Berserker (Saberhagen)

Five hundred years have passed since the combined fleets of humanity met and broke the berserker armada at Stone Place. But though the human victory was total, one of the killer machines-weaponless, its star drive a ruin-managed to limp to a secret sanctuary on a planet called Hunter's World. Over the years since then, a new cult has arisen there: a cult dedicated to Death as the only and ultimate good. For Hunter's World has become Berserker's Planet.

To defeat the ultimate weapon, you must become one... Once, mankind feared the berserkers, killer machines determined to eradicate all life in the universe. But the Berserker Wars are over and the threat of the sentient doomsday devices is over. Or is it? The berserkers are back, stronger and more unstoppable than before. And one strange child, half human and half machine, may be humanity's only hope-or its final destroyer.

The great blue Berserker's destruction of the human colony Shubra was swift and merciless. And when it was over, Niles Domingo's daughter lay among the dead. Now Niles Domingo is a man with a mission: vengeance at any cost. With one small ship, Niles sets out against the great Berserker called Leviathan, tracking it through the interstellar mists of the Milkpail Nebula. He is sure he is ready for anything, but nothing can prepare him for the astonishing discoveries that lie between him and his vengeance.

Long, long ago, two alien races fought a war of extinction. All that is left of either of them are the berserkers: vast, thinking, spacefaring, killer machines whose sole purpose is to destroy all living things. For the first time in all of their history, they have met a life form that has a chance of stopping them. In the cold reaches of space, the berserkers seize a floating laboratory full of human germ-plasm being stored for retrieval and growth in a future colonization project. The ship contains millions of human lives-but why are they not destroying them? Will the human pursuers manage to find the missing lab, defeat the berserkers, and save the nascent lives? This is a major Berserker novel-one of Saberhagen's finest-with one hell of a surprise up its sleeve.

Our wars were behind us. Mankind was moving out from the planet of its birth. New worlds were settled, and with the wealth of the galaxy at hand, poverty was eliminated. Then out of a clear summer sky came the first berserker attack. The great battles began-between life and nonlife, between freethinking humanity and the preprogrammed killing machines we came to call berserkers. And some of those battles would be waged with lies. This collection of short stories continues the ongoing saga of the berserker wars with "The Machinery of Lies," "Masque of the Red Shift," "In the Temple of Mars," "Brother Berserker," and "Smasher."

There had been a battle, and the Berserker met some terrible opponents, taking an awful wound. The cavity reached through level after level of machinery, deck after deck of armor, stopped only by the last inner defenses of the buried, unliving heart. The Berserker survived and crushed its enemy. When Hemphill saw the blasted cavity, he felt a shrinking fear, stunned by the realization of just what it means to fight the Berserker. Hemphill, his pistol ready, his right arm instinctively around Maria, had a bomb and two hundred feet of cord tied around his left arm when he recognized the Berserker's great scar for what it was. The damned thing had survived a level of attempted destruction that rendered the bomb under his arm only a pathetic toy. This is the beginning of the war against the berserkers, with machines poised to destroy all life in the galaxy. The only thing standing in their way is the descendants of Earth.