t the end of Berserker's Star (2003), our hero Harry Silver was a new dad, having sired a child named Ethan with his wife, Becky. The opening of this new book finds Becky and Ethan safe on their home planet, while Harry continues to gallivant around the universe trying to make a living as a pilot. He's without a ship of his own, however, and so is naturally receptive when one of the richest men in the galaxy—the ancient Winston Cheng—offers him a top-of-the-line ship in return for accepting a small assignment. There's only one catch: The job spells suicide.
Cheng's granddaughter and her child have been kidnapped by Berserkers, and the billionaire wants Harry to lead an armed force to recover the victims, in lieu of any cooperation from the reluctant police authorities. Normally these relic killing machines simply exterminate any "badlife" wherever they find it. ("Goodlife" is the term Berserkers apply to their traitorous human stooges.) But the Berserker unit who kidnapped the Chengs is a rogue, and Winston Cheng has hope his heirs are still alive. As we discover, the rogue is an experimental unit that has split off from the Berserker command. What its plans are for its captives, no one knows.
Harry declines to take the incredibly dangerous job. But he's soon forced to change his mind when Becky and Ethan are also captured by the rogue. (Coincidence, or larger plot?) Now, Winston Cheng represents Harry's only hope of rescuing his own family.
Harry joins the other members of Cheng's squad on a starless world, where they will prepare for the assault on the rogue's hidden nearby base. There, Harry meets—or re-meets—an old acquaintance, Del Satranji. Satranji bears a grudge against Harry, making for chilly professional relations. But they cooperate under Cheng's command. One of Harry's first tasks is to secure the services of a genius inventor named Aristotle Gianopolous. In the course of doing so, Harry encounters new information relating to the kidnapping of his family, which deepens the mystery.
With the assault imminent, however, Cheng's plan falls to pieces, and Harry is left to improvise madly—one very human skill that the Berserkers have no defense against.
More human-Berserker interaction
In the prior installment of this series, Saberhagen seemed to lose his focus a bit. The Berserkers were kept mostly offstage, depriving the reader of the face-to-faceplate confrontations that stoked so much of the action of the earliest episodes. In this volume, however, it's back to the basics, and that's all to the good.
Harry has to confront not only the rogue Berserker, but also another killing machine who is simultaneously hunting Harry and the rogue. By cooperating at times with both deadly machines, Harry walks a suspenseful tightrope. The moral ambiguity of his actions adds another dimension to the tale. Harry, in the wake of his personal tragedy, has become a kind of amoral, driven figure. He really cares little for his own life or the lives of anyone who gets in the way of the rescue of his family. This transformation of his character is nicely handled by Saberhagen, who at times portrays Harry as a kind of almost Punisher-style figure. His actions, for instance, when confronted with human captives at the rogue's base are, if not exactly ignoble, certainly not conventionally heroic. This alteration of the figure we knew from the earlier book is a surprising yet alluring change.
What is also surprising is the way Saberhagen is willing to undermine his own plotting. Not to deliver any spoilers, but Cheng's mission fails to come off as planned, despite all narrative foreshadowings to the contrary. This injection of realistic snafus into the tale undercuts any cliched predictability.
As for the Berserker psychology on display, Saberhagen has crafted a truly scary and worthy opponent for Harry in the form of the Rogue. (The Rogue's fascination with human nature recalls a similar motif in the recent Dune prequels, but Anderson and Herbert were probably influenced by Saberhagen's pioneering work rather than vice versa.) Future appearances by this nemesis will be watched for with anticipation.
