Pirates of the Thunder

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Nagy, you ever made a jump with low fuel off the charts before?”

  “Never had to, but it’s the only way. The only other choice is to slow down and turn as quickly as possible, and try to blow the bugger back to machine hell as it emerges. It’ll be ready for that, and it has a lot more fuel than we do.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a dozen charts we could jump on and come out at a safe point.”

  “That’s the problem. There’s a dozen. How long you figure it’ll take to refuel? A couple hours? If there are two of ‘em out there, then in that time all dozen could be checked—and would be. You make the choice. This is one fix your little talent won’t get you out of.”

  “You think of this ahead of time or are you making this up as you go along?”

  “Improvisation, my friend, is the soul of survival. If it goes wrong I’ll blame it on this computer link.”

  “If anything goes wrong you won’t have any reason to blame anything. You’ll be dead long before we were. Hang on. Emergence.”

  Sabatini was right on the mark, but he cut power slightly and fully opened the jets as he made a graceful turn.

  “We fight, then?” Nagy asked nervously.

  “We have fifteen minutes before it emerges. That gives me ten minutes to take in what I can in this dense outer dust belt and another four to make the punch. I am computer-linked, too, remember.”

  “Quiet. I have an idea. Open communications channels.”

  “I see. Good idea, if we have the time.”

  “Shut up and gobble.”

  Sitting in the back, Raven and Warlock were ignorant of all this. They could only wait and wonder until either of the ship’s operators took the time and trouble to brief them.

  In what seemed like no time the ship was back up to speed and punching through once more, and only then did Nagy relax enough to explain the situation. Neither of the passengers liked it much.

  “Don’t see what you can do, though,” Raven consoled him. “Let’s play it as it lays. But I can’t help wondering—suppose we punch through for only forty percent of the fuel? Then turn around and punch right back to where we were just at?”

  “Damn! Why didn’t I think of that one?” Sabatini swore. “Too late now—I’ve used fifty percent, and with what it will take to reposition that won’t be quite enough to get us back. Why didn’t I think of it, though?”

  “In all your lives you never were no Crow, that’s why. An old tracker knows the double-back. I’m surprised Nagy didn’t, considering his background.”

  “Too civilized, Raven,” Nagy said. “I went from Vatican Center to West Europe Center and then to port Security, then finally Melchior. I never was in the field. It wasn’t my area of expertise.”

  “Yeah, well, next time remember that us ignorant savages might know a few tricks your ancestors forgot, and deal us in. You believe in all this high-tech brain shit and you get to playing Master System’s game.”

  “Yeah. Next time.”

  “If I were the tracker Val, that is where I would put the second Val. At the last stop,” Warlock whispered dryly.

  “Shut up, Warlock,” Raven growled.

  The ship was now pretty much on automatic, and there was nothing that anyone could do for a while, so the two at the controls set the alarms and disengaged after bringing temperature and pressure to normal levels. It was safe to remove the pressure suits, relax, eat, even catch some sleep, and Raven got to smoke a couple of his precious cigars over the protests of the other three and the air filtration system.

  The time seemed to drag, and sleep was difficult. Finally, though, the alarm sounded and Sabatini and Nagy, almost with relief, headed back up to the command chairs and reconnected themselves to the ships’ systems.

  Emergence was smooth and right on time, but it was quite literally in the middle of nowhere.

  “Dust and cosmic debris levels are very small,” Sabatini noted. “Distance to nearest stellar system’s outer reaches is about thirty-three light-years. If we did another punch we might get within four or five.”

  Sabatini did a quick scan of the region and found little to be optimistic about. “There’s some very weak gravity source at bearing one seven one, but it’s beyond our range and who knows what it is? If it’s a black hole or something it could be farther than that next stellar system. I think we’re stuck.”

  They poked and probed and moved over a vast distance of empty space during the next few hours tracking down any potential sources of gravity that might mean trapped dust, rock, and, therefore, fuel—and life. The hunting was pretty slim.

  “The good news is that we are collecting enough material to keep us going for several years if it remains constant,” Sabatini told them. “The bad news is that it’s just about enough to keep the life support and local engines going—with a very slight loss. It means we can drag around here for a long time but we can’t ever gain enough to offset what we’re spending collecting it.”

  “We should’a brought a couple of them playmate slaves if we were gonna be stuck out here,” Raven growled.

  “I guess we should’ve fought after all,” Nagy sighed. “Our only hope now—”

  He paused, and even Raven and Warlock could feel the tension fill the air. The screen flickered to life and went to maximum magnification.

  An area of space that was as dark as the darkest night now had a glowing ring around it and, although it seemed impossible, the area within seemed even darker, deeper, and blacker. Out of it came a ship, small, sleek, and shopworn black against the even blacker hole.

  “Son of a bitch!” Nagy swore. “I must’ve missed one!”

  The Val ship emerged, closing the hole behind it, slowed gracefully, and made a steady turn toward them.

  Sabatini sighed. “I guess we fight them anyway,” he said.

  6. SCOUTING EXPEDITIONS

  THE VAL SHIP TOOK UP ITS POSITION WELL WITHIN SENSOR range but just beyond the range of conventional weapons. Nagy and Sabatini were integrated with their ship’s computers; the Val was its ship’s computer. Even allowing for the time their ship’s engines and weapons took to function, that meant the Val was always going to be a fraction of a second ahead in terms of responding to a sudden move—a crucial difference. Once both systems were in full gear, however, their automatic reactions would be nearly instantaneous and, therefore, equal. But the Val still had an advantage: It’s speed of thought was far faster even than that of computer-linked humans, while its reasoning was very similar to a human’s. It understood its prey well. That forced the humans to let the automatics react, thus placing them permanently on the defensive, a situation in which they could not win, only draw or lose.

  “By the authority of Master System I command you to halt and identify yourselves” came the Val’s call, which Nagy put on the speaker. The voice was that of Hawks; this was the same Val that had accosted them in the lounge.

  “Since when did you have such authority?” Nagy challenged back. “You are keyed to no one on this ship, a fact you well know. We have committed no criminal acts that would cause an exception.” None that you know, anyway. “I stand on the covenant.”

  “And I step on it,” the Val retorted. “The covenant exists because it is useful to the system. In its own way it serves the system. The covenant will not be broken as far as anyone is concerned. There is no one out here in the middle of nowhere but us.”

  It was tough to deny the truth of that, but truth wasn’t at stake here. “And what sort of logic and system is it that can be violated at will when it is convenient? One does not defend the honor and integrity of a superior system by ignoring it when it is safe or convenient. That is the human way of things, and Master System was created to avoid that flaw. If you can break the system, even under these conditions, then Master System has no right to exist, no right to authority over humankind except by sheer might. And if it is no better than human law, then it is a tyranny that must be disobeyed as a moral duty.”

  �
�You are quite good at that, aren’t you?” the Val responded, impressed. “The logic cannot be denied even though you and I both know you don’t believe a word of it. Very well. I am keyed to track down an Earth-human, a North American Center historian who is called Walks With the Night Hawks, also called John Hawks. He possessed forbidden knowledge and did not surrender it or himself, making him an enemy of the system. You know where he is. Tell me, and win your own freedom until another time, another Val, seeks you.”

  “That is nothing to us,” Nagy told it. “Even if we knew this person, which we do not, the price is far too low. We haven’t sufficient fuel or sources of fuel to get back to the chart. You saw to that. So we die out here slowly, or we die quickly. We are all professionals. Quick is better if you have to choose one or the other.”

  “I could give you a tow to that system over there. Enough fuel to get almost anywhere. Arnold Nagy, is it not, formerly of Melchior? You went in pursuit of the fugitives as was your duty and somehow joined them instead. Raven, and Warlock—more Security gone bad. There will be wholesale cleanings of Security nests before this is over. I do not know the fourth member of this quartet in any way, but it makes little difference. Another escapee, I suspect. You are professionals, as you say. What do you owe these others?”

  Warlock leaned over to Raven. “Why does it talk so much when we are so vulnerable?” She didn’t seem ruffled by the thought of imminent death.

  Raven was a fatalist. “Because if it blows us to hell it’s back at square one—up the river without a paddle. It has the bad luck to want Hawks, not any one of us. If we die, any leads to Hawks die with us. This ain’t over yet.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” Nagy was saying, “how the hell did I miss any tracers? I was sure I got ‘em all and you damn well didn’t get inside.”

  “No, I assumed you were competent. I also assumed that you would never look very closely at two cases of good cigars.”

  “Damn!” Raven swore.

  “You couldn’t possibly know which cases we’d take on or arrange it back there!” Nagy retorted.

  “I didn’t have to. I had a basic data file on Raven and I knew he was an addicted smoker. I also was in the lounge when the first thing he did was order cigars—a particular kind of cigar. I left and found the source of them after leaving you, and spent a great deal of care inserting my tracers in the casing. There was only one case. It followed that Raven would wish to take more with him and that the only means of supplying them would be via the transmuter —which also, of course, duplicated the tracer. It was elementary, my dear Nagy.”

  “That walking machine-shop son of a bitch,” Raven growled, feeling had. It was exactly his kind of trick, which was what bothered him the most.

  Nagy sighed. “Well, I guess we deserve this, then. Here’s the bottom line, though, Val Hawks. We’re it. Sole survivors. They figured out how to get that monster ship going, but they never had full control of it. It broke up off a neutron star. Very little of it was ever habitable, and we had no choice but to split it up—some in my ship, the rest on the bridge. There was no chance to save the others—I barely saved ourselves, and then only because we were living here. You’re in an endless loop, my friend. You’re doomed to wander forever in pursuit of a quarry who no longer exists.”

  The Val actually paused for a moment before replying. “It truly is a pleasure to encounter a real pro now and then. Your voice analysis actually shows that you are speaking the absolute truth. Had I not surprised you in the lounge, had you had some warning of my presence before you actually saw me, I might not have received any anomalous readings at all.”

  “Why don’t they just fight and get it over with?” Raven grumbled.

  Warlock smiled. “What do you think they are doing, darling?”

  “It reads true because it is truth,” Nagy assured the Val.

  “Well, then, there is an easy way to settle it all. Send me one of you. Let me subject him or her to the mind-printer here. If indeed it is true then I will have the documentation I need, and you will receive your tow and a head start on my associates. I will owe you that for saving me much fruitless labor.”

  Uh oh, gotcha there, didn’t he, Nagy? Arnold Nagy swore to himself.

  “You cannot win against a Val even under optimum conditions,” the robot detective said. “And these are hardly optimum.”

  It was certainly true that the conditions were lousy. Sabatini, drawing on the experience not only of Koll but of others the thing it was had consumed and become back on Melchior, had no trouble seeing the Val strategy. Blows that hurt, not killed. Blows that damaged, weakened, but never at the expense of giving them a clean shot. In and out, back and forth, until they used up the last of their fuel and were dead in space. The Val had the infinite patience of a machine and much preferred that at least one of them remain alive.

  “You can drill that rot about the invulnerability of the Val into all the idiots at Centers you want,” Nagy told it, “but you and I know you’re mortal. Your ship is just a ship—no better armored than this one. I admit that you are better armored than I am, but if I had the drop on you, I know where to shoot. That inevitability and invulnerability crap makes it easy for you most times. The game believes it so thoroughly that when you catch up they roll over and play dead. I’m not going to roll over and I am not going to give you what you want. You see, I can cheat you, and beat you, very easily. Just reverse the transmuter and apply full thrust. A quick end, with all of us and our ship vaporized. Quick, probably painless, and you won’t know a damned thing more about the one you’re really after. You will have vaporized your one real lead. I’m not scared, Val Hawks. We do not have a massacre situation here—we have a standoff.”

  The Val seemed somewhat taken aback by this. It was always supremely confident and, like all Vals, felt itself superior to the humans it dealt with and hunted. “I take it that all of you prefer suicide to surrender, then?” it asked finally.

  “Watch it!” Sabatini said nervously. “That’s an open invitation to blow us to hell right now!”

  “It won’t act until we do,” Nagy assured him. “There’s no percentage in it.”

  Raven snapped his fingers. “Nagy, how much crud do you need for fuel conversion on this tub?”

  “Huh? It’s measured in tons to do us any good. Why?”

  Raven sighed. “Nothing. I was just thinkin’ that we got a whole shitload of stuff here we might somehow use.”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything. The space suits. The boxes of cigars. The clothes on our backs. These chairs if we could get ‘em up. Blow ‘em out the hatch and gobble ‘em in the ram jet slow and easy. Forget it, it was just a thought.”

  “Uh uh! You have something there! Besides, ditching the cigars will mean ditching it as well.”

  “You nuts?” Sabatini asked seriously. “The space suits, for Christ’s sake!”

  “What good are space suits if we’re dead anyway? Take the communications port and keep him stalled. I don’t care what you say! I’m cutting loose and seeing what can be done.”

  “But what if it attacks and we got no pilot?”

  “The same thing that happens if it attacks and we have a pilot! Now let me go—time’s wasting!”

  Nagy came quickly out from the spell woven by the interface and, although a little dizzy from it, he indeed wasted no time. There were minor tools and a basic repair kit in an aft storage compartment. He was relieved that Star Eagle hadn’t removed them. He took out a laser torch and began cutting the unused chairs off at their base.

  Raven and Warlock got up to help as much as they could, stacking the items as Nagy disassembled them.

  “You said it took tons to do much,” Raven noted. “So what’s this all about?”

  Arnold Nagy chuckled. “Maybe not enough for survival, but enough to screw that son of a bitch, that’s for sure. Figure each one of these reinforced chairs has a mass equal to, oh, forty kilograms with their supports. That’s tw
o forty. Add another ten for the webbing and belting, minimum. Two fifty. The suits are another fifty. Add a lot more junk around here and I think maybe we can find another two fifty, three hundred. That’s more than half a ton. Here, give me a hand. We might even be able to get the damned toilet out of here. If that bastard gives us the time we might scrounge up to a ton here!”

  They fell into helping, but Raven was still puzzled. “So what’s a ton mean?”

  “We spent fifty percent getting here. We’re about ten percent low and that’s about a ton for a vessel this size. We might get back with this much stuff!”

  “Well, we made punches without belts and chairs before, that’s for sure, but what good will it do? That thing’ll just figure it’s what we did and follow, assuming it don’t just blow us to hell as we punch. Then we’re dead meat for it. What can we do? We’re throwin’ out everything we could even heave at it.”

  “Maybe nothing. Who the hell knows? I’m goin’ for broke, though, ‘cause there ain’t no other way!”

  In weightlessness it was simple to move the stuff to the air-lock entry.

  “How’s our Val been?” Nagy called to Sabatini.

  “We’ve been debating the fine points of morality, but it hasn’t made a move. They have infinite patience, you know.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m counting on that. Be ready with a glib line. We’re gonna flush what we got out here by depressurizing the air lock to maybe ten percent of normal. We got two, maybe three loads to flush. Then we still got to figure some way of maneuvering it into the ram without getting creamed. If, of course, we chopped that stuff up enough to get it all.”

  On communications, Sabatini had his hands full.

  “Why is all of that being flushed?” the Val asked. “I want it stopped. Now.”