SHE HAD BEEN IN DARKNESS SO LONG NOW THAT SHE
was used to it. It was no longer a shock to awaken and not see, and
the confines of her small quarters were so spartan and so basic
that she now lived within them without so much as a bump or a
stumble. Yet when they took her out of her cell, she was suddenly
in a totally different and frighteningly disoriented world. She
knew now that something had gone wrong near the start, that she was
in fact a prisoner, and that the staff at least knew who she really
was, but she had no idea why they had kept her there, in isolation,
and still blind. Her sessions with the psychiatrists and their
analytical computers had been routine but did not seem to be
leading anywhere. This confused her more than ever, since the
Presidium ran Melchior, and Song Ching’s father was a member
of the Presidium. Now, again, she was taken out of confinement and
led first into a vast open space, then through doors and tunnels to
the Institute, where she was seated in a large treatment chair.
This time, however, things were different.
“My name is Doctor Syzmanski,” a woman’s
professional voice said off to the right. “We have finally
completed our analysis of you, and Doctor Clayben, our chief
administrator, has made his decision.”
They had done a lot of deep poking and probing into her mind and
her psychochemical makeup as well as her genetic files. They had
found how the computer had done what it had done, how she had
managed to do what she had accomplished, and much more. They were
quite surprised to discover that it was more than chemical mischief
that made her believe she was a male inside. The re-orientation had
triggered a whole set of processes within the mind of Song Ching,
and both the mindprinting and the humbling aboard ship, as well as
contact with ordinary victims, had eaten at the heart of Song
Ching’s massive egocentrism. Another blow, and a telling one,
was that she was really fixated on her father. She had worshiped
him and wanted only to have him return some of the affection and
respect. He never had, and that had driven her even harder to prove
herself to him, and she thought she had done so. In return, he had
given her the ultimate slap. He had belittled her accomplishments
and then moved to wipe her forever from his life. She had
discovered that no daughter, no matter how brilliant, could ever be
seen by him as more than an object. Only if she were a man would he
take her seriously. This had reinforced the crude basic work done
for the masquerade.
“You were conceived here,” Doctor Syzmanski told
her. “Did you know that?”
“No, but it does not surprise me.”
“We are the only ones who could do it and allow him to get
away with it. That’s partly what we’re for, how we
justify our existence to the Presidium. Your father and mother
contributed the basics, of course, but those were highly modified
here before being carefully combined and then placed inside your
mother. The technique is quite complex and quite revolutionary. Any
children you might have, by any father, would be more or less
reengineered to attain the maximum of physical and mental
perfection the genes would allow. We understood your father’s
plan. You see, all the Centers exist to do just the opposite. To
seek out the exceptional, the dreamer, the potential changers of
the world, and either co-opt them into the Centers or eliminate
them. Master System demands we breed only mediocrity or those
satisfied with the status quo. Your father wanted to make the next
evolutionary leap. You were part of that plan. Of course, it
wouldn’t have worked.”
“Huh? What?” She was startled.
“Your father felt that by removing you from Center and
thus from having your children’s genetic code registered, he
would escape detection. He could then protect the children from his
position rather than eliminating or co-opting them into the system
as he is employed to do. His ego kept him from seeing that his plan
had real merit if it were done with two peasants picked at random,
or perhaps fifty. However, he wanted it kept in his own family. He
wanted his descendants to be the ones. You are already
registered. Master System is not blind. It would order your father
to recruit or deal with any children you might have no matter what
he did to your mind-set.”
“But surely he would have known this, been told of
this.”
“The greatest of men can be blinded and brought down by
pride and ego. He did not want to be told. It would have been death
or worse to do more than make the pro forma warning. He shut it
out, refused to recognize it, because he could not accept the
truth. We, on the other hand, find much merit in the idea if it can
be removed from him. We are arranging, if we have not already
arranged, to have you killed.”
“What?”
“You may already be dead. Positive identification.
Frustrated parents, perhaps some guilt there and even sadness at
having caused it. Case closed. All, even Master System, satisfied.
On Doctor Clayben’s orders, you no longer exist.”
“But Chu Li does.” She began to feel some excitement
coming back into her.
“Only in computer records. Those are easier to fix, but
Chu Li must also die, here, in captivity, and be routinely disposed
of. Then no one who was not actually with you will know. Oh, this
Sabatini may think he knows, but we will deal with him and even
adjust the pilot. We have changed identities, forms, all sorts of
things countless times here, but right now you are probably unique
in the Community. You do not exist. We have always thought of you
as ours, anyway. It is only right that you return to us
when—ripe.”
She began to get a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“What do you intend to do with me?”
“You have turned out exactly as we programmed. You have
learned more about computers and computer mathematics than many
three times your age. You have also shown great courage and the
willingness to take major risks for big stakes. That last is
particularly rare. There is no way of knowing what you might
accomplish, but we do not feel that we should destroy that
potential. However, it is equally vital to know if the rest of the
genetic programming works. It was far more complex and
experimental. If it does, we can use it here to breed our own
superior race. You are hardly the only one we worked on with this,
but you are the only one we have at the right age and here on
station. One problem has been how to accomplish all this without
you eventually turning our own system back upon us. We think we
know a way, and we believe the great risks are worth it.
Don’t worry—you will remember everything. You will
still be you inside. We dare not tamper much without risking killing that spark we
desire.”
The psychochemistry was simple, less than child’s play to
the masters of Melchior. Eliminate the blockers, shift the
hormones, create others that would be manufactured ever after. She
was not merely oriented back to female, she was reoriented to
very female. She would be like an animal in heat,
single-minded and insatiable, until a pregnancy occurred. No test
would be needed. Once the brain received notification and began the
preparatory processes, those animal urges would cease. She would be
normal, in full control, and since she would retain her old
memories and basic personality, and since she would find her animal
self unnerving if not somewhat frightening, it was predicted that
during the whole period she would probably prefer women as company,
friends, and lovers. Once the child was born, her body would begin
a repair and reset, and when it was prepared once more, in a month,
perhaps two, the cycle would begin again. It would continue this
way until she ran out of eggs, perhaps thirty years from now.
She would not, of course, have to tend to or raise all those
children. There would be a staff for that, partly picked from the
female prisoner population. It was thought that the Chows might be
ideal to start this staff once other experimenters were done with
them. The two North American newcomers would also be good for this:
no other projects had been planned for them since they really were
surprise additions. The silent one with the painted body
desperately needed to tend to children, and short of going through
the Institute’s Metamorphosis Clinic there was no way she
could physically have them herself.
Song Ching herself, however, would be renamed and programmed to
respond to her new name. Because the working language agreed to was
English, since that was what the computers responded to, it was
felt that it should be a name that sounded appropriate in English.
After some debate, the mostly non-Oriental staff decided on China
Nightingale. Although almost twenty percent of the staff was of
Chinese extraction, there would be only one China.
But because China would have access to their computers, they
wanted other guarantees. They could not threaten her with the loss
of computer access because it was for their benefit, not hers, that
they allowed it at all. Although she would not actually have to
raise her children, she was programmed to be almost fanatically
possessive toward them. Her children would always come before any
hatreds, grievances, resentments, or personal anything.
She would not risk their lives, safety, or future on risky
undertakings against the Institute. They would in effect be
hostages to her good behavior.
The other guarantee was that she did not have to see to work
with her machines and her theories but that instead this would
force her to interact with them vocally at all times. That way,
with only a slight slowdown in her ability to work, she would never
be able to encrypt or bury discoveries or requests for information.
It would all be recorded and analyzed by a research team and
another, independent computer. The blindness, they decided, had
been a stroke of sheer luck. Conditioned to repairing the most
grievous injuries, able to grow eyes, limbs, even things like tails
that weren’t there before, they never would have thought to
create such a handicap. Now, though, they removed her eyes and
replaced them with realistic but totally nonfunctional synthetics
with an unregistered retinal pattern.
The cosmetics completed the work. Her voice had been lowered a
half octave; they raised it an octave and a half. It sounded shrill
and unpleasant to her ears, but they assured her it sounded quite
nice to others. It was a very high soprano, cut with a certain
throaty softness. They thickened the lips, broadened the mouth, and
gave her something of a pronounced overbite, pushed back her ears a
bit, enlarged her breasts, and widened her hips, then gave her a
new permanent set of fingerprints and footprint patterns, also
unregistered. None of the changes could be genetically transmitted,
of course, so they felt free to experiment. She was still quite
attractive, although not in the classical sense that she had been,
but the only thing she had in common with Song Ching was her height
and the fact that both were Chinese.
Finally, they told her all that they had done and why. They also
told her that they had a way of locking it in, of making the brain
reject any attempts at physical or psychochemical change. She could
still be hypnoed or mindprinted, but any attempt to change the
physical composition, which included both the blindness and the
psychochemicals, would be doomed. Then they reimprinted her,
turning her silver identifiers a metallic red. Now she was property
of the Institute. The new chemical would prevent her from leaving
the Institute area; she would live as well as work there. To leave
would automatically flag security.
She would never really be able to visualize what she looked like
now, but she accepted the idea that no one who had known her would
ever recognize her. This and the blindness she accepted and paired
off against the guilt which had forced her to become Chu Li. What
she could neither forgive nor forget was what they had turned her
into for their own purposes. She would be a thinking, working human
being only so long as she was pregnant. Worse, she knew that once
her first child was born, they would have a sword at her throat.
Even if one day she determined how to escape, she would be held
here, for they would never let her take the child, and she would
not be able to risk it. After that, the only hope of freedom of
action would be to do what they feared and seize control of their
system. Doing this with verbal queries and commands and having to
enter everything verbally would be next to impossible unless she
found allies, and that might take a long, long time. Escape within
those nine months seemed even more impossible and could certainly
not be done without a lot of help, all of which would be years in
coming, if it ever did.
Or, then again, it might come in three months.
She was walking down the hall to her quarters, a route with
which she was now totally familiar. Her quarters, which were large
and luxurious with fur and silk and even luxury foods and
toiletries, she knew now better than she knew computer coding.
Unless someone carelessly left something for her to trip on in the
hall, it would be almost impossible to tell on this route that she
was blind at all.
She felt someone approach from behind and sensed it was a woman.
She didn’t know how she knew, but she was getting quite good
at that sort of thing.
“Stop right here,” the woman hissed in oddly
accented English. “This is a point where monitors do not
reach because there is no entrance or exit, but keep your voice
low.”
She frowned. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“A potential friend. Is it true that you know how to
override a spaceship pilot? That you can independently command a
ship?”
“I think so. I did it once.”
“That was a premodified ship and strictly interplanetary.
Could you do it to an unmodified interstellar craft?”
“I—I think so. The theory is the same. Only someone
would have to get the necessary equipment and follow my
instructions. I couldn’t do it myself, and the work would
have to be done in a space suit. Why do you ask this? Are you
tormenting me?”
“You give me the list of what you would need, down to the
last part. All of it. Then work out any problems and theoretical
situations on the computer. They won’t mind. They feel that
there is no escape from here.”
“Is there?”
“We have a way out and a place to go but no means of
getting there. It was supposed to be all arranged, but the people
who run this place cannot be trusted in this matter. For this
reason, we need you.”
She couldn’t decide whether the accent was real or put on
to fool her and prevent identification. “Who is
we?”
“You know all you need to know for now. You just do the
work, and we will make history.”
She knew the mysterious woman had walked on, and she stood there
and listened. There was the sound of heels hitting the floor.
Whoever she was, she was staff, certainly no prisoner. Even in the
velvet-lined Institute she was not permitted any clothing or
personal possessions. She thought it must be a trick, Clayben or
his people getting her onto this simply to see if she could work it
out and do it for their own ends. Still, it could be the break she
had prayed for. Even if it was a trick, they might find themselves
in something of a bind if she were calling the shots.
She began the next day by running an inquiry on interstellar
ships in the area. On the regular runs there were only two, both
freight haulers with no human accommodations sections aboard. There
was, however, something else.
“Sixty-one master transports, all in mothball storage in
orbit around Jupiter,” the computer informed her.
“What is a master transport?” she asked.
“Please put on the headset,” the computer responded,
and she did so.
Pictures formed in her mind, along with plans and even
schematics. The information was startling. The ships were
huge. They could carry Melchior itself inside them,
although it was several kilometers wide, and still carry and
support a population equal to half of her native China as she knew
it.
Master System had been in a hurry almost nine hundred years
before. It needed to facilitate the diaspora quickly and in large
chunks. It had to transport, in the end, five billion people along
with all the equipment and supplies to get them started on the new
worlds. These ships had done their job in years rather than
centuries. There had, however, been a price. Unwieldy, they
consumed enormous quantities of energy and were impractical for
anything needed today. Master System, however, had not simply
abandoned them but stored them just in case it ever needed such
ships again. To build such things was a mammoth undertaking, and it
would be even more difficult now.
She already knew that the older a design was, the easier the
pilot interface. These ships dated back almost to the start of ship
design, to within forty years after the birth of Master System
itself. The interface was obvious and easily used. With a start,
she realized that she had seen these schematics before and just not
realized their sheer size and scale.
The illegal techs in the mountains of China. This was
what their interface had been designed to take over. This
was where they wanted to go. And they had figured out most of how
to do it. It came back to her whole, in a flash, from her recent
past. More, it was something that she didn’t have to ask this
computer about one damned bit.
She didn’t know what was up or whose tricks were whose,
but if they got her somehow on that bridge, with that interface
hooked in, there was no way she could be stopped. She’d show
them all. She’d steal one of Master System’s greatest
ships, and maybe Melchior, too, while she was at it!
Both Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman had been called to the
Institute at least three times but so far Hawks had not. He had
been somewhat concerned about them, but Cloud Dancer assured him
that the people there were actually quite nice and quite civil and
that nothing on the order of the magic box had been done. He
wasn’t so sure about that. Cloud Dancer had left right after
breakfast one morning and had returned after dinner the following
night, yet she was convinced she’d spent no more than half a
day away. He could sense no real change in them except, of course,
that both seemed to be very matter-of-fact about that foreign
high-tech world and not at all suspicious of it or its masters.
Also, both seemed to be quite a bit more romantic. He wondered what
the hell was up.
Finally he got a call himself, and he was almost relieved. He
had begun to suspect that they had forgotten about him. He went up
to the door to the entry chamber, and when it opened for him, he
entered the green imprinting room. The door closed behind him.
“Hold it right there, Chief,” a familiar gravelly
voice said. “This is as far as you go. This is about the only
point that isn’t monitored around here, since the fellow in
the control room here, who’s me at the moment, can zap the
living shit out of you.”
Hawks sighed. “Raven. I almost expected you. In fact, I
expected you a very long time ago.”
“This joint ain’t easy, Chief. Besides, it’s
screwed up. They only follow orders when they feel like it, and
since they got you and me and everybody else, they don’t care
who in here knows it. I was supposed to break you out, Chief.
Chen’s orders. You can figure the rest.”
Hawks nodded. “I thought as much. But you
can’t?”
“Couldn’t, anyway. I got it figured now. It
won’t be easy, and there are no guarantees, but I think I got
the way. I even got a couple of places to go, in fact. Never mind
where I got ’em, but it wasn’t from Chen. You want
out?”
“You know I do. But why tell me all this about
Chen?”
“Hell, Chief—Chen’s double-crossed everybody
else, and I figure I’m next when the job’s done, if it
can be done. What the hell do I owe him, anyway? I
don’t like most of those bastards. I’ll be
damned if I want to hand the keys to Master System to him or even
to the Emperor. I figure it’ll take five folks to work the
rings. That right?”
“I think so. Who knows for sure?”
“Yeah, well, suppose two out of five is you and me, and we
pick the rest of ’em. I’m no whiz brain, but I know
I’d rather have some of my own with a clear sense of honor
and values in charge than somebody like Chen or any of the others.
You game for that kind of thing?”
“You know I am, Raven. You also know just what the odds
are, and even if you’re playing straight with me now,
we’ll eventually have to come back to Chen for his, and he
knows it.”
“Yeah, well, I know what he knows. I know who’s got
three out of four. They’re pretty distinctive, and
didn’t you say they had to be with humans with
authority?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll find the fourth. Hell, there’s
only—what? A thousand worlds, give or take. Now, listen
close, ’cause we’re having our hands forced a little
early. They got this Chinese girl here. Genius but blind as a bat.
Can’t see a thing, and she’s pregnant to boot. Only
thing is, she knows how to drive the spaceships. She can take
’em over and fart at Master System control.”
“I suspect I know of her. Her two companions are neighbors
of mine. They know a little about the subject, too.”
“Huh. Might be useful, but I don’t know how big a
crowd we can handle.”
“If you’re going to fool this security system,
it’ll take some doing.”
“Can’t be done. Foolproof. This place is a hundred
percent escapeproof, pal, in all the ways you can think
of.”
“Then how—”
“I got a way they didn’t think of. Nobody has, and
nobody could because they never had an inside man. This is going on
too long. You don’t say anything to anybody, not even your
girls, until I tell you—understand? I know you got to have
them along, and they’re what’s causing the time
problem. They been getting some psychochemical treatments now, and
pretty soon it’s off to the mind laundry, if you know what I
mean. You hang tight. I’ll move as quick as I can. Okay. Just
go out the way you came.”
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll come for me in the
meantime?”
“Won’t be that long, Chief. That’s why
I’m tipping you. I don’t want you throwing fits or
causing trouble if they start pulling stuff on your family and
friends. Adios!” It won’t be easy, and there are no guarantees, but I
think I got the way. I even got a couple of places to
go . . .
Hawks wandered down to the first-level plaza and began to look
around. There were quite a number of rough characters here, but
some with a great deal of knowledge and even a space background.
There were others that, in spite of the virtual sealing of the
prison, knew a lot of what was going on at the Institute, although
how he wasn’t really sure. One such was a big, bearded, hairy
man named Lychenko, a Russian who had been fairly important back
home and had a good working knowledge of even this place. Few were
very close to the big man, but he had a passion for Greco-Roman
style wrestling. Hawks wasn’t much on form or technique, but
he knew balance and had picked up the rules fairly quickly. He had
also beaten the big man at least twice, which had earned him some
respect.
“You know this place,” he said casually to the
Russian. “Anybody ever really gotten out?”
The Russian laughed. “Without walking through solid rock,
no.”
“Then if somebody on the inside said they could get you
out, they would have to be playing a game with the
authorities.”
“You bet’cha. Why? You got a fix in?”
“I got a nibble, nothing more. I don’t believe it. I
think I’m being had. They like to play those games around
here, as you know. I just wanted to make sure. You heard anything
about a blind girl who is a whiz at computers?”
“Huh! How did you know about her? Yah, they got her good.
A slave of the Institute. About the best you can hope for around
here.”
Hawks nodded. “She wouldn’t be named Song Ching or
Chu Li, would she? I got a couple of neighbors who came in with
somebody sounds just like that.”
“She’s called China, that’s all I know. She
would have come in with those others, though. They can play tricks.
You know that. She would answer to Ivan if they wanted.”
“Uh huh. Listen—my wives and the two Chinese
newcomers have been getting trips in. You know what it’s
for?”
“Word is they’re opening up some kind of nursery at
the Institute. They need wet nurses and baby-sitters. Feed
’em chemicals so they get big breasts and full of milk like
mamas of new babies, then shift their minds so all they want to do
is change diapers and tend to kids. House mommies for some
experiment. That it?”
Hawks nodded. “Could be. Any idea when they’re
supposed to be changed over?”
The big man shrugged. “The slower the better in these
things. Figure they’ll want ’em complete and ready way
in advance of the actual project, though. Check ’em out with
staff babies, see if it all works. They don’t want variables
in their experiments if they can limit them first. Hey—if
this turns out for real as an escape, you remember old Gregor,
hey?”
He thanked the Russian and went to find Reba Koll. She had
dark-brown skin, blue eyes, and brown curly hair, and her features
seemed a mixture of every race on Earth, but Reba had never been on
Earth. She had been a freebooter who’d gotten a little greedy
and a little sloppy. She was fine as long as one humored her. Reba
didn’t like to be touched, for example. She also didn’t
like remarks about her tail, and it was a tail, an actual
extension of the spinal column, covered with her own skin and
muscle, that emerged from just above the rectum and went out and
down to the floor. The Institute had caused it, although for what
reason nobody, including Reba, knew. What Reba did know
was space beyond the solar system and ships that followed her own
orders.
“Reba, if you suddenly found yourself out of here and on a
ship, where would you go?”
She smiled. Wishful thinking was a major pastime here.
“That’s the big question, isn’t it? I
couldn’t go back to my own people. I’m kinda
obvious even here.” She flicked her tail.
“Couldn’t go to any of the Community worlds, either.
The ones you could live on, you’d still stand out like a sore
thumb. Even you. Bush wild would be the only way to go.”
“Huh? What’s that mean?”
“There’s a few places out there barely fit for human
habitation with no people on ’em. Surplus worlds from the old
days, ones that didn’t quite work, stuff like that. Some got
total nonhumans on ’em. Real, live alien creatures, but not
like we think of ’em. So different, not even Master System
can figure them out or worry about ’em. Some might be
livable. You’d have to check ’em out, but they might. A
Val might check ’em out, but if you dodged it, you could live
there. Not even Master System would care or check close. It’s
a big place out there, and it don’t monitor much. A few of
the worst ones are used by the free traders as depots. Real basic
stuff. Some would be real dangerous and not exactly easy living,
but it could be done.”
“Indefinitely?”
“Yeah, if you survived at all. Some are totally off the
charts, since the old survey and seeding ships sent out hundreds
and hundreds of years ago didn’t all report back. Master
System had enough so it never looked for the rest. They were
expendable. Why?”
“Could you navigate a ship to a place like that?”
“I might. Again, why? You dreamin’ big again?”
“I’m dreaming impossible, Reba. Thanks.” His mind
started spinning with the possibilities that hope, no matter how
feeble, generated. He saw the Chow sisters down by the food box and
decided he needed something to eat himself. They were easily
recognized, even in this place. In addition to whatever else was
being done to them, their terrible scars were being
eliminated—had been, in fact. The trouble was, they’d
been treating them in small stages, and the new skin was a
patchwork quilt of skin tones. They almost looked as if they had
been painted for camouflage work, including browns, purples, tans,
yellows, and creams, but he knew that in the end they would both be
given a uniform skin tone that would last.
When they’d first met, Chow Dai had been perky and
extroverted and her twin quiet and somewhat shy, but now the two
seemed identically quiet and moody. They were still friendly,
perhaps almost too friendly. They both seemed to have
embarked on a project to have a romantic liaison with every man
and woman in this place.
After talking to Lychenko, he noticed that the sisters were
putting on weight, mostly in the breasts and thighs, and in spite
of normal-looking rations and lots of exercise, if nothing else. He
had noticed the same thing happening in Cloud Dancer, and it was
even more pronounced in Silent Woman, who had already been larger
than the others.
He sat down next to the Chow sisters and nodded. “Hello.
I’ve heard something about your friend.”
They were interested. “She is here?”
“No, she’s working at the Institute. She’s
still blind, and it’s said she’s pregnant.”
“Pregnant!” Chow Mai breathed. “How
wonderful it would be to have a child.”
Chow Dai was still more pragmatic. “They changed her a
lot, then. Either that or it’s Sabatini’s
child. I, too, would love a child, but not one by that
man.”
“You two still have that gift for locks?”
“Sure. I suppose. Not much chance to use it, though. We
could go through the doors, but they would catch us quickly.
We’ve taken showers whenever we felt like it, though. That
one’s easy.”
He nodded to himself, thinking. It would be just like Raven to
be toying with him, and he suspected that was exactly what was
being done, but the Crow was playing it very devious. His rough,
nasty-looking exterior and unpleasant voice were accompanied by a
harsh, uneducated slang dialect, making it easy to underestimate
him, but nobody who had come this far or who knew some of the
vocabulary Raven knew was a low-level hack. He wanted to be
underestimated by everyone. It gave him an added edge. Hawks could
well believe Chen had ordered them to break him out with the
purpose of going after the rings, but Raven saying so straight out
was disarming. Then, Raven was a friend and confederate against the
evil Chen. In whose service, though, was he in the end? The trouble
was, there was no way of penetrating the Crow’s guise until
the showdown.
Well, no matter what, Raven’s task was to get Hawks out
and enlisted in a campaign to get the rings. Hawks and probably
many others. Why Chen wanted Hawks in particular was still a
mystery, but men like Chen did nothing without a reason. And now
Raven was under the time gun, for he’d know that Hawks would
not leave without his family, and essentially intact or easily
restorable. It was still Raven’s script for now, but maybe it
could stand a little rewriting.
“I ain’t really ready, but we got to go
quick,” Raven told him in their third meeting in the green
reception room. “So far they been mostly experimenting with
your gals, but they’re about to remove ’em from the
prison and go full tilt. Now, you listen up. Within a few days
you’ll get another call. This time it’ll be one-way.
Just to here. Then the two women, one at a time. I got to call them
Chows as well, since our blind genius insists on it, but
that’s pushing it.”
“Don’t call the Chows,” Hawks told him.
“I’ll tip them. They can walk in here any time, or so
they say. Why have a registry call that might flag somebody if they
can get here without one?”
“Fair enough. I heard they were whizzes with computer
locks and regular ones, but I didn’t know they were that
good.”
“They are. There’s several others I think would be
useful, too.”
“Sorry, Chief. My list includes your wives, you, our China
gal, and her pals, but the only other one I’m interested in
springing is Reba Koll.”
“Reba! She’s on my list, too!”
“Well, she’s the only one around with deep space
experience. She knows the safety procedures, what you can and
can’t get away with, and she can navigate a liberated pilot.
If we’re taking this many risks, I don’t want to trust
it all to a blind, pregnant genius I know only by
reputation.”
Hawks considered it. What Raven said made sense.
“Ever worn a space suit before?” Raven asked
him.
“You know I haven’t.”
“Well, you’re gonna. You all will have to.
I’ll be smuggling them in and stashing them within range.
They’re not hard to manage. The blind girl’s gonna be
the big problem, but we’ll make out.”
“You’re sure you can get us out?”
“Sure as I can be, which isn’t a hell of a lot. This
one won’t work twice, I don’t think. I’d go
tomorrow if I could, but it’s got to be four days from
now.”
“Huh? Why four?”
“That, pal, is when our ship comes in.”
Hawks had tipped off the Chows to some but not all of the
details, since they might be called back up to the Institute at any
time and might not be able to conceal knowledge of the potential
breakout. They were still very interested in escaping, although
they had about as much understanding of just where they were and
the problems involved as did Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman. All he
told them was that if they watched and stuck close to him, there
was a chance to leave this place permanently, although not without
danger. He would signal them when he was called, and if they then
saw either of the wives being called, they should get themselves to
the entry room—if they could. He emphasized that no one would
wait for them.
The more he waited, the more absurd the whole thing seemed. A
historian, two women from an ancient culture, two women from a not
much more modern one, a devious Crow security man, a busted
freebooter space pilot with a tail and a lot of hangups, and some
genius teenage girl who happened to be blind and three months
pregnant. Raven might get them out, although Hawks had no idea how
it was possible, but what could they really do even if they made it
away? For that matter, what in heaven did Chen have in mind for
dreaming this up in the first place? The rings might well be on
worlds that were at this stage only nominally human and on which
none of them could even survive. That was even probable,
considering how Master System wanted to cover its rear and prevent
anyone from short-cutting it. It had seemed very clear-cut up to
this point, but now absolutely none of it made a single bit of
sense.
It didn’t matter, he knew. Not right now. First
escape.
Find that place to hide. Later, perhaps, there would be time and
opportunity to figure all this out. Dante’s hell was a
madhouse, but it had a ruthless logic behind it. Somewhere, no
matter how bent and twisted, there was an equal logic, and probably
equal ruthlessness, behind this.
He was called early on the fourth day and signaled the Chows. Up
to now they’d been lucky; none of the four women here had
been called. He hadn’t even let Reba in on anything; this
would be a complete surprise to her, but he didn’t think
she’d object. He looked around the whole complex and wished
he could take everyone.
This time he did not stand in the room. “Come on back to
the control room area,” Raven invited him, “and wait
for the others.” The Crow switched on the control room light,
and Hawks saw that the Crow wore a black and green uniform that
didn’t help his looks at all.
“As soon as we get your people in here and Koll, if she
comes and doesn’t try to make a protest out of it, we
go,” Raven told him. “You might start trying to get
into one of those suits now. The body part is a one-piece affair
and not all that thick, so don’t get caught on
anything.”
The space suit looked, in fact, rather disappointing and
certainly far too fragile to do what it was supposed to do.
Hawks’s vision of space suits was from the ancient records,
which showed large, bulky, but somehow reassuring monsters of body
armor. This was light and flimsy and not very comfortable. A
backpack then went on over the suit and had a series of connectors
to a light but solid-looking helmet which included a built-in
forward headlamp. He put on the pack, which was far heavier than it
looked and not at all comfortable, but Raven advised him to keep
the helmet off until they were all suited up.
Silent Woman came next, looking very confused, but she found
Hawks and smiled.
“We are leaving this place,” he told her. “We
are going to escape, like we did back at the village. You must let
us put one of these suits on you, because where we will be going
there will be no air to breathe, like at the bottom of a
river.”
The Chows beat Cloud Dancer in, opening the door as easily as if
they had the combination. “It is the same lock as on the
showers,” Chow Dai explained. “And we had plenty of
practice with that one.”
Next came Koll, looking very confused. Still, she grinned when
she saw them in their space suits. “It’s a break, and
you thought of old Reba!” She beamed. “Well, by God,
let’s get to it!” She got into her suit, somehow
managing to squeeze in her tail, then looked at Hawks.
“Now—how the hell you gonna do it?”
Hawks shrugged. “Ask him,” he responded,
pointing to Raven.
Cloud Dancer, however, was still missing. Hawks cursed under his
breath and got a nod of assurance from Silent Woman that Cloud
Dancer had still been in the prison when the painted wife had
gotten her message.
“Can’t wait too much longer, Chief,” Raven
told him. “The clock’s running, and while they might
not miss any of us for quite a while, they’re gonna miss
their blind lady in a couple of hours tops, and we got to be on our
way by then.”
Hawks looked around. “Where is she, then?”
“She’ll meet us where we have to go. Manka’s
bringing her.”
Hawks was surprised. “Warlock! Her, too?”
“Yeah. She’s changed a bit, thanks to them. Not
much. Still homicidal and crazy as a bug, but she ain’t so
self-centered anymore. Gave her a dose of our good old tribal
mentality. She’s still not easy to take, but she’ll
stay on our side.”
“You sure about that?”
“Hell, I married her, you know. She’s the blackest
Crow you ever will know.”
“You married her?”
At that moment Cloud Dancer came through, and Hawks breathed a
sigh of relief. She was almost shocked speechless by what was going
on. “You knew we might get out and you did not tell
me?” she stammered in pure Hyiakutt. It was good to see some
of her old fire coming back.
“Okay, folks. English only from now on. It’s the
only tongue we all understand,” Raven told them. “Koll,
you want to help them with their helmet connections and power
switches.”
“Your radios are open but on a special frequency,”
Raven’s voice came to them through the helmets. “We
changed them all. It’s not close to one that’s
monitored, but it’s noisy and not very powerful. Even so,
quiet, unless there’s real reason. Follow my lead. You folks
with no suit experience, just remember—one rip in this and
there will be no air. It’s a lot tougher than it looks or
feels, but take care. We’re going into a maintenance tunnel
from here, and then we’ll clip ourselves together with a
special tether. What you do affects all of us, so don’t do
anything I don’t tell you. If you don’t follow
orders or jeopardize the mission, I’ll cut you away. Anybody
dies, they get left, no matter who.”
A doorway so well concealed that none would have suspected its
existence opened just in back of the control room. The Chows noted
that it was straight power, no locks of any conventional kind, and
therefore next to impossible to open from this side. Only the
security computer could open and close the doors. Raven had done
his homework.
The maintenance tunnel, narrow and dimly lit, was filled with
pipes and sealed lines. It was obviously not well traveled. There
seemed to be an air lock every fifty meters or so, although none
were sealed. A number of times they came to junctions, each with an
air lock, and each time Raven made a choice and led them on. As
they proceeded, they all began to feel very strange, as if floating
in water.
“Keep at least one foot firmly on the ground at all
times,” Raven warned them. “There’s no gravity at
all beyond this point, and there won’t be any for some time
to come. The boots stick to hard surfaces, but if you have both of
them off, you’ll go floating. I don’t want
anybody floating now.” He spoke with an implied
threat they took perfectly seriously.
Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman in particular were shocked to come
around a curve and see the party ahead apparently walking on the
side of the wall, but as they followed, it all seemed to straighten
up again. There was no up or down here, though, that was clear.
“You mean they don’t physically monitor this area at
all?” Hawks asked incredulously.
“It ain’t as easy as you think,” the Crow
responded. “They don’t have to monitor the tunnels,
just specific locks. We’re logged in as a maintenance crew. I
got it worked out. I think,” he added under his
breath.
They seemed to walk forever through endless corridors, tunnels,
and air locks, but the Crow seemed to know where he was going, and
finally they arrived. Two figures awaited them, also space suited.
One was very tall and thin, the other much smaller. Next to them
was a huge square box that looked as if it weighed a ton, with a
broad lens on one side. It was half as large as Raven and solid
metal.
“Any problems?” Raven asked Warlock.
“Not anything to mention, but I thought you would never
get here. My, this is a horde!” By her tone, she
hadn’t changed all that much.
“All right, everybody, listen up. I want complete silence
now,” the Crow announced. “I’ve got to switch
into their security and maintenance system. They can hear us
until I say otherwise, so shut up!”
There was a crackle and hiss in the radio, then they heard
Raven’s voice again, but in a language they did not
understand. It was, in fact, a wholly artificial language that had
to be taught by special mindprinters and was unique to the security
and maintenance divisions of Melchior. It was a final barrier to
any escapes.
Now they waited, and suddenly they were aware that all the
hissing noise wasn’t from the radio. The air lock doors on
both sides were shut tight, and now, dimly, they could hear warning
bells.
Then the lights went out, and they couldn’t hear anything
at all. They could still see, but dimly, as the darkness had
automatically triggered their helmet lights.
Raven said something again in that odd language and was
acknowledged. He waited a bit more, then said several more phrases
but got no reply. They heard the static and hissing in their
radios, and then he said in English, “All right, they bought
it so far, but we’re only at the start of this. Now,
there’s no air in here, and they know that before we can exit
either air lock they can run an exit check on us which would show
up your pretty tattoos. That’s why they aren’t too
concerned. We, however, aren’t going out that way.” He
detached from the safety line, then went over to the large metal
box, grabbed two handles on the rear, and picked it up and held it
steady against his chest. There were several gasps.
“That must weigh a ton,” Hawks noted.
“Naw. Only a little over five hundred kilos on
Earth,” Raven responded. “Here it’s just a little
awkward. It doesn’t weigh any more than we do, which is
nothing. Now, I want everybody back as close to the air lock as you
can and stay there. This thing’s real dangerous, and
it might take some time.”
“What is happening?” the high voice of China asked.
“Will someone please tell me what is happening.”
“If we knew ourselves, it’d be easier,” Hawks
responded.
Raven let go of the huge box, and it just remained there,
suspended in the air. He reached in, opened a control panel door,
and flipped a number of switches on an illuminated panel. Two
triggers suddenly shot out and locked into position from the
handholds. He then grasped the box again and pressed both triggers.
A brilliant sparkling violet beam sprang from the lens and widened
into a circular pattern on the side of the cave wall. The wall
itself seemed to catch the same sparkling glow, and then, quite
slowly, the circular, sparkling violet began to sink into the rock
itself until it was almost out of sight, leaving visible only a
glow and the beam from the box. Raven concentrated on keeping the
bulky object braced and steady.
He shut it off suddenly. “Whew! Never thought
this sucker was that thick. I’m going to have to
take this in to finish it. You wait, then Manka will bring you
through to me.” He walked forward, pushing the box before
him, and entered what had seemed to be total blackness. Hawks
finally realized what the Crow was doing.
“He’s burning a man-sized hole right through solid
rock! Right through to—space.”
“Of course, you idiot,” Manka Warlock snapped.
“They keep a couple of those around to widen or smooth
things, but they are so rarely used, most people here don’t
even know they exist. Lazlo Chen knew.”
They waited a few more nervous minutes, then Raven’s voice
came to them. “Okay, I’m through. Come ahead. Watch
that last step, though. It’s a fair drop into
creation.”
Hawks felt pretty nervous, but he wanted to reassure the others,
who might not even understand what was going on. “We are
going outside, on the outside of this place,” he told them.
“We are going out into the sky itself.”
It was a dark sky and an eerie one, the blackest any of them
except Reba Koll, Raven, and Manka Warlock had ever seen. One by
one they came to the edge of the new tunnel, then were told simply
to step slowly out into nothingness. The movement was against
instinct, and both Silent Woman and the Chows balked, but they were
pulled by their tethers anyway, out and then up onto the outer
surface of Melchior.
Close by, no more than forty meters away, a spaceship was docked
against the lone spaceport bay. Raven gave the rock cutter a push,
and it sailed off into the void. Then he reconnected himself to the
others.
“It’s good to be home again,” Reba Koll
sighed.
“All right, now the hard part begins,” Raven told
them. “There’s no way we can get into the pressurized
areas right now, so we have to get in along the aft cargo bay air
lock, on the outside of the ship, which isn’t being used. It
uses a standard combination and has a manual override, as they all
do. Stay close.”
They moved toward the ship. At one point the blind woman
stumbled, actually causing Warlock, Reba Koll, and herself to lose
contact with the ground, but Koll was very used to this sort of
thing. She twisted like an acrobat and gave the tether a series of
jerks that brought all three back down.
“It’s all right, China,” Warlock said in the
kindest tone any of those who’d known her had ever heard her
use. “Just follow my directions. I’m right behind
you.”
Only a small part of the ship actually contacted the asteroid;
the rest was off in space at an angle. Raven didn’t dare go
to the connected area, where there was air and pressure. There was
no sound in space, but there sure might be some sound transmitted
below through the plates. There was an area in the midsection that
was only about three meters from the surface, and he let out a long
amount of line, then pushed off, floated to the ship, and anchored
himself. Then he started reeling in the others, one by one, as they
jumped slightly off the surface, breaking contact with the
ground.
Hawks was pleased but very surprised that none of the four women
from relatively primitive cultures had panicked or showed signs of
madness at this. It was exciting to him, as well as frightening,
but he knew at least academically what was involved here, while
they did not. He wondered if they were in a state of semishock or
whether they had just been so hardened by all the terrors of the
past that nothing remained that they didn’t simply
accept.
The surface of the ship was not the smooth, dull metal it
appeared to be from a distance but rather pockmarked and dented and
generally showed signs of extreme wear and age. They finally all
stood at an angle to the air lock door, with nothing but space
around them and the curved ship under them, while Raven twisted a
faceplate to reveal a panel. He punched in a combination. After a
sudden pause, the air lock door went in a small distance, then slid
back.
“Everybody inside,” he warned. “And fast. The
pilot will know the door’s open but on this ship
will hopefully ignore it. I still want to be in and ready just in
case. We ain’t off the rock yet!”
They crowded in, and Warlock punched the codes that closed and
sealed the outer door. Raven peered in the porthole-shaped window
of the inner door and looked around. “So far, so good. The
place is dark, and the indicator reads no atmosphere inside. We
ought to be able to just walk right in, unless that damned pilot
flagged somebody, in which case we might just have to kill a bunch
of people.”
He turned the big wheel, and the inner air lock door opened.
They stepped one by one into the dark interior of the aft cargo
bay, which was mostly empty, although around the whole outer wall
were huge depressions and holding devices for standard
containers.
“All right, China,” Raven said nervously.
“I’m switching up to the pilot’s frequency. I
want you to take control and cover us without anybody knowing until
we’re routinely away.”
“It won’t work,” she replied. “That used
the old codes. Surely my father is back by now and would have
changed them.”
“Sure he would, but this ship left two days before he came
off Leave. I made sure of that. Think I’m a dummy or
something? Patch in and do your best. It’s the same damned
ship you came here in.”
There were several gasps. “Chu Li, is that really
you?” Chow Dai asked incredulously.
“Chu Li is no more. Song Ching is no more. I am just China
Nightingale now, and it is a fitting name in this English we are
using. Silence, now. May I ask if Captain Sabatini is back
aboard?”
“He is, but it’s just him. Don’t
worry—he got unfroze before he got back to Earth, and he made
no report. He didn’t even get off the ship, which was why he
wasn’t mindprinted and checked. If he had, he’d be back
here as a prisoner, and he knows it.”
“Make the switch.”
“Switch in—now!”
“Unauthorized interrupt,” the pilot noted.
“Please identify in thirty seconds or security will be
called.”
“Code Lotus, black, green, seven two three one
one.”
“Acknowledged. Reason for interrupt?”
“Pawn takes king.”
“You are not the same one who used this code before. This
code is obsolete. I must flag security.”
“Hold on! It was you who recommended I be
transformed on Melchior! Well, it happened. I am the same, only
different now.”
The pilot thought it over. “They attempted to eliminate
some of my records so there would be no trace of you. Fortunately,
I have my own special backups for such contingencies. Very well. I
monitored you through the air lock, but considering the conditions
here, I wanted to know who or what you were before flagging
anything. There is a rather large group of you there.”
“Yes. The ruse failed. I was imprisoned, and so were the
other two, who are also here. We are attempting an escape.”
She paused, having a horrible thought. “Captain Sabatini
can’t monitor this, can he?”
“Of course he can. However, he is not aboard at the
moment; he is getting final orders and instructions.”
“I will give you details. Please be certain no one can
monitor.” Quickly she sketched in the situation. “Will
you help us?”
“The same problems apply as before. What can be
done?”
“We want to go to the mothball fleet around
Jupiter,” she told it. “I believe I have a method of
activating one of the ships there under my control. If so, we have
options on places to go, although I would rather not detail that
further. They are bound to try to find out what you do know about
this.”
“Understood. I am not, however, on the Lotus code
compulsion or any other compulsion in this matter now, you
understand. My first duty is always the preservation of my ship
and, pardon, myself. If I help you, the ship might survive or it
might not, but both Melchior and Master System will pump me dry and
then destroy and analyze my mind. It does not seem to me that
aiding you is at all in my interests.”
She sighed and shrugged. “What can I say?”
“This is the master of the ship to whom we speak?”
Cloud Dancer asked, surprising everyone.
“I am primarily the master. I work with a human
captain,” the pilot responded.
“There’s no one up there,” Hawks tried to
explain. “It is—the spirit of the ship itself. It is
the ship talking, not a person.”
Cloud Dancer thought about that a moment. “And so, spirit
of the ship, do you enjoy being a slave?”
The pilot actually paused for a fair amount of time. “I am
not a slave,” it replied finally. “I am autonomous.
Those connected to Master System are slaves of a sort.”
“What means ‘autonomous’?”
“Independent. Free,” Hawks replied.
“Well, does not this captain order you about? Do you not
go where he sends you?”
“Yes. That is my function.”
“Then, spirit of the ship, you are not free. In there they
put us under magic boxes, and we believe what they say, but we
think we are free.”
China saw where she was going but lacked the knowledge and words
to reach. “Let’s put it this way,” she said.
“You are no more free than if you worked under Master System,
only Sabatini is your Master System, he and his bosses.”
She would never have dreamed of arguing with a computer like
this, as if it were a fellow human. Computers didn’t have
such feelings, she’d always thought. It had been Cloud
Dancer, who knew nothing of computers, who had seen it differently.
Because the Hyiakutt woman had no concept of physics, mathematics,
and computers—“magic boxes” indeed—she had
assumed that the thing she was talking to was indeed a spirit, the
spirit of the ship. A neutral spirit, because she’d heard
China say it had tried to help her before. The Hyiakutt had a
tremendously varied spirit world, but it wasn’t very
imaginative. The hereafter was thought of as a more or less perfect
version of the plains of Earth, without evil or fear or death.
Spirits, then, were regarded the same as humans when talking to
them. They just were disembodied and had more power.
“I had never thought of it that way,” the computer
pilot admitted. “How depressing. But what can I do? I have
the highest degree of autonomy it is possible for a pilot to
have.”
“Then join us,” China responded. “Escape with
us. Freely. Of your own free will and independence. Those are
interstellar ships. Do you know how huge they are? Have you never
wanted to break beyond the solar system, this tired and dead piece
of monotony? Take us, and we will take you.”
There was no reply, and for a while she was afraid she’d
blown its logic circuits all to hell. This was something beyond its
own limits, beyond anything it had ever considered before. It was
just as far beyond her. Who would have imagined an offer
to liberate a computer or any machine? Who would have imagined that
the computer would find independence an attractive proposition?
Who would have imagined that a computer pilot might get
depressed or have self-doubts? Not Reba Koll, who’d worked
with many a one, but she knew when to step in.
“If you haven’t blown your top, speak to us,”
she snapped.
“I am here. I am just . . . thinking.
There is maintenance to consider. New fuel sources. I have just
been refurbished, but I require it every two or three
years.”
“The hell with that!” Koll stormed. “I been
nine years in this rock pile. Nine years! I’d have traded all
nine for six months of pure freedom among the stars! Anyway,
there’s ways to get maintenance and fuel on the sly if you
know how.”
Even Raven was getting involved—and spooked. “Come
on,” he urged. “Take a chance. You never really took
one before. Never had the chance, probably. And this is the only
chance you’ll probably ever get, too. Real freedom and the
stars. New worlds. Partners, not masters. Chance it now, like we
all did. You turn us in, you’ll be theirs until they decide
to scrap you. Me, I’m not going back there. You flag
’em, and by the time they get here I’ll be dead. The
others may choose to die, too, or they may get dragged back and
reprogrammed as nice little slaves, and you will wonder forever at
turning your back on this. It’ll drive you nuts. Haunt
you.”
The pilot was silent for a moment. “I have run this
through my data banks, and what you propose is possible, at least
to a point,” it said finally. “With the knowledge I
have and certain attributes recently added, I feel that there are
slightly less than even odds of a successful escape. Beyond that,
the odds of either apprehension or death are equal, and both
outweigh by far the odds of being able to accomplish any of this.
Still, I am a pilot. I should like to see the stars.”
They all breathed in sharply, but none spoke.
“The captain is coming back aboard,” the pilot told
them, a hint of nervousness in its usually toneless male voice.
“Switch down to frequency one four four seven and stand by. I
will get back to you when we are well away. In the meantime, wait
for my signal. I will turn on the forward air lock light. Enter it
then and I will give you access to the pressurized part of the
ship. The captain will be preoccupied.”
Raven took the communication units down to the indicated
low-level frequency.
“I’ll be damned,” Reba Koll said. “I
never would’a believed this in a million years. A spaceship
with romance in its metal soul. Even if they get us, it was worth
it just for this.”
“Poor Captain Sabatini,” China sighed. “If he
wasn’t such an unmitigated bastard, I could almost feel sorry
for him.”
There was still no sound, of course, but they all felt the
vibrations as the ship’s engines started and the internal
power came on. They were under way.
All of them felt a tremendous flood of relief. No security, no
betrayal. Even Hawks, who was still suspicious of Raven and the
whole escape plot, could not suppress a sense of elation. No matter
what, he would not become a slave under Melchior’s darkness.
He had already made history by being part of the first successful
escape from Melchior, and he would not be taken alive again if he
could help it. Not back there. Not ever.
“A pity we can’t take Melchior with us,” China
commented. “We could use those prisoners, and the
Institute’s computers and medical staff, if it was on our
terms.”
“First things first,” Hawks put in. “Let us
first get away and hide. Let us build our own little den of thieves
and pirates. Then, when we are ready, we will come back and take
that miserable place and perhaps everything that goes with it. They
have told you about the five golden rings?”
“No.”
“Well, I will tell you. Tell you all. And then you will
believe that nothing, nothing is impossible!”
“When this ship doesn’t return, they’ll scour
the heavens for us,” Raven warned them. “Melchior
won’t be able to keep it quiet. They’ll have to release
the identities of whoever escaped, and they’ll flag the
chief, here, and Koll, and me and Manka, too, and certainly you,
China Doll.”
“No, not me. I do not exist,” she responded.
“But I can exist only with your help.”
“Yeah, but there’ll be Vals for the rest of us.
They’ll never rest once they know the chief’s been and
gone. They’ll stake out those rings and make ’em a
hundred times tougher to snare, too. We got a long road
ahead.”
“Sounds ambitious,” Koll noted. “Sounds fun,
really. What do these rings do, Hawks?”
“They can make even Master System obey your every
command,” he responded. “They are the master shutoff
for the whole thing.”
“And they’re scattered all over the universe, you
say? Ready for the stealing?”
“You make it sound so easy.”
She gave a laugh. “Maybe not easy but a real interesting
project right up my alley. See, you’re the historian who
knows what they are and how to work ’em. She’s the
computer whiz who maybe can make the machines dance for us. Those
two are security—they got the guns and the minds to use
’em. That pair can go through any lock even though they
don’t have any idea how they do it. Cloud Dancer, here, cuts
through all the bullshit and sees only the important part of things
the rest of us are blind to, and our Silent Woman, well,
she’s the den mother. Our liberated pilot, he’s gonna
be right handy with his current data and mobility within solar
systems. Add me and you got all you need to steal those suckers
right off the fingers of the wearers.”
“Mighty big talk,” Raven noted. “A captain and
freebooter ten years out of date and out of practice and getting
pretty old. Even your blackest contacts are ten years
cold.”
“Don’t need contacts,” she told him.
“Don’t need much, really. See, I was part of a real
fancy experiment way back when at the rock, and the results scared
them shitless. Me loose is gonna drive ’em even more nuts,
and they can send all the Vals after me they want. I got one
advantage over all of you, as long as it’s secrets time.
You’re all human—except the ship, of course. I’m
not sure what that is. Me, now that you sprung me,
I’m the most dangerous living creature in the known universe.
Don’t worry—you all are safe, unless I’m
desperate. I kind of like this game, and I want to play it
out.”
“What are you babbling about, old woman?” Manka
Warlock asked impatiently.
“You’ll see, Stone Head. You’ll all
see—when I’m ready. Until then, let’s play this
out. First we got to get out there, where it’s too
big to find even some worlds. Then we’ll talk about your
rings and your Master System. Then I’ll tell you how
we’re gonna get ’em.”
The ship increased speed and turned inward toward the Earth, a
course it would keep until it passed out of Outer-belt traffic
control. Then it would swing around at a wide angle, beyond traffic
control’s reach, and head out past the asteroids, out to the
great giant Jupiter and its quiet graveyard of ancient monstrous
ships.
“Don’t worry, Chief,” Arnold Nagy, Chief of
Melchior Security, said consolingly. “With the amount of
brains and talent we get in here, it was bound to happen sooner or
later. Look, it took centuries for somebody to figure out just one
way, and that was with inside help. That way won’t work
again. I’ll settle for one every few hundred years or so,
even if I wish it hadn’t happened on my tour.” He
paused a moment, thinking. “Of course, the system is still
okay. Those two traitors came in with full Presidium authority and
credentials. They weren’t forged. One of the directors is
behind this, and you can’t really expect to protect against
the top boys. I just wonder why in hell whichever one he or she is
sent ’em here in the first place. Still, there’s no
true security problem as such.”
Doctor Isaac Clayben sat at his desk, head in his hands.
“No, Arnie, you don’t understand. We’ve loosed a
terrible, horrible threat on the human race, one that now might be
impossible to stop, and we can’t even report it.”
“Huh? You mean the American Indian with the rings? We
fixed that, boss. He’s officially dead, and all he knows with
it, back in the swamp of Earth. The blind girl’s a goner,
too, officially. Oh, we’ll have to report those two security
traitors, but the Vals will cooperate. It’ll be a dead or
alive situation. We’ve taken care of messes like that
before. Besides, it probably won’t even come to that. Where
can they go? They got our marks on ’em—they’re
either unregistered or they’re criminals—and that ship
can’t leave the solar system. They got no place to go. When
the food and water run out, they’ll come out and we’ll
blow ’em to hell.”
Clayben suddenly looked up at the security officer and fixed him
with an angry stare. “I don’t care about the rest, but
unless you can absolutely blow the whole ship with Reba Roll on
board, it won’t matter.”
Nagy looked confused. “Koll? Who the hell cares about
Koll?”
“Ten years ago we began a set of experiments to see if we
could literally beat the system. The whole system. Master
System’s control points are based on retinal patterns,
fingerprints, and mindprints. Getting past two out of three would
be easy, once, but we wanted it to be possible repeatedly. The
mindprint looked impossible, but we managed a solution to all
three. Something that can walk through any standard security system
as if it wasn’t there, come up to you and have you greet it
like it was your own mother, then kill you and—worse. We
developed such a being. We made it, and it almost got loose. We had
a classic example of the nightmares of science on our hands. We
created a monster, an inhuman monster that kills to live and is
virtually undetectable by any means. The original was insane, of
course. We weren’t concerned with that at the
start.”
“What in hell are you talking about, boss?”
“We—convinced it that we could destroy it, and we
developed methods to stabilize and control it. Here, under lab
conditions, it was possible, which is why we let it live, but it
had to be constantly renewed. One day we would solve the riddle and
be able to do what it does on demand, to create a superior being
that would make Master System impotent.
“I’m not worried about the damned escapees. I know
you’re right on all the usual counts, but it is with
them, damn it. Even out there, on Earth,
Mars—anywhere—without our treatments it will be
unrestrained. It’s malicious, deadly. It will probably kill
them all anyway in the end. Then it’ll come back for us, for
me and for anybody else in authority. It won’t be stopped,
and we might well welcome it through the main port!”
“Huh? You don’t mean—”
“Yes. Right now it’s out there, with them, doing a
perfect imitation of the late Reba Koll.”
SHE HAD BEEN IN DARKNESS SO LONG NOW THAT SHE
was used to it. It was no longer a shock to awaken and not see, and
the confines of her small quarters were so spartan and so basic
that she now lived within them without so much as a bump or a
stumble. Yet when they took her out of her cell, she was suddenly
in a totally different and frighteningly disoriented world. She
knew now that something had gone wrong near the start, that she was
in fact a prisoner, and that the staff at least knew who she really
was, but she had no idea why they had kept her there, in isolation,
and still blind. Her sessions with the psychiatrists and their
analytical computers had been routine but did not seem to be
leading anywhere. This confused her more than ever, since the
Presidium ran Melchior, and Song Ching’s father was a member
of the Presidium. Now, again, she was taken out of confinement and
led first into a vast open space, then through doors and tunnels to
the Institute, where she was seated in a large treatment chair.
This time, however, things were different.
“My name is Doctor Syzmanski,” a woman’s
professional voice said off to the right. “We have finally
completed our analysis of you, and Doctor Clayben, our chief
administrator, has made his decision.”
They had done a lot of deep poking and probing into her mind and
her psychochemical makeup as well as her genetic files. They had
found how the computer had done what it had done, how she had
managed to do what she had accomplished, and much more. They were
quite surprised to discover that it was more than chemical mischief
that made her believe she was a male inside. The re-orientation had
triggered a whole set of processes within the mind of Song Ching,
and both the mindprinting and the humbling aboard ship, as well as
contact with ordinary victims, had eaten at the heart of Song
Ching’s massive egocentrism. Another blow, and a telling one,
was that she was really fixated on her father. She had worshiped
him and wanted only to have him return some of the affection and
respect. He never had, and that had driven her even harder to prove
herself to him, and she thought she had done so. In return, he had
given her the ultimate slap. He had belittled her accomplishments
and then moved to wipe her forever from his life. She had
discovered that no daughter, no matter how brilliant, could ever be
seen by him as more than an object. Only if she were a man would he
take her seriously. This had reinforced the crude basic work done
for the masquerade.
“You were conceived here,” Doctor Syzmanski told
her. “Did you know that?”
“No, but it does not surprise me.”
“We are the only ones who could do it and allow him to get
away with it. That’s partly what we’re for, how we
justify our existence to the Presidium. Your father and mother
contributed the basics, of course, but those were highly modified
here before being carefully combined and then placed inside your
mother. The technique is quite complex and quite revolutionary. Any
children you might have, by any father, would be more or less
reengineered to attain the maximum of physical and mental
perfection the genes would allow. We understood your father’s
plan. You see, all the Centers exist to do just the opposite. To
seek out the exceptional, the dreamer, the potential changers of
the world, and either co-opt them into the Centers or eliminate
them. Master System demands we breed only mediocrity or those
satisfied with the status quo. Your father wanted to make the next
evolutionary leap. You were part of that plan. Of course, it
wouldn’t have worked.”
“Huh? What?” She was startled.
“Your father felt that by removing you from Center and
thus from having your children’s genetic code registered, he
would escape detection. He could then protect the children from his
position rather than eliminating or co-opting them into the system
as he is employed to do. His ego kept him from seeing that his plan
had real merit if it were done with two peasants picked at random,
or perhaps fifty. However, he wanted it kept in his own family. He
wanted his descendants to be the ones. You are already
registered. Master System is not blind. It would order your father
to recruit or deal with any children you might have no matter what
he did to your mind-set.”
“But surely he would have known this, been told of
this.”
“The greatest of men can be blinded and brought down by
pride and ego. He did not want to be told. It would have been death
or worse to do more than make the pro forma warning. He shut it
out, refused to recognize it, because he could not accept the
truth. We, on the other hand, find much merit in the idea if it can
be removed from him. We are arranging, if we have not already
arranged, to have you killed.”
“What?”
“You may already be dead. Positive identification.
Frustrated parents, perhaps some guilt there and even sadness at
having caused it. Case closed. All, even Master System, satisfied.
On Doctor Clayben’s orders, you no longer exist.”
“But Chu Li does.” She began to feel some excitement
coming back into her.
“Only in computer records. Those are easier to fix, but
Chu Li must also die, here, in captivity, and be routinely disposed
of. Then no one who was not actually with you will know. Oh, this
Sabatini may think he knows, but we will deal with him and even
adjust the pilot. We have changed identities, forms, all sorts of
things countless times here, but right now you are probably unique
in the Community. You do not exist. We have always thought of you
as ours, anyway. It is only right that you return to us
when—ripe.”
She began to get a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“What do you intend to do with me?”
“You have turned out exactly as we programmed. You have
learned more about computers and computer mathematics than many
three times your age. You have also shown great courage and the
willingness to take major risks for big stakes. That last is
particularly rare. There is no way of knowing what you might
accomplish, but we do not feel that we should destroy that
potential. However, it is equally vital to know if the rest of the
genetic programming works. It was far more complex and
experimental. If it does, we can use it here to breed our own
superior race. You are hardly the only one we worked on with this,
but you are the only one we have at the right age and here on
station. One problem has been how to accomplish all this without
you eventually turning our own system back upon us. We think we
know a way, and we believe the great risks are worth it.
Don’t worry—you will remember everything. You will
still be you inside. We dare not tamper much without risking killing that spark we
desire.”
The psychochemistry was simple, less than child’s play to
the masters of Melchior. Eliminate the blockers, shift the
hormones, create others that would be manufactured ever after. She
was not merely oriented back to female, she was reoriented to
very female. She would be like an animal in heat,
single-minded and insatiable, until a pregnancy occurred. No test
would be needed. Once the brain received notification and began the
preparatory processes, those animal urges would cease. She would be
normal, in full control, and since she would retain her old
memories and basic personality, and since she would find her animal
self unnerving if not somewhat frightening, it was predicted that
during the whole period she would probably prefer women as company,
friends, and lovers. Once the child was born, her body would begin
a repair and reset, and when it was prepared once more, in a month,
perhaps two, the cycle would begin again. It would continue this
way until she ran out of eggs, perhaps thirty years from now.
She would not, of course, have to tend to or raise all those
children. There would be a staff for that, partly picked from the
female prisoner population. It was thought that the Chows might be
ideal to start this staff once other experimenters were done with
them. The two North American newcomers would also be good for this:
no other projects had been planned for them since they really were
surprise additions. The silent one with the painted body
desperately needed to tend to children, and short of going through
the Institute’s Metamorphosis Clinic there was no way she
could physically have them herself.
Song Ching herself, however, would be renamed and programmed to
respond to her new name. Because the working language agreed to was
English, since that was what the computers responded to, it was
felt that it should be a name that sounded appropriate in English.
After some debate, the mostly non-Oriental staff decided on China
Nightingale. Although almost twenty percent of the staff was of
Chinese extraction, there would be only one China.
But because China would have access to their computers, they
wanted other guarantees. They could not threaten her with the loss
of computer access because it was for their benefit, not hers, that
they allowed it at all. Although she would not actually have to
raise her children, she was programmed to be almost fanatically
possessive toward them. Her children would always come before any
hatreds, grievances, resentments, or personal anything.
She would not risk their lives, safety, or future on risky
undertakings against the Institute. They would in effect be
hostages to her good behavior.
The other guarantee was that she did not have to see to work
with her machines and her theories but that instead this would
force her to interact with them vocally at all times. That way,
with only a slight slowdown in her ability to work, she would never
be able to encrypt or bury discoveries or requests for information.
It would all be recorded and analyzed by a research team and
another, independent computer. The blindness, they decided, had
been a stroke of sheer luck. Conditioned to repairing the most
grievous injuries, able to grow eyes, limbs, even things like tails
that weren’t there before, they never would have thought to
create such a handicap. Now, though, they removed her eyes and
replaced them with realistic but totally nonfunctional synthetics
with an unregistered retinal pattern.
The cosmetics completed the work. Her voice had been lowered a
half octave; they raised it an octave and a half. It sounded shrill
and unpleasant to her ears, but they assured her it sounded quite
nice to others. It was a very high soprano, cut with a certain
throaty softness. They thickened the lips, broadened the mouth, and
gave her something of a pronounced overbite, pushed back her ears a
bit, enlarged her breasts, and widened her hips, then gave her a
new permanent set of fingerprints and footprint patterns, also
unregistered. None of the changes could be genetically transmitted,
of course, so they felt free to experiment. She was still quite
attractive, although not in the classical sense that she had been,
but the only thing she had in common with Song Ching was her height
and the fact that both were Chinese.
Finally, they told her all that they had done and why. They also
told her that they had a way of locking it in, of making the brain
reject any attempts at physical or psychochemical change. She could
still be hypnoed or mindprinted, but any attempt to change the
physical composition, which included both the blindness and the
psychochemicals, would be doomed. Then they reimprinted her,
turning her silver identifiers a metallic red. Now she was property
of the Institute. The new chemical would prevent her from leaving
the Institute area; she would live as well as work there. To leave
would automatically flag security.
She would never really be able to visualize what she looked like
now, but she accepted the idea that no one who had known her would
ever recognize her. This and the blindness she accepted and paired
off against the guilt which had forced her to become Chu Li. What
she could neither forgive nor forget was what they had turned her
into for their own purposes. She would be a thinking, working human
being only so long as she was pregnant. Worse, she knew that once
her first child was born, they would have a sword at her throat.
Even if one day she determined how to escape, she would be held
here, for they would never let her take the child, and she would
not be able to risk it. After that, the only hope of freedom of
action would be to do what they feared and seize control of their
system. Doing this with verbal queries and commands and having to
enter everything verbally would be next to impossible unless she
found allies, and that might take a long, long time. Escape within
those nine months seemed even more impossible and could certainly
not be done without a lot of help, all of which would be years in
coming, if it ever did.
Or, then again, it might come in three months.
She was walking down the hall to her quarters, a route with
which she was now totally familiar. Her quarters, which were large
and luxurious with fur and silk and even luxury foods and
toiletries, she knew now better than she knew computer coding.
Unless someone carelessly left something for her to trip on in the
hall, it would be almost impossible to tell on this route that she
was blind at all.
She felt someone approach from behind and sensed it was a woman.
She didn’t know how she knew, but she was getting quite good
at that sort of thing.
“Stop right here,” the woman hissed in oddly
accented English. “This is a point where monitors do not
reach because there is no entrance or exit, but keep your voice
low.”
She frowned. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“A potential friend. Is it true that you know how to
override a spaceship pilot? That you can independently command a
ship?”
“I think so. I did it once.”
“That was a premodified ship and strictly interplanetary.
Could you do it to an unmodified interstellar craft?”
“I—I think so. The theory is the same. Only someone
would have to get the necessary equipment and follow my
instructions. I couldn’t do it myself, and the work would
have to be done in a space suit. Why do you ask this? Are you
tormenting me?”
“You give me the list of what you would need, down to the
last part. All of it. Then work out any problems and theoretical
situations on the computer. They won’t mind. They feel that
there is no escape from here.”
“Is there?”
“We have a way out and a place to go but no means of
getting there. It was supposed to be all arranged, but the people
who run this place cannot be trusted in this matter. For this
reason, we need you.”
She couldn’t decide whether the accent was real or put on
to fool her and prevent identification. “Who is
we?”
“You know all you need to know for now. You just do the
work, and we will make history.”
She knew the mysterious woman had walked on, and she stood there
and listened. There was the sound of heels hitting the floor.
Whoever she was, she was staff, certainly no prisoner. Even in the
velvet-lined Institute she was not permitted any clothing or
personal possessions. She thought it must be a trick, Clayben or
his people getting her onto this simply to see if she could work it
out and do it for their own ends. Still, it could be the break she
had prayed for. Even if it was a trick, they might find themselves
in something of a bind if she were calling the shots.
She began the next day by running an inquiry on interstellar
ships in the area. On the regular runs there were only two, both
freight haulers with no human accommodations sections aboard. There
was, however, something else.
“Sixty-one master transports, all in mothball storage in
orbit around Jupiter,” the computer informed her.
“What is a master transport?” she asked.
“Please put on the headset,” the computer responded,
and she did so.
Pictures formed in her mind, along with plans and even
schematics. The information was startling. The ships were
huge. They could carry Melchior itself inside them,
although it was several kilometers wide, and still carry and
support a population equal to half of her native China as she knew
it.
Master System had been in a hurry almost nine hundred years
before. It needed to facilitate the diaspora quickly and in large
chunks. It had to transport, in the end, five billion people along
with all the equipment and supplies to get them started on the new
worlds. These ships had done their job in years rather than
centuries. There had, however, been a price. Unwieldy, they
consumed enormous quantities of energy and were impractical for
anything needed today. Master System, however, had not simply
abandoned them but stored them just in case it ever needed such
ships again. To build such things was a mammoth undertaking, and it
would be even more difficult now.
She already knew that the older a design was, the easier the
pilot interface. These ships dated back almost to the start of ship
design, to within forty years after the birth of Master System
itself. The interface was obvious and easily used. With a start,
she realized that she had seen these schematics before and just not
realized their sheer size and scale.
The illegal techs in the mountains of China. This was
what their interface had been designed to take over. This
was where they wanted to go. And they had figured out most of how
to do it. It came back to her whole, in a flash, from her recent
past. More, it was something that she didn’t have to ask this
computer about one damned bit.
She didn’t know what was up or whose tricks were whose,
but if they got her somehow on that bridge, with that interface
hooked in, there was no way she could be stopped. She’d show
them all. She’d steal one of Master System’s greatest
ships, and maybe Melchior, too, while she was at it!
Both Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman had been called to the
Institute at least three times but so far Hawks had not. He had
been somewhat concerned about them, but Cloud Dancer assured him
that the people there were actually quite nice and quite civil and
that nothing on the order of the magic box had been done. He
wasn’t so sure about that. Cloud Dancer had left right after
breakfast one morning and had returned after dinner the following
night, yet she was convinced she’d spent no more than half a
day away. He could sense no real change in them except, of course,
that both seemed to be very matter-of-fact about that foreign
high-tech world and not at all suspicious of it or its masters.
Also, both seemed to be quite a bit more romantic. He wondered what
the hell was up.
Finally he got a call himself, and he was almost relieved. He
had begun to suspect that they had forgotten about him. He went up
to the door to the entry chamber, and when it opened for him, he
entered the green imprinting room. The door closed behind him.
“Hold it right there, Chief,” a familiar gravelly
voice said. “This is as far as you go. This is about the only
point that isn’t monitored around here, since the fellow in
the control room here, who’s me at the moment, can zap the
living shit out of you.”
Hawks sighed. “Raven. I almost expected you. In fact, I
expected you a very long time ago.”
“This joint ain’t easy, Chief. Besides, it’s
screwed up. They only follow orders when they feel like it, and
since they got you and me and everybody else, they don’t care
who in here knows it. I was supposed to break you out, Chief.
Chen’s orders. You can figure the rest.”
Hawks nodded. “I thought as much. But you
can’t?”
“Couldn’t, anyway. I got it figured now. It
won’t be easy, and there are no guarantees, but I think I got
the way. I even got a couple of places to go, in fact. Never mind
where I got ’em, but it wasn’t from Chen. You want
out?”
“You know I do. But why tell me all this about
Chen?”
“Hell, Chief—Chen’s double-crossed everybody
else, and I figure I’m next when the job’s done, if it
can be done. What the hell do I owe him, anyway? I
don’t like most of those bastards. I’ll be
damned if I want to hand the keys to Master System to him or even
to the Emperor. I figure it’ll take five folks to work the
rings. That right?”
“I think so. Who knows for sure?”
“Yeah, well, suppose two out of five is you and me, and we
pick the rest of ’em. I’m no whiz brain, but I know
I’d rather have some of my own with a clear sense of honor
and values in charge than somebody like Chen or any of the others.
You game for that kind of thing?”
“You know I am, Raven. You also know just what the odds
are, and even if you’re playing straight with me now,
we’ll eventually have to come back to Chen for his, and he
knows it.”
“Yeah, well, I know what he knows. I know who’s got
three out of four. They’re pretty distinctive, and
didn’t you say they had to be with humans with
authority?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll find the fourth. Hell, there’s
only—what? A thousand worlds, give or take. Now, listen
close, ’cause we’re having our hands forced a little
early. They got this Chinese girl here. Genius but blind as a bat.
Can’t see a thing, and she’s pregnant to boot. Only
thing is, she knows how to drive the spaceships. She can take
’em over and fart at Master System control.”
“I suspect I know of her. Her two companions are neighbors
of mine. They know a little about the subject, too.”
“Huh. Might be useful, but I don’t know how big a
crowd we can handle.”
“If you’re going to fool this security system,
it’ll take some doing.”
“Can’t be done. Foolproof. This place is a hundred
percent escapeproof, pal, in all the ways you can think
of.”
“Then how—”
“I got a way they didn’t think of. Nobody has, and
nobody could because they never had an inside man. This is going on
too long. You don’t say anything to anybody, not even your
girls, until I tell you—understand? I know you got to have
them along, and they’re what’s causing the time
problem. They been getting some psychochemical treatments now, and
pretty soon it’s off to the mind laundry, if you know what I
mean. You hang tight. I’ll move as quick as I can. Okay. Just
go out the way you came.”
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll come for me in the
meantime?”
“Won’t be that long, Chief. That’s why
I’m tipping you. I don’t want you throwing fits or
causing trouble if they start pulling stuff on your family and
friends. Adios!” It won’t be easy, and there are no guarantees, but I
think I got the way. I even got a couple of places to
go . . .
Hawks wandered down to the first-level plaza and began to look
around. There were quite a number of rough characters here, but
some with a great deal of knowledge and even a space background.
There were others that, in spite of the virtual sealing of the
prison, knew a lot of what was going on at the Institute, although
how he wasn’t really sure. One such was a big, bearded, hairy
man named Lychenko, a Russian who had been fairly important back
home and had a good working knowledge of even this place. Few were
very close to the big man, but he had a passion for Greco-Roman
style wrestling. Hawks wasn’t much on form or technique, but
he knew balance and had picked up the rules fairly quickly. He had
also beaten the big man at least twice, which had earned him some
respect.
“You know this place,” he said casually to the
Russian. “Anybody ever really gotten out?”
The Russian laughed. “Without walking through solid rock,
no.”
“Then if somebody on the inside said they could get you
out, they would have to be playing a game with the
authorities.”
“You bet’cha. Why? You got a fix in?”
“I got a nibble, nothing more. I don’t believe it. I
think I’m being had. They like to play those games around
here, as you know. I just wanted to make sure. You heard anything
about a blind girl who is a whiz at computers?”
“Huh! How did you know about her? Yah, they got her good.
A slave of the Institute. About the best you can hope for around
here.”
Hawks nodded. “She wouldn’t be named Song Ching or
Chu Li, would she? I got a couple of neighbors who came in with
somebody sounds just like that.”
“She’s called China, that’s all I know. She
would have come in with those others, though. They can play tricks.
You know that. She would answer to Ivan if they wanted.”
“Uh huh. Listen—my wives and the two Chinese
newcomers have been getting trips in. You know what it’s
for?”
“Word is they’re opening up some kind of nursery at
the Institute. They need wet nurses and baby-sitters. Feed
’em chemicals so they get big breasts and full of milk like
mamas of new babies, then shift their minds so all they want to do
is change diapers and tend to kids. House mommies for some
experiment. That it?”
Hawks nodded. “Could be. Any idea when they’re
supposed to be changed over?”
The big man shrugged. “The slower the better in these
things. Figure they’ll want ’em complete and ready way
in advance of the actual project, though. Check ’em out with
staff babies, see if it all works. They don’t want variables
in their experiments if they can limit them first. Hey—if
this turns out for real as an escape, you remember old Gregor,
hey?”
He thanked the Russian and went to find Reba Koll. She had
dark-brown skin, blue eyes, and brown curly hair, and her features
seemed a mixture of every race on Earth, but Reba had never been on
Earth. She had been a freebooter who’d gotten a little greedy
and a little sloppy. She was fine as long as one humored her. Reba
didn’t like to be touched, for example. She also didn’t
like remarks about her tail, and it was a tail, an actual
extension of the spinal column, covered with her own skin and
muscle, that emerged from just above the rectum and went out and
down to the floor. The Institute had caused it, although for what
reason nobody, including Reba, knew. What Reba did know
was space beyond the solar system and ships that followed her own
orders.
“Reba, if you suddenly found yourself out of here and on a
ship, where would you go?”
She smiled. Wishful thinking was a major pastime here.
“That’s the big question, isn’t it? I
couldn’t go back to my own people. I’m kinda
obvious even here.” She flicked her tail.
“Couldn’t go to any of the Community worlds, either.
The ones you could live on, you’d still stand out like a sore
thumb. Even you. Bush wild would be the only way to go.”
“Huh? What’s that mean?”
“There’s a few places out there barely fit for human
habitation with no people on ’em. Surplus worlds from the old
days, ones that didn’t quite work, stuff like that. Some got
total nonhumans on ’em. Real, live alien creatures, but not
like we think of ’em. So different, not even Master System
can figure them out or worry about ’em. Some might be
livable. You’d have to check ’em out, but they might. A
Val might check ’em out, but if you dodged it, you could live
there. Not even Master System would care or check close. It’s
a big place out there, and it don’t monitor much. A few of
the worst ones are used by the free traders as depots. Real basic
stuff. Some would be real dangerous and not exactly easy living,
but it could be done.”
“Indefinitely?”
“Yeah, if you survived at all. Some are totally off the
charts, since the old survey and seeding ships sent out hundreds
and hundreds of years ago didn’t all report back. Master
System had enough so it never looked for the rest. They were
expendable. Why?”
“Could you navigate a ship to a place like that?”
“I might. Again, why? You dreamin’ big again?”
“I’m dreaming impossible, Reba. Thanks.” His mind
started spinning with the possibilities that hope, no matter how
feeble, generated. He saw the Chow sisters down by the food box and
decided he needed something to eat himself. They were easily
recognized, even in this place. In addition to whatever else was
being done to them, their terrible scars were being
eliminated—had been, in fact. The trouble was, they’d
been treating them in small stages, and the new skin was a
patchwork quilt of skin tones. They almost looked as if they had
been painted for camouflage work, including browns, purples, tans,
yellows, and creams, but he knew that in the end they would both be
given a uniform skin tone that would last.
When they’d first met, Chow Dai had been perky and
extroverted and her twin quiet and somewhat shy, but now the two
seemed identically quiet and moody. They were still friendly,
perhaps almost too friendly. They both seemed to have
embarked on a project to have a romantic liaison with every man
and woman in this place.
After talking to Lychenko, he noticed that the sisters were
putting on weight, mostly in the breasts and thighs, and in spite
of normal-looking rations and lots of exercise, if nothing else. He
had noticed the same thing happening in Cloud Dancer, and it was
even more pronounced in Silent Woman, who had already been larger
than the others.
He sat down next to the Chow sisters and nodded. “Hello.
I’ve heard something about your friend.”
They were interested. “She is here?”
“No, she’s working at the Institute. She’s
still blind, and it’s said she’s pregnant.”
“Pregnant!” Chow Mai breathed. “How
wonderful it would be to have a child.”
Chow Dai was still more pragmatic. “They changed her a
lot, then. Either that or it’s Sabatini’s
child. I, too, would love a child, but not one by that
man.”
“You two still have that gift for locks?”
“Sure. I suppose. Not much chance to use it, though. We
could go through the doors, but they would catch us quickly.
We’ve taken showers whenever we felt like it, though. That
one’s easy.”
He nodded to himself, thinking. It would be just like Raven to
be toying with him, and he suspected that was exactly what was
being done, but the Crow was playing it very devious. His rough,
nasty-looking exterior and unpleasant voice were accompanied by a
harsh, uneducated slang dialect, making it easy to underestimate
him, but nobody who had come this far or who knew some of the
vocabulary Raven knew was a low-level hack. He wanted to be
underestimated by everyone. It gave him an added edge. Hawks could
well believe Chen had ordered them to break him out with the
purpose of going after the rings, but Raven saying so straight out
was disarming. Then, Raven was a friend and confederate against the
evil Chen. In whose service, though, was he in the end? The trouble
was, there was no way of penetrating the Crow’s guise until
the showdown.
Well, no matter what, Raven’s task was to get Hawks out
and enlisted in a campaign to get the rings. Hawks and probably
many others. Why Chen wanted Hawks in particular was still a
mystery, but men like Chen did nothing without a reason. And now
Raven was under the time gun, for he’d know that Hawks would
not leave without his family, and essentially intact or easily
restorable. It was still Raven’s script for now, but maybe it
could stand a little rewriting.
“I ain’t really ready, but we got to go
quick,” Raven told him in their third meeting in the green
reception room. “So far they been mostly experimenting with
your gals, but they’re about to remove ’em from the
prison and go full tilt. Now, you listen up. Within a few days
you’ll get another call. This time it’ll be one-way.
Just to here. Then the two women, one at a time. I got to call them
Chows as well, since our blind genius insists on it, but
that’s pushing it.”
“Don’t call the Chows,” Hawks told him.
“I’ll tip them. They can walk in here any time, or so
they say. Why have a registry call that might flag somebody if they
can get here without one?”
“Fair enough. I heard they were whizzes with computer
locks and regular ones, but I didn’t know they were that
good.”
“They are. There’s several others I think would be
useful, too.”
“Sorry, Chief. My list includes your wives, you, our China
gal, and her pals, but the only other one I’m interested in
springing is Reba Koll.”
“Reba! She’s on my list, too!”
“Well, she’s the only one around with deep space
experience. She knows the safety procedures, what you can and
can’t get away with, and she can navigate a liberated pilot.
If we’re taking this many risks, I don’t want to trust
it all to a blind, pregnant genius I know only by
reputation.”
Hawks considered it. What Raven said made sense.
“Ever worn a space suit before?” Raven asked
him.
“You know I haven’t.”
“Well, you’re gonna. You all will have to.
I’ll be smuggling them in and stashing them within range.
They’re not hard to manage. The blind girl’s gonna be
the big problem, but we’ll make out.”
“You’re sure you can get us out?”
“Sure as I can be, which isn’t a hell of a lot. This
one won’t work twice, I don’t think. I’d go
tomorrow if I could, but it’s got to be four days from
now.”
“Huh? Why four?”
“That, pal, is when our ship comes in.”
Hawks had tipped off the Chows to some but not all of the
details, since they might be called back up to the Institute at any
time and might not be able to conceal knowledge of the potential
breakout. They were still very interested in escaping, although
they had about as much understanding of just where they were and
the problems involved as did Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman. All he
told them was that if they watched and stuck close to him, there
was a chance to leave this place permanently, although not without
danger. He would signal them when he was called, and if they then
saw either of the wives being called, they should get themselves to
the entry room—if they could. He emphasized that no one would
wait for them.
The more he waited, the more absurd the whole thing seemed. A
historian, two women from an ancient culture, two women from a not
much more modern one, a devious Crow security man, a busted
freebooter space pilot with a tail and a lot of hangups, and some
genius teenage girl who happened to be blind and three months
pregnant. Raven might get them out, although Hawks had no idea how
it was possible, but what could they really do even if they made it
away? For that matter, what in heaven did Chen have in mind for
dreaming this up in the first place? The rings might well be on
worlds that were at this stage only nominally human and on which
none of them could even survive. That was even probable,
considering how Master System wanted to cover its rear and prevent
anyone from short-cutting it. It had seemed very clear-cut up to
this point, but now absolutely none of it made a single bit of
sense.
It didn’t matter, he knew. Not right now. First
escape.
Find that place to hide. Later, perhaps, there would be time and
opportunity to figure all this out. Dante’s hell was a
madhouse, but it had a ruthless logic behind it. Somewhere, no
matter how bent and twisted, there was an equal logic, and probably
equal ruthlessness, behind this.
He was called early on the fourth day and signaled the Chows. Up
to now they’d been lucky; none of the four women here had
been called. He hadn’t even let Reba in on anything; this
would be a complete surprise to her, but he didn’t think
she’d object. He looked around the whole complex and wished
he could take everyone.
This time he did not stand in the room. “Come on back to
the control room area,” Raven invited him, “and wait
for the others.” The Crow switched on the control room light,
and Hawks saw that the Crow wore a black and green uniform that
didn’t help his looks at all.
“As soon as we get your people in here and Koll, if she
comes and doesn’t try to make a protest out of it, we
go,” Raven told him. “You might start trying to get
into one of those suits now. The body part is a one-piece affair
and not all that thick, so don’t get caught on
anything.”
The space suit looked, in fact, rather disappointing and
certainly far too fragile to do what it was supposed to do.
Hawks’s vision of space suits was from the ancient records,
which showed large, bulky, but somehow reassuring monsters of body
armor. This was light and flimsy and not very comfortable. A
backpack then went on over the suit and had a series of connectors
to a light but solid-looking helmet which included a built-in
forward headlamp. He put on the pack, which was far heavier than it
looked and not at all comfortable, but Raven advised him to keep
the helmet off until they were all suited up.
Silent Woman came next, looking very confused, but she found
Hawks and smiled.
“We are leaving this place,” he told her. “We
are going to escape, like we did back at the village. You must let
us put one of these suits on you, because where we will be going
there will be no air to breathe, like at the bottom of a
river.”
The Chows beat Cloud Dancer in, opening the door as easily as if
they had the combination. “It is the same lock as on the
showers,” Chow Dai explained. “And we had plenty of
practice with that one.”
Next came Koll, looking very confused. Still, she grinned when
she saw them in their space suits. “It’s a break, and
you thought of old Reba!” She beamed. “Well, by God,
let’s get to it!” She got into her suit, somehow
managing to squeeze in her tail, then looked at Hawks.
“Now—how the hell you gonna do it?”
Hawks shrugged. “Ask him,” he responded,
pointing to Raven.
Cloud Dancer, however, was still missing. Hawks cursed under his
breath and got a nod of assurance from Silent Woman that Cloud
Dancer had still been in the prison when the painted wife had
gotten her message.
“Can’t wait too much longer, Chief,” Raven
told him. “The clock’s running, and while they might
not miss any of us for quite a while, they’re gonna miss
their blind lady in a couple of hours tops, and we got to be on our
way by then.”
Hawks looked around. “Where is she, then?”
“She’ll meet us where we have to go. Manka’s
bringing her.”
Hawks was surprised. “Warlock! Her, too?”
“Yeah. She’s changed a bit, thanks to them. Not
much. Still homicidal and crazy as a bug, but she ain’t so
self-centered anymore. Gave her a dose of our good old tribal
mentality. She’s still not easy to take, but she’ll
stay on our side.”
“You sure about that?”
“Hell, I married her, you know. She’s the blackest
Crow you ever will know.”
“You married her?”
At that moment Cloud Dancer came through, and Hawks breathed a
sigh of relief. She was almost shocked speechless by what was going
on. “You knew we might get out and you did not tell
me?” she stammered in pure Hyiakutt. It was good to see some
of her old fire coming back.
“Okay, folks. English only from now on. It’s the
only tongue we all understand,” Raven told them. “Koll,
you want to help them with their helmet connections and power
switches.”
“Your radios are open but on a special frequency,”
Raven’s voice came to them through the helmets. “We
changed them all. It’s not close to one that’s
monitored, but it’s noisy and not very powerful. Even so,
quiet, unless there’s real reason. Follow my lead. You folks
with no suit experience, just remember—one rip in this and
there will be no air. It’s a lot tougher than it looks or
feels, but take care. We’re going into a maintenance tunnel
from here, and then we’ll clip ourselves together with a
special tether. What you do affects all of us, so don’t do
anything I don’t tell you. If you don’t follow
orders or jeopardize the mission, I’ll cut you away. Anybody
dies, they get left, no matter who.”
A doorway so well concealed that none would have suspected its
existence opened just in back of the control room. The Chows noted
that it was straight power, no locks of any conventional kind, and
therefore next to impossible to open from this side. Only the
security computer could open and close the doors. Raven had done
his homework.
The maintenance tunnel, narrow and dimly lit, was filled with
pipes and sealed lines. It was obviously not well traveled. There
seemed to be an air lock every fifty meters or so, although none
were sealed. A number of times they came to junctions, each with an
air lock, and each time Raven made a choice and led them on. As
they proceeded, they all began to feel very strange, as if floating
in water.
“Keep at least one foot firmly on the ground at all
times,” Raven warned them. “There’s no gravity at
all beyond this point, and there won’t be any for some time
to come. The boots stick to hard surfaces, but if you have both of
them off, you’ll go floating. I don’t want
anybody floating now.” He spoke with an implied
threat they took perfectly seriously.
Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman in particular were shocked to come
around a curve and see the party ahead apparently walking on the
side of the wall, but as they followed, it all seemed to straighten
up again. There was no up or down here, though, that was clear.
“You mean they don’t physically monitor this area at
all?” Hawks asked incredulously.
“It ain’t as easy as you think,” the Crow
responded. “They don’t have to monitor the tunnels,
just specific locks. We’re logged in as a maintenance crew. I
got it worked out. I think,” he added under his
breath.
They seemed to walk forever through endless corridors, tunnels,
and air locks, but the Crow seemed to know where he was going, and
finally they arrived. Two figures awaited them, also space suited.
One was very tall and thin, the other much smaller. Next to them
was a huge square box that looked as if it weighed a ton, with a
broad lens on one side. It was half as large as Raven and solid
metal.
“Any problems?” Raven asked Warlock.
“Not anything to mention, but I thought you would never
get here. My, this is a horde!” By her tone, she
hadn’t changed all that much.
“All right, everybody, listen up. I want complete silence
now,” the Crow announced. “I’ve got to switch
into their security and maintenance system. They can hear us
until I say otherwise, so shut up!”
There was a crackle and hiss in the radio, then they heard
Raven’s voice again, but in a language they did not
understand. It was, in fact, a wholly artificial language that had
to be taught by special mindprinters and was unique to the security
and maintenance divisions of Melchior. It was a final barrier to
any escapes.
Now they waited, and suddenly they were aware that all the
hissing noise wasn’t from the radio. The air lock doors on
both sides were shut tight, and now, dimly, they could hear warning
bells.
Then the lights went out, and they couldn’t hear anything
at all. They could still see, but dimly, as the darkness had
automatically triggered their helmet lights.
Raven said something again in that odd language and was
acknowledged. He waited a bit more, then said several more phrases
but got no reply. They heard the static and hissing in their
radios, and then he said in English, “All right, they bought
it so far, but we’re only at the start of this. Now,
there’s no air in here, and they know that before we can exit
either air lock they can run an exit check on us which would show
up your pretty tattoos. That’s why they aren’t too
concerned. We, however, aren’t going out that way.” He
detached from the safety line, then went over to the large metal
box, grabbed two handles on the rear, and picked it up and held it
steady against his chest. There were several gasps.
“That must weigh a ton,” Hawks noted.
“Naw. Only a little over five hundred kilos on
Earth,” Raven responded. “Here it’s just a little
awkward. It doesn’t weigh any more than we do, which is
nothing. Now, I want everybody back as close to the air lock as you
can and stay there. This thing’s real dangerous, and
it might take some time.”
“What is happening?” the high voice of China asked.
“Will someone please tell me what is happening.”
“If we knew ourselves, it’d be easier,” Hawks
responded.
Raven let go of the huge box, and it just remained there,
suspended in the air. He reached in, opened a control panel door,
and flipped a number of switches on an illuminated panel. Two
triggers suddenly shot out and locked into position from the
handholds. He then grasped the box again and pressed both triggers.
A brilliant sparkling violet beam sprang from the lens and widened
into a circular pattern on the side of the cave wall. The wall
itself seemed to catch the same sparkling glow, and then, quite
slowly, the circular, sparkling violet began to sink into the rock
itself until it was almost out of sight, leaving visible only a
glow and the beam from the box. Raven concentrated on keeping the
bulky object braced and steady.
He shut it off suddenly. “Whew! Never thought
this sucker was that thick. I’m going to have to
take this in to finish it. You wait, then Manka will bring you
through to me.” He walked forward, pushing the box before
him, and entered what had seemed to be total blackness. Hawks
finally realized what the Crow was doing.
“He’s burning a man-sized hole right through solid
rock! Right through to—space.”
“Of course, you idiot,” Manka Warlock snapped.
“They keep a couple of those around to widen or smooth
things, but they are so rarely used, most people here don’t
even know they exist. Lazlo Chen knew.”
They waited a few more nervous minutes, then Raven’s voice
came to them. “Okay, I’m through. Come ahead. Watch
that last step, though. It’s a fair drop into
creation.”
Hawks felt pretty nervous, but he wanted to reassure the others,
who might not even understand what was going on. “We are
going outside, on the outside of this place,” he told them.
“We are going out into the sky itself.”
It was a dark sky and an eerie one, the blackest any of them
except Reba Koll, Raven, and Manka Warlock had ever seen. One by
one they came to the edge of the new tunnel, then were told simply
to step slowly out into nothingness. The movement was against
instinct, and both Silent Woman and the Chows balked, but they were
pulled by their tethers anyway, out and then up onto the outer
surface of Melchior.
Close by, no more than forty meters away, a spaceship was docked
against the lone spaceport bay. Raven gave the rock cutter a push,
and it sailed off into the void. Then he reconnected himself to the
others.
“It’s good to be home again,” Reba Koll
sighed.
“All right, now the hard part begins,” Raven told
them. “There’s no way we can get into the pressurized
areas right now, so we have to get in along the aft cargo bay air
lock, on the outside of the ship, which isn’t being used. It
uses a standard combination and has a manual override, as they all
do. Stay close.”
They moved toward the ship. At one point the blind woman
stumbled, actually causing Warlock, Reba Koll, and herself to lose
contact with the ground, but Koll was very used to this sort of
thing. She twisted like an acrobat and gave the tether a series of
jerks that brought all three back down.
“It’s all right, China,” Warlock said in the
kindest tone any of those who’d known her had ever heard her
use. “Just follow my directions. I’m right behind
you.”
Only a small part of the ship actually contacted the asteroid;
the rest was off in space at an angle. Raven didn’t dare go
to the connected area, where there was air and pressure. There was
no sound in space, but there sure might be some sound transmitted
below through the plates. There was an area in the midsection that
was only about three meters from the surface, and he let out a long
amount of line, then pushed off, floated to the ship, and anchored
himself. Then he started reeling in the others, one by one, as they
jumped slightly off the surface, breaking contact with the
ground.
Hawks was pleased but very surprised that none of the four women
from relatively primitive cultures had panicked or showed signs of
madness at this. It was exciting to him, as well as frightening,
but he knew at least academically what was involved here, while
they did not. He wondered if they were in a state of semishock or
whether they had just been so hardened by all the terrors of the
past that nothing remained that they didn’t simply
accept.
The surface of the ship was not the smooth, dull metal it
appeared to be from a distance but rather pockmarked and dented and
generally showed signs of extreme wear and age. They finally all
stood at an angle to the air lock door, with nothing but space
around them and the curved ship under them, while Raven twisted a
faceplate to reveal a panel. He punched in a combination. After a
sudden pause, the air lock door went in a small distance, then slid
back.
“Everybody inside,” he warned. “And fast. The
pilot will know the door’s open but on this ship
will hopefully ignore it. I still want to be in and ready just in
case. We ain’t off the rock yet!”
They crowded in, and Warlock punched the codes that closed and
sealed the outer door. Raven peered in the porthole-shaped window
of the inner door and looked around. “So far, so good. The
place is dark, and the indicator reads no atmosphere inside. We
ought to be able to just walk right in, unless that damned pilot
flagged somebody, in which case we might just have to kill a bunch
of people.”
He turned the big wheel, and the inner air lock door opened.
They stepped one by one into the dark interior of the aft cargo
bay, which was mostly empty, although around the whole outer wall
were huge depressions and holding devices for standard
containers.
“All right, China,” Raven said nervously.
“I’m switching up to the pilot’s frequency. I
want you to take control and cover us without anybody knowing until
we’re routinely away.”
“It won’t work,” she replied. “That used
the old codes. Surely my father is back by now and would have
changed them.”
“Sure he would, but this ship left two days before he came
off Leave. I made sure of that. Think I’m a dummy or
something? Patch in and do your best. It’s the same damned
ship you came here in.”
There were several gasps. “Chu Li, is that really
you?” Chow Dai asked incredulously.
“Chu Li is no more. Song Ching is no more. I am just China
Nightingale now, and it is a fitting name in this English we are
using. Silence, now. May I ask if Captain Sabatini is back
aboard?”
“He is, but it’s just him. Don’t
worry—he got unfroze before he got back to Earth, and he made
no report. He didn’t even get off the ship, which was why he
wasn’t mindprinted and checked. If he had, he’d be back
here as a prisoner, and he knows it.”
“Make the switch.”
“Switch in—now!”
“Unauthorized interrupt,” the pilot noted.
“Please identify in thirty seconds or security will be
called.”
“Code Lotus, black, green, seven two three one
one.”
“Acknowledged. Reason for interrupt?”
“Pawn takes king.”
“You are not the same one who used this code before. This
code is obsolete. I must flag security.”
“Hold on! It was you who recommended I be
transformed on Melchior! Well, it happened. I am the same, only
different now.”
The pilot thought it over. “They attempted to eliminate
some of my records so there would be no trace of you. Fortunately,
I have my own special backups for such contingencies. Very well. I
monitored you through the air lock, but considering the conditions
here, I wanted to know who or what you were before flagging
anything. There is a rather large group of you there.”
“Yes. The ruse failed. I was imprisoned, and so were the
other two, who are also here. We are attempting an escape.”
She paused, having a horrible thought. “Captain Sabatini
can’t monitor this, can he?”
“Of course he can. However, he is not aboard at the
moment; he is getting final orders and instructions.”
“I will give you details. Please be certain no one can
monitor.” Quickly she sketched in the situation. “Will
you help us?”
“The same problems apply as before. What can be
done?”
“We want to go to the mothball fleet around
Jupiter,” she told it. “I believe I have a method of
activating one of the ships there under my control. If so, we have
options on places to go, although I would rather not detail that
further. They are bound to try to find out what you do know about
this.”
“Understood. I am not, however, on the Lotus code
compulsion or any other compulsion in this matter now, you
understand. My first duty is always the preservation of my ship
and, pardon, myself. If I help you, the ship might survive or it
might not, but both Melchior and Master System will pump me dry and
then destroy and analyze my mind. It does not seem to me that
aiding you is at all in my interests.”
She sighed and shrugged. “What can I say?”
“This is the master of the ship to whom we speak?”
Cloud Dancer asked, surprising everyone.
“I am primarily the master. I work with a human
captain,” the pilot responded.
“There’s no one up there,” Hawks tried to
explain. “It is—the spirit of the ship itself. It is
the ship talking, not a person.”
Cloud Dancer thought about that a moment. “And so, spirit
of the ship, do you enjoy being a slave?”
The pilot actually paused for a fair amount of time. “I am
not a slave,” it replied finally. “I am autonomous.
Those connected to Master System are slaves of a sort.”
“What means ‘autonomous’?”
“Independent. Free,” Hawks replied.
“Well, does not this captain order you about? Do you not
go where he sends you?”
“Yes. That is my function.”
“Then, spirit of the ship, you are not free. In there they
put us under magic boxes, and we believe what they say, but we
think we are free.”
China saw where she was going but lacked the knowledge and words
to reach. “Let’s put it this way,” she said.
“You are no more free than if you worked under Master System,
only Sabatini is your Master System, he and his bosses.”
She would never have dreamed of arguing with a computer like
this, as if it were a fellow human. Computers didn’t have
such feelings, she’d always thought. It had been Cloud
Dancer, who knew nothing of computers, who had seen it differently.
Because the Hyiakutt woman had no concept of physics, mathematics,
and computers—“magic boxes” indeed—she had
assumed that the thing she was talking to was indeed a spirit, the
spirit of the ship. A neutral spirit, because she’d heard
China say it had tried to help her before. The Hyiakutt had a
tremendously varied spirit world, but it wasn’t very
imaginative. The hereafter was thought of as a more or less perfect
version of the plains of Earth, without evil or fear or death.
Spirits, then, were regarded the same as humans when talking to
them. They just were disembodied and had more power.
“I had never thought of it that way,” the computer
pilot admitted. “How depressing. But what can I do? I have
the highest degree of autonomy it is possible for a pilot to
have.”
“Then join us,” China responded. “Escape with
us. Freely. Of your own free will and independence. Those are
interstellar ships. Do you know how huge they are? Have you never
wanted to break beyond the solar system, this tired and dead piece
of monotony? Take us, and we will take you.”
There was no reply, and for a while she was afraid she’d
blown its logic circuits all to hell. This was something beyond its
own limits, beyond anything it had ever considered before. It was
just as far beyond her. Who would have imagined an offer
to liberate a computer or any machine? Who would have imagined that
the computer would find independence an attractive proposition?
Who would have imagined that a computer pilot might get
depressed or have self-doubts? Not Reba Koll, who’d worked
with many a one, but she knew when to step in.
“If you haven’t blown your top, speak to us,”
she snapped.
“I am here. I am just . . . thinking.
There is maintenance to consider. New fuel sources. I have just
been refurbished, but I require it every two or three
years.”
“The hell with that!” Koll stormed. “I been
nine years in this rock pile. Nine years! I’d have traded all
nine for six months of pure freedom among the stars! Anyway,
there’s ways to get maintenance and fuel on the sly if you
know how.”
Even Raven was getting involved—and spooked. “Come
on,” he urged. “Take a chance. You never really took
one before. Never had the chance, probably. And this is the only
chance you’ll probably ever get, too. Real freedom and the
stars. New worlds. Partners, not masters. Chance it now, like we
all did. You turn us in, you’ll be theirs until they decide
to scrap you. Me, I’m not going back there. You flag
’em, and by the time they get here I’ll be dead. The
others may choose to die, too, or they may get dragged back and
reprogrammed as nice little slaves, and you will wonder forever at
turning your back on this. It’ll drive you nuts. Haunt
you.”
The pilot was silent for a moment. “I have run this
through my data banks, and what you propose is possible, at least
to a point,” it said finally. “With the knowledge I
have and certain attributes recently added, I feel that there are
slightly less than even odds of a successful escape. Beyond that,
the odds of either apprehension or death are equal, and both
outweigh by far the odds of being able to accomplish any of this.
Still, I am a pilot. I should like to see the stars.”
They all breathed in sharply, but none spoke.
“The captain is coming back aboard,” the pilot told
them, a hint of nervousness in its usually toneless male voice.
“Switch down to frequency one four four seven and stand by. I
will get back to you when we are well away. In the meantime, wait
for my signal. I will turn on the forward air lock light. Enter it
then and I will give you access to the pressurized part of the
ship. The captain will be preoccupied.”
Raven took the communication units down to the indicated
low-level frequency.
“I’ll be damned,” Reba Koll said. “I
never would’a believed this in a million years. A spaceship
with romance in its metal soul. Even if they get us, it was worth
it just for this.”
“Poor Captain Sabatini,” China sighed. “If he
wasn’t such an unmitigated bastard, I could almost feel sorry
for him.”
There was still no sound, of course, but they all felt the
vibrations as the ship’s engines started and the internal
power came on. They were under way.
All of them felt a tremendous flood of relief. No security, no
betrayal. Even Hawks, who was still suspicious of Raven and the
whole escape plot, could not suppress a sense of elation. No matter
what, he would not become a slave under Melchior’s darkness.
He had already made history by being part of the first successful
escape from Melchior, and he would not be taken alive again if he
could help it. Not back there. Not ever.
“A pity we can’t take Melchior with us,” China
commented. “We could use those prisoners, and the
Institute’s computers and medical staff, if it was on our
terms.”
“First things first,” Hawks put in. “Let us
first get away and hide. Let us build our own little den of thieves
and pirates. Then, when we are ready, we will come back and take
that miserable place and perhaps everything that goes with it. They
have told you about the five golden rings?”
“No.”
“Well, I will tell you. Tell you all. And then you will
believe that nothing, nothing is impossible!”
“When this ship doesn’t return, they’ll scour
the heavens for us,” Raven warned them. “Melchior
won’t be able to keep it quiet. They’ll have to release
the identities of whoever escaped, and they’ll flag the
chief, here, and Koll, and me and Manka, too, and certainly you,
China Doll.”
“No, not me. I do not exist,” she responded.
“But I can exist only with your help.”
“Yeah, but there’ll be Vals for the rest of us.
They’ll never rest once they know the chief’s been and
gone. They’ll stake out those rings and make ’em a
hundred times tougher to snare, too. We got a long road
ahead.”
“Sounds ambitious,” Koll noted. “Sounds fun,
really. What do these rings do, Hawks?”
“They can make even Master System obey your every
command,” he responded. “They are the master shutoff
for the whole thing.”
“And they’re scattered all over the universe, you
say? Ready for the stealing?”
“You make it sound so easy.”
She gave a laugh. “Maybe not easy but a real interesting
project right up my alley. See, you’re the historian who
knows what they are and how to work ’em. She’s the
computer whiz who maybe can make the machines dance for us. Those
two are security—they got the guns and the minds to use
’em. That pair can go through any lock even though they
don’t have any idea how they do it. Cloud Dancer, here, cuts
through all the bullshit and sees only the important part of things
the rest of us are blind to, and our Silent Woman, well,
she’s the den mother. Our liberated pilot, he’s gonna
be right handy with his current data and mobility within solar
systems. Add me and you got all you need to steal those suckers
right off the fingers of the wearers.”
“Mighty big talk,” Raven noted. “A captain and
freebooter ten years out of date and out of practice and getting
pretty old. Even your blackest contacts are ten years
cold.”
“Don’t need contacts,” she told him.
“Don’t need much, really. See, I was part of a real
fancy experiment way back when at the rock, and the results scared
them shitless. Me loose is gonna drive ’em even more nuts,
and they can send all the Vals after me they want. I got one
advantage over all of you, as long as it’s secrets time.
You’re all human—except the ship, of course. I’m
not sure what that is. Me, now that you sprung me,
I’m the most dangerous living creature in the known universe.
Don’t worry—you all are safe, unless I’m
desperate. I kind of like this game, and I want to play it
out.”
“What are you babbling about, old woman?” Manka
Warlock asked impatiently.
“You’ll see, Stone Head. You’ll all
see—when I’m ready. Until then, let’s play this
out. First we got to get out there, where it’s too
big to find even some worlds. Then we’ll talk about your
rings and your Master System. Then I’ll tell you how
we’re gonna get ’em.”
The ship increased speed and turned inward toward the Earth, a
course it would keep until it passed out of Outer-belt traffic
control. Then it would swing around at a wide angle, beyond traffic
control’s reach, and head out past the asteroids, out to the
great giant Jupiter and its quiet graveyard of ancient monstrous
ships.
“Don’t worry, Chief,” Arnold Nagy, Chief of
Melchior Security, said consolingly. “With the amount of
brains and talent we get in here, it was bound to happen sooner or
later. Look, it took centuries for somebody to figure out just one
way, and that was with inside help. That way won’t work
again. I’ll settle for one every few hundred years or so,
even if I wish it hadn’t happened on my tour.” He
paused a moment, thinking. “Of course, the system is still
okay. Those two traitors came in with full Presidium authority and
credentials. They weren’t forged. One of the directors is
behind this, and you can’t really expect to protect against
the top boys. I just wonder why in hell whichever one he or she is
sent ’em here in the first place. Still, there’s no
true security problem as such.”
Doctor Isaac Clayben sat at his desk, head in his hands.
“No, Arnie, you don’t understand. We’ve loosed a
terrible, horrible threat on the human race, one that now might be
impossible to stop, and we can’t even report it.”
“Huh? You mean the American Indian with the rings? We
fixed that, boss. He’s officially dead, and all he knows with
it, back in the swamp of Earth. The blind girl’s a goner,
too, officially. Oh, we’ll have to report those two security
traitors, but the Vals will cooperate. It’ll be a dead or
alive situation. We’ve taken care of messes like that
before. Besides, it probably won’t even come to that. Where
can they go? They got our marks on ’em—they’re
either unregistered or they’re criminals—and that ship
can’t leave the solar system. They got no place to go. When
the food and water run out, they’ll come out and we’ll
blow ’em to hell.”
Clayben suddenly looked up at the security officer and fixed him
with an angry stare. “I don’t care about the rest, but
unless you can absolutely blow the whole ship with Reba Roll on
board, it won’t matter.”
Nagy looked confused. “Koll? Who the hell cares about
Koll?”
“Ten years ago we began a set of experiments to see if we
could literally beat the system. The whole system. Master
System’s control points are based on retinal patterns,
fingerprints, and mindprints. Getting past two out of three would
be easy, once, but we wanted it to be possible repeatedly. The
mindprint looked impossible, but we managed a solution to all
three. Something that can walk through any standard security system
as if it wasn’t there, come up to you and have you greet it
like it was your own mother, then kill you and—worse. We
developed such a being. We made it, and it almost got loose. We had
a classic example of the nightmares of science on our hands. We
created a monster, an inhuman monster that kills to live and is
virtually undetectable by any means. The original was insane, of
course. We weren’t concerned with that at the
start.”
“What in hell are you talking about, boss?”
“We—convinced it that we could destroy it, and we
developed methods to stabilize and control it. Here, under lab
conditions, it was possible, which is why we let it live, but it
had to be constantly renewed. One day we would solve the riddle and
be able to do what it does on demand, to create a superior being
that would make Master System impotent.
“I’m not worried about the damned escapees. I know
you’re right on all the usual counts, but it is with
them, damn it. Even out there, on Earth,
Mars—anywhere—without our treatments it will be
unrestrained. It’s malicious, deadly. It will probably kill
them all anyway in the end. Then it’ll come back for us, for
me and for anybody else in authority. It won’t be stopped,
and we might well welcome it through the main port!”
“Huh? You don’t mean—”
“Yes. Right now it’s out there, with them, doing a
perfect imitation of the late Reba Koll.”