Berserker Kill
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
An ancient berserker, a gigantic space going killer machine programmed to destroy all life, seizes a space laboratory devoted to preserving a vast number of human zygotes. The zygotes are being stored for retrieval and growth in a future colonization project. Captain Dirac Sardou, whose wife and zygote were on the space vehicle, is obsessed with pursuit of the berserker. During the chase, mysteriously the laboratory, Captain Sardou’s ship, and the berserker disappear.
Three hundred years after the disappearance, evidence of the missing vehicles and the damaged berserker is found.
The would be rescuers are confounded. Why didn’t the berserker destroy the Captain’s ship? Why hasn’t the berserker destroyed the vessel filled with nascent life?
A fast paced space adventure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Saberhagen's Berserker series chronicles the ongoing conflict between space-faring humanity and the doomsday war machines of the title, programmed to exterminate all life. Emerging from the depths of the Mavronari Nebula, a berserker ship takes human prisoners, steals a research station orbiting the nearby planetoid Imatra--which carries a billion stored human zygotes intended for a colonization effort--and heads back to its Mavronari hideout, leaving Imatrans mystified. Premier Dirac Sardou, believing his newlywed wife may still be aboard the station, assembles a makeshift force and pursues, never to be heard from again. Three centuries later, a new berserker attack demolishes Imatra; another human expedition gives chase, and what they find in the Mavronari dust cloud is stranger than anything they expected. Saberhagen breathes life into the often-arid soil of future-war SF with intriguing characters, neat plot twists, rousing action and no trace of the gung-ho macho posturing that marks much military science fiction. This smart, fast-moving story is edge-of-the-seat reading.
