There have been a battle, and the Berserker met some terrible opponents, taking a horrible wound. The cavity reached through level after degree of equipment, deck after deck of armor, stopped only by the last internal defenses of the buried, unliving heart. The Berserker survived and crushed its enemy.

When Hemphill saw the blasted cavity, he sensed a shrinking fear, stunned by the realization of precisely what this means to battle the Berserker. Hemphill, his pistol prepared, his correct arm instinctively around Maria, got a bomb and two hundred feet of cord tied around his left arm when he identified the Berserker’s great scar tissue for what it had been. The damned issue had survived an even of attempted damage that rendered the bomb under his arm just a pathetic gadget.

This is the start of the war against the berserkers, with machines poised to eliminate all life in the galaxy. The thing standing within their way may be the descendants of Earth.