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Harry stepped out into the clear before the flying shape came down.
Standing where he had a clear line of fire, he pumped packet after packet
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singly into the lifeless metal, one impact hurling the maimed puppet back into
the air, another smashing it against the broken geometry of the
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html cliffside. A third and a fourth tore
it to pieces before it could fall back to Maracandan soil.
There was little left of the berserker machine but tumbling fragments, sparks
dying in the dusty atmosphere.
Nothing anywhere but burning wreckage, no piece bigger than a human hand or
foot.
"Harry?" Lily's voice came from the ship.
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"
Harry
?" At last she sounded like she might be cracking with the strain.
"I'm all right. Just shut up a minute."
He had heard something else, something that made him stand and listen. Turning
up his airmikes' sensitivity, he waited for his own breathing to quiet, and
listened very carefully.
Cautiously he moved to
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html a new position, still keeping a
barricade of rock between himself and the cave entrance.
There might, after all, be one more bandit somewhere in there.
Then, with his carbine ready, he moved closer to the cave's mouth.
His airmikes told him there were faint sounds coming from inside, faint sounds
as of another pair of human lungs.
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TWENTY-TWO
Keeping a sharp eye out, Harry advanced step by step to the very threshold of
the cave.
Deep inside, thirty or forty meters ahead, the discreet lights that he had
noticed earlier still burned, making modest pools of illumination in front of
and around mysterious equipment whose purpose the intruder could not yet
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html guess. The moaning sounds were coming
from somewhere in the same vicinity.
Harry's view of the area was partially blocked by squarish intervening
objects, and he saw that he was facing the back of a row of high crates and
cabinets that formed a rough partition across most of the width of the cave.
The pummeling Harry's
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html armor had absorbed from falling rocks
and glancing shots had started up some stray vibrations in his suit so that
the arms and legs were taking turns in palsied quiverings.
Inside his helmet and its forcefield pads, his ears still rang. He hoped and
expected that, given a little time, his gear could readjust itself to deal
with these several problems. Meanwhile, he
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html could still see and hear and walk. He
could fire the carbine again if he had to. He only hoped he could still hit
something.
It was almost as if his quivering suit had suddenly turned coward on him.
Before turning his back on what was left of the berserker, Harry instinctively
gave the ruin one more careful look, just making sure the bits and pieces were
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Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Star.html now harmless. In the past he had seen
the damned berserkers do too many wonderful and horrible things to ever feel
safe in the presence of one of them, even when it had been torn apart. Maybe
after the remains had been thoroughly gone over by human experts and their
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