Pirates of the Thunder

by Jack L. Chalker

  “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 hatchs 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.”