down, but preserved and ready for reactivation if their service should ever be
needed-was a bit over fourteen kilometers long. The ship had a brain and
massive
amounts of stored knowledge and skills that had not been needed in a very long
while.
"I wonder if it is bothered by that," Cloud Dancer said, more to herself than
to
the others who were gazing at the viewing screen of their relatively small
interplanetary freighter.
"Huh?" Walks With the Night Hawks, her husband and co-conspirator, looked at
her. "Who is bothered by what?"
"The ship. It has a mind, a soul, as this one does. Its spirit is dedicated to
work, to a great task, and it has been told to do nothing since it did that
task. I wonder if it minds, sitting there idle, without hope or opportunity to
do its task, to be itself, for all this time."
"It sure fought like hell to keep us out," came the gravelly voice of the Crow
Agency man, Raven. Not long, before they had been the targets of some of those
fighters nestled inside the great ships; only deciphering the clearance code
in
time and some fancy maneuvering had saved them from being blown from the sky.
"That was its duty," the Hyiakutt Indian woman responded. She was quite smart,
but having been raised in a primitive culture, she saw the universe from a
perspective as alien to the others as they were to the computer brain of the
great ship they now approached. "Now it receives us. I wonder if it is eager,
or
if it is waiting to devour us?"
"Neither," an odd voice said through the ship's intercom. When Star Eagle, as
they had named the computer pilot of the ship, spoke on his own, it was in a
pleasant male voice, but when China was interfaced into the ship's system,
forming a human-computer synthesis, the voice sounded strange, neither male
nor
female, but somehow both at once. "There is no command module on any of these
ships. It was removed when they were placed in storage here. These ships have
many brains, as it were, since even the tiny fractions of a second it might
take
to relay an order might cause needless risk, but the only ones there now are
automatic maintenance and ship's security. The tech cult that discovered the
human interfaces intended to fly the ship themselves, without a command
module."
Hawks frowned. "Is that possible?"
"Yes, but not efficient or practical. They did not think beyond that point,
since even attaining that much was highly improbable. All plans were based on
the escape, not what came next. Just like us."
Yes, but we're at least better off than they would have been. We have Koll,
who's been out there, and information from Raven and Warlock. We are not going
completely blind. He frowned, wondering if that was really true or if he was
just trying to reassure himself.
Still, he had no doubt they would get away. No mystical sense informed him,
and
he knew of no particular edge on their part, but even though they'd had to
fight
every step of the way to this point, he couldn't shake the feeling that
somehow
they were being led.
Most of this crew had been selected, somehow, by Lazlo Chen, the ambitious
chief
administrator of the central Asian district and discoverer of the information