Pirates of the Thunder (5 page)

Suddenly there were strange clicking, whirring, and beeping sounds through their intercom sets.

“It’s on all frequencies! Radios off for now!” China yelled over the din. “Count to a hundred and check each hundred until it’s quiet again!”

It was eerie enough to be in the ghostly dark bowels of the strange ship, but in silence it was even worse. Hawks took some comfort from seeing Raven and Raven’s light, but he couldn’t help wondering about China. Deaf and dumb because of this, like the others, she was also blind and now completely cut off.

At each check the horrible sounds were so painful that none could stand to keep his or her radio on for more than the briefest moment. The number of hundred counts seemed to go on forever.

Outside the hatch, China waited in a world of silent darkness, hand in hand with Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman on either side of her, that touch the only reality she had other than the breathing sounds from her suit. She had never felt so totally helpless, and her complete dependence on the others was only now being driven home to her. She didn’t like the feeling at all. Worse, she could not understand what was happening, or why. Nobody, not even the researchers who’d theorized all this, had actually touched one of these ships. Nine centuries had passed since humans had been even cargo on this ship; no human being had ever set foot in here as an independent agent.

Suddenly a million possibilities presented themselves to her mind. A power mismatch. Inverted circuitry that would cause a loop and ultimately a burnout. Or, perhaps, the great ship and its complexities was simply too much for Star Eagle to handle or comprehend, much as his mind was actually alien to hers.

Keeping hold of China’s left hand, Cloud Dancer turned to look back into the darkness of the immense cavity. Suddenly she gasped and squeezed that hand tighter, then tried to poke one of the others. Koll, finally, turned and saw what Cloud Dancer saw.

Behind them a snake of lights was growing, writhing, twisting, going ever outward, upward, downward. It took them a moment to realize what was happening.

All the floor lights on the catwalks were being illuminated, section by section. The ancient cavity that had transported uncounted thousands or perhaps millions was soon lit up like a festival, dimly but beautifully, as far as any eye could see.

They tried their radios. There was still a lot of static and odd background noise, but the sounds were no longer unbearable.

“Anybody on?” Reba Koll called. Her voice crackled a bit, but it carried all right.

“I’m in!” Hawks’s voice sounded even worse.

“We are here!” the Chow sisters chimed in. “Is it not beautiful?”

“All of us are going to die,” Carlo Sabatini wailed.

Cloud Dancer kept nudging China until the girl finally let go and activated her radio. One by one they all checked in.

“Still nothing much down here,” Raven reported worriedly. Cloud Dancer told them about the lights.

“Nothing like that here, but I’m feeling something. A low vibration ,” Hawks told them. “What about up there?”

“Faint. Very faint,” China responded in a voice that sounded curiously unlike her. The sharp edge, the confidence, was gone, Hawks thought.
She’s been badly scared.
It was almost a relief to discover that she was human after all.

A strange voice cut them all off. It was quite high at first, then went down a scale as if it was testing each note to find one it liked. Finally it stopped.

“Do I have communication?” the voice asked at last. It sounded a bit less than human, like a man’s voice played at a speed slightly too slow and irregular. The effect was eerie.

“You have it,” China responded. “Is that you, Star Eagle?”

“Star Eagle... Yes, I identify with that. It is... difficult. There is so much, so much at once. It keeps coming at me, but it is far too much to absorb. I am grown
enormous!
It is... difficult... to focus my primary consciousness, to limit it. Somehow this must be partitioned.”

“We require entry to the bridge, then the establishment of power and life support there,” she told it. “Can you handle that?”

“Proceed up to the bridge. It is essential that the capping locks be placed on my modules and then the hatch resealed before we can proceed. I can then activate the isolation circuitry that will keep the core bay suspended and vacuum insulated from shocks and vibrations.”

“You heard the man, Chief,” Raven noted. “See what he’s talking about?”

“Now I do,” Hawks responded. “We’ve been walking on it.”

They had taken the one flatter area on the floor of the bubble as some sort of ramp. Now they stepped off it, then lifted it up and into place. “No fasteners, though,” Hawks added.

“Stand back. I will activate the locking mechanism,” the ship told them. A series of clamps came up through the bolt holes and flatted out, then the entire metal surface seemed to buckle slightly inward. Hawks assumed it to be some sort of magnetic and vacuum seal.

They made their way back out, then managed, not without difficulty, to get the round giant screw part of the way back in. Again the ship warned them to step aside, and the plate screwed itself in the rest of the way, sealing itself shut.

“The topmost hatch,” China told them. “We must head for the bridge.”

They had to walk through more corridor for a long way, then up railed ramps. Finally, though, they reached a ceiling hatch that led to an air lock, which opened onto the bridge.

Star Eagle had turned on the bridge lights, but the resulting red glow was barely adequate to illuminate the room of gun-black metal. It was perhaps twenty by thirty meters, a big semicircular room with stations at instrument clusters lining the walls and more stations in three banks of boxy machinery front to back. The station chairs, of black metallic mesh, looked uncomfortable: They had swivels, but they were low-backed, armless, and were solidly fixed to the floor.

“We’ll have to shift some of the more comfortable stuff from the old ship to here,” Cloud Dancer remarked. “This is not very comfortable.”

“Most of ‘em’s pretty spare,” Reba Koll commented. “Big mother, but no privacy at all.”

“I do not notice a kitchen or a bathroom,” Manka Warlock noted. “This will not be a pleasant place.”

“I am going to pressurize the bridge,” Star Eagle informed them. “It will be very oxygen-rich and quite dry, but it will be serviceable. Until I can gain better mastery of what is here and how it all works, I will have to make do and so will you. Later on I can give more comfort. The transmuters here have enormous capabilities, I think, but they are
huge.
A more suitable interface to the bridge area will have to be arranged. I will order Maintenance to see to it. I am afraid the fare will not be very good right now, but I believe I can arrange some basic food and water needs. My food service programs are for the small transmuter aboard the old ship and won’t be much use here. Your suitmechanisms will take care of liquid wastes; I fear you must improvise on solid waste until something can be worked out. In all this ship, the only bathroom is the one back on the old ship.”

“What did he mean by ‘transmuter’?” one of the Chows asked.

“A ship this size needs spare parts always, and spare everything,” China explained. “Also, it could never carry sufficient water and air and the rest to support the number of people it carried. It is sufficient that the master computer contain the plans and schematics for everything required, from computer consoles and circuitry to basic water, and be able to make them. For this it uses a device called a transmuter. All of the food that we consumed on the old ship was made that way. It takes something solid or some energy and it converts it to whatever is needed. The salad you ate a day ago might well have been worn-out parts from the ship once, or spare exhaust gases from the propulsion system. Nothing is wasted, you see. Very small transmuters were even used on me back on Melchior, to speed what they wished to make .of me. Shortcuts to surgery, to create—or to destroy. We have all had it, to a degree. The tattoos on our faces—this is why they seem so much a part of us and do not wear out.”

All of them who had been prisoners on Melchior had the tattoos on their faces. Those of Hawks, Silent Woman, Cloud Dancer, the Chows, and Reba Koll were silver; China’s was a metallic crimson. Each was an abstract design, ranging from a solid ball near the corners of the mouth and spreading up, tendrillike, to the side of the eyes and ears. The markings were slightly indented and quite smooth, but they had sensation like that of the surrounding skin—the tattoos were, indeed, the prisoners’ own skin. No prisoner could ever fake not being a prisoner, and the color of the tattoo indicated the levels to which one had access, so one could not even sneak away. It was the indelible mark of Melchior. Only Raven, Warlock, and Sabatini lacked tattoos; they had not been prisoners.

“Someday these designs will be marks of honor,” Hawks said, more to himself than the others.

“This transmuter, then—it can make food? And water? And air?” Chow Mai asked. “It is the magic of the gods.”

“It is only technology, nothing more,” China responded. “A machine, like the others, but an essential one—for us. This ship was never designed to carry humans such as we.”

Cloud Dancer looked around at the chairs on the bridge. “Then how do you explain
this?”
she asked.

“If we could explain this, then perhaps we could explain Master System,” Hawks noted dryly.

“Pressurization complete,” Star Eagle reported. “It is safe to take off your suits. The air temperature at introduction is well within the comfort zone. Avoid all flames and sparks, since it is mostly oxygen. You might feel some slight dizziness or intoxication, and slight changes in voice, as well, so be prepared.”

They had been in the suits for many hours, and in close quarters for far longer than that, so they were happy to remove their suits and stretch out on the floor. They were tired, sweaty, and now mostly helpless, dependent on a computer that was trying to learn how to run the ship. Even Sabatini seemed to have had all the fight taken out of him. None of the others trusted him, but under the circumstances there was little he could do to harm the party as a whole, and if he tried to hurt an individual member, the others were more than willing to take care of him, a fact he understood well.

The metal walls and decking were still cold, but Hawks didn’t care. His wives, Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman, came over to sit beside him, and he put one arm around each of them.
What a strange, motley crew of revolutionaries,
he thought. Silent Woman, with her garish multicolored tattoos from the shoulders down; the Chows, with skin grafts to heal their once badly mutilated bodies in place but discolored, giving them a camouflagelike complexion; Reba Koll, a little old lady with a thin tail; and China, her exquisite body very visibly pregnant. He could only wonder if the child would survive all this, and, if so, what they would do with it.

How the hell were they going to do anything? Damn it, out here even such as he and Raven were as primitive and ignorant as Silent Woman. He was hungry, and thirsty—they all were—but he had endured such before. He—and they—could only wait. But for what?

More than fifty thousand kilometers out from the graveyard of ancient generation ships, just outside the activation limit of the automatic defense system but within scanning and sensor range of the mothball fleet, was another ship. It was not a large ship, not by the standards of that ghost fleet or even by the standards of the freighter they’d chased, but it was far sleeker and, locally, within stellar systems, far faster.

Arnold Nagy, Chief of Melchior Security, sat in his usual padded chair, half reclining, only casually looking at the screens. He was bored and depressed at the same time, a man who had failed at his job and who did not dare to go home. In a sense, he was as much a wanted fugitive as the party he was chasing, only more comfortable.

An older man came up from below and settled into the next chair. Even Master System, the all-powerful, nearly omnipotent master of the known universe, would have been shocked to see him there, since he was simultaneously captive back on Val-occupied Melchior.

Doctor Isaac Clayben had not gotten as far as he had without being clever. For more than three decades he had fooled Master System and maintained a combination prison colony and research station to probe the Forbidden Knowledge, the proscribed and hidden knowledge of Master System and its technological wizardry. To such a man, creating a physical duplicate who appeared to be the real thing with his mind erased was child’s play. Yet now he, too, was a fugitive, a man who did not even exist. Were Master System to get even a hint that he was not only alive and in full possession of his mind and skills, but that he had with him the data banks representing tremendous advances into things humans were not supposed to know, would cause a hunt as great or greater than that now being organized to chase Hawks and his group of rebels. Thanks to them, he also knew about the five gold rings. In many ways, he was better equipped technologically to obtain them, but he had no idea where they were. He assumed that the renegades knew where in the tractless universe to find the rings and quite possibly the names of their owners. The obvious solution would be to make a deal, but not so long as they were partially led by China and Reba Koll. China had reason to despise him—more reason than she now knew. And Koll—well, that was a special case.

“No signs of any activity after all this time?” the scientist asked. “I would think, by now, if something were possible it would have been done. It will only be a few more days until Master System’s own fleet of Vals and who knows what else will be here. Be pretty hard to miss a target like that.”

“There’s a lot of ‘ifs,’“ Nagy agreed. “That ship was banged up pretty bad. They got it aboard, but who knows how much of that was automated? Air, food, water—and how the hell you gonna drive one of them hanging cities, anyway? I think maybe we oughtta be thinking about our own skins. I figure sixty hours more is it, and that’s pushin’ the safety margin. Master System doesn’t hav’ta allow for the survival of human beings, you know.”