Pirates of the Thunder

by Jack L. Chalker

  He nodded. It figured that somebody, like Savaphoong would find a way to take his world with him.

  “The others are San Cristobal, Novovladivostok, Chunhoifan, Indrus, Bahakatan, and Sisu Moduru. I know them all from the past. I shot it out with San Cristobal’s skipper a few years back. I was glad to see he got it back in running condition. Truth was, I’d lost track of most of them until we crossed paths at the fallback positions.” She paused for a moment. “I had hoped that we might have seen a couple more before we had to run here.”

  There was no official leader—these were proud and independent people—but Savaphoong certainly had the commanding voice among them, and few would challenge him. His contacts might well be valid, including many on colonial worlds, and he was the best prepared for an undertaking like this.

  “Can you plug me in to Savaphoong’s ship?” Raven asked. “We might as well break the news right off. I think anything I have, to say should be said to him first before one of your trigger-happy friends takes to blasting us just on general principles.”

  Fernando Savaphoong was right up on his bridge for the arrival of the Kaotan. He was happy to hear of the load they had aboard and a bit less thrilled to hear of their passenger, but he agreed to talk.

  “Sir, my name’s Raven and I was at your place with Arnold Nagy not too long ago.”

  Savaphoong remembered quite a lot about Raven, including things he shouldn’t have known.

  Quickly, Raven filled the other in on what had happened so far—the death of Arnold Nagy, and at least as much of their purpose and goals as he’d given Ikira. Savaphoong listened patiently, then noted, “I can see why you precipitated all the action. Very well, Senor Raven, what do you think you are going to do now?”

  “That’s not the question. I’m stuck here unless some deal is made or I’m dropped at an agreed pickup point and you know it. It seems to me the question is what are you going to do? The cozy relationship between the freebooters and Master System is gone. Every freebooter is a fugitive now, because they’ll try every one they find until they find us. Those caught with no other value will either be disposed of or put through the mill and changed into a worshipful supporter of the System. Face it—in a few days, a few weeks at most, you won’t even be able to risk contacting or trusting ships and people you’ve known for years. We are the only ones you can ever fully feel comfortable around. We want to make a deal. We need you, and I think you need us. Put me on to all of them and I’ll give it straight.”

  It took about an hour of radio diplomacy on Savaphoong’s part to get the others calmed down enough to listen, and when they did that’s all they agreed to do—listen.

  Once more Raven introduced himself and described the situation. “You have no place else to go, no other life that has any profit or future,” he told them. “You cannot trust anyone, not here right now. You can’t go back to your old free-lancing deals with the colonial worlds without knowing that Master System and its forces will be out gunning for you. You might make it several times, maybe last a year or two, but eventually you and Master System will have a meeting because there are only so many colonial worlds.”

  “We could go off the charts, into regions even Master System hasn’t gone,” someone suggested. “We can start over again and build ourselves back up with or without colonial support.”

  “Wishful thinking and you know it, if you stop and think a minute,” Raven retorted. “It would be rougher than you know, and all guesswork until you formed your own charts. Probably at least half of you would run dry somewhere in a hole like this one and never be heard of again. The other half—well, you might scrimp by, but there’ll be no illegal shipyards, no big transmuters, no access to technology and supercomputing. Many of you are one of a kind out here, and when you die out, that’s it. Some of you might have enough numbers to make a really tiny colony somewhere on some grubby rock, if you can find one that’ll support human life and if you can survive the wilderness there. That’ll go until your ships break down for lack of repair or out of sheer ignorance by your children and grandchildren, condemning them to be new colonials and devolve into savagery and primitivism. You have no future and very short lives now, unless you team up with us.”

  “I ain’t sure how much future I got teamin’ up with the likes of you,” someone else commented. “You know how many people they killed so far because of you? And that’s only the beginning. And the colonial worlds depend on us for murylium to keep a jump ahead of Master System. You come out here, with no space experience, and in a real short time you destroy a whole way of life.”

  Raven grinned. “You mean we came out and in no time flat we destroyed your neat little system? Eleven people, nine of ‘em space rookies, and they destroy your whole system? Well, then, maybe we can knock over the big system, huh?”

  “If you’re tryin’ to be funny, I got some real slow ways for you to die,” someone said.

  “No! Let him go on!” another urged. “He’s making some sense here.”

  That was encouraging. “We didn’t destroy your system, we just gave you what you always said was most dear—liberation. You can get mad and yell and scream, but any of you with any sense out there will have to realize that the freebooters were as much a colonial unit as any of the worlds you served under Master System’s thumb as long as you were useful to it and easily thrown away when no longer needed. You were its unlisted colony, and you provided a service. We ended that. If you want it back, I’m sure you can just trot back to Master System, let its machines see how nice and loyal you are, and it’ll stick you back in business with no illusions. You either do that or you join the rebellion and instead of taking shots at each other you can take shots at Master System. Colonial loyalists allowed to play with antique spaceships—or freedom-fighting rebels. That’s your real choice, and your only one. If you can’t see that, you’re blind or crazy and no good to us anyway. If you can and want to go back to playing footsie with Master System, we sure as hell don’t want you. But if you want real freedom, if you want to win, we need you bad.”

  After all the nasty carping on the channel, the silence was almost eerie. Finally a man’s low, gruff voice spoke. “If I really thought we had any chance of winning, I’d throw in, but I just can’t believe it.”

  “That’s all I can offer, but it’s more than you think—a chance,” Raven told him. “There are no guarantees and I can virtually promise that many will die in this, or worse. We might have to—pay the ultimate price. We might have to transmute ourselves, or sacrifice ourselves for others. I intend to minimize that last possibility when it comes to myself, but I recognize it. And we are going to have to work in teams to get it done rather than go strictly lone wolf, since any major failure has the potential to compromise all of us. Now, that’s a heady brew for the likes of freebooters, but that’s the way it is.”

  “Too steep,” someone commented. “I’d rather chase and run from the bastards.”

  “Ah, but you haven’t heard the important part,” Raven responded. “You don’t do this for nothing. You do this for a payoff—and a big one. You see, once you’re in, you’re in. I put this in terms of bullets and a big gun, but that’s not really right. See, this bullet don’t kill Master System, it just makes it into what it was at the start—a nice, obedient machine that takes orders. Takes orders from whoever gets it. Now, you think about that. Whoever does this all the way gets to rule Master System the way Master System rules most everybody else. The power it has, and all the loyalty it has, and all that it knows and can do, passes up to others—human beings. If you’re in, you’re in all the way. Do your job, don’t screw up or get killed, and you name your own price and I mean it. Anything you want! Your own world, your own fleet of big ships, all just the way you might have dared dream it could be. It’s the magic totem for real, or whatever your own legends call it. You help us, you last it out, and you get one wish for anything that’s within Master System’s power—and you get Master System off your back,
too.”

  That was something they could understand, and it was staggering.

  “I must tell you that I am favorably inclined to go their way,” Savaphoong’s voice came to them. “I can exist for the rest of my life without them, I am fairly certain, and at minimal risk—I have made provisions for this sort of eventuality. Still, if there is no risk, there is no gain, and if I refuse now and then they do it, I will have no profit, no share in the rewards. If they fail, then I lose it all including what might have been, and I admit this. But if they succeed—and I know the background of one or two and would not count them out—then I want my share of godhood.”

  There was a long period of silence, then suddenly everybody seemed to try to talk at once, making any rational communication impossible. There was nothing to do but wait for it to die down.

  Finally Raven was able to make himself heard again.

  “Now, this shouldn’t be anything hasty. Each ship should get off for a while and discuss it, captains and crew. I want no single individual in on this who doesn’t want to be there. I am absolutely certain we can combine crews and ships—those who say yes, those who say no. This is the only shot you get, though. If you’re out, you’re out. If you’re in, you will be in all the way or we will eliminate you without a second thought. Only those who come with me will get the details and the planning. There is nothing personal for those who refuse, but any who fail to take our offer now will be treated later as our enemy. We’ll have to do it that way.”

  “I don’t like it,” a woman’s voice said. “We have only his word that this shit even exists. We have no proof that he’s spinning more than a fairy tale, a pipe dream, to lure us into their service permanently and then get rid of us when we’ve served our purpose, who the hell are they who made this discovery? They come here from the Mother World and maybe they believe it, but who’s to say it’s true? All we’re doing is becoming their damned servants. How come this big secret gets kept for nine hundred-plus years and suddenly falls into the hands of a bunch of yokels?”

  “You may be right, Meg,” Savaphoong agreed, “but, as I say, I know some of these people. Their scientific brain is perhaps the smartest human being alive, and he has all his data. We believes it. Others, like friend Raven here, are Center people, security people who had the best that the system can offer and paths to power. They gave it up, and they are not all mad. The best example is Master System itself, which is so outraged and so panicky that it has mobilized all its resources to find and get these people. You think Master System would collapse the covenant just to track down pirates, even very slick ones? What are they to its domains? What are the pirates of the Thunder in the larger scheme of things? What is one ship full of murylium to Master System? It is pulling out all its stops, abandoning all its conventions, to go after a tiny band of mere human beings. Oh, yes, my friends—what they say is true. They know the way to fry the brains of Master System, even if they now lack the means.”

  The logic was compelling to most of them, but so was the corollary. “What’s to keep us from doing it, then, without them! We got mindprinters here, and hypnoscans, and all the rest, and we got this Raven. Why throw in with them at all?”

  Raven was prepared for that one. His rehearsal with Ikira was paying big dividends. “Simple,” he told them. “I can tell you what we’re after, but not how to use them. Just having them ain’t enough. What good is having bullets and guns if you don’t have a target? I don’t know where Master System is, or what it looks like, or anything else. Do you?”

  “Then we’re no worse off than you,” somebody pointed out.

  “Oh, but you are. We are an odd group, but we were carefully picked. When we get what we’re looking for, at least one of us will know where and how to use it. I’m not certain how—whether it’s a conditional hypno or deep mindprint or something else—but it’s there. You can trust us, or Master System—I leave it to you whether you want to trust the word of a machine or of human beings. Nothing whatever, though, can reveal the target and the means of loading the gun until we have the bullets. That way, it’s safe for all of us.”

  “You talk like you all are working for somebody,” noted the suspicious lady. “Who?”

  Raven smiled, although they couldn’t see it. “Somebody with a lot of knowledge, but still somebody who can’t get these things themselves—or use ‘em. I don’t know who or what it is, and I’m not the least bit concerned with them except for the help they give us until we have all that we seek. Then we might have, well, a difference of opinion. I’m not concerned. We will have what is needed. The bargaining chips will be all ours, and, just as importantly, if we are tough enough and smart enough and clever enough to do what no one else has ever even dreamed of doing, then we can deal with anyone who might try to take it away from us. If we cannot, then we don’t deserve the rewards.”

  “I believe, my friends, that all that can be said on this has been said,” Savaphoong put in. “I suggest we now take Raven’s advice and discuss it among our own people. We are not that pressed for a decision as monumental as this one. Let us sleep on it. It is fourteen twenty-two. At twenty-four hundred, in a bit less than ten hours, we will again take this up, and at that time we will vote and make up our minds. This is reasonable, yes?”

  “All right with me.” Raven sighed. “I’m almost gettin’ used to boredom.”

  Ikira Sukotae had been back with her crew for quite a while, leaving Raven alone on the bridge with his thoughts. All this potential, he couldn’t help thinking. It’s almost like magic how it all falls together. I wonder how many will come? He knew better than to believe they all would. Savaphoong, the opportunist, was a sure bet if only because he figured in the end to be one of the ones giving all the orders, not just one wish as some kind of payoff. He would have to be watched and, perhaps, eventually controlled or dealt with more severely, but until then he would be invaluable. He and Clayben were worlds apart in knowledge and genius, but, deep down, they were two of a kind.

  Who would have thought it? he mused, still not quite believing how far they had already come. Raven, born in a small village by a quiet river in the high mountains, raised up first to Security, and with all the cynicism of that job and the knowledge of what was true and real in the universe that bred such cynicism—Raven, the revolutionary, the overthrower of worlds. Quite a leap for Spotted Horse’s little boy, running alongside the warriors as they went to the hunt and dreaming brave deeds. He sighed. That was a long time ago; another life, really, and he’d long ago buried that little kid and his comfortable dreams of honor and glory.

  His honor had been tossed aside the moment he’d learned that the whole thing was a lie, that they were ruled not by a creator spirit but by some big damned machine. It had made the concept of glory meaningless, as well, for what was the glory in dying not for one’s people but for the purpose of a museum exhibit for a master machine that didn’t even give a damn about the exhibit?

  Center’s wonders had delighted him, but at first the people there had disgusted him. Corrupt, selfish, as contemptuous of their own people and their customs and ways as they were of the system they served. There really hadn’t been much choice; you either became like them or you went back home and lived a lie. It had been easy to be a cynic.

  Yet now he began to wonder if that little boy was truly as dead as he had thought. He was still no visionary, no ambitious revolutionary with a grand dream, but he was alive again, alive as he had only felt in the past when he was back home, back in the mountains and the plains, the field that was a part of him. He hadn’t really thought like this in many years, except for brief times alone camped out on the prairies with just his horse and a small fire and the looming shapes of the purple snow-clad mountains in the distance—and those moments had been very brief indeed.

  Somehow it seemed ironic that he should find that little boy way out here, far from his people and his beloved north country, far from anything he held to be important and dear. Were you t
here all the time, boy, or did I imagine your return?

  Ikira returned to the bridge, breaking his reverie, and he nodded to her. “You made your own decision yet?” he asked. “It’s almost time.”

  “We talked it over, yeah,” she told him. “It wasn’t easy, you know. It’s not easy for any of us.”

  “And?”

  “We got more colonial experience than any two of these other ships put together. We figured your odds, and we figured ours on our own out here under new conditions. None of us really have any homes or lives except this ship, but we have dreams. We’re in, Raven.”

  He clapped his hands together and grinned. “All right! Now let’s see what the score is. Plug me in and we’ll get goin’ on this.”

  The vote was by no means unanimous, but it was better than he had thought at the start. In addition to Savaphoong’s Espiritu Luzon, which, Raven suspected, had only one vote that counted and was thus easy to convince, San Cristobal, Chunhoifan, Indrus, and Bahakatan were in, with the exception of some crewmember dissidents who would leave. The majority of Novovladivostok and Sisu Moduru, including their owner-captains, decided against—including both the woman with grave doubts and the tough-sounding man with the questions. Some of their crew, however, also disagreed, and a swap was arranged.

  That added, in one swoop five experienced pilots, ships, and crews to the pirate fleet, along with numerous crew members. Those who would not or could not trust Raven and his company transferred to the two ships that had voted against. The few on board the two holdouts who wanted in transferred to the ships of their choice, at least as a temporary measure. Maintenance robots on Kaotan managed to carve up portions of raw murylium ore from the hold and mount them on skids and shift those portions to the Novovladivostok and the Sisu Moduru.