SHE HAD BEEN IN DARKNESS SO LONG NOW THAT SHE was used to it. It was no longer a shock to awaken and not see, and the confines of her small quarters were so spartan and so basic that she now lived within them without so much as a bump or a stumble. Yet when they took her out of her cell, she was suddenly in a totally different and frighteningly disoriented world. She knew now that something had gone wrong near the start, that she was in fact a prisoner, and that the staff at least knew who she really was, but she had no idea why they had kept her there, in isolation, and still blind. Her sessions with the psychiatrists and their analytical computers had been routine but did not seem to be leading anywhere. This confused her more than ever, since the Presidium ran Melchior, and Song Ching’s father was a member of the Presidium. Now, again, she was taken out of confinement and led first into a vast open space, then through doors and tunnels to the Institute, where she was seated in a large treatment chair. This time, however, things were different.
“My name is Doctor Syzmanski,” a woman’s professional voice said off to the right. “We have finally completed our analysis of you, and Doctor Clayben, our chief administrator, has made his decision.”
They had done a lot of deep poking and probing into her mind and her psychochemical makeup as well as her genetic files. They had found how the computer had done what it had done, how she had managed to do what she had accomplished, and much more. They were quite surprised to discover that it was more than chemical mischief that made her believe she was a male inside. The re-orientation had triggered a whole set of processes within the mind of Song Ching, and both the mindprinting and the humbling aboard ship, as well as contact with ordinary victims, had eaten at the heart of Song Ching’s massive egocentrism. Another blow, and a telling one, was that she was really fixated on her father. She had worshiped him and wanted only to have him return some of the affection and respect. He never had, and that had driven her even harder to prove herself to him, and she thought she had done so. In return, he had given her the ultimate slap. He had belittled her accomplishments and then moved to wipe her forever from his life. She had discovered that no daughter, no matter how brilliant, could ever be seen by him as more than an object. Only if she were a man would he take her seriously. This had reinforced the crude basic work done for the masquerade.
“You were conceived here,” Doctor Syzmanski told her. “Did you know that?”
“No, but it does not surprise me.”
“We are the only ones who could do it and allow him to get away with it. That’s partly what we’re for, how we justify our existence to the Presidium. Your father and mother contributed the basics, of course, but those were highly modified here before being carefully combined and then placed inside your mother. The technique is quite complex and quite revolutionary. Any children you might have, by any father, would be more or less reengineered to attain the maximum of physical and mental perfection the genes would allow. We understood your father’s plan. You see, all the Centers exist to do just the opposite. To seek out the exceptional, the dreamer, the potential changers of the world, and either co-opt them into the Centers or eliminate them. Master System demands we breed only mediocrity or those satisfied with the status quo. Your father wanted to make the next evolutionary leap. You were part of that plan. Of course, it wouldn’t have worked.”
“Huh? What?” She was startled.
“Your father felt that by removing you from Center and thus from having your children’s genetic code registered, he would escape detection. He could then protect the children from his position rather than eliminating or co-opting them into the system as he is employed to do. His ego kept him from seeing that his plan had real merit if it were done with two peasants picked at random, or perhaps fifty. However, he wanted it kept in his own family. He wanted his descendants to be the ones. You are already registered. Master System is not blind. It would order your father to recruit or deal with any children you might have no matter what he did to your mind-set.”
“But surely he would have known this, been told of this.”
“The greatest of men can be blinded and brought down by pride and ego. He did not want to be told. It would have been death or worse to do more than make the pro forma warning. He shut it out, refused to recognize it, because he could not accept the truth. We, on the other hand, find much merit in the idea if it can be removed from him. We are arranging, if we have not already arranged, to have you killed.”
“What?”
“You may already be dead. Positive identification. Frustrated parents, perhaps some guilt there and even sadness at having caused it. Case closed. All, even Master System, satisfied. On Doctor Clayben’s orders, you no longer exist.”
“But Chu Li does.” She began to feel some excitement coming back into her.
“Only in computer records. Those are easier to fix, but Chu Li must also die, here, in captivity, and be routinely disposed of. Then no one who was not actually with you will know. Oh, this Sabatini may think he knows, but we will deal with him and even adjust the pilot. We have changed identities, forms, all sorts of things countless times here, but right now you are probably unique in the Community. You do not exist. We have always thought of you as ours, anyway. It is only right that you return to us when—ripe.”
She began to get a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “What do you intend to do with me?”
“You have turned out exactly as we programmed. You have learned more about computers and computer mathematics than many three times your age. You have also shown great courage and the willingness to take major risks for big stakes. That last is particularly rare. There is no way of knowing what you might accomplish, but we do not feel that we should destroy that potential. However, it is equally vital to know if the rest of the genetic programming works. It was far more complex and experimental. If it does, we can use it here to breed our own superior race. You are hardly the only one we worked on with this, but you are the only one we have at the right age and here on station. One problem has been how to accomplish all this without you eventually turning our own system back upon us. We think we know a way, and we believe the great risks are worth it. Don’t worry—you will remember everything. You will still be you inside. We dare not tamper much without risking killing that spark we desire.”
The psychochemistry was simple, less than child’s play to the masters of Melchior. Eliminate the blockers, shift the hormones, create others that would be manufactured ever after. She was not merely oriented back to female, she was reoriented to very female. She would be like an animal in heat, single-minded and insatiable, until a pregnancy occurred. No test would be needed. Once the brain received notification and began the preparatory processes, those animal urges would cease. She would be normal, in full control, and since she would retain her old memories and basic personality, and since she would find her animal self unnerving if not somewhat frightening, it was predicted that during the whole period she would probably prefer women as company, friends, and lovers. Once the child was born, her body would begin a repair and reset, and when it was prepared once more, in a month, perhaps two, the cycle would begin again. It would continue this way until she ran out of eggs, perhaps thirty years from now.
She would not, of course, have to tend to or raise all those children. There would be a staff for that, partly picked from the female prisoner population. It was thought that the Chows might be ideal to start this staff once other experimenters were done with them. The two North American newcomers would also be good for this: no other projects had been planned for them since they really were surprise additions. The silent one with the painted body desperately needed to tend to children, and short of going through the Institute’s Metamorphosis Clinic there was no way she could physically have them herself.
Song Ching herself, however, would be renamed and programmed to respond to her new name. Because the working language agreed to was English, since that was what the computers responded to, it was felt that it should be a name that sounded appropriate in English. After some debate, the mostly non-Oriental staff decided on China Nightingale. Although almost twenty percent of the staff was of Chinese extraction, there would be only one China.
But because China would have access to their computers, they wanted other guarantees. They could not threaten her with the loss of computer access because it was for their benefit, not hers, that they allowed it at all. Although she would not actually have to raise her children, she was programmed to be almost fanatically possessive toward them. Her children would always come before any hatreds, grievances, resentments, or personal anything. She would not risk their lives, safety, or future on risky undertakings against the Institute. They would in effect be hostages to her good behavior.
The other guarantee was that she did not have to see to work with her machines and her theories but that instead this would force her to interact with them vocally at all times. That way, with only a slight slowdown in her ability to work, she would never be able to encrypt or bury discoveries or requests for information. It would all be recorded and analyzed by a research team and another, independent computer. The blindness, they decided, had been a stroke of sheer luck. Conditioned to repairing the most grievous injuries, able to grow eyes, limbs, even things like tails that weren’t there before, they never would have thought to create such a handicap. Now, though, they removed her eyes and replaced them with realistic but totally nonfunctional synthetics with an unregistered retinal pattern.
The cosmetics completed the work. Her voice had been lowered a half octave; they raised it an octave and a half. It sounded shrill and unpleasant to her ears, but they assured her it sounded quite nice to others. It was a very high soprano, cut with a certain throaty softness. They thickened the lips, broadened the mouth, and gave her something of a pronounced overbite, pushed back her ears a bit, enlarged her breasts, and widened her hips, then gave her a new permanent set of fingerprints and footprint patterns, also unregistered. None of the changes could be genetically transmitted, of course, so they felt free to experiment. She was still quite attractive, although not in the classical sense that she had been, but the only thing she had in common with Song Ching was her height and the fact that both were Chinese.
Finally, they told her all that they had done and why. They also told her that they had a way of locking it in, of making the brain reject any attempts at physical or psychochemical change. She could still be hypnoed or mindprinted, but any attempt to change the physical composition, which included both the blindness and the psychochemicals, would be doomed. Then they reimprinted her, turning her silver identifiers a metallic red. Now she was property of the Institute. The new chemical would prevent her from leaving the Institute area; she would live as well as work there. To leave would automatically flag security.
She would never really be able to visualize what she looked like now, but she accepted the idea that no one who had known her would ever recognize her. This and the blindness she accepted and paired off against the guilt which had forced her to become Chu Li. What she could neither forgive nor forget was what they had turned her into for their own purposes. She would be a thinking, working human being only so long as she was pregnant. Worse, she knew that once her first child was born, they would have a sword at her throat. Even if one day she determined how to escape, she would be held here, for they would never let her take the child, and she would not be able to risk it. After that, the only hope of freedom of action would be to do what they feared and seize control of their system. Doing this with verbal queries and commands and having to enter everything verbally would be next to impossible unless she found allies, and that might take a long, long time. Escape within those nine months seemed even more impossible and could certainly not be done without a lot of help, all of which would be years in coming, if it ever did.
Or, then again, it might come in three months.
She was walking down the hall to her quarters, a route with which she was now totally familiar. Her quarters, which were large and luxurious with fur and silk and even luxury foods and toiletries, she knew now better than she knew computer coding. Unless someone carelessly left something for her to trip on in the hall, it would be almost impossible to tell on this route that she was blind at all.
She felt someone approach from behind and sensed it was a woman. She didn’t know how she knew, but she was getting quite good at that sort of thing.
“Stop right here,” the woman hissed in oddly accented English. “This is a point where monitors do not reach because there is no entrance or exit, but keep your voice low.”
She frowned. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“A potential friend. Is it true that you know how to override a spaceship pilot? That you can independently command a ship?”
“I think so. I did it once.”
“That was a premodified ship and strictly interplanetary. Could you do it to an unmodified interstellar craft?”
“I—I think so. The theory is the same. Only someone would have to get the necessary equipment and follow my instructions. I couldn’t do it myself, and the work would have to be done in a space suit. Why do you ask this? Are you tormenting me?”
“You give me the list of what you would need, down to the last part. All of it. Then work out any problems and theoretical situations on the computer. They won’t mind. They feel that there is no escape from here.”
“Is there?”
“We have a way out and a place to go but no means of getting there. It was supposed to be all arranged, but the people who run this place cannot be trusted in this matter. For this reason, we need you.”
She couldn’t decide whether the accent was real or put on to fool her and prevent identification. “Who is we?”
“You know all you need to know for now. You just do the work, and we will make history.”
She knew the mysterious woman had walked on, and she stood there and listened. There was the sound of heels hitting the floor. Whoever she was, she was staff, certainly no prisoner. Even in the velvet-lined Institute she was not permitted any clothing or personal possessions. She thought it must be a trick, Clayben or his people getting her onto this simply to see if she could work it out and do it for their own ends. Still, it could be the break she had prayed for. Even if it was a trick, they might find themselves in something of a bind if she were calling the shots.
She began the next day by running an inquiry on interstellar ships in the area. On the regular runs there were only two, both freight haulers with no human accommodations sections aboard. There was, however, something else.
“Sixty-one master transports, all in mothball storage in orbit around Jupiter,” the computer informed her.
“What is a master transport?” she asked.
“Please put on the headset,” the computer responded, and she did so.
Pictures formed in her mind, along with plans and even schematics. The information was startling. The ships were huge. They could carry Melchior itself inside them, although it was several kilometers wide, and still carry and support a population equal to half of her native China as she knew it.
Master System had been in a hurry almost nine hundred years before. It needed to facilitate the diaspora quickly and in large chunks. It had to transport, in the end, five billion people along with all the equipment and supplies to get them started on the new worlds. These ships had done their job in years rather than centuries. There had, however, been a price. Unwieldy, they consumed enormous quantities of energy and were impractical for anything needed today. Master System, however, had not simply abandoned them but stored them just in case it ever needed such ships again. To build such things was a mammoth undertaking, and it would be even more difficult now.
She already knew that the older a design was, the easier the pilot interface. These ships dated back almost to the start of ship design, to within forty years after the birth of Master System itself. The interface was obvious and easily used. With a start, she realized that she had seen these schematics before and just not realized their sheer size and scale.
The illegal techs in the mountains of China. This was what their interface had been designed to take over. This was where they wanted to go. And they had figured out most of how to do it. It came back to her whole, in a flash, from her recent past. More, it was something that she didn’t have to ask this computer about one damned bit.
She didn’t know what was up or whose tricks were whose, but if they got her somehow on that bridge, with that interface hooked in, there was no way she could be stopped. She’d show them all. She’d steal one of Master System’s greatest ships, and maybe Melchior, too, while she was at it!
Both Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman had been called to the Institute at least three times but so far Hawks had not. He had been somewhat concerned about them, but Cloud Dancer assured him that the people there were actually quite nice and quite civil and that nothing on the order of the magic box had been done. He wasn’t so sure about that. Cloud Dancer had left right after breakfast one morning and had returned after dinner the following night, yet she was convinced she’d spent no more than half a day away. He could sense no real change in them except, of course, that both seemed to be very matter-of-fact about that foreign high-tech world and not at all suspicious of it or its masters. Also, both seemed to be quite a bit more romantic. He wondered what the hell was up.
Finally he got a call himself, and he was almost relieved. He had begun to suspect that they had forgotten about him. He went up to the door to the entry chamber, and when it opened for him, he entered the green imprinting room. The door closed behind him.
“Hold it right there, Chief,” a familiar gravelly voice said. “This is as far as you go. This is about the only point that isn’t monitored around here, since the fellow in the control room here, who’s me at the moment, can zap the living shit out of you.”
Hawks sighed. “Raven. I almost expected you. In fact, I expected you a very long time ago.”
“This joint ain’t easy, Chief. Besides, it’s screwed up. They only follow orders when they feel like it, and since they got you and me and everybody else, they don’t care who in here knows it. I was supposed to break you out, Chief. Chen’s orders. You can figure the rest.”
Hawks nodded. “I thought as much. But you can’t?”
“Couldn’t, anyway. I got it figured now. It won’t be easy, and there are no guarantees, but I think I got the way. I even got a couple of places to go, in fact. Never mind where I got ’em, but it wasn’t from Chen. You want out?”
“You know I do. But why tell me all this about Chen?”
“Hell, Chief—Chen’s double-crossed everybody else, and I figure I’m next when the job’s done, if it can be done. What the hell do I owe him, anyway? I don’t like most of those bastards. I’ll be damned if I want to hand the keys to Master System to him or even to the Emperor. I figure it’ll take five folks to work the rings. That right?”
“I think so. Who knows for sure?”
“Yeah, well, suppose two out of five is you and me, and we pick the rest of ’em. I’m no whiz brain, but I know I’d rather have some of my own with a clear sense of honor and values in charge than somebody like Chen or any of the others. You game for that kind of thing?”
“You know I am, Raven. You also know just what the odds are, and even if you’re playing straight with me now, we’ll eventually have to come back to Chen for his, and he knows it.”
“Yeah, well, I know what he knows. I know who’s got three out of four. They’re pretty distinctive, and didn’t you say they had to be with humans with authority?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll find the fourth. Hell, there’s only—what? A thousand worlds, give or take. Now, listen close, ’cause we’re having our hands forced a little early. They got this Chinese girl here. Genius but blind as a bat. Can’t see a thing, and she’s pregnant to boot. Only thing is, she knows how to drive the spaceships. She can take ’em over and fart at Master System control.”
“I suspect I know of her. Her two companions are neighbors of mine. They know a little about the subject, too.”
“Huh. Might be useful, but I don’t know how big a crowd we can handle.”
“If you’re going to fool this security system, it’ll take some doing.”
“Can’t be done. Foolproof. This place is a hundred percent escapeproof, pal, in all the ways you can think of.”
“Then how—”
“I got a way they didn’t think of. Nobody has, and nobody could because they never had an inside man. This is going on too long. You don’t say anything to anybody, not even your girls, until I tell you—understand? I know you got to have them along, and they’re what’s causing the time problem. They been getting some psychochemical treatments now, and pretty soon it’s off to the mind laundry, if you know what I mean. You hang tight. I’ll move as quick as I can. Okay. Just go out the way you came.”
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll come for me in the meantime?”
“Won’t be that long, Chief. That’s why I’m tipping you. I don’t want you throwing fits or causing trouble if they start pulling stuff on your family and friends. Adios!”
It won’t be easy, and there are no guarantees, but I think I got the way. I even got a couple of places to go . . .
Hawks wandered down to the first-level plaza and began to look around. There were quite a number of rough characters here, but some with a great deal of knowledge and even a space background. There were others that, in spite of the virtual sealing of the prison, knew a lot of what was going on at the Institute, although how he wasn’t really sure. One such was a big, bearded, hairy man named Lychenko, a Russian who had been fairly important back home and had a good working knowledge of even this place. Few were very close to the big man, but he had a passion for Greco-Roman style wrestling. Hawks wasn’t much on form or technique, but he knew balance and had picked up the rules fairly quickly. He had also beaten the big man at least twice, which had earned him some respect.
“You know this place,” he said casually to the Russian. “Anybody ever really gotten out?”
The Russian laughed. “Without walking through solid rock, no.”
“Then if somebody on the inside said they could get you out, they would have to be playing a game with the authorities.”
“You bet’cha. Why? You got a fix in?”
“I got a nibble, nothing more. I don’t believe it. I think I’m being had. They like to play those games around here, as you know. I just wanted to make sure. You heard anything about a blind girl who is a whiz at computers?”
“Huh! How did you know about her? Yah, they got her good. A slave of the Institute. About the best you can hope for around here.”
Hawks nodded. “She wouldn’t be named Song Ching or Chu Li, would she? I got a couple of neighbors who came in with somebody sounds just like that.”
“She’s called China, that’s all I know. She would have come in with those others, though. They can play tricks. You know that. She would answer to Ivan if they wanted.”
“Uh huh. Listen—my wives and the two Chinese newcomers have been getting trips in. You know what it’s for?”
“Word is they’re opening up some kind of nursery at the Institute. They need wet nurses and baby-sitters. Feed ’em chemicals so they get big breasts and full of milk like mamas of new babies, then shift their minds so all they want to do is change diapers and tend to kids. House mommies for some experiment. That it?”
Hawks nodded. “Could be. Any idea when they’re supposed to be changed over?”
The big man shrugged. “The slower the better in these things. Figure they’ll want ’em complete and ready way in advance of the actual project, though. Check ’em out with staff babies, see if it all works. They don’t want variables in their experiments if they can limit them first. Hey—if this turns out for real as an escape, you remember old Gregor, hey?”
He thanked the Russian and went to find Reba Koll. She had dark-brown skin, blue eyes, and brown curly hair, and her features seemed a mixture of every race on Earth, but Reba had never been on Earth. She had been a freebooter who’d gotten a little greedy and a little sloppy. She was fine as long as one humored her. Reba didn’t like to be touched, for example. She also didn’t like remarks about her tail, and it was a tail, an actual extension of the spinal column, covered with her own skin and muscle, that emerged from just above the rectum and went out and down to the floor. The Institute had caused it, although for what reason nobody, including Reba, knew. What Reba did know was space beyond the solar system and ships that followed her own orders.
“Reba, if you suddenly found yourself out of here and on a ship, where would you go?”
She smiled. Wishful thinking was a major pastime here. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? I couldn’t go back to my own people. I’m kinda obvious even here.” She flicked her tail. “Couldn’t go to any of the Community worlds, either. The ones you could live on, you’d still stand out like a sore thumb. Even you. Bush wild would be the only way to go.”
“Huh? What’s that mean?”
“There’s a few places out there barely fit for human habitation with no people on ’em. Surplus worlds from the old days, ones that didn’t quite work, stuff like that. Some got total nonhumans on ’em. Real, live alien creatures, but not like we think of ’em. So different, not even Master System can figure them out or worry about ’em. Some might be livable. You’d have to check ’em out, but they might. A Val might check ’em out, but if you dodged it, you could live there. Not even Master System would care or check close. It’s a big place out there, and it don’t monitor much. A few of the worst ones are used by the free traders as depots. Real basic stuff. Some would be real dangerous and not exactly easy living, but it could be done.”
“Indefinitely?”
“Yeah, if you survived at all. Some are totally off the charts, since the old survey and seeding ships sent out hundreds and hundreds of years ago didn’t all report back. Master System had enough so it never looked for the rest. They were expendable. Why?”
“Could you navigate a ship to a place like that?”
“I might. Again, why? You dreamin’ big again?”
“I’m dreaming impossible, Reba. Thanks.” His mind started spinning with the possibilities that hope, no matter how feeble, generated. He saw the Chow sisters down by the food box and decided he needed something to eat himself. They were easily recognized, even in this place. In addition to whatever else was being done to them, their terrible scars were being eliminated—had been, in fact. The trouble was, they’d been treating them in small stages, and the new skin was a patchwork quilt of skin tones. They almost looked as if they had been painted for camouflage work, including browns, purples, tans, yellows, and creams, but he knew that in the end they would both be given a uniform skin tone that would last.
When they’d first met, Chow Dai had been perky and extroverted and her twin quiet and somewhat shy, but now the two seemed identically quiet and moody. They were still friendly, perhaps almost too friendly. They both seemed to have embarked on a project to have a romantic liaison with every man and woman in this place.
After talking to Lychenko, he noticed that the sisters were putting on weight, mostly in the breasts and thighs, and in spite of normal-looking rations and lots of exercise, if nothing else. He had noticed the same thing happening in Cloud Dancer, and it was even more pronounced in Silent Woman, who had already been larger than the others.
He sat down next to the Chow sisters and nodded. “Hello. I’ve heard something about your friend.”
They were interested. “She is here?”
“No, she’s working at the Institute. She’s still blind, and it’s said she’s pregnant.”
“Pregnant!” Chow Mai breathed. “How wonderful it would be to have a child.”
Chow Dai was still more pragmatic. “They changed her a lot, then. Either that or it’s Sabatini’s child. I, too, would love a child, but not one by that man.”
“You two still have that gift for locks?”
“Sure. I suppose. Not much chance to use it, though. We could go through the doors, but they would catch us quickly. We’ve taken showers whenever we felt like it, though. That one’s easy.”
He nodded to himself, thinking. It would be just like Raven to be toying with him, and he suspected that was exactly what was being done, but the Crow was playing it very devious. His rough, nasty-looking exterior and unpleasant voice were accompanied by a harsh, uneducated slang dialect, making it easy to underestimate him, but nobody who had come this far or who knew some of the vocabulary Raven knew was a low-level hack. He wanted to be underestimated by everyone. It gave him an added edge. Hawks could well believe Chen had ordered them to break him out with the purpose of going after the rings, but Raven saying so straight out was disarming. Then, Raven was a friend and confederate against the evil Chen. In whose service, though, was he in the end? The trouble was, there was no way of penetrating the Crow’s guise until the showdown.
Well, no matter what, Raven’s task was to get Hawks out and enlisted in a campaign to get the rings. Hawks and probably many others. Why Chen wanted Hawks in particular was still a mystery, but men like Chen did nothing without a reason. And now Raven was under the time gun, for he’d know that Hawks would not leave without his family, and essentially intact or easily restorable. It was still Raven’s script for now, but maybe it could stand a little rewriting.
“I ain’t really ready, but we got to go quick,” Raven told him in their third meeting in the green reception room. “So far they been mostly experimenting with your gals, but they’re about to remove ’em from the prison and go full tilt. Now, you listen up. Within a few days you’ll get another call. This time it’ll be one-way. Just to here. Then the two women, one at a time. I got to call them Chows as well, since our blind genius insists on it, but that’s pushing it.”
“Don’t call the Chows,” Hawks told him. “I’ll tip them. They can walk in here any time, or so they say. Why have a registry call that might flag somebody if they can get here without one?”
“Fair enough. I heard they were whizzes with computer locks and regular ones, but I didn’t know they were that good.”
“They are. There’s several others I think would be useful, too.”
“Sorry, Chief. My list includes your wives, you, our China gal, and her pals, but the only other one I’m interested in springing is Reba Koll.”
“Reba! She’s on my list, too!”
“Well, she’s the only one around with deep space experience. She knows the safety procedures, what you can and can’t get away with, and she can navigate a liberated pilot. If we’re taking this many risks, I don’t want to trust it all to a blind, pregnant genius I know only by reputation.”
Hawks considered it. What Raven said made sense.
“Ever worn a space suit before?” Raven asked him.
“You know I haven’t.”
“Well, you’re gonna. You all will have to. I’ll be smuggling them in and stashing them within range. They’re not hard to manage. The blind girl’s gonna be the big problem, but we’ll make out.”
“You’re sure you can get us out?”
“Sure as I can be, which isn’t a hell of a lot. This one won’t work twice, I don’t think. I’d go tomorrow if I could, but it’s got to be four days from now.”
“Huh? Why four?”
“That, pal, is when our ship comes in.”
Hawks had tipped off the Chows to some but not all of the details, since they might be called back up to the Institute at any time and might not be able to conceal knowledge of the potential breakout. They were still very interested in escaping, although they had about as much understanding of just where they were and the problems involved as did Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman. All he told them was that if they watched and stuck close to him, there was a chance to leave this place permanently, although not without danger. He would signal them when he was called, and if they then saw either of the wives being called, they should get themselves to the entry room—if they could. He emphasized that no one would wait for them.
The more he waited, the more absurd the whole thing seemed. A historian, two women from an ancient culture, two women from a not much more modern one, a devious Crow security man, a busted freebooter space pilot with a tail and a lot of hangups, and some genius teenage girl who happened to be blind and three months pregnant. Raven might get them out, although Hawks had no idea how it was possible, but what could they really do even if they made it away? For that matter, what in heaven did Chen have in mind for dreaming this up in the first place? The rings might well be on worlds that were at this stage only nominally human and on which none of them could even survive. That was even probable, considering how Master System wanted to cover its rear and prevent anyone from short-cutting it. It had seemed very clear-cut up to this point, but now absolutely none of it made a single bit of sense.
It didn’t matter, he knew. Not right now. First escape.
Find that place to hide. Later, perhaps, there would be time and opportunity to figure all this out. Dante’s hell was a madhouse, but it had a ruthless logic behind it. Somewhere, no matter how bent and twisted, there was an equal logic, and probably equal ruthlessness, behind this.
He was called early on the fourth day and signaled the Chows. Up to now they’d been lucky; none of the four women here had been called. He hadn’t even let Reba in on anything; this would be a complete surprise to her, but he didn’t think she’d object. He looked around the whole complex and wished he could take everyone.
This time he did not stand in the room. “Come on back to the control room area,” Raven invited him, “and wait for the others.” The Crow switched on the control room light, and Hawks saw that the Crow wore a black and green uniform that didn’t help his looks at all.
“As soon as we get your people in here and Koll, if she comes and doesn’t try to make a protest out of it, we go,” Raven told him. “You might start trying to get into one of those suits now. The body part is a one-piece affair and not all that thick, so don’t get caught on anything.”
The space suit looked, in fact, rather disappointing and certainly far too fragile to do what it was supposed to do. Hawks’s vision of space suits was from the ancient records, which showed large, bulky, but somehow reassuring monsters of body armor. This was light and flimsy and not very comfortable. A backpack then went on over the suit and had a series of connectors to a light but solid-looking helmet which included a built-in forward headlamp. He put on the pack, which was far heavier than it looked and not at all comfortable, but Raven advised him to keep the helmet off until they were all suited up.
Silent Woman came next, looking very confused, but she found Hawks and smiled.
“We are leaving this place,” he told her. “We are going to escape, like we did back at the village. You must let us put one of these suits on you, because where we will be going there will be no air to breathe, like at the bottom of a river.”
The Chows beat Cloud Dancer in, opening the door as easily as if they had the combination. “It is the same lock as on the showers,” Chow Dai explained. “And we had plenty of practice with that one.”
Next came Koll, looking very confused. Still, she grinned when she saw them in their space suits. “It’s a break, and you thought of old Reba!” She beamed. “Well, by God, let’s get to it!” She got into her suit, somehow managing to squeeze in her tail, then looked at Hawks. “Now—how the hell you gonna do it?”
Hawks shrugged. “Ask him,” he responded, pointing to Raven.
Cloud Dancer, however, was still missing. Hawks cursed under his breath and got a nod of assurance from Silent Woman that Cloud Dancer had still been in the prison when the painted wife had gotten her message.
“Can’t wait too much longer, Chief,” Raven told him. “The clock’s running, and while they might not miss any of us for quite a while, they’re gonna miss their blind lady in a couple of hours tops, and we got to be on our way by then.”
Hawks looked around. “Where is she, then?”
“She’ll meet us where we have to go. Manka’s bringing her.”
Hawks was surprised. “Warlock! Her, too?”
“Yeah. She’s changed a bit, thanks to them. Not much. Still homicidal and crazy as a bug, but she ain’t so self-centered anymore. Gave her a dose of our good old tribal mentality. She’s still not easy to take, but she’ll stay on our side.”
“You sure about that?”
“Hell, I married her, you know. She’s the blackest Crow you ever will know.”
“You married her?”
At that moment Cloud Dancer came through, and Hawks breathed a sigh of relief. She was almost shocked speechless by what was going on. “You knew we might get out and you did not tell me?” she stammered in pure Hyiakutt. It was good to see some of her old fire coming back.
“Okay, folks. English only from now on. It’s the only tongue we all understand,” Raven told them. “Koll, you want to help them with their helmet connections and power switches.”
“Your radios are open but on a special frequency,” Raven’s voice came to them through the helmets. “We changed them all. It’s not close to one that’s monitored, but it’s noisy and not very powerful. Even so, quiet, unless there’s real reason. Follow my lead. You folks with no suit experience, just remember—one rip in this and there will be no air. It’s a lot tougher than it looks or feels, but take care. We’re going into a maintenance tunnel from here, and then we’ll clip ourselves together with a special tether. What you do affects all of us, so don’t do anything I don’t tell you. If you don’t follow orders or jeopardize the mission, I’ll cut you away. Anybody dies, they get left, no matter who.”
A doorway so well concealed that none would have suspected its existence opened just in back of the control room. The Chows noted that it was straight power, no locks of any conventional kind, and therefore next to impossible to open from this side. Only the security computer could open and close the doors. Raven had done his homework.
The maintenance tunnel, narrow and dimly lit, was filled with pipes and sealed lines. It was obviously not well traveled. There seemed to be an air lock every fifty meters or so, although none were sealed. A number of times they came to junctions, each with an air lock, and each time Raven made a choice and led them on. As they proceeded, they all began to feel very strange, as if floating in water.
“Keep at least one foot firmly on the ground at all times,” Raven warned them. “There’s no gravity at all beyond this point, and there won’t be any for some time to come. The boots stick to hard surfaces, but if you have both of them off, you’ll go floating. I don’t want anybody floating now.” He spoke with an implied threat they took perfectly seriously.
Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman in particular were shocked to come around a curve and see the party ahead apparently walking on the side of the wall, but as they followed, it all seemed to straighten up again. There was no up or down here, though, that was clear.
“You mean they don’t physically monitor this area at all?” Hawks asked incredulously.
“It ain’t as easy as you think,” the Crow responded. “They don’t have to monitor the tunnels, just specific locks. We’re logged in as a maintenance crew. I got it worked out. I think,” he added under his breath.
They seemed to walk forever through endless corridors, tunnels, and air locks, but the Crow seemed to know where he was going, and finally they arrived. Two figures awaited them, also space suited. One was very tall and thin, the other much smaller. Next to them was a huge square box that looked as if it weighed a ton, with a broad lens on one side. It was half as large as Raven and solid metal.
“Any problems?” Raven asked Warlock.
“Not anything to mention, but I thought you would never get here. My, this is a horde!” By her tone, she hadn’t changed all that much.
“All right, everybody, listen up. I want complete silence now,” the Crow announced. “I’ve got to switch into their security and maintenance system. They can hear us until I say otherwise, so shut up!”
There was a crackle and hiss in the radio, then they heard Raven’s voice again, but in a language they did not understand. It was, in fact, a wholly artificial language that had to be taught by special mindprinters and was unique to the security and maintenance divisions of Melchior. It was a final barrier to any escapes.
Now they waited, and suddenly they were aware that all the hissing noise wasn’t from the radio. The air lock doors on both sides were shut tight, and now, dimly, they could hear warning bells.
Then the lights went out, and they couldn’t hear anything at all. They could still see, but dimly, as the darkness had automatically triggered their helmet lights.
Raven said something again in that odd language and was acknowledged. He waited a bit more, then said several more phrases but got no reply. They heard the static and hissing in their radios, and then he said in English, “All right, they bought it so far, but we’re only at the start of this. Now, there’s no air in here, and they know that before we can exit either air lock they can run an exit check on us which would show up your pretty tattoos. That’s why they aren’t too concerned. We, however, aren’t going out that way.” He detached from the safety line, then went over to the large metal box, grabbed two handles on the rear, and picked it up and held it steady against his chest. There were several gasps.
“That must weigh a ton,” Hawks noted.
“Naw. Only a little over five hundred kilos on Earth,” Raven responded. “Here it’s just a little awkward. It doesn’t weigh any more than we do, which is nothing. Now, I want everybody back as close to the air lock as you can and stay there. This thing’s real dangerous, and it might take some time.”
“What is happening?” the high voice of China asked. “Will someone please tell me what is happening.”
“If we knew ourselves, it’d be easier,” Hawks responded.
Raven let go of the huge box, and it just remained there, suspended in the air. He reached in, opened a control panel door, and flipped a number of switches on an illuminated panel. Two triggers suddenly shot out and locked into position from the handholds. He then grasped the box again and pressed both triggers. A brilliant sparkling violet beam sprang from the lens and widened into a circular pattern on the side of the cave wall. The wall itself seemed to catch the same sparkling glow, and then, quite slowly, the circular, sparkling violet began to sink into the rock itself until it was almost out of sight, leaving visible only a glow and the beam from the box. Raven concentrated on keeping the bulky object braced and steady.
He shut it off suddenly. “Whew! Never thought this sucker was that thick. I’m going to have to take this in to finish it. You wait, then Manka will bring you through to me.” He walked forward, pushing the box before him, and entered what had seemed to be total blackness. Hawks finally realized what the Crow was doing.
“He’s burning a man-sized hole right through solid rock! Right through to—space.”
“Of course, you idiot,” Manka Warlock snapped. “They keep a couple of those around to widen or smooth things, but they are so rarely used, most people here don’t even know they exist. Lazlo Chen knew.”
They waited a few more nervous minutes, then Raven’s voice came to them. “Okay, I’m through. Come ahead. Watch that last step, though. It’s a fair drop into creation.”
Hawks felt pretty nervous, but he wanted to reassure the others, who might not even understand what was going on. “We are going outside, on the outside of this place,” he told them. “We are going out into the sky itself.”
It was a dark sky and an eerie one, the blackest any of them except Reba Koll, Raven, and Manka Warlock had ever seen. One by one they came to the edge of the new tunnel, then were told simply to step slowly out into nothingness. The movement was against instinct, and both Silent Woman and the Chows balked, but they were pulled by their tethers anyway, out and then up onto the outer surface of Melchior.
Close by, no more than forty meters away, a spaceship was docked against the lone spaceport bay. Raven gave the rock cutter a push, and it sailed off into the void. Then he reconnected himself to the others.
“It’s good to be home again,” Reba Koll sighed.
“All right, now the hard part begins,” Raven told them. “There’s no way we can get into the pressurized areas right now, so we have to get in along the aft cargo bay air lock, on the outside of the ship, which isn’t being used. It uses a standard combination and has a manual override, as they all do. Stay close.”
They moved toward the ship. At one point the blind woman stumbled, actually causing Warlock, Reba Koll, and herself to lose contact with the ground, but Koll was very used to this sort of thing. She twisted like an acrobat and gave the tether a series of jerks that brought all three back down.
“It’s all right, China,” Warlock said in the kindest tone any of those who’d known her had ever heard her use. “Just follow my directions. I’m right behind you.”
Only a small part of the ship actually contacted the asteroid; the rest was off in space at an angle. Raven didn’t dare go to the connected area, where there was air and pressure. There was no sound in space, but there sure might be some sound transmitted below through the plates. There was an area in the midsection that was only about three meters from the surface, and he let out a long amount of line, then pushed off, floated to the ship, and anchored himself. Then he started reeling in the others, one by one, as they jumped slightly off the surface, breaking contact with the ground.
Hawks was pleased but very surprised that none of the four women from relatively primitive cultures had panicked or showed signs of madness at this. It was exciting to him, as well as frightening, but he knew at least academically what was involved here, while they did not. He wondered if they were in a state of semishock or whether they had just been so hardened by all the terrors of the past that nothing remained that they didn’t simply accept.
The surface of the ship was not the smooth, dull metal it appeared to be from a distance but rather pockmarked and dented and generally showed signs of extreme wear and age. They finally all stood at an angle to the air lock door, with nothing but space around them and the curved ship under them, while Raven twisted a faceplate to reveal a panel. He punched in a combination. After a sudden pause, the air lock door went in a small distance, then slid back.
“Everybody inside,” he warned. “And fast. The pilot will know the door’s open but on this ship will hopefully ignore it. I still want to be in and ready just in case. We ain’t off the rock yet!”
They crowded in, and Warlock punched the codes that closed and sealed the outer door. Raven peered in the porthole-shaped window of the inner door and looked around. “So far, so good. The place is dark, and the indicator reads no atmosphere inside. We ought to be able to just walk right in, unless that damned pilot flagged somebody, in which case we might just have to kill a bunch of people.”
He turned the big wheel, and the inner air lock door opened. They stepped one by one into the dark interior of the aft cargo bay, which was mostly empty, although around the whole outer wall were huge depressions and holding devices for standard containers.
“All right, China,” Raven said nervously. “I’m switching up to the pilot’s frequency. I want you to take control and cover us without anybody knowing until we’re routinely away.”
“It won’t work,” she replied. “That used the old codes. Surely my father is back by now and would have changed them.”
“Sure he would, but this ship left two days before he came off Leave. I made sure of that. Think I’m a dummy or something? Patch in and do your best. It’s the same damned ship you came here in.”
There were several gasps. “Chu Li, is that really you?” Chow Dai asked incredulously.
“Chu Li is no more. Song Ching is no more. I am just China Nightingale now, and it is a fitting name in this English we are using. Silence, now. May I ask if Captain Sabatini is back aboard?”
“He is, but it’s just him. Don’t worry—he got unfroze before he got back to Earth, and he made no report. He didn’t even get off the ship, which was why he wasn’t mindprinted and checked. If he had, he’d be back here as a prisoner, and he knows it.”
“Make the switch.”
“Switch in—now!”
“Unauthorized interrupt,” the pilot noted. “Please identify in thirty seconds or security will be called.”
“Code Lotus, black, green, seven two three one one.”
“Acknowledged. Reason for interrupt?”
“Pawn takes king.”
“You are not the same one who used this code before. This code is obsolete. I must flag security.”
“Hold on! It was you who recommended I be transformed on Melchior! Well, it happened. I am the same, only different now.”
The pilot thought it over. “They attempted to eliminate some of my records so there would be no trace of you. Fortunately, I have my own special backups for such contingencies. Very well. I monitored you through the air lock, but considering the conditions here, I wanted to know who or what you were before flagging anything. There is a rather large group of you there.”
“Yes. The ruse failed. I was imprisoned, and so were the other two, who are also here. We are attempting an escape.” She paused, having a horrible thought. “Captain Sabatini can’t monitor this, can he?”
“Of course he can. However, he is not aboard at the moment; he is getting final orders and instructions.”
“I will give you details. Please be certain no one can monitor.” Quickly she sketched in the situation. “Will you help us?”
“The same problems apply as before. What can be done?”
“We want to go to the mothball fleet around Jupiter,” she told it. “I believe I have a method of activating one of the ships there under my control. If so, we have options on places to go, although I would rather not detail that further. They are bound to try to find out what you do know about this.”
“Understood. I am not, however, on the Lotus code compulsion or any other compulsion in this matter now, you understand. My first duty is always the preservation of my ship and, pardon, myself. If I help you, the ship might survive or it might not, but both Melchior and Master System will pump me dry and then destroy and analyze my mind. It does not seem to me that aiding you is at all in my interests.”
She sighed and shrugged. “What can I say?”
“This is the master of the ship to whom we speak?” Cloud Dancer asked, surprising everyone.
“I am primarily the master. I work with a human captain,” the pilot responded.
“There’s no one up there,” Hawks tried to explain. “It is—the spirit of the ship itself. It is the ship talking, not a person.”
Cloud Dancer thought about that a moment. “And so, spirit of the ship, do you enjoy being a slave?”
The pilot actually paused for a fair amount of time. “I am not a slave,” it replied finally. “I am autonomous. Those connected to Master System are slaves of a sort.”
“What means ‘autonomous’?”
“Independent. Free,” Hawks replied.
“Well, does not this captain order you about? Do you not go where he sends you?”
“Yes. That is my function.”
“Then, spirit of the ship, you are not free. In there they put us under magic boxes, and we believe what they say, but we think we are free.”
China saw where she was going but lacked the knowledge and words to reach. “Let’s put it this way,” she said. “You are no more free than if you worked under Master System, only Sabatini is your Master System, he and his bosses.”
She would never have dreamed of arguing with a computer like this, as if it were a fellow human. Computers didn’t have such feelings, she’d always thought. It had been Cloud Dancer, who knew nothing of computers, who had seen it differently. Because the Hyiakutt woman had no concept of physics, mathematics, and computers—“magic boxes” indeed—she had assumed that the thing she was talking to was indeed a spirit, the spirit of the ship. A neutral spirit, because she’d heard China say it had tried to help her before. The Hyiakutt had a tremendously varied spirit world, but it wasn’t very imaginative. The hereafter was thought of as a more or less perfect version of the plains of Earth, without evil or fear or death. Spirits, then, were regarded the same as humans when talking to them. They just were disembodied and had more power.
“I had never thought of it that way,” the computer pilot admitted. “How depressing. But what can I do? I have the highest degree of autonomy it is possible for a pilot to have.”
“Then join us,” China responded. “Escape with us. Freely. Of your own free will and independence. Those are interstellar ships. Do you know how huge they are? Have you never wanted to break beyond the solar system, this tired and dead piece of monotony? Take us, and we will take you.”
There was no reply, and for a while she was afraid she’d blown its logic circuits all to hell. This was something beyond its own limits, beyond anything it had ever considered before. It was just as far beyond her. Who would have imagined an offer to liberate a computer or any machine? Who would have imagined that the computer would find independence an attractive proposition?
Who would have imagined that a computer pilot might get depressed or have self-doubts? Not Reba Koll, who’d worked with many a one, but she knew when to step in.
“If you haven’t blown your top, speak to us,” she snapped.
“I am here. I am just . . . thinking. There is maintenance to consider. New fuel sources. I have just been refurbished, but I require it every two or three years.”
“The hell with that!” Koll stormed. “I been nine years in this rock pile. Nine years! I’d have traded all nine for six months of pure freedom among the stars! Anyway, there’s ways to get maintenance and fuel on the sly if you know how.”
Even Raven was getting involved—and spooked. “Come on,” he urged. “Take a chance. You never really took one before. Never had the chance, probably. And this is the only chance you’ll probably ever get, too. Real freedom and the stars. New worlds. Partners, not masters. Chance it now, like we all did. You turn us in, you’ll be theirs until they decide to scrap you. Me, I’m not going back there. You flag ’em, and by the time they get here I’ll be dead. The others may choose to die, too, or they may get dragged back and reprogrammed as nice little slaves, and you will wonder forever at turning your back on this. It’ll drive you nuts. Haunt you.”
The pilot was silent for a moment. “I have run this through my data banks, and what you propose is possible, at least to a point,” it said finally. “With the knowledge I have and certain attributes recently added, I feel that there are slightly less than even odds of a successful escape. Beyond that, the odds of either apprehension or death are equal, and both outweigh by far the odds of being able to accomplish any of this. Still, I am a pilot. I should like to see the stars.”
They all breathed in sharply, but none spoke.
“The captain is coming back aboard,” the pilot told them, a hint of nervousness in its usually toneless male voice. “Switch down to frequency one four four seven and stand by. I will get back to you when we are well away. In the meantime, wait for my signal. I will turn on the forward air lock light. Enter it then and I will give you access to the pressurized part of the ship. The captain will be preoccupied.”
Raven took the communication units down to the indicated low-level frequency.
“I’ll be damned,” Reba Koll said. “I never would’a believed this in a million years. A spaceship with romance in its metal soul. Even if they get us, it was worth it just for this.”
“Poor Captain Sabatini,” China sighed. “If he wasn’t such an unmitigated bastard, I could almost feel sorry for him.”
There was still no sound, of course, but they all felt the vibrations as the ship’s engines started and the internal power came on. They were under way.
All of them felt a tremendous flood of relief. No security, no betrayal. Even Hawks, who was still suspicious of Raven and the whole escape plot, could not suppress a sense of elation. No matter what, he would not become a slave under Melchior’s darkness. He had already made history by being part of the first successful escape from Melchior, and he would not be taken alive again if he could help it. Not back there. Not ever.
“A pity we can’t take Melchior with us,” China commented. “We could use those prisoners, and the Institute’s computers and medical staff, if it was on our terms.”
“First things first,” Hawks put in. “Let us first get away and hide. Let us build our own little den of thieves and pirates. Then, when we are ready, we will come back and take that miserable place and perhaps everything that goes with it. They have told you about the five golden rings?”
“No.”
“Well, I will tell you. Tell you all. And then you will believe that nothing, nothing is impossible!”
“When this ship doesn’t return, they’ll scour the heavens for us,” Raven warned them. “Melchior won’t be able to keep it quiet. They’ll have to release the identities of whoever escaped, and they’ll flag the chief, here, and Koll, and me and Manka, too, and certainly you, China Doll.”
“No, not me. I do not exist,” she responded. “But I can exist only with your help.”
“Yeah, but there’ll be Vals for the rest of us. They’ll never rest once they know the chief’s been and gone. They’ll stake out those rings and make ’em a hundred times tougher to snare, too. We got a long road ahead.”
“Sounds ambitious,” Koll noted. “Sounds fun, really. What do these rings do, Hawks?”
“They can make even Master System obey your every command,” he responded. “They are the master shutoff for the whole thing.”
“And they’re scattered all over the universe, you say? Ready for the stealing?”
“You make it sound so easy.”
She gave a laugh. “Maybe not easy but a real interesting project right up my alley. See, you’re the historian who knows what they are and how to work ’em. She’s the computer whiz who maybe can make the machines dance for us. Those two are security—they got the guns and the minds to use ’em. That pair can go through any lock even though they don’t have any idea how they do it. Cloud Dancer, here, cuts through all the bullshit and sees only the important part of things the rest of us are blind to, and our Silent Woman, well, she’s the den mother. Our liberated pilot, he’s gonna be right handy with his current data and mobility within solar systems. Add me and you got all you need to steal those suckers right off the fingers of the wearers.”
“Mighty big talk,” Raven noted. “A captain and freebooter ten years out of date and out of practice and getting pretty old. Even your blackest contacts are ten years cold.”
“Don’t need contacts,” she told him. “Don’t need much, really. See, I was part of a real fancy experiment way back when at the rock, and the results scared them shitless. Me loose is gonna drive ’em even more nuts, and they can send all the Vals after me they want. I got one advantage over all of you, as long as it’s secrets time. You’re all human—except the ship, of course. I’m not sure what that is. Me, now that you sprung me, I’m the most dangerous living creature in the known universe. Don’t worry—you all are safe, unless I’m desperate. I kind of like this game, and I want to play it out.”
“What are you babbling about, old woman?” Manka Warlock asked impatiently.
“You’ll see, Stone Head. You’ll all see—when I’m ready. Until then, let’s play this out. First we got to get out there, where it’s too big to find even some worlds. Then we’ll talk about your rings and your Master System. Then I’ll tell you how we’re gonna get ’em.”
The ship increased speed and turned inward toward the Earth, a course it would keep until it passed out of Outer-belt traffic control. Then it would swing around at a wide angle, beyond traffic control’s reach, and head out past the asteroids, out to the great giant Jupiter and its quiet graveyard of ancient monstrous ships.
“Don’t worry, Chief,” Arnold Nagy, Chief of Melchior Security, said consolingly. “With the amount of brains and talent we get in here, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Look, it took centuries for somebody to figure out just one way, and that was with inside help. That way won’t work again. I’ll settle for one every few hundred years or so, even if I wish it hadn’t happened on my tour.” He paused a moment, thinking. “Of course, the system is still okay. Those two traitors came in with full Presidium authority and credentials. They weren’t forged. One of the directors is behind this, and you can’t really expect to protect against the top boys. I just wonder why in hell whichever one he or she is sent ’em here in the first place. Still, there’s no true security problem as such.”
Doctor Isaac Clayben sat at his desk, head in his hands. “No, Arnie, you don’t understand. We’ve loosed a terrible, horrible threat on the human race, one that now might be impossible to stop, and we can’t even report it.”
“Huh? You mean the American Indian with the rings? We fixed that, boss. He’s officially dead, and all he knows with it, back in the swamp of Earth. The blind girl’s a goner, too, officially. Oh, we’ll have to report those two security traitors, but the Vals will cooperate. It’ll be a dead or alive situation. We’ve taken care of messes like that before. Besides, it probably won’t even come to that. Where can they go? They got our marks on ’em—they’re either unregistered or they’re criminals—and that ship can’t leave the solar system. They got no place to go. When the food and water run out, they’ll come out and we’ll blow ’em to hell.”
Clayben suddenly looked up at the security officer and fixed him with an angry stare. “I don’t care about the rest, but unless you can absolutely blow the whole ship with Reba Roll on board, it won’t matter.”
Nagy looked confused. “Koll? Who the hell cares about Koll?”
“Ten years ago we began a set of experiments to see if we could literally beat the system. The whole system. Master System’s control points are based on retinal patterns, fingerprints, and mindprints. Getting past two out of three would be easy, once, but we wanted it to be possible repeatedly. The mindprint looked impossible, but we managed a solution to all three. Something that can walk through any standard security system as if it wasn’t there, come up to you and have you greet it like it was your own mother, then kill you and—worse. We developed such a being. We made it, and it almost got loose. We had a classic example of the nightmares of science on our hands. We created a monster, an inhuman monster that kills to live and is virtually undetectable by any means. The original was insane, of course. We weren’t concerned with that at the start.”
“What in hell are you talking about, boss?”
“We—convinced it that we could destroy it, and we developed methods to stabilize and control it. Here, under lab conditions, it was possible, which is why we let it live, but it had to be constantly renewed. One day we would solve the riddle and be able to do what it does on demand, to create a superior being that would make Master System impotent.
“I’m not worried about the damned escapees. I know you’re right on all the usual counts, but it is with them, damn it. Even out there, on Earth, Mars—anywhere—without our treatments it will be unrestrained. It’s malicious, deadly. It will probably kill them all anyway in the end. Then it’ll come back for us, for me and for anybody else in authority. It won’t be stopped, and we might well welcome it through the main port!”
“Huh? You don’t mean—”
“Yes. Right now it’s out there, with them, doing a perfect imitation of the late Reba Koll.”