“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.”
I bet 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 forced by 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.