Pirates of the Thunder

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Space travel without spaceships,” Hawks commented. “Incredible.”

  “But very limited. First, there must be a matching transmuter at the destination. Second, the signal must be very powerful to retain its full consistency from station to station, which limits its range. Third, it is strictly line of sight, and conditions must be perfect. In the old days, initial setup ships must have been sent to all the new worlds and transmuter receiving stations established at various points on each planet’s surface. Then, when the passengers came along, they could be beamed serially—one at a time —to the receiving stations. What you send from here is precisely what you get down there. There is a mobile transmuter system in the main cargo area that seems almost like a gun; it is designed to move along guides on the catwalks and line up to each cargo cavity. It is connected to the external system, so we know that the people were put to sleep on Earth, then beamed up to here and inserted sequentially into the holding modules. Upon arrival at the new world, the process was reversed. They probably never even knew about all this. They went to sleep on Earth and woke up on a strange world.”

  “But not necessarily the way they left,” Raven noted. “I saw a Martian once. They came from human stock but there’s no way they’re human like us.”

  China nodded. “That was the primary function of the missing fourth module in the core. It was preprogrammed with certain necessary biological information. The cargo bay mobile transmitter made a new pass after all were aboard and the ship was underway. Each human occupant was once more dissolved to energy and then reformed as something else—a human able to live and survive on the target world. Otherwise, it would have taken thousands of years to change those worlds into places fit for human habitation. The transmuting of individual humans must be extremely precise and exacting, requiring a second core module and probably supporting data banks to get it right. Many human beings certainly died each time a new form was attempted before the computers got it right. Then they sent a small colony to the new world to see if they could and would survive there. Only then did mass transmutations and movements of large numbers of people begin. It was the only logical way such a plan could be carried out, but the cost in lives must have been quite high.”

  “Even when they got there,” Hawks put in, a bit awed and more than a little frightened by all this, “this would change the body, but not the mind, a mind used to thinking in human terms, to seeing things according to human standards, even themselves. They had to learn to be alien creatures. Many would be unable to do so. Many more would go mad.”

  “That’s true,” she agreed. “Although I suspect that the mindprinters were used to minimize it. Take data and information from the early colonists who survived and adapted, and feed it to the newcomers when they come down. The mindprinter taught most of us the English we are using, and made some of this possible. It could teach the basics.”

  Hawks had a sudden, uneasy thought. “You say it takes a receiving station to work as a transport mechanism? Then how will we get to wherever it is Koll is taking us? How will we get down there? And, when we go after the rings, how will we get to the target planet? Assuming the stations on the planets are still operational, we can’t use them. It would be like a thief walking up to the front door, knocking, and announcing himself to the intended victim.”

  “Getting to the surface of a world not in the system should be possible,” she told him. “Star Eagle assures me he can duplicate the necessary receiving station and get it down using one of the fighters, although I suspect it’s more complex than that. Getting into the other worlds will be much tougher. For one thing, the Thunder is going to be rather obvious in a stellar system controlled by Master System. We will have to work on that.”

  “Bah!” Raven snorted. “We are like children in this! The technology is so beyond us that we are no less ignorant than Cloud Dancer! We might as well be villagers faced with great magic!”

  “So?” China responded. “What difference does that make? Back at the Center where you lived and worked, did you really understand why and how the light came on when you touched the wall switch? Did you understand the process by which your food arrived, or did you just take it for granted and eat it? The same for the heating and the air conditioning and all the rest. I can fly a skimmer, but I have only a vague idea of how it works. I can use powerful computers, yet I do not truly understand how they think and the intricacies of their work. One does not have to know how something works to use it. Many people have been killed by guns wielded by gunmen who have not the slightest idea of the physics involved. Even Star Eagle does not understand some of that which he is doing. He was never intended to run a ship of this type and complexity. He does, however, have access to the operating instructions and can run them.”

  “Point taken,” Hawks replied. “All right, so we savages can manage this thing. I think the time has come to have a council meeting and decide just what the hell we are really going to do.”

  They sat in a circle on the bridge, relaxed but interested, not all of them understanding what this more formal meeting was for.

  “I called this meeting, but that may be a temporary usurpation of authority,” Hawks began. “Among my people, this would be a tribal council convened to create rules, objectives, and policies for all. We come from different places and different backgrounds. We think in different tongues, and some of us have less in common with one another than even we might think. However, we come here with a common bond. We are all fugitives. We all live under a death sentence or even worse. We also share a secret, of sorts. We know that there is a way to beat Master System. We know that there is a way to totally destroy the dictatorship of the machine. We are all here, together, with no others to share our bond, and we are, in a sense, stuck with each other, like it or not. We are all escaping now, but not to a specific place or a specific set of objectives. Before we can discuss the future and set those objectives, we must have someone in charge, not as dictator or chief but as chairman, as it were, of a collective.”

  “You’re doin’ fine, Chief,” Raven said. “I’m content to let you chair the meetings and bang the drums. Some of us know about the different parts of humanity and some of us know a lot about machines but you’re the one person here with the education to see the big picture. Any objections?”

  There were some nervous glances from side to side, but nobody seemed to be unhappy with that.

  “Very well, I assume the leadership, but when a majority of you is dissatisfied with it, I will step down. I will appoint our China, here, second in command and with full authority. I think the two of us are better at planning than in direct action. Very well. We then proceed to the first really important item on the agenda. Captain Koll, just where are we heading?”

  “In the bush, sir. A region two punches off any known interstellar routes. It was crudely scouted in the old days by Master System and there were some early experiments on some planets there, but none proved out. There are several stellar systems there that show some promise and might possibly sustain a land base with the support of the Thunder. We can’t be expected to live in this can indefinitely. It’s not healthy and it’s a sitting duck. If we’re tied to it absolutely we’ll just have to accept a life of constantly being on the run, or heading this thing out and just punching until we’re so far away even we couldn’t find our way back. If we’re gonna stay close enough to Master System to do some damage, then we can’t ever have all our eggs in one basket. Somebody’s gotta survive, with the information on the rings and the story of all this.”

  “I find the ship more than adequate,” China responded. “It can be modified to support many more of us, and it gives us mobility. We do not seem a likely group for survival on a hostile world.”

  There were several nods, but Hawks understood what Koll was saying.

  “This is not and cannot be a passive vessel,” he told them. “We are going to have to get what we cannot make for ourselves. The interstellar shipping system is tot
ally automated and runs that way. Right now it is vulnerable, perhaps wide open to us. We need smaller, more practical interstellar vessels. We need backups to our systems. We will also need information channels, and that will mean direct contact with freebooters and the like, those who live outside the system. We will need to pillage and plunder, as it were, and also to reconnoiter our target systems without advertising our presence to Master System. Everyone, even the freebooters themselves, might be our enemy. The captain is correct. If we are to be pirates, we must have a place to study and bury our loot. We will eventually require more people, perhaps as allies. And, finally, these confines are no place to raise children, and we will have children, won’t we, China?”

  She nodded somberly. “Yes. Star Eagle was checking out the transmuter system and eventually required a human. It—tickles. All over. Nothing more. You are not even aware that it is done until it is over. In so doing, he also had to make a molecule-by-molecule memory map of me in order to reconstruct me. I was aware that a transmuter was used upon me by Clayben’s staff on Melchior. I was not aware until now of the extent.” Her voice was dry, hollow, as if that tough exterior was about to fragment into a million pieces.

  Star Eagle broke in. “She has been thoroughly transmuted,” the computer pilot reported, “although the changes are not so obvious. I had hoped to be able to restore her to some semblance of normalcy with my devices, but that is impossible. Perhaps Master System could restore her, but I cannot. There is a certain—instability—inherent in a full transmutation. I knew that just from the small transmuters on the old ship. There are some minor losses each time something is actually changed—no loss if absolutely reconstructed. That was why a separate core was needed to transmute the human cargo of this ship. There is literally no tolerance for errors. The losses she suffered at the hands of Melchior are negligible, but to do it again would compound those losses. Reassembly might well kill or cripple her. There is some indication that this is actually built into the system when dealing with complex organic life forms. Master System wanted to make certain that none of those it created could change themselves back. It wanted permanency, and it designed it into the system.”

  “I was—am—a genetic experiment,” China explained. “My father worked to create me. My extreme beauty—I am not saying that to be egotistical—and my very high intelligence were part of it. I was part of a larger project to breed a race of superior intellects, intellects that might do more than simply cheat on the system. I was but stage one, however; that race was to be bred, and it was my purpose to be one of those who would bear the next generation that might be the rebels. It was to escape this life as a breeding factory that I fled. I saw my father as unfeeling, as even evil, and I ran into the hands of Clayben, who was far more unfeeling and evil than my father ever dreamed of being. Melchior was Clayben’s playpen, possibly the only place in the known universe where such vast knowledge and power could be wielded without restraint by human beings. He examined me, discovered my background, and decided my father was correct.”

  “But you escaped from him, as well,” Chow Dai noted.

  “Not soon enough. They analyzed what my father’s geneticists and biochemists had done and made improvements on it in computer models, but as you know such modifications would not be inheritable if induced, unlike my father’s more direct approach with laboratory eggs and sperm. They were also aware of all that I had accomplished in escaping my father, Center, and even Earth. They wanted my mind and my body—in that, at least, their ideas were better than my father’s—but they wanted me secure, particularly if I was to work with their best computers and data bases. Melchior was originally established as a research station by Master System to create the Martians. It has a small but very workable transmitter. They use it for many experiments. Captain Koll’s tail is a good example.”

  “I’m more familiar with it than you know, dearie,” Koll said enigmatically.

  “At any rate, they modified me. All of me. Incorporated their genetic changes to be inheritable, building on my father’s work. Star Eagle can tell you the rest.”

  “They wanted to make certain she couldn’t pull a fast one on them,” the pilot told them. ‘That was how they hit on the blindness. She is not merely blind—she does not even have the processing inputs for visual images. The entire interconnection system simply isn’t there as it is in you. This is not a genetic modification; her children will see. There may be devices that bypass all of that that might just work, but I have no knowledge of them. She is also what might only be called a baby factory. Brain and body chemistry is set up for that. Her natural and normal condition is pregnancy. When she is not pregnant she will have almost no self-control. She will become increasingly frenzied until that condition is restored, after which she will again be as she is now. The combination of genetic work and Melchior’s modifications is astonishing. She is resistant to much of what inflicts others. She will age very slowly and heal very quickly. Her defensive and regenerative powers are enormous and automatic. She could very easily remain youthful and sexually functional for sixty or seventy years.”

  That got them all. Sixty or seventy years with pregnancy a natural condition...

  “Even in my day there was ways to beat that,” Reba Koll noted. “Fool the body into thinkin’ it’s pregnant, or, hell, take out the equipment if you can’t shut it off.”

  “Not here. Her body would treat any control method I might be able to come up with as if it were a disease and destroy it or render it ineffective. The same would go for psychochemicals. Surgical alteration would be repaired and healed quickly by the body and in the interim she would still be possessed of the lust and frenzy, which is induced by chemicals made in her own body. They knew she had used mindprinters before to her advantage, along with psychochemical alterations, and they wanted to be certain she could not do so again. To remove her reproductive organs would be far worse. It would drive her horribly and irreparably mad. A bullet in the brain would be kinder, and quicker. No, they fed her mindprint into their computers and their computers came up with an absolute system. I am not certain what Clayben intended—breed his own super race, perhaps. In the meantime, so long as she was pregnant, he had the complete services of her mind and abilities.”

  That stunned those who hadn’t already known about it, but Hawks had a different point to this information. “Understand this well, then. We need her mind and her skills; therefore, she will receive what she needs when she requires it. If we are to have a substantial second generation, then it might fall to them eventually to get the last of the rings. We require a colony.”

  “There’s darker stuff here, Chief,” Raven put in. “More than that problem. I been listenin’ to all this and, as you know, I followed it when we was still researching the whole thing, and when I first heard about these transmuters I figured our problem on getting into our target world was solved. We could change ourselves into what was needed. Now I see that’s not gonna happen. For one thing, old Star Eagle don’t have the codes and genetic shit to do it to any of us. For another, even if he did, it’s a one-way trip. There’s no way I’m gonna be changed into a monster for good, or, even if it was something I didn’t mind bein’, wind up bein’ left forever on some world while somebody else sticks them rings in Master System’s ass.”

  “A good point,” Hawks agreed. “I’m afraid we might have to face the transmitter to accomplish our goals, at least at the start, but while that sacrifice might have to be made by some or even all of us, I could not ask anyone to place him—or herself in the position of having to remain behind. I am personally prepared to make any sacrifice, including death or mutilation, to end the tyranny, but only if it means something. I would not shed an eyelash if it meant that an Isaac Clayben or a Lazlo Chen, who is much the same son, would wind up our masters. I know enough history to understand that achieving a revolution is not the same as winning it. I am as dedicated to our revolution as I can be, but I am equally dedicated to not replacin
g Master System with a human monster.”

  “I’m afraid I shall have to insist on a planetary base,” Star Eagle interjected. “I will need time to convert this ship into something more practical, and I will require independence and mobility.”

  “All right, so we’re agreed that far,” Raven said. “So we go out there and we build a base, more than a colony. Then what?”

  “As I said, piracy. We need mobility. We have the only active colony ship in the known universe. We need another ship, preferably more than one. Their data banks alone might tell us of other targets worth hitting and the schedules we need. We outfit them. Either Star Eagle converts them to our side or we learn to fly them without a core. Outfit them. Weapons. Sensors. Our own communications and codes. Then it will be time for some of us to make contact with the freebooters. By that time we’ll have something of a mysterious reputation. We need information. We need to know about these worlds we’re going to be going to. Who are the people there? What’s the culture, the language, the physical and biological problems? Who’s in charge and who runs what? Which leader wears a large gold ring with a design in it? Does anyone know of another that we do not? Step by step, a bit at a time, with infinite patience and dedication.”

  “It sounds impossible,” China commented.

  “It’s not. Difficult, yes. Dangerous, yes. Certain? By no means. I would say the odds are against us overwhelmingly. But impossible it certainly is not. I have thought it through and thought it through until my head burst, but I think I have it now. What Raven and Warlock, there, and Chen as well, knew from the start.” He looked at the Crow and the Jamaican beauty. “It can’t be impossible, can it? It is required to be at least possible.”

  The Crow grinned. “You got it, Chief. You’re smarter than I thought. I would have explained it, sooner or later, but why bother now?”