Pirates of the Thunder (17 page)

“Ours or theirs?” Raven asked casually.

Hawks settled back and thought for a moment.
This is what it is like to be chief,
he told himself.
How many bodies...? For that matter, whose bodies?
It was a good question, one he’d never really thought about until now. Could he order a massacre if he had to? Could he be as ruthless and heartless as the enemy in order to break him?

“What if this man believed that Master System had turned against him? Or could be turned against him?” he asked them. “What if he could be convinced that his petty little empire could not be held?”

They all looked at him. “You got something, Chief?” Raven asked.

“We need information,” he told them. “We need to know the organization, the structure there, everything.
Lightning
is ready and available. Could we get in and get this sort of information without drawing the dogs of the Master?”

“Maybe,” Nagy replied. “Not you, though, or anybody else with them tattoos on their cheeks. Ain’t nobody else with those particular designs roaming around, so there’s no way to hide who you are and where you came from. I haven’t been there in quite a while, and not too many people would recognize me on sight. Sabatini, here, is perfect—no marks and a total unknown there who still knows his way around thanks to his, uh, past lives, and I’m pretty sure we can do a halfway decent disguise on Raven and Warlock here, which would also gain us two more people with some deep-space experience. More would be obvious.”

Sabatini smiled grimly. “I could—become—this Fernando Savaphoong. That would vastly simplify matters.”

“Perhaps. For a while,” Hawks replied, “but only for a while. What happens when we need you to become someone else? What happens if your underlings cannot see the profit and will not go along? No, we’ll keep that in reserve, but not immediately.” He sighed. “I wish I could go along!”

“Get used to it, Chief,” Raven said, anticipating some action at last with obvious excitement. “You should know—chiefs don’t lead their men into battle, they stand on the high ground and direct it. You just watch it while we’re gone. I still don’t trust Clayben farther than I can throw him and I can’t even pick him up.”

The Hyiakutt historian suddenly started and snapped his fingers. “Of course!” he muttered to himself. “Of course!”

“You got something, Chief?” Raven asked him.

“This whole business has been percolating through my mind for weeks now. There’s been nothing much else to think about, anyway. Suddenly, just now, it all came together. We are few in numbers and relative power. Most of us cannot go into any civilized company without being known. Master System is required only to allow us the attempt, not the success, and it knows where we must go to get the rings, so it need only watch and wait there and we must come to it.”

“Yeah, so?” Nagy prompted.

“There is an old story, with many variations, of the professional master thief who wagers a fortune with a rich man that the rich man will be successfully robbed within a week. The rich man
is
robbed, in spite of all his precautions, yet when he comes to arrest the thief the suspect is found to have spent the whole evening with the chief of police.”

“I’ve heard that one,” Nagy responded. “He didn’t bet that
he
would rob the guy—he just bet the guy would be successfully robbed. That drew every thief in the world to the job since they figured they could take the rich man and the thief would take the fall. Go on. I’m beginning to see the way you’re thinking and I think I like it.”

“We are pirates, not secret agents. Suppose we
did
tell everyone, and I mean everyone, about the rings and what they did? Suppose we spread it throughout the entire freebooter camp? A hundred camps. They would go for it, would they not? After all, Master System will be looking for
us
to make the attempt. It knows where we must go—and so do we. We need only set the bait and wait for the experts to flock to it. Then
we
take the rings from those who succeed.”

“Tricky, but not as tricky as trying to heist them ourselves,” Arnold Nagy agreed. “We’ll need more ships, more intelligence. We’ll have to know the what and where. And we’ll have to be better than Master System.”

“That is what we start first. Communications. Intelligence. Ships. Training our own people and recruiting some specific personnel. There will be lots of details to work out before we can even start it all going.”

“It ain’t bad,” Raven commented, “but it needs work. What if we can’t track down all these thieves? What if they get away with the rings?”

“How many? One ring does no one any good, nor two, nor three, nor even four. We will use Chen’s logic against him. Even if someone were to amass all four they would have to go to Chen. These freebooters never went beyond Melchior by law and custom. They would not know. We can offer the fifth ring. We can also offer more—expertise on how they are to be used. In the end, remember, all five must be brought to Master System itself with quick death the penalty for any mistakes.”

“That’s all well and good, Chief, but we don’t have that expertise and you know it. We don’t know where Master System is any more than they do, let alone how to make it all work.”

“That may be true, but they do not have to know that. The very alarm put out by Master System will spotlight us as the experts, the ones who know. Consider: First the rings must be located, then stolen—the last no easy task in any case. Then the various organizations that have them must settle it between themselves until one has them all. Finally, they must bring them to us to know how to use them—to us or to Chen, if they learn of him. We will be conciliatory. We will deal. We will put it together.”

Hawks had left the communications channels open and now activated the communicator. “You hear all this, Star Eagle?”

“I do and I concur. First things first, though. We must know just what we face in the freebooter camp. I should be able to shadow and monitor them from a distance so long as there are no Vals or direct sensor stations within the system itself. We need information and we need contacts. As for ships—we will make the pirates of the
Thunder
a legend here.”

Raven smacked one fist into the other. “Hot damn! Let’s
do
it!”

5. A NICE LITTLE LAYOVER

T
HE CHANGES THAT HAD BEEN WROUGHT IN
Lightning
were astonishing. Its original exterior had resembled nothing so much as two bullet-shaped tubes attached to either side of a very large but similarly shaped tube of dull gun-metal gray. Now the area between the tubes had been neatly filled in and reshaped and the entire thing coated with a dull bronze-looking substance. It now looked like a three-edged metal arrowhead and resembled no known ship profile. But on sensor screens and scopes, it would look very much like a Val fighter.

It was a good compromise. Such a strange-looking ship would cause much curiosity but no real alarm when viewed by the freebooters, yet it would have to get very close in to be seen as an unfriendly vessel by the average Master System pilot.

The inside had been changed, as well. Clayben’s precious computer backup files, to which he was still forbidden access, along with the separate unit that held and ran them, had been removed and placed within a chamber in
Thunder.
This freed up a great deal of space; in an emergency,
Lightning
could hold the entire company. A duplicate of the old interplanetary ship’s galley had been installed and could sustain them indefinitely, although in spartan conditions. The considerable armament had been retained and checked, and instrumentation had been added to allow for far more effective displays to the human occupants.

“I wish I could have done more,” Star Eagle told them apologetically. “If I had the shops and the full facilities for disassembly, and the time, I would have loved to have made more of them, but with what I have this is the best that could be done. I
have
scanned and analyzed it inside and out down to the molecular level; if we ever get hold of a shipyard I might well be able to turn out more. Still, I have learned much from it that could be incorporated into other ships.”

Nagy slid into the Captain’s chair. The two forward positions had been retained in their original forms, including the comfortable bracing chairs. The other seats were more utilitarian. “I kinda miss the yacht feeling.” The former security chief sighed. “But this is better for our purposes.”

“How hard is it to fly?” Raven asked him.

“Very easy once you get practice. You’re right, that’s what we should do first. Any one of us oughta be able to take this sucker off and get the hell out of someplace if something happens to the rest. Sabatini, I hope I can assume that your Koll memories would let you run this thing if you had to.”

“If it uses the standard interface override, yeah.”

“Okay, then—we’ve got two. Raven, I don’t expect you or Warlock to get to be expert pilots, but I think I can teach you the basics. Sabatini, you ride weapons in the second chair. I think we’ll check her out first, then see about a few lessons.”

He reached down and picked up the helmet. “This is the interface—same as the China girl used with the
Thunder,
essentially. You put it on and you get a mild anesthetic effect and you relax and concentrate. It maps the input-output circuitry of your brain and determines what impulse code means what. Takes a few seconds. Then you get plugged in to whatever the interface plugs you into. Either of these positions can handle either weapons or flying, but right now I’m set for the ship and Sabatini’s set for the weapons systems. Now, the computers in this thing can think a lot faster than any of us, so in a crisis don’t get bogged down with who’s controlling who. When you need instant reactions, let it go. You can override if need be and provide consultation. When it’s noncritical,
you
fly it. If things get damaged, you might have to do it all.”

He leaned forward and punched in a code on a small keypad, then threw a small switch and touched another code into the pad. “I’ve just activated both interfaces and directed them to their appropriate functions,” he told them. “We’ll have to come up with new codes all of us can remember. You only get three tries. Muff it the first two times and it just doesn’t work; muff it the third time and it’ll
seem
to work but when you put the helmet on it’ll just put you to sleep and keep you there until somebody with the
right
code comes and finds you. Keeps things nice and secure. All right, we’re gonna take it out of here and check it all out. Then we’ll let you get a taste of it.”

He put on the helmet and leaned back in the chair as Sabatini did the same. Both men seemed to relax and then lapse into a deep sleep. Only a few seconds elapsed, and then Star Eagle opened the
Thunder’s
cargo-bay door and
Lightning
shuddered and came slowly to life. It lifted smoothly a meter or so off the deck, began a slow turn to the open space beyond, then moved slowly and deliberately out and away.

Instruments and screens flared into life, one showing a view of the massive
Thunder
already receding as they sped away.

“Mighty efficient, but it ain’t much good for conversation,” Raven noted to Warlock, who just shrugged.

“There’s no problem with conversation,” said the apparently sleeping form of Arnold Nagy. “I may be connected up to the ship, but that just makes it an extension of myself. Of course, I can conveniently shut you out if I want to, which is nice sometimes, and just concentrate on the ship.”

The ship shuddered a few times, and they heard some very strange and unnatural short, sharp sounds. “What is
that?”
Warlock asked.

“Target practice,” Sabatini replied. “We throw out some junk at random, and I try and hit it. Nothing to it. This is a very impressive ship.”

Nagy’s body suddenly gave a jerk, and he took several deep breaths, opened his eyes, sat up, and removed his helmet.

“Who’s flying this thing?” Raven asked nervously.

“It flies itself pretty well until it needs to ask a question,” Nagy replied. “All right, want to try it? I’m gonna switch Sabatini over to copilot and put the defense systems on automatic.”

Raven licked his lips nervously. “I ain’t never been a pilot for anything more than a horse and a canoe. I never even tried a skimmer.”

Nagy chuckled. “You’re probably better off because you don’t have to unlearn as much. Most experienced flyers want to do it all or override the computer too much. Just go ahead and go with the flow. I think you’ll find it’s easier than the canoe. I always turned over in canoes.”

Raven snorted. “Since when did Hungarians ride canoes?” But he moved forward and allowed Nagy to settle him into the seat and lower the helmet.

“This,” Arnold Nagy said, “was the way it was
supposed
to work.”

Raven felt momentarily dizzy, then very relaxed; the small aches and pains that he, like everyone, lived with vanished, but awareness did not. If anything, it improved; Raven was reminded of the many tales of “out-of-body” experiences, some of which were solidly entrenched in Crow mysticism. He could see himself, and the others, as well, in a sort of three-dimensional mental picture. The mere sight of
all sides
of an object at once was at first disorienting, them simply strange.