Pirates of the Thunder

by Jack L. Chalker

  Forty thousand kilometers away and on station, Arnold Nagy jumped in his seat and then sat up straight. “She’s moving, Doc! They’re underway!”

  “Strap in!” Clayben shouted back from below. “Punch in the codes and maintain distance and monitoring! We don’t want to lose them!”

  The great ship came to life on the outside, as well. Red and green lights flashed on along the length and breadth of the ship, and in the rear huge engines flared into brilliance.

  Quite slowly at first, but very clearly, the big ship turned and began to pull away from its siblings in orbit around Jupiter. On the bridge, loose objects floated toward the back wall and the vibration grew intense, joined now by yet another strange sound.

  “Thunder,” Cloud Dancer whispered. “It sounds like the approach of a great storm across the prairie. This is truly a mighty ship. Does it have a name?”

  “None that means anything anymore, I suspect,” her husband replied.

  “Then it should be the Thunder,” she said. “That is the awe that it inspires, and that is its sound and being, its soul.”

  “What about it, everyone? Star Eagle? Shall this ship henceforth be the Thunder?”

  “It is an appropriate and mighty name,” China responded.

  “And easy to remember,” Chow Dai added.

  The computer was agreeable. “Then we are the Thunder. I think it is a good name.”

  “I think I’m gonna puke,” Carlo Sabatini said.

  For something so huge, the ship’s acceleration rate was startling. Within two hours it had cleared the grip of mighty Jupiter and was heading in a great arc that would take it first away, then back toward the mighty giant at tremendous speed. It would use this combination of speed and the gravity of the mighty planet to build up massive acceleration very quickly.

  As the speed grew, the more pronounced the sounds of thunder became, as if just outside and all around them raged a great storm.

  For those on the bridge, the long hours of getting underway and the limitations it placed on them was simultaneously exciting, somewhat frightening, and extremely boring. Finally, however, the rate smoothed out, and they could move about easily again. But some of the vibration and noise remained, giving them a constant feeling of motion, even though inside the ship all was calm and still.

  “We’re being followed,” Star Eagle reported. “A single ship. Small. Unfamiliar design. I have searched all database patterns and can find nothing close to it. Great power. It might well be interstellar capable.”

  Reba Roll frowned. “Master System? A Val?”

  “It is somewhat like their ships, but it is not one of them. Besides, my sensors show a life-support system activated aboard it. Not certain, but it is probably a rogue ship, like us.”

  China thought that over. “It’s possible that Melchior had something in reserve. Those fighters it tried to use against us were pretty impressive overall and also of a unique design. They were using a sister ship of our old ship to give chase. Star of Islam, I believe. Could the Star have carried it?”

  “Not inside,” the pilot told her, “but piggybacked on the exterior it would be no problem at all. It contains weapons systems that might be close to what their fighters had, but those fighters were not manned. Any action recommended?”

  China talked it over with Reba Koll and the others. “No,” she finally replied. “If we hail it, they’ll know we know about them and possibly make it harder for us to keep track of them. If we slow to bring them in range of our weapons it will also cause great delay in us getting out of here, which is the first priority. Are you certain there is only one? No more?”

  “Yes. One.”

  “Then let it follow. If it gets within weapons range, hail it and order it to stand down and be boarded or destroy it. If it attacks, defend. Otherwise, do nothing until we are well away from this stellar system. Even if they are of Melchior they are in an illegal ship engaged in prohibited activity. My guess is that they did not think we could do what we have done, but now that we have they want what we want but for themselves. We will deal with them when we can.”

  “Acknowledged. I am now receiving faint stop orders on both superspace and subspace command frequencies. Master System knows about the Thunder.”

  “To be expected,” Raven commented. “We’re hotter than a burial fire right now. What’s the odds of us being intercepted by any force that could do us any real harm?”

  “Very slim. Negligible. They might get a ship in before I can make the punch but nothing that could handle these systems. They really don’t make weapons ships like that. A Val ship would have the most firepower, and that would be little more than that of the fighters Melchior sent against us. The security computer informs me that this ship is able to take virtually any known system of its own day, and they were far more heavily armed then than now. Our worst enemy would be another ship like this one, and it is unlikely that such would be set against us. Too easy to avoid. Security believes it most likely that Master System will order ships constructed specifically to exploit our weaknesses and take us out, but that will take considerable time. If we can get lost the first time, and if we are careful, it is unlikely even they will find us when they can surprise us and take us.”

  “Then they won’t try to take us aboard,” Raven surmised. “We’re no real threat or problem cooped up in this monster. If they can’t trace us now, they’ll put out all the alarms and wait for us to move.”

  Hawks sighed. “Yeah. If we know where three of the rings are, good old Master System knows where all of them are, I bet, and has a pretty good eye out for them. Unlike those bastards from Melchior back there, it doesn’t really have to chase us. It just has to wait, and we must come to them.”

  “Infinite patience is one of the hallmarks of computers,” China noted darkly.

  Hawks scratched his chin. “Don’t get too downcast. Maybe it is impossible. So is what we have done so far.”

  A few hours later the pilot reported, “I have attained sufficient speed for a punch and we are sufficiently clear of Jupiter’s gravitational pull that I can compensate for it. There should not be any untoward effects, but I cannot predict for certain, never having done it before.”

  “Won’t be nothin’,” Reba Koll assured them. “Might sound like the whole ship’s breakin’ apart, but don’t let that worry you none. Once it’s done, it’ll be still and quiet as death until we come out the other side. You might get some funny feelings inside or even some hallucinations, but they’ll only last a real short while, and it’s a good idea to sit or lie down ‘cause most everybody gets a little dizzy, but it all passes pretty fast and each time you do it the effects will be less and less. Just relax and don’t let it scare you.”

  They waited, nervous in spite of Koll’s assurances, and the punch came.

  First there was tremendous vibration that continued to build with a supporting roaring sound until it seemed to engulf them. At that moment the lights blinked and the sound seemed to fade as if swallowed up in some huge drain; the vibration, too, settled down to a level far lower than that produced by the regular space drive. There was a wave of dizziness, and some nausea, and each one of them found his or her attention fixed on something—an object, a reflection, even another person—unable to tear away that gaze. Even China, who could see nothing, appeared to be staring at something specific in her world of darkness.

  Hawks stared involuntarily at the blind girl and she seemed to shimmer, taking on a wraithlike appearance of stunning beauty. She seemed to float up and come toward him, then change again into a horrible, skeletal monster, jaws open, coming for him—

  He screamed, and suddenly everything was back to normal. He found himself sweating and shaken, breathing hard, and it took a few moments for him to get hold of himself and look around and reaffirm reality. The others had varying degrees of reaction, but all of them clearly had seen something, something uniquely their own. Sabatini looked scared to death, and the Chows were shiver
ing. Sooner or later, Hawks decided, he would find out what each had seen, but for now he just noted the differences. Of them all, Raven and Warlock looked the least affected and the least concerned.

  The thunder was quiet now; there was nothing but a very low steady vibration through the deck and walls, quite distant. None of them, except perhaps Koll, understood what had just happened, but Hawks grasped at least the basics. Somehow, they were no longer in the universe at all. Somehow, now, they were in another medium, somewhere else, traveling across a ripple in space-time by the shortest available route.

  It was a frightening, awesome concept, yet it meant one thing above all.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Raven commented aloud to no one in particular. “We actually got away.”

  Spanning hundreds, perhaps thousands, of light-years by the punch method was incredible, but it still took time.

  Some of that time was spent in attaining a more livable, civilized environment. Star Eagle now had a reasonable command of the ship’s systems and how they worked. The maintenance computer subsystem was employed creating and then using an army of spindly robots that were able to turn chambers in the bow of the Thunder into reasonably private rooms. Much of the old ship was dismantled, its essential parts modified and duplicated by the Thunder’s transmitters. A square meter of passenger-lounge carpeting was sufficient for the transmuters to create a carpeted floor for the new rooms and for the bridge. The old ship’s toilets were modified and duplicated, as well, and tied into new piping using the vast support system of the Thunder. The old ship’s transmuter-driven automated galley was reinstalled with some modifications, allowing the old menus to be used. The bridge chairs were replaced with copies of the more practical and comfortable passenger lounge chairs. Since the Thunder wasted nothing and recycled everything, even a shower chamber was possible, although in the zero gravity it had to be a more or less sealed system and strictly a one-at-a-time affair.

  Of equal importance were the interfaces that had to be designed and installed between the passengers and the pilot and master of the Thunder, a central amplifier and communications system that might eventually extend to the whole of the ship; a way of specifying human-supplied designs for the transmuters to work with, to create things like furnishings for the new cabins and some basic clothing. The women chose robes with soft linings and rope ties; the men got flimsy versions of Sabatini’s usual shirt and pants. Only Manka Warlock broke the pattern by insisting on the shirt and pants for herself.

  China and Reba Koll worked on installing the interface helmets on the bridge. China was anxious to see if they would work here as on the old, smaller ship. The idea of interfacing with Star Eagle and becoming one with this ship excited her.

  Some tubular lighting was arranged, but it was still kept low and indirect. In normal space there was no power problem, but during a punch the ship was the only reality; there was nothing at all outside, according to the pilot. Nothing. That meant that all transmuting—all power consumption—was accomplished using materials within the ship, and particularly with all the modifications and construction going on it was a drain. There was a consensus not to start cannibalizing the ship for luxuries until they knew their limits and understood their new environment.

  They also began exploring the ship.

  There were over twenty thousand pods in the transport bay. There had been a hundred ships like this one, and an Earth population of possibly six billion, when the grand project had begun. That meant that each ship had made hundreds of round trips over the two or more centuries of interstellar colonization. The time frame was not clear in the records, but the evidence here was clear enough. The Thunder was a veteran indeed.

  Slave ship, Hawks couldn’t help thinking.

  “How many worlds are charted as being part of the settlement?” he asked Star Eagle.

  “Four hundred and forty-seven,” was the reply. “But it might not be complete. The region spans over forty thousand light-years.”

  He tried doing some quick math in his head. That was only about thirteen or fourteen million a world!

  “The initial populations were not large,” the computer agreed. “Nor was Mars, the prototype, if you remember. There are almost two hundred million Martians now, and they have a relatively slow birth rate. You forget that Earth was limited in its reproductive rates and carefully regulated, but that this does not necessarily hold true for these worlds. It is entirely possible that we could find planets with billions on them—or planets with few, if any, survivors. How would we know?”

  “Four hundred forty-seven,” Raven commented. “Minimum. Good thing we know where three of the rings are.”

  “Ever the optimist,” Hawks retorted. “We know the worlds where they are, but nothing about those worlds and nothing about how many possible leaders could have them. And that leaves us with just four hundred and forty-four other worlds in which to find the last ring. Perhaps our grandchildren or great-grandchildren might find it.”

  “Don’t you worry, Chief. We’ll find it. We didn’t come this far to fail in that. Stealin’ it, and the others, will be the tough job.”

  “Please pardon the intrusion,” Chow Dai put in, “but might I be permitted to ask why, if this Master System knows that we know, it will not just collect or hide all four, perhaps all five, from us before we can even try for them?”

  It was a good question. “There’s no easy answer to that,” Hawks told her. “It remains a possibility, but I think not for several reasons. First, those rings are the only avenue to us. It knows we’re going after them, and so it will be waiting for us. Second, there’s something very odd going on here. There’s more than just us in this. Maybe you should ask Raven about that.”

  The Crow’s eyebrows went up. “Don’t know what you mean, Chief. I told you the straight stuff. Chen’s the only one I know behind all this. Word of honor.”

  Hawks privately doubted that Raven’s honor was worth very much, but he knew it was fruitless to press the point. It was even possible that the former security man was telling the truth. Why would Chen select this crew—particularly this group—and think they had a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding? He’d asked himself that a thousand times and had no answer, yet Chen was a wily, even brilliant man. Did Chen, and perhaps Raven, know something that might explain it, and might also explain how they had been able in the first place to pull this off under a system that had some cracks but no chasms? They had walked through the Grand Canyon of cracks in Master System’s rule, and they should not have been able to do so.

  In many ways, the Thunder proved something of a disappointment in that beyond its transport bays and incredible lengths of corridors and catwalks there was little else with any use for humans. In spite of the mysteries of the bridge and its interfaces, the ship had never been built with humans in mind for anything except cargo. Much of the romance engendered by the mere sight and thought of such a ship was gone in the sterile metals and plastics of the reality. Star Eagle could show them more than they could see themselves on the screens —of the bridge—another anomaly. If the ship was run by a remote computer brain directly connected to service and security subbrains and to the mobile machines they controlled, why were there viewing screens on the bridge?

  The star drive was actually forward and well shielded against any type of prying. It appeared that “punch” was indeed as good a word as any for what it did; it appeared to focus forward, open up some sort of hole in space-time, and allow the ship through, encased somewhat in an energy field to protect it from whatever forces were out there now. The massive rear drives were strictly for in-system movement and docking, and were not used in interstellar flight at all.

  The top of the ship, as oriented from the bridge, consisted of massive tanks of gases, fuels, and all else needed both to sustain the human cargo and to provide whatever was necessary to the ship’s systems. If the Thunder had a weak point, this was it, but the tanks were armored to an amazing degree and atop the
m were complexes of defensive weapons. If a potential attacker somehow got past the fourteen small automated fighters that provided the ship’s primary defense, there would still be no easy taking of the main ship.

  Below were the four massive cargo bays, in one of which sat the remains of the interplanetary ship that had brought them from Melchior. Each of the bays had extensive equipment for moving and reaching almost any point in the cavities, and independent medium-sized transmitters.

  “One thing I haven’t figured out,” Raven said, “is how they got all those people in here and back out again. There’s no docking piers for support ships.”

  “This ship could never land anywhere,” China explained. “The transmuter is the heart of Master System’s whole scheme. It is the heart of everything that also makes the rest possible. Some are used simply to manufacture spare parts, repairs, and to recycle everything that can no longer be used. The corps of robots Star Eagle is using were nothing but plans in the ship’s data banks, fed to transmuters along with something of necessary mass-exhaust gases, waste products, debris, garbage. The mass is transformed into energy and then reformed as whatever solid matter the ship might need. There are transmuters in the bow which can literally scoop up space debris-rock, dust, gases—and feed them into the storage tanks above us in compressed form. When we’re inside a punch, as now, the ship uses this stored material to keep itself and everything else going. These were very low when we moved out, but in the transit of Jupiter the ship picked up enough to fill those holding tanks.”

  “Yeah, but—people?”

  “In the same way that the things can change one form of matter or energy into another, it can also maintain a specific object. All of it is catalogued when it is picked up, so if necessary it could be reformed as itself. We could put you in a transmuter, reduce you to energy, then beam that energy to a receiving transmuter along with that pattern. You would then be converted back into yourself. The process would take only as long as light required to travel the distance.”