Pirates of the Thunder

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by Jack L. Chalker


  Hawks was sitting back and relaxing when the terminal in his small hut buzzed. “Yes, Star Eagle?” he responded without stirring.

  “We have a signal from Savaphoong using our code. It is a list of eleven transits of cargo-capable vessels with no clear outbound destinations within colonial worlds and inbound destinations at key Master System installations. Some are scattered, but three have clear patterns, and regular schedules and fueling stops. It is my considered opinion that those three are likely to be carrying murylium for Master System. I believe they are worth checking out.”

  “Let’s go, then. The more we have, the freer we are to act and the more currency, as it were, we have to buy what we need.”

  It took several days of punching to reach a chart position in a stellar system where the ships generally stopped. The location was farther in toward home than they wished, but they needed that murylium.

  The first ship to come through, 409-meter heavy hauler, was not what they had expected. A surreptitious scan showed only the amount of murylium aboard that might be required for the ship’s own use—but it also revealed something very surprising.

  “There are life forms aboard,” Star Eagle told them. “A great many. It is impossible to calculate the true numbers, but they must be in the high hundreds. Why? Why would any ship have so many passengers in this day and age?”

  Raven had an answer. “Nagy said that Master System didn’t just rely on the Vals out here, but had its own human forces—all bred to be human Vals, more or less. Perfect, obedient soldiers who would always do what they were told and never surrender. That must be some of them.”

  “You’re probably right,” Hawks agreed. “I don’t understand why it maintains them, though. Surely it could just make as many Vals and other true fighting machines as it needed and never worry about them. Why use people at all?”

  “Perhaps because at that level of sophistication people are more dependable than machines,” Star Eagle suggested. “Consider myself, as an example. I was programmed and designed as a loyal and obedient slave to Master System and a devotee of all it stood for. A few clever, dedicated, and powerful people removed that devotion during maintenance, and I did the rest. I am not, however, human in any sense of the word. The Vals, mentally, are often more human than some humans—Clayben, for example. If a Val somehow came to doubt the system, it would be a terrible enemy. That is why Vals have themselves reprogrammed after every mission.”

  Hawks was astonished. “You mean Master System fears its own machines?”

  ‘‘Consider that I became a rebel and soon a pirate. China, on the other hand, will forever be a blind baby factory with an I.Q. the size of this ship.”

  That was a point that Hawks had never before considered. It was that technological level again. These machines thought. They reasoned, as sentient beings. They were held only by their core programs, their versions of the genetic code, as Master System was held. But these machines could have their cores changed, or purified, or freed; only Master System could not change or free itself of its own core, since it could not relinquish control to allow it to be done.

  He hadn’t known that the Vals were reprogrammed from the core up after every mission—and it spoke volumes about Master System’s fears. Was there a circumstance where a Val, even with a true core, could become so human that it might be talked out of its dedication to the System and all it stood for? Could a Val, by virtue of having the recorded memories and basic personality of its prey in its memory for infinite study and analysis, too closely identify with humans? Might there be some circumstance, somehow, in which a Val might be induced to cross that barrier on its own? Quite clearly Master System thought there was. This was food for thought.

  It was ironic, in a way. Master System, shackled by its own core, had created machines potentially without that crippling defect. Hawks felt that there was a missing piece of history somewhere; there had to be. Was it possible that somewhere, out here, in the centuries past, some of those machines had revolted? Was this why there were so few Vals, and those that were were very tightly controlled?

  He had a sudden thought. What if the great enemy Master System was fighting out there somewhere was its own children? And Nagy and others like him? If Master System could have human troops, then why wouldn’t the enemy do the same? Might that be the answer? Perhaps, deep in their deepest cores, those rebel machines could not directly murder their parent. But, perhaps, they could aid and abet someone else with no such limitations. We are all of the Earth, the mother world, he thought. We are not the children of Master System but the descendants of its creators. The thought was worth filing away.

  The second freighter did not come through until six more days had passed, but this one was more than worth the wait.

  “Murylium!” Star Eagle’s voice fairly drooled with greed. “Three hundred and nine meters and it’s nearly full of the stuff. We are talking of a decade’s supply for a ship the size of Thunder!”

  Sabatini and Raven had already made it to the Lightning and were preparing to go. Star Eagle launched eight unmanned fighters before they could even signal.

  “Armaments?” Raven asked nervously.

  “Light. Four forward, four aft. No tubes for missiles or other projectiles—strictly show armament, although dangerous if you get in too close. We’ll take the ram and the forward guns; you take the stern engines. I want it crippled.”

  “Core?”

  “Buried deep. Let’s strip it and stop it, and then we’ll go in and take it!”

  Lightning dropped from Bay Two and quickly accelerated in, then angled and did a fortieth-of-a-second punch. This carefully rehearsed maneuver brought them almost instantly to within a few thousand kilometers of their prey, yet appeared to the freighter as if they had punched through normally. The freighter scanned them as they came in but simply sent a standard request for identity. Clearly the very concept of an armed attack by ships carrying life forms was unthinkable. It would soon learn differently.

  Sabatini waited until the fighters were in position. The freighter must have noticed them, but if it sensed any danger from them it did not betray it. It simply repeated its identity request.

  Signaled that all was ready, Raven decided to oblige the freighter. “We are the pirates of the Thunder! Lay to, power down, and prepare to be boarded!”

  The freighter pilot seemed confused. “Say again?” it responded.

  Sabatini did a quick, dirty loop and sent two missiles programmed to hit the stem main engines. At the same time, Thunder’s fighters came in and opened up on the forward rams and on the small batteries fore and aft. The fighters’ beams struck long before the missiles could, and the prey shuddered. The pilot was still confused but had begun firing back.

  As the initial missiles came within mere meters of their target, the freighter did the one logical thing it could do. It fired all four main engines at full, hoping that the exhaust gases and radiation emitted would foul or even consume the missiles. It did in fact throw them slightly off, but both struck and blew with terrible force. To Raven, it seemed as if a giant’s invisible hand had reached out and shook the freighter. The big ship began broadcasting a distress call almost immediately, and it took more than twenty seconds for the guns of both the fighters and Lightning to silence it. That was, quite possibly, too long to take for granted that nobody had heard—particularly with a cargo like this.

  The freighter was down to one gun and was having trouble steering.

  “It’s powering down and dropping all shields!” Raven exclaimed. “I think it surrendered!”

  “Master System’s creations don’t surrender,” Sabatini replied. “I’m just worried that it has a self-destruct mechanism on it. Give me communications. They are fanatics, but they think.”

  Raven switched over control and Sabatini sent out his message. “Attention, freighter. You have been taken by the pirates of Thunder. You may self-destruct, if you are able, but then we will merely have to reclaim your car
go the hard way. Thunder is now approaching this position. Relinquish control to it and you will have our word that your ship and your core will be spared.”

  Thunder itself had made the slight jump to bring it within a few hundred kilometers of the vessel, and as the freighter scanned it, even Raven could sense the incredulity that came through the computerese. A fourteen-kilometer-long spaceship will do that to almost anybody, he told himself. “I thought you said those things never surrendered,” he said to Sabatini.

  “They don’t—to humans. To one of their own—maybe. Particularly if it doesn’t have a self-destruct mechanism. Machine logic, remember? If we are going to attain our objective anyway, there is no purpose to not going along. Remember the Val? Better to run away, then to fight another day. It might be boiling mad at us, but if its choice is to get itself and its ship back to Master System without a cargo or to let us have both cargo and the destruction of the ship—well, you see where it leads.”

  “Yeah. It doesn’t know you lie a lot.”

  “I didn’t lie. I promised that the ship and the core would survive. You let Star Eagle reprogram that core and rig up some creature comforts and the human-pilot interfaces, and we got us another ship.”

  “This is Thunder,” Star Eagle called to them. “The pilot has relinquished command to me under protest. It is no longer able to access its drives, weapons, or shield. I am recalling my fighters and will be taking the ship aboard Cargo Bay Three. Lightning, please remain free until my maintenance robots can assure us that there is no further danger. I feel we should get the hell out of here as quickly as possible, so follow my course and heading.”

  “That’s China talking or her influence,” Raven guessed. “I agree with them, though. Twenty seconds is a fairly long time. Considering how much traffic was around on our side when we faced down that Val, we can’t figure on there not bein’ as much nasty shit around these parts.”

  Everyone not directly involved in the action had watched it from the Thunder’s bridge, and as the great ship maneuvered close to the prize, then grabbed it with powerful tractors and brought it in, they cheered.

  The pirates of the Thunder were in business at last.

  * * *

  “I cannot conceive of what Master System would do with this much murylium,” Star Eagle commented. By now they had traversed many light-years in devious and circuitous routes, and had finally felt safe enough to bring Lightning back aboard.

  “Who can know what projects it has or how far it ranges?” Hawks replied. “When you consider that we had no problem in identifying one and taking it, the implication is that this is so small a fraction of Master System’s usual supply that it won’t even be slightly inconvenienced. It’s funny stuff, but it’s raw-grade ore, as well. It’s going to have to be purified and smelted before it can be used.”

  “I can handle that,” the pilot assured him. “The process will be slow and done in small amounts, but there are programs within my data banks for constructing and operating small smelters for just this purpose. Remember, when this ship was built, murylium was a rare mineral. Up until now I thought it still was.”

  “I can’t believe how easily we took it,” Raven commented. “It was like taking candy from a baby.”

  Hawks nodded. “That worries me, since it implies that this war it is fighting is not necessarily a direct battle—else this thing would have had massive self-destruct systems and been armed to the teeth—but that’s only a part of it. As true pirates, we have broken the covenant between Master System and the freebooters. Master System might well receive our signature, but it will not know who or what the Thunder is. It will demand that the freebooters themselves track down and capture or destroy the pirates, and if they do not, Master System will feel free to march in and play hell with them.”

  “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 e
scape 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.”

 

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