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Berserker

Series · 19 books

By Fred Saberhagen

There had been a battle. The berserker had met some terrible opponent, and had taken a terrible wound. A cavity two miles wide and 50 miles deep had been driven in by a sequence of shaped atomic charges, through level after level of machinery, deck after deck of armor and had been stopped only by the last inner defenses of the buried unliving heart. The berserker had survived and crushed its enemy, and soon after, its repair machines had sealed over the outer opening of the wound, using extra thicknesses of armor. When Hemphill sees the blasted cavity, what little of it his tiny spacesuit lamp can show, he feels a shrinking fear greater than any in his memory. Stopping on the edge of the void with his arm instinctively around Maria, he is stunned by the realization of just what fighting the berserker means. They have already come an hour's journey from the airlock, through weightless vacuum inside the great machine. Hemphill, his pistol ready, has a bomb, and 200 feet of cord tied around his left arm, when he recognizes the once-molten edge of the berserker's great scar for what it the damned thing has survived a level of attempted destruction that not only had hardly weakened it, but rendered the bomb Hemphill carried under his arm only a pathetic toy.

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Author

Fred Saberhagen

Author · 81 books

Fred Saberhagen was an American science fiction and fantasy author most famous for his ''Beserker'' and Dracula stories. Saberhagen also wrote a series of a series of post-apocalyptic mytho-magical novels beginning with his popular ''Empire of the East'' and continuing through a long series of ''Swords'' and ''Lost Swords'' novels. Saberhagen died of cancer, in Albuquerque, New Mexico Saberhagen was born in and grew up in the area of Chicago, Illinois. Saberhagen served in the [[U.S. Air Force]] during the Korean War while he was in his early twenties. Back in civilian life, Saberhagen worked as an It was while he was working for Motorola (after his military service) that Saberhagen started writing fiction seriously at the age of about 30. "Fortress Ship", his first "Berserker" short shory, was published in 1963. Then, in 1964, Saberhagen saw the publication of his first novel, ''The Golden People''. From 1967 to 1973, he worked as an editor for the Chemistry articles in the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' as well as writing its article on science fiction. He then quit and took up writing full-time. In 1975, he moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He married fellow writer Joan Spicci in 1968. They had two sons and a daughter.