THE VAL SHIP TOOK UP ITS POSITION WELL WITHIN SENSOR range but just beyond the range of conventional weapons. Nagy and Sabatini were integrated with their ship’s computers; the Val was its ship’s computer. Even allowing for the time their ship’s engines and weapons took to function, that meant the Val was always going to be a fraction of a second ahead in terms of responding to a sudden move—a crucial difference. Once both systems were in full gear, however, their automatic reactions would be nearly instantaneous and, therefore, equal. But the Val still had an advantage: Its speed of thought was far faster even than that of computer-linked humans, while its reasoning was very similar to a human’s. It understood its prey well. That forced the humans to let the automatics react, thus placing them permanently on the defensive, a situation in which they could not win, only draw or lose.
“By the authority of Master System I command you to halt and identify yourselves,” came the Val’s call, which Nagy put on the speaker. The voice was that of Hawks; this was the same Val that had accosted them in the lounge.
“Since when did you have such authority?” Nagy challenged back. “You are keyed to no one on this ship, a fact you well know. We have committed no criminal acts that would cause an exception.” None that you know, anyway. “I stand on the covenant.”
“And I step on it,” the Val retorted. “The covenant exists because it is useful to the system. In its own way it serves the system. The covenant will not be broken as far as anyone is concerned. There is no one out here in the middle of nowhere but us.”
It was tough to deny the truth of that, but truth wasn’t at stake here. “And what sort of logic and system is it that can be violated at will when it is convenient? One does not defend the honor and integrity of a superior system by ignoring it when it is safe or convenient. That is the human way of things, and Master System was created to avoid that flaw. If you can break the system, even under these conditions, then Master System has no right to exist, no right to authority over humankind except by sheer might. And if it is no better than human law, then it is a tyranny that must be disobeyed as a moral duty.”
“You are quite good at that, aren’t you?” the Val responded, impressed. “The logic cannot be denied even though you and I both know you don’t believe a word of it. Very well. I am keyed to track down an Earth-human, a North American Center historian who is called Walks With the Night Hawks, also called John Hawks. He possessed forbidden knowledge and did not surrender it or himself, making him an enemy of the system. You know where he is. Tell me, and win your own freedom until another time, another Val, seeks you.”
“That is nothing to us,” Nagy told it. “Even if we knew this person, which we do not, the price is far too low. We haven’t sufficient fuel or sources of fuel to get back to the chart. You saw to that. So we die out here slowly, or we die quickly. We are all professionals. Quick is better if you have to choose one or the other.”
“I could give you a tow to that system over there. Enough fuel to get almost anywhere. Arnold Nagy, is it not, formerly of Melchior? You went in pursuit of the fugitives as was your duty and somehow joined them instead. Raven, and Warlock—more Security gone bad. There will be wholesale cleanings of Security nests before this is over. I do not know the fourth member of this quartet in any way, but it makes little difference. Another escapee, I suspect. You are professionals, as you say. What do you owe these others?”
Warlock leaned over to Raven. “Why does it talk so much when we are so vulnerable?” She didn’t seem ruffled by the thought of imminent death.
Raven was a fatalist. “Because if it blows us to hell it’s back at square one—up the river without a paddle. It has the bad luck to want Hawks, not any one of us. If we die, any leads to Hawks die with us. This ain’t over yet.”
“Just out of curiosity,” Nagy was saying, “how the hell did I miss any tracers? I was sure I got ’em all and you damn well didn’t get inside.”
“No, I assumed you were competent. I also assumed that you would never look very closely at two cases of good cigars.”
“Damn!” Raven swore.
“You couldn’t possibly know which cases we’d take on or arrange it back there!” Nagy retorted.
“I didn’t have to. I had a basic data file on Raven and I knew he was an addicted smoker. I also was in the lounge when the first thing he did was order cigars—a particular kind of cigar. I left and found the source of them after leaving you, and spent a great deal of care inserting my tracers in the casing. There was only one case. It followed that Raven would wish to take more with him and that the only means of supplying them would be via the transmuter—which also, of course, duplicated the tracer. It was elementary, my dear Nagy.”
“That walking machine-shop son of a bitch,” Raven growled, feeling had. It was exactly his kind of trick, which was what bothered him the most.
Nagy sighed. “Well, I guess we deserve this, then. Here’s the bottom line, though, Val Hawks. We’re it. Sole survivors. They figured out how to get that monster ship going, but they never had full control of it. It broke up off a neutron star. Very little of it was ever habitable, and we had no choice but to split it up—some in my ship, the rest on the bridge. There was no chance to save the others—I barely saved ourselves, and then only because we were living here. You’re in an endless loop, my friend. You’re doomed to wander forever in pursuit of a quarry who no longer exists.”
The Val actually paused for a moment before replying. “It truly is a pleasure to encounter a real pro now and then. Your voice analysis actually shows that you are speaking the absolute truth. Had I not surprised you in the lounge, had you had some warning of my presence before you actually saw me, I might not have received any anomalous readings at all.”
“Why don’t they just fight and get it over with?” Raven grumbled.
Warlock smiled. “What do you think they are doing, darling?”
“It reads true because it is truth,” Nagy assured the Val.
“Well, then, there is an easy way to settle it all. Send me one of you. Let me subject him or her to the mindprinter here. If indeed it is true then I will have the documentation I need, and you will receive your tow and a head start on my associates. I will owe you that for saving me much fruitless labor.”
Uh oh, gotcha there, didn’t he, Nagy? Arnold Nagy swore to himself.
“You cannot win against a Val even under optimum conditions,” the robot detective said. “And these are hardly optimum.”
It was certainly true that the conditions were lousy. Sabatini, drawing on the experience not only of Koll but of others the thing it was had consumed and become back on Melchior, had no trouble seeing the Val strategy. Blows that hurt, not killed. Blows that damaged, weakened, but never at the expense of giving them a clean shot. In and out, back and forth, until they used up the last of their fuel and were dead in space. The Val had the infinite patience of a machine and much preferred that at least one of them remain alive.
“You can drill that rot about the invulnerability of the Val into all the idiots at Centers you want,” Nagy told it, “but you and I know you’re mortal. Your ship is just a ship—no better armored than this one. I admit that you are better armored than I am, but if I had the drop on you, I know where to shoot. That inevitability and invulnerability crap makes it easy for you most times. The game believes it so thoroughly that when you catch up they roll over and play dead. I’m not going to roll over and I am not going to give you what you want. You see, I can cheat you, and beat you, very easily. Just reverse the transmuter and apply full thrust. A quick end, with all of us and our ship vaporized. Quick, probably painless, and you won’t know a damned thing more about the one you’re really after. You will have vaporized your one real lead. I’m not scared, Val Hawks. We do not have a massacre situation here—we have a standoff.”
The Val seemed somewhat taken aback by this. It was always supremely confident and, like all Vals, felt itself superior to the humans it dealt with and hunted. “I take it that all of you prefer suicide to surrender, then?” it asked finally.
“Watch it!” Sabatini said nervously. “That’s an open invitation to blow us to hell right now!”
“It won’t act until we do,” Nagy assured him. “There’s no percentage in it.”
Raven snapped his fingers. “Nagy, how much crud do you need for fuel conversion on this tub?”
“Huh? It’s measured in tons to do us any good. Why?”
Raven sighed. “Nothing. I was just thinkin’ that we got a whole shitload of stuff here we might somehow use.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. The space suits. The boxes of cigars. The clothes on our backs. These chairs if we could get ’em up. Blow ’em out the hatch and gobble ’em in the ram jet slow and easy. Forget it, it was just a thought.”
“Uh uh! You have something there! Besides, ditching the cigars will mean ditching it as well.”
“You nuts?” Sabatini asked seriously. “The space suits, for Christ’s sake!”
“What good are space suits if we’re dead anyway? Take the communications port and keep him stalled. I don’t care what you say! I’m cutting loose and seeing what can be done.”
“But what if it attacks and we got no pilot?”
“The same thing that happens if it attacks and we have a pilot! Now let me go—time’s wasting!”
Nagy came quickly out from the spell woven by the interface and, although a little dizzy from it, he indeed wasted no time. There were minor tools and a basic repair kit in an aft storage compartment. He was relieved that Star Eagle hadn’t removed them. He took out a laser torch and began cutting the unused chairs off at their base.
Raven and Warlock got up to help as much as they could, stacking the items as Nagy disassembled them.
“You said it took tons to do much,” Raven noted. “So what’s this all about?”
Arnold Nagy chuckled. “Maybe not enough for survival, but enough to screw that son of a bitch, that’s for sure. Figure each one of these reinforced chairs has a mass equal to, oh, forty kilograms with their supports. That’s two forty. Add another ten for the webbing and belting, minimum. Two fifty. The suits are another fifty. Add a lot more junk around here and I think maybe we can find another two fifty, three hundred. That’s more than half a ton. Here, give me a hand. We might even be able to get the damned toilet out of here. If that bastard gives us the time we might scrounge up to a ton here!”
They fell into helping, but Raven was still puzzled. “So what’s a ton mean?”
“We spent fifty percent getting here. We’re about ten percent low and that’s about a ton for a vessel this size. We might get back with this much stuff!”
“Well, we made punches without belts and chairs before, that’s for sure, but what good will it do? That thing’ll just figure it’s what we did and follow, assuming it don’t just blow us to hell as we punch. Then we’re dead meat for it. What can we do? We’re throwin’ out everything we could even heave at it.”
“Maybe nothing. Who the hell knows? I’m goin’ for broke, though, ’cause there ain’t no other way!”
In weightlessness it was simple to move the stuff to the air-lock entry.
“How’s our Val been?” Nagy called to Sabatini.
“We’ve been debating the fine points of morality, but it hasn’t made a move. They have infinite patience, you know.”
“Yeah, well, I’m counting on that. Be ready with a glib line. We’re gonna flush what we got out here by depressurizing the air lock to maybe ten percent of normal. We got two, maybe three loads to flush. Then we still got to figure some way of maneuvering it into the ram without getting creamed. If, of course, we chopped that stuff up enough to get it all.”
On communications, Sabatini had his hands full.
“Why is all of that being flushed?” the Val asked. “I want it stopped. Now.”
“What do you think we’re doing—laying mines? If we were, you’d have hit one by now. We’re not going to stop.”
The Val did not reply, but fired a thin beam that struck one of the objects, fragmenting it.
“I think he just shot the damned toilet,” Raven noted.
“No matter,” Nagy assured him. “He didn’t disintegrate it, he blew it up. It’s the mass that counts. I was kinda worried about that one fitting in the ram anyway. Now I know it will. Okay, time to grab on to whatever’s left back here and hold tight. Odds are we’re all gonna get bruised and knocked around by this one, but consider the alternative.”
He went forward once more and donned the interface helmet. He no longer had a chair, but with judicious use of the torch and some muscle he had fashioned two handholds out of parts of the instrument console.
“You gonna explain this, or am I supposed to be surprised?” Sabatini asked him.
“I’m gonna back up real slow, just enough to get as much of that junk as I can in one pass, ’cause that’s all we get,” Nagy told him. “I think we were careful enough to keep it fairly bunched, although I don’t know what effect that blast had on it.”
“You back up and that thing’ll close,” Sabatini warned.
“Fine. So long as he doesn’t fire until too late, I couldn’t care less.”
“But you need acceleration to punch! If you go forward in a pass for that stuff, it’ll have to be flank speed from a relatively standing start! The Val’ll have to shoot or be rammed!”
“Good. Let it shoot. If it figures we’re gonna suicide and try to take it with us, as I hope it does, it’s gonna lose. Only if it figures out the game are we in trouble.”
“Yeah? That thing’s a supercomputer! You figure you got an angle it doesn’t know or can’t figure out in nanoseconds?”
“Sure. I’m gonna do something that isn’t possible, so it won’t think of it.”
“What! If it’s impossible then what good is it?”
“Because I don’t know it’s impossible and my math was always lousy. All right—hang on, everybody! Here we go!”
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Nagy applied the brakes, which had the effect of backing up the ship a few millimeters a second. The movement was so slow that even the Val had to check its instrumentation before issuing a challenge.
“You are moving! Halt at once or I will be forced by necessity to open fire!”
“I’m not moving—I’m experiencing drag. Hold on, I’ll see what’s what.”
“You will compensate now.”
Nagy made no reply for more than thirty seconds, by which time he had increased the braking so that the ship cleared the mass showing on the sensors by a few meters; he kept the ship’s nose toward the Val ship to present the smallest target.
The Val fired at the port ramjet scoop, but Sabatini had expected this and set the automatics to parry.
Nagy brought the ship to a dead stop relative to the floating debris and angled the nose so that the ship would accumulate maximum mass in a forward thrust. “I just ran the calculations on this thing,” he told them.
“Yes?” Sabatini replied. “And?”
“It said ‘Don’t do it!’ or words to that effect. Hang on, everybody! Either we’re gonna be out of this mess in a couple of minutes or we’re gonna be dead. I’ve programmed it in. Stand by!”
The engines suddenly roared to life and the ship shuddered; the rattles and noises were unusually loud because of all the remnants of the destruction about the ship. This did not go unnoticed by the Val.
“Throttle down! If you have any idea of picking up that debris, I have already demonstrated that you are in range of my weapons!”
“We’re overheating the engines!” Sabatini warned. “Either throttle down or do something, but you can’t sustain this for more than twenty or thirty seconds! This is madness! He’ll blow us to hell as soon as we pick up that shit!”
There was no way Arnold Nagy could do the split-second timing involved; he simply gave the orders to the ship’s computer. The computer said it would comply but would not be responsible for the consequences. “ENGINE FAILURE PREDICTED IN FIVE SECONDS!” it warned.
“Go!” Arnold Nagy yelled.
The amount of heat and pressure built up in the engines was massive; Raven and Warlock, although braced as best they could be, were slammed against the aft wall and pinned there. Only the extreme control of Nagy and Sabatini under the interface kept their grips on their handholds, but it was not without its own costs. The handholds on Nagy’s side began to give way.
It was so fast that there was no way to realize what had happened until it was over. In the end, it all seemed somewhat anticlimactic.
At the last possible moment, with engines thrusting full and close to protective shutdown, the dense gases, which had been building under tremendous pressure that must either be expelled or blow up the ship, were released. For a brief moment nothing seemed to happen, and the Val, for whom it was a very long time, calmly adjusted its guns, noted its regrets, and trained its full fire directly on the point just beyond the debris where it would have a clear and unobstructed full field of fire.
The Val’s target suddenly lurched forward and, as it touched the debris itself, it did the one thing neither the Val nor anyone else except Arnold Nagy anticipated.
Lightning punched.
It was a wide field punch and it was entered at a relatively slow speed, but the focus of the punch beams was mere millimeters beyond the densest pack of debris, and so wide that its very opening sucked in some of the debris not collected by the ram in its passage.
Suddenly realizing what its enemy had done, the Val fired, but the punch was wide enough to absorb virtually all the energy, shielding Lightning. Realizing that it had been outmaneuvered, the Val checked the course, speed, and trajectory of its prey and quickly swung around to follow. Time was of the essence.
Nagy throttled down to minimum speed; it didn’t matter inside a punch how much power was expended, although a small amount was necessary. One arrived at one’s destination at the same time all the same. Inside, the ship moaned and groaned and sounded as if it would come apart at any moment, but the passenger cabin seemed to be holding.
“That’s impossible!” Sabatini said flatly. “No ship with a life-support system could sustain the pressures we just did!”
“Okay, then you’re dead,” Nagy responded, sounding more casual than he actually felt. “This thing was built as an escape ship, remember, and the theoretical problems and computer models that it was based on assumed that a whole fleet of Master System fighters would be coming in on us. We’re not home free yet, though, folks. Wait for the main event.”
Raven groaned. “Damn it, I feel like I broke every bone in my body!” he complained. He started, staring at the limp form of Warlock, and was relieved to find her still breathing, though unconscious. He looked forward at the two forms sitting on the deck in their death grips and saw blood on Nagy. “Nagy, check yourself out! You’re bleeding like a stuck pig!”
“Yeah. Broke a wrist and somehow a rib, and messed up a little in my head, but I’ll survive until I’m through this. It’s gonna be real tough to disengage this interface, though. Sabatini, you sound okay to me.”
“I suffered massive internal damage, but I am now repairing it,” the creature who was Sabatini replied. “I will be whole again in a few minutes.”
Raven groaned. He felt as if he’d been worked over with a rubber hose, but he didn’t think anything was broken. Like the others, he found some blood coming from a nostril, but it wasn’t much. “What d’ya mean, it ain’t over yet?” he asked.
“Let’s see . . . half a second for the Val to figure what I did, assume I survived somehow, and decide to give chase. Three minutes to apply thrust and angle in to the same trajectory, course, and speed and punch. I’m not gonna allow any fudge factor; I’ll assume it does it in the minimum, so that puts him just a hundred eighty and a half seconds behind us. Good thing he didn’t close on us. If he had, I wouldn’t have any margin at all.”
Raven gasped. “You mean he’s still behind us?”
The ship continued to moan and groan. “Sure. And I didn’t jump long. We went in real slow, so it’d take damned near forever and half our fuel for life support if I did. If I timed it right, some of the debris should have been pulled in with us by magnetic and gravitational forces. That and the remains of his ship should get us almost anywhere.”
“The remains of—what the hell?” both of the others managed at once. Warlock moaned and stirred, but nobody noticed.
“You wait. Coming out in one minute. Hold on back there! You might get flung forward this time!”
Warlock opened her eyes and frowned. “What?”
“Don’t ask,” Raven responded. “Just turn around facing the wall and hold on again or you’re gonna be splattered against the forward wall!”
“Wha—?” she managed, but turned and did as instructed, still not quite back to normal.
Lightning punched out in a sector of space as empty and forlorn as the one it had left and, in truth, not a great distance away in astronomical terms. As soon as the ship emerged, Nagy checked for any debris that might have come with them, found some, accelerated slightly and scooped what he could, then came to a near-dead stop. Then, very slowly, he began reverse thrust until he reached a predetermined point. He used more than two and a half minutes doing so, which meant there wasn’t long to wait.
This time Sabatini, with the aid of the ship’s computers, understood exactly what was going on. “All weapons systems armed. This is gonna be real close, Nagy. I read the forward distance as a hundred and six meters.”
“Give it all you got. I don’t just want him disabled, I need him in pieces. We can’t go out there and do a salvage job on him—we jettisoned the space suits.”
“Yeah, that’s right. All right—locked on. Like shooting fish in a barrel.”
The Val was late; in fact, it was almost seventeen seconds late, which made Nagy wonder if it had somehow guessed his intention, but he was counting on its supreme self-confidence and the fact that he’d had to enter the punch at a very slow speed.
As soon as the Val’s punch closed behind it, all forward batteries of the Lightning opened up on the Val ship, which could only then use its sensors to see behind the punch and discover the plot.
Sixteen beams of maximum-strength fire struck the aft engines of the Val ship; it shuddered, then the Val applied full thrust and shot back, but the shots were wide and the thrust was erratic, causing the ship to go off at an angle. Defensive force fields were up now, but massive damage had already been done. As soon as the Val gave Sabatini any sort of a broadside and he could calculate the steering angle, he launched four seeker missiles, two for the tail along the line of the guns, the other two angling around to come in on either side of the main fuselage.
The Val was clearly in trouble and had focused most of its attention on getting away fast, but it managed to shift shields to deflect both the two missiles coming in on its engines and the one coming directly for its side. It might well have seen, or suspected, the fourth missile if its sensors were still intact, but it was having real power problems.
There was a tremendous bright flash, and when it cleared, the Val ship had a gaping hole in it, with pieces of ship flying off and forming an eerie escort on Lightning’s sensors. The shields wavered, then collapsed aft as connections were severed; only the nose area was still guarded or intact, probably containing the still very much alive but powerless Val.
Sabatini let Nagy take them to the best broadside and then began pouring all he had into the dead ship, literally blowing it apart. “Hah! Who says you can’t beat a Val!” he shouted with enthusiasm. Then, suddenly, he sobered. “What the—?”
A small section of the still-shielded nose suddenly flared into life and detached itself from the mainship; Sabatini immediately shifted half his guns to it, not willing to take them all away in case it was some kind of trick. He missed—the thing flew away from them at increasing speed and with the hardest shields either of the two space veterans had ever seen. Nagy was still trying to decide whether or not to chase it when his instruments showed a tiny punch and it was gone.
“What was that?” Sabatini asked in wonder.
“The brain of the Val, I’d guess,” came the reply. “I never knew anybody who beat one of these bastards before, so we might be among the first to see that. Get cracking—I need that hulk broken up into pieces small enough to get us back on the charts. Remember, there’s a second Val around here someplace and if that little thing that just got away is anything at all it’s speeding someplace to report on all this and call in the big guns. Let’s move it! Besides, if we don’t get somewhere where we can link with Star Eagle in a little while, I’m afraid I’m gonna die.”
They laid out Nagy’s body on the deck, but kept him connected to the interface. Sabatini disengaged and checked Nagy’s condition. “He’s in deep shock,” he told the others. “If he’s moved or if he disengages, he’s dead. I can’t even guarantee anything if he stays hooked up, but at least there won’t be any pain.”
Raven shook his head sadly. “Anything that could help him? Anything we could do, I mean?”
Sabatini chuckled dryly. “I think even the medical kit went overboard, for all the good it would do. Short of a really good medical center with all its support stuff, the only hope he’s got is a transmuter big enough and independent enough to do the job. The only one we got is on the Thunder.”
Raven sighed. “Yeah, and that’s a couple of days away at the minimum. He’s not gonna last that long.”
“I can’t tell you how this conversation is cheering me up,” Nagy said through the intercom; his own throat was no longer capable of speech. The voice startled Raven and Warlock; they had forgotten that the man in bad shape in front of them was also interfaced with the ship.
“Yeah, well, I’d want it straight and I guess you would, too,” Raven replied. “Hell, I think you know your condition.”
“Better than you. I’m pretty torn up inside and I got a punctured lung. I don’t need it spelled out for me. About the only hope I got, let’s face it, is if Star Eagle got the emergency message we sent out just before punching into the middle of nowhere and is coming to the chart position we were in when we sent it on the off chance we’ll double back. According to my calculations, even if Star Eagle did that and started off immediately, the ship wouldn’t be there until about a half hour after we get back.”
Raven’s eyebrows went up. “Then you are doubling back. What if that other Val is backing up the one we blew to hell back there? We got lucky this once, but I ain’t sure we could pull that twice.”
Sabatini stared at him. “You had the bright idea of doubling back in the first place.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think it all the way through. It was the best I could come up with, all things considerin’.”
“Well, we had no choice anyway,” Nagy told him. “We got as much of the Val ship’s remains as we could, but we’re still running pretty low, and it’s not easy to get back on the chart for home from where we wound up. If the Val’s still there, then it is and we’ll deal with it, kill or be killed. If it’s not, maybe Star Eagle will come with the Thunder. If nobody’s home or showing up, there’s nothing else to do but follow the routine.”
Sabatini thought a moment. “Nagy, if it’s not there . . . you don’t have to die—exactly. Not exactly.”
Nagy was silent a moment, then realized the nature of the offer. “I’m not too sure I want to be absorbed. The one thing I got left is my own mind, my independence. You’re not Sabatini—you’re an imitation who could mimic Sabatini exactly if you wanted to but you aren’t Sabatini much at all right now and you wouldn’t really be Arnold Nagy, either. You’d have my looks and my memories, but I’d kinda like to keep my memories. There are some things a man would rather let die than tell. No, when I go, if I go, just stick me in the lock and set me adrift. It’s kinda fitting that way.”
“Don’t talk that way yet!” Raven snapped. “We should all be dead right now according to all the fancy computers and brains around. If we can’t find what we need, maybe we can figure an angle. You just don’t give up, you hear?”
“I never give up,” Arnold Nagy responded. “Isn’t that obvious by now?”
They hadn’t punched very long the last time because of their limited fuel supply, and even though they had to retrace their path exactly in order to find the destination once again, it was a matter of long hours, not days. They were getting used to the process now.
“Kinda funny how this muddles your brain,” Raven noted as they waited.
“Huh?” Sabatini was half asleep and looked up, startled. “What?”
“This ridin’ in a metal coffin. Hour after hour, day after day sometimes, with nothin’ at all to say or do. Not that I mind the company, but you get talked out in a day or two and that’s that. When you’re in the wilderness, out in the mountains or on the prairies, there’s always something. Maybe it’s not conversation, maybe not even real thinkin’—something inside you reacts and you’re at peace even in dangerous territory. Even our damned little island has some of that. You can always go off into the mountains or sit and look at the water and feel the breeze on your face. This—this is death. Worse than death. It’s my people’s vision of hell. Hawks’ nation, now, they have a real strange theology but out here is supposed to live the Lords of the Middle Dark, whose domain is defined as a great nothingness. Maybe they’re right.”
“You could try sleeping,” Sabatini grumbled. “Even I must sleep. Only you of all the people I have ever heard of is immune from that necessity.”
“I can sleep on a prairie filled with buffalo, or by the side of a raging river. It’s this kind of thing that gets to me.”
“This is hardly the normal trip. Usually there are books, tapes, learning programs, computers, and much else to occupy your time or divert your mind. Some of us like being in space more than we like being with other people.”
“Not me. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”
Nagy’s inert body suddenly shook with spasms and he began to cough long and hard, bringing up blood. They rushed to his side, but there was nothing they could do, and the attack finally subsided. Nagy wasn’t all of it, but he was part of it, Raven knew. To die here, alone, in this sterile junkheap, and be cast out into the darkness . . . it was wrong. All human beings died, the great and small alike, but he had always envisioned his own death out in the free, clean air, his body either cremated and scattered or simply allowed to feed the Earth and return to it. Either was a noble way to die.
I’ve been kidding myself, he thought sourly. This sort of thing is not for the likes of me. Nagy and Sabatini or whatever it is—this is their element. I’d take on a Val if I had to, but on my turf, not its. Damn you, Lazlo Chen! If we ever get away with this you ain’t gonna depend on old Raven for support. Not with you sitting back there fat and lazy in your desert domain. I’ll do your damned dirty work, but this is too much.
“Raven—Warlock—Sabatini,” came Nagy’s electronic voice through the speakers. “I don’t think I’m gonna make it. I want you to know a few things just in case.”
“You go into shutdown and don’t think. You can’t afford the energy,” Sabatini cautioned.
“Forget it. Listen, I’m gonna tell you a few things. All of you. First, I already showed you a Val can be taken in space if you’re crazy enough and unpredictable enough. They have a weakness and it’s called conceit. They think they understand human beings perfectly, and maybe they do, but they don’t think like human beings. They’re machines. Logical devices. When they see a predetermined course of action, and the sequence is logical, they tend to assume the conclusion will be the obvious. That’s why we nailed the Val. On the ground they’re just as vulnerable, but they have a lot more tricks. Don’t let one get too close to you or you’ll never know what hit you. They can be had, though, even on the ground. Use high-intensity lasers that’ll carve through walls. That won’t stop ’em, but it penetrates. The head’s a dummy. Ignore it. Their brains are in their asses—about seven to eight centimeters above the crotch. Just imagine that they have a navel and aim for it. Crisscross. X patterns. The hind is more vulnerable than the front, though. Try to ambush it and don’t stop until it’s down. Don’t get within four meters until you’re sure it’s totally dead.”
This was interesting. Raven felt torn between telling Nagy to shut up and take it easy, and learning what he could from a dying man. He said nothing.
“Don’t assume, too, that all your dangerous enemies are machines. There are times when machines just can’t do the job, and the supply of Vals is small,” Nagy continued. “Master System has human troops, as well, out here, on several bases. Mindprinted, genetically bred, as devoted and loyal and singleminded as Vals. You can even argue with a Val—it’s just doing its job. You can’t argue with these troops, and not all of them are human.”
Raven looked at Sabatini. “You know about them?”
Sabatini nodded. “I heard about them. Never saw ’em—that is, none of my people ever did.”
“When you take the first ring,” Nagy went on, “everything else will stop except for you. Vals and troopers and everything else will be pulled out for the hunt. There’s help out there—I’ve started you on your way—but the odds are still way against you. You’ll need more people and you’ll need for everyone to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Except for Sabatini here, none of the rest of you can even get in to scout around and case an area. None of them are Earth-human—except for Chen.”
“What the hell do you mean by ‘ultimate sacrifice’?” Raven wanted to know. “Death? You know we are prepared for that.”
“Not death. Life. You can’t just put on a mask and stick up a Center, particularly when you are the one who looks and acts alien. Out here, you are the monsters. Dying is one thing. Could you, for the chance at a ring and action, become a monster to yourself? You better ask that. You better have Hawks ask that of everyone. The only way you’re gonna steal those rings under the noses of chief administrators and Master System on worlds that aren’t really human is to become one of them. You better face that fact and also face the fact that Chen’s counting on just that. Nobody left who’s Earth-human. Nobody who can come for his ring without being pretty damned obvious.”
“For one who came unexpectedly along for the ride he seems to know a great deal about this,” Warlock whispered.
Raven nodded. “You not tellin’ us something we ought’a know, son?”
“I’m telling you all you ought to know, Raven. You can trust Savaphoong within limits. He won’t betray you to Master System, but if you had four out of five rings he’s clever enough to figure out where the fifth one is and take those four from you. Build your contacts with the other freebooters, as well. Don’t depend on a single source. The same goes for Clayben. He’ll be a real team player until you win. He really is terrified of you, Sabatini—use that, but watch your back. He created you, but he’s also the one who figured out how to capture and hold you. Being hard to kill isn’t the same thing as being immortal. You would have died with us back there no matter what.”
“I’ll remember. Clayben took me by surprise when I was immature. I will not allow that to happen again.”
“Look, I’m running out of time here. Go for Janipur first. It’s no pushover, but if you can’t take that ring you can’t take any of them. Oops! We’re punching out in just a minute. Stand by. Sabatini, get back on the console. We want to make sure that somebody here can drive this thing no matter what.”
Sabatini did as instructed and was quickly back under the ship’s interface. Neither Raven nor Warlock bothered to do more than slightly brace themselves; after what they’d been through, punches were getting routine.
“Looks to be all clear right now,” Sabatini told them. “No sensor readings of anything that shouldn’t be here in the immediate neighborhood. Let’s give it a wide sweep.”
The sensors gave information on practically everything within line of sight for a 360-degree radius, but they weren’t good enough, particularly in wide scan, to identify all objects accurately. What they could detect was the all-important murylium that would mean a ship.
“Vals can do what we can’t,” Nagy warned them. “They can power down completely. So long as their engines aren’t on and they’re just using storage power for instrumentation, they can escape detection with the shields around the murylium core, so we aren’t out of the woods yet. Still, we ought to be able to get several minutes’ warning if it powers up from nothing, unless it’s right next to us.”
“Seems to me we did pretty good from a standing start,” Raven noted.
“Sure, but we never powered down and our shields were in place. From battery, the engines have to be started, brought up to speed, and initial power diverted to the shields in order to start. I’m opening the ram scoops wide and we’ll take on as much as we can. Vals do best by psyching you out, not by their innate superiority to humans, which is only relative. They have to obey the same laws of physics we do.”
Without a Val directly on their tail, they were able to angle the scoops and take in a very large load quickly.
“Another ten or fifteen minutes and we’ll be full up. You could make it most of the way to Earth if you had to,” Nagy told them. “I don’t think you can count on Star Eagle to come with the Thunder, though.”
His words weren’t lost on them. Without the Thunder, Nagy was doomed; “we” had become “you.”
“Uh oh!” Sabatini said suddenly. “I just got a punchout reading. Stand by!”
“Maybe it’s the Thunder,” Raven suggested hopefully.
“Nope. Too small. Maybe it’s an automated ship, but I have a sinking feeling I’ve seen that kind of reading before.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Nagy responded. “We’ve got enough juice now to give him a hell of a run, though. Trouble is that damned thing that escaped from the first Val. If it contained a record of the battle and got intercepted, then the same trick won’t work twice. Maybe we can bluff it through. It’s not sure who or what we are, anyway. I’m getting a stock machine-language identity code query. I’ve just answered it by telling it that we’re the freebooter ship Finland and to mind its own damned business. I don’t think it’s buying it, though. I’m getting voice transmission.”
“Freebooter cruiser Finland, stand where you are for examination,” came a voice through the intercom. It was a woman’s voice, and very familiar, but not quite anyone Raven could place.
“China’s voice,” Warlock said softly. “Harder, younger, but still her.”
Raven nodded, placing it now. They wouldn’t have any recordings of China after the Doc had finished with her, so they’d have used the last recording they had, which was of the old Song Ching back on Earth.
“You have no authority to break the covenant,” Nagy responded to the Val. “Be on your way and let us be on ours.”
“Seems like I been through this once before.” Raven sighed.
“Highly dangerous fugitives are loose in this region,” the Val told them. “Measures must be taken that are extraordinary. I must board and verify that your passengers and crew are not among them.”
“Go stick it up your metallic ass!” Nagy responded. “You have no probable cause, and I’ve just wide-beamed this exchange to whom it may concern, as you must know. Let us go or all will know you break the covenant.”
“If necessary I have that authority,” the Val told them. “I would rather it be voluntary, since if I verify that you are not among those we seek, you will go your own way and nothing is broken. But if you do not drop your shields and prepare for boarding, I will be forced to fight.”
“Looks like it was all for nothing.” Nagy sighed. “Still, if I got to go out, then I’d like to go out this way.”
“Well, I wouldn’t,” Raven retorted. “Damn it, you just got through saying they ain’t invulnerable! We just blew one to hell!”
“If I had a second ship I’d turn that bastard into spaghetti,” Sabatini growled. “But, one on one, he’s always gonna be a hair faster.”
“Maybe you got something there,” Nagy responded. “I’m keeping the com channel on open broadcast. It’s why they’ve kept the covenant up to now.” He switched to the open channel. “Anyone out there want to see the covenant go down without a fight? You’re next. We can hold this bucket of bolts for a little while. You freebooters all know the truth out there. You want to defend the covenant?”
Subspace communications were not instantaneous, but an open and broad-beam broadcast didn’t take long to get to nearby areas.
“Finland, this is Kasavutu. I am one hour away and on my way.”
“Finland, this is Yokohama Maru. I am one hour and nine minutes away and punching now.”
They began coming in, one after the other. In the lonely emptiness of space, this region suddenly seemed very, very crowded.
“Hah!” Sabatini exclaimed. “That’ll teach that damned Val to jam transmissions!”
“It couldn’t without also blocking communications to us,” Nagy noted. “This is an unprecedented act and even the Val knows it. It’s used to people rolling over and playing dead or running like hell when it appears.” He turned his attention back to the Val. “All right, Val—up to you. You have the authority to break the covenant over this or not. I’m full of fuel, heavily armed, tightly shielded, and highly maneuverable. You figure the odds yourself. I can hold you for an hour, maybe two, on automatics alone. By that time you’ll be fighting a whole fleet of people in heavily armed and shielded ships who hate your mechanical guts. If you are going to break the covenant, then you will pay for it dearly and you will still not get anything from the action.”
The Val was more than taken aback by this. If there was one thing a good computer could do, it could compute odds. Its backup was gone, a fact it might or might not know, and the odds were also that any additional help was many hours, if not days, away.
“Very well, then, we will sit here,” the Val responded. “I will not fire except in my own defense, but I will not go. Your precious covenant allows me the same rights here as you, and the same freedom of action. We will sit here until you grow old and gray, and where you go, so do I.”
“Another standoff.” Sabatini sighed.
“No, not at all,” Nagy replied. “I think our friend out there is very much misreading and underestimating the people who are coming. They can’t permit this to happen to any one of them or the covenant’s gone anyway, and they stop being freebooters and start being parts of the system or hunted fugitives. Under the covenant it’s within their rights, and ours, to take whatever measures we deem necessary to go our own way. I—I don’t think I’m gonna be here then, but you blast that sucker for me.”
“Raven!” Sabatini called sharply. “He’s had an automatic disconnect! See to him! I’ll switch over to full control.”
Both Raven and Warlock rushed forward to Nagy’s body. It was heaving and convulsing, and yet the security man’s eyes opened and he looked up at them and tried to speak.
“Water! Warlock, get him some water!” Raven snapped, and she went back and got some from the food transmuting unit. Raven gently lifted Nagy’s head and let him drink. Nagy swallowed, then coughed, bringing up some blood and mucus, but he got himself under control and managed a croaking whisper.
“I—would have liked—to have—had the honor—to fight alongside you in the quest,” he got out. “But—I—realize now—that it would be—against the rules.”
Raven frowned, again getting that eerie feeling that there was something more here than they were being told. “Rules? What rules? Whose?”
Nagy managed a smile. “That—would be telling. My job—to give you—the edge—when you were outmatched. Worked—for years—in that hole—Melchior. Helping set it up.”
Raven’s mouth opened in knowing surprise. He understood a little more now, but not nearly enough. “Then you’re one of the ones behind all this. Who are you, Nagy? Who do you work for? Chen?”
Nagy’s chuckle ended in another of those terrible coughs. “Chen—we put the bug—in Chen’s ear. Damned idiot needed it almost—spelled out—for him.” He suddenly reached up and grabbed Raven with surprising strength. “You must destroy it, Raven! Master System—must—die!”
“Who do you work for, Nagy? Damn it! Who?”
“It’s a—war—Raven. We are at war!” He went limp, and for a moment Raven thought he was dead, but he stirred again, briefly, and took a little more water.
“For your own sake—listen carefully,” Nagy said, fighting off the inevitable. “That Val—must be—destroyed—before you—send my body—to rest. Once done, just throw me out—air lock.”
“Don’t gimme that shit! You’re gonna make it! You’re too mean and tricky to die.”
“I’m almost dead now. Don’t worry. Do what—I say. Exactly. For your—own sakes. Then I will—die—but I will not—leave. When you need me—to even odds—I’ll be there. Promise me!”
“I swear it, Nagy. Only hold on, I—” Raven stopped, checked the body, then sighed. It was too late. Arnold Nagy was clearly now very dead.
Warlock shrugged. “That fellow took longer to die than an opera singer.”
Raven looked up at her and frowned. “Huh?”
“Never mind. He is gone. Toss him and take the controls.”
“No! I gave my word. First we take the Val, like he said.”
“What’s the difference? He was out of his head at the end anyway. Dead, but he’ll come back when we need him. So many get religion at the end.”
Raven removed the helmet from Nagy’s head and pulled the body away from the bridge console. “Uh uh. Maybe that part was a little nuts, but not the rest. I don’t know who—or what—he really was, but he was one hell of an agent. He suckered Clayben and Chen and the rest of ’em. Hawks was right—there was lots more than coincidence at work here. He was one of the puppeteers, the guys pulling the strings on all this. He had the answers, damn it!”
“He was crazy,” she maintained. “Crazier than we are.”
“His body doesn’t go out until we blow up or shake this Val. Understand? What could it hurt?”
“All right, all right. It just seems to me that you are taking on a dead man’s madness.”
Within twenty minutes, the lonely system began to get more and more crowded. The numbers astonished Raven and even impressed Sabatini. One hell of a lot of fire power and, most impressive to Raven, all under human control.
They were male and female, and some he couldn’t be sure about, and they spoke with many accents, and a few probably did not look the least bit human, but there they were. Lightning was not their cause; they wouldn’t have crossed the street, let alone millions of kilometers of interstellar space, for Lightning. But Nagy had been right—they were all freebooters, and if this sort of thing happened to any one of them and they stood by and did nothing, then it would happen in the end to each and every one of them.
“All right, Val, your move,” Sabatini said, sounding far more relaxed and confident.
“I move when you move. You have no right, any of you, to dislodge me here. I have as much right to be here as you do, and if I choose to leave by the same path as that ship out there, I also have the right to do that.”
“You can stay here as long as you want,” replied a sharp female voice that reminded Raven of Reba Koll. “Or you can pull out now. Them folks over there can also leave, but you don’t follow them. Any other course, speed, angle, and trajectory is fine but not theirs. That’s the way it is, iron ass.”
“You have no right to do that,” the Val came back. “It is against the covenant.”
Sabatini chuckled. “Look who’s invoking the covenant now! You all heard the thing—it was ready to violate the covenant at a moment’s notice. Either Master System has abrogated the agreement, in which case it’s got no rights at all, or this thing’s malfunctioning, damaged, a rogue who’d bring down the covenant, and therefore one that is outside of it. That logic says you got no right to be here at all, Val. What do you say, you others out there? We don’t want anybody damaged or hurt, so what say we give it five minutes to get up to speed and punch anywhere it wants? After that, I think we got a moral obligation to take it on.”
There were numerous murmurs of agreement and even a few menacing growls.
The Val was, indeed, a computer, and the odds were ten to one against it. It might well take one ship, perhaps two, with it, but there was no way it could win. As Nagy pointed out so well, it was forced to obey the same laws of physics as everybody else.
“Very well,” the Val said. “I will leave for now. We will postpone this fight, you on that ship that call yourselves the Finland. But we will meet again, and soon. Another time, another place, outside the covenant and without clannish allies. And then you will beg for a merciful death and it will not be given!” The Val ship began to power up once more and move out and away from the gathering crowd.
“Oh, hell, it’s runnin’,” somebody said, sounding genuinely disappointed.
“We could always blast it anyway,” another suggested hopefully.
“Uh uh. Let it run,” Sabatini told them. The Val achieved fairly high speed, then there was a punch and within seconds it was gone. “We owe you one, though. Give me your ship’s identifiers and then check in in a month or so at Halinachi. It’ll be worth your while. Just tell old Savaphoong you did a favor for the pirates of the Thunder. He’ll know what to do.”
They might or might not follow through, but they all sent their identifiers and acknowledged.
Raven got up and went to the back. “Now we leave Nagy the way he wanted.”
They put the limp form in the air lock, closed it, and brought up a fair amount of pressure before releasing the outer door. Nagy’s form shot out the side of the ship and was soon lost to view.
Sabatini called excitedly to them. “Hey! A big mother of a punch! I’ll be damned—it’s the Thunder!”
Raven stared back at the air lock hatch. “Yep. Just a little too late to do any good.”
Thunder’s own shields snapped on tight and her armament came alive as it sensed the near armada there.
“Take it easy,” Sabatini called to Star Eagle. “They’re friends. We’ll give you the details later.”
“Holy mother of God! What is that thing?” someone exclaimed. Several others echoed a mixture of fear, awe, and amazement. The largest in the ragtag fleet, an old freighter, was perhaps four hundred meters long; the length of this thing was fourteen kilometers.
“That, my friends, is the Thunder,” Sabatini told them. “Hey, Star Eagle! Glad you could make it even if you missed all the excitement!”
“I apologize for the delay,” came the voice of the Thunder’s pilot. “I was elsewhere when your beam arrived at the base system, and did not get it until I attempted a relay. I came as quickly as I could after that.”
“It’s those fugitives from Melchior!” somebody on one of the freebooter ships exclaimed. “Well, I’ll be damned! If I didn’t see it, I wouldn’t believe it!”
Sabatini maneuvered close to Thunder until Lightning could be caught by tractors from the larger vessel and brought inside Cargo Bay Two.
“Where is Nagy?” Star Eagle asked before they were on board. “I do not get a readout on him. And what did you do to the inside of that ship?”
“Nagy’s dead,” Sabatini told the pilot. “We got a Val, but we had to pay a price. His body’s floating through here someplace. Hey—that’s funny!”
Raven frowned. “What is it?”
“You remember when we blasted that Val? That thing that flew out and away and punched?”
“Yes, I remember you saying so. Why?”
“I just got the same kind of reading. A punch, much too small for a ship or anything else useful. Not too far off here, either. Did you get it, Star Eagle?”
“Yes. I just checked my records and I noted it. A very brief but very powerful punch no more than two meters across.”
Raven felt a chill. About the size of Arnold Nagy’s body, he thought.