Pirates of the Thunder (18 page)

“Let the inside take care of itself.” Sabatini’s voice came to him, not aloud but inside his mind. “Look
outside,
out there—and you will have the inside, as well. Don’t think about it—just do it.”

The starfield burst around him. He concentrated on a single direction and suddenly had the intricate details of a star map in his mind, including names, distances, and relationships. He understood it now, understood what China felt when she was one with the
Thunder;
he even approached, perhaps, what Star Eagle truly was. He, Raven, was one with the ship! He
was
the ship; all its functions, all its commands, ail its data, were at his instant beck and call. The powerful engines were no more or less to him than his own arms and legs, and could be used without any more thought. And yet this extended to his human form as well; his body was no different from the rest of the ship’s functions and as easily managed.

I
am the father of all eagles!
he thought, exhilarated.

Don’t think about it, just do it.
It really was as simple as that. One did not think about walking or talking or picking something up; all that information was in the brain encoded for automatic response to the desire to do it. The ship and its data were now such an extension; one didn’t have to think about it to pilot it.

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Sabatini responded, apparently hearing and understanding Raven’s surface thoughts. “But I think you have enough of a hang of it to fly it if you had to. We’ll practice the finer stuff later. Let me switch you out and allow Warlock the experience, just in case.”

Raven was reluctant; he really didn’t want to cut the connection, but he was not fully in charge. The sense of diminution, of suddenly being weak and small after having been powerful and great, was overwhelming. He took off the helmet, handed it to Nagy, and went back to his old seat, where he idly lit a half cigar. The air filtration system suddenly switched to maximum.

“You know, that’s a hell of a thing,” he commented, mostly to himself. “Now I think I understand why our China girl wants desperately to be a spaceship.”

Halinachi was not much of a world, but it was one of those very few places not fully under the tyranny of the machine. But that didn’t make it any less dangerous, since this was one of the points where Master System and the few who lived outside the system met as neutrals, almost as equals. Almost—for those who lived here and ran the place understood that the only reason Master System tolerated this world was that it was useful to the System, and the only reason it hadn’t done a mass extermination of the freebooters themselves was that they were little threat and sometimes a help.

“In effect, to live outside the system you must kiss its ass,” Warlock noted dryly. “These are not free people. They are merely masochists.”

Nagy chuckled. “Well, you have something of a point there, but freedom isn’t what’s real, it’s a state of mind. Earth’s ignorant, primitive masses mostly believe they’re free and independent, and wouldn’t know a computer or a skimmer or a round Earth from the Circles of Hell.”

“But they are kept in ignorance,” Raven pointed out. “These people
know.”

“Never overestimate the human mind,” Nagy responded. “Even without the aid of mindprinters and hypnoscanners and all the rest, people can convince themselves of most anything, if they really want to.”

The screens showed a small, rocky, barren world, the antithesis of the one from which they’d come. Weather here was rare, and a small but strong sun, more orange than the ones they had known, beat upon it. Halinachi was a colorful place with buttes and bizarre, twisted landforms in oranges, purples, and tans, but there was not much green.

“It has an atmosphere, one that blocks out most of the really nasty stuff the sun sends out, but not much water,” Arnold Nagy told them. “You couldn’t breathe the stuff—more nitrogen than we’re used to, and not enough oxygen to really do the job. Still, there’s nothing down there that’ll really hurt you, either, so you can pretty well get along with just an air supply and nosepiece or mask. If you ever really added the right stuff to the air and got a lot of water you could probably grow stuff here and maybe make it livable, but nobody’s really inclined to do it. You’d need Master System’s logistics, and it isn’t about to help.”

“People actually live on that hole?” Raven asked, somewhat appalled. “It looks as lifeless as the Moon.”

“It is. Only one settlement—that’s Savaphoong’s. We’ll be coming up on it shortly, and I expect to be hailed by their controllers.”

That expectation was fulfilled almost immediately, and Nagy tended to it after putting up a view of the settlement on the big screen. It looked to be two fairly large domes connected by a long cylinder, with several smaller domes along the cylinder itself. It resembled a space station more than a ground settlement.

Just off one of the large domes was a small spaceport. They could not build a ship there, but they could probably overhaul, modify, and service one. From the looks of the place, though,
Lightning,
which was not a large vessel, would be about the largest they could handle down there.

Any form of money was worthless on Halinachi. Anyone who controlled a transmuter controlled everyone dependent on it. The true medium of exchange was information, innovation, and ideas—but there was a single commodity that was always welcome, and that was murylium. The irony of the transmuter was that it could not take its power from its own sources; it needed an independent, direct source, a particular compound of absolute purity and quality one key component of which was murylium, a scarce mineral found only in a few places in the universe.

As Fernando Savaphoong controlled his minions by alone controlling the transmuters, so was he dependent on a supply of murylium, the one substance transmuters needed and could not make.

It seemed that every time one tried to make murylium from a murylium-powered device, one got blown to bits, along with about thirty cubic kilometers of surrounding planet.

Melchior had once had massive amounts of the stuff; Master System’s early robot probes had discovered as much and had mined the hell out of it. Those caverns were modern Melchior, and Melchior itself was powered by the leftover amounts.

So, in a sense, Halinachi was like a gold-mining town of the ancient North American West or Australia or South Africa, but it also traded in other things.
Lightning
and the
Thunder
needed all the murylium they could get; they had very little. Nagy had considered the problem, and Clayben had supplied the solution—a simple set of equations that would increase the transmitter’s efficiency by more than ten percent; one of Melchior’s little discoveries needed because Melchior had been running on traces of its cannibalized self.

“And we just give that to Savaphoong?” Raven asked. “And so he takes it and we’re still in the hole.”

“No, he wouldn’t do that,” Nagy assured him. “You see, if he didn’t give fair return, or if he double-crossed those bringing him things, he would very quickly find himself a nonmarket. There is a lot of competition out here, and not only among the three more or less legally tolerated outposts. He’ll pay—and pay well—in Halinachi credit because he wants the next item exclusively. See?”

“One good mindprobe on any of us and he has got it all,” Warlock noted suspiciously.

“If he did, there’d also be a lot of repercussions,” Nagy assured her. “But, in any case, that’s why we are taking precautions, and that’s why the
Thunder
is monitoring us. Damn it, we’re all professional killers and these are our own kind. I don’t worry much about Savaphoong. I worry about that small black ship in Bay Three.”

Warlock gasped. “A Val ship! We dare not go in now!”

“We dare not
not
go in now,” Nagy replied casually. “We’d never outrun it, and I seriously doubt that we could outfight it right now, and that’s what we’d have to do.”

“But what if it’s tuned to one of us? The four of us, I mean?”

“Then we will have to destroy it. I doubt that it is, anyway, but if it is? Bet that it isn’t just after one of us, but all of us. I don’t think we really have to worry about it until we leave.”

“I like the way you say that, all casuallike,” Raven noted sourly. “We’ll just destroy it, that’s all. That’s a damned killing machine! They ain’t that easy to dispose of!”

“Sure, and if you believe that, then they’re invulnerable. Look, they are also programmed to avoid mass killings or slaughter, and apprehension rather than the kill is their first priority. They won’t spray fire in a room full of innocents, they won’t go through a hostage, and they have lots of other weak points. They’re no pushovers—you won’t get them with a good head shot—but they can be had. The transmuters made this a throwaway society. Nothing’s indestructible.”

“Including us,” Raven grumped. “Better you watch yourself in there to keep from betraying that you’re new. Watch your tongue, and don’t stare at or react to anybody who isn’t Earth-human.”

“Huh? You mean there’s some of the colonist types here?”

“Sure. A person’s still a person, and we aren’t the
only
ones able to beat the system. There might even be some genuine aliens, although that’s rarer. None of ‘em could ever break free of their worlds on their own—Master System saw to that after it found them—but some were recruited by the freebooters because of certain talents and abilities they might have that are a real help out here. Tolerance to various kinds of radiation, extreme heat, that kind of thing. When you don’t have big transmuters and you don’t have much in the way of friendly robots, or you’re scared of robots, they fill a handy niche. All set? We’re going down!”

The place had looked reasonable from the air, but once they emerged from the ship, they could detect a definite seediness about it. The air smelled somewhat foul and unpleasant, the heat and humidity were oddly off, and even the elevator down into the complex was jerky and noisy and looked the worse for wear.

They were met at the main level by a four-person security party from what served as Halinachi’s government. It was an odd and unpleasant assortment, and Raven and Warlock both proved they were pros by keeping their inner feelings totally hidden.

One, who seemed to be the leader, was Earth-human enough, but in place of his arms were two skeletal robot arms ending in five-fingered steel hands. No attempt had been made to disguise them as human replacements, and clearly he either preferred them to new arms and hands or didn’t have access to any top medical personnel.

Behind him was a woman perhaps two meters tall whose leathery skin looked as if it were made of dark-olive plates, and whose eyes were round, unblinking, and yellow. She was hairless, and her fingers and toes resembled talons. Next to her was a short, squat little man whose dark-gray complexion and blocky build made him look as if he were made of stone. The last was an elderly-looking Oriental man with thick white hair and a long, drooping white mustache, his skin dark and mottled. All wore sidearms.

“You are Captain Hoxa?” the man with the steel arms said in a low, gravelly voice that fit his appearance perfectly.

“I am,” Nagy replied smoothly. “I remember you from the last time I was here. Beklar, isn’t it?”

The squad leader nodded approvingly. Anyone who knew him had to be an old hand, though clearly he didn’t remember Nagy. “Yes. I understand you have information for credits?”

“I do. Take me to the terminal and I’ll punch it in.”

“Why not just give it to me?”

Nagy grinned. “Are you robbing people at gunpoint now, or do you just take me for a fool?”

The big man shrugged and they went over to an entry terminal. Nagy acted right at home, Raven noted. He wondered how many times the security chief had been there before, and why.

Nagy punched in the formulas Clayben had furnished, which took a surprisingly short length of time, then waited. The information was not reflected on the screen, but suddenly a number appeared there. Nagy slammed his fist against the wall next to the terminal and turned to the security crew. “Forty thousand! I save this joint a fortune and it’s just forty thousand? Next time I’ll take my stuff to the competition!”

A small speaker within the terminal came to life, and a man’s voice said, “Very well, Captain. Four days unlimited credit for you and your crew. If you don’t abuse it, I will deposit forty thousand credits for a return visit when you leave. Will that be satisfactory?”

Nagy nodded. “That’s more like it.” He walked back to the group and looked at the security party. “Okay to enter now?”

“Yeah, go ahead,” growled the man with the metal arms. “You sure got some clout here. Check your weapons and personal possessions in the next room, then go through entry.”

“You make the Val check its weapons?”

“A comedian, huh? Why? You got some problems with them?”

“Depends on who it’s looking for and why, same as most people out here. You want to give me a clue?”

“They been around, in and out, for a couple of weeks or more. Word is somebody broke out of Melchior and stole one of them big universe ships. We don’t like ‘em snoopin’ around—bad for business—but what can we do? They’re lookin’ for people with the Melchior brand, so you’re safe.”

“From the Val, anyway. All right, lead on.”

“We got to check everything?” Raven whispered to Nagy when he could.

“Everything. Even clothes. Savaphoong didn’t get this far by letting anything slip by him. When you’re in his world, you’re under his absolute control.”

Stripped completely, they were run through a decontamination chamber, then issued utilitarian clothing that was cheaply made, didn’t fit well, and was clearly reused. All the time they were under the watchful eye of security cameras and personnel.

A man and woman, both of whom looked Earth-human, met them on the other side. The man was tall, perhaps a hundred eighty-five centimeters, and very heavily muscled, with near-perfect features, long blond hair, a dark complexion, and even a hairy chest, and the way he was dressed left no doubt as to his most outstanding attribute. The woman had the same coloring, but she was short—no more than a hundred sixty centimeters—and extremely curvaceous, with a huge heaving bosom. Their eyes and expressions gave the impression that they both probably had the brains and imagination of a head of lettuce, but that was as deliberate as the rest of them. The only thing marring their perfection was the small triangular tattoo in the center of each of their foreheads; the marks looked like the same sort of job done on Melchior inmates, but less obtrusive. Raven now had a suspicion of just what business Savaphoong had had with Melchior through the years; these were perfect examples of Clayben’s transmuter and mind-printer handiwork.