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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.

International.

Berserkers® is a registered trademark of Fred Saberhagen

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

Fred Saberhagen - Berserker Death.pdf

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