Berserker's Star — Fred Saberhagen

Fred Saberhagen continues his Berserker Series®, a chronicle of a war between humanity and the terrifying race of sentient machines bent on death and destruction. Pilot Harry Silver's name is know throughout the galaxy. While he has defeated his share of Berserkers, he has also stolen a powerful weapon from the Space Force, making him a fugitive from the life he once knew. Looking for an adventure Harry agrees to bring a passenger aboard his ship: Lily, a woman who is on a quest to retrieve her husband.

It won't be easy, as Lily's husband has joined a secretive religious cult on Maracanda, an almost-planet lodged between a shifting black hole and a neutron star. While the landscape of Maracanda is treacherous, so too, may be the people around Harry Silver. For as the search for Lily's husband deepens, Harry finds himself investigating a larger mystery and looking for missing persons, almost ending up one himself.

And, as always, there is the threat of death from above, in the path of a machine whose only intent is to kill.