Pirates of the Thunder

by Jack L. Chalker

  “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 suitmechanisms 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 univers
e, 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 oughtta 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 woman, 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.”

  2. THE PIRATES OF THE THUNDER

  STAR EAGLE HAD BEEN AS ACCOMMODATING AS possible under the circumstances. The ship had a host of maintenance robots, most of which were quite specialized and of no practical use to the current crew, but a few could be turned into convenience mechanisms in a pinch. One, a spindly thing with a clamp and tray, was most useful: It was able to bring some blankets and other such luxuries from the remains of the old ship, as well as some more important items. An old casing with a medium-sized hole in the top became a portable toilet; it was smelly and not really built for human comfort and convenience, but it worked for now—if their little robot took it out at least every twelve hours or so to clean and sanitize it.

  Water was no problem; the huge holding tanks on the ship contained all that was needed and could create more out of by-products if need be, all distilled pure. Food was much more critical; Star Eagle had to improvise with what was handy, and the result was a large cube of sickly green with the consistency of cake icing and a taste that was a cross between dead grass and library paste. It went down, however, did not upset, and provided the minimum necessary to sustain them. Later they could have more amenities; now they had to move, which meant that Star Eagle had to learn how to drive the ship. The information was there, but it was far more complicated than what a computer programmed and designed to run an interplanetary freighter was used to. The sheer bulk of data was the problem. All, even Star Eagle, knew their clock was ticking, however. Even now Master System would be closing in on them with heavily armed ships that knew exactly what they were up against.

  The big ship was hardly defenseless; it had an enormous range of real and potential weapons at its disposal, suggesting that in the old days Master System was not at all confident of what it would find out in the farther reaches of space even though it knew where it was going and had scouted the routes. Had there been resistance? Had there been opposing interstellar civilizations? There was no way to know.

  It took more than three days to power up the systems and check them out as best the computer could. Communication with the computer pilot was still awkward, however. It could flash a message on the bridge screens to let the humans know that it wanted to talk, but only the helmet radios allowed good two-way conversation. Still, it was now confident that it could at least get them out of there—but to where?

  “Initially it doesn’t matter,” Hawks told it. “Just—away. Far away, and off the beaten track, as it were.”

  “The fact that the existing star charts are nine centuries old doesn’t matter much,” Reba Koll assured them. “There is some shift, but not a lot and nothing that can’t easily be allowed for.” She worked with Star Eagle, who had figured out how to put star charts and grids up on the bridge screens without much trouble.

  “I ain’t got time to explain how this drive works,” she told them, “if, of course, I knew how it did anyways. Best idea I can give you is if you take this here piece of cloth and make it hump up-curve. That’s how space is, really. Shortest distance ain’t across the top but straight through. You punch a hole here and you come out there. Course there’s lotsa other shit involved. There’s black holes and gravity curvatures and all the rest. Don’t look at me that way—I only fly ‘em, I don’t hav’ta understand ‘em. Net result is you tell it you wanta go there and if figures the route and trajectory and gets you there in days or weeks instead of years or centuries like it would the usual way. You let the pilot do the figures and time the jumps and energy and speed. Now, I suggested some routes to Star Eagle, but he’s got reservations.”

  “The region she suggests is not well charted,” the pilot explained. “Oh, the stars are charted well enough, but there’s no detail. It was not part of the pattern of resettlement. Also, to get there we will have to make a large number of punches and this will intersect for the first half of the journey with the routings to and from the remote colonies. We must cross known shipping lanes.”

  “Bah! That’s no worry!” Koll snorted. “The odds of actually hitting within sensor range of any ship is practically nil, but even if we did we could deal with those freighters and supply ships. There’s little or no armament on them. What’s to fight when you’re in Master System’s territory?”

  “I was thinking more of monitors and navig
ational stations,” Star Eagle responded. “They could chart us without us even knowing about it. We could be traced. This interstellar punching is all straight-line routing. To change direction, course, or speed you have to come out, readjust, then punch in again. The amount of energy expended on the punch determines how far you go before you come out again. Just measure the energy level at the punch and note the course, direction, and speed, and it wouldn’t take a computer to figure the destination.”

  “You’re not devious enough, pilot!” Koll told it. “I’ll explain misdirection to you. A series of small punches whenever we’re in a dangerous area. Each small punch increases the number of possible courses, directions, and speeds. Not even Master System has the resources to track down that many variables.”

  “That will take time, though,” the computer pointed out. “There will be frequent recharges necessary. If we took a more or less direct route to the region you suggest it would take twenty-seven standard days. To do as you suggest would take three to five times as long.”

  “But we’d get there,” she noted. “And we’d get there unknown and undetected. Maybe we’ll even have this stinkhole livable by then. Plot your course with the minimum number of exponential variables to get us there and get any possible snoopers hopelessly lost and confused. If we don’t get away clean, what difference did all this make?”

  They took a vote—Sabatini excepted—and all agreed to her plan.

  “My energy is sufficient,” Star Eagle told them. “Let’s do it.”

  The vibrations, which had been growing throughout their tenure on the big vessel, grew much stronger now, more intense. The throbbing and pulsing sensation that at first had been difficult to get used to but had become merely background noise was in the background no longer.

  “Everybody just lie on the floor as comfortably as you can and grab hold of something solid—a chair or something like that,” Koll instructed. “Once we’re completely up to speed and out we’ll be able to regain some movement.”