Pirates of the Thunder (27 page)

“They’ve been getting too soft anyway,” Sabatini said. “Where the hell do you think all the ships they have came from, anyway? The early days when everybody was a pirate and everybody was being hunted. It bred a tough, lean, nasty race out here, but then they struck a deal. The generation that’s out here now has never known what it is to be what their grandparents were—outlaws. The fact that our second Val broadcast to them all that it felt free to disregard the covenant works for us. It’ll make them more careful and give them some justification for pirate outbreaks. Don’t kid yourself. The freebooters, led by Savaphoong and our rescue party, will be quick to identify and blame us for all this.”

“Master System is not stupid,” Hawks reminded him. “It will know that some collusion was necessary in order for us, comparative novices out here, to even identify the right ship and take it. Thanks to that whatever it was—memory module, records, whatever—that the Val you destroyed was able to send off, there is one logical connection between us and the freebooters. If I were Master System, I would say the hell with it. I would take my forces, turn around, and go after that connection in the hope that it would turn us in.”

“Halinachi,” Raven said nodding. “I’d go after Savaphoong fast and with everything I could muster.”

“If we are lucky, perhaps we can beat Master System to it,” Star Eagle suggested. The engines of the
Thunder
increased power.

It was several days, however, before they could get far enough out to hail Savaphoong using his encoded repeater signal. Hawks did not want to proceed directly in; that might precipitate the exact result they feared, or it might lay them open to a trap. None of them had forgotten the encounter with the Vals, or that shipload of life forms.

They sent a combination victory and warning message to the boss of Halinachi, and waited for a reply. Depending on the situation there and on just how often somebody checked the channel for messages, it might be hours or even days before they got a response. The wait was unnerving, but Master System could not act instantaneously, either. Its own forces would have to be marshalled and then dispatched with specific orders across the same kinds of distances faced by the
Thunder
and with the same time constraints and limitations.

In the meantime, Star Eagle went to work on the captured freighter. It was a bit too large, and a bit lumbering and slow, but it would do. The mysterious human interfaces, for which there had never been a logical explanation, were present here as well, although paneled over. It wasn’t the sleek, fast,
Lightning-class
fighter they might have wished for, but they could use it.

They did not have the technology and machinery to re-program the core directly, as had been done with Star Eagle, so they had to “section” it. Essentially, this was the computer equivalent of a lobotomy, in which self-awareness was sectioned off and isolated so that it could neither function alone nor control any ship’s functions, leaving the ship basically a mindless slave awaiting orders.

The engines were badly damaged, but they could be disassembled, processed through the transmuter using the pattern of the lone undamaged unit, and reconstructed. The power plant and weapons system would be completely redesigned. Nothing could make the new ship anything more than a big, ugly, ungainly freighter, but anyone attacking
this
scow would find that it had very nasty teeth.

When several days went by with no response from Savaphoong, there was serious talk about sending
Lightning
over to Halinachi to assess the situation. Hawks, however, vetoed it. “If they have taken the settlement, then they have laid a trap and are waiting. Anyone coming into that system will be stopped and searched—with plenty of fire-power behind them to back it up. We would need our whole force to have even a prayer, and we simply cannot afford to risk that. We will wait one more day, then go on. We must begin major refining of the murylium, and we must begin our main work. That comes above all else.”

But finally, almost in the last hours, word did come from Savaphoong. “Two Vals leading a human force of more than five hundred hit us by surprise five days ago. We retreated into our special redoubt barely in time, but it was several days before we risked a breakout. We launched a sufficient number of drone ships to draw off the picket force and escape with a series of very fast and dirty punches, but little is left. We need to arrange a meet. I badly need murylium, which you have in abundance.”

“Sounds like a trap to me,” Raven said thoughtfully. “It’s hard to believe anybody could escape an attack like that unless they threw in, were allowed to, or could be traced. If I was the Vals in charge I’d let ‘em go, if I felt sure I could trace ‘em and let them lead ‘em to us.”

Hawks nodded. “Nevertheless, we could use people who are at home out here and have the contacts. Doctor Clayben, if we had those people here, do you have enough equipment to verify that they are not themselves reprogrammed by mindprinter or planted duplicates?”

“I’m pretty sure I could,” the scientist replied.

“I don’t want ‘pretty sure’. I want
certainty.
Can you do it or not?”

“Nothing is certain in this business, but I am as certain as I can be.”

“All right, then. We pick a deserted system where we can control access and get in and out quickly. We will use the new ship and some maintenance robots. It’ll be a good shakedown and test for it anyway. It will carry five hundred kilos of murylium and also two fighters—the two we used for the remotes in the attack.
Lightning
will cover out of sensor but within communications range, and
Thunder
will cover
Lightning
and use the com link relays. The freighter drops the murylium on some barren rock, then we beam Savaphoong the location for the pickup and withdraw, leaving the fighters and drawing off the freighter until it forms a third point on our monitoring triangle. We will then see who shows up to take the bait, and go from there. Star Eagle, do you think you can set up a sensor to show if a ship has a locator aboard?”

“As Doctor Clayben said, nothing is certain, but I can sweep all the frequencies used by normal ships. I might not recognize it as a locator, but I will notice anything that continuously transmits location, movements, course, speed, trajectory, all the rest. Perhaps in code, but if it uses a nonstandard code of sufficient complexity, we can draw our own conclusions from that.”

“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.”