“Doubtful,” said Star Eagle. “Even on Matriyeh they had a communications link to a master ground computer. No such link exists here or my probes would have detected it. There is a monitoring satellite but it is not geostationary. It’s designed to casually sweep the planet’s surface and is easily fooled. No, it is probable that Master System here is relying entirely on its anonymity and the hostility and insularity of its people. This is not to say that there are not permanent traps there— an SPF sort, or disguised Vals, or whatever. And if the latter, there can just as easily be one or more Val ships down there, hidden, switched off, self-maintained and ready, which could be impossible for us to detect but available to be switched on and used as required. All it would take is orbital attainment and it could send an emergency call through the solar system monitors.”
“And it might be the wrong place,” China put in worriedly. “We have no real evidence that this is where the fifth ring resides. The reason that there is no activity might be that there is nothing to guard. The reason why these people are on no charts might be that they are not descended from humans at all but are an indigenous species.”
“Unlikely,” Clayben responded. “Even from our crude early examination of the place I can say that it doesn’t fit the pattern for the independent evolution of intelligent life. Oh, give it a few million years and I will readily change my mind, but there is clear evidence here of Master System’s terraforming methodology, and with the air, water, and organics present—all clearly introduced and the plants descended from easily recognizable Earth ancestors—it would be in some way life as we know it. No. It is circumstantial evidence, but we must take the risk. Logic says that it is here, that this is the place. It is consistent with the way Master System thinks.”
Raven sighed. “I’d say we start where we were before. It seemed to be a safe spot in the middle of some civilization, and we’ll have to stick to land at the start, until we get the full lay of it.”
Takya Mudabur, one of the two remaining unchanged crew of the Kaotan and the only native-born water creature among them, spoke up.
“Why do we have to stick to the land? I would enjoy a dip in such a beautiful ocean.” Her people breathed air but lived entirely in the sea. She needed to be in water much of the time, and could be underwater, even in depths as high as five hundred meters, for hours at a time. She had a rudimentary gill system as well as lungs.
“Can’t risk it, or you,” Raven replied. “Butar, Chung, and Min also can handle themselves in water, and we sure have some weapons that’ll work there easy enough, but even sending four instead of one in their element— the element of our unknown people—is like setting me and Hawks down in the middle of Janipur. Somebody would notice, and these folks got a reputation for killing first and wonderin’ later. No, there’ll be a time for that, but not yet. The only smart way to do this is to draw ’em out into our element, away from water. Then we get a look at ’em and we got a fighting chance.”
“Who would you want, then?” Hawks asked him. “I assume the way you’re talking that you’re volunteering to mastermind all this.”
Raven grinned. “About time I did something, ain’t it, Chief? And this is just up my trail.” He looked around at them, thinking. “I want folks with lightning reflexes, in better condition than me, and real nimble shooters. Any volunteers?”
“You need warriors to protect you, Raven,” Santiago said. A great deal of therapy, both mental and physical, had restored the original personalities of her and her companion Midi while retaining the aggressive instincts they had needed to survive on Matriyeh, and now both were resigned to accepting their adopted race and form. They were once more the primitive warrior women of that fierce world, yet their old, technologically sophisticated selves were once again very much in control. Maria was tall, with almost black skin, little body hair, and small, rock-solid breasts. Her European-featured face, which was quite reminiscent of her original looks, was crowned by short, straight black hair. She also had the gracefully athletic body of a female body builder, and the strength and reflexes to match, and looked quite Earth-human, though she was not. Her race was as alien as that of Chanchuk or Janipur. Midi was much the same, only very slightly shorter and with different, more Orientalized features reflecting her original looks.
“You’ve done your share,” Hawks pointed out. “More than your share. You’ve lost a ship, a crew, and become one of a colonial race. Besides, you both have children to think of.”
“Matriyehan children are more independent than that,” she responded. “I was a freebooter captain and then I became a warrior. It’s in the genes you stuck me with, you know. We were talking about it not long ago. We are now designed as warriors, not as sweet young things to tend the kids while the menfolk go off to fight. On Matriyeh there are no menfolk. We crave action. And we are best suited for this kind of thing.”
Raven shrugged. “I agree you two’d be perfect if you really want to go. That’s three. I think I’ll need at least five, maybe six. Somebody’s got to tend camp and maintain the communications and security links, and I ain’t too sure I want to go on the other island with less than five good guns.”
“I’ll go,” said Dora Panoshka. “It is likely that Kaotan will not be needed at this stage of the game, and it would be nice to be on the ground for a change. If Kaotan is needed, then Butar can do for me what I did for her.” Panoshka, now captain of the Kaotan and the one responsible for picking up the Chanchuk team, although humanoid, looked more like a bipedal lion than an Earth-human woman. She was covered with orange and yellow lionlike fur, her rather Earth-human-looking hands and feet disguised with pads, hairy clumps, and nasty retractable claws. Her face was also fur-covered and had a flared-out all-around mane, and the lipless mouth opened wide and menacing, as if it could swallow a person whole. Few would take the time to see that that mouth had no fanglike teeth at all, merely even rows of large, flat ones that were for a jaw that moved primarily from side to side and betrayed her for the absolute vegetarian she and her race were.
“Pardon, but Chunhoifan has been a peripheral player until now,” said Captain Chun Wo Har. He, too, was a born colonial, a humanoid but with a hard, chitinous exoskeleton, bulging black eyes, and the look and manner of a giant insect. “Such a civilization as might be down there would likely be of the bow and arrow and spear variety. I doubt that weapons such as these could pierce my body. I might not be so quick, and I am certainly getting old and out of practice, but I would be honored to come along.”
Captain ben Suda sighed. “I, too, feel much the same. We have fought battles in space and done much scouting, but Bahakatan is also underrepresented in the real object of all this. I was quite good with rifle and sidearm in my younger days, and I feel the need to oil the joints and remove some of the rust.”
“Well, I’d welcome you both,” Raven responded, then caught Hawks’s glare.
“No,” said the leader. “Both of you have intact families predating any of this. And I cannot afford to risk both of my most experienced surviving captains along with Santiago and Panoshka on this kind of scouting expedition. There’s going to be more fighting ahead no matter how this comes out. I just can’t spare the two of you. I’ve lost San Cristobal and Indrus. Kaotan is down to a skeleton crew now and needs supplements to run efficiently. I’m sorry, but this is a command decision. I don’t want either of you away from your ships where you’ll be ready at a moment’s notice for any emergencies.”
Both captains said nothing, immediately sensing Hawks’s resolve and, as captains themselves, seeing reason in it.
Finally Captain Chun said, “Bahakatan contributed Chung and Min to the Chanchuk operation. Allow me to consult with my own crew. Perhaps we can find ones more acceptable to you, sir.”
Hawks nodded. He understood how much honor meant to Chun, and he didn’t want to point out that they were running low on people who could be transmuted. If that was required here, then Chun’s crew were likely candidates.
“Very well. We don’t have to decide now,” the chief told them. “It will take some time to fully scout and plan this out, and I want all care and caution taken both before and during this operation. Because we have three rings and need only one more, we’re overanxious. That could kill us, or sink everything we’ve spent all these years and all these lives in attaining. Even after we select the team, I’ll want Raven to work with all of you, drill and practice, until you do the right thing without thinking. For now, this meeting is adjourned.”
Cloud Dancer was sketching again. She was an excellent artist, both drawing and sculpting, and the interior of the Thunder was filled with her work. Now, though, she had been doing a simple project, but one that immediately caught Hawks’s eye.
There were four of them, charcoals, one for each of the known rings—the three they had and the one they knew was back on Earth. For some reason, it had never really occurred to Hawks to study the rings themselves before. True, the designs were there, but so small, so delicate, that he’d found it impossible to really see the detail in them. Cloud Dancer, however, was an artist with an artist’s eye for even the finest detail, and she had studied them and drawn them folio size. Now, suddenly, seeing them blown up to so large a size, every tiny detail enlarged and reproduced, each of the intricate designs seemed too perfect, too deliberate, to be just ornamental numbers.
He picked them up, then placed them in descending order, 4-3-2-1. He stood back. He stared at them. Suddenly he turned and went to an intercom.
“Star Eagle—the Fellowship. The five who created the Master System program and had the rings made.”
“Yes?”
“What religions were they?”
“You asked me this before, a few years ago. Joseph Sung Yi, born Singapore, China, naturalized citizen: no religion of record but had dabbled in Buddhism. Golda Pinsky, born Haifa, Israel: Jewish. Aaron Menzelbaum, born New York City: Jewish ancestry but an outspoken, rather militant atheist. Maurice Ntunanga, born Mimongo, Gabon, naturalized citizen: Moslem. Mary Lynn Yomashita, born Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii: nominally Buddhist.”
Hawks frowned. “No Christians? None of them were Christians?”
“No. Everything but. Interesting. The records on them are quite complete, even in my original pilot’s program. Why wonted with Maurog will ever understand you, but Star Eagle can translate and once you’re permanently back here we can restore the others. Also, if you can, arrange for the others in the party to get some land duty where we can treat them as well.”
“Why not just let me find the hypnocasters and disable them? They use focused beams. It wouldn’t take much of a tracer to find them.”
“Too risky. If I were Master System, I’d have installed a broadcast alarm that would be triggered if any of their equipment was taken out. That’s what we think the Val was doing in the system. Planting monitors. This is a better plan even if slower. What they have down there is effective. Star Eagle reports that you have no memory of any of the rings in any way, let alone the one we want. So it’s one step forward, now two steps back.”
Takya sighed. “None of this will be easy, least of all the softer print. I have become the kind of man I have detested all my life. The gift of the gods to women.”
“Well, park your scruples. It’s not only yours and three other lives at stake, if you fail then more will have to be sent.”
The agent sighed again. “I know, I know.”
To the People, the realm of air was one of discomfort and awkwardness. They felt helpless above the surface, ungainly and, yes, ugly. Yet they had all been born on the land, and there was a certain mystery and mystique about it.
It was more bearable at night; the daylight, even when cloud-shrouded and storm-tossed, was bright and harsh and gave them headaches and dizziness. At night, though, there was a magical feel, with the flickering fires that could not exist below reflecting past the tikis onto the sacred heiau walls, creating a strange, moving shadow dance that seemed to show the spirits within the tikis, if obliquely, in the only way humans were permitted to see them, reflected in the obsidian beyond.
But in the water, now—in the water it all changed. There was not the usual Earth-human sense of floating or swimming; rather, it was more like suddenly becoming weightless, of flying free, of seeing and catching the underwater currents created by the distant and silent wind and storm and gradations in temperature, and most of all by the random but incessant volcanic activity permeating the world. These were not the people of Maui, who rode the sun, but of Pele, goddess of fire.
Those, though, were the only real sights in the upper levels, save the mana of some of the sea creatures and of the occasional fellow flyer.
In the depths, in a world without light, the creatures there made their own. Most had self-illumination, and a fish’s size and type and even sex and age could be told by its configuration and coloration. All nonpredators had this gift, which the priests said was the mana of life inside showing through, a reflection of the gods who made them. Only one predator made its own light at will, though, and that was the People, through an electrochemical process controlled by voluntary muscles in the ribbed areas of their undersides. The markings were distinctive, as unique as an Earth-human’s fingerprints, and one could tell not only all the data from the patterns but also something of tribal lineage and, if you knew them well, you could identify individuals by their visible mana. This alone gave them the edge against the dark predators, the Great Snakes, the Demon Sharks, and the Tentacled Ones, who, being of evil, had no mana of their own but who could very nicely see the mana of others.
Below, the relatively shallow sea floors were marked with trails distinctive to each tribe and nation, and mana was used, too, as territorial markers. Only the females could exude it so that it was separate from their bodies, and then only at certain times of the month, but once gathered it could be mixed with dyes from sea and land plants and take on a color of its own.
The city was a fairyland of beauty, a glowing, multicolored, magical place. The predators never ventured near the cities; they were mainly solitary hunters and had learned over the years not to stray into areas too bright or too densely populated where they could become sacrifices and perhaps be eaten themselves. Were it not for their strong place in the religion of the People they would have been exterminated in the earliest centuries, but while they were diminished in number they were contained rather than eliminated now. If the People did not understand the balance upon which even their own way of life depended, the priests did.
For all their simplicity, they were a happy people overall, rather content with their existence. They danced and they sang and they gathered food and made love and occasionally made war; they created works of art out of the volcanic products and shells and other marine remains, and they indulged in combative sports pitting warrior skills against warrior skills—they generally had fun. They were not deep thinkers and saw no reason to be so. Their world was their universe, and everything in it was either understood or had been properly interpreted by the priests. They were not stupid, but they simply had no curiosity.
One was also struck by the openness of the society. There were no police, and the only guards were the warriors who scouted the accessways to the city itself and patrolled the trails between the villages to protect against predators and interlopers. The fairyland houses with their strange shapes and twisted formations, carved out of varicolored volcanic rock by skilled craftsmen, had no doors, let alone locks. The king’s dwelling, at the north end of the city, a grandiose crystalline palace that somehow seemed to have its own mana within its infinite glassy sides, was impressive, but only some tikis guarded it. It was sufficient.
At the opposite end of the city, against a wall of reddish-brown rock that looked like cooled pudding, was the Temple, its countless tikis, decorated with the mana of every woman of the king’s own tribe and those of the royal families of the other tribes who paid him at least technical allegiance, were more impressive than the Temple itself. Beyond those faces carved—of stone, not perishable wood—were the sacrificial altar stone and the stage area for public rites and ceremonies that were common, and between that area and the Temple entrance was an impressive array of bubbling, hissing steam vents that reminded the People whose temple it was.
The pirates had all looked at and studied this land and its people from the mindprints of the natives and the agents they had sent in. It had taken three months for Takya to maneuver the others into positions where they, too, could be taken and restored, and Savaphoong in particular had been furious at having been so easily overcome, but now it was different. Now those aboard Thunder could only vicariously experience what the quartet below were living in and, as always, wait.
“Signal from receptor twenty-two,” Star Eagle reported, galvanizing them into action. “It appears to be Takya.”
Raven frowned. “Alone?”
“Apparently. The others will register as being within the city.”
“Trouble, then. I’m going down.” He strapped on his pistols and his belt and went back to Lightning. Maria and Midi, who had been backing him up on all his ground missions, were already waiting for him.
Think it’s a trap?” Midi asked him as they prepared to detach from Thunder, punch in to the system, then go down in a smaller fighter. “This was not in the plan.”
“I doubt a trap, but keep your weapons ready,” he told them both. “If we don’t have all four down there, then who knows what’s going on, even if we will be rendezvousing in daylight. It’s not like them to let anybody go off alone.”
The small atoll was peaceful enough; it was one of those that the People never visited or used because it had been played out years ago, as had the first island they had used when initially coming to this world. The People understood sea management well, but they were hard on the land when they planted and reaped.
Takya waited a bit inland, out of sight of the sea but in a small stream that kept her relatively cool and wet. She sat, half submerged, reclining on a low rock and looking like every sailor’s nightmare of what a mermaid shouldn’t be.
The irony was that they couldn’t talk to her directly, thanks to the language trick played by the hypnocasters. They could only bring a complex box that she and they could speak into, awkwardly, and which translated to and from the odd intermediate computer language in the same rather dull monotone.