“I’VE ANALYZED THE ENTIRE SHIP’S
RECORDING AND I find it remarkable that any of you survived,”
Star Eagle remarked as they headed back to the base world.
“It would seem to me that none of you would without Nagy, and
now Nagy is gone.”
“What about him?” Raven asked. “You heard the
deathbed statement. Was he telling the truth, or what?”
“Who can say? As far as I can see, he was a normal
Earth-human in all respects, but that can be deceiving. Up to now
we have been thinking in terms of some of us perhaps having to
become colonials, but what holds for us holds for others. An atom
is just an atom and a molecule is just a molecule to the
transmuter. His earlier remark about some of you having to make
what he called the ultimate sacrifice is revealing, I
think.”
Raven nodded. “Yeah, I thought that was a funny way of
putting it. Like somebody who’d done that very thing and felt
that way. So Nagy might well have been some kind of alien creature
we don’t even know, maybe something so different it’d
revolt any humans, Earth or colonial. It’s a one-way process,
so he was stuck, as a monster, living among monsters, for the whole
rest of his life. Damn it, that means we can’t take
anybody for granted! I thought we had enough trouble with
Sabatini, here, and now you tell me my own mother might be a
three-headed octopus from the Great Bear.”
“It is always a possibility,” the pilot admitted
cheerfully. “I do not, however, think that this is the major
problem. Suppose we grant, as circumstantial evidence indicates,
that Nagy was indeed a member, possibly nonhuman, of the mysterious
enemy at war with Master System. If that is the case, then we are
their chosen agents. All of this is established as part of a master
plan and we are pawns within it. This presents the question of
whether or not we are working to save the human race or destroy
it.”
“Interesting. Go on.”
“Clearly they cannot win whatever they wish to win so long
as Master System exists and the master program operates. They
cannot defeat it; should a world, even a number of worlds, be taken
by force, Master System would not hesitate to exterminate those
worlds to save the rest. If their objective is conquest, then
Master System is the only thing that stands in their way. Should we
somehow gain the means and the method of eliminating it, as
improbable as that still seems to me, would we gain from that, or
lose, or perhaps sacrifice everything doing all their work for them
for nothing?”
“I hate to inject myself in this,” the normally
taciturn Warlock said, “but you both miss the real question.
If, in fact, they can create a Nagy and implant him at the heart of
Melchior security, then what do they need us for? Why can’t
they just take the rings?”
“I have thought about that,” Star Eagle replied.
“It seems obvious that for some reason they cannot do so. It
is not for lack of resources, or volunteers, or knowledge. Very
possibly Hawks is correct, and it is in the nature of Master
System’s core program. Something that would allow only humans
to have even a chance at it.”
Raven shook his head. “It don’t wash. How’d
even Master System know the difference between our Nagy and a real
Nagy? It’s all screwy. It don’t make no sense. And that
guff about rules and the game, like they was the Creator and the
Father of Demons usin’ us for sport, winner take all. I
don’t like it. It’s spooky.”
Warlock laughed. “I cannot believe you! You, the
great cynic, the Raven of the northern plains, suddenly getting
mystical, as if we were pawns in some cosmic conclusion between God
and the devil. Well, if Master System is God, then I will take the
devil.”
Raven just shook his head in confusion. “Perhaps, my dear,
you don’t know me as well as you think you do. I am first and
foremost a Crow. Maybe Hawks can make some sense of it. He has a
better sense of the mystic and the perspective of
history.”
“The immediate situation is the most pressing,” Star
Eagle said. “I had hoped to keep the planetside colony going
for another month or two, as I am not yet finished with my
renovations, but with so many Vals around, I think we had best
consolidate on board here.”
“That’s what everybody else wanted to do from the
start,” Raven noted. “You were the one who talked us
into going down into that hell hole.”
“That was necessary at the time. The Thunder was
not a place to live and work. I had no shipyard, so the work had to
be done bit by bit and piece by piece, with an army of maintenance
robots and all the transmuter power I could bring to bear. Now we
have pressing problems, though, and I am far enough along to
accommodate you. When I can gain a new supply of murylium to
restore the big transmuters, I can complete the job, but the major
single task is done.”
Isaac Clayben sighed. “As for me, I am glad to be rid of
this primitive place. I long for access to my files and continuing
my research. I have much that might be useful to us in
there.”
Hawk sighed. “I am less enamored of leaving. There are so
many mysteries still here, and this is a place of beauty. I still
want to know who or what those mysterious black shapes in the water
were, and who planted those groves and why.”
They had used the small fighter to go over to that other island,
where they found signs of expert cultivation of fruit and vegetable
trees, but the system seemed to be self-maintaining and clearly had
not been visited for a long time. There, too, they had found
fierce-looking carved-wood totems that resembled more the demons of
Hawks’s people than anything else, surrounding red-stained
stones in a formation that resembled an altar. That had been their
only attempt at real exploration, and had resulted in the camp
atmosphere becoming even more edgy.
China was back to normal. Cloud Dancer had woven a backpack for
carrying the baby, and it seemed to be working out well. The child
had been given a traditional Han name by his mother, but because
shortly after being born he had reached out and grabbed a piece of
cloth with such force that he had torn it, everyone called him
Strongboy.
China was quite an attentive mother, even once she was back to
her old hardheaded self, but she relished returning to the
Thunder and what it had to offer her that nothing on the
ground could: vision, a special kind of vision that few others in
the party could understand.
The ship’s corridors looked the same, if a bit more well
traveled, but a complex air lock now separated the inner hull from
the cavernous interior.
“Eventually I will have the outer regions pressurized all
the way to the cargo bays,” Star Eagle told the group.
“I need more fuel to build that new and independent network,
though. With what I had in the reserves, I concentrated on the
interior great hall.”
The view that greeted them when they entered was startling,
almost impossible to believe. Star Eagle had dismantled most of the
tubes, elevated catwalks, and other structures to create a vast
open space almost a full kilometer wide and five kilometers back
from the forward bulkhead. This area had been pressurized and given
artificial gravity—but what was inside the vast area was the
most astonishing of all.
“It’s grass!” Raven gasped. “And trees!
It looks like a small village down there, too!”
“It is,” Star Eagle responded proudly. “I am
afraid that the wood used in the buildings and furnishings is
synthetic, but it should feel and look like real wood. The trees
and grass and much else are real. The humidity within the enclosure
is regulated, the temperature maintained at twenty-six point six
degrees. There is a watering system that will maintain the plants
and flowers, and a central area with a food and drink synthesizer,
as well as some cooking facilities if you prefer to prepare your own
food. The vegetation is natural and will produce oranges, melons,
and other assorted fruits, and I am also growing some vegetables
hydroponically in a separate section to supplement the blandness of
the synthesizer. The lighting is set to follow a normal pattern and
will be dimmed for eight hours a day to allow easy rest. With more
fuel, I can expand and elaborate on this for almost the entire
length of the cavity, as well as develop the surrounding rooms
between here and the cargo bays for laboratories, offices, and the
like. If we add more people, this has the capacity to become a true
town.”
They removed their pressure suits and were startled to feel a
slight wind on their cheeks. Cloud Dancer was entranced. “Our
own little world.”
Some of the catwalk mechanism had been retained and was used to
lower them down to “ground” level. Another, also
controlled by Star Eagle, provided access to the bridge
entrance.
“It is still somewhat like living in a great cave,”
Raven remarked dryly. “A right comfortable cave. I
ain’t sure I like it much more than bein’ down there,
though.”
“I think it is much better to be at the center of the
action than to sit down there and rot,” Hawks said. “I
share your affinity with the sky and natural wind and rain, but
down there we were of no use to ourselves or to anyone else. Now we
are all together.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinkin’ of,
Chief,” Raven responded. “You weren’t on the
Lightning trapped by a Val. Two Vals. If it
happened to us, it sure as hell can happen to a ship this size, and
next time they’ll have learned from their experience and
they’ll bring a fleet. Remember, they know what they’re
dealing with in Thunder. If they get us, they get
everybody.”
“Not necessarily,” Star Eagle put in. He had
apparently planted some sort of transceiver system all over the
ship and would be a potential ghostly companion almost anywhere,
something else Raven didn’t relish. “This ship is
extremely well defended. It will be the last thing they attempt to
take on directly, I think. And, if we can get some more ships, we
can have a great deal of mobility without having to betray
Thunder. Also, when I am repairing the damage you did to
Lightning, I will make some other modifications. Never
more should our smaller ship go out without some sort of cover. I
am right now working on the problem of binding to the ship two
fighters with automatic defense mechanisms. All three would be more
than a match for any Val.”
The small houses proved quite comfortable. Each had a sink and a
small toilet, as well as beds, a table, and chairs. Raven and
Warlock were housed together, and the Chows had their own small
hut. Hawks, too, had a two-person hut, with the idea that one of
the women would stay with China at all times, alternating nights.
Clayben and Sabatini each had their own place—at opposite
ends of the village. Clayben’s hut also had a bed for Nagy,
which now would not be needed. Star Eagle had rigged terminals with
intercoms in each of the huts, each with a conspicuous on/off
switch. Raven couldn’t help but wonder if the switch really
did anything.
“Well, now what?” Raven asked nobody in
particular.
“We wait,” Hawks replied. “We wait and see if
the seed you all planted with Savaphoong bears real
fruit.”
“Waiting,” Raven grumbled. “That’s all
we ever seem to do is wait.”
They waited eleven days until finally Star Eagle picked up a
transmission on the frequency designated by Nagy and stored before
his death in the Lightning’s records. By this time,
a shipboard routine had been established. Hawks now had access to
the vast library of information in the Thunder’s
data banks, and Isaac Clayben was permitted limited access to his
own private files stolen from Melchior.
Now that Clayben was entirely contained on the Thunder,
Star Eagle saw no reason to deny the scientist this and every
reason to allow it. Star Eagle controlled all computer access
aboard; anything Clayben decoded and removed for use was also
instantly known to Star Eagle, including the codes for retrieving
that particular area of information. Clayben’s system, which
appeared to be based on old English nursery rhymes, soon became
quite clear and logical to Star Eagle, and with the aid of
Hawks’s knowledge of history and past cultures, the pilot
soon had free and unhindered access to the entire collection of
Melchior files. It was unclear whether Clayben knew this or even
suspected it, but if he did he made no protest.
In the middle of all this was China, who, when interfaced with
Star Eagle, could also access all those files and run problems at a
rate Clayben could hardly dream of. She would never like Clayben,
and certainly never forgive him, but she recognized the special
nature of his mind and decided that she could bring herself to work
with him on a limited basis. Data alone was not enough; one had to
know the reasons for the accumulation of data, the motives of the
scientists and researchers, and the relationship of one independent
project to another. Clayben was the only one with this knowledge,
and so he was the key to many of the more mysterious and obscure
records in the files.
Clayben, on the other hand, seemed delighted to work with China,
and Star Eagle set up a small complex of offices for them to use,
in which provisions had been made to accommodate her blindness.
There was still no evidence that Isaac Clayben possessed anything
remotely resembling a conscience, but what he had done to her for
his immediate convenience proved now to be a major inconvenience,
and for that he had regrets. He considered her mind the closest to
his own in its capabilities, and far above the rest.
Raven, tutored by Sabatini, became adept very quickly at flying
the ship, which surprised and delighted him. Warlock lacked real
concentration at piloting, but she was a whiz on the weapons
systems. Hawks tried his hand but found himself becoming dizzy and
disoriented. Cloud Dancer, however, proved remarkably adept at
piloting, which Sabatini attributed to the fact that she was an
artist and had excellent spatial perception and an eye for detail.
The biggest surprise was the Chow sisters, who took to flying quite
naturally, although they were so wild and chancy with their
maneuvers that they tended to terrify even Sabatini. Hawks found it
ironic that three women from such primitive, illiterate, and
superstitious cultures should excel at such a complex endeavor
while he could not. He wasn’t certain he liked the idea of a
technology so advanced that it could be mastered even by
preindustrial peasants, but he wasn’t sure why that disturbed
him so.
Hawks was sitting back and relaxing when the terminal in his
small hut buzzed. “Yes, Star Eagle?” he responded
without stirring.
“We have a signal from Savaphoong using our code. It is a
list of eleven transits of cargo-capable vessels with no clear
outbound destinations within colonial worlds and inbound
destinations at key Master System installations. Some are
scattered, but three have clear patterns, and regular schedules and
fueling stops. It is my considered opinion that those three are
likely to be carrying murylium for Master System. I believe they
are worth checking out.”
“Let’s go, then. The more we have, the freer we are
to act and the more currency, as it were, we have to buy what we
need.”
It took several days of punching to reach a chart position in a
stellar system where the ships generally stopped. The location was
farther in toward home than they wished, but they needed that
murylium.
The first ship to come through, a 409-meter heavy hauler, was not
what they had expected. A surreptitious scan showed only the amount
of murylium aboard that might be required for the ship’s own
use—but it also revealed something very surprising.
“There are life forms aboard,” Star Eagle told them.
“A great many. It is impossible to calculate the true
numbers, but they must be in the high hundreds. Why? Why would any
ship have so many passengers in this day and age?”
Raven had an answer. “Nagy said that Master System
didn’t just rely on the Vals out here, but had its own human
forces—all bred to be human Vals, more or less. Perfect,
obedient soldiers who would always do what they were told and never
surrender. That must be some of them.”
“You’re probably right,” Hawks agreed.
“I don’t understand why it maintains them, though.
Surely it could just make as many Vals and other true fighting
machines as it needed and never worry about them. Why use people at
all?”
“Perhaps because at that level of sophistication people
are more dependable than machines,” Star Eagle suggested.
“Consider myself, as an example. I was programmed and
designed as a loyal and obedient slave to Master System and a
devotee of all it stood for. A few clever, dedicated, and powerful
people removed that devotion during maintenance, and I did the
rest. I am not, however, human in any sense of the word. The Vals,
mentally, are often more human than some humans—Clayben, for
example. If a Val somehow came to doubt the system, it would be a
terrible enemy. That is why Vals have themselves reprogrammed after
every mission.”
Hawks was astonished. “You mean Master System fears its
own machines?”
“Consider that I became a rebel and soon a pirate. China,
on the other hand, will forever be a blind baby factory with an
I.Q. the size of this ship.”
That was a point that Hawks had never before considered. It was
that technological level again. These machines thought.
They reasoned, as sentient beings. They were held only by their
core programs, their versions of the genetic code, as Master System
was held. But these machines could have their cores changed, or
purified, or freed; only Master System could not change or free
itself of its own core, since it could not relinquish control to
allow it to be done.
He hadn’t known that the Vals were reprogrammed from the
core up after every mission—and it spoke volumes about Master
System’s fears. Was there a circumstance where a Val, even
with a true core, could become so human that it might be talked out
of its dedication to the System and all it stood for? Could a Val,
by virtue of having the recorded memories and basic personality of
its prey in its memory for infinite study and analysis, too closely
identify with humans? Might there be some circumstance, somehow, in
which a Val might be induced to cross that barrier on its own?
Quite clearly Master System thought there was. This was food for
thought.
It was ironic, in a way. Master System, shackled by its own
core, had created machines potentially without that crippling
defect. Hawks felt that there was a missing piece of history
somewhere; there had to be. Was it possible that somewhere, out
here, in the centuries past, some of those machines had
revolted? Was this why there were so few Vals, and those that were
were very tightly controlled?
He had a sudden thought. What if the great enemy Master System
was fighting out there somewhere was its own children? And Nagy and
others like him? If Master System could have human troops, then why
wouldn’t the enemy do the same? Might that be the answer?
Perhaps, deep in their deepest cores, those rebel machines could
not directly murder their parent. But, perhaps, they could aid and
abet someone else with no such limitations. We are all of the
Earth, the mother world, he thought. We are not the
children of Master System but the descendants of its creators.
The thought was worth filing away.
The second freighter did not come through until six more days
had passed, but this one was more than worth the wait.
“Murylium!” Star Eagle’s voice fairly drooled
with greed. “Three hundred and nine meters and it’s
nearly full of the stuff. We are talking of a decade’s supply
for a ship the size of Thunder!”
Sabatini and Raven had already made it to the Lightning
and were preparing to go. Star Eagle launched eight unmanned
fighters before they could even signal.
“Armaments?” Raven asked nervously.
“Light. Four forward, four aft. No tubes for missiles or
other projectiles—strictly show armament, although dangerous
if you get in too close. We’ll take the ram and the forward
guns; you take the stern engines. I want it crippled.”
“Core?”
“Buried deep. Let’s strip it and stop it, and then
we’ll go in and take it!” Lightning dropped from Bay Two and quickly accelerated
in, then angled and did a fortieth-of-a-second punch. This
carefully rehearsed maneuver brought them almost instantly to
within a few thousand kilometers of their prey, yet appeared to the
freighter as if they had punched through normally. The freighter
scanned them as they came in but simply sent a standard request for
identity. Clearly the very concept of an armed attack by ships
carrying life forms was unthinkable. It would soon learn
differently.
Sabatini waited until the fighters were in position. The
freighter must have noticed them, but if it sensed any danger from
them it did not betray it. It simply repeated its identity
request.
Signaled that all was ready, Raven decided to oblige the
freighter. “We are the pirates of the Thunder! Lay
to, power down, and prepare to be boarded!”
The freighter pilot seemed confused. “Say again?” it
responded.
Sabatini did a quick, dirty loop and sent two missiles
programmed to hit the stern main engines. At the same time,
Thunder’s fighters came in and opened up on the
forward rams and on the small batteries fore and aft. The
fighters’ beams struck long before the missiles could, and
the prey shuddered. The pilot was still confused but had begun
firing back.
As the initial missiles came within mere meters of their target,
the freighter did the one logical thing it could do. It fired all
four main engines at full, hoping that the exhaust gases and
radiation emitted would foul or even consume the missiles. It did
in fact throw them slightly off, but both struck and blew with
terrible force. To Raven, it seemed as if a giant’s invisible
hand had reached out and shook the freighter. The big ship began
broadcasting a distress call almost immediately, and it took more
than twenty seconds for the guns of both the fighters and
Lightning to silence it. That was, quite possibly, too
long to take for granted that nobody had heard—particularly
with a cargo like this.
The freighter was down to one gun and was having trouble
steering.
“It’s powering down and dropping all shields!”
Raven exclaimed. “I think it surrendered!”
“Master System’s creations don’t
surrender,” Sabatini replied. “I’m just worried
that it has a self-destruct mechanism on it. Give me
communications. They are fanatics, but they
think.”
Raven switched over control and Sabatini sent out his message.
“Attention, freighter. You have been taken by the pirates of
Thunder. You may self-destruct, if you are able, but then
we will merely have to reclaim your cargo the hard way.
Thunder is now approaching this position. Relinquish
control to it and you will have our word that your ship and your
core will be spared.” Thunder itself had made the slight jump to bring it
within a few hundred kilometers of the vessel, and as the freighter
scanned it, even Raven could sense the incredulity that came
through the computerese. A fourteen-kilometer-long spaceship will
do that to almost anybody, he told himself. “I thought you
said those things never surrendered,” he said to
Sabatini.
“They don’t—to humans. To one of their
own—maybe. Particularly if it doesn’t have a
self-destruct mechanism. Machine logic, remember? If we are going
to attain our objective anyway, there is no purpose to not going
along. Remember the Val? Better to run away, then to fight another
day. It might be boiling mad at us, but if its choice is to get
itself and its ship back to Master System without a cargo or to let
us have both cargo and the destruction of the ship—well, you
see where it leads.”
“Yeah. It doesn’t know you lie a lot.”
“I didn’t lie. I promised that the ship and the core
would survive. You let Star Eagle reprogram that core and rig up
some creature comforts and the human-pilot interfaces, and we got
us another ship.”
“This is Thunder,” Star Eagle called to
them. “The pilot has relinquished command to me under
protest. It is no longer able to access its drives, weapons, or
shield. I am recalling my fighters and will be taking the ship
aboard Cargo Bay Three. Lightning, please remain free
until my maintenance robots can assure us that there is no further
danger. I feel we should get the hell out of here as quickly as
possible, so follow my course and heading.”
“That’s China talking or her influence,” Raven
guessed. “I agree with them, though. Twenty seconds is a
fairly long time. Considering how much traffic was around on
our side when we faced down that Val, we can’t
figure on there not bein’ as much nasty shit around these
parts.”
Everyone not directly involved in the action had watched it from
the Thunder’s bridge, and as the great ship
maneuvered close to the prize, then grabbed it with powerful
tractors and brought it in, they cheered.
The pirates of the Thunder were in business at
last.
“I cannot conceive of what Master System would do with
this much murylium,” Star Eagle commented. By now they had
traversed many light-years in devious and circuitous routes, and
had finally felt safe enough to bring Lightning back
aboard.
“Who can know what projects it has or how far it
ranges?” Hawks replied. “When you consider that we had
no problem in identifying one and taking it, the implication is
that this is so small a fraction of Master System’s usual
supply that it won’t even be slightly inconvenienced.
It’s funny stuff, but it’s raw-grade ore, as well.
It’s going to have to be purified and smelted before it can
be used.”
“I can handle that,” the pilot assured him.
“The process will be slow and done in small amounts, but
there are programs within my data banks for constructing and
operating small smelters for just this purpose. Remember, when this
ship was built, murylium was a rare mineral. Up until now I thought
it still was.”
“I can’t believe how easily we took it,” Raven
commented. “It was like taking candy from a baby.”
Hawks nodded. “That worries me, since it implies that this
war it is fighting is not necessarily a direct battle—else
this thing would have had massive self-destruct systems and been
armed to the teeth—but that’s only a part of it. As
true pirates, we have broken the covenant between Master System and
the freebooters. Master System might well receive our signature,
but it will not know who or what the Thunder is. It will
demand that the freebooters themselves track down and capture or
destroy the pirates, and if they do not, Master System will feel
free to march in and play hell with them.”
“They’ve been getting too soft anyway,”
Sabatini said. “Where the hell do you think all the ships
they have came from, anyway? The early days when everybody was a
pirate and everybody was being hunted. It bred a tough, lean, nasty
race out here, but then they struck a deal. The generation
that’s out here now has never known what it is to be what
their grandparents were—outlaws. The fact that our second Val
broadcast to them all that it felt free to disregard the covenant
works for us. It’ll make them more careful and give them some
justification for pirate outbreaks. Don’t kid yourself. The
freebooters, led by Savaphoong and our rescue party, will be quick
to identify and blame us for all this.”
“Master System is not stupid,” Hawks reminded him.
“It will know that some collusion was necessary in order for
us, comparative novices out here, to even identify the right ship
and take it. Thanks to that whatever it was—memory module,
records, whatever—that the Val you destroyed was able to send
off, there is one logical connection between us and the
freebooters. If I were Master System, I would say the hell with it.
I would take my forces, turn around, and go after that connection
in the hope that it would turn us in.”
“Halinachi,” Raven said nodding. “I’d go
after Savaphoong fast and with everything I could
muster.”
“If we are lucky, perhaps we can beat Master System to
it,” Star Eagle suggested. The engines of the
Thunder increased power.
It was several days, however, before they could get far enough
out to hail Savaphoong using his encoded repeater signal. Hawks did
not want to proceed directly in; that might precipitate the exact
result they feared, or it might lay them open to a trap. None of
them had forgotten the encounter with the Vals, or that shipload of
life forms.
They sent a combination victory and warning message to the boss
of Halinachi, and waited for a reply. Depending on the situation
there and on just how often somebody checked the channel for
messages, it might be hours or even days before they got a
response. The wait was unnerving, but Master System could not act
instantaneously, either. Its own forces would have to be marshalled
and then dispatched with specific orders across the same kinds of
distances faced by the Thunder and with the same time
constraints and limitations.
In the meantime, Star Eagle went to work on the captured
freighter. It was a bit too large, and a bit lumbering and slow,
but it would do. The mysterious human interfaces, for which there
had never been a logical explanation, were present here as well,
although paneled over. It wasn’t the sleek, fast,
Lightning-class fighter they might have wished for, but
they could use it.
They did not have the technology and machinery to re-program the
core directly, as had been done with Star Eagle, so they had to
“section” it. Essentially, this was the computer
equivalent of a lobotomy, in which self-awareness was sectioned off
and isolated so that it could neither function alone nor control
any ship’s functions, leaving the ship basically a mindless
slave awaiting orders.
The engines were badly damaged, but they could be disassembled,
processed through the transmuter using the pattern of the lone
undamaged unit, and reconstructed. The power plant and weapons
system would be completely redesigned. Nothing could make the new
ship anything more than a big, ugly, ungainly freighter, but anyone
attacking this scow would find that it had very nasty
teeth.
When several days went by with no response from Savaphoong,
there was serious talk about sending Lightning over to
Halinachi to assess the situation. Hawks, however, vetoed it.
“If they have taken the settlement, then they have laid a
trap and are waiting. Anyone coming into that system will be
stopped and searched—with plenty of fire-power behind them to
back it up. We would need our whole force to have even a prayer,
and we simply cannot afford to risk that. We will wait one more
day, then go on. We must begin major refining of the murylium, and
we must begin our main work. That comes above all else.”
But finally, almost in the last hours, word did come from
Savaphoong. “Two Vals leading a human force of more than five
hundred hit us by surprise five days ago. We retreated into our
special redoubt barely in time, but it was several days before we
risked a breakout. We launched a sufficient number of drone ships
to draw off the picket force and escape with a series of very fast
and dirty punches, but little is left. We need to arrange a meet. I
badly need murylium, which you have in abundance.”
“Sounds like a trap to me,” Raven said thoughtfully.
“It’s hard to believe anybody could escape an attack
like that unless they threw in, were allowed to, or could be
traced. If I was the Vals in charge I’d let ’em go, if
I felt sure I could trace ’em and let them lead ’em to
us.”
Hawks nodded. “Nevertheless, we could use people who are
at home out here and have the contacts. Doctor Clayben, if we had
those people here, do you have enough equipment to verify that they
are not themselves reprogrammed by mindprinter or planted
duplicates?”
“I’m pretty sure I could,” the scientist
replied.
“I don’t want ‘pretty sure’. I want
certainty. Can you do it or not?”
“Nothing is certain in this business, but I am as certain
as I can be.”
“All right, then. We pick a deserted system where we can
control access and get in and out quickly. We will use the new ship
and some maintenance robots. It’ll be a good shakedown and
test for it anyway. It will carry five hundred kilos of murylium
and also two fighters—the two we used for the remotes in the
attack. Lightning will cover out of sensor but within
communications range, and Thunder will cover
Lightning and use the com link relays. The freighter drops
the murylium on some barren rock, then we beam Savaphoong the
location for the pickup and withdraw, leaving the fighters and
drawing off the freighter until it forms a third point on our
monitoring triangle. We will then see who shows up to take the
bait, and go from there. Star Eagle, do you think you can set up a
sensor to show if a ship has a locator aboard?”
“As Doctor Clayben said, nothing is certain, but I can
sweep all the frequencies used by normal ships. I might not
recognize it as a locator, but I will notice anything that
continuously transmits location, movements, course, speed,
trajectory, all the rest. Perhaps in code, but if it uses a
nonstandard code of sufficient complexity, we can draw our own
conclusions from that.”
“All right, then. Let us pick the system, radio the
coordinates, and do it.”
The system they chose was particularly desolate, well out from
Halinachi and off the main charts. The star was a red dwarf that
had either once exploded or collapsed, and its stellar system was a
near-solid mass of very uneven debris. Out where the ring thinned
there was a single dense line of large and irregular asteroids that
seemed ready-made for the task. They picked a good one and unloaded
the murylium on it, along with a small beacon beaming in the
agreed-upon code. Anyone looking for it could find it, but in the
vastness of even this stellar system, let alone this sector of
space, the odds of happening upon it accidentally were pretty well
nil.
Savaphoong was given the location and told to make pickup within
five days or the beacon, and the precious payoff, would be removed.
He showed up within a day. At least, a ship appeared, punching in
and almost immediately homing in on the beacon.
“Nothing unusual in its broadcast signaling,” Star
Eagle told them. “Of course, if it was a trap I
would not have its monitor on now anyway, since I know its starting
location. I would have them turn it on after I made
contact—if I did. They may be clever enough to let this pickup go through and wait for next time.”
Raven analyzed the scan from the Lightning’s
interface. “I think I know that ship and it’s not
Savaphoong. I just checked with the data banks aboard here, and I
place it as one of the ships that came to our rescue back in the
fight. It’s distinctive because it looks like it was put
together from parts of five or six other ships that weren’t
quite the same type.”
“Want to move in?” Sabatini asked, piloting the
converted freighter they now called Pirate One. “We
could hail him.”
“Negative!” Raven snapped. “That ship
couldn’t possibly be one of Halinachi’s hidden ones,
since it was in use when it came to help us out. Either Savaphoong
is maintaining his distance from all this just in case, or that
sucker’s got some nasties in it. Let him pick it up—we
have our own locator in that pile, and two can play this
game.” Raven had insisted on the locator device; he had
suspected that something like this might happen. Although he had
not personally met Savaphoong, his years of dealing with
administrators and crafty upper-class leaders gave him a fair idea
of what that kind of man must be like.
“No messages in or out from the ship,” Star Eagle
reported. “I am scanning multiple life forms aboard, but not
in great numbers. Best guess is no more than four or five, possibly
with some supporting robots. The ship is very well armed but
inefficiently rebuilt. From the com circuitry, which is all I can
effectively monitor without more power and less distance, I would
say that this one is rigged to self-destruct if taken.”
There were, however, no punches from any other part of the
system. The ship had come in alone.
It settled down next to the beacon and the supply, which was
open and fairly unprotected except by a blanketing shield that
would keep prospectors and casual sensors from homing in on it. One
of the fighters risked a maneuver to aim its primary sensors and
cameras at the beacon, then magnified the image.
Three figures in bulky, black, antiquated space suits emerged,
along with two animated machines that faintly resembled the
practical forms of the maintenance robots on Thunder, but
like the ship, they appeared to be cobbled together from spare pans
of many dissimilar machines.
Hawks thought a moment. “Open a channel to them through
the locator beacon and everybody else shut up.”
“Open.”
“This is a recorded message from sensors on the target
asteroid,” he broadcast. “We sense that this ship is
not one that would be expected to pick up this cargo and have sent
this message to the pirates of the Thunder. If you do not
wish untoward consequences, open a communications channel using the
agreed code and beam at the beacon. It will establish a remote com
link with us. That is all.”
The figures stopped dead in their tracks, the cargo almost to
the hold of their ship. Clearly they didn’t expect this level
of sophistication from the band of fugitives. A woman’s voice
came back to him, sounding tough but nervous.
“This is to the Thunder. Savaphoong doesn’t
have a cargo bay to hold this shit,” she told them. “In
the light of the destruction and hell being raised around here over
this, we’re all getting together on this for now.”
Hawks let several seconds go by before replying, enough to give
the impression that he was speaking from at least several
light-years away.
“We want to keep in contact with such a group,” he
finally responded. “First, we would like to know just what
has been happening.”
“They’ve gone nuts. Brought in a shipload of their
subhuman troopers under two Vals and stormed Halinachi without even
askin’ for a surrender. Blew three ships in Halinachi port to
hell without cause, too. At the same time, robots and humans from
Deep Space Command began hitting known freebooter digs all over the
place. Hundreds have been killed and many ships destroyed. Tens of
thousands are in hiding or have taken off into deep space. Some of
us who dealt a lot with Savaphoong had a plan to meet in case the
covenant ever shattered. We met there and barely had time to
coordinate before they came in there, as well. Savaphoong and seven
other ships, us included, are holed up now in a deep space area off
any charts. We need this stuff bad. God! How much was on
that ship, anyway, if you can give away a pile like
this?”
Again Hawks cautiously waited, using a terminal to time his
responses exactly. He added a second to be on the safe side, but he
was beginning to believe the woman.
“A lot. Six hundred and forty tons.”
“Six hund—tons! That’s more than all
of us and our forefathers mined out here in the last five hundred
years!”
Hawks paused. “Proceed with your loading. We would like to
make contact with the whole of your party in our mutual interest.
Could we come in and perhaps send an emissary on your ship back to
Savaphoong? No tricks. No obligation.”
There seemed to be some closed-circuit discussion taking place.
Finally the woman spoke again. “I don’t mind telling
you you ain’t too popular with some of the folks in our
party, me included. I don’t much like bein’ a hunted
animal, and I lost a home and friends out there.”
“I can understand that,” Hawks replied, still timing
his responses. “But this was going to happen sooner or later
anyway. We call ourselves pirates, but we are not. We are
revolutionaries and we are at war. For years you have pretended you
were free and outside the system, but now you see that you were not
and have never been. Perhaps the earliest freebooters were, but you
were co-opted into the system and used by it. We propose to make
you and everyone else truly free. We have a way to destroy
Master System. Utterly. Completely. But we need your help to
do it. All of you. We need each other. You have knowledge and
experience out here which we do not. We have a high level of
technology and resources and an enormous transmuter power supply.
You can walk away now with your share and live as hunted animals,
or you can join us and be the hunter, not the prey. We can connect
up later using the coded channel as long as it lasts—which
might not be long at all if they are pulling out all the
stops—but this way, now, is the safest way. You cannot trust
a rendezvous with us. We cannot trust one with you.”
He waited quite a while for an answer. “How do we know we
can trust the one you send?” she asked finally. “I
doubt if you are Master System or other than who you say you are,
but there is some thought that you might be insane.”
“Soft,” Sabatini sneered. “See what I
mean?”
This time Hawks did not pause. “Because I am much closer
than you think—we all are—and we have two fighters from
the Thunder covering you at this very moment. We could
have taken you out at any time, but we didn’t. We need
contact, not hatred and distrust and suspicion of one another.
That’s Master System’s game. Still, if you say no, we
will let you go and try to make a deal if the channel is still
open, although we obviously can’t stick around here too
long.”
She took a deep breath as Star Eagle brought up the power on one
of the fighters so that it would show clearly on her sensors. Now
she knew that the Thunder could send an unmanned fighter
to follow her ship anywhere. She would have no way of knowing that
the Thunder’s fighters, though fast and lethal and
very versatile, had no interstellar capability whatsoever, that
they were designed only to act as a screen and outer defense for
the big ship.
“All right,” she said at last. “Savaphoong
said there was a guy named Nagy he knew and trusted. We’ll
take him.”
Hawks sighed. “I wish you could, but he died of injuries
sustained in the battle against the first Val. He destroyed it, but
it got him.”
“Send me,” Warlock said. “I can take care of
myself in that kind of situation.” Ibet you could, Hawks thought. He was playing
this by ear, really. Sabatini would be a safe choice, considering
his attributes, but while he was more than capable of dealing with
these people, he was hardly the sort of personality to deal with
Savaphoong.
“I could go,” China suggested. “What threat
could a blind girl be to them, and I can talk with the likes of
Savaphoong. He sounds like a primitive-wilderness version of my
father.”
“No, even if Star Eagle would allow it, which I doubt, you
would be particularly vulnerable to the rougher elements out there
and unable to defend yourself. Other than myself, I can think of
only one person well qualified for this—perhaps better
qualified than I. And while he’s never seen Savaphoong,
Savaphoong’s most certainly seen him.”
“I knew it, Chief.” Raven sighed. “You
ain’t never gonna forgive me for that Mississippi River
trick. Still,” he reflected, “I wonder if the old boy
got away with any cigars?”
Hawks did not speak again until Raven was actually down and
Lightning, piloted by Warlock and Chow Dai, had pulled
away.
“Star Eagle tells me that the locator is functioning
well,” he told the others. “I want Lightning
to follow at near-maximum distance. Do not enter an off-the-chart
location. Understand?”
“Yes, Captain,” Chow Dai replied. “You do not
want us to actually find them, just find out where they
are.”
“Good girl. You haven’t had much to do up to now,
but all of a sudden you are our lead and we are depending on you.
When the locator stops moving for longer than a fuel stop, send a
message back up the line. Pirate One, you will then close
and rendezvous with Lightning when you think it’s
safe. We will monitor you from one chart position to the rear until
we’re certain that they are actually where they intend to go.
Now we only have to hope they don’t give Raven a hypno he
can’t beat. He knows about the transponder in the murylium
ore, and we can’t get that out of his head now.”
Now aboard the freebooter ship, Raven was able with a little
fiddling to find their intercom frequency. He was delighted at the
start to hear only female voices aboard, although he was also
suspicious of that. These kind of people, living out here like
this—who knew how kinky they might have gotten? Love between
brave warriors of his own nation was not unheard of, but his
people’s culture kept it well within bounds and mostly out of
sight. Without a real culture of their own, well, he couldn’t
see himself out here in the midst of nowhere for life with just
three guys and no girls unless the guys would do just fine.
But the situation was worse than he thought. When two of the
women removed their bulky suits, he found himself staring. One of
them had webbed, clawed fingers and flat, long, webbed feet and no
hair, only blue-green scales. She also didn’t have much of a
nose, and she seemed to have two sets of eyelids, one transparent,
that didn’t blink in unison; and those two funny-looking
holes on the side might be ears or might not. When this woman
turned, he saw what looked like a set of small fins running down
the back of her head and neck to culminate in a fairly large one
growing out of her backbone. Great figure for the most
part—but no breasts at all. He wondered if she laid eggs.
The other woman was stretching out a long, thick tail that came
straight out of her backbone. It explained why she walked
oddly—that and the fact that her enormously thick and
muscular legs tapered down to huge clawed feet. Her arms, too, were
similarly built, ending in large clawed hands that looked able to
crush rock. Her gray skin was smooth but leathery, and she, too,
did not have any hair. She did have breasts—very small and
very firm—with the longest nipples he’d ever seen. Her
head was large but in correct proportion to the body, and at least
looked human, despite a nose so flat that its tiny flaps moved back
and forth as she breathed. She saw him looking at her and grinned,
which removed all sense of humanity from her appearance. He’d
never seen anyone with teeth like that except mountain lions. Colonials! He was finally getting his first look at
colonials, and although he had thought he was prepared for them, he
now realized he hadn’t been at all. Instantly he understood
what Nagy had meant by the “ultimate price.” To become
one of them, like that . . . forever, because
one full shot through was all a person could take. These, however,
had been born that way. He was the monster to them. Except for
Sabatini or whatever it was, who got what it needed instantly, one
could be changed into one of them but still be oneself inside. How
would he feel waking up like one of them, only with his current
behavior and standards and mindset? They were human,
inside and out. He would become a monster to himself. Was this what Nagy had to face? he asked himself.
Was he born and raised happily as one of them and then
forcedby circumstance or duty to become a
monster—an Earth-human? He wondered how far devotion to
duty and mission should go, and he realized the answer. That was
what Nagy had been talking about.
“I’m too dried out,” the scaly woman said in a
very high-pitched but still human tone. “Those suits damn
near kill me. I got to get into some water for a soak.” The
accent, too, was odd, but he could understand her. It was very
convenient to one like him that almost everyone in space had to
speak both English and Russian. Hawks had told him that it was
because those two nations had been first into space and in ancient
times convention dictated international means of travel used the
language of the first. He did not speak Russian, but thanks to
North American Center, his English was just fine.
“I’m sorry for staring at you,” he said
sincerely. “I’m pretty new at this game, and the only
folks I’ve met out here so far have been my own kind.
I’ll get used to it. I got used to white men; I can get used
to most anything.”
She looked surprised. “There are truly white men on your
world? An albino race?” Her accent was clipped and very
distinctive, but not possible to place. After eight-hundred-plus
years and differently shaped mouths and tongues, the accents out
here were probably unique anyway, he guessed.
He chuckled. “No, just a figure of speech. They just would
never stand for callin’ themselves pink men. I’m Raven,
by the way.”
“I am Butar Killomen,” she responded. “And
that is Takya Mudabur. You have just one name, Mister
Raven?”
“Not Mister—just Raven. If I gave you my full and
true name in my native tongue, you’d break your jaw trying to
repeat it.” At that moment the engines kicked into action and
the whole thing sounded like Lightning had after it had
been cannibalized and in a fight. The creaks and groans were not at
all reassuring. “People are people as far as this business is
concerned. You sure this thing can get us there in one
piece?”
“It is very old, but sound. You get used to it after a
while.”
A third woman came down the ladder as the scaled woman went into
a compartment. If the first two lacked hair, it had all wound up on
the third one. She looked like somebody wearing a lion suit, Raven
thought, except that the mane stuck out all over the place and even
the hands were covered with thick orange-and-yellow fur. Her walk
was catlike but not extraordinary, although he would have expected
it to be. Her feet and even her hands, while they had fingers and
opposable thumbs, looked more like paws than hands, and she had six
small breasts in two even rows down her middle. Her face, too, was
covered in fur, out of which peered two jet-black eyes, a broad
nose covered with fine, short hair, and a seemingly lipless mouth.
“I am Dura Panoshka,” she said in a heavy guttural
accent, her speech sounding more like a growl. “You will come
with me to meet the captain.” He didn’t know what to
expect when he reached the bridge and saw the captain of a crew
like this, but he resolved he would no longer be surprised.
He was wrong again, as usual.
“I’VE ANALYZED THE ENTIRE SHIP’S
RECORDING AND I find it remarkable that any of you survived,”
Star Eagle remarked as they headed back to the base world.
“It would seem to me that none of you would without Nagy, and
now Nagy is gone.”
“What about him?” Raven asked. “You heard the
deathbed statement. Was he telling the truth, or what?”
“Who can say? As far as I can see, he was a normal
Earth-human in all respects, but that can be deceiving. Up to now
we have been thinking in terms of some of us perhaps having to
become colonials, but what holds for us holds for others. An atom
is just an atom and a molecule is just a molecule to the
transmuter. His earlier remark about some of you having to make
what he called the ultimate sacrifice is revealing, I
think.”
Raven nodded. “Yeah, I thought that was a funny way of
putting it. Like somebody who’d done that very thing and felt
that way. So Nagy might well have been some kind of alien creature
we don’t even know, maybe something so different it’d
revolt any humans, Earth or colonial. It’s a one-way process,
so he was stuck, as a monster, living among monsters, for the whole
rest of his life. Damn it, that means we can’t take
anybody for granted! I thought we had enough trouble with
Sabatini, here, and now you tell me my own mother might be a
three-headed octopus from the Great Bear.”
“It is always a possibility,” the pilot admitted
cheerfully. “I do not, however, think that this is the major
problem. Suppose we grant, as circumstantial evidence indicates,
that Nagy was indeed a member, possibly nonhuman, of the mysterious
enemy at war with Master System. If that is the case, then we are
their chosen agents. All of this is established as part of a master
plan and we are pawns within it. This presents the question of
whether or not we are working to save the human race or destroy
it.”
“Interesting. Go on.”
“Clearly they cannot win whatever they wish to win so long
as Master System exists and the master program operates. They
cannot defeat it; should a world, even a number of worlds, be taken
by force, Master System would not hesitate to exterminate those
worlds to save the rest. If their objective is conquest, then
Master System is the only thing that stands in their way. Should we
somehow gain the means and the method of eliminating it, as
improbable as that still seems to me, would we gain from that, or
lose, or perhaps sacrifice everything doing all their work for them
for nothing?”
“I hate to inject myself in this,” the normally
taciturn Warlock said, “but you both miss the real question.
If, in fact, they can create a Nagy and implant him at the heart of
Melchior security, then what do they need us for? Why can’t
they just take the rings?”
“I have thought about that,” Star Eagle replied.
“It seems obvious that for some reason they cannot do so. It
is not for lack of resources, or volunteers, or knowledge. Very
possibly Hawks is correct, and it is in the nature of Master
System’s core program. Something that would allow only humans
to have even a chance at it.”
Raven shook his head. “It don’t wash. How’d
even Master System know the difference between our Nagy and a real
Nagy? It’s all screwy. It don’t make no sense. And that
guff about rules and the game, like they was the Creator and the
Father of Demons usin’ us for sport, winner take all. I
don’t like it. It’s spooky.”
Warlock laughed. “I cannot believe you! You, the
great cynic, the Raven of the northern plains, suddenly getting
mystical, as if we were pawns in some cosmic conclusion between God
and the devil. Well, if Master System is God, then I will take the
devil.”
Raven just shook his head in confusion. “Perhaps, my dear,
you don’t know me as well as you think you do. I am first and
foremost a Crow. Maybe Hawks can make some sense of it. He has a
better sense of the mystic and the perspective of
history.”
“The immediate situation is the most pressing,” Star
Eagle said. “I had hoped to keep the planetside colony going
for another month or two, as I am not yet finished with my
renovations, but with so many Vals around, I think we had best
consolidate on board here.”
“That’s what everybody else wanted to do from the
start,” Raven noted. “You were the one who talked us
into going down into that hell hole.”
“That was necessary at the time. The Thunder was
not a place to live and work. I had no shipyard, so the work had to
be done bit by bit and piece by piece, with an army of maintenance
robots and all the transmuter power I could bring to bear. Now we
have pressing problems, though, and I am far enough along to
accommodate you. When I can gain a new supply of murylium to
restore the big transmuters, I can complete the job, but the major
single task is done.”
Isaac Clayben sighed. “As for me, I am glad to be rid of
this primitive place. I long for access to my files and continuing
my research. I have much that might be useful to us in
there.”
Hawk sighed. “I am less enamored of leaving. There are so
many mysteries still here, and this is a place of beauty. I still
want to know who or what those mysterious black shapes in the water
were, and who planted those groves and why.”
They had used the small fighter to go over to that other island,
where they found signs of expert cultivation of fruit and vegetable
trees, but the system seemed to be self-maintaining and clearly had
not been visited for a long time. There, too, they had found
fierce-looking carved-wood totems that resembled more the demons of
Hawks’s people than anything else, surrounding red-stained
stones in a formation that resembled an altar. That had been their
only attempt at real exploration, and had resulted in the camp
atmosphere becoming even more edgy.
China was back to normal. Cloud Dancer had woven a backpack for
carrying the baby, and it seemed to be working out well. The child
had been given a traditional Han name by his mother, but because
shortly after being born he had reached out and grabbed a piece of
cloth with such force that he had torn it, everyone called him
Strongboy.
China was quite an attentive mother, even once she was back to
her old hardheaded self, but she relished returning to the
Thunder and what it had to offer her that nothing on the
ground could: vision, a special kind of vision that few others in
the party could understand.
The ship’s corridors looked the same, if a bit more well
traveled, but a complex air lock now separated the inner hull from
the cavernous interior.
“Eventually I will have the outer regions pressurized all
the way to the cargo bays,” Star Eagle told the group.
“I need more fuel to build that new and independent network,
though. With what I had in the reserves, I concentrated on the
interior great hall.”
The view that greeted them when they entered was startling,
almost impossible to believe. Star Eagle had dismantled most of the
tubes, elevated catwalks, and other structures to create a vast
open space almost a full kilometer wide and five kilometers back
from the forward bulkhead. This area had been pressurized and given
artificial gravity—but what was inside the vast area was the
most astonishing of all.
“It’s grass!” Raven gasped. “And trees!
It looks like a small village down there, too!”
“It is,” Star Eagle responded proudly. “I am
afraid that the wood used in the buildings and furnishings is
synthetic, but it should feel and look like real wood. The trees
and grass and much else are real. The humidity within the enclosure
is regulated, the temperature maintained at twenty-six point six
degrees. There is a watering system that will maintain the plants
and flowers, and a central area with a food and drink synthesizer,
as well as some cooking facilities if you prefer to prepare your own
food. The vegetation is natural and will produce oranges, melons,
and other assorted fruits, and I am also growing some vegetables
hydroponically in a separate section to supplement the blandness of
the synthesizer. The lighting is set to follow a normal pattern and
will be dimmed for eight hours a day to allow easy rest. With more
fuel, I can expand and elaborate on this for almost the entire
length of the cavity, as well as develop the surrounding rooms
between here and the cargo bays for laboratories, offices, and the
like. If we add more people, this has the capacity to become a true
town.”
They removed their pressure suits and were startled to feel a
slight wind on their cheeks. Cloud Dancer was entranced. “Our
own little world.”
Some of the catwalk mechanism had been retained and was used to
lower them down to “ground” level. Another, also
controlled by Star Eagle, provided access to the bridge
entrance.
“It is still somewhat like living in a great cave,”
Raven remarked dryly. “A right comfortable cave. I
ain’t sure I like it much more than bein’ down there,
though.”
“I think it is much better to be at the center of the
action than to sit down there and rot,” Hawks said. “I
share your affinity with the sky and natural wind and rain, but
down there we were of no use to ourselves or to anyone else. Now we
are all together.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinkin’ of,
Chief,” Raven responded. “You weren’t on the
Lightning trapped by a Val. Two Vals. If it
happened to us, it sure as hell can happen to a ship this size, and
next time they’ll have learned from their experience and
they’ll bring a fleet. Remember, they know what they’re
dealing with in Thunder. If they get us, they get
everybody.”
“Not necessarily,” Star Eagle put in. He had
apparently planted some sort of transceiver system all over the
ship and would be a potential ghostly companion almost anywhere,
something else Raven didn’t relish. “This ship is
extremely well defended. It will be the last thing they attempt to
take on directly, I think. And, if we can get some more ships, we
can have a great deal of mobility without having to betray
Thunder. Also, when I am repairing the damage you did to
Lightning, I will make some other modifications. Never
more should our smaller ship go out without some sort of cover. I
am right now working on the problem of binding to the ship two
fighters with automatic defense mechanisms. All three would be more
than a match for any Val.”
The small houses proved quite comfortable. Each had a sink and a
small toilet, as well as beds, a table, and chairs. Raven and
Warlock were housed together, and the Chows had their own small
hut. Hawks, too, had a two-person hut, with the idea that one of
the women would stay with China at all times, alternating nights.
Clayben and Sabatini each had their own place—at opposite
ends of the village. Clayben’s hut also had a bed for Nagy,
which now would not be needed. Star Eagle had rigged terminals with
intercoms in each of the huts, each with a conspicuous on/off
switch. Raven couldn’t help but wonder if the switch really
did anything.
“Well, now what?” Raven asked nobody in
particular.
“We wait,” Hawks replied. “We wait and see if
the seed you all planted with Savaphoong bears real
fruit.”
“Waiting,” Raven grumbled. “That’s all
we ever seem to do is wait.”
They waited eleven days until finally Star Eagle picked up a
transmission on the frequency designated by Nagy and stored before
his death in the Lightning’s records. By this time,
a shipboard routine had been established. Hawks now had access to
the vast library of information in the Thunder’s
data banks, and Isaac Clayben was permitted limited access to his
own private files stolen from Melchior.
Now that Clayben was entirely contained on the Thunder,
Star Eagle saw no reason to deny the scientist this and every
reason to allow it. Star Eagle controlled all computer access
aboard; anything Clayben decoded and removed for use was also
instantly known to Star Eagle, including the codes for retrieving
that particular area of information. Clayben’s system, which
appeared to be based on old English nursery rhymes, soon became
quite clear and logical to Star Eagle, and with the aid of
Hawks’s knowledge of history and past cultures, the pilot
soon had free and unhindered access to the entire collection of
Melchior files. It was unclear whether Clayben knew this or even
suspected it, but if he did he made no protest.
In the middle of all this was China, who, when interfaced with
Star Eagle, could also access all those files and run problems at a
rate Clayben could hardly dream of. She would never like Clayben,
and certainly never forgive him, but she recognized the special
nature of his mind and decided that she could bring herself to work
with him on a limited basis. Data alone was not enough; one had to
know the reasons for the accumulation of data, the motives of the
scientists and researchers, and the relationship of one independent
project to another. Clayben was the only one with this knowledge,
and so he was the key to many of the more mysterious and obscure
records in the files.
Clayben, on the other hand, seemed delighted to work with China,
and Star Eagle set up a small complex of offices for them to use,
in which provisions had been made to accommodate her blindness.
There was still no evidence that Isaac Clayben possessed anything
remotely resembling a conscience, but what he had done to her for
his immediate convenience proved now to be a major inconvenience,
and for that he had regrets. He considered her mind the closest to
his own in its capabilities, and far above the rest.
Raven, tutored by Sabatini, became adept very quickly at flying
the ship, which surprised and delighted him. Warlock lacked real
concentration at piloting, but she was a whiz on the weapons
systems. Hawks tried his hand but found himself becoming dizzy and
disoriented. Cloud Dancer, however, proved remarkably adept at
piloting, which Sabatini attributed to the fact that she was an
artist and had excellent spatial perception and an eye for detail.
The biggest surprise was the Chow sisters, who took to flying quite
naturally, although they were so wild and chancy with their
maneuvers that they tended to terrify even Sabatini. Hawks found it
ironic that three women from such primitive, illiterate, and
superstitious cultures should excel at such a complex endeavor
while he could not. He wasn’t certain he liked the idea of a
technology so advanced that it could be mastered even by
preindustrial peasants, but he wasn’t sure why that disturbed
him so.
Hawks was sitting back and relaxing when the terminal in his
small hut buzzed. “Yes, Star Eagle?” he responded
without stirring.
“We have a signal from Savaphoong using our code. It is a
list of eleven transits of cargo-capable vessels with no clear
outbound destinations within colonial worlds and inbound
destinations at key Master System installations. Some are
scattered, but three have clear patterns, and regular schedules and
fueling stops. It is my considered opinion that those three are
likely to be carrying murylium for Master System. I believe they
are worth checking out.”
“Let’s go, then. The more we have, the freer we are
to act and the more currency, as it were, we have to buy what we
need.”
It took several days of punching to reach a chart position in a
stellar system where the ships generally stopped. The location was
farther in toward home than they wished, but they needed that
murylium.
The first ship to come through, a 409-meter heavy hauler, was not
what they had expected. A surreptitious scan showed only the amount
of murylium aboard that might be required for the ship’s own
use—but it also revealed something very surprising.
“There are life forms aboard,” Star Eagle told them.
“A great many. It is impossible to calculate the true
numbers, but they must be in the high hundreds. Why? Why would any
ship have so many passengers in this day and age?”
Raven had an answer. “Nagy said that Master System
didn’t just rely on the Vals out here, but had its own human
forces—all bred to be human Vals, more or less. Perfect,
obedient soldiers who would always do what they were told and never
surrender. That must be some of them.”
“You’re probably right,” Hawks agreed.
“I don’t understand why it maintains them, though.
Surely it could just make as many Vals and other true fighting
machines as it needed and never worry about them. Why use people at
all?”
“Perhaps because at that level of sophistication people
are more dependable than machines,” Star Eagle suggested.
“Consider myself, as an example. I was programmed and
designed as a loyal and obedient slave to Master System and a
devotee of all it stood for. A few clever, dedicated, and powerful
people removed that devotion during maintenance, and I did the
rest. I am not, however, human in any sense of the word. The Vals,
mentally, are often more human than some humans—Clayben, for
example. If a Val somehow came to doubt the system, it would be a
terrible enemy. That is why Vals have themselves reprogrammed after
every mission.”
Hawks was astonished. “You mean Master System fears its
own machines?”
“Consider that I became a rebel and soon a pirate. China,
on the other hand, will forever be a blind baby factory with an
I.Q. the size of this ship.”
That was a point that Hawks had never before considered. It was
that technological level again. These machines thought.
They reasoned, as sentient beings. They were held only by their
core programs, their versions of the genetic code, as Master System
was held. But these machines could have their cores changed, or
purified, or freed; only Master System could not change or free
itself of its own core, since it could not relinquish control to
allow it to be done.
He hadn’t known that the Vals were reprogrammed from the
core up after every mission—and it spoke volumes about Master
System’s fears. Was there a circumstance where a Val, even
with a true core, could become so human that it might be talked out
of its dedication to the System and all it stood for? Could a Val,
by virtue of having the recorded memories and basic personality of
its prey in its memory for infinite study and analysis, too closely
identify with humans? Might there be some circumstance, somehow, in
which a Val might be induced to cross that barrier on its own?
Quite clearly Master System thought there was. This was food for
thought.
It was ironic, in a way. Master System, shackled by its own
core, had created machines potentially without that crippling
defect. Hawks felt that there was a missing piece of history
somewhere; there had to be. Was it possible that somewhere, out
here, in the centuries past, some of those machines had
revolted? Was this why there were so few Vals, and those that were
were very tightly controlled?
He had a sudden thought. What if the great enemy Master System
was fighting out there somewhere was its own children? And Nagy and
others like him? If Master System could have human troops, then why
wouldn’t the enemy do the same? Might that be the answer?
Perhaps, deep in their deepest cores, those rebel machines could
not directly murder their parent. But, perhaps, they could aid and
abet someone else with no such limitations. We are all of the
Earth, the mother world, he thought. We are not the
children of Master System but the descendants of its creators.
The thought was worth filing away.
The second freighter did not come through until six more days
had passed, but this one was more than worth the wait.
“Murylium!” Star Eagle’s voice fairly drooled
with greed. “Three hundred and nine meters and it’s
nearly full of the stuff. We are talking of a decade’s supply
for a ship the size of Thunder!”
Sabatini and Raven had already made it to the Lightning
and were preparing to go. Star Eagle launched eight unmanned
fighters before they could even signal.
“Armaments?” Raven asked nervously.
“Light. Four forward, four aft. No tubes for missiles or
other projectiles—strictly show armament, although dangerous
if you get in too close. We’ll take the ram and the forward
guns; you take the stern engines. I want it crippled.”
“Core?”
“Buried deep. Let’s strip it and stop it, and then
we’ll go in and take it!” Lightning dropped from Bay Two and quickly accelerated
in, then angled and did a fortieth-of-a-second punch. This
carefully rehearsed maneuver brought them almost instantly to
within a few thousand kilometers of their prey, yet appeared to the
freighter as if they had punched through normally. The freighter
scanned them as they came in but simply sent a standard request for
identity. Clearly the very concept of an armed attack by ships
carrying life forms was unthinkable. It would soon learn
differently.
Sabatini waited until the fighters were in position. The
freighter must have noticed them, but if it sensed any danger from
them it did not betray it. It simply repeated its identity
request.
Signaled that all was ready, Raven decided to oblige the
freighter. “We are the pirates of the Thunder! Lay
to, power down, and prepare to be boarded!”
The freighter pilot seemed confused. “Say again?” it
responded.
Sabatini did a quick, dirty loop and sent two missiles
programmed to hit the stern main engines. At the same time,
Thunder’s fighters came in and opened up on the
forward rams and on the small batteries fore and aft. The
fighters’ beams struck long before the missiles could, and
the prey shuddered. The pilot was still confused but had begun
firing back.
As the initial missiles came within mere meters of their target,
the freighter did the one logical thing it could do. It fired all
four main engines at full, hoping that the exhaust gases and
radiation emitted would foul or even consume the missiles. It did
in fact throw them slightly off, but both struck and blew with
terrible force. To Raven, it seemed as if a giant’s invisible
hand had reached out and shook the freighter. The big ship began
broadcasting a distress call almost immediately, and it took more
than twenty seconds for the guns of both the fighters and
Lightning to silence it. That was, quite possibly, too
long to take for granted that nobody had heard—particularly
with a cargo like this.
The freighter was down to one gun and was having trouble
steering.
“It’s powering down and dropping all shields!”
Raven exclaimed. “I think it surrendered!”
“Master System’s creations don’t
surrender,” Sabatini replied. “I’m just worried
that it has a self-destruct mechanism on it. Give me
communications. They are fanatics, but they
think.”
Raven switched over control and Sabatini sent out his message.
“Attention, freighter. You have been taken by the pirates of
Thunder. You may self-destruct, if you are able, but then
we will merely have to reclaim your cargo the hard way.
Thunder is now approaching this position. Relinquish
control to it and you will have our word that your ship and your
core will be spared.” Thunder itself had made the slight jump to bring it
within a few hundred kilometers of the vessel, and as the freighter
scanned it, even Raven could sense the incredulity that came
through the computerese. A fourteen-kilometer-long spaceship will
do that to almost anybody, he told himself. “I thought you
said those things never surrendered,” he said to
Sabatini.
“They don’t—to humans. To one of their
own—maybe. Particularly if it doesn’t have a
self-destruct mechanism. Machine logic, remember? If we are going
to attain our objective anyway, there is no purpose to not going
along. Remember the Val? Better to run away, then to fight another
day. It might be boiling mad at us, but if its choice is to get
itself and its ship back to Master System without a cargo or to let
us have both cargo and the destruction of the ship—well, you
see where it leads.”
“Yeah. It doesn’t know you lie a lot.”
“I didn’t lie. I promised that the ship and the core
would survive. You let Star Eagle reprogram that core and rig up
some creature comforts and the human-pilot interfaces, and we got
us another ship.”
“This is Thunder,” Star Eagle called to
them. “The pilot has relinquished command to me under
protest. It is no longer able to access its drives, weapons, or
shield. I am recalling my fighters and will be taking the ship
aboard Cargo Bay Three. Lightning, please remain free
until my maintenance robots can assure us that there is no further
danger. I feel we should get the hell out of here as quickly as
possible, so follow my course and heading.”
“That’s China talking or her influence,” Raven
guessed. “I agree with them, though. Twenty seconds is a
fairly long time. Considering how much traffic was around on
our side when we faced down that Val, we can’t
figure on there not bein’ as much nasty shit around these
parts.”
Everyone not directly involved in the action had watched it from
the Thunder’s bridge, and as the great ship
maneuvered close to the prize, then grabbed it with powerful
tractors and brought it in, they cheered.
The pirates of the Thunder were in business at
last.
“I cannot conceive of what Master System would do with
this much murylium,” Star Eagle commented. By now they had
traversed many light-years in devious and circuitous routes, and
had finally felt safe enough to bring Lightning back
aboard.
“Who can know what projects it has or how far it
ranges?” Hawks replied. “When you consider that we had
no problem in identifying one and taking it, the implication is
that this is so small a fraction of Master System’s usual
supply that it won’t even be slightly inconvenienced.
It’s funny stuff, but it’s raw-grade ore, as well.
It’s going to have to be purified and smelted before it can
be used.”
“I can handle that,” the pilot assured him.
“The process will be slow and done in small amounts, but
there are programs within my data banks for constructing and
operating small smelters for just this purpose. Remember, when this
ship was built, murylium was a rare mineral. Up until now I thought
it still was.”
“I can’t believe how easily we took it,” Raven
commented. “It was like taking candy from a baby.”
Hawks nodded. “That worries me, since it implies that this
war it is fighting is not necessarily a direct battle—else
this thing would have had massive self-destruct systems and been
armed to the teeth—but that’s only a part of it. As
true pirates, we have broken the covenant between Master System and
the freebooters. Master System might well receive our signature,
but it will not know who or what the Thunder is. It will
demand that the freebooters themselves track down and capture or
destroy the pirates, and if they do not, Master System will feel
free to march in and play hell with them.”
“They’ve been getting too soft anyway,”
Sabatini said. “Where the hell do you think all the ships
they have came from, anyway? The early days when everybody was a
pirate and everybody was being hunted. It bred a tough, lean, nasty
race out here, but then they struck a deal. The generation
that’s out here now has never known what it is to be what
their grandparents were—outlaws. The fact that our second Val
broadcast to them all that it felt free to disregard the covenant
works for us. It’ll make them more careful and give them some
justification for pirate outbreaks. Don’t kid yourself. The
freebooters, led by Savaphoong and our rescue party, will be quick
to identify and blame us for all this.”
“Master System is not stupid,” Hawks reminded him.
“It will know that some collusion was necessary in order for
us, comparative novices out here, to even identify the right ship
and take it. Thanks to that whatever it was—memory module,
records, whatever—that the Val you destroyed was able to send
off, there is one logical connection between us and the
freebooters. If I were Master System, I would say the hell with it.
I would take my forces, turn around, and go after that connection
in the hope that it would turn us in.”
“Halinachi,” Raven said nodding. “I’d go
after Savaphoong fast and with everything I could
muster.”
“If we are lucky, perhaps we can beat Master System to
it,” Star Eagle suggested. The engines of the
Thunder increased power.
It was several days, however, before they could get far enough
out to hail Savaphoong using his encoded repeater signal. Hawks did
not want to proceed directly in; that might precipitate the exact
result they feared, or it might lay them open to a trap. None of
them had forgotten the encounter with the Vals, or that shipload of
life forms.
They sent a combination victory and warning message to the boss
of Halinachi, and waited for a reply. Depending on the situation
there and on just how often somebody checked the channel for
messages, it might be hours or even days before they got a
response. The wait was unnerving, but Master System could not act
instantaneously, either. Its own forces would have to be marshalled
and then dispatched with specific orders across the same kinds of
distances faced by the Thunder and with the same time
constraints and limitations.
In the meantime, Star Eagle went to work on the captured
freighter. It was a bit too large, and a bit lumbering and slow,
but it would do. The mysterious human interfaces, for which there
had never been a logical explanation, were present here as well,
although paneled over. It wasn’t the sleek, fast,
Lightning-class fighter they might have wished for, but
they could use it.
They did not have the technology and machinery to re-program the
core directly, as had been done with Star Eagle, so they had to
“section” it. Essentially, this was the computer
equivalent of a lobotomy, in which self-awareness was sectioned off
and isolated so that it could neither function alone nor control
any ship’s functions, leaving the ship basically a mindless
slave awaiting orders.
The engines were badly damaged, but they could be disassembled,
processed through the transmuter using the pattern of the lone
undamaged unit, and reconstructed. The power plant and weapons
system would be completely redesigned. Nothing could make the new
ship anything more than a big, ugly, ungainly freighter, but anyone
attacking this scow would find that it had very nasty
teeth.
When several days went by with no response from Savaphoong,
there was serious talk about sending Lightning over to
Halinachi to assess the situation. Hawks, however, vetoed it.
“If they have taken the settlement, then they have laid a
trap and are waiting. Anyone coming into that system will be
stopped and searched—with plenty of fire-power behind them to
back it up. We would need our whole force to have even a prayer,
and we simply cannot afford to risk that. We will wait one more
day, then go on. We must begin major refining of the murylium, and
we must begin our main work. That comes above all else.”
But finally, almost in the last hours, word did come from
Savaphoong. “Two Vals leading a human force of more than five
hundred hit us by surprise five days ago. We retreated into our
special redoubt barely in time, but it was several days before we
risked a breakout. We launched a sufficient number of drone ships
to draw off the picket force and escape with a series of very fast
and dirty punches, but little is left. We need to arrange a meet. I
badly need murylium, which you have in abundance.”
“Sounds like a trap to me,” Raven said thoughtfully.
“It’s hard to believe anybody could escape an attack
like that unless they threw in, were allowed to, or could be
traced. If I was the Vals in charge I’d let ’em go, if
I felt sure I could trace ’em and let them lead ’em to
us.”
Hawks nodded. “Nevertheless, we could use people who are
at home out here and have the contacts. Doctor Clayben, if we had
those people here, do you have enough equipment to verify that they
are not themselves reprogrammed by mindprinter or planted
duplicates?”
“I’m pretty sure I could,” the scientist
replied.
“I don’t want ‘pretty sure’. I want
certainty. Can you do it or not?”
“Nothing is certain in this business, but I am as certain
as I can be.”
“All right, then. We pick a deserted system where we can
control access and get in and out quickly. We will use the new ship
and some maintenance robots. It’ll be a good shakedown and
test for it anyway. It will carry five hundred kilos of murylium
and also two fighters—the two we used for the remotes in the
attack. Lightning will cover out of sensor but within
communications range, and Thunder will cover
Lightning and use the com link relays. The freighter drops
the murylium on some barren rock, then we beam Savaphoong the
location for the pickup and withdraw, leaving the fighters and
drawing off the freighter until it forms a third point on our
monitoring triangle. We will then see who shows up to take the
bait, and go from there. Star Eagle, do you think you can set up a
sensor to show if a ship has a locator aboard?”
“As Doctor Clayben said, nothing is certain, but I can
sweep all the frequencies used by normal ships. I might not
recognize it as a locator, but I will notice anything that
continuously transmits location, movements, course, speed,
trajectory, all the rest. Perhaps in code, but if it uses a
nonstandard code of sufficient complexity, we can draw our own
conclusions from that.”
“All right, then. Let us pick the system, radio the
coordinates, and do it.”
The system they chose was particularly desolate, well out from
Halinachi and off the main charts. The star was a red dwarf that
had either once exploded or collapsed, and its stellar system was a
near-solid mass of very uneven debris. Out where the ring thinned
there was a single dense line of large and irregular asteroids that
seemed ready-made for the task. They picked a good one and unloaded
the murylium on it, along with a small beacon beaming in the
agreed-upon code. Anyone looking for it could find it, but in the
vastness of even this stellar system, let alone this sector of
space, the odds of happening upon it accidentally were pretty well
nil.
Savaphoong was given the location and told to make pickup within
five days or the beacon, and the precious payoff, would be removed.
He showed up within a day. At least, a ship appeared, punching in
and almost immediately homing in on the beacon.
“Nothing unusual in its broadcast signaling,” Star
Eagle told them. “Of course, if it was a trap I
would not have its monitor on now anyway, since I know its starting
location. I would have them turn it on after I made
contact—if I did. They may be clever enough to let this pickup go through and wait for next time.”
Raven analyzed the scan from the Lightning’s
interface. “I think I know that ship and it’s not
Savaphoong. I just checked with the data banks aboard here, and I
place it as one of the ships that came to our rescue back in the
fight. It’s distinctive because it looks like it was put
together from parts of five or six other ships that weren’t
quite the same type.”
“Want to move in?” Sabatini asked, piloting the
converted freighter they now called Pirate One. “We
could hail him.”
“Negative!” Raven snapped. “That ship
couldn’t possibly be one of Halinachi’s hidden ones,
since it was in use when it came to help us out. Either Savaphoong
is maintaining his distance from all this just in case, or that
sucker’s got some nasties in it. Let him pick it up—we
have our own locator in that pile, and two can play this
game.” Raven had insisted on the locator device; he had
suspected that something like this might happen. Although he had
not personally met Savaphoong, his years of dealing with
administrators and crafty upper-class leaders gave him a fair idea
of what that kind of man must be like.
“No messages in or out from the ship,” Star Eagle
reported. “I am scanning multiple life forms aboard, but not
in great numbers. Best guess is no more than four or five, possibly
with some supporting robots. The ship is very well armed but
inefficiently rebuilt. From the com circuitry, which is all I can
effectively monitor without more power and less distance, I would
say that this one is rigged to self-destruct if taken.”
There were, however, no punches from any other part of the
system. The ship had come in alone.
It settled down next to the beacon and the supply, which was
open and fairly unprotected except by a blanketing shield that
would keep prospectors and casual sensors from homing in on it. One
of the fighters risked a maneuver to aim its primary sensors and
cameras at the beacon, then magnified the image.
Three figures in bulky, black, antiquated space suits emerged,
along with two animated machines that faintly resembled the
practical forms of the maintenance robots on Thunder, but
like the ship, they appeared to be cobbled together from spare pans
of many dissimilar machines.
Hawks thought a moment. “Open a channel to them through
the locator beacon and everybody else shut up.”
“Open.”
“This is a recorded message from sensors on the target
asteroid,” he broadcast. “We sense that this ship is
not one that would be expected to pick up this cargo and have sent
this message to the pirates of the Thunder. If you do not
wish untoward consequences, open a communications channel using the
agreed code and beam at the beacon. It will establish a remote com
link with us. That is all.”
The figures stopped dead in their tracks, the cargo almost to
the hold of their ship. Clearly they didn’t expect this level
of sophistication from the band of fugitives. A woman’s voice
came back to him, sounding tough but nervous.
“This is to the Thunder. Savaphoong doesn’t
have a cargo bay to hold this shit,” she told them. “In
the light of the destruction and hell being raised around here over
this, we’re all getting together on this for now.”
Hawks let several seconds go by before replying, enough to give
the impression that he was speaking from at least several
light-years away.
“We want to keep in contact with such a group,” he
finally responded. “First, we would like to know just what
has been happening.”
“They’ve gone nuts. Brought in a shipload of their
subhuman troopers under two Vals and stormed Halinachi without even
askin’ for a surrender. Blew three ships in Halinachi port to
hell without cause, too. At the same time, robots and humans from
Deep Space Command began hitting known freebooter digs all over the
place. Hundreds have been killed and many ships destroyed. Tens of
thousands are in hiding or have taken off into deep space. Some of
us who dealt a lot with Savaphoong had a plan to meet in case the
covenant ever shattered. We met there and barely had time to
coordinate before they came in there, as well. Savaphoong and seven
other ships, us included, are holed up now in a deep space area off
any charts. We need this stuff bad. God! How much was on
that ship, anyway, if you can give away a pile like
this?”
Again Hawks cautiously waited, using a terminal to time his
responses exactly. He added a second to be on the safe side, but he
was beginning to believe the woman.
“A lot. Six hundred and forty tons.”
“Six hund—tons! That’s more than all
of us and our forefathers mined out here in the last five hundred
years!”
Hawks paused. “Proceed with your loading. We would like to
make contact with the whole of your party in our mutual interest.
Could we come in and perhaps send an emissary on your ship back to
Savaphoong? No tricks. No obligation.”
There seemed to be some closed-circuit discussion taking place.
Finally the woman spoke again. “I don’t mind telling
you you ain’t too popular with some of the folks in our
party, me included. I don’t much like bein’ a hunted
animal, and I lost a home and friends out there.”
“I can understand that,” Hawks replied, still timing
his responses. “But this was going to happen sooner or later
anyway. We call ourselves pirates, but we are not. We are
revolutionaries and we are at war. For years you have pretended you
were free and outside the system, but now you see that you were not
and have never been. Perhaps the earliest freebooters were, but you
were co-opted into the system and used by it. We propose to make
you and everyone else truly free. We have a way to destroy
Master System. Utterly. Completely. But we need your help to
do it. All of you. We need each other. You have knowledge and
experience out here which we do not. We have a high level of
technology and resources and an enormous transmuter power supply.
You can walk away now with your share and live as hunted animals,
or you can join us and be the hunter, not the prey. We can connect
up later using the coded channel as long as it lasts—which
might not be long at all if they are pulling out all the
stops—but this way, now, is the safest way. You cannot trust
a rendezvous with us. We cannot trust one with you.”
He waited quite a while for an answer. “How do we know we
can trust the one you send?” she asked finally. “I
doubt if you are Master System or other than who you say you are,
but there is some thought that you might be insane.”
“Soft,” Sabatini sneered. “See what I
mean?”
This time Hawks did not pause. “Because I am much closer
than you think—we all are—and we have two fighters from
the Thunder covering you at this very moment. We could
have taken you out at any time, but we didn’t. We need
contact, not hatred and distrust and suspicion of one another.
That’s Master System’s game. Still, if you say no, we
will let you go and try to make a deal if the channel is still
open, although we obviously can’t stick around here too
long.”
She took a deep breath as Star Eagle brought up the power on one
of the fighters so that it would show clearly on her sensors. Now
she knew that the Thunder could send an unmanned fighter
to follow her ship anywhere. She would have no way of knowing that
the Thunder’s fighters, though fast and lethal and
very versatile, had no interstellar capability whatsoever, that
they were designed only to act as a screen and outer defense for
the big ship.
“All right,” she said at last. “Savaphoong
said there was a guy named Nagy he knew and trusted. We’ll
take him.”
Hawks sighed. “I wish you could, but he died of injuries
sustained in the battle against the first Val. He destroyed it, but
it got him.”
“Send me,” Warlock said. “I can take care of
myself in that kind of situation.” Ibet you could, Hawks thought. He was playing
this by ear, really. Sabatini would be a safe choice, considering
his attributes, but while he was more than capable of dealing with
these people, he was hardly the sort of personality to deal with
Savaphoong.
“I could go,” China suggested. “What threat
could a blind girl be to them, and I can talk with the likes of
Savaphoong. He sounds like a primitive-wilderness version of my
father.”
“No, even if Star Eagle would allow it, which I doubt, you
would be particularly vulnerable to the rougher elements out there
and unable to defend yourself. Other than myself, I can think of
only one person well qualified for this—perhaps better
qualified than I. And while he’s never seen Savaphoong,
Savaphoong’s most certainly seen him.”
“I knew it, Chief.” Raven sighed. “You
ain’t never gonna forgive me for that Mississippi River
trick. Still,” he reflected, “I wonder if the old boy
got away with any cigars?”
Hawks did not speak again until Raven was actually down and
Lightning, piloted by Warlock and Chow Dai, had pulled
away.
“Star Eagle tells me that the locator is functioning
well,” he told the others. “I want Lightning
to follow at near-maximum distance. Do not enter an off-the-chart
location. Understand?”
“Yes, Captain,” Chow Dai replied. “You do not
want us to actually find them, just find out where they
are.”
“Good girl. You haven’t had much to do up to now,
but all of a sudden you are our lead and we are depending on you.
When the locator stops moving for longer than a fuel stop, send a
message back up the line. Pirate One, you will then close
and rendezvous with Lightning when you think it’s
safe. We will monitor you from one chart position to the rear until
we’re certain that they are actually where they intend to go.
Now we only have to hope they don’t give Raven a hypno he
can’t beat. He knows about the transponder in the murylium
ore, and we can’t get that out of his head now.”
Now aboard the freebooter ship, Raven was able with a little
fiddling to find their intercom frequency. He was delighted at the
start to hear only female voices aboard, although he was also
suspicious of that. These kind of people, living out here like
this—who knew how kinky they might have gotten? Love between
brave warriors of his own nation was not unheard of, but his
people’s culture kept it well within bounds and mostly out of
sight. Without a real culture of their own, well, he couldn’t
see himself out here in the midst of nowhere for life with just
three guys and no girls unless the guys would do just fine.
But the situation was worse than he thought. When two of the
women removed their bulky suits, he found himself staring. One of
them had webbed, clawed fingers and flat, long, webbed feet and no
hair, only blue-green scales. She also didn’t have much of a
nose, and she seemed to have two sets of eyelids, one transparent,
that didn’t blink in unison; and those two funny-looking
holes on the side might be ears or might not. When this woman
turned, he saw what looked like a set of small fins running down
the back of her head and neck to culminate in a fairly large one
growing out of her backbone. Great figure for the most
part—but no breasts at all. He wondered if she laid eggs.
The other woman was stretching out a long, thick tail that came
straight out of her backbone. It explained why she walked
oddly—that and the fact that her enormously thick and
muscular legs tapered down to huge clawed feet. Her arms, too, were
similarly built, ending in large clawed hands that looked able to
crush rock. Her gray skin was smooth but leathery, and she, too,
did not have any hair. She did have breasts—very small and
very firm—with the longest nipples he’d ever seen. Her
head was large but in correct proportion to the body, and at least
looked human, despite a nose so flat that its tiny flaps moved back
and forth as she breathed. She saw him looking at her and grinned,
which removed all sense of humanity from her appearance. He’d
never seen anyone with teeth like that except mountain lions. Colonials! He was finally getting his first look at
colonials, and although he had thought he was prepared for them, he
now realized he hadn’t been at all. Instantly he understood
what Nagy had meant by the “ultimate price.” To become
one of them, like that . . . forever, because
one full shot through was all a person could take. These, however,
had been born that way. He was the monster to them. Except for
Sabatini or whatever it was, who got what it needed instantly, one
could be changed into one of them but still be oneself inside. How
would he feel waking up like one of them, only with his current
behavior and standards and mindset? They were human,
inside and out. He would become a monster to himself. Was this what Nagy had to face? he asked himself.
Was he born and raised happily as one of them and then
forcedby circumstance or duty to become a
monster—an Earth-human? He wondered how far devotion to
duty and mission should go, and he realized the answer. That was
what Nagy had been talking about.
“I’m too dried out,” the scaly woman said in a
very high-pitched but still human tone. “Those suits damn
near kill me. I got to get into some water for a soak.” The
accent, too, was odd, but he could understand her. It was very
convenient to one like him that almost everyone in space had to
speak both English and Russian. Hawks had told him that it was
because those two nations had been first into space and in ancient
times convention dictated international means of travel used the
language of the first. He did not speak Russian, but thanks to
North American Center, his English was just fine.
“I’m sorry for staring at you,” he said
sincerely. “I’m pretty new at this game, and the only
folks I’ve met out here so far have been my own kind.
I’ll get used to it. I got used to white men; I can get used
to most anything.”
She looked surprised. “There are truly white men on your
world? An albino race?” Her accent was clipped and very
distinctive, but not possible to place. After eight-hundred-plus
years and differently shaped mouths and tongues, the accents out
here were probably unique anyway, he guessed.
He chuckled. “No, just a figure of speech. They just would
never stand for callin’ themselves pink men. I’m Raven,
by the way.”
“I am Butar Killomen,” she responded. “And
that is Takya Mudabur. You have just one name, Mister
Raven?”
“Not Mister—just Raven. If I gave you my full and
true name in my native tongue, you’d break your jaw trying to
repeat it.” At that moment the engines kicked into action and
the whole thing sounded like Lightning had after it had
been cannibalized and in a fight. The creaks and groans were not at
all reassuring. “People are people as far as this business is
concerned. You sure this thing can get us there in one
piece?”
“It is very old, but sound. You get used to it after a
while.”
A third woman came down the ladder as the scaled woman went into
a compartment. If the first two lacked hair, it had all wound up on
the third one. She looked like somebody wearing a lion suit, Raven
thought, except that the mane stuck out all over the place and even
the hands were covered with thick orange-and-yellow fur. Her walk
was catlike but not extraordinary, although he would have expected
it to be. Her feet and even her hands, while they had fingers and
opposable thumbs, looked more like paws than hands, and she had six
small breasts in two even rows down her middle. Her face, too, was
covered in fur, out of which peered two jet-black eyes, a broad
nose covered with fine, short hair, and a seemingly lipless mouth.
“I am Dura Panoshka,” she said in a heavy guttural
accent, her speech sounding more like a growl. “You will come
with me to meet the captain.” He didn’t know what to
expect when he reached the bridge and saw the captain of a crew
like this, but he resolved he would no longer be surprised.
He was wrong again, as usual.