Pirates of the Thunder

by Jack L. Chalker

  “All right, then. Let us pick the system, radio the coordinates, and do it.”

  The system they chose was particularly desolate, well out from Halinachi and off the main charts. The star was a red dwarf that had either once exploded or collapsed, and its stellar system was a near-solid mass of very uneven debris. Out where the ring thinned there was a single dense line of large and irregular asteroids that seemed ready-made for the task. They picked a good one and unloaded the murylium on it, along with a small beacon beaming in the agreed-upon code. Anyone looking for it could find it, but in the vastness of even this stellar system, let alone this sector of space, the odds of happening upon it accidentally were pretty well nil.

  Savaphoong was given the location and told to make pickup within five days or the beacon, and the precious payoff, would be removed. He showed up within a day. At least, a ship appeared, punching in and almost immediately homing in on the beacon.

  “Nothing unusual in its broadcast signaling,” Star Eagle told them. “Of course, if it was a trap I would not have its monitor on now anyway, since I know its starting location. I would have them turn it on after I made contact—if I did. They may be clever enough to let this pick up go through and wait for next time.”

  Raven analyzed the scan from the Lightning’s interface. “I think I know that ship and it’s not Savaphoong. I just checked with the data banks aboard here, and I place it as one of the ships that came to our rescue back in the fight. It’s distinctive because it looks like it was put together from parts of five or six other ships that weren’t quite the same type.”

  “Want to move in?” Sabatini asked, piloting the converted freighter they now called Pirate One. “We could hail him.”

  “Negative!” Raven snapped. “That ship couldn’t possibly be one of Halinachi’s hidden ones, since it was in use when it came to help us out. Either Savaphoong is maintaining his distance from all this just in case, or that sucker’s got some nasties in it. Let him pick it up—we have our own locator in that pile, and two can play this game.” Raven had insisted on the locator device; he had suspected that something like this might happen. Although he had not personally met Savaphoong, his years of dealing with administrators and crafty upper-class leaders gave him a fair idea of what that kind of man must be like.

  “No messages in or out from the ship,” Star Eagle reported. “I am scanning multiple life forms aboard, but not in great numbers. Best guess is no more than four or five, possibly with some supporting robots. The ship is very well armed but inefficiently rebuilt. From the com circuitry, which is all I can effectively monitor without more power and less distance, I would say that this one is rigged to self-destruct if taken.”

  There were, however, no punches from any other part of the system. The ship had come in alone.

  It settled down next to the beacon and the supply, which was open and fairly unprotected except by a blanketing shield that would keep prospectors and casual sensors from homing in on it. One of the fighters risked a maneuver to aim its primary sensors and cameras at the beacon, then magnified the image.

  Three figures in bulky, black, antiquated space suits emerged, along with two animated machines that faintly resembled the practical forms of the maintenance robots on Thunder, but like the ship, they appeared to be cobbled together from spare pans of many dissimilar machines.

  Hawks thought a moment. “Open a channel to them through the locator beacon and everybody else shut up.”

  “Open.”

  “This is a recorded message from sensors on the target asteroid,” he broadcast. “We sense that this ship is not one that would be expected to pick up this cargo and have sent this message to the pirates of the Thunder. If you do not wish untoward consequences, open a communications channel using the agreed code and beam at the beacon. It will establish a remote com link with us. That is all.”

  The figures stopped dead in their tracks, the cargo almost to the hold of their ship. Clearly they didn’t expect this level of sophistication from the band of fugitives. A woman’s voice came back to him, sounding tough but nervous.

  “This is to the Thunder. Savaphoong doesn’t have a cargo bay to hold this shit,” she told them. “In the light of the destruction and hell being raised around here over this, we’re all getting together on this for now.”

  Hawks let several seconds go by before replying, enough to give the impression that he was speaking from at least several light-years away.

  “We want to keep in contact with such a group,” he finally responded. “First, we would like to know just what has been happening.”

  “They’ve gone nuts. Brought in a shipload of their subhuman troopers under two Vals and stormed Halinachi without even askin’ for a surrender. Blew three ships in Halinachi port to hell without cause, too. At the same time, robots and humans from Deep Space Command began hitting known freebooter digs all over the place. Hundreds have been killed and many ships destroyed. Tens of thousands are in hiding or have taken off into deep space. Some of us who dealt a lot with Savaphoong had a plan to meet in case the covenant ever shattered. We met there and barely had time to coordinate before they came in there, as well. Savaphoong and seven other ships, us included, are holed up now in a deep space area off any charts. We need this stuff bad. God! How much was on that ship, anyway, if you can give away a pile like this?”

  Again Hawks cautiously waited, using a terminal to time his responses exactly. He added a second to be on the safe side, but he was beginning to believe the woman.

  “A lot. Six hundred and forty tons.”

  “Six hund—tons! That’s more than all of us and our forefathers mined out here in the last five hundred years!”

  Hawks paused. “Proceed with your loading. We would like to make contact with the whole of your party in our mutual interest. Could we come in and perhaps send an emissary on your ship back to Savaphoong? No tricks. No obligation.”

  There seemed to be some closed-circuit discussion taking place. Finally the woman spoke again. “I don’t mind telling you you ain’t too popular with some of the folks in our party, me included. I don’t much like bein’ a hunted animal, and I lost a home and friends out there.”

  “I can understand that,” Hawks replied, still timing his responses. “But this was going to happen sooner or later anyway. We call ourselves pirates, but we are not. We are revolutionaries and we are at war. For years you have pretended you were free and outside the system, but now you see that you were not and have never been. Perhaps the earliest freebooters were, but you were co-opted into the system and used by it. We propose to make you and everyone else truly free. We have a way to destroy Master System. Utterly. Completely. But we need your help to do it. All of you. We need each other. You have knowledge and experience out here which we do not. We have a high level of technology and resources and an enormous transmitter power supply. You can walk away now with your share and live as hunted animals, or you can join us and be the hunter, not the prey. We can connect up later using the coded channel as long as it lasts—which might not be long at all if they are pulling out all the stops—but this way, now, is the safest way. You cannot trust a rendezvous with us. We cannot trust one with you.”

  He waited quite a while for an answer. “How do we know we can trust the one you send?” she asked finally. “I doubt if you are Master System or other than who you say you are, but there is some thought that you might be insane.”

  “Soft,” Sabatini sneered. “See what I mean?”

  This time Hawks did not pause. “Because I am much closer than you think—we all are—and we have two fighters from the Thunder covering you at this very moment. We could have taken you out at any time, but we didn’t. We need contact, not hatred and distrust and suspicion of one another. That’s Master System’s game. Still, if you say no, we will let you go and try to make a deal if the channel is still open, although we obviously can’t stick around here too long.”

  She took a deep breath as Star
Eagle brought up the power on one of the fighters so that it would show clearly on her sensors. Now she knew that the Thunder could send an unmanned fighter to follow her ship anywhere. She would have no way of knowing that the Thunder’s fighters, though fast and lethal and very versatile, had no interstellar capability whatsoever, that they were designed only to act as a screen and outer defense for the big ship.

  “All right,” she said at last. “Savaphoong said there was a guy named Nagy he knew and trusted. We’ll take him.”

  Hawks sighed. “I wish you could, but he died of injuries sustained in the battle against the first Val. He destroyed it, but it got him.”

  “Send me,” Warlock said. “I can take care of myself in that kind of situation.”

  I bet you could, Hawks thought. He was playing this by ear, really. Sabatini would be a safe choice, considering his attributes, but while he was more than capable of dealing with these people, he was hardly the sort of personality to deal with Savaphoong.

  “I could go,” China suggested. “What threat could a blind girl be to them, and I can talk with the likes of Savaphoong. He sounds like a primitive-wilderness version of my father.”

  “No, even if Star Eagle would allow it, which I doubt, you would be particularly vulnerable to the rougher elements out there and unable to defend yourself. Other than myself, I can think of only one person well qualified for this—perhaps better qualified than I. And while he’s never seen Savaphoong, Savaphoong’s most certainly seen him.”

  “I knew it, Chief.” Raven sighed. “You ain’t never gonna forgive me for that Mississippi River trick. Still,” he reflected, “I wonder if the old boy got away with any cigars?”

  Hawks did not speak again until Raven was actually down and Lightning, piloted by Warlock and Chow Dai, had pulled away.

  “Star Eagle tells me that the locator is functioning well,” he told the others. “I want Lightning to follow at near-maximum distance. Do not enter an off-the-chart location. Understand?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Chow Dai replied. “You do not want us to actually find them, just find out where they are.”

  “Good girl. You haven’t had much to do up to now, but all of a sudden you are our lead and we are depending on you. When the locator stops moving for longer than a fuel stop, send a message back up the line. Pirate One, you will then close and rendezvous with Lightning when you think it’s safe. We will monitor you from one chart position to the rear until we’re certain that they are actually where they intend to go. Now we only have to hope they don’t give Raven a hypno he can’t beat. He knows about the transponder in the murylium ore, and we can’t get that out of his head now.”

  Now aboard the freebooter ship, Raven was able with a little fiddling to find their intercom frequency. He was delighted at the start to hear only female voices aboard, although he was also suspicious of that. These kind of people, living out here like this—who knew how kinky they might have gotten? Love between brave warriors of his own nation was not unheard of, but his people’s culture kept it well within bounds and mostly out of sight. Without a real culture of their own, well, he couldn’t see himself out here in the midst of nowhere for life with just three guys and no girls unless the guys would do just fine.

  But the situation was worse than he thought. When two of the women removed their bulky suits, he found himself staring. One of them had webbed, clawed fingers and fiat, long, webbed feet and no hair, only blue-green scales. She also didn’t have much of a nose, and she seemed to have two sets of eyelids, one transparent, that didn’t blink in unison; and those two funny-looking holes on the side might be ears or might not. When this woman turned, he saw what looked like a set of small fins running down the back of her head and neck to culminate in a fairly large one growing out of her backbone. Great figure for the most part—but no breasts at all. He wondered if she laid eggs.

  The other woman was stretching out a long, thick tail that came straight out of her backbone. It explained why she walked oddly—that and the fact that her enormously thick and muscular legs tapered down to huge clawed feet. Her arms, too, were similarly built, ending in large clawed hands that looked able to crush rock. Her gray skin was smooth but leathery, and she, too, did not have any hair. She did have breasts—very small and very firm—with the longest nipples he’d ever seen. Her head was large but in correct proportion to the body, and at least looked human, despite a nose so flat that its tiny flaps moved back and forth as she breathed. She saw him looking at her and grinned, which removed all sense of humanity from her appearance. He’d never seen anyone with teeth like that except mountain lions.

  Colonials! He was finally getting his first look at colonials, and although he had thought he was prepared for them, he now realized he hadn’t been at all. Instantly he understood what Nagy had meant by the “ultimate price.” To become one of them, like that... forever, because one full shot through was all a person could take. These, however, had been born that way. He was the monster to them. Except for Sabatini or whatever it was, who got what it needed instantly, one could be changed into one of them but still be oneself inside. How would he feel waking up like one of them, only with his current behavior and standards and mindset? They were human, inside and out. He would become a monster to himself.

  Was this what Nagy had to face? he asked himself. Was he born and raised happily as one of them and then forced by circumstance or duty to become a monster—an Earth-human? He wondered how far devotion to duty and mission should go, and he realized the answer. That was what Nagy had been talking about.

  “I’m too dried out,” the scaly woman said in a very high-pitched but still human tone. “Those suits damn near kill me. I got to get into some water for a soak.” The accent, too, was odd, but he could understand her. It was very convenient to one like him that almost everyone in space had to speak both English and Russian. Hawks had told him that it was because those two nations had been first into space and in ancient times convention dictated international means of travel used the language of the first. He did not speak Russian, but thanks to North American Center, his English was just fine.

  “I’m sorry for staring at you,” he said sincerely. “I’m pretty new at this game, and the only folks I’ve met out here so far have been my own kind. I’ll get used to it. I got used to white men; I can get used to most anything.”

  She looked surprised. “There are truly white men on your world? An albino race?” Her accent was clipped and very distinctive, but not possible to place. After eight-hundred-plus years and differently shaped mouths and tongues, the accents out here were probably unique anyway, he guessed.

  He chuckled. “No, just a figure of speech. They just would never stand for callin’ themselves pinkmen. I’m Raven, by the way.”

  “I am Butar Killomen,” she responded. “And that is Takya Mudabur. You have just one name, Mister Raven?”

  “Not Mister—just Raven. If I gave you my full and true name in my native tongue, you’d break your jaw trying to repeat it.” At that moment the engines kicked into action and the whole thing sounded like Lightning had after it had been cannibalized and in a fight. The creaks and groans were not at all reassuring. “People are people as far as this business is concerned. You sure this thing can get us there in one piece?”

  “It is very old, but sound. You get used to it after a while.”

  A third woman came down the ladder as the scaled woman went into a compartment. If the first two lacked hair, it had all wound up on the third one. She looked like somebody wearing a lion suit, Raven thought, except that the mane stuck out all over the place and even the hands were covered with thick orange-and-yellow fur. Her walk was catlike but not extraordinary, although he would have expected it to be. Her feet and even her hands, while they had fingers and opposable thumbs, looked more like paws than hands, and she had six small breasts in two even rows down her middle. Her face, too, was covered in fur, out of which peered two jet-black eyes, a broad nose covered with
fine, short hair, and a seemingly lipless mouth. “I am Dura Panoshka,” she said in a heavy guttural accent, her speech sounding more like a growl. “You will come with me to meet the captain.” He didn’t know what to expect when he reached the bridge and saw the captain of a crew like this, but he resolved he would no longer be surprised.

  He was wrong again, as usual.

  8. RECONNAISSANCE MISSION

  “FIRST YOU WILL STRIP OFF ALL YOUR CLOTHING,” Lion Girl ordered, “so that we may scan your clothes and space suit. If we find anything suspicious there, they—and you—will go one way while we go another.”

  She took his reluctance for modesty. “Do not think you are God’s gift to women or something. No one will care here.”

  The truth was, he was embarrassed, but not for the reason she thought. Fact was, it was going to be painfully obvious that none of these women turned him on in the least. None, anyway, until he met the captain, and she presented other difficulties.

  The woman in the captain’s chair looked exotically Earth-human, and she was built like a sex bomb if he’d ever seen one. Gorgeous, sexy, sensual, perfectly proportioned—you name it and she had it. Her hair was short in a pageboy style with bangs in front that only heightened the beauty of her features. In fact, she’d be a real male fantasy if she hadn’t been just ninety centimeters tall.

  When he looked closely he saw other, less human, differences. Her dark eyes looked human, but when she moved her head so they caught a light, they shone like cat’s eyes, and her ears were oddly shaped, almost shell-like with a point at the upper end. There were also two small protuberances, like tiny ball-shaped horns, barely visible in her hair. Her complexion seemed extremely pale, yet one could catch hints of almost every color of the rainbow if one stared long enough. The fact that she was also smoking a cigar that seemed almost a third as big as she was didn’t help matters any, but it certainly attracted Raven’s interest.