Pirates of the Thunder

by Jack L. Chalker

  “What do you think we’re doing—laying mines? If we were, you’d have hit one by now. We’re not going to stop.”

  The Val did not reply, but fired a thin beam that struck one of the objects, fragmenting it.

  “I think he just shot the damned toilet,” Raven noted.

  “No matter,” Nagy assured him. “He didn’t disintegrate it, he blew it up. It’s the mass that counts. I was kinda worried about that one fitting in the ram anyway. Now I know it will. Okay, time to grab on to whatever’s left back here and hold tight. Odds are we’re all gonna get bruised and knocked around by this one, but consider the alternative.”

  He went forward once more and donned the interface helmet. He no longer had a chair, but with judicious use of the torch and some muscle he had fashioned two handholds out of parts of the instrument console.

  “You gonna explain this, or am I supposed to be surprised?” Sabatini asked him.

  “I’m gonna back up real slow, just enough to get as much of that junk as I can in one pass, ‘cause that’s all we get,” Nagy told him. “I think we were careful enough to keep it fairly bunched, although I don’t know what effect that blast had on it.”

  “You back up and that thing’ll close,” Sabatini warned.

  “Fine. So long as he doesn’t fire until too late, I couldn’t care less.”

  “But you need acceleration to punch! If you go forward in a pass for that stuff, it’ll have to be flank speed from a relatively standing start! The Val’ll have to shoot or be rammed!”

  “Good. Let it shoot. If it figures we’re gonna suicide and try to take it with us, as I hope it does, it’s gonna lose. Only if it figures out the game are we in trouble.”

  “Yeah? That thing’s a supercomputer! You figure you got an angle it doesn’t know or can’t figure out in nanoseconds?”

  “Sure. I’m gonna do something that isn’t possible, so it won’t think of it.”

  “What! If it’s impossible then what good is it?”

  “Because I don’t know it’s impossible and my math was always lousy. All right—hang on, everybody! Here we go!”

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Nagy applied the brakes, which had the effect of backing up the ship a few millimeters a second. The movement was so slow that even the Val had to check its instrumentation before issuing a challenge.

  “You are moving! Halt at once or I will be forced by necessity to open fire!”

  “I’m not moving—I’m experiencing drag. Hold on, I’ll see what’s what.”

  “You will compensate now.”

  Nagy made no reply for more than thirty seconds, by which time he had increased the braking so that the ship cleared the mass showing on the sensors by a few meters; he kept the ship’s nose toward the Val ship to present the smallest target.

  The Val fired at the port ramjet scoop, but Sabatini had expected this and set the automatics to parry.

  Nagy brought the ship to a dead stop relative to the floating debris and angled the nose so that the ship would accumulate maximum mass in a forward thrust. “I just ran the calculations on this thing,” he told them.

  “Yes?” Sabatini replied. “And?”

  “It said ‘Don’t do it!’ or words to that effect. Hang on, everybody! Either we’re gonna be out of this mess in a couple of minutes or we’re gonna be dead. I’ve programmed it in. Stand by!”

  The engines suddenly roared to life and the ship shuddered; the rattles and noises were unusually loud because of all the remnants of the destruction about the ship. This did not go unnoticed by the Val.

  “Throttle down! If you have any idea of picking up that debris, I have already demonstrated that you are in range of my weapons!”

  “We’re overheating the engines!” Sabatini warned. “Either throttle down or do something, but you can’t sustain this for more than twenty or thirty seconds! This is madness! He’ll blow us to hell as soon as we pick up that shit!”

  There was no way Arnold Nagy could do the split-second timing involved; he simply gave the orders to the ship’s computer. The computer said it would comply but would not be responsible for the consequences. “ENGINE FAILURE PREDICTED IN FIVE SECONDS!” it warned.

  “Go!” Arnold Nagy yelled.

  The amount of heat and pressure built up in the engines was massive; Raven and Warlock, although braced as best they could be, were slammed against the aft wall and pinned there. Only the extreme control of Nagy and Sabatini under the interface kept their grips on their handholds, but it was not without its own costs. The handholds on Nagy’s side began to give way.

  It was so fast that there was no way to realize what had happened until it was over. In the end, it all seemed somewhat anticlimactic.

  At the last possible moment, with engines thrusting full and close to protective shutdown, the dense gases, which had been building under tremendous pressure that must either be expelled or blow up the ship, were released. For a brief moment nothing seemed to happen, and the Val, for whom it was a very long time, calmly adjusted its guns, noted its regrets, and trained its full fire directly on the point just beyond the debris where it would have a clear and unobstructed full field of fire.

  The Val’s target suddenly lurched forward and, as it touched the debris itself, it did the one thing neither the Val nor anyone else except Arnold Nagy anticipated.

  Lightning punched.

  It was a wide field punch and it was entered at a relatively slow speed, but the focus of the punch beams was mere millimeters beyond the densest pack of debris, and so wide that its very opening sucked in some of the debris not collected by the ram in its passage.

  Suddenly realizing what its enemy had done, the Val fired, but the punch was wide enough to absorb virtually all the energy, shielding Lightning. Realizing that it had been outmaneuvered, the Val checked the course, speed, and trajectory of its prey and quickly swung around to follow. Time was of the essence.

  Nagy throttled down to minimum speed; it didn’t matter inside a punch how much power was expended, although a small amount was necessary. One arrived at one’s destination at the same time all the same. Inside, the ship moaned and groaned and sounded as if it would come apart at any moment, but the passenger cabin seemed to be holding.

  “That’s impossible!” Sabatini said flatly. “No ship with a life-support system could sustain the pressures we just did!”

  “Okay, then you’re dead,” Nagy responded, sounding more casual than he actually felt. “This thing was built as an escape ship, remember, and the theoretical problems and computer models that it was based on assumed that a whole fleet of Master System fighters would be coming in on us. We’re not home free yet, though, folks. Wait for the main event.”

  Raven groaned. “Damn it, I feel like I broke every bone in my body!” he complained. He started, staring at the limp form of Warlock, and was relieved to find her still breathing, though unconscious. He looked forward at the two forms sitting on the deck in their death grips and saw blood on Nagy. “Nagy, check yourself out! You’re bleeding like a stuck pig!”

  “Yeah. Broke a wrist and somehow a rib, and messed up a little in my head, but I’ll survive until I’m through this. It’s gonna be real tough to disengage this interface, though. Sabatini, you sound okay to me.”

  “I suffered massive internal damage, but I am now repairing it,” the creature who was Sabatini replied. “I will be whole again in a few minutes.”

  Raven groaned. He felt as if he’d been worked over with a rubber hose, but he didn’t think anything was broken. Like the others, he found some blood coming from a nostril, but it wasn’t much. “What d’ya mean, it ain’t over yet?” he asked.

  “Let’s see... half a second for the Val to figure what I did, assume I survived somehow, and decide to give chase. Three minutes to apply thrust and angle in to the same trajectory, course, and speed and punch. I’m not gonna allow any fudge factor; I’ll assume it does it in the minimum, so that puts him just a hundred eighty and a
half seconds behind us. Good thing he didn’t close on us. If he had, I wouldn’t have any margin at all.”

  Raven gasped. “You mean he’s still behind us?”

  The ship continued to moan and groan. “Sure. And I didn’t jump long. We went in real slow, so it’d take damned near forever and half our fuel for life support if I did. If I timed it right, some of the debris should have been pulled in with us by magnetic and gravitational forces. That and the remains of his ship should get us almost anywhere.”

  “The remains of—what the hell?” both of the others managed at once. Warlock moaned and stirred, but nobody noticed.

  “You wait. Coming out in one minute. Hold on back there! You might get flung forward this time!”

  Warlock opened her eyes and frowned. “What?”

  “Don’t ask,” Raven responded. “Just turn around facing the wall and hold on again or you’re gonna be splattered against the forward wall!”

  “Wha—?” she managed, but turned and did as instructed, still not quite back to normal.

  Lightning punched out in a sector of space as empty and forlorn as the one it had left and, in truth, not a great distance away in astronomical terms. As soon as the ship emerged, Nagy checked for any debris that might have come with them, found some, accelerated slightly and scooped what he could, then came to a near-dead stop. Then, very slowly, he began reverse thrust until he reached a predetermined point. He used more than two and a half minutes doing so, which meant there wasn’t long to wait.

  This time Sabatini, with the aid of the ship’s computers, understood exactly what was going on. “All weapons systems armed. This is gonna be real close, Nagy. I read the forward distance as a hundred and six meters.”

  “Give it all you got. I don’t just want him disabled, I need him in pieces. We can’t go out there and do a salvage job on him—we jettisoned the space suits.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. All right—locked on. Like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  The Val was late; in fact, it was almost seventeen seconds late, which made Nagy wonder if it had somehow guessed his intention, but he was counting on its supreme self-confidence and the fact that he’d had to enter the punch at a very slow speed.

  As soon as the Val’s punch closed behind it, all forward batteries of the Lightning opened up on the Val ship, which could only then use its sensors to see behind the punch and discover the plot.

  Sixteen beams of maximum-strength fire struck the aft engines of the Val ship; it shuddered, then the Val applied full thrust and shot back, but the shots were wide and the thrust was erratic, causing the ship to go off at an angle. Defensive force fields were up now, but massive damage had already been done. As soon as the Val gave Sabatini any sort of a broadside and he could calculate the steering angle, he launched four seeker missiles, two for the tail along the line of the guns, the other two angling around to come in on either side of the main fuselage.

  The Val was clearly in trouble and had focused most of its attention on getting away fast, but it managed to shift shields to deflect both the two missiles coming in on its engines and the one coming directly for its side. It might well have seen, or suspected, the fourth missile if its sensors were still intact, but it was having real power problems.

  There was a tremendous bright flash, and when it cleared, the Val ship had a gaping hole in it, with pieces of ship flying off and forming an eerie escort on Lightning’s sensors. The shields wavered, then collapsed aft as connections were severed; only the nose area was still guarded or intact, probably containing the still very much alive but powerless Val.

  Sabatini let Nagy take them to the best broadside and then began pouring all he had into the dead ship, literally blowing it apart. “Hah! Who says you can’t beat a Val!” he shouted with enthusiasm. Then, suddenly, he sobered. “What the—?”

  A small section of the still-shielded nose suddenly flared into life and detached itself from the mainship; Sabatini immediately shifted half his guns to it, not willing to take them all away in case it was some kind of trick. He missed —the thing flew away from them at increasing speed and with the hardest shields either of the two space veterans had ever seen. Nagy was still trying to decide whether or not to chase it when his instruments showed a tiny punch and it was gone.

  “What was that?” Sabatini asked in wonder.

  “The brain of the Val, I’d guess” came the reply. “I never knew anybody who beat one of these bastards before, so we might be among the first to see that. Get cracking—I need that hulk broken up into pieces small enough to get us back on the charts. Remember, there’s a second Val around here someplace and if that little thing that just got away is anything at all it’s speeding someplace to report on all this and call in the big guns. Let’s move it! Besides, if we don’t get somewhere where we can link with Star Eagle in a little while, I’m afraid I’m gonna die.”

  They laid out Nagy’s body on the deck, but kept him connected to the interface. Sabatini disengaged and checked Nagy’s condition. “He’s in deep shock,” he told the others. “If he’s moved or if he disengages, he’s dead. I can’t even guarantee anything if he stays hooked up, but at least there won’t be any pain.”

  Raven shook his head sadly. “Anything that could help him? Anything we could do, I mean?”

  Sabatini chuckled dryly. “I think even the medical kit went overboard, for all the good it would do. Short of a really good medical center with all its support stuff, the only hope he’s got is a transmitter big enough and independent enough to do the job. The only one we got is on the Thunder.”

  Raven sighed. “Yeah, and that’s a couple of days away at the minimum. He’s not gonna last that long.”

  “I can’t tell you how this conversation is cheering me up,” Nagy said through the intercom; his own throat was no longer capable of speech. The voice startled Raven and Warlock; they had forgotten that the man in bad shape in front of them was also interfaced with the ship.

  “Yeah, well, I’d want it straight and I guess you would, too,” Raven replied. “Hell, I think you know your condition.”

  “Better than you. I’m pretty torn up inside and I got a punctured lung. I don’t need it spelled out for me. About the only hope I got, let’s face it, is if Star Eagle got the emergency message we sent out just before punching into the middle of nowhere and is coming to the chart position we were in when we sent it on the off chance we’ll double back. According to my calculations, even if Star Eagle did that and started off immediately, the ship wouldn’t be there until about a half hour after we get back.”

  Raven’s eyebrows went up. “Then you are doubling back. What if that other Val is backing up the one we blew to hell back there? We got lucky this once, but I ain’t sure we could pull that twice.”

  Sabatini stared at him. “You had the bright idea of doubling back in the first place.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t think it all the way through. It was the best I could come up with, all things considerin’.”

  “Well, we had no choice anyway,” Nagy told him. “We got as much of the Val ship’s remains as we could, but we’re still running pretty low, and it’s not easy to get back on the chart for home from where we wound up. If the Val’s still there, then it is and we’ll deal with it, kill or be killed. If it’s not, maybe Star Eagle will come with the Thunder. If nobody’s home or showing up, there’s nothing else to do but follow the routine.”

  Sabatini thought a moment. “Nagy, if it’s not there... you don’t have to die—exactly. Not exactly.”

  Nagy was silent a moment, then realized the nature of the offer. “I’m not too sure I want to be absorbed. The one thing I got left is my own mind, my independence. You’re not Sabatini—you’re an imitation who could mimic Sabatini exactly if you wanted to but you aren’t Sabatini much at all right now and you wouldn’t really be Arnold Nagy, either. You’d have my looks and my memories, but I’d kinda like to keep my memories. There are some things a man would rather let
die than tell. No, when I go, if I go, just stick me in the lock and set me adrift. It’s kinda fitting that way.”

  “Don’t talk that way yet!” Raven snapped. “We should all be dead right now according to all the fancy computers and brains around. If we can’t find what we need, maybe we can figure an angle. You just don’t give up, you hear?”

  “I never give up,” Arnold Nagy responded. “Isn’t that obvious by now?”

  They hadn’t punched very long the last time because of their limited fuel supply, and even though they had to retrace their path exactly in order to find the destination once again, it was a matter of long hours, not days. They were getting used to the process now.

  “Kinda funny how this muddles your brain,” Raven noted as they waited.

  “Huh?” Sabatini was half asleep and looked up, startled. “What?”

  “This ridin’ in a metal coffin. Hour after hour, day after day sometimes, with nothin’ at all to say or do. Not that I mind the company, but you get talked out in a day or two and that’s that. When you’re in the wilderness, out in the mountains or on the prairies, there’s always something. Maybe it’s not conversation, maybe not even real thinkin’—something inside you reacts and you’re at peace even in dangerous territory. Even our damned little island has some of that. You can always go off into the mountains or sit and look at the water and feel the breeze on your face. This—this is death. Worse than death. It’s my people’s vision of hell. Hawks’ nation, now, they have a real strange theology but out here is supposed to live the Lords of the Middle Dark, whose domain is defined as a great nothingness. Maybe they’re right.”

  “You could try sleeping,” Sabatini grumbled. “Even I must sleep. Only you of all the people I have ever heard of is immune from that necessity.”

  “I can sleep on a prairie filled with buffalo, or by the side of a raging river. It’s this kind of thing that gets to me.”

  “This is hardly the normal trip. Usually there are books, tapes, learning programs, computers, and much else to occupy your time or divert your mind. Some of us like being in space more than we like being with other people.”