China’s blind head snapped up at that. She looked old for her years now, her beauty and glow faded by the curses Melchior had inflicted on her so many years ago, but she was still as sharp as ever. “Big! Of course!”
“If you got somethin’, girl, spit it out,” Raven said.
“The probe’s just one of our fighters, specially outfitted. Have it check the orbit around Jupiter and report.”
“Scanning,” Star Eagle responded.
Hawks looked over at her. “Jupiter? You’re not thinking…”
“They’re still there, China,” the pilot told her. “All still nicely mothballed. Minimal status.”
“Recall the probe,” she ordered. “We have need for it. If they let it come in once, they might just let it come in again. Stay well clear of Jupiter—I don’t want to telegraph our intentions.”
“Will do,” the computer responded. “And, yes, it just might work. At least the attempt will be minimal in cost.”
Hawks shook his head in wonder. “You’re thinking of somehow getting in close enough to activate those old universe ships? With what? A fighter? It couldn’t carry more than one, maybe two people in pressure suits.”
“Master System knows that,” China replied. “That’s why I’m counting on it letting us get in there for a little while. A fighter from a sister ship shouldn’t even set off the security systems aboard those things.”
“An interesting idea,” Isaac Clayben put in, “but they have no cores. We, at least, had Star Eagle to work with.”
“Then we must make cores,” China responded. “Star Eagle is capable of it, since he knows his own design, and the ships are all the same as this one used to be so we know exactly where everything is.”
“But we could not exactly duplicate Star Eagle with- , out removing him from the core command center amidships,” Clayben pointed out. “To do so would cripple this vessel, cause the failure of all life support and other systems, and leave us totally vulnerable. Besides, true cores aren’t like people. One minor mistake and we could wind up with no core at all, killing Star Eagle in the process.”
“I am willing to take that risk,” the computer told them. “All of you have done as much or worse.”
“No! We don’t need that!” China responded. “Besides, it would take too long. What we need is the physical unit. Programmable. Not Star Eagle’s complex systems and banks. We don’t need ten or twenty Star Eagles, as much as that might be nice. What we need are basic cores capable of handling the ships and carrying out commands from Thunder. Remotes, as it were.”
Clayben’s eyebrows rose. “Indeed? And even if we could do that, how would we get the cores aboard? Standards or not, the security there would seize control of any service robots we might use.”
Captain ben Suda looked thoughtful. “But would the same apply to a being who might be able to work in such an environment?” he asked them. “One who could even survive a deep-space vacuum for up to three hours? A Makkikor, for example, who was also the finest ship’s engineer alive?”
“You think he’d do it?” Hawks asked, interested.
“I think so. In a sense, his world and people have been injured more by Master System than ours. After all, it was our own ancestors who created this monster, but his people just had the bad luck to be in the middle of the exploration field when Master System rolled over it. I should think he would consider it an honor and a privilege to not only do whatever was necessary but to give his life to free his people—from us.”
Raven shook his head. “No, no. A Makkikor can stand a vacuum, yeah, and work mostly in the dark, too, but that don’t mean it don’t need air. It ain’t a matter of holdin’ your breath for three hours, it’s havin’ the air inside for three hours’ worth of work, and he’s a big sucker. We might sneak him in, but not the auxiliary ship with the air and water. He can’t manufacture it, you know, even if he gets the cores in and the ships operating. There’s only so much murylium in them ship’s engines and they’ll be needed for full power. They ain’t got the transmuters we got, neither. Remember, we had to build and modify over months to get what we got here. A transmuter that simply fuels the engines won’t do no good at all.”
Clayben scratched his chin in thought. “I wonder. We still have plenty of power, and they are bound to notice and figure out what we’re doing if we get a punch that close in to Jupiter anyway. If I were thinking of coming in, a head-on engagement, I might well run a sacrificial lamb right into them to check out their power and organization before I committed my real forces. If we could punch into the solar system not far from Jupiter, but sufficiently distant to not draw undue notice to our intentions, and if we could punch through two ships in tandem, very close, the punch pulse might register as a single entry. If the trailing ship had the proper exit speed and momentum and made its turns using minimal local power, it just might not get picked up on the scanners at all. Then the defenders would concentrate on the leading ship, the probe, and possibly never even notice the one heading in toward the mothball fleet. And if that ship had the proper codes, which we can easily check with the fighter, then the mothball fleet would not react. Yes—it could be done.”
“You are not talking about small automated fighters there,” Maria Santiago pointed out. “You are talking about a full-size ship and a trailing smaller ship, both managed by skilled pilots. The second might make it, it is true, but the first, the diversion—what did you call it? A sacrificial lamb? Without the unpredictability of a human pilot aboard you could not hope to throw the defensive computers off long enough for your diversion to succeed, but we would most certainly lose that ship—and any who were aboard. You are asking someone to commit suicide.”
Hawks sighed. “Any other reasonable way to do this? Doctor, is there no possibility your technological magic could get us in any other way?”
“That is the best I can come up with, and it is filled with a great many variables,” Clayben responded. “Star Eagle?”
“It is risky, but feasible,” the computer responded. “I’m afraid Maria is correct—if even I were to engage the defenses there now, it would be no contest. No matter what a rebel I have become, or what I have learned, the fact is that my basic design—and basic designer—is the same as those cores on the defensive ships. That means I can unerringly know how they are going to react, and they will know how I will react. That is the reason for Val ships—they have a measure of humanity, as it were, from the life memories recorded within them. There are Vals in the system, but they are not involved in the main task force as far as I can tell, nor could they reach the positions in time. No, it is the ship’s computer mated with the unpredictable and often irrational human interface that might buy some time. I agree with Doctor Clayben—and Maria.”
Hawks looked around at them. “So, all this computer and brain power and we come up with a suicide play in which the most likely result is that we lose two of our remaining ships and three or more people. How can I authorize such a thing?”
“I believe it is the way in,” Star Eagle told him. “There must be a way in. I am more convinced of that than ever now. Master System is required, I think, to leave a blind spot, a single avenue of entry. In each case we have either found that avenue or discovered one that it did not think of. I really suspect that there is little Master System doesn’t think of. Consider its sheer size, power, speed, data bases, and intellect. Consider just how much it governs, and how absolute its power really is over that vast area where even tightbeam communication can take hours or days. No, it is as Raven said so long ago. Humans have an absolute right to go for the rings and to use them. Master System may make it very difficult and dangerous but its core program, its subconscious dictator, as it were, requires it to miss something, to keep creating blind spots, possibly without even realizing it. It should be child’s play for such a computer to keep us off Earth, even if it cannot find us. And now I have proof. My fighter probe indicates that the security codes to the colonization ships have not been changed since we stole this one. Unchanged. That fleet is unlocked—if we can get to it.”
Hawks sighed. “There it is, then. That little detail is not something Master System would overlook. It’s something it was compelled to not think about. It has drawn its usual convoluted and dangerous route, and with the highest of prices to be paid. Somehow I never thought of the core imperatives in terms of a subconscious mind, but the analogy is sound.” He paused a moment, as if suddenly seeing a new thought, a new fact, for the first time. He shook his head as if to clear it and muttered, “No, it couldn’t be,” low and to himself.
“What ‘couldn’t be’?” China asked him.
“Never mind. A silly thought from out of my own depths. The fact remains, even if all this is true and this is the only way left to us, it requires something I have never asked, or been able to ask, of anyone. It is not my right, even as chief and leader, to ask it.”
“Oh, hell,” Raven said casually, “I’ll fly your damned target.”
They all turned and stared at him, and he seemed almost embarrassed by that. He shrugged and explained, “Hey—ask Hawks. Our people had a damned habit of attacking iron horses with bows and arrows and somehow kiddin’ themselves they could stop millions of white faces by winning a few cavalry battles. They got creamed, of course. But wouldn’t it have been worth it to my ancestors to ride down whoopin’ and hollerin’ on the towns and the forts as a diversion, the warriors who fell knowin’ that while everybody was watchin’ and worryin’ about them a few smart braves were blowin’ up the Great White Father?”
“You don’t have to do this,” Hawks told him seriously. “You have nothing to atone for, no stain on your honor from our point of view.”
“Not from your point of view, Chief,” Raven responded. “But I don’t give a damn about your point of view. Never have, and you know it. You know, I can’t think of anything that might have come up that I really wanted to do more than this. No more bein’ a pawn, no more sneakin’ around, no more cheap cigars. By god, it’s what I was born to do, Chief! One lone Crow warrior against a nest of the worst damned iron horses the white man ever inflicted on anybody! One damned warrior in the craziest, stupidest, loudest diversionary action his ancestors ever thought of—and, this time, we don’t do it just for honor, we actually got a chance to win. But I don’t just want one of the ships. I want the best armament, the best attack programs, the most speed possible.”
“Lightning would be best, but we can’t use it,” Clayben noted. “It is a smaller ship, the logical trailing vessel with the smaller footprint and the better intrasystem maneuverability. It’s big enough to take the cores, the air supplies, the other supplies we might need, all that, but nothing could hide behind it save a fighter and that would be much too small.”
Raven grinned. “I figured that, Doc. Kaotan’s good, but it don’t turn tight enough for my tastes, and deep down it’s just a cobbled-together rust bucket. No offense, Ali, Chun, but Bahakatan and Chunhoifan are fine merchant vessels, well maintained and real capable, but in the end they’re still freighters. No, there’s only one ship that meets all the requirements, and it just so happens it ain’t got no captain right now. It’s fast heavily armed, and very neatly disguised as just another scow. Besides, we only got to take this warrior shit so far. With Espiritu Luzon I go out in absolute luxury.”
Everyone who could fly a ship volunteered for Lightning, but Hawks refused to pick anyone right then. “It will be the best one for the job,” he told them. “There is no rush in this. In the meantime, Captain ben Suda, you might just ask your Makkikor engineer if he’s willing to go along with this. If he’s not, then we’ve got a lot of rethinking to do.”
The Makkikor was an incredibly fluid creature for being so large and so formidable looking. Its basic shape was lobsterlike, but instead of legs it had seemingly endless numbers of fine tendrils that could secrete various substances to allow it to stick to or walk upon almost any surface. What looked like a shell was deep purple with some yellow strains, yet the exoskeleton, while as tough as it looked, was almost rubbery in its ability to twist and bend, to contort into whatever shape its wearer required.
The head—it was not possible to really think of it as a face—consisted of eight very long tentacles covered with thousands of tiny sucker pads grouped around a circular mouth that resembled more the cavity of some gigantic worm than anything else. The eyes, on each side of the exoskeleton, were lumpy protrusions from inside the body, each able to independently swivel in almost any direction. The irises were black, with V-shaped yellow pupils. When you looked upon a Makkikor you knew for certain that this was no creature of Master Systern’s design, but a product of a far different evolutionary path. To most humans, colonial and Earth types alike, it was monstrous, yet its people had risen on their home world to a high level of technology and while their brains might work as differently as their bodies looked, they were of extremely high intelligence.
Perhaps more intelligent than humans, some commented, because although they, too, were the products of a violent history they had the good sense never to create a Master System. Smart enough, too, to realize after a struggle that this alien computer was unbeatable and to accept the new system as the only alternative to genocide.
No Makkikor had the capacity for humanlike speech; theirs was a far different language, beyond human abilities as well. This one had a small transceiver implanted within it that was controlled by the creature’s own electrochemistry. The implant would broadcast the Makkikor’s words to another unit, translating as it did so. Although still imperfect, the implant was better than the unit it had used prior to joining the crew of the Thunder, and the creature fully understood what they had done and what they were intending to do.
“What will the new system do to my people?” it asked, mulling over the proposition.
“Nothing,” Hawks tried to assure it, although he was grateful that Ali ben Suda was on hand, as well, a human used to conversing with it. “We are liberators, not new enslavers.”
The Makkikor considered that. “Almost all enslavers began as liberators,” it noted. “In my history, in your history. Such power will corrupt anyone. Human history is genocidal. I fear that even if we are liberated and grow out into space as our forefathers tried to do, we will meet the vastness of humanity doing the same.”
“There are no guarantees,” Hawks admitted. “I promise nothing, I guarantee nothing. In terms of the future, I can speak only for myself. We have no choice in this matter, really. Not you, not me. Our people—yours and mine—stagnate. We are strangled, slowly, by a dictator both ruthless and all-powerful yet for benevolent reasons. This must cease. What happens when its hold is broken is something I cannot say, but it is an unacceptable present versus the unknown future. I fear that future for my people as much as you fear it for your own, but I am committed. The system we face now is wrong. What might be is not something I can be concerned about. I believe it is as fitting for my people to be involved in this enterprise as it is fitting that one of your race also be here. It can only be said that we took the risks and struck the blows, Makkikor and Hyiakutt among them. For me, that is sufficient. That is as much as I can expect, and it will not be forgotten.”
The Makkikor seemed to think on that. It had wound up with ben Suda because of a chance run-in on one of those freebooter worlds where ships were cannibalized to keep the other ships running. Why it had signed oil was never clear, but it had been loyal and a superior engineer—Bahakatan was the best-run and best-maintained ship of all the freebooter craft. It had come here because its ship was here, and it had stayed mostly to itself all these years, working on not only its own craft but the others, as well.
“I am old,” the Makkikor said. “Old and tired. I will do it not because I believe that what comes after will be any better, nor for what your people call honor, nor for loyalty or ideals or any of those things. I am too old to have retained any such feelings if I once had them. I will do it because I wish to die among my own kind. I will do it because between the time the old way dies and the new is organized might well be longer than I have left, and certainly longer than it would take me to go home.”
“Each of us acts for his or her own reasons,” Hawks responded. “I do not ask for motives, only for accomplishment.”