Pirates of the Thunder (29 page)

“But this god has a weak spot. It’s tried, successfully until now, to keep it a secret for nine hundred years, but it’s not a secret anymore. That’s why we’re out here. That’s what it’s all about.”

She was interested. “And you come from the Mother World out here to do your battles?”

He wasn’t certain how much to reveal, but he felt this was a good test of what he was supposed to do when they rendezvoused with the others. “We have—sort of a gun,” he told her. “The gun will only fire a special bullet made for it, and only five were made—the exact number needed to fire into old Master System’s guts. Master System knows about the gun and the bullets, but can’t stop them from being there and maybe being used. The only thing it could do was to take those bullets and scatter them out into the galaxy, putting them into the hands of people important enough to protect them but ignorant of what they really were. We think we have the gun—in a sense, anyway—and we know where four of the five bullets are. We are not alone in this—very powerful enemies of Master System instigated this whole thing. We mean to beg, borrow, steal, or in any other way get those bullets, and track down the fifth, load up our gun, and blow the damned thing’s brains out.”

She nodded, listening intently, then asked an unexpected question. “Why do you do that? Slip in and out of bad grammar and ignorant expressions into excellent educated English with words like ‘instigated’.”

He shrugged. “My natural self is the coarse one, but I adjust to the company I’m keeping. That’s experience.”

“Uh huh. Somehow I think you’ve got more education alone than the sum total of all the people I ever met. What was your job, Raven—before all this, I mean?”

“Field agent. Security for North American Center, if you know where that is.”

She shook her head. “I have no idea, but I understand the job and the terms. You are probably a very dangerous man under all that, Raven. I will have to keep that in mind.”

“We’re all dangerous, Captain. All hunted, driven people are dangerous. You should know that. We’re just dangerous in different ways. We got one guy who’s the human equivalent of Master System and about as scary. We got a delicate little blind girl who could redesign Master System in her head. And we got one woman, born low and in primitive ignorance, brutalized all her life, tattooed all over and her tongue torn out, who maybe don’t understand a word of what we’re sayin’, but don’t let her get the idea you’re our enemy. Me, I got a lovely lady partner with wonderful diction when she wants to use it and a fine intellect who’s goin’ nuts ‘cause she hasn’t killed nobody in months. And that’s only the half of us. I guess we’re dangerous all right, but the whole question is, dangerous to who? I think you ought’a know. You’re still here, a survivor, with a ship and whatever freedom that brings.”

“And you’re curious as to how all this ship and crew came about, I expect. I guess you noticed you’re the only man aboard.”

“It was kinda obvious.”

“I never thought of my world as particularly rough or nasty, but compared to most I’ve seen since it is. Real mild climate over most of it, but it’s rich and full of predators and game. It was said we were created small because big people could dominate and ruin the system while ones like us would keep it—and us—stable. It’s pretty hard to develop much when every day you have to go out and get what you need in a big world where everything’s either out to get you or might trample you without even noticing. Very few people grow old there, so the few that do are venerated as leaders because they are tougher and smarter than the rest just by doing it. To make sure we survive, the men—about a head taller than me—are built like rocks and solid muscle. They’re built to be hunters and gatherers and warriors, but they still die young. The women are basically breeders. We can’t help it—it’s chemical. Just get close to a man and we’re in the bushes with ‘em. We’re breeding kids constantly just to keep up. No muscles, no speed, no weight—we’re pretty defenseless and dependent on the men for food and protection. We have some defenses, but no offense, you might say.”

He nodded, thinking of China. She’d understand perfectly, only she didn’t even have defenses—unless one counted Star Eagle, who was, indeed, formidable. “Defenses?” he prompted.

She nodded. “The things to stay alive so you keep breeding. It fades bit by bit when you can’t breed any more. I can remain so still that the keenest ears could not hear me. I can mask any scent by secreting odors that match my surroundings. Right now that’d be cigar smoke, so I won’t demonstrate. My hearing has five or six times the range of any other race I have known, and while my daylight vision is weak I can see in almost pure darkness and into the heat ranges where I have found most others cannot. This is because, as a race, we dwell mostly underground. And, almost at will, I can do
this.”

He watched, still thinking about the rest. She could see the infrared spectrum, and hear perhaps better than a dog or even a mouse. But what was most remarkable was what she was demonstrating now. It was
fast,
too, amazingly so. She was sitting on a red blanket, her arms resting on a gray seat, and, incredibly, her skin faded into the tones of the blanket—even the weave—while her arms adjusted for the gray of the chair and even the gaps in between. She was hardly invisible, particularly when you knew she was there, but he bet she could become as good as invisible in her native element.

“I can also mimic almost everyone or anything I have heard before,” she told him in a very male voice that was almost exactly like his own. “That way I can, if still discovered or pinned down too long, imitate something bigger and nastier than whatever is hunting me.” She shifted back to the hard female voice she’d been using, and Raven now understood that it was a deliberate
persona,
to make her sound and therefore seem bigger than she really was. It was also clear why, coming from a mild climate, nakedness was normal; any clothing would nullify most of the coloration defense and perhaps have a more distinctive scent as well.

“Nothing offensive, as you see,” she noted. “Oh, I’ve killed flies and bugs, but I haven’t even the arm strength for spears or bows, let alone lifting and aiming a common pistol. But
here,
in this chair, on this ship, with that interface there and the weapons under my control, I could destroy a city.” She said that almost as if she really wanted to, and suddenly he wasn’t sure if he was talking to someone like China or a miniature Manka Warlock. A little of both, he decided.

“But you didn’t grow up in a hunter-gatherer society any more than I did,” Raven guessed. “You would never even have dreamed that any of this existed if you did.”

“In a way, you’re right. I was no nobility, but I had the right bloodlines, and as a child I think I was more curious and inquisitive than girls were supposed to be. The Elders decided that my mind could handle the wonders and mysteries of a Center, and I was selected while still very young to go there. I didn’t have a choice. Oh, I was still breeding stock—I was just supposed to breed better, smarter candidates for the Center in the future. They didn’t educate us —they kept us amused in the lap of luxury like permanent spoiled children. We were all smarter than they thought girls could be, though, so we were able to do some learning on our own. Even if you got caught cold at some terminal with a lecture and display on some complicated subject, all you had to do was act dumb and cute and ignorant and they never caught on or cared. Why they didn’t became real clear after a while. When you reached puberty they ran you through a mindprinter, and you just weren’t curious or inquisitive anymore. Then you went into the harem, where the men of the Elect visited, and soon you were knee-deep in babies, locked in for thirty or more years of that, and when you couldn’t produce any more you just kept helping run the place until you fell apart or died.”

“A great waste, although I can see the computer logic of the culture. But it didn’t happen to you.”

“No. I found out early what the situation was, and I was lucky enough to bump into a boy a bit older than me and just beginning to have the feelings, if you know what I mean. He was the son of a big man at Center—chief deputy administrator, in fact—and about as spoiled and arrogant as anyone could imagine. But I played to his urges and his ego and his arrogance for all I was worth, and he got to thinking of me as his. Just the idea that
his
girl would be thrown into a communal harem made him boil, and he was in the right spot to do something about it. I admit I lowered myself as far as I could go—no matter what his wish, I granted it, no matter what his fantasy, I played to it. And when my time came, he got me exempted. Several of the big shots had small private harems. Exclusivity is a perk of the powerful. He was in the tough time for him, when his education was intensive and would determine his place in the future, so he needed a servant and housekeeper and somebody to screw when he needed to. He didn’t need babies yet, so he got me a drug that kept me wanting it all the time but prevented conception. And while he was out all day, I’d use his terminals and his books and his lessons to give myself a real education. Hell, he didn’t even know I could
read,
and if he had it would’ve been the mindprinter in a minute, but it never even entered his head.”

“There are a lot of cultures like that even on Earth,” Raven told her, “and many more that differ only by degrees. Usually it disappears at the Center level, or becomes tolerable, but the fact that we still have ‘harem’ in the languages says it all, I guess.”

In fact, however, Ikira had seen this as the pinnacle of existence because, for her, there was nowhere else to go but down. Then about a year and a half into this existence, her “husband” had taken her with him on what was something of a trade mission. Like the vast bulk of colonial worlds, her planet’s Centers required a small but dependable supply of murylium for their own needs, mostly research and medical. Needless to say, one did not get this from Master System but in spite of it, and that was where freebooter trade came in. Her world had no spaceports and only a few skimmers for Center use, but freebooters could —and did—land in the damndest places. What the freebooters wanted was some sort of access to the state-of-the-art technology that the Centers represented, including, quite often, the working out of practical problems that were beyond the capabilities of their own computers. They traded murylium for these services.

Most Centers, however, were outfitted identically; only in the few whose very smart and frustrated chief administrators worked clandestinely was there any competitive edge. To keep freebooters from going off to another Center or even another world meant treating them like royalty and anticipating their needs. The chief deputy had decided that his favorite son was ready to experience the real travails of having to deal with this sort of person, and sonny boy never went anywhere without his concubine.

To Ikira, it was an experience that turned her entire world view upside down and inside out. She had known there were other worlds and other forms of human beings, but nothing had prepared her for the reality.

There were three of them, and two were women. First of all, they were
enormous,
giants compared to even the largest men of her own race and world. Second, while they were a bit rough and coarse and not really all that pretty, they looked very much the way Ikira’s own race looked except for the size, and they had strong personalities that were in no way deferential to the man with them. In fact, it soon became clear that one of the women was the captain, and that the
man
worked for
her.
To Ikira, seeing her own men, arrogant big shots, acting not merely civil but downright servile to these women whose services they needed more than the women needed them was another revelation.

With a lot of guts, considering what might have happened had she been discovered by her own, she sneaked away one day and approached the female freebooter captain privately. Captain Smokevski was more than touched by Ikira’s plight and impressed with her intelligence and nerve. The captain was none too pleased with the culture she was doing business with, but that Center had a genius with an uncannily accurate system for locating new murylium deposits. Now, at last, she had a way of thumbing her nose at this sexist society. This time Ikira’s diminutive size and defense skills came in very handy, and Smokevski managed to smuggle the tiny woman onto the shuttle at take-off. Ikira was in space and free of her culture.

Weightlessness was even more of a wonder to her. She could almost fly, and she could move and even lift things that the strongest male of her own race couldn’t budge. It took months to hunt down a small enough pressure suit, but once she had it she could do maintenance in places too small for others to reach, and her long, tiny fingers and exceptional sight and hearing made her a whiz at doing jury-rigged repairs on equipment that often had to be kept going with nothing but a prayer. She was interested in virtually everything and learned all she could. Of equal import to her future, she found that she quickly lost the sexual compulsions she had lived with since puberty. In her face, the arousal was strictly chemical, and without males of her own kind around, she simply did not feel the urge. Not that she was sexless, but she was in now in total control.

It was a story of both liberation and compensation. Her size a major liability, she simply worked six times harder and did everything six times better. She learned how to think on her feet and be taken as an equal in exotic and gigantic foreign locales. She began to make her own deals and, in one of the apparently not uncommon fights over a murylium claim that wound up in ship-to-ship combat, she had taken over for a captain who’d lost her guts—and won. She parlayed her reputation and profits from that into an ancient, creaking hulk that she redesigned and restored herself, with help from the crew of that fighting ship who’d left their captain, as well, and it became the
Kaotan.
The other two were Dura Panoshka, the Lion Girl, and Butar Killomen, who’d met Raven when he had boarded. Takya had joined later; she’d had trouble keeping jobs or berths because of her need for regular immersions to keep her skin from drying out. But there were very few freebooters who could deal with the water races, and Ikira had seen the potential for information there that was virtually untapped. Takya had been both useful and dependable, and worth the extra weight and expense of a true water-based rather than chemical bath system and all the problems it entailed.