The Cosmic Computer, H. Beam Piper [best sci fi novels of all time .TXT] 📗

on his sleeve asked. “There was firing, artillery and nuclears, and they herded us down here. Have you cleaned the bloody murderers out?”

“We’re working on it,” Conn said. “I take it they aren’t friends of yours?”

Foolish Question of the Year; they all made that evident.

“They took my ship; they murdered my first officer and half my crew and passengers⁠ ⁠…”

“They burned our home and killed our servants,” the girl said. “They kidnapped my father and me⁠ ⁠…”

“They’ve been keeping us here as slaves.”

“It’s the Blackie Perales gang,” the tall man with the gray beard said. “They’ve been making us work for them, converting a blasted tub of a contragravity ship into a spacecraft. I beg your pardon, Captain Nichols; she was a fine ship⁠—for her intended purpose.”

“You’re Captain Nichols?” Anse Dawes exclaimed. “Of the Harriet Barne?”

“That’s right. The Harriet Barne’s here; they’ve been making us work on her, to convert her to an interplanetary craft, of all idiotic things.”

“My name’s Yves Jacquemont,” the man with the gray beard said. “I’m a retired hyperspace maintenance engineer; I had a little business at Waterville, buying, selling and rebuilding agricultural machinery. This gang found out about me; they raided and burned our village and carried me and my daughter, Sylvie, away. We’ve been working for them for the last four months, tearing Captain Nichols’ ship down and armoring her with collapsium.”

“How many pirates are there here?”

That started an argument. Nobody was quite sure; two hundred and fifty seemed to be the highest estimate, which Conn decided to play safe by accepting.

“You get us out of here,” Yves Jacquemont was saying. “All we want is a chance at them.”

“How about arms? You can’t do much with clubs and fists.”

“Don’t worry about that; we know where to get arms. The treasure house, where they store their loot. There’s plenty of arms and ammunition, and anything else you can think of. They’ve used us to help stow the stuff; we know where it is.”

“Anse, you remember those scows we saw, in the big room before we came to the broad passage? Take four men in the jeep; have them lift two of them and bring them here. Then, you get out to the end of the tunnel and call the Lester Dawes. Tell them what’s happened, tell them they can get gunboats all the way in, and wait to guide them when they arrive.”

When Anse turned and climbed into the jeep, he asked Yves Jacquemont: “Why does this Perales want an interplanetary ship?”

“He’s crazy!” Jacquemont swore. “Paranoid; megalomaniac. He talks of organizing all the pirates and outlaws on the planet into one band and making himself king. He’s heard that there are Space Navy superweapons on Koshchei⁠—I suppose there are, at that⁠—and he wants to get a lot of planetbusters and hellburners and annihilators.” He lowered his voice. “Captain Nichols and I were going to fix up something that’d blow the Harriet Barne up as soon as he got her out of atmosphere.”

He talked for a while to Jacquemont and his daughter Sylvie, and to Nichols and the chief engineer, whose name was Vibart. There was evidently nothing else at the spaceport of which a spaceship could be built, but there were foundries and rolling-mills and a collapsed-matter producer. The Harriet Barne was gutted, half torn down, and half armored with new collapsium-plated sheet steel. It might be possible to continue the work on her and take her to space.

Then the two scows floated over the top of the pit and began letting down. They got the prisoners into them, the combat-effective men in one and the women and children in the other. At the top, he took over the remaining jeep, getting Jacquemont, his daughter, and the two contragravityship officers in with him.

“Up to the top,” Jacquemont said. “Take the middle passage, and turn right at the next intersection.”

As they approached the section where the pirates stored their loot, the sound of guns and explosions grew louder, and they began picking up radio and screen signals, all of which were scrambled and incomprehensible. The pirates, in different positions, talking among themselves. With all that, it ought to be safe to use their own communication equipment; nobody would notice it.

The treasure room looked like a giant pack rat’s nest. Cases and crates of merchandise, bales, boxes, barrels. Machinery. Household and industrial robots. The prisoners piled out of the two scows and began rummaging. Somebody found a case of cigarettes and smashed it open; in a moment, cartons were being tossed around and opened, and everybody was smoking. The pirates evidently hadn’t issued any tobacco rations to their prisoners.

And they found arms and ammunition, began ripping open cases, handing out rifles, pistols, submachine guns. The prisoners grabbed them even more hungrily than the cigarettes. Sylvie Jacquemont took charge of the ammunition; she had three men opening boxes for her, while she passed out boxes of cartridges and made sure that everybody had ammunition to fit their weapons. A ragged man who might have been a farm-tramp or a rich planter before his capture had gotten a bale of cloth open and was tossing rags around while the chief engineer inspected weapons and showed people how to clean out the cosmoline and fill their spare magazines.

Conn collected a few of his own party.

“Let’s look these robots over,” he said. “Find about half a dozen we can load with blasting explosive and send ahead of us on contragravity.”

They found several⁠—an electric-light servicer, a couple of wall-and-window washers, a serving-robot that looked as if it had come from a restaurant, and an all-purpose robo-janitor. In the passage outside, they began loading the lorries with bricks of ionite and packages of cataclysmite, packing all the scrap-iron and other junk around the explosives that they could. As soon as they had weapons, the prisoners came swarming out, making more noise than was necessary and a good deal more than was safe. Sylvie Jacquemont, with a submachine gun slung from