-face (if that's the right way to put it; you know
what I mean) contact with the Carmpan than have any other group of Solarian humans in history. As you
are well aware, we were very eager for this chance. On the long voyage out here we managed to
convince ourselves that with goodwill on both sides (a requirement that I certainly feel has been met) we
were going to do a lot better at communicating with the Carmpan than any other of our race has ever
done. We were going to dig a lot of Galactic history out of them, complete with hard facts, dates,
numbers, the kind of thing
we
like to call history. We would dig up information that must be available to
them even if they consider it valueless, and bring it home with us. Not only that, we would at last meet a
Carmpan or two who really wanted to learn about us through our own conscious attempts at
communication; and, boy, were we ever going to communicate with
them.
Need I add, that so far it hasn't worked out quite that way? That so far our formal conference sessions
are dominated, whatever we Solarians try to do, by the Carmpan spiritual (?) and sociological
abstractions? (Military readers, see my monograph on
Drifts and Tones in Carmpan Communications
; someone at the Archives will be glad to furnish you with copies.) That's just the way in which our
gracious hosts here insist on looking at the Universe. I find I must set down the cliche once again, and
then I swear that I will ban it from all later messages: The Carmpan mind is very, very different from our
own.
Of course the communications we have been directing to the Carmpan while in general conference form,
to our way of thinking, a clear and concise outline of the history of our Solarian variant of the human race,
from our origins on Earth through our later phases of expansion and development to the present, when
we are the dominant life form on more than a thousand major planets in more than seven hundred
systems, not to mention all the natural and artificial extrasystemic habitats, enjoying a blessed variety of
political and economic organizations while managing to co-operate quite well, most of us, most of the
time, in the thousand-year Berserker War.
I frankly don't know what our hosts think of this presentation we make about ourselves. There are
moments when I believe they knew it all already, knew more than we have told them, down to the last
detailed production statistic, through their own far-ranging mental activities. And, again, there are times
when I believe they just don't care, don't know and aren't interested, are going through the motions of
listening to us only out of politeness. They do express thanks when we pause after shoving information at
them, as they express thanks for so much else that our race has done. But there is no substantive
comment on what we tell them. There are no questions that sound eager.
That's how things stand now. We are here, and being very well treated, and we like our hosts. And they
like us and are glad to have us here, even if it would be strictly inaccurate to say that they enjoy our
company. And it is somehow implied that they have done, are doing, will do, something important for us.
That's how things stand now, how they stood the moment we arrived. Actually we could just have sent
them an electronic greeting card and accomplished just as much.
Except of course for one thing. Our presentation of our own history evidently had at least one good
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