Pirates of the Thunder Read Online Free Page B

the radio from back inside the freighter’s remains. “That is a break for us.”
    “I’m not sure about that break business,” Raven noted sourly. “There are corridors leading to corridors leading to corridors.”
    “I have a marker here from the ship’s kit,” Hawks tried to reassure him, although he wasn’t feeling very secure himself. “I’m making a mark every ten floor lights or so, and I will indicate direction at every intersection. That’s the best we can do.”
    They went on for what seemed like a long time without hitting any landmark that China could use to place them. The corridors seemed to go off in all directions into eternity.
    “Hey, Chief? You noticed we ain’t come on no big rooms, no lines of rooms? No offices, dormitories, or camp meeting places, for that matter. Just access ways for equipment and service. We got to be in the service corridors and not the main halls. I mean, this was built as a cargo ship and its cargo was people. Lots and lots of people. Where in hell did they put them?”
    Hawks didn’t reply, but he was getting a bad feeling about all this. As a historian, he knew of these ships and what they’d done—although he’d never dreamed that they still existed—and he had always imagined them as great inverted worlds, with gardens and dense apartmentlike clusters, like an immense floating and self-sufficient city. This, however, was sterile, spartan, cold, and lifeless. Raven was right. A ship this size might be expected to transport and support thousands of people. Where? And how?
    And, quite suddenly, through one more hatch, they found the answer.
    They must be, Hawks guessed, in the belly of the ship, yet it was crowded and went off in all directions. Their helmet lights and the lights on what had now become a wide catwalk revealed only a tiny part of it, but there was the sense that this, too, went on forever.
    “Jeez! It’s like some kinda monster honeycomb,” Raven remarked. The many catwalks divided an enormous section that extended above and below as far as the light carried. They could see down past some half-dozen levels of chambers before the honeycomb was swallowed in darkness.
    Hawks turned and studied the way the catwalk was fastened to the inner hull wall. “Rails,” he noted, pointing. “The walks move up and down. See the stops there? Each walk would service, I would say, five rows of these holes or chambers up, and perhaps five down. They were probably not marched in. It would be too messy. Most likely the people were placed in some sort of drug-induced coma, probably in large groups by gas, then hauled in here and loaded automatically by equipment designed for that purpose. You said it, Raven—cargo.” He leaned over and felt just inside the nearest chamber. “Some sort of soft synthetic lining. See? Each one is large enough for one human adult. You can see small vents, and that tiny box looks as if it contains tentacular tubing. They put them in, then the tubing attached itself where necessary, and they were sustained for the journey.”
    “Yeah,” Raven said dryly. “Gives you the shakes. I suppose they kept a mixture of the gas and pure oxygen in here to keep ‘em out, or maybe these things can be sealed and separately flooded. Gives you the creeps, though.”
    “Until now this was only an academic thing for me,” Hawks told him, his voice strained. “In its own way it was even somewhat romantic. Whole human civilizations being carted off to the stars to found new colonies. It does not seem very romantic now. This is the true face of Master System, Raven, the one we served and even believed in to a great degree when we were younger. Even this expedition, this rebellion, was, I admit, as much a romance to me, a chance to live beyond the confines, to experience rather than merely study—but no more. I have lost an innocence here I did not know I retained, and I am filled with revulsion. These weren’t humans to Master System and its