They all looked at him. “You got something, Chief?” Raven asked.
“We need information,” he told them. “We need to know the organization, the structure there, everything. Lightning is ready and available. Could we get in and get this sort of information without drawing the dogs of the Master?”
“Maybe,” Nagy replied. “Not you, though, or anybody else with them tattoos on their cheeks. Ain’t nobody else with those particular designs roaming around, so there’s no way to hide who you are and where you came from. I haven’t been there in quite a while, and not too many people would recognize me on sight. Sabatini, here, is perfect—no marks and a total unknown there who still knows his way around thanks to his, uh, past lives, and I’m pretty sure we can do a halfway decent disguise on Raven and Warlock here, which would also gain us two more people with some deep-space experience. More would be obvious.”
Sabatini smiled grimly. “I could—become—this Fernando Savaphoong. That would vastly simplify matters.”
“Perhaps. For a while,” Hawks replied, “but only for a while. What happens when we need you to become someone else? What happens if your underlings cannot see the profit and will not go along? No, we’ll keep that in reserve, but not immediately.” He sighed. “I wish I could go along!”
“Get used to it, Chief,” Raven said, anticipating some action at last with obvious excitement. “You should know—chiefs don’t lead their men into battle, they stand on the high ground and direct it. You just watch it while we’re gone. I still don’t trust Clayben farther than I can throw him and I can’t even pick him up.”
The Hyiakutt historian suddenly started and snapped his fingers. “Of course!” he muttered to himself. “Of course!”
“You got something, Chief?” Raven asked him.
“This whole business has been percolating through my mind for weeks now. There’s been nothing much else to think about, anyway. Suddenly, just now, it all came together. We are few in numbers and relative power. Most of us cannot go into any civilized company without being known. Master System is required only to allow us the attempt, not the success, and it knows where we must go to get the rings, so it need only watch and wait there and we must come to it.”
“Yeah, so?” Nagy prompted.
“There is an old story, with many variations, of the professional master thief who wagers a fortune with a rich man that the rich man will be successfully robbed within a week. The rich man is robbed, in spite of all his precautions, yet when he comes to arrest the thief the suspect is found to have spent the whole evening with the chief of police.”
“I’ve heard that one,” Nagy responded. “He didn’t bet that he would rob the guy—he just bet the guy would be successfully robbed. That drew every thief in the world to the job since they figured they could take the rich man and the thief would take the fall. Go on. I’m beginning to see the way you’re thinking and I think I like it.”
“We are pirates, not secret agents. Suppose we did tell everyone, and I mean everyone, about the rings and what they did? Suppose we spread it throughout the entire freebooter camp? A hundred camps. They would go for it, would they not? After all, Master System will be looking for us to make the attempt. It knows where we must go—and so do we. We need only set the bait and wait for the experts to flock to it. Then we take the rings from those who succeed.”
“Tricky, but not as tricky as trying to heist them ourselves,” Arnold Nagy agreed. “We’ll need more ships, more intelligence. We’ll have to know the what and where. And we’ll have to be better than Master System.”
“That is what we start first. Communications. Intelligence. Ships. Training our own people and recruiting some specific personnel. There will be lots of details to work out before we can even start it all going.”
“It ain’t bad,” Raven commented, “but it needs work. What if we can’t track down all these thieves? What if they get away with the rings?”
“How many? One ring does no one any good, nor two, nor three, nor even four. We will use Chen’s logic against him. Even if someone were to amass all four they would have to go to Chen. These freebooters never went beyond Melchior by law and custom. They would not know. We can offer the fifth ring. We can also offer more—expertise on how they are to be used. In the end, remember, all five must be brought to Master System itself with quick death the penalty for any mistakes.”
“That’s all well and good, Chief, but we don’t have that expertise and you know it. We don’t know where Master System is any more than they do, let alone how to make it all work.”
“That may be true, but they do not have to know that. The very alarm put out by Master System will spotlight us as the experts, the ones who know. Consider: First the rings must be located, then stolen—the last no easy task in any case. Then the various organizations that have them must settle it between themselves until one has them all. Finally, they must bring them to us to know how to use them—to us or to Chen, if they learn of him. We will be conciliatory. We will deal. We will put it together.”
Hawks had left the communications channels open and now activated the communicator. “You hear all this, Star Eagle?”
“I do and I concur. First things first, though. We must know just what we face in the freebooter camp. I should be able to shadow and monitor them from a distance so long as there are no Vals or direct sensor stations within the system itself. We need information and we need contacts. As for ships—we will make the pirates of the Thunder a legend here.”
Raven smacked one fist into the other. “Hot damn! Let’s do it!”
5. A NICE LITTLE LAYOVER
THE CHANGES THAT HAD BEEN WROUGHT IN Lightning were astonishing. Its original exterior had resembled nothing so much as two bullet-shaped tubes attached to either side of a very large but similarly shaped tube of dull gun-metal gray. Now the area between the tubes had been neatly filled in and reshaped and the entire thing coated with a dull bronze-looking substance. It now looked like a three-edged metal arrowhead and resembled no known ship profile. But on sensor screens and scopes, it would look very much like a Val fighter.
It was a good compromise. Such a strange-looking ship would cause much curiosity but no real alarm when viewed by the freebooters, yet it would have to get very close in to be seen as an unfriendly vessel by the average Master System pilot.
The inside had been changed, as well. Clayben’s precious computer backup files, to which he was still forbidden access, along with the separate unit that held and ran them, had been removed and placed within a chamber in Thunder. This freed up a great deal of space; in an emergency, Lightning could hold the entire company. A duplicate of the old interplanetary ship’s galley had been installed and could sustain them indefinitely, although in spartan conditions. The considerable armament had been retained and checked, and instrumentation had been added to allow for far more effective displays to the human occupants.
“I wish I could have done more,” Star Eagle told them apologetically. “If I had the shops and the full facilities for disassembly, and the time, I would have loved to have made more of them, but with what I have this is the best that could be done. I have scanned and analyzed it inside and out down to the molecular level; if we ever get hold of a shipyard I might well be able to turn out more. Still, I have learned much from it that could be incorporated into other ships.”
Nagy slid into the Captain’s chair. The two forward positions had been retained in their original forms, including the comfortable bracing chairs. The other seats were more utilitarian. “I kinda miss the yacht feeling.” The former security chief sighed. “But this is better for our purposes.”
“How hard is it to fly?” Raven asked him.
“Very easy once you get practice. You’re right, that’s what we should do first. Any one of us oughta be able to take this sucker off and get the hell out of someplace if something happens to the rest. Sabatini, I hope I can assume that your Koll memories would let you run this thing
if you had to.”
“If it uses the standard interface override, yeah.”
“Okay, then—we’ve got two. Raven, I don’t expect you or Warlock to get to be expert pilots, but I think I can teach you the basics. Sabatini, you ride weapons in the second chair. I think we’ll check her out first, then see about a few lessons.”
He reached down and picked up the helmet. “This is the interface—same as the China girl used with the Thunder, essentially. You put it on and you get a mild anesthetic effect and you relax and concentrate. It maps the input-output circuitry of your brain and determines what impulse code means what. Takes a few seconds. Then you get plugged in to whatever the interface plugs you into. Either of these positions can handle either weapons or flying, but right now I’m set for the ship and Sabatini’s set for the weapons systems. Now, the computers in this thing can think a lot faster than any of us, so in a crisis don’t get bogged down with who’s controlling who. When you need instant reactions, let it go. You can override if need be and provide consultation. When it’s noncritical, you fly it. If things get damaged, you might have to do it all.”
He leaned forward and punched in a code on a small keypad, then threw a small switch and touched another code into the pad. “I’ve just activated both interfaces and directed them to their appropriate functions,” he told them. “We’ll have to come up with new codes all of us can remember. You only get three tries. Muff it the first two times and it just doesn’t work; muff it the third time and it’ll seem to work but when you put the helmet on it’ll just put you to sleep and keep you there until somebody with the right code comes and finds you. Keeps things nice and secure. All right, we’re gonna take it out of here and check it all out. Then we’ll let you get a taste of it.”
He put on the helmet and leaned back in the chair as Sabatini did the same. Both men seemed to relax and then lapse into a deep sleep. Only a few seconds elapsed, and then Star Eagle opened the Thunder’s cargo-bay door and Lightning shuddered and came slowly to life. It lifted smoothly a meter or so off the deck, began a slow turn to the open space beyond, then moved slowly and deliberately out and away.
Instruments and screens flared into life, one showing a view of the massive Thunder already receding as they sped away.
“Mighty efficient, but it ain’t much good for conversation,” Raven noted to Warlock, who just shrugged.
“There’s no problem with conversation,” said the apparently sleeping form of Arnold Nagy. “I may be connected up to the ship, but that just makes it an extension of myself. Of course, I can conveniently shut you out if I want to, which is nice sometimes, and just concentrate on the ship.”
The ship shuddered a few times, and they heard some very strange and unnatural short, sharp sounds. “What is that?” Warlock asked.
“Target practice,” Sabatini replied. “We throw out some junk at random, and I try and hit it. Nothing to it. This is a very impressive ship.”
Nagy’s body suddenly gave a jerk, and he took several deep breaths, opened his eyes, sat up, and removed his helmet.
“Who’s flying this thing?” Raven asked nervously.
“It flies itself pretty well until it needs to ask a question,” Nagy replied. “All right, want to try it? I’m gonna switch Sabatini over to copilot and put the defense systems on automatic.”
Raven licked his lips nervously. “I ain’t never been a pilot for anything more than a horse and a canoe. I never even tried a skimmer.”
Nagy chuckled. “You’re probably better off because you don’t have to unlearn as much. Most experienced flyers want to do it all or override the computer too much. Just go ahead and go with the flow. I think you’ll find it’s easier than the canoe. I always turned over in canoes.”
Raven snorted. “Since when did Hungarians ride canoes?” But he moved forward and allowed Nagy to settle him into the seat and lower the helmet.
“This,” Arnold Nagy said, “was the way it was supposed to work.”
Raven felt momentarily dizzy, then very relaxed; the small aches and pains that he, like everyone, lived with vanished, but awareness did not. If anything, it improved; Raven was reminded of the many tales of “out-of-body” experiences, some of which were solidly entrenched in Crow mysticism. He could see himself, and the others, as well, in a sort of three-dimensional mental picture. The mere sight of all sides of an object at once was at first disorienting, them simply strange.
“Let the inside take care of itself.” Sabatini’s voice came to him, not aloud but inside his mind. “Look outside, out there—and you will have the inside, as well. Don’t think about it—just do it.”
The starfield burst around him. He concentrated on a single direction and suddenly had the intricate details of a star map in his mind, including names, distances, and relationships. He understood it now, understood what China felt when she was one with the Thunder; he even approached, perhaps, what Star Eagle truly was. He, Raven, was one with the ship! He was the ship; all its functions, all its commands, ail its data, were at his instant beck and call. The powerful engines were no more or less to him than his own arms and legs, and could be used without any more thought. And yet this extended to his human form as well; his body was no different from the rest of the ship’s functions and as easily managed.
I am the father of all eagles! he thought, exhilarated.
Don’t think about it, just do it. It really was as simple as that. One did not think about walking or talking or picking something up; all that information was in the brain encoded for automatic response to the desire to do it. The ship and its data were now such an extension; one didn’t have to think about it to pilot it.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Sabatini responded, apparently hearing and understanding Raven’s surface thoughts. “But I think you have enough of a hang of it to fly it if you had to. We’ll practice the finer stuff later. Let me switch you out and allow Warlock the experience, just in case.”
Raven was reluctant; he really didn’t want to cut the connection, but he was not fully in charge. The sense of diminution, of suddenly being weak and small after having been powerful and great, was overwhelming. He took off the helmet, handed it to Nagy, and went back to his old seat, where he idly lit a half cigar. The air filtration system suddenly switched to maximum.
“You know, that’s a hell of a thing,” he commented, mostly to himself. “Now I think I understand why our China girl wants desperately to be a spaceship.”
Halinachi was not much of a world, but it was one of those very few places not fully under the tyranny of the machine. But that didn’t make it any less dangerous, since this was one of the points where Master System and the few who lived outside the system met as neutrals, almost as equals. Almost—for those who lived here and ran the place understood that the only reason Master System tolerated this world was that it was useful to the System, and the only reason it hadn’t done a mass extermination of the freebooters themselves was that they were little threat and sometimes a help.
“In effect, to live outside the system you must kiss its ass,” Warlock noted dryly. “These are not free people. They are merely masochists.”
Nagy chuckled. “Well, you have something of a point there, but freedom isn’t what’s real, it’s a state of mind. Earth’s ignorant, primitive masses mostly believe they’re free and independent, and wouldn’t know a computer or a skimmer or a round Earth from the Circles of Hell.”
“But they are kept in ignorance,” Raven pointed out. “These people know.”
“Never overestimate the human mind,” Nagy responded. “Even without the aid of mindprinters and hypnoscanners and all the rest, people can convince themselves of most anything, if they really want to.”
The screens showed a small, rocky, barren world, the antithesis of the one from which they’d come. Weather here was rare, and a small but strong sun, more orange than the ones they had known, beat upon it. Halinachi was a colorful place with buttes and biz
arre, twisted landforms in oranges, purples, and tans, but there was not much green.
“It has an atmosphere, one that blocks out most of the really nasty stuff the sun sends out, but not much water,” Arnold Nagy told them. “You couldn’t breathe the stuff—more nitrogen than we’re used to, and not enough oxygen to really do the job. Still, there’s nothing down there that’ll really hurt you, either, so you can pretty well get along with just an air supply and nosepiece or mask. If you ever really added the right stuff to the air and got a lot of water you could probably grow stuff here and maybe make it livable, but nobody’s really inclined to do it. You’d need Master System’s logistics, and it isn’t about to help.”
“People actually live on that hole?” Raven asked, somewhat appalled. “It looks as lifeless as the Moon.”
“It is. Only one settlement—that’s Savaphoong’s. We’ll be coming up on it shortly, and I expect to be hailed by their controllers.”
That expectation was fulfilled almost immediately, and Nagy tended to it after putting up a view of the settlement on the big screen. It looked to be two fairly large domes connected by a long cylinder, with several smaller domes along the cylinder itself. It resembled a space station more than a ground settlement.
Just off one of the large domes was a small spaceport. They could not build a ship there, but they could probably overhaul, modify, and service one. From the looks of the place, though, Lightning, which was not a large vessel, would be about the largest they could handle down there.
Any form of money was worthless on Halinachi. Anyone who controlled a transmuter controlled everyone dependent on it. The true medium of exchange was information, innovation, and ideas—but there was a single commodity that was always welcome, and that was murylium. The irony of the transmuter was that it could not take its power from its own sources; it needed an independent, direct source, a particular compound of absolute purity and quality one key component of which was murylium, a scarce mineral found only in a few places in the universe.
Pirates of the Thunder Page 13
