Pirates of the Thunder (35 page)

The leader of the pirate band sighed again and nodded. “You’re right. And in that case some excuse could be made for an open colonial visit—and they still wouldn’t be able to do it because they would be watched like, well, hawks around the chickens.”

“We are stuck. They were obviously provided to help solve this particular problem. We may try it without them, but we would be crippled if we did.”

“I agree. I’ll start easing into discussing it with them. In the meantime, do you have anything visual on what these Janipurians look like? I think I’d better know what I’m asking before I ask it.”

“Come up to the bridge. I haven’t any such data from Vulture, but I have some recordings from
Indrus’s
files.”

He went on up and found several members of the various crews there working at some of the consoles, and Raven, cigar stuck in the side of his mouth, trying to look as if he were busy too. But when Star Eagle put up a picture of a Janipurian, all turned and stared.

“What the hell is that?” Raven asked.

The creature was more animal than human, yet it had some very human gestures. The face, light tan in coloration, was large and humanoid, although the nose had flap-covered nostrils, was too large and wide, and its porous skin glistened with dampness like many animal noses; the mouth seemed too wide and the chin too small, giving the face a blocky shape. The pointed ears were upright and seemed to be on a swivellike socket, able to turn in any direction. Most inhuman were the eyes, which were large, round bulges.

The whole body was covered in very short but thick hair. The torso was tapered, thinner near the thick neck than at the rear and shaped more like that of a four-footed animal than a bipedal human. The arms, too, were more like forelegs, and the hands, on incredibly thick wrists, were enormous, the fingers and thumb long and pointed and looking deceptively boneless. And from the back of each hand grew an enormous, thick prominence that looked hard as steel. The creature was standing more or less erect on its two feet, although it gave the appearance of being slightly bent over, as if ready to launch into a four-footed run. Arms and legs looked to be of equal length, and the feet had huge, splayed toes with deep, curved nails that seemed to dig into the ground. Again, on the back of the ankles there was that same steellike growth. Some kind of brief protective bit of clothing was draped above the thick, animalistic thighs, but there was no hiding the fact that the creature was a male.

“If that thing can walk like that, I’ll eat it,” Raven mumbled.

A young woman, one of the crew from the
Indrus,
laughed. “They do not walk like that, you are right,” she said. “The hands and balancing feet curl up, leaving the hooves for moving and running. They are quite fast, in fact. They do get around upright when inside, though, if they have something to hold on to or the distance to go is very short. Do not let it fool you, though. The hands are quite dexterous, and the people are excellent artisans. Those claws can also rip someone open with one try, and they can wield weapons with deadly accuracy. They do not see very well at all at night, but always their sense of smell and their hearing is far better than ours.”

Hawks shivered.
What am I asking someone to do?
he couldn’t help thinking.
Do I have the right to even ask!

“You said ‘weapons,’“ Raven noted, not encumbered by such a duty. “Do they hunt or have prey?”

“Oh, no. They are vegetarians, strictly. Their mouths move more side to side, and their teeth are flat and big. Their design is based primarily on the fact that they came from a culture that was highly vegetarian to begin with—although not all—and this world developed warm as mostly grasslands, desert, and mountains. The grasslands can support a large population, but there are limits, so the system added some rather nasty predators once native to their old region—such as tigers—to maintain a balance in the early days. Today, however, most of the predators are strictly controlled and only occasionally escape from royal preserves. Much of the central grasslands is intensively farmed now, you see—those claws can also till soil. They have some domestic animals to aid them, but their tools are basically wood and stone. Useful metal is rare and prized there, and we traded a fair amount of it.”

Hawks tried to put his more personal concerns from his mind and concentrate on the problem at hand. If Cochin Center was anything like North American Center, and he thought it probably was, its floors would be of smooth, hard synthetics. Those hooves would make quite a lot of noise on them. The aural sensors would be a real problem. On the other hand, if those long, pointed fingers were really all that dexterous, then they would be an advantage when it came time to deal quietly with the locks.

“This is a male,” he noted. “What do the females look like?”

“Slightly smaller, with firm breasts that hang down when she is on all fours,” the woman told him. “The children are born as four-footed creatures with only flaps where the hands and feet will be. These do not begin to really grow out and develop until they are about seven, and are not really useful until they’re ten or eleven. The standing, walking upright, and the developed use of the hands is something they must be taught. This was thought to be a protective innovation when the world was more dangerous, as they are still essentially self-sufficient from the age of two and can walk on all fours in a matter of hours or days after birth. But it is the hands that make them truly human, that allow them to manipulate and create and build. The hands and the mastery of them are the mark of being human there. Also, you note the coloring?”

“You mean the light tan, almost white hair?”

She nodded. “That indicates that this man is a Brahman. High caste, probably either a major religious leader or from a Center, as this one was. The castes are known by their coloring. A darker tan, a light brown, would be below this one and probably a professional or a politician or regional leader. Dark, reddish brown would be working class—farmers and laborers, mainly. Black is, well, untouchable. Unclean. They roam wild and are something of a danger to the others.”

“Wonderful,” Raven grumbled. “So what happens if two castes marry?”

“The effect is interesting, as they take on multiple rather than mixed or blended coloration. The half castes or less have the rights and duties of the lowest caste their coloration shows. Such mixing is rare, but it happens often enough to be noticeable even in a small village such as the one we used for our dealings.”

Hawks was thoughtful. “And you say only the light tan get into the Centers? Nobody else?”

“That is what we were told, and it is logical in a society where you wear your class and your social potential on your body.”

“Then it’s another complication. Finding enough of these light tans to copy will be a problem.”

“No big deal, Chief,” Raven replied. “They got to come out. If Vulture says they follow the standard procedures, then they ail got to go on leave for a period—and that means some are always on leave, right? No, that ain’t the problem. The problem is that everybody on that level will have everything on record, birth to death, whatever they use for prints, you name it. The odds are if they don’t all know each other—them tans I mean—they know mutual friends and family. It’s gonna be pretty damned tough to fake.”

Hawks sat back in his chair and sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. If ten percent are Master System plants, who knows whom down there these days or can take things for granted?” He leaned forward again. “No, we can make some of those factors work for us. We might even get Master System and its friends to take the fall for the robbery, which will nicely aid our getaway. No, the two big ifs we have to face aren’t there. We can work all those out. The first is—is it possible to lift that ring? Can we do it under all their noses and get away with it?”

“Yeah,” Raven agreed, chomping on his cigar. “And who’s gonna hav’ta become one of
them
for life to spring the damned locks while Vulture covers?”

The ultimate price..
. And this was only the first time.

The Chows seemed more alive than he remembered them, and happier, too. He wished this situation could have arisen under more miserable circumstances. The girls were certainly curious, particularly when they were summoned to Hawks’s private office and found him there alone with one of the women from the
Indrus.

“Sit down,” he invited. “Make yourself comfortable. So far you’ve played a background role in all this. You’ve been very helpful, but I know both of you felt that you just happened to attach yourself to this group by sheer chance. Would you be surprised if I told you that you had been included all along? That much of what happened to you was deliberate and designed to make sure you came with us?”

That startled them. “We—just happened to be on the same ship as China,” Chow Dai noted.

“Uh uh. A ship taking you to Melchior, so you could be handled and strictly controlled until it was time to move. You were not there by accident. They needed someone with very specific skills and they ran those skills through their computer and you came out, having been caught at China Center going through doors that expert technicians couldn’t crack. Tell me, do you know how you do it?”

They both shrugged. “How do you sing or dance? You do not think about it—it is clear in the mind. You know our uncle was a magician, an illusionist he called himself, who loved to escape from the impossible. He taught us many of his tricks because we were good at them. There are only so many ways locks work, and there is always a weak spot.”

“Huh! And does this explain how you can crack elaborate electronic combinations of numbers and even coded badge and fingerprint and eyeprint locks?”

“There are some secrets we must keep,” Chow Dai replied coyly, “because we swore an oath to our uncle, but there are always ways of getting the right numbers for finding how to fake what is needed.”

“Some of those locks at Melchior matched a minutely detailed hologram. You walked through them like they weren’t there.”

They both grinned. “There is always an alternate way to spring a lock. Anyone who needs a lock that complicated must first be very afraid that someone will get in. After they install it, and after a few times when it does not work and
they
cannot get in, they always have an equal or greater fear that this might happen all the time. The more complicated the lock the easier it is to figure out the emergency bypass, since it must work without triggering the other, more ordinary, way in.”

“Have you ever seen a lock or security system you couldn’t beat?”

They looked at each other and shrugged. “Yes and no,” Chow Dai responded. “We have never seen one we could not beat, but we have been caught because we did not have any easy way to look over the system and take the time to find out all about it. We were ignorant peasant girls. At the time, we did not even know what a visual monitor was.”

“But you do now.”

“Oh, yes. We have spent much time aboard here learning more and more. Star Eagle has been very kind and has read us details of the most
incredible
security systems, and shown us moving cartoon pictures of them. We know
much
more now.”

Hawks wondered who put Star Eagle up to
that
useful activity. The crazy thing was, the Chows were exactly what they said they were—simple peasants taken in as domestic servants by a spoiled China Center official’s wife. Neither of them could read or write or showed much inclination to learn; neither had any formal education at all. Their good speech in English was due to a mindprinter program and extensive practice aboard the
Thunder.
They were certainly geniuses, but their genius was limited to certain areas.

“You know what this is all about? You understand what we’re doing out here, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. You are trying to find the five magic rings that will bring down the machine that plays god. It is a noble thing that might free our people one day.”

Here it is.
“One of the rings is in a Center on a planet called Janipur. It is guarded by a complicated security system that is mechanical, electronic, and personally guarded, and is considered impregnable. This was known to the people who set up our little pirate band. They felt you could crack that system, steal the ring, and get away. That is why you are here, why you have been here all along. To steal that ring.”

“Then we will do it. We have not had a good challenge like that in a very long time.”

“There is—a problem. A hitch. The problem is that the people down there are not human like we are human. They are another kind of human—different from us but no more different than some of the others we have aboard this ship right now. We might, under very risky conditions, get humans to the Center, but they would be useless. They couldn’t walk around, get in any visual monitor, be seen by anyone there, since there are no Earth-humans anywhere on that world. Master System also has people who look like those other kind of humans down there just waiting for anyone not of that race to even be glimpsed. All our information, all our experts and computers, say that no one could get near enough to that ring to even pick the locks who was not of their race. You understand?”

“You wish us to teach them how to do it?”

He sighed. This was even harder man he thought. “No. We can’t allow any of them in on this. Not right now. They are decent people down there, mostly, but Master System is standing over them and telling them what to do and they can’t fight it, so they’re not going to do the job for us. We have to do it ourselves.”

“But you just said—”

He held up his hand. “You remember Song Ching who became China Nightingale? You know how they did it?”

They looked at each other, then at him. “They—used some kind of machine. One that changes you.”

“Yes. We have the same kind of machine, and Star Eagle knows how to run it. This ship was designed to do that, to change one kind of human into another. But we don’t have any mindprinter program, or a good means of getting one, that would teach anyone changed into the kind of people down there how to use that body. It would have to be learned after someone was changed into one of their kind. It would be very, very hard.”