IT WAS A SPACESHIP—AND IT WAS MORE THAN THAT.
It was a starship, a ship designed to go to places even the eye could not follow and to go distances beyond the grasp of human minds—but it was more than that.
It looked very much like a great tube, flattened a bit on top and bottom and rounded at both ends, with protuberances that were bays for the scout ships that clung to their mother in special recesses, and sensors, and communications devices—and much, much more.
The ship itself—one of the hundreds that circled great Jupiter in silence, shut down, but preserved and ready for reactivation if their service should ever be needed—was a bit over fourteen kilometers long. The ship had a brain and massive amounts of stored knowledge and skills that had not been needed in a very long while.
“I wonder if it is bothered by that,” Cloud Dancer said, more to herself than to the others who were gazing at the viewing screen of their relatively small interplanetary freighter.
“Huh?” Walks With the Night Hawks, her husband and co-conspirator, looked at her. “Who is bothered by what?”
“The ship. It has a mind, a soul, as this one does. Its spirit is dedicated to work, to a great task, and it has been told to do nothing since it did that task. I wonder if it minds, sitting there idle, without hope or opportunity to do its task, to be itself, for all this time.”
“It sure fought like hell to keep us out,” came the gravelly voice of the Crow Agency man, Raven. Not long, before they had been the targets of some of those fighters nestled inside the great ships; only deciphering the clearance code in time and some fancy maneuvering had saved them from being blown from the sky.
“That was its duty,” the Hyiakutt Indian woman responded. She was quite smart, but having been raised in a primitive culture, she saw the universe from a perspective as alien to the others as they were to the computer brain of the great ship they now approached. “Now it receives us. I wonder if it is eager, or if it is waiting to devour us?”
“Neither,” an odd voice said through the ship’s intercom. When Star Eagle, as they had named the computer pilot of the ship, spoke on his own, it was in a pleasant male voice, but when China was interfaced into the ship’s system, forming a human-computer synthesis, the voice sounded strange, neither male nor female, but somehow both at once. “There is no command module on any of these ships. It was removed when they were placed in storage here. These ships have many brains, as it were, since even the tiny fractions of a second it might take to relay an order might cause needless risk, but the only ones there now are automatic maintenance and ship’s security. The tech cult that discovered the human interfaces intended to fly the ship themselves, without a command module.”
Hawks frowned. “Is that possible?”
“Yes, but not efficient or practical. They did not think beyond that point, since even attaining that much was highly improbable. All plans were based on the escape, not what came next. Just like us.”
Yes, but we’re at least better off than they would have been. We have Koll, who’s been out there, and information from Raven and Warlock. We are not going completely blind. He frowned, wondering if that was really true or if he was just trying to reassure himself.
Still, he had no doubt they would get away. No mystical sense informed him, and he knew of no particular edge on their part, but even though they’d had to fight every step of the way to this point, he couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow they were being led.
Most of this crew had been selected, somehow, by Lazlo Chen, the ambitious chief administrator of the central Asian district and discoverer of the information that five gold rings could, if found and used properly, deactivate or control Master System. Chen owned the only one of the rings remaining on Earth, and was determined that this group secure the others for him. The stakes were quite high—nothing less than godhood for the one who found all the rings and brought them together.
But even Chen was subject to Master System; even Chen had severe limits on his knowledge and power. Chen’s reach extended over the whole of the Earth and even beyond, but it did not reach as far out as Jupiter. Since their escape from the asteroid penal colony, Melchior, Hawks had been convinced that another player was also on the scene, one who also wanted them to succeed and whose reach did extend farther out. Who or what this player was could not be known now; nor could they guess whether it was using Chen for its own ends, or whether Chen was using it.
This was a strange band to pick for such a mission. Hawks was a Hyiakutt Amerind historian, a student of rebels and warriors, not one himself. Cloud Dancer had been born and raised in the Plains culture, a primitive suddenly thrust into a world of what to her was magic. The Chow sisters came out of an equally primitive society in China, but as personal servants to Center personnel they’d had more experience with technology; they had an uncanny ability to pick even computer-encoded locks, though they were otherwise ignorant. Raven, the Crow security man built like a boulder, and his associate Manka Warlock, the Jamaican beauty with the cold personality and a liking for killing people, seemed more obvious choices, but neither of them had ever before left Earth. Out here in space they were as ignorant and helpless as he was. The selection of China, too, made some sense—originally known as Song Ching, she was the daughter of the chief administrator of China and the product of a breeding experiment to produce a subrace that was physically perfect and mentally so advanced it was hoped to be a match for the computer system—but she, too, had never been off Earth, and thanks to the cruel experimentation of the scientists on Melchior she was hardly a perfect choice now. Blind and compulsively pregnant, her true value was only in her ability to use the human interface to become one with the mind of the ship’s computer pilot, as she was doing now.
That, too, was a mystery. Why did these ships have interfaces for humans at all? Master System alone could build them, in far-off, wholly automated factories among the stars. Why was there a bridge, with connections to the vital parts and operations of the ships, as if humans and computers were supposed to work together? It was this absolute control of space that made Master System unbeatable, and it had been perhaps nine hundred years since any humans had traveled on spaceships as anything other than passengers. It would have been simple to build these ships so that no one could ever control or tamper with the command modules, the computer brains. Why hadn’t that been done?
Even the huge interstellar vessel they were now approaching had positions for humans, and more than one bridge, yet these ships had not been built until after Master System had taken total control of humanity. These ships had been designed not for human use but to carry the bulk of humanity against its will to captivity among the stars. Why, then, were there a bridge and interfaces for humans, since without those they would have no escape, no opportunity to flee, at all?
And then there was Reba Koll, the essential one, the only one who’d been out there before, and the only one who herself had used the interfaces illegally to pilot a spaceship. They had a lot riding on the memories and long-unused skills of the strange old woman with the tail, and she was quite mad—who wouldn’t have been after enduring ten years of experimentation on Melchior? She claimed not to be Reba Koll but someone—or something—else she would not now reveal. Even the security forces who had pursued them from Melchior claimed the same, and that worried Hawks. He didn’t think she was some sort of inhuman monstrosity, but he wondered if she was something very dangerous such as the carrier of a dread disease.
The final two in the party had been unexpected additions to the mission. Silent Woman, a product of years of slavery and degradation in the primitive culture of North America, her tongue cut out, her body covered with colorful tattoos, was almost childlike, and there was little or no way to communicate with her on more than a rudimentary basis. She understood none of the languages the others used commonly—though Hawks had used a mindprint machine to give her basic English—and she seemed to live in a world all her own.
Sabatini, the cruel captain from whom they’d taken this ship, was here involuntarily, a prisoner. They could neither trust him nor let him go; sooner or later, Hawks knew, they would have to face his disposal.
There was nothing left to see on the viewscreen; Star Eagle was now so close to the massive interstellar ship that the vast bulk blotted everything out.
“Strap in and prepare for a set of big jolts,” the ship warned them. “My reverse thrusters are shot thanks to the battle, and that means, in effect, no brakes. I’ve done as much as I can, but now we will have to be caught and halted by tractor beam and that’s going to be a pretty big shock. Helmets on and switch to internal air supply. I have no idea if we can maintain pressurization.”
They were already all strapped in, both here and in the lounge and up on the bridge, yet each checked his own straps and webbing to make certain they were secure. The ship then activated the restraint system, pulling them back and holding them so firmly that it was hard to breathe. All were wearing pressure suits and helmets now, and they could only wait.
Suddenly there was a massive jolt, a tremor that shook the whole ship, followed by another, then another. The ship seemed to lurch, moving in all directions at once, and all around were creaks and groans of metal in distress. Loud hissing sounds punctuated the moaning and groaning of fatigued metal. The sense of motion and the shocks stopped quickly; the noises did not.
“What’s happening?” Warlock asked nervously. “We’re not going to die just on the edge of victory!”
The speakers sputtered, hissed, and crackled. “I—released China—to her,” came the pilot’s normal voice. “Ship—break up. Suits on, hold tight—I—”
“You’re breaking up!” Hawks said through his suit radio. “If I understand correctly the ship is breaking up in the tractor. Will you be all right?”
“You—get in—soon as bays close. Decompressing . . . main module—no serious danger to—China—”
Suddenly there was silence except for the faint buzz of the carrier in the suit radio. The lights blinked, then went off, leaving the passengers for a moment in darkness and then in an eerie semilight as their helmet and small body locator lights came on.
“Is the ship dead?” Cloud Dancer asked, awed by the idea. “Has Star Eagle now soared to the otherworld?”
“I—I don’t know,” Hawks responded. “The body of the ship is dead, that’s for sure, but those computers have their own power supplies and sources of energy. It’s possible he’s still alive and we can rescue him. I hope so.”
There was a sudden and unexpected jarring and the whole ship shuddered, then seemed to roll over slightly on its side, as the big ship’s tractor mechanism pulled them in, controlled by the automatic maintenance and defense systems.
“We’re in!” Raven called. “Damn it, we’re inside the thing!”
Hawks was suddenly galvanized into action. “Warlock, go forward and see to China and Reba Koll and bring them back here.”
“No need,” came Koll’s sharp, raspy voice over the radio. “We’re all right and coming back now.”
“The command module,” China said in her own soft, high voice. “Have you seen to it?”
“Huh?” Hawks frowned. “Where is it?”
“Aft, in the first cargo hold. There’s a big round plate in the floor secured by nine recessed bolts and an electronic combination. You throw two long switches to reveal the lock.”
Hawks looked around. “Okay, Chow sisters. That sounds like it’s in your department.”
“No need,” China told him. “I know the combination and it can be set and timed to blow the bolts. I come as quick as I can. Someone get a measuring tool and meet us there.”
“Do we have to do it now?” Warlock asked irritably. “It’s a damned machine. It’ll wait.”
“It is one with us,” Cloud Dancer responded in a bitter, almost menacing tone. “It comes with us.”
China was there now, being led by Reba Koll. Hawks shrugged as he was handed an electronic measure from Sabatini’s kit and went back with them. “Nobody leaves yet,” he cautioned. “You don’t want to go into that kind of place without backup.”
“How long’s the air last in these things?” Raven muttered.
“Better than sixty hours,” Koll told him. “There’s time.”
“Yeah.” The Crow security man sighed. “There’s time, but is there air out there?”
Hawks wasn’t quite sure what China had in mind, but he was willing to go along with her. She was a strange sort, but she knew these machines like nobody else did, and in a real sense the whole group was dependent on the blind girl.
The plate was not easy to find in the dark; even under normal conditions they might have missed it. Recessed into the deck were two long mechanical rods that took some effort just to get lifted up a bit; they were almost as difficult to raise the rest of the way, eventually requiring the combined weight of Hawks and Raven. Finally, though, both rods were pulled up and then pushed over as far as they could go, and a center plate popped out revealing a dirt-caked touchpad. When they’d cleaned it off as best they could, China gave them the combination that she had learned from Star Eagle.
Hawks nervously keyed it in, then they all stepped back, well away of the plate, and waited. There was no sound in the airless ship, but a sudden series of flashes burst around the plate and the bolts all seemed to leap out of their sockets. Moving quickly now, they pried the plate up and put it out of the way, revealing a cavity perhaps half a meter deep in which sat three small rectangular objects.
“Pull up the center one carefully—very carefully,” China instructed. “Then measure its dimensions and tell me of its connectors.”
Doing so carefully was a chore; magnetism or some other force kept the device seated well, and breaking that grip was tough. Finally, though, they got it up, measured it, and checked it over. The connectors, smoothly polished and brass-colored, seemed etched into the sides and bottom of the box; there were a lot of them in numerous patterns. Hawks did his best to describe them to China.
She nodded. “For now, put it back so that it can continue to draw on its emergency power reserves,” she instructed. “Now we must go into the big ship.”
“Just what is that, lady?” Raven asked, irritated that this didn’t seem to have much point after all that work.
“That is the command module—the brain—of Star Eagle,” she told them. “The other two are management modules. They can live far longer there than we can in these suits, so we must hurry. We need to discover the equivalent place on the big ship and check it out as well.”
Hawks understood. “You’re thinking of moving Star Eagle from this ship into command of the big one. Is that possible? Surely the design of the command modules will be different for a massive interstellar craft than for an interplanetary freighter. The operations will be far more complex.”
“Not really,” she told him. “Most of it appears standardized so that they can be reprogrammed easily at any point. Master System doesn’t want any computer too sophisticated running these things, and particularly not one that can’t be reprogrammed on the fly. There is no guarantee; the size might be right but the connectors different, for example.”
“What if it is?” Hawks asked her. “What if it’s impossible? How do we fly this monster?”
“The way the tech cult who discovered the plans for these intended to do it. Direct interface, human mind to machine. Or minds, in this case. I suspect it will take several to manage it.”
“You know where this thing’s supposed to go in?” Raven asked.
“Yes—more or less. It should be obvious once we’re there. The trouble is, I have no idea where we are in this ship except that we are on an outer deck.”
“You realize how big this mother is?” Raven asked her. “It could take days, weeks, to find our way around, with nothing much working. There’s limited water in these suits, even more limited air, no food, and no road map. It’s impossible!”
“So was getting this far,” Hawks snapped, trying to break the mood. “First, two of us go out and find out where we are—some landmark, something, that’ll give China a clue. Then we get her and Captain Koll up to that bridge to start doing things the hard way while others of us try and find the interface. I assume, China lady, that you have some sort of map of this thing in your head if we can find landmarks.”
“I have a schematic imprinted there, the memory of which was further enhanced by Star Eagle, but it is not of the detail I would like. The bridge should be easy, and we’ll take it from there. At least if I can find the bridge and establish some sort of interconnect we ought to be able to get some life-support systems operating.”
Hawks sighed. “Well, Crow—you feeling up to a walk in the dark with me?”
“Anything to get moving,” Raven responded.
There was something ironic about moving around in a strange, dark, eerie environment using a blind woman for eyes. The compartment they were in was enormous, far too large for their lights to illuminate even a wall. The freighter they had just left was close to three hundred meters in length and it didn’t even crowd the place. The first step, then, was finding a wall, and that took almost forty minutes.
With gravity their task might have been impossible; there were few objects that could be used as ladders or footholds. In zero gee, however, they were able to explore more efficiently. Eventually they found hatches on an inner wall and studied one. It was locked electronically, of course, but they found the manual override and opened it.
They moved through the hatch and were startled when a small string of lights came on along both sides of the corridor near the floor.
“Motion sensing,” China explained through the radio from back inside the freighter’s remains. “That is a break for us.”
“I’m not sure about that break business,” Raven noted sourly. “There are corridors leading to corridors leading to corridors.”
“I have a marker here from the ship’s kit,” Hawks tried to reassure him, although he wasn’t feeling very secure himself. “I’m making a mark every ten floor lights or so, and I will indicate direction at every intersection. That’s the best we can do.”
They went on for what seemed like a long time without hitting any landmark that China could use to place them. The corridors seemed to go off in all directions into eternity.
“Hey, Chief? You noticed we ain’t come on no big rooms, no lines of rooms? No offices, dormitories, or camp meeting places, for that matter. Just access ways for equipment and service. We got to be in the service corridors and not the main halls. I mean, this was built as a cargo ship and its cargo was people. Lots and lots of people. Where in hell did they put them?”
Hawks didn’t reply, but he was getting a bad feeling about all this. As a historian, he knew of these ships and what they’d done—although he’d never dreamed that they still existed—and he had always imagined them as great inverted worlds, with gardens and dense apartmentlike clusters, like an immense floating and self-sufficient city. This, however, was sterile, spartan, cold, and lifeless. Raven was right. A ship this size might be expected to transport and support thousands of people. Where? And how?
And, quite suddenly, through one more hatch, they found the answer.
They must be, Hawks guessed, in the belly of the ship, yet it was crowded and went off in all directions. Their helmet lights and the lights on what had now become a wide catwalk revealed only a tiny part of it, but there was the sense that this, too, went on forever.
“Jeez! It’s like some kinda monster honeycomb,” Raven remarked. The many catwalks divided an enormous section that extended above and below as far as the light carried. They could see down past some half-dozen levels of chambers before the honeycomb was swallowed in darkness.
Hawks turned and studied the way the catwalk was fastened to the inner hull wall. “Rails,” he noted, pointing. “The walks move up and down. See the stops there? Each walk would service, I would say, five rows of these holes or chambers up, and perhaps five down. They were probably not marched in. It would be too messy. Most likely the people were placed in some sort of drug-induced coma, probably in large groups by gas, then hauled in here and loaded automatically by equipment designed for that purpose. You said it, Raven—cargo.” He leaned over and felt just inside the nearest chamber. “Some sort of soft synthetic lining. See? Each one is large enough for one human adult. You can see small vents, and that tiny box looks as if it contains tentacular tubing. They put them in, then the tubing attached itself where necessary, and they were sustained for the journey.”
“Yeah,” Raven said dryly. “Gives you the shakes. I suppose they kept a mixture of the gas and pure oxygen in here to keep ’em out, or maybe these things can be sealed and separately flooded. Gives you the creeps, though.”
“Until now this was only an academic thing for me,” Hawks told him, his voice strained. “In its own way it was even somewhat romantic. Whole human civilizations being carted off to the stars to found new colonies. It does not seem very romantic now. This is the true face of Master System, Raven, the one we served and even believed in to a great degree when we were younger. Even this expedition, this rebellion, was, I admit, as much a romance to me, a chance to live beyond the confines, to experience rather than merely study—but no more. I have lost an innocence here I did not know I retained, and I am filled with revulsion. These weren’t humans to Master System and its machines, Raven. Not their makers, not their charges. Just digits. Binary ones and zeros. Quantity this. Not even the dignity of zoo animals or pets. Carrion. No—live meat in its despicable deep freeze.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” China’s voice broke in, “but can you get any real landmark on the central cargo bay? You’ve got a lot of people back here who are getting hungry and will also need air.”
Hawks resented her intrusion, and also her tone. She must have heard them. When she saw—but, no, she wouldn’t see. She couldn’t. She could be standing right here and it could only be described to her as it might be read by him from some book or computer printout. At times that strange girl seemed more machine than human, anyway. She might very well stand here, even if she could see, and explain the cold and efficient logic behind the system from a computer’s point of view. She probably would.
“The corridor we entered on has to be one that services this level, running parallel to it,” Raven responded. “Best we might do is pick a direction and follow it until it ends.”
Hawks tore himself away from his reverie. “No. If we’re near one end of the chamber and go the wrong way it might be ten kilometers to reach an end, and it might be an end with nothing worth the trouble. We must split up. You walk one way, I, the other, until the first one of us comes to an end or some other recognizable feature. Remain parallel to the hatches leading to the walks. If we are not in the center, and the odds are against it, then one of us should reach something useful in a short time.”
“Fair enough. I’ll go left and if I junction I’ll continue to always take the left fork. You do the same on the right, taking the right fork. We have to get cracking on this. History can wait, as usual.”
After about another thirty or forty minutes, Raven called out. “I’ve gotten to the end! There’s another catwalk out here, but also ones leading up to hatches all along the wall.”
“Any distinguishing features on the wall?” China asked him.
“Hard to see with the light we got. There’s five hatches makin’ kind of a triangle goin’ up one side to a center one and then back down. Lemme haul myself up there and see what’s what.” There was a pause filled with some intermittent grunts. Then Raven spoke again. “It’s recessed in the whole area. Triangle shape, and right up top is a whole bunch of what looks like pipes that come together in a neat line and go into the wall. That help?”
“Yes. I know exactly where you are. Look carefully down from the center hatch, perhaps centered in the middle. A round plate of some kind, possibly secured by rivets.”
“Ugh! No handholds down there, and I ain’t got this no-gravity stuff down yet, if I ever will. Let’s see . . . Yeah! It’s here. Looks like it was designed to turn if you had a handle, but I don’t see one.”
“A strong magnet would do it. I think we can find something here. It is probably not locked. That is a service tunnel going down to the core room. The center hatch above should lead to the bridge. Hawks?”
“Yeah?”
“Stop going where you’ve been walking. You’re walking aft and you’d be a long time getting to anyplace useful. Best you return here and get the rest of us. We must take Star Eagle’s core and the two support modules and see if we can make them fit in there. If we can, we will be masters of this ship.”
“Uh huh,” Raven grunted. “And if we can’t?”
“Then we will have to work around it. Let’s try the other first. Master System is almost maniacal about standardization. It’s one reason we have been able to beat the system so often. The interplanetary ships were designed as precursors to these, and there is no evidence that they have ever been significantly changed in their basic design and specifications. You remain there and let Hawks and the rest of us come to you.”
“Yeah, I’ll just sit here all nice and comfy,” the Crow responded. “Sorta like hangin’ around the mausoleum.”
When they finally succeeded in removing the bulky plate, they revealed a round cavity large enough for a human in a pressure suit to enter. Hawks and Raven were again the first inside, the latter pushing the three modules from their crippled interplanetary craft.
The tube angled down for perhaps twenty meters, then opened into a large bubblelike chamber. Around the wall in a band were drawerlike module compartments, all filled, and in the center was a raised squared-off pedestal with four rectangular cavities laid out in a cross. All were vacant.
“Well, we have the right place, but which goes where?” Hawks asked China through the suit intercom. “All four look exactly the same, and there aren’t exactly instruction sheets printed on them. Also, we have four holes and only three modules.”
“That won’t matter much, I don’t think,” China assured him. “The core had a unique set of contacts. Those contacts should match only one of the sockets. Are the sizes right?”
“Look right,” Raven told her. “We’ll see when we try. There’s a million of these tiny nipples in this gold leaf, though. Hard to tell which is which by just looking at them. Maybe you could see a difference but I sure as hell can’t.”
“I wish I could see it,” the Chinese girl responded. “Well, there is only one core socket; the others are data modules. The data modules aren’t socket specific, only the core, or brain. If there is no other way, then place the two support modules in any two sockets and then attempt to load the core in one of the remaining sockets. Be careful not to damage or scrape any part of it. If it fits, fine, but don’t force it. If it doesn’t fit, try the other. Then switch.”
“Be easier if we just tried the core first,” Hawks noted.
“No! The core is its brain but the storage modules are its basic memories. If it connects with this ship but does not immediately have access to its memory modules it will not know where it is or who we are or what this is all about. The core is still the basic Master System core; it is the modules that were altered to allow it freedom. Activating the core without the modules will simply deliver us into the hands of a slave of Master System.”
“Uh, yeah. Uh huh.” They turned and carefully selected one of the storage modules, then studied the cavities.
“I’d say let’s put these in the right and left cavities as seen from the hatch and try the core with the vertical,” Hawks suggested. Raven shrugged.
The first one slid easily and seemed to be firmly seated. “So far so good,’ Raven noted, sweating. They inserted the other, which went in just as easily. “Best guess is that one of the two remaining is in fact the brains.”
“I had only a partial schematic,” China told them. “I’m not certain what the fourth one would be. Possibly additional memory to help manage a ship this size, or possibly a subsidiary brain, one handling the ship and the other the cargo life support. It is possible it might fit both places. Try it and see. We have no choice.”
“Top one,” Hawks guessed. “Seems silly, but it’s closest to the actual bridge above.”
“Yeah, by about a meter and a half,” Raven responded, but they carefully maneuvered the core and then fitted it into the cavity. Nothing happened. “Seems to be sitting just a little higher than the others. Want to try the bottom one?”
“We couldn’t get it all right first time,” Hawks said. “All right—use the small magnets and pull.”
They lifted the module out, then maneuvered it slowly to the lower cavity, checked its position, and lowered it into place. Again, it didn’t seem to go in quite all the way. “We’re either wrong on the others or we’re gonna have to risk pushing on the thing,” Raven noted.
“Careful!” China warned them. “They are tough but not too tough. It is why they are shielded.”
There was a tiny bit of play, and they tried moving the module first this way, then that, pushing down slightly as they did so. They were just beginning to decide that perhaps they had the wrong one, after all, when Raven accidentally jiggled the top as he shifted position, and the module sank down just a bit in the socket and seated itself firmly.
“Hey! It’s in!” the Crow shouted, staring in wonder at the thing. “But nothin’s happening!”
Suddenly there were strange clicking, whirring, and beeping sounds through their intercom sets.
“It’s on all frequencies! Radios off for now!” China yelled over the din. “Count to a hundred and check each hundred until it’s quiet again!”
It was eerie enough to be in the ghostly dark bowels of the strange ship, but in silence it was even worse. Hawks took some comfort from seeing Raven and Raven’s light, but he couldn’t help wondering about China. Deaf and dumb because of this, like the others, she was also blind and now completely cut off.
At each check the horrible sounds were so painful that none could stand to keep his or her radio on for more than the briefest moment. The number of hundred counts seemed to go on forever.
Outside the hatch, China waited in a world of silent darkness, hand in hand with Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman on either side of her, that touch the only reality she had other than the breathing sounds from her suit. She had never felt so totally helpless, and her complete dependence on the others was only now being driven home to her. She didn’t like the feeling at all. Worse, she could not understand what was happening, or why. Nobody, not even the researchers who’d theorized all this, had actually touched one of these ships. Nine centuries had passed since humans had been even cargo on this ship; no human being had ever set foot in here as an independent agent.
Suddenly a million possibilities presented themselves to her mind. A power mismatch. Inverted circuitry that would cause a loop and ultimately a burnout. Or, perhaps, the great ship and its complexities was simply too much for Star Eagle to handle or comprehend, much as his mind was actually alien to hers.
Keeping hold of China’s left hand, Cloud Dancer turned to look back into the darkness of the immense cavity. Suddenly she gasped and squeezed that hand tighter, then tried to poke one of the others. Koll, finally, turned and saw what Cloud Dancer saw.
Behind them a snake of lights was growing, writhing, twisting, going ever outward, upward, downward. It took them a moment to realize what was happening.
All the floor lights on the catwalks were being illuminated, section by section. The ancient cavity that had transported uncounted thousands or perhaps millions was soon lit up like a festival, dimly but beautifully, as far as any eye could see.
They tried their radios. There was still a lot of static and odd background noise, but the sounds were no longer unbearable.
“Anybody on?” Reba Koll called. Her voice crackled a bit, but it carried all right.
“I’m in!” Hawks’s voice sounded even worse.
“We are here!” the Chow sisters chimed in. “Is it not beautiful?”
“All of us are going to die,” Carlo Sabatini wailed.
Cloud Dancer kept nudging China until the girl finally let go and activated her radio. One by one they all checked in.
“Still nothing much down here,” Raven reported worriedly. Cloud Dancer told them about the lights.
“Nothing like that here, but I’m feeling something. A low vibration ,” Hawks told them. “What about up there?”
“Faint. Very faint,” China responded in a voice that sounded curiously unlike her. The sharp edge, the confidence, was gone, Hawks thought. She’s been badly scared. It was almost a relief to discover that she was human after all.
A strange voice cut them all off. It was quite high at first, then went down a scale as if it was testing each note to find one it liked. Finally it stopped.
“Do I have communication?” the voice asked at last. It sounded a bit less than human, like a man’s voice played at a speed slightly too slow and irregular. The effect was eerie.
“You have it,” China responded. “Is that you, Star Eagle?”
“Star Eagle . . . Yes, I identify with that. It is . . . difficult. There is so much, so much at once. It keeps coming at me, but it is far too much to absorb. I am grown enormous! It is . . . difficult . . . to focus my primary consciousness, to limit it. Somehow this must be partitioned.”
“We require entry to the bridge, then the establishment of power and life support there,” she told it. “Can you handle that?”
“Proceed up to the bridge. It is essential that the capping locks be placed on my modules and then the hatch resealed before we can proceed. I can then activate the isolation circuitry that will keep the core bay suspended and vacuum insulated from shocks and vibrations.”
“You heard the man, Chief,” Raven noted. “See what he’s talking about?”
“Now I do,” Hawks responded. “We’ve been walking on it.”
They had taken the one flatter area on the floor of the bubble as some sort of ramp. Now they stepped off it, then lifted it up and into place. “No fasteners, though,” Hawks added.
“Stand back. I will activate the locking mechanism,” the ship told them. A series of clamps came up through the bolt holes and flatted out, then the entire metal surface seemed to buckle slightly inward. Hawks assumed it to be some sort of magnetic and vacuum seal.
They made their way back out, then managed, not without difficulty, to get the round giant screw part of the way back in. Again the ship warned them to step aside, and the plate screwed itself in the rest of the way, sealing itself shut.
“The topmost hatch,” China told them. “We must head for the bridge.”
They had to walk through more corridor for a long way, then up railed ramps. Finally, though, they reached a ceiling hatch that led to an air lock, which opened onto the bridge.
Star Eagle had turned on the bridge lights, but the resulting red glow was barely adequate to illuminate the room of gun-black metal. It was perhaps twenty by thirty meters, a big semicircular room with stations at instrument clusters lining the walls and more stations in three banks of boxy machinery front to back. The station chairs, of black metallic mesh, looked uncomfortable: They had swivels, but they were low-backed, armless, and were solidly fixed to the floor.
“We’ll have to shift some of the more comfortable stuff from the old ship to here,” Cloud Dancer remarked. “This is not very comfortable.”
“Most of ’em’s pretty spare,” Reba Koll commented. “Big mother, but no privacy at all.”
“I do not notice a kitchen or a bathroom,” Manka Warlock noted. “This will not be a pleasant place.”
“I am going to pressurize the bridge,” Star Eagle informed them. “It will be very oxygen-rich and quite dry, but it will be serviceable. Until I can gain better mastery of what is here and how it all works, I will have to make do and so will you. Later on I can give more comfort. The transmuters here have enormous capabilities, I think, but they are huge. A more suitable interface to the bridge area will have to be arranged. I will order Maintenance to see to it. I am afraid the fare will not be very good right now, but I believe I can arrange some basic food and water needs. My food service programs are for the small transmuter aboard the old ship and won’t be much use here. Your suit mechanisms will take care of liquid wastes; I fear you must improvise on solid waste until something can be worked out. In all this ship, the only bathroom is the one back on the old ship.”
“What did he mean by ‘transmuter’?” one of the Chows asked.
“A ship this size needs spare parts always, and spare everything,” China explained. “Also, it could never carry sufficient water and air and the rest to support the number of people it carried. It is sufficient that the master computer contain the plans and schematics for everything required, from computer consoles and circuitry to basic water, and be able to make them. For this it uses a device called a transmuter. All of the food that we consumed on the old ship was made that way. It takes something solid or some energy and it converts it to whatever is needed. The salad you ate a day ago might well have been worn-out parts from the ship once, or spare exhaust gases from the propulsion system. Nothing is wasted, you see. Very small transmuters were even used on me back on Melchior, to speed what they wished to make of me. Shortcuts to surgery, to create—or to destroy. We have all had it, to a degree. The tattoos on our faces—this is why they seem so much a part of us and do not wear out.”
All of them who had been prisoners on Melchior had the tattoos on their faces. Those of Hawks, Silent Woman, Cloud Dancer, the Chows, and Reba Koll were silver; China’s was a metallic crimson. Each was an abstract design, ranging from a solid ball near the corners of the mouth and spreading up, tendrillike, to the side of the eyes and ears. The markings were slightly indented and quite smooth, but they had sensation like that of the surrounding skin—the tattoos were, indeed, the prisoners’ own skin. No prisoner could ever fake not being a prisoner, and the color of the tattoo indicated the levels to which one had access, so one could not even sneak away. It was the indelible mark of Melchior. Only Raven, Warlock, and Sabatini lacked tattoos; they had not been prisoners.
“Someday these designs will be marks of honor,” Hawks said, more to himself than the others.
“This transmuter, then—it can make food? And water? And air?” Chow Mai asked. “It is the magic of the gods.”
“It is only technology, nothing more,” China responded. “A machine, like the others, but an essential one—for us. This ship was never designed to carry humans such as we.”
Cloud Dancer looked around at the chairs on the bridge. “Then how do you explain this?” she asked.
“If we could explain this, then perhaps we could explain Master System,” Hawks noted dryly.
“Pressurization complete,” Star Eagle reported. “It is safe to take off your suits. The air temperature at introduction is well within the comfort zone. Avoid all flames and sparks, since it is mostly oxygen. You might feel some slight dizziness or intoxication, and slight changes in voice, as well, so be prepared.”
They had been in the suits for many hours, and in close quarters for far longer than that, so they were happy to remove their suits and stretch out on the floor. They were tired, sweaty, and now mostly helpless, dependent on a computer that was trying to learn how to run the ship. Even Sabatini seemed to have had all the fight taken out of him. None of the others trusted him, but under the circumstances there was little he could do to harm the party as a whole, and if he tried to hurt an individual member, the others were more than willing to take care of him, a fact he understood well.
The metal walls and decking were still cold, but Hawks didn’t care. His wives, Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman, came over to sit beside him, and he put one arm around each of them. What a strange, motley crew of revolutionaries, he thought. Silent Woman, with her garish multicolored tattoos from the shoulders down; the Chows, with skin grafts to heal their once badly mutilated bodies in place but discolored, giving them a camouflagelike complexion; Reba Koll, a little old lady with a thin tail; and China, her exquisite body very visibly pregnant. He could only wonder if the child would survive all this, and, if so, what they would do with it.
How the hell were they going to do anything? Damn it, out here even such as he and Raven were as primitive and ignorant as Silent Woman. He was hungry, and thirsty—they all were—but he had endured such before. He—and they—could only wait. But for what?
More than fifty thousand kilometers out from the graveyard of ancient generation ships, just outside the activation limit of the automatic defense system but within scanning and sensor range of the mothball fleet, was another ship. It was not a large ship, not by the standards of that ghost fleet or even by the standards of the freighter they’d chased, but it was far sleeker and, locally, within stellar systems, far faster.
Arnold Nagy, Chief of Melchior Security, sat in his usual padded chair, half reclining, only casually looking at the screens. He was bored and depressed at the same time, a man who had failed at his job and who did not dare to go home. In a sense, he was as much a wanted fugitive as the party he was chasing, only more comfortable.
An older man came up from below and settled into the next chair. Even Master System, the all-powerful, nearly omnipotent master of the known universe, would have been shocked to see him there, since he was simultaneously captive back on Val-occupied Melchior.
Doctor Isaac Clayben had not gotten as far as he had without being clever. For more than three decades he had fooled Master System and maintained a combination prison colony and research station to probe the Forbidden Knowledge, the proscribed and hidden knowledge of Master System and its technological wizardry. To such a man, creating a physical duplicate who appeared to be the real thing with his mind erased was child’s play. Yet now he, too, was a fugitive, a man who did not even exist. Were Master System to get even a hint that he was not only alive and in full possession of his mind and skills, but that he had with him the data banks representing tremendous advances into things humans were not supposed to know, would cause a hunt as great or greater than that now being organized to chase Hawks and his group of rebels. Thanks to them, he also knew about the five gold rings. In many ways, he was better equipped technologically to obtain them, but he had no idea where they were. He assumed that the renegades knew where in the tractless universe to find the rings and quite possibly the names of their owners. The obvious solution would be to make a deal, but not so long as they were partially led by China and Reba Koll. China had reason to despise him—more reason than she now knew. And Koll—well, that was a special case.
“No signs of any activity after all this time?” the scientist asked. “I would think, by now, if something were possible it would have been done. It will only be a few more days until Master System’s own fleet of Vals and who knows what else will be here. Be pretty hard to miss a target like that.”
“There’s a lot of ‘ifs,’ ” Nagy agreed. “That ship was banged up pretty bad. They got it aboard, but who knows how much of that was automated? Air, food, water—and how the hell you gonna drive one of them hanging cities, anyway? I think maybe we oughta be thinking about our own skins. I figure sixty hours more is it, and that’s pushin’ the safety margin. Master System doesn’t hav’ta allow for the survival of human beings, you know.”
“They’ll do it, Arnold. I know they will. China will get it moving, somehow, and Koll will get them out of there. If we aren’t right with them, if we lose them, we also lose any chance at the rings. And, Arnold, unless we have the rings we’re goners. We’re too hot. The freebooters won’t shield us, we have no large transmuter capable of integrating with one of the other populations nor the knowledge and contacts with them to use it to any advantage, and we have no place else to go.”
Nagy sighed. “Yeah. In a way, they’re better off than we are. Seven women and only three guys. Pick a nice planet and let your kids do the rebellion.”
“Six women, Arnold. Six women, three men, and a monster.”
“Yeah, well, six to three is still better than none to two. What do you think, Doc? Is Koll gonna kill ’em and go after the rings herself, or what?”
“I doubt it. Not most of them, anyway. She’ll use them. So long as it is not a choice of her survival or theirs and so long as she thinks she can get her hands on the rings, she’ll play along with them.” He sighed. “This is deep, Arnold. Deep and complex. So many sides, so many players.”
“Yeah, well, I—” Nagy broke off suddenly and sat up in his chair, his attention drawn by data on one of his screens. “They’ve got power! Damn me to hell, but they got power on that big bastard! That sucker’s charging its energy banks!”
Clayben stared at the screen. “Yes, you’re right. Well, I guess that answers your question, anyway. They are alive, they are in control of that ship, and if they can build up sufficient energy they are going to move.”
“We’ll be ready for them. This is one express we ain’t gonna miss.”