Pirates of the Thunder (32 page)

“You ought’a seen the place before we fixed it up,” the Crow noted. “It looked like the biggest rolling mausoleum in history. We still got plenty of room back there, and if we can take the banging and other construction there should eventually be room for everybody in this kind of setting. Once we get your ships repaired and all fixed up, we’ll have to figure a way to give the ones on the outside some kind of direct access in.”

But it was Takya Mudabur, the amphibian, who said what was in back of all the colonial crew’s minds. “Our ancestors—might have come on this very ship. This is the origin, the way it began...”

He hadn’t even considered the historical and cultural impact the
Thunder
might have, but he was secretly glad they hadn’t seen in it in its original form. The history of colonial transport might as well remain romantic; let only the original rebel band know how ugly it really was.

Cloud Dancer arrived with another awed and incredulous crew. Star Eagle was landing them in measured order to minimize the confusion and stretch his few greeters as best he could.

San Cristobal
had a mixed crew of Earth-humans and colonials including a couple of people that the
Kaotan
crew seemed to know very well, if the emotional greetings were an indication. Its crew of six included two defectors from the ships that had opted out. Captain Maria Santiago was small, brown, and Earth-human; the other two Earth-humans were both men, one large and blond and bearded, the other medium-sized with some of the characteristics of Raven’s own people. Two others were the oddest colonials yet. Their torsos and heads were very strange but at least humanoid. Their large bodies stood on four legs; the largest part of the steel-blue torso was under the humanoid part, and the rear rested on what appeared to be short, stubby back legs that almost didn’t seem up to the job. The final one was the Rock Monster, if a man could turn to rough stone, develop bumps all over, and have deep, dark recessed eyes and a mouth as wide as the whole face, this was how he might look.

Hawks arrived with Savaphoong and his entourage, which included a very tough-looking Earth-human man and two Earth-human women who looked just as tough and mean. He had also brought his favorite remakes—the air-headed slaves of Halinachi—but had left them aboard as he didn’t even have space suits for them. The two males and five females still aboard the
Espiritu Luzon
would be more a source of embarrassment to the rest than any real use, anyway.

Raven excused himself and went to fetch the crew of
Chunhoifan
as Clayben arrived with those aboard the
Indrus.
Captain Ravi Paschittawal was obviously more provincial in his choice of crews, or he kept it all in the family. The two men and two women with him, all Earth-human, were definitely of the same race and culture as their captain. Hawks knew enough to recognize them as the same sort of people who ran Delhi Center back home. The
real
Indians.

Chunhoifan
proved entirely colonial, with Captain Chun Wo Har a creature who, while humanoid, wore an armor like exoskeleton that together with his stalked eyes and long feelers gave him an insect-like appearance. Two others of his kind accompanied him, both female and, oddly, looking it in spite of their alien appearance. With them were two others from one of the ships that remained behind: Small, rotund humanoids with green skin and mottled complexions, owlish faces, bulging yellow eyes, and what looked like wings on their backs although it was impossible that ones of their shape and weight could ever actually fly. Hawks decided that the wings must have another less obvious function, since no colonial would have anything vestigial.

Finally Clayben, on his second trip, brought in the crew of
Bahakatan.
Captain All Mohammed ben Suda looked Earth-human enough, although his appearance reflected a hard life as did that of his wife, Fatima, who might have been no older than Cloud Dancer but whose medium-length hair was gray. They looked North African or Middle Eastern, and the two Earth-human members of the crew, both huge men, had Han Chinese features very much like those of the Chows and China. One had blue eyes and the other a full reddish-brown beard and hair—
half Han,
most likely.

Hawks and the others had been, they thought, mentally prepared for the sight and smells of colonials, but now they realized that they had been wrong. It would be very difficult sledding before everyone was comfortable here, Hawks thought. He was a bit ashamed of himself for feeling that way and somewhat admiring that Raven had appeared to have no such problems.

It was the last member of the
Bahakaton’s
crew, however, that caused the most consternation and would be hardest to accept. The creature had an exoskeleton and long, flat tail terminating in large finlike appendages, but it walked on four thick legs mounted on circular joints. Although it was a glistening, shiny black, Hawks couldn’t help thinking of Mississippi crawfish. Two other sets of appendages were arranged around its head, both tiny in proportion to the body or legs and terminating in ridged pincerlike claws. The head was a set of eight tentacles, long and rubbery and constantly in motion, around two protruding eyes on what seemed to be retractable stalks, and something dark and wet and nasty that might have been a mouth.

This thing was no colonial; this thing had never had a human ancestor, had never been processed by Master System at all. It had been spawned on a world far different from anything the rest of them there could even imagine.

“I sssee your wooks,” the thing said in a very unpleasant simulation of a human voice from inside that pulpy mass beneath the tentacles. “I am ssschief engineer of
Bahakatan. I
am Makkikor. You hafff never ssseen Makkikor before. I can tell.”

That
was putting it mildly. All of a sudden Hawks felt like hugging the insectival Captain Chun and calling him “brother.”

Captain ben Suda was quick to intervene. “The Makkikor are alien to all of us, sir, but they are no less under the great demon’s thumb than we. They had the bad luck to be in the way when Master System was expanding its colonial empire and they were simply co-opted into the colonial system by force. Their world is not one any of us would be comfortable on, but it is no less a part of the system than the colonials, and after these centuries it and they have far more in common with us than they should. I was lucky to get him, and you should feel lucky, too. The Makkikor carry around their own natural son of air supply and are nearly impervious to vacuums and much of the radiation that would be injurious to us. Debo, here, is the best ship’s engineer and maintenance crewman imaginable.”

Raven stared at the creature and gave a wry chuckle. “Well, Chief, you can’t say we ain’t startin’ off with no one-note crew.”

Hawks opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. All he could think was,
Welcome to the universe, Walks With the Night Hawks.

The
Thunder
vibrated, roared, and began to move out into a universe far more complex than even the originals had anticipated.

9. THE VULTURE OF JANIPUR

T
HE NEXT SEVEN MONTHS WAS A PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT
and personal compromise for all concerned, but somehow the new crew settled into a group marriage of convenience, tolerance, and, in some cases, friendship and mutual respect. The difficulty did not stem only from the alienness of the colonists, though, but also from the freebooters’ starting attitudes toward the original group. It was clear that the vast majority of newcomers still didn’t really believe that the rebels’ scheme could succeed.

Hawks once again demonstrated his leadership skills by forming a council of captains and treating them with respect. Each captain was still absolute master of his or her own ship, but each was under the command of what they had come to consider an admiral—one who commands not a ship but a fleet. And that one was Hawks.

In fact, the hardest thing for the freebooters to accept was Star Eagle’s existence at all, let alone as an equal captain among them. All their lives had been spent hating machines that could think on their own. No matter how different they looked, no matter what languages they thought in or what they liked to eat or how they liked to live, all of them, even the alien engineer, were living creatures born of other living creatures. To them, Star Eagle seemed a member of the true alien race, the one they were fighting, and it was very difficult for them to trust him.

Star Eagle had certainly done his best for them. Maintenance had created more elaborate cargo access ports fitted with air locks and tubes directly into the ships that had to be carried outside, and hoped to have real pressurization throughout the ship as needed, even in the cargo bays themselves, within another month.

The interior village was still badly in need of work, but it had been expanded enough and customized enough to satisfy most of the needs of those on board who required more than Earth-human conditions. Savaphoong continued to live on his luxurious yacht with its transmuter producing luxury goods as needed and human slaves to wait on him and his subordinates; this arrangement actually made everyone more comfortable.

Each crew was given an area of the interior shell, along with working offices in the surrounding middle region, designed as much to their specifications as practicality and space and data banks allowed. Ikira Sukotae, for example, actually had a dwelling within a very dark and grass-covered mound with little or no lighting, although somehow in there was a miniaturized vaporizer toilet and running water and much else. Her amphibian crewmember had a hut with a chamber in which fresh water sufficient to cover her body was available along with air. The centauroids preferred just a patch of ground with specially designed water supply and waste disposal; they didn’t care a bit for privacy.

The others, even the Rock Man, found that the normal hut could be configured to their needs. The green owlish couple, for example, used things much the same as everyone else but slept standing up. So, in fact, did the thick-tailed Buta Killomen and the Rock Man, while Captain Chun and his exoskeletal mates slept wrapped around pipes or logs. Only the Makkikor proved a problem to accommodate, since its native environment and needs were so different—even if it could breathe human air and a lot of other things, as it turned out—but it preferred to sleep in the niche it had designed on the
Bahakatan
and seemed delighted to help Star Eagle and the maintenance robots with the renovation and refurbishment of the freebooter ships.

The transmitter at Melchior had made China the way she was, but Isaac Clayben had figured a mechanical way to help her out at least in the area of her blindness. Although the program created by his old staff had been diabolically clever and designed not to be circumvented, Clayben and Star Eagle had devised a mindprinter interpretive routine and a gadget that gave her a son of sight when she chose to use it. Sound waves, traveling on a frequency that would not interfere with ship’s systems and was beyond the ability of any colonials or Earth-humans aboard to hear, were translated into electrical signals and sent through nerves to her brain, where the interpretive program operated. Only the Makkikor could hear the signals; he found the sounds not only pleasant but, Hawks suspected, somewhat erotic.

Using the device along with the mindprinter program, China could “see” well enough to distinguish individual objects, although she could not discern specific features of a person nor, for example, read print. She still preferred her memorization routines, which were now so natural that she hardly looked handicapped getting about, but in an emergency or in a strange environment, the device might mean life or death, and she appreciated it.

They had not wasted the time in other ways, either. They hunted without much success for other remnants of the freebooter culture, and finally Hawks decided, with the council of captains concurring, to go after a ring.

By now the newcomers had been told the whole story—what they were after, what the rings could do, and why the rings had been created. Two of the crews had visited Chanchuk, and the
Indrus
knew Janipur well, since the people of that world had been created out of the same original race as theirs and had kept many of the same customs and forms of the ancient Hindu beliefs. Captain Paschittawal, in fact, had even seen the ring itself, in the People’s Treasures collection at Cochin Center, the chief administrator’s headquarters. Apparently, he reported, the chief administrator rarely wore it, except on solemn and highly ceremonial occasions.

“It is a beautiful thing, very big,” Captain Paschittawal told them. “It is kept under a magnifier, in fact, so that one can see the exquisite detail work. Two beautiful birds, mirror images, sitting on small fir branches. It is most treasured because it is one of the every few artifacts that came with the Founders centuries ago.”

Hawks nodded. “I want you to get together with Raven and Sabatini and give them as much detail as you can. I believe it is time we put Sabatini’s unique talents to work for us.”