Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 11 - Berserker Kill.pdf - Fred Saberhagen - widez2

BERSERKER'S

KILL

THE BERSERKER SERIES

Fred Saberhagen

Tor books by Fred Saberhagen

THE BERSERKER SERIES

The Berserker Wars

Berserker Base (with Poul Anderson, Ed Bryant, Stephen

Donaldson, Larry Niven, Connie Willis, and Roger Zelazny)

Berserker: Blue Death

The Berserker Throne

Berserker's Planet

THE DRACULA SERIES

The Dracula Tapes

The Holmes-Dracula Files

An Old Friend of the Family

Thorn

Dominion

A Matter of Taste

A Question of Time

Seance for a Vampire*

THE SWORDS SERIES

The First Book of Swords

The Second Book of Swords

The Third Book of Swords

The First Book of Lost Swords: Woundhealer's Story

The Second Book of Lost Swords: Sightblinder's Story

The Third Book of Lost Swords: Stonecutter's Story

The Fourth Book of Lost Swords: Farslayer's Story

The Fifth Book of Lost Swords: Coinspinner's Story

The Sixth Book of Lost Swords: Mindsword's Story

The Seventh Book of Lost Swords: Wayfinder's Story

The Last Book of Swords: Shieldbreaker's Story*

OTHER BOOKS

A Century of Progress Coils (with Roger Zelazny) Earth

Descended The Mask of the Sun The Veils of Azlaroc The Water

of Thought

[ * Forthcoming]

FRED SABERHAGEN

BERSERKER KILL

TOR

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or

events is purely coincidental.

BERSERKER KILL

portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10010

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 0-312-85266-5

First edition: October 1993

Printed in the United States of America

PROLOGUE

The ship was more intelligent in several ways than either of

the people it was carrying. One task at which the optel brain of

the ship excelled was computing the most efficient search

pattern to be traced across and around the indistinct,

hard-to-determine edges of the deep, dark nebula. Most of the

time during the mission the ship drove itself without direct

human guidance along this self-selected course, back and forth,

in and out among the broad serrations, the yawning,

million-kilometer chasms in the clouds of interstellar gas and

dust that made up the Mavronari.

The only reason that such ships weren't sent out crewless to

conduct surveys without direct supervision was that their

intelligence was inferior to that of organic humanity when it

came to dealing with the unforeseen. Only breathing humans

could be expected to pay close attention to everything about the

nebula that other breathing humans might find of interest.

__________________

A man and a woman, Scurlock and Carol, crewed the survey

ship. The couple had known for months that they were very right

for each other, and that was good, because being on the best of

terms with your partner was requisite when you were spending

several months in the isolation of deep space, confined to a

couple of small rooms, continually alone together.

Carol and Scurlock had been married shortly before embarking

on this voyage, though they had not been acquainted for very

long before that. By far the greater proportion of their married

life, now totaling approximately a standard month, had been

spent out here nosing around the Mavronari Nebula.

The ship was not their property, of course. Very, very few

individuals were wealthy enough to possess their own interstellar

transportation. It was a smallish but highly maneuverable and

reasonably speedy spacecraft, bearing no name but only a

number, and it was the property of the Sardou Foundation,

wealthy people who had their reasons for being willing to spend

millions collecting details about some astronomical features,

certain aspects of the Galaxy, which most Galactic citizens found

highly unexciting.

At the moment the young couple and their employers' ship

were many days away from the nearest inhabited planet, even at

the optimum pattern of superluminal jumps and journeying in

normal space at sublight velocity that the survey craft could have

managed. Not that such remoteness from the rest of humanity

had particularly concerned either Carol or Scurlock, up to now.

Scurlock was rather tall and loosely muscled, with pale eyes

and long lashes that made him look even younger than he really

was. Carol was of middle height, inclined to thinness, and had

several physical features suggesting that some of her ancestors

had called old Earth's Middle East their home.

Both young people tended to be intense and ambitious. But just

now both were in a light mood, singing and joking as they made

the observations of nebular features comprising today's work.

Some of the jokes were at the expense of their shipboard optel

brain, the very clever unit that was cradling their two lives at the

moment, assuming responsibility for piloting and astrogation

during most of the voyage. But no offense was taken; like other

ships, this one never knew or cared what its human masters and

passengers might be making jokes about.

One of the secondary objectives of this mission, politely but

firmly impressed upon the couple by their employers, was to

discover, if possible, some practical new means of ingress to the

nebula, an astrogable channel or channels, as yet uncharted,

leading into the Mavronari. The existence of such a passage

would greatly facilitate interstellar travel between the inhabited

worlds existing on one side of this great mass of gas and dust, and

other worlds, now largely unknown but possibly habitable, that

Fred Saberhagen - Berserker 11 - Berserker Kill.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: