THE DUTY OFFICER ABOARD THE SPF COMMAND SHIP was irritated at having been hailed by the communications CQ, and decided that it had better be really important or somebody was going to get the chewing-out of her life.
“What is it?” he growled, still asleep.
“Freighter coming in, sir.”
The officer frowned. “We aren’t due for a supply ship.” He was suddenly very suspicious. “ID checks out?”
“Yes, sir. Special shipment from Master System itself. Large-scale transmuters and heavy processing equipment along with a fair amount of murylium ore. I guess the rumors about us being ordered to abolish the Center form of supervision are true.”
The duty officer nodded, having heard those rumors himself. He knew for a fact that it had been done elsewhere and was being contemplated as a system-wide policy, but he’d also heard that those plans had been put on hold pending resolution of the current crisis. Still, it made sense here. The prey below had done an impossible amount of damage but had now slipped completely from sight and could be anywhere in the billion-plus population by now. It seemed a bit drastic to destroy an entire civilization just to nab a few rebels, no matter how brilliant or dangerous they might have been. Orders, however, were orders.
“Did you scan the ship?” he asked. The pirates were known to have an operating freighter and they all looked alike. He wanted to take no chances, even though he had the firepower to blast something as lumbering as a freighter to atoms before it could get close enough to do any damage.
“Yes, sir. Murylium count abnormally high, as would be expected, and a great deal of inert cargo. No life forms aboard.”
He sighed. “What are the instructions?”
“Dock with us and offload using service robots through both cargo bays. It’s all containerized, so it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. It is diverted from a deadhead run back to its normal pickup point and has instructions to offload and be away as quickly as possible in order to keep to its normal schedule.”
“Very well. Call it in to the colonel’s office below and if they have no objection, give the ship immediate clearance to dock and dispatch our service robots to the offloading bays.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The colonel himself was not contacted, of course, but the SPF chief of security drew the same sad conclusions as the duty officer and saw no objections. The freighter was signaled in and ordered to proceed. It approached to within forty kilometers of the orbiting command ship and then slowly eased its way closer, a maneuver that took about seventy minutes.
The command ship itself, like the freighters, was never designed for planetfall; the freighters were loaded by transmuter transmission and, for some specialized times, by barges and tugs from the surface of whichever planet it happened to be orbiting. Because of this, the command ship was designed to be supplied by just such ships, and maneuvers like this were routine, with the pilots of both ships using centuries-old automatic procedures. The timing involved in the docking and equalization of pressure was precise. With that equalization, the two large ships were locked together as firmly as if they were welded, although if necessary they could be separated almost instantly.
The service robots waited for the cargo-bay doors to open, then moved forward toward the now-gaping holds of the freighter.
In the vacuum of space, the enormous explosion, and the subsequent explosions that followed took place in deathly silence, but were spectacular to look at. Pirate One had been packed with all the explosives Star Eagle’s transmuters could crank out and Thunder’s robots could pack solidly in. With the pressurization and open holds, the tremendous force of the explosions was directed primarily into the command ship, ripping into its very heart. Yet Star Eagle had taken no chances; the first explosions were merely a trigger for a murylium fusion bomb of a size never before seen; in less than three seconds both ships had been almost totally converted to energy in an explosion so intense that, from below, it lit up the sky and could be seen easily with the naked eye even in daylight.
The fighters, stationed in other orbits, immediately came to life and searched for their mother ship, but found nothing. They were not allowed time to be confused, however; their response switched immediately to automatic and they powered up and headed out toward the punch-points their sensors were even now detecting.
Raven and Warlock punched in in Lightning, followed almost immediately by Kaotan, Indrus, Chunhoifan, and San Cristobal in a rough V formation.
They had practiced acting as a unit, but they were still basically a collection of individual ships rather than a tightly coordinated group. The captains were experienced pilots, but none had really captained a ship going into a head-to-head battle. They were linked by an interconnection that gave them almost speed-of-thought broadcast capability at short range.
“Mother of God!” swore Maria Santiago of San Cristobal. “Will you look at that! My readings are off the scale!”
“Yeah, we certainly plastered that bastard,” Raven agreed, “but let’s not get cocky now. We still have a bunch of bad guys around and who knows what in the shadows.”
“Watch it!” came the steely voice of Captain Chun. “Both fighters just did short punches. I—”
There was hardly time to calculate the punch before the fighters emerged just behind the group and fired a series of rapid bursts from their aft systems, then looped in opposite spirals and came back at the pirate fleet firing. “I’m hit!” called Dura Panoshaka, temporarily captaining Kaotan. “Nothing serious but the bastards are coming back in at me!”
The V broke apart as each ship went in a different direction in broad loops. Raven brought Lightning up and around as Warlock was targeting the lead fighter. She allowed the automatics to begin beam fire and concentrated on trajectories for the torpedoes. “Kaotan! Cristobal! Key on the lead fighter with all you’ve got!” she instructed. “All others key on trailing fighter with torpedoes.”
At that moment the lead fighter launched its own torpedoes, more than a dozen in a spread pattern, each obviously instructed to key in on the easiest single target. Chunhoifan and Lightning opened up on them with concentrated beam fire, but two slipped through, curled around, and went for the stern of Indrus. Paschittawal shifted all shielding power to the stem and broke away in a high arc. Both torpedoes exploded on or near the tail, and the ship shuddered but still seemed to be operable.
“Kaotan! Cristobal! Keep keying in on the lead fighter!” Warlock instructed, sounding very calm and very much in control. “Kaotan, take a spread of six at the stern, Cristobal amidships! Now!”
The fighter noted three spreads coming from three different directions, and shifted most of its shielding to its stern, which was always the most vulnerable area of a ship, but it was also forced to shoot from its bow and side guns at the onrushing torpedoes. No shield operating at anything less than maximum strength could withstand direct hits by that many torpedoes, but a ship’s weapons system couldn’t fire outward if the shield was on full. The fighter was doing a good job of picking off the incoming missiles, but it missed seven out of eighteen in the three groups, each of which was now headed for a different area of the ship.
Kaotan’s stern shots were going to hit first, so it shifted more power to its rear shield, but at the same time, three of Cristobal’s shots struck weakened shields amidships and the fighter shook and trembled. Lightning’s two surviving torpedoes landed on the undefended bow, and the whole forward quarter of the fighter became a mass of twisted metal. With no bow, the fighter was defenseless as long as the enemy kept coming dead on, and though it tried to take evasive action, Kaotan poured six torpedoes straight into the guts of the ship from the bow angle. The fighter shook and then disappeared from the pirate’s sensors.
The second fighter was bearing down on the shaken Indrus, and Chunhoifan was in turn bearing down on the fighter.
“All ships key in on the other fighter!” Warlock ordered. “Concentrated fire. Pour it in! Pour it in!”
“There’s something else coming in at high speed,” Captain Chun warned. “I can’t make it out.”
“Worry about it later!”
There was a limit to a shield’s abilities, since shielding had never really been designed for combat situations but to protect a ship from space debris. In this case, superior numbers meant inevitable victory. A vast amount of fire-power raked all parts of the remaining fighter until it exploded.
“Damage reports!” Warlock called.
“Just some bruises for us, but we have limited mobility at the moment. Right now we’re seeing what we can do to make repairs,” Paschittawal reported. Damage to the other ships was even more minor.
“Unknown closing in,” Chun reported. “I cannot make it out, and I don’t like it.”
“Chunhoifan and we will intercept,” Warlock responded. “San Cristobal, you stay with Indrus. Kaotan, you are to go for Pickup Three as soon as we engage. Thunder command, stand by to commit reserves. I don’t know what this is coming in, but it’s definitely the surprise they had planned.”
The mysterious object continued to close and the two ships went to meet it. Its configuration indicated a multi-drive vessel that should have made it large, but it was compact—too large for a Val ship or fighter and too small for anything else. As they closed on it, the shape changed; the new enemy actually split apart and was instantly recognizable.
“Holy shit!” Raven exclaimed. “It’s two Val ships in tandem!”
One of the Vals continued straight on, while the other peeled off and headed for San Cristobal and the crippled Indrus. These were no mere fighters; there was intelligence behind these two ships as well as great weaponry. The effect was clear from the start; the Val ship closing on Lightning and Chunhoifan suddenly executed a series of maneuvers that would have killed any humans aboard, firing off salvos and launching a spiral pattern of torpedoes at the same time with deadly accuracy. The automatics aboard Lightning and Chunhoifan were simply not prepared for things like this, and both ships were slower than the Val’s, Chunhoifan markedly so. Both human-controlled ships were forced to take direct control of their weapons systems—but humans thought far slower than Vals even if their orders could be carried out instantly. At one against two, the Val actually had a slight advantage.
“Commit reserves! Repeat, commit reserves! Key your punch location on Indrus! We will—holy shit!”
The Val had suddenly changed position, almost instantaneously. By the time they realized that the enemy was using punches mere milliseconds in duration, the Val had gotten beneath them and was coming straight up between the two ships, firing heavily, counting on them to hold fire for fear of hitting each other with their rounds. The distance between the ships was enormous, but not for the weapons involved.
Warlock targeted everything she could bring to bear on a point just a hair above Chunhoifan’s elevation and let it fly as the Val was just coming up between them. Both Lightning and Chunhoifan shook and shuddered, and behind Raven and Warlock there was a groaning sound.
“Oh, boy! I heard that one before,” he said grumpily. “We’re still intact, but I don’t know what’s holding us together.”
The Val had, however, taken a risk itself. Its speed allowed no way to avoid the salvos fired by Warlock and Chun. The Val had concentrated all its fire on the two ships as it spiraled upward, and was unable to pick off the torpedoes, six of which locked on and struck home. Lightning was hurt, but the Val was hurt worse.
“I’m stopped in place,” Captain Chun reported. “All system and drive power lost. Three dead, with a gaping hole just forward of my stern tubes.”
“I’ve got about half power, and I’m steering a bit wobbly, but I’m serviceable,” Raven responded. “We’ll stick with you and give you what firepower we can, Chunhoifan. By the time I got back up to the Indrus it’d be over anyway. Where’s that damned Val?”
“Forty-two degrees off the orbital plane and about twenty thousand kilometers out,” Chun replied. “Looks like he’s dead in space, too. That’s something. If he’d made it out with even minimal drive power, we’d be finished.”
“Yeah, I got him now. Maybe playing possum, maybe not. I’m going after him. Stand by your guns.”
The second Val ship was having great success, as well. It had entirely ignored Indrus and concentrated on San Cristobal, scoring some solid hits while remaining untouched itself. Santiago maneuvered as close to Indrus as she dared to combine their firepower, but she was definitely still in trouble.
When Bahakatan and Espiritu Luzon punched in, the Val was caught by surprise, not expecting this group to have the numbers to afford reserves. It abandoned San Cristobal and Indrus, both crippled but with weapon systems still functional, and headed straight for the two newcomers. Neither of the crippled ships were going anywhere it couldn’t follow, but it wanted to take on the new threat before it became trapped between the two.
It attempted an in-between spiral maneuver, similar to the one that its companion had used on Lightning and Chunhoifan, but with an added twist. It released its salvo just beneath the two ships, executed a preplanned mini-punch, and came out just above and let loose a second bombardment. The trick completely fooled Espiritu Luzon, but Captain ben Suda of Bahakatan hadn’t waited and launched at the high position while the Val ship was still spiraling upward. All three ships took damaging hits, although none of them was completely knocked out.
The Val assessed the results and determined that it had lost its punch ability and some of its speed and maneuverability, but it was in better shape than any of its four victims. Its main problem, though, was that it was running low on torpedoes and none of the four enemy ships had lost shielding.
Below, Vulture could hear the whine of flyers coming in, and one was already landing within sight. Ikira and the Chows were already up, and Sabir was about to step into the fighter as small-arms fire erupted all around. “Go on! Move! I’ll hold them if I can or get out another way!” He took up a position behind some crumbling bricks and opened fire.
Raven closed on the crippled Val, which still had its shields up and clearly had weapons control. He could only guess that the enemy ship really was hurt—otherwise why not come back and just finish them?—and that the Val within was trying desperately to jury-rig repairs. That was exactly what he had to try to stop.
Warlock launched a six-torpedo salvo and had the same returned to her. Each ship easily destroyed the other’s missiles with beam weapons. “No good.” She sighed. “We are too evenly matched.”
“Keep giving it all you’ve got,” Raven growled. “It’ll keep the thing from making repairs and at least buy time. Maybe we’ll run it out of torpedoes before we’re empty.”
“It thought of that, too. It’s just picked off the second salvo but fired none back. Why should it?”
“Good point. Lay off, then, and we’ll try a standoff for a while. If that thing looks like it’s gonna get back to full steam, I’ll ram the bastard before I’ll let it go.”
The second Val, although crippled, was in better shape than its mate, but it was worried. It knew that there was one ship missing, and long-range sensors showed it in orbit around Janipur. No matter how satisfying blowing up enemy ships might be, a successful defense was not measured in casualties inflicted but in denying the enemy its objective. The Val understood that principle well, and turned and made its best speed toward Janipur.
“It’s going after Kaotan!” Maria Santiago reported. “Can anyone pursue?”
“We can’t afford another hit,” responded Midi, Savaphoong’s chief pilot on the Espiritu Luzon. “Best we cover you.”
“I will give chase,” came ben Suda’s voice. “This one has made me very angry.” His ship didn’t appear to be in much better shape than the others, but he sounded as if he could track the Val by sheer willpower.
Aboard Kaotan, Ikira Sukotae was back in her element and very glad to be there.
“Break off!” Dura Panoshka said urgently. “There’s a Val bearing down on us and it’ll be in range in under four minutes. We’re sitting ducks here in geostationary orbit!”
“No,” the tiny captain responded. “Shields full along the flanks and watch out that he doesn’t go under and come up on the planet side. Bring the throttle up full but do not release. I’m gonna give Vulture those four minutes.”
Well away from the action, Raven was getting worried. “I’m registering energy flares on the Val ship. I think he’s going to be operational again in just a couple of minutes, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” He opened a common carrier channel. “This is Lightning to damaged Val ship. Cease repairs and maintain standoff or I will be forced to ram.”
“You wish to commit suicide?” came a response in a low, pleasant baritone.
“I do not, but if I let you get going again, I’m dead meat anyway. Might as well take you with me.”
The Val was disconcerted and sensed that reasonable argument wouldn’t meet with much success. It stopped testing its repaired lines, but it knew it could not accept such a standoff. A stalemate was as good as a defeat since the remaining ships would still be there, and with only one operable Val left in service there would be little chance of victory. It knew from its companion that the other ships were all damaged to some degree, but that made little difference. While the companion was chasing after Kaotan, the other four renegades would have time to make repairs of their own. There was little choice.
The instant the Val ship moved, Raven took a deep mental breath and pushed the throttle. Gaining speed with every second, he followed a course straight for the Val, while Warlock began firing with every available weapon, forcing their opponent to abandon its defense and get to full throttle.
The Val ship flared into brilliance, then winked out.
It took a second for Warlock to react, and then she was initially puzzled. “Did it get away or did we get it?”
“Whew!” Raven sighed. “I thought I was going to the land of my ancestors there. It blew up. I have lots of scattered debris in the scan, almost all small. One down, one to go. Kaotan, you get the hell out of there!”
The transmuter receiver installed on Kaotan hummed, and Vulture more fell than stepped off the plate. He was a bloody mess, and it looked as if he’d taken numerous shots to the body, but he was alive. Sabir and the Chows crowded around him and Takya Mudabur knelt beside him. “No one could survive such wounds,” she said sorrowfully.
Ikira Sukotae didn’t wait for a medical report. She released the engines and moved at flank speed out of orbit at an angle that took the ship away from the Val. Reacting instantly, the Val changed course to pursue and let loose a pattern of fire that did not quite reach Kaotan. It was clear that even damaged the Val had an edge in speed and maneuverability over the old freebooter freighter. And Sukotae could not depend on Bahakatan for help; it simply couldn’t catch up.
Kaotan, however, was undamaged, and Sukotae was not about to take on the Val alone. She had the ring aboard and the rest of the people from Janipur; her first duty was to safeguard them. She didn’t have speed for a really big punch, but it wouldn’t matter, clearly the Val had lost its punch power and could not follow. Kaotan punched just as the Val closed to within range.
The Val wasted no time on lost opportunities. If it could not stop the getaway, then the least it could do was cost the enemy as much as possible. It turned and headed back at full throttle toward Indrus and San Cristobal.
“It’s coming back in!” Santiago reported. “E.T.A. five minutes twenty-five seconds. Indrus cannot move and my shielding is completely gone. Can you move in, Espiritu Luzon?”
“Negative! This thing handles worse than a freighter at the best of times and I have damage. I will try to get in some good shots if I can, but all it has to do is skim to within your range opposite my position and I won’t be able to stop it. The best I can do is position myself so we’ll know where its best shooting position is. That will allow you to concentrate your fire on its salvos.”
“Bahakatan here. I can’t get back in time, but I noticed in its pursuit of Kaotan that it used no beam weapons at all. I believe the Val has been forced to divert all energy to its engines in order to maintain speed, maneuverability, and shielding. If someone could get in behind it, it might be vulnerable.”
“Here we go!” Santiago called. “Angle is right where we figured. No vector to the ship, but we might be able to hit most or all of the torpedoes. We’ll see.”
The Val came in on an arc that placed it within range for only three seconds, not enough to be worth firing at, but it loosed its full complement of twelve torpedoes in a zigzag spread pattern at the two crippled ships. Three got through the withering fire; two of those hit Indrus but failed to penetrate the shields. The third, however, came straight into San Cristobal’s midsection, nearly tearing the ship in half and knocking out all power.
The Val looped and came back for a second run, its tubes reloaded. The last pattern, so perfect yet so erratic, indicated that the Val was leaving the ship on preprogrammed automatic pilot and guiding in the torpedoes itself. It let loose the whole series aimed at Indrus, following the same pattern as before. With Espiritu Luzon laying off and San Cristobal as good as destroyed, there was little chance for Indrus to pick off more than half the incoming missiles.
The Val, unlike humans, could consciously perform many functions at the same time, but guiding twelve missiles under fire was stretching itself to its limit. It noticed the sensor call of another punch, but so many of the torpedoes were getting through, it didn’t dare stop and look.
Indrus’ guns had done a good job, but four missiles got through, all converging on a single spot near the tail section where the engines were. The ship reeled and began spinning; its entire aft section in one direction, the rest of it in another. Noting this, the Val turned to take on its new attacker, and immediately fired its entire forward battery. It was to no avail.
Thunder’s huge ram scoops were open wide like the jaws of a mighty beast, and before the Val could react, its entire ship was engulfed in the ram and processed by the great converters into energy. No other ship in service could have accomplished that feat; Thunder was so enormous that it ate asteroids larger than the Val ship just to feed its mighty engines.
“Everyone remain where you are,” Star Eagle called. “I will come to you. The most badly damaged to the cargo bays, the ones with any real power to the outside docks. Espiritu Luzon and Bahakatan approach and look for survivors. I will go and collect Lightning and Chunhoifan first, then return here. I want the wreckage, too—and any bodies that might be found. The battle is over.”
Raven sighed. “Yeah, and, just think. This was supposed to be the easy one.”
The losses were large, but in many ways not as bad as they had feared. Maria Santiago and the two centauroids survived in their pressure suits, although the ship and the other three members of the crew were lost. Raven in particular regretted the loss of the one he thought of as the rock monster; it never was very sociable or communicative but it played a mean game of cards.
On the Indrus only Lalla Paschittawal and Suni Banderesh, wife of Ravi’s weapons officer, survived, ironically because both had been in the tail section trying to repair the engines. Although they had been banged around and had a few broken bones, the fact that they had been there, tethered, and in spacesuits saved them. Ravi Paschittawal never wore one unless he had to, and his weapons officer generally followed this lead. Santiago, on the other hand, had put everyone in suits from the start just in case. It hadn’t saved everyone, but it saved her.
So the cost had been five lives from their small company and two ships. “At this rate we will be unable to muster any strength for the fourth ring and we haven’t even gotten the second yet,” Hawks noted dourly.
“All our losses were in the escape, not the operation,” China noted. “The next time we determine our methods before we commit our people, and that’s that. We simply cannot afford any more of this. This time they underestimated our numbers and strength—they will not do so again. We paid a sad price, but it is the price of learning. If we use this experience, we should be able to do it better and with less cost next time.”
One they did not lose was Vulture, much to Takya Mudabur’s shock and dismay. She had seen a laser hole through his heart and another through a part of his brain. Now, only a day later, he was walking around with no sign of any wounds except for some bloodstains that wouldn’t come out of the fur.
“And what about our prize?” Hawks asked the group.
Isaac Clayben cleared his throat. “It is a most fascinating device. As we expected it is passive, so once stolen it is impossible to locate. The ‘stone,’ as we might call it, is made of a highly conductive synthetic substance that has the electronics embedded in it—in fact, the electronics are mostly formed out of the substance itself! The design is actually somewhat primitive, and I have no idea what the material is and couldn’t duplicate it now if I wanted to.”
“But it is definitely what the papers said it was?” Hawks pressed.
“Who knows? I have no way of accessing the code inside of it, which might be incredibly complex, nor any way to read it if I could since it is early code—most likely direct assembly language to the original Master System core. The only thing I can say for sure, and probably the only thing I can say until we try to use it, is that it is definitely a module intended to interface with some sort of direct receptor. In other words, it is probably exactly what we think it is. The override and direct access to Master System’s core was deliberately divided into five parts, possibly not so much due to fear of the computer as to insure that no one of its designers could gain independent access to such power nor could even form a majority cabal. It took the consent and direct action of all five, no dissent allowed, to even do minor modification work. I suspect it was a safety device by agreement so that no one person could make himself a god. I will wager that if we see the receptors, they will be spaced far enough apart from one another that it will take five individuals to insert them and hold them there.”
“Interesting,” China said. “The implication is that even with all five inserted it would only give the ability and authority to modify. It is entirely possible that it would take the agreement of all five people to do just about anything. Chen would only be one among equals. Even if he plans on the other four being henchmen under his control, each would have an absolute veto power. That’s if the computer could be effectively accessed at all.”
Hawks looked up at her. “Huh? What do you mean?”
“These might only unlock five terminals or some direct interface by which the Master System core language could be fed in or read out. We might not know the language.”
“We’ll know,” Clayben assured them. “First of all, Master System would not be so persistent against us if we had no chance of access, and, secondly, the original Master System would be far smaller and more primitive than the one we face now. The rings are more than a mechanical method of access—they are the passwords and the instructions to the computer on how it interacts with the ring owners. I would bet on some sort of direct access, possibly even simple speech. Why would they make it hard on themselves? They had to use this just about every day. However, she is correct about one thing—it will require unanimity to alter the core. Of course, hypnos and mindprinters could change this, but who can be certain? Suppose the interfaces were something like those of the spaceships? If they had mindprinters or similar techniques in those days, and primitive methods of mind control were available long before there were even computers, then the designers would have built a failsafe into the access instructions to allow for that possibility. Such an interface could also give Master System access to the mind of the human interfacer. They were top-security people in top-security posts. They would have to have allowed for it.”
“Well, that makes me feel a little better,” Hawks admitted, “but it doesn’t solve the basic problem. At least this time we knew just who owned the ring and where it was. We have far less to go on with the next two, and we still don’t know where the fourth one even is.”
“I am equally concerned about the performance, or lack of it, in our own people,” China noted. “I talked to Maria and to the two Indrus women, and Star Eagle has made a preliminary check of Espiritu Luzon and found very little damage. They had full operational power including punch power—they were just jolted around a little and had to rush to fix some minor damage inside—and they have almost their full complement of weapons still aboard. They falsified their on-site damage report and did almost no fighting. They were close enough and in good enough shape to give that Val hell but they begged off and let those two ships and those five people die. In the right position and with a full field of fire, they could have forced that Val to dodge torpedoes instead of guiding them.”
Hawks nodded slightly, mostly to himself. “All right, I have the reports from the others myself. They did the bare minimum and they want a free ride. Well, it isn’t going to wash. There’s no use confronting them with it now or attempting any disciplinary action—I think they’ll get some cold treatment from the rest as it is, and I’d rather not listen to any of their excuses or give them any cause to try to leave our band or deliver it into the hands of the enemy. For now, we let them get away with it, but they move to the top of the priority list. Individually they are going to put up or they’re all going under the doctor’s mindprinter. Now, they’re going to have to put in for repairs or their story will be totally shot, and I suspect we’ll find something major to be fixed even if it wasn’t damaged during the battle. Star Eagle, while it’s in, reprogram the pilot core to allow for both override from Thunder and self-destruct. None of that crew is to have the ability or authority to operate that ship without someone else there with a key password and override. Can you do that?”
“I can and will. But why go through the charade?”
“Because if we press it, Savaphoong will have somebody set up to take the fall all by him- or herself. It’ll be more complicated than it’s worth. But if Espiritu Luzon goes out again, it will be with somebody else there. Somebody without a ship—like Maria Santiago or one of the Indrus survivors. Let them relax and congratulate themselves in their lap of luxury. We know them now, and we have them on a list. It might not be right away, but sooner or later all those aboard that ship who can think for themselves are going to wish they’d risked death back there off Janipur. Nobody here gets off without sacrifice and risk.” That seemed to satisfy them for the moment.
Over the many days that followed, the damage was repaired and weaknesses identified and reinforced. Hawks was feeling somewhat impatient now that they had been blooded and the real work had begun. He began to look at the two other worlds known to have rings. Before the battle of Janipur, these worlds had been looked at as closely as could be allowed without actually landing.
“Chanchuk follows the usual Center pattern,” he told Vulture. “We don’t know their form or culture, but intercepted transmissions indicate that they speak a dialect of Chinese no longer used on Earth. China could read it but almost went nuts trying to understand it when spoken. The grammar and pronunciation are all very different; so different that a phrase like ‘the writing pen is on the table’ could be heard as ‘the lead pipe is freezing up my ass.’ We don’t have any equivalent mindprinter modules for it.”
“I’m not surprised by the Chinese. About half the colonial worlds are Chinese or Indian in origin because they comprised half the human race when the whole split happened. The language doesn’t worry me, though. I can learn it by osmosis, as it were,” Vulture noted.
“I’m aware of that, but it also means that we’d have to pick you back up, bring you up here, take a mindprinter reading of it, do comparison matching and eventually create our own new records. I’m also concerned about doing a second job so similar in some ways to the first—using Center security and the like. This time we’ll probably have to break into the chief administrator’s bedroom. There’s an SPF command ship in orbit there, so you know they’re just as much involved down there as they were on Janipur, only they’ll have taken the lessons they just learned to heart. We just can’t afford another one like we just had. Master System is probably even now making Vals to replace the ones it lost every bit as good and as tough as those were, and the fate the SPF on Janipur will have will be a real incentive to the ones on Chanchuk, you can bet on that. I think we have to be much better prepared the next time.”
“I agree. So what if we bypass Chanchuk for now while we study the problem some more and maybe build ourselves back up? What’s the other one like?”
“Bizarre. That’s the only word for it. There are no Centers that we can detect. There is, in fact, no sign of any sort of artificial energy generation on the planet stronger than fire making. The world is rough. Lots of active volcanic activity, earthquakes, that sort of thing. The storms are extremely violent and they’re huge. Much of the planet is shrouded in clouds most of the time, and better than sixty percent of the landmass is covered with jungle—the kind of vegetation that looks like it’ll eat you instead of you eating it. You remember that world you stuck us on at the start of all this?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. It was the only noncolonical world Koll knew about that could support people. How was I to know?”
“Well, this one’s worse. It’s hot. Thirty to forty-five degrees Celsius in the regions of vegetation and human habitation. Lots of islands with no clear signs of habitation and two main continents. It’s got animals, but God knows what they eat except each other.”
“Water civilization, then?”
“No, land. Mammalian. Quite a lot of them, all things considered, although I suspect they don’t have long life-spans. They appear to be hunter-gatherers with social organization at the tribal level, and small at that, but there’s several million of them spread out on both continents and a couple of the larger islands. You can look at the survey and also at the photos we managed to get through the infrequent cloud breaks. The lack of Centers bothers me, but the lack of cities or any large tribal culture bothers me even more. A ‘human with authority’ on Matriyeh would have to be no more than a tribal chief. With an average tribe numbering about a hundred, and with several million people on all that land, how the hell will we ever find the right one? It’s a needle-in-a-haystack problem.”
“SPF and Master System?”
“They have a fair number of warning satellites and the like around—far more than you’d expect for a place nobody would ever want to visit—but no command ship. You can be pretty damned sure that one will come running along with Vals and a whole division of troops if they get wind we’re working down there, though. If I were them, I wouldn’t bother wasting resources there right now, either.” He sighed. “In a way, I wish we had the strength to mount two expeditions simultaneously. That way we’d probably have Matriyeh to ourselves while they bore in on Chanchuk. The fact is, though, that I don’t think we have a prayer of doing both.”
Vulture looked over all the data and was as concerned as Hawks about the lack of any clear centers of power. It just didn’t fit. Master System tended to do pretty much the same thing place after place—except here.
If anything, Hawks was understating the looks of both the jungle and the blasted volcanic plains. The animal life looked even less appetizing. There were large flying things with brown and black leathery wings and strange, thin tails; and other creatures that looked like flying plates with thin, long membranes for tails. He couldn’t imagine where Master System had dreamed them up, unless they were there to begin with.
The land animals were less clearly defined, and though some of them were overly large for a jungle that dense, most seemed to have the same coloration as their habitats. Even the older volcanic areas seemed riddled with holes that served as dens for things that might be worms, snakes, or something worse, all man-sized or larger. No clear cut herbivore candidates for the ecological niche of prey seemed obvious, unless it was humans, and that wasn’t a pleasant thought.
This world was almost any civilized person’s vision of hell. There were, however, some high-resolution photographs of the people, and even though they were grainy and the close-ups in poor focus, Vulture was able to identify a variety of tribes from various areas of both continents. He noted with a touch of sadness and some guilt that the photos had been taken by the Indrus.
The natives actually looked Earth-human, although he knew better than to accept that at face value. They had tough, very dark brown skin nearly black in color, with huge manes of woolly black hair. Their faces, however, did not have any clear racial antecedents from Earth’s old cultures that he could tell, but were surprisingly quite attractive, even delicate in a way, with small but prominent noses and thin lips. They wore no clothing but did seem to paint or brand their faces and parts of their body with delicate, intricate designs, and many wore crude necklaces or bracelets and anklets. Jewelry, probably of bone, dangled from their ears, was placed in the hair, and apparently inserted in the nose. Most carried stone-tipped spears and what might have been blow guns and other primitive weapons. They all seemed quite young.
He went back, looking again at picture after picture, and frowned. “But where’re the men?” he muttered. “There are no men in these shots. Not anywhere. It’s all women!”
Hawks joined him. “You see how ugly the place is.”
“Yes, yet there is a certain beauty to it, as well. I am puzzled, though. All those pictures, and not one male in the entire series. Where are the men? Is it a unisexual race?’
“I have no idea, although that struck me as well. As with Janipur and the others, there are some things we cannot know until we discover it for ourselves.”
“I suppose. I also notice that none of the artifacts they wear or carry is metal. While it is possible that useful metals might be difficult to extract by primitive people down there, I find it curious. It is almost like a look into the earliest past of humanity. Stone axes, stone spears, reed blow guns, no signs of cultivation even with a volcanic soil. They are tough, though, these women. Virtually all the hunting parties contained pregnant ones, as well.”
“The lack of any Centers bothered me more, but I have a possible explanation both for that and for much else of what you see,” Hawks told him. “Theory only, of course. But Lazlo Chen told us that Master System had the idea of reducing Earth to this level of civilization and culture and abolishing the Center system because Master System is finally realizing that it is not in complete control that way. It took the ancestors of humanity tens of thousands of years, perhaps longer than that, to rise up from the primitive to anything near what we think of as civilization. With satellites doing surveys almost constantly, it’s possible that when signs of large settlements and cultivated agriculture appear Master System’s forces could be brought in to reduce them once again. Simpler, cheaper, more efficient than the current system, although terrible for humanity.”
“And you think this was done here?”
“The number of monitoring satellites and their type suggest it was. Look, they are close enough to Earth-human, in appearance at any rate, and the population was probably never very advanced on a world such as this. It would be far easier to do it here and see how practical and manageable an idea it might be. And, of course, it is a world with a ring. Master System would think of the needle-in-the-haystack problem, as well.”
“A prototype, then.”
“Yes, I fear so. We used a similar scenario to get Pirate One docked to the command ship at Janipur and none of the SPF or their computers thought it the least odd, so they know of it. Still, something bothered me and it was only later when I dragged these out for you to look at and got to looking at them again myself that I finally was struck by something. Master System is a prisoner of its core program. A chief of some tribe measuring a hundred simply wouldn’t do. Life is obviously short down there—for chiefs, as well, and perhaps for chiefs in particular. There would be no control, and no assurance that the ring would remain where it is mandated to be. Also, in a society like that, such a ring would have incredible magical properties, perhaps even be an object of worship. It is worked metal with intricate designs, far beyond their knowledge and powers. It would obviously be taken as something of the gods and would be treated accordingly.”
Vulture nodded. “I see what you mean. Such an object would be sufficient to generate, perhaps, a priesthood. Maybe even an entire theology.”
“That led me to begin comparing both the designs they paint on themselves and on their totems, as best we can make them out. My own people use face-painting, charms, and amulets both for religious purposes and to denote, say, rank and position in a hunt or in battle. My tribe is quite small, yet its markings are distinctive; so much so that there is little or no chance to mistake a Hyiakutt for a Sioux or Sauk or Manitwoc. In all our photos of southern continent people I found what I would expect—some basic similarities, but overall quite distinctive color and design even between small groups living close together. But in the north—well, look for yourself.”
The picture that came up on the monitor was somewhat fuzzy but still showed painted markings of distinctive design on faces and bodies, the variations small enough to be those of rank or assignment. A second picture showed a different tribe, but the markings were quite similar, differing only in minor details.
“The two tribes you see live a thousand kilometers apart,” Hawks told him. “The tribal groups tend to be territorial and there is little trade because there is little to trade. Yet the markings are pretty consistent, as are the shapes of some of the bond charms. Unfortunately, the resolution isn’t perfect, but there is a consistency in the patterns. They all seem to be bone or wood carved into the shape of stylized birds and basic trees—but the things that fly down there aren’t birds, I can assure you.”
“A consistent theology, then. One that probably justifies their existence and seeks to maintain the status quo. Very clever. So there are religious leaders within the tribes, and perhaps a priesthood surrounding the ring, as well. Then there is a chief administrator down there, and a supporting staff! They just don’t know what they are!”
Hawks nodded. “Exactly.”
“But why only the northern continent? It would seem to me that it would work best if all of them were unified at least in a basic set of beliefs.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps this is an ongoing experiment and the south is the control group. Which is more dangerous—a diffuse culture with no strong common cultural base, or one that has a religion that tells them that life is but a test for the hereafter, progress is blasphemy, invention is demonic, and has the totem to prove their divine authority? Master System knows human history but it’s the first to ever be able to run experiments on human social behavior. Although it fascinates me as a historian, it is beside the point for our purposes. The fact is that, we have clear evidence of a unitary theological base in the north and all that implies. Somewhere down there is a religious center with a high priest—or priestess, as it looks—who is protected and pampered is the ultimate authority because he or she speaks to the gods—and has the ring to prove it.”
Vulture stared at the maps. It was a big continent. “But where? It need not be very large, but it would have to have some kind of support system so that the priesthood would be freed from the daily grind of hunting and gathering. And there would be a single permanent settlement of sorts.”
Hawks shrugged. “Right now we can’t find it. It might just be too small to be noticeable on these survey photos. You can bet it’s an austere priesthood, living a hard, monastic life. The only way to know would be to have some surface operative who could guide us there. Surely someone down there knows the way. Someone must relay the theology, exercise the power down the social chain. The tribal priest must be instructed, trained, and kept to the straight and narrow. I suspect that the culture is far more complex than it looks from a distance.”
Vulture nodded. “And, as usual, I provide the intelligence. What about getting in and out?”
“Ever since the problem on Janipur surfaced, we have been working on ways to do that. We were able to get into orbit and take a survey because of some of our experimental work. I think we can jam the satellites sufficiently to move rather freely in that system without an alarm going out. There’s all sorts of cosmic interference going on, especially with so many devices. Getting in and getting you supplied and supported, even getting you out, would not be a major problem so long as they don’t send a force to the system. My concern is, for all its complexities, it’s too easy.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“They know we’re after the rings. They know we have to have all of them. They have access to better tools than we do, and they aren’t hampered by any moral or ethical considerations. They have the ability to create true believers who won’t question even the illogical or irrational and will think when they use the magic to speak to Heaven they are talking to God and not Master System. It can’t afford to entrust the ring to savages, yet it can’t do otherwise without violating its experiment. Somewhere, down there, they’ve set a trap for us, Vulture, and I bet it’s a whopper. If we don’t find it, then we’re going to be faced with a battle as ugly as the one we survived and that might just cripple us for years. Still, until we can work out alternate exit methods for Chanchuk, this is our best bet. Go down there. Spot the trap. Then and only then will we be able to take the ring.”