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"Fortress Ship" is a 5,000-word short story by Fred Saberhagen, about some Earth spaceships fighting against an alien killing machine. The story was first published in the January 1963 issue of Worlds of If.

Plot

A berserker is an automated alien ship, built to destroy all life it encounters, probably built as a weapon in a war years ago. Two Earth ships are in a standoff with a berserker, delaying it until the third ship, necessary to destroy a berserker, can arrive. The berserker uses a mind and body control beam to disable one of the Earth pilots, but it doesn’t work very well. Then the berserker proposes playing a simplified game of checkers against the pilot. The pilot realizes that playing the game will give the berserker information on when his mind control beam is working, because then he will not be able to play the game intelligently any more. But the pilot has an animal on board, an aiyon named Newton. The pilot shows Newton some positions from the game, and trains him to push certain buttons when certain positions show up. This makes it look, to the berserker, like an intelligent mind is controlling the ship, which delays the berserker attack until they can destroy it.

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 25 (1963).

This was the first of many stories that Saberhagen has written about berserker ships.