Berserker

Author: Fred Saberhagen

Is there anything scarier than a human hell-bent on eradicating life as we know it? Only sentient, artificially intelligent beings that are hell-bent on eradicating all life in the universe! Berserker is a collection of space opera, science-fiction stories that regales the reader with the ongoing war between the humans and the Berserkers. Saberhagen named the Berserkers after the Norse warrior legends. They are self-replicating war machines, doomsday weapons that are leftovers from an inter-stellar alien war. They were designed by the Builders to annihilate the Red Race, in a war which took place around the time of Earth's Paleolithic era. In a rookie error, the Builders fails to program the Berserkers to protect their creators after destroying their enemies, and shortly after Berserkers destroyed the Red Race; they turned on their creators and exterminated them too. The Berserkers are artificially intelligent beings who range from the size of asteroids to humans to even smaller sizes, and what makes them deadly is their programming of one, single objective: destroy all life. After destroying both the Builders and the Red Race, the self-replicating Berserkers have continued to follow their programming and wipe out all forms of life that they encounter in the Milky Way, which leads to the coordination of the sentient races in to defeat them.