Berserker (Saberhagen)

The art of speculative fiction lies in the ability to create a plausible future that tells us a great deal about our present. This critically acclaimed recording by narrators Aaron Lustig and Henry Strozier chronicles human reactions on earth to an invasion by alien exterminators intent upon wiping out all sentient life on earth.

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 long over and the threat of the sentient doomsday has passed. Or has 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 Empress of the Eight Worlds has been assassinated. Prince Harivarman, exiled on the Templar Radiant, suspects that he will be the next victim. Help is scarce: Anne Blenheim, the fortress' clear-eyed, fair Commander, is favorably disposed toward the Prince, but her first responsibility is to the Templar High Command. And Chen Shizuoka, a Templar recruit sympathetic to Harivarman's cause, is being stalked by planetary security forces. When Prince Harivarman discovers an operable Berserker—one of the asteroid-sized, spacefaring war machines that once destroyed their makers and all other life in their path—his first instinct is to turn it in. But then he finds an ancient code that will either allow him to control the dreaded machine or lead him—and everyone else on the Templar Radiant—to certain death.

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 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.

The Berserkers, intelligent, space-faring killing machines whose sole purpose is to destroy all life, have developed a new trick: Berserker units that can pass for human-created androids. They're gambling on the advantage this gives them and massing for an all-out attack on human-held space.

In a sector of the galaxy occupied by Earth-descended people, one berserker computer has suddenly and mysteriously developed a tactical strategy unlike anything the human opposition has seen before. Shiva, like the Hindu god of destruction after which it was named, annihilates entire colonies with the help of its fiendish subordinates. Commander Claire Normandy struggles to prepare for Shiva's attacks, while Pilot Harry Silver realizes that he must deal with his own demons in order to help her. When a decision is made to destroy the destroyer, neither side is prepared for the incredible risks that emerge as the attack becomes imminent. Can either side face the possibility that something wholly unexpected and eerily familiar lies gnarled within the steel?

Master storyteller Fred Saberhagen continues his bestselling Berserker series, detailing humanity's war with the dreaded juggernaut-like machines programmed to destroy all life in the galaxy. On the Twin World planets, Prairie and Timber, Plenipotentiary Gregor is determined to serve his government-even if it means executing innocent Huvean hostages, invaders from another planet-and even though Gregor's own granddaughter, Luon, is in love with a Huvean. But now the Berserkers are threatening the Twin Worlds, capturing the planets' president and reprogramming his brain to suit their violent agenda. And only the Huveans, in a desperate reprieve, can save the Twin Worlds' populace from annihilation.

Harry Silver has already had a lifetime of trouble from ordinary Berserkers, the automated killing machines programmed an age ago to denude the galaxy of life. And now one of these machines has gone rogue—and kidnapped his own family. What worse devilry will a deviant killing machine attempt? How will he stop it? And even if he can, will he ever see his family alive again?

There had been a battle, and the Berserker had met some terrible opponent, 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 had 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.

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."