Pirates of the Thunder (28 page)

“Soft,” Sabatini sneered. “See what I mean?”

This time Hawks did not pause. “Because I am much closer than you think—we all are—and we have two fighters from the
Thunder
covering you at this very moment. We could have taken you out at any time, but we didn’t. We need contact, not hatred and distrust and suspicion of one another. That’s Master System’s game. Still, if you say no, we will let you go and try to make a deal if the channel is still open, although we obviously can’t stick around here too long.”

She took a deep breath as Star Eagle brought up the power on one of the fighters so that it would show clearly on her sensors. Now she knew that the
Thunder
could send an unmanned fighter to follow her ship anywhere. She would have no way of knowing that the
Thunder’s
fighters, though fast and lethal and very versatile, had no interstellar capability whatsoever, that they were designed only to act as a screen and outer defense for the big ship.

“All right,” she said at last. “Savaphoong said there was a guy named Nagy he knew and trusted. We’ll take him.”

Hawks sighed. “I wish you could, but he died of injuries sustained in the battle against the first Val. He destroyed it, but it got him.”

“Send me,” Warlock said. “I can take care of myself in that kind of situation.”

I
bet you could,
Hawks thought. He was playing this by ear, really. Sabatini would be a safe choice, considering his attributes, but while he was more than capable of dealing with these people, he was hardly the sort of personality to deal with Savaphoong.

“I could go,” China suggested. “What threat could a blind girl be to them, and I can talk with the likes of Savaphoong. He sounds like a primitive-wilderness version of my father.”

“No, even if Star Eagle would allow it, which I doubt, you would be particularly vulnerable to the rougher elements out there and unable to defend yourself. Other than myself, I can think of only one person well qualified for this—perhaps better qualified than I. And while he’s never seen Savaphoong, Savaphoong’s most certainly seen him.”

“I knew it, Chief.” Raven sighed. “You ain’t never gonna forgive me for that Mississippi River trick. Still,” he reflected, “I wonder if the old boy got away with any cigars?”

Hawks did not speak again until Raven was actually down and
Lightning,
piloted by Warlock and Chow Dai, had pulled away.

“Star Eagle tells me that the locator is functioning well,” he told the others. “I want
Lightning
to follow at near-maximum distance. Do not enter an off-the-chart location. Understand?”

“Yes, Captain,” Chow Dai replied. “You do not want us to actually find them, just find out where they are.”

“Good girl. You haven’t had much to do up to now, but all of a sudden you are our lead and we are depending on you. When the locator stops moving for longer than a fuel stop, send a message back up the line.
Pirate One,
you will then close and rendezvous with
Lightning
when you think it’s safe. We will monitor you from one chart position to the rear until we’re certain that they are actually where they intend to go. Now we only have to hope they don’t give Raven a hypno he can’t beat. He knows about the transponder in the murylium ore, and we can’t get that out of his head now.”

Now aboard the freebooter ship, Raven was able with a little fiddling to find their intercom frequency. He was delighted at the start to hear only female voices aboard, although he was also suspicious of that. These kind of people, living out here like this—who knew how kinky they might have gotten? Love between brave warriors of his own nation was not unheard of, but his people’s culture kept it well within bounds and mostly out of sight. Without a real culture of their own, well, he couldn’t see himself out here in the midst of nowhere for life with just three guys and no girls unless the guys would do just fine.

But the situation was worse than he thought. When two of the women removed their bulky suits, he found himself staring. One of them had webbed, clawed fingers and fiat, long, webbed feet and no hair, only blue-green scales. She also didn’t have much of a nose, and she seemed to have two sets of eyelids, one transparent, that didn’t blink in unison; and those two funny-looking holes on the side might be ears or might not. When this woman turned, he saw what looked like a set of small fins running down the back of her head and neck to culminate in a fairly large one growing out of her backbone. Great figure for the most part—but no breasts at all. He wondered if she laid eggs.

The other woman was stretching out a long, thick tail that came straight out of her backbone. It explained why she walked oddly—that and the fact that her enormously thick and muscular legs tapered down to huge clawed feet. Her arms, too, were similarly built, ending in large clawed hands that looked able to crush rock. Her gray skin was smooth but leathery, and she, too, did not have any hair. She did have breasts—very small and very firm—with the longest nipples he’d ever seen. Her head was large but in correct proportion to the body, and at least looked human, despite a nose so flat that its tiny flaps moved back and forth as she breathed. She saw him looking at her and grinned, which removed all sense of humanity from her appearance. He’d never seen anyone with teeth like that except mountain lions.

Colonials!
He was finally getting his first look at colonials, and although he had thought he was prepared for them, he now realized he hadn’t been at all. Instantly he understood what Nagy had meant by the “ultimate price.” To become one of them, like that... forever, because one full shot through was all a person could take. These, however, had been born that way. He was the monster to them. Except for Sabatini or whatever it was, who got what it needed instantly, one could be changed into one of them but still be oneself inside. How would he feel waking up like one of them, only with his current behavior and standards and mindset?
They
were human, inside and out.
He
would become a monster to himself.

Was this what Nagy had to face?
he asked himself.
Was he born and raised happily as one of them and then forced
by circumstance or duty to become a monster—an Earth-human?
He wondered how far devotion to duty and mission should go, and he realized the answer. That was what Nagy had been talking about.

“I’m too dried out,” the scaly woman said in a very high-pitched but still human tone. “Those suits damn near kill me. I got to get into some water for a soak.” The accent, too, was odd, but he could understand her. It was very convenient to one like him that almost everyone in space had to speak both English and Russian. Hawks had told him that it was because those two nations had been first into space and in ancient times convention dictated international means of travel used the language of the first. He did not speak Russian, but thanks to North American Center, his English was just fine.

“I’m sorry for staring at you,” he said sincerely. “I’m pretty new at this game, and the only folks I’ve met out here so far have been my own kind. I’ll get used to it. I got used to white men; I can get used to most anything.”

She looked surprised. “There are truly white men on your world? An albino race?” Her accent was clipped and very distinctive, but not possible to place. After eight-hundred-plus years and differently shaped mouths and tongues, the accents out here were probably unique anyway, he guessed.

He chuckled. “No, just a figure of speech. They just would never stand for callin’ themselves pinkmen. I’m Raven, by the way.”

“I am Butar Killomen,” she responded. “And that is Takya Mudabur. You have just one name, Mister Raven?”

“Not Mister—just Raven. If I gave you my full and true name in my native tongue, you’d break your jaw trying to repeat it.” At that moment the engines kicked into action and the whole thing sounded like
Lightning
had after it had been cannibalized and in a fight. The creaks and groans were not at all reassuring. “People are people as far as this business is concerned. You sure this thing can get us there in one piece?”

“It is very old, but sound. You get used to it after a while.”

A third woman came down the ladder as the scaled woman went into a compartment. If the first two lacked hair, it had all wound up on the third one. She looked like somebody wearing a lion suit, Raven thought, except that the mane stuck out all over the place and even the hands were covered with thick orange-and-yellow fur. Her walk was catlike but not extraordinary, although he would have expected it to be. Her feet and even her hands, while they had fingers and opposable thumbs, looked more like paws than hands, and she had six small breasts in two even rows down her middle. Her face, too, was covered in fur, out of which peered two jet-black eyes, a broad nose covered with fine, short hair, and a seemingly lipless mouth. “I am Dura Panoshka,” she said in a heavy guttural accent, her speech sounding more like a growl. “You will come with me to meet the captain.” He didn’t know what to expect when he reached the bridge and saw the captain of a crew like this, but he resolved he would no longer be surprised.

He was wrong again, as usual.

8. RECONNAISSANCE MISSION

“F
IRST YOU WILL STRIP OFF ALL YOUR CLOTHING
,” Lion Girl ordered, “so that we may scan your clothes and space suit. If we find anything suspicious there, they—and you—will go one way while we go another.”

She took his reluctance for modesty. “Do not think you are God’s gift to women or something. No one will care here.”

The truth was, he was embarrassed, but not for the reason she thought. Fact was, it was going to be painfully obvious that none of these women turned him on in the least. None, anyway, until he met the captain, and she presented other difficulties.

The woman in the captain’s chair looked exotically Earth-human, and she was built like a sex bomb if he’d ever seen one. Gorgeous, sexy, sensual, perfectly proportioned—you name it and she had it. Her hair was short in a pageboy style with bangs in front that only heightened the beauty of her features. In fact, she’d be a real male fantasy if she hadn’t been just ninety centimeters tall.

When he looked closely he saw other, less human, differences. Her dark eyes looked human, but when she moved her head so they caught a light, they shone like cat’s eyes, and her ears were oddly shaped, almost shell-like with a point at the upper end. There were also two small protuberances, like tiny ball-shaped horns, barely visible in her hair. Her complexion seemed extremely pale, yet one could catch hints of almost every color of the rainbow if one stared long enough. The fact that she was also smoking a cigar that seemed almost a third as big as she was didn’t help matters any, but it certainly attracted Raven’s interest.

She looked very young, but Raven suspected that was just the look of her race. Such a tiny, frail creature did not get to be captain over three large colonial women and a ship like this without being the smartest, as well as the most capable and experienced, of the crew.

She sat, perfectly nude, on a normal-size command chair adapted to her with the addition of a smaller form-fitted insert, pillow, and underblanket. She looked so natural and unselfconscious that he suspected that nudity was the norm for her and perhaps for her people. That was interesting, too.

“I am Ikira Sukotae,” she said in the voice that had addressed the
Thunder
over the communications line. She spoke English with the same sort of accentless machine-learned English as China and the Chows used. “Welcome aboard the
Kaotan,
which means in English the
Wild Doe.”
Her tone told him that he wasn’t very welcome at all.

He sighed. “Look, you didn’t want me here and I was volunteered to come, so we’re even. I know it’s kinda tense and it’s irrational of me, but to be perfectly honest I lust after one of your cigars.”

And she laughed. A big, throaty laugh, incongruous from such a small creature. She gestured to a small case near her right hand. “Go ahead, take one. Even though I’m the captain I’d have a mutiny if I smoked off the bridge or around those three. We’ll be punching for several hours yet, which might give us time to really stink up this joint.”

The ice was broken.

“So you and your big ship and your dozen or so people are going to overthrow Master System, huh? Big dreams.”

“Yup,” he admitted, enjoying his first real cigar since Halinachi. “Real impossible, ain’t it? I mean, it’s no more likely than somebody like you becoming captain of a big freebooter spaceship.”

She was taken aback for a moment. “You might have something there. But this—such as it is—is just the result of hard work and strong will and some very lucky breaks. You have all that, but that’s not enough against the whole damned system. This is an enemy with the power of the ancient gods, countless minions to do its bidding, and whom you can’t even see, feel, or face directly.”