There was silence for a moment. "I received an indicator warning and sensor support," the pilot responded at last. "Are you sure?"

Sabatini climbed from level to level and checked all fastenings, but after fifteen minutes he was more than sure. "Must be a faulty signal," he told the pilot. "There's nothing wrong here."

"I will run a check on my aft sensors immediately," the pilot replied. "Clearly something is wrong here."

"Yeah, well, find it and fix it," he grumbled. He floated back over to the air lock webbing, then braced himself and expertly stepped into the transition passage. There was a momentary sense of dizziness, then, as he proceeded back in, an increasing feeling of weight. He was used to it, but it still wasn't a pleasant feeling.

He walked back into the passenger cabin more annoyed than tired. Then, on the way to the lavatory, he suddenly felt something there, behind him. He stopped, then turned and faced no fewer than eight space-suited figures standing there staring at him. One of them had a pistol pointing right at him. The bright orange-red of the tight-fitting suits seemed out of place here. The intruders had all removed their helmets, and he could see their faces. Four North Americans, three Chinese, a black woman, and an old, tough-looking European woman faced him. All but one of the American men and the black woman had the distinctive tattoo of prisoners of Melchior on their cheeks, silver for all but one of the Chinese girls; hers was sparkling crimson.

"Pilot, I have unauthorized visitors," he said calmly into his headset. Then he added to the visitors, "Sorry, but if I'd known you were coming, I'd have dressed for company." He looked at the bunch. At least two of them he thought he knew. They didn't have the disfiguring scars, but the Chows had that oddly mottled and discolored skin that came from repair work left incomplete.

"How'd you manage this?" Sabatini asked, not wanting to betray the nervousness he felt. Why hadn't the pilot acted now? Why hadn't it acted before this?

"Trade secret," the man with the gun replied. "I'm Raven, by the way, and this lady here is my wife, Manka Warlock."

"The girls have been telling us about you, Captain," Warlock said in a heavy Caribe accent. "I think, perhaps, I will enjoy playing with you." The way she said that, it didn't sound like fun.

"This here's the chief," Raven continued, pointing to the other Amerind man.

"Jon Nighthawk in English. The slender lady next to him is his first wife, Cloud Dancer, and the other is his second wife, Silent Woman. She don't talk much. No tongue."

Sabatini swallowed hard. "I see," he managed.

"The older lady there is Captain Reba Koll. She was in the same work you are until they hauled her in to Melchior. The pretty one on her left is China Nightingale. Her eyes don't work, but she's damned smart. Knows a lot."

"I know the captain, although he does not know me," she said in a very high, soft, melodic voice. "Melchior changes people, Captain, but I have very vivid memories."

"You-you were the fake Song Ching?"

She smiled. "So you remember. No, Captain, I used to be the real Song Ching, but that was another life ago."

"The last member of our little band is here too," Raven told him.

"I'm sorry, Captain Sabatini, but you are relieved of your command." The pilot's voice in his headphones now seemed to have an almost eerie human quality to it; it was no longer quite toneless or expressionless.

Sabatini sighed in defeat. "So you pulled your trick again. Be real handy to know how you can override a pilot's programming."

"I didn't," China told him truthfully. "Actually, it was Cloud Dancer. She talked him in to it."

"That's impossible!"

The woman of the Hyiakutt tribe smiled. "You think you know your machines, but you know only the material by which you make them. This big canoe is guided by a good spirit who was bound against its will to the Dark. We have freed it, and it joins us of its own free will."

"Spirit! It's nothing but a damned computer! A machine!"

"Watch it, Sabatini," the pilot responded. "You have no friends here, but it would not do to make me your enemy. You know nothing of how or where I was fashioned. Your own brain is nothing but a biological computer subject to reprogramming. You are no less an intricate thinking machine than I am, and no more. Not blinded by your prejudices, the woman has told me who and what I am and set me free in doing so."

"This is crazy'" Sabatini protested. "A computer in revolt and a bunch of prisoners broken out by somebody with high connections. All right, you got me.

Now, mind telling me who you two are working for and how the hell you expect to get anywhere by doing this."

The fact was, there was no place in the solar system to run from both Master System and Presidium Security. The girls had taken over his ship before but had been unable to alter the outcome. Sabatini felt certain that this, too, would come to nothing, although the idea that he would be avenged did not sit well with him. Better rescued than avenged.

"Ever felt like going to the stars, Captain?" Raven asked lightly. "I think you're coming along for the ride. Unless, of course, you'd rather get out and walk now- and this time there'll be no safety cache for you to use. I'll see to that. And if you stay, you'll be a good boy. My lovely Manka here will see to that. She has a thousand ways to inflict pain and torture on people, all real slow. She likes to do it. It's her hobby."

Manka Warlock looked at Sabatini the way a gardener might look at a ripe tomato.

The captain swallowed hard. "The stars? But this ship can't go that far out!

It'd take a thousand years to reach the nearest inhabited system, maybe more, at full throttle."

"This ship will go to the stars, Sabatini," China assured him. "But as a passenger, like us. We're going to steal one of the old interstellar fleet."

"The inter- You are insane! The lot of you! Even if you escape detection and make it out there, those things aren't just sitting there! There'll be a computer fighter guard to restrict unauthorized entry. This ship's got two small outboard guns and takes kilometers to make a turn without killing everybody aboard. There is no way you're gonna get near one of those big suckers! You'll just get us all blown to bits!"

"Could be," Raven agreed. "But by all lights we all should'a been dead by now anyway. May as well go for broke. We go back in or get taken alive, we're worse than dead anyway. Living dead. And so are you. Once they might overlook being taken, but twice, the second time happening during the only escape in Melchior's history, and you're through, Cap. Melchior's no fun at all."

Sabatini sighed and just sat down in the middle of the floor. Then, suddenly, he reached up, removed his headset, and tossed it against a wail, where it struck and fell to the floor. Chow Mai picked it up and put it in China's hands. She smiled and put it on. "Pilot-can you home on me?"

"I have you locked in, yes."

"Then you be my eyes, if you can spare the attention. I will need to get around this ship without falling over people and things."

"I am capable of quadrillions of simultaneous operations," the pilot responded.

"Doing that will be no hardship, even in battle."

"Good. Switch yourself into the public address system so all may hear you and leave this on an independent channel for personal use." She hesitated a moment.

"You know, we can't just keep calling you pilot. Pilots are common. You are a free individual and partner. You should have your own name. Do you have a preference?"

"None. I have never felt the need one way or the other, but I will take a name if that makes it easier on the rest. Any name you suggest."

"What about Star Eagle?" Cloud Dancer suggested. "He is surely a chief here."

"Very well," China replied. "What do you think of it? It is a good name in English and in Mandarin."

"I like it. Very well. I am Star Eagle."

"Birds," Sabatini mumbled. "All these damned birds. Nighthawks, Ravens, and Nightingales, and now the ship's an Eagle."

Arnold Nagy studied the charts. Melchior's chief of security was pretty pissed about being the man in charge when the first successful breakout occurred, and he didn't want it to go much further.

"You know where they're headed?" the aide asked him.

"Yeah, it's not hard. That's why we blinded the genius girl. She had to do all her queries by voice. She was looking into all the old universe ships drydocked around Jupiter. She's smart, but I don't think that was a blind. They really don't have much choice. There are one or two starcraft in the system now, but they're crawling with robot maintenance. These mothball ships are the only chance out."

"Can they really steal one? They've been in orbit for centuries, so it's not even clear they'll work or won't need a lot of service before they'll work. Even then, the pilots will be absolute slaves to Master System."

"We checked China's mindprint, and she knows how, all right. If they can get to one of them and on board, she can take 'em over. The trick will be even getting that far. There's protection on those babies, isn't there?"

"All the ships themselves are in vacuum condition for storage, and minimal maintenance power is being fed through light collectors aimed at Jupiter. They don't need much in shutdown. They themselves don't have any armament to speak of, but they carry a dozen small automated fighter craft that will react to any threat. They're fast, they work as one, and they have more than enough speed and muscle to take care of an old scow like the inmates are flying. The moment they don't give the correct hailing control codes, those fighters will be activated.

Just as important, Master System will be notified."

"Screw Master System. Even at the speed of light it'll be a while before Master System can get anything approaching real power there. The fighters will have to do it, if they activate. The trouble is, what if they somehow have the control codes?"

"You think that's possible?"

"How can I rule anything out after what's happened? Run this through the computer. Project a course that will take them in to the mothball fleet from here without Master System's alert or detection. Give me the estimated speed and arrival date and time. Then figure how long we would need to get there with a straight-line trajectory. Also give me any Master System ships capable of intercept."

It took only a few seconds. "Assuming they take close-in risks to traffic control to gain time, the worst case is that they would arrive in forty-six days from now. We could make it straight there in forty-if we had the ships. Master System shows no ships that could make it any faster. It's the mothball fighters or nothing."

"Like hell. What can we get our hands on quickly?"

"Depends on how you define quickly. The Star of Islam is due in four days, but it's as old a tub as our quarry and carries only two standard guns, forward top and underside aft. Other than that we have the Getaway craft sitting on the asteroid Clebus, but they're still three days away because of the current orbital paths."

"They're well armed, though, and really nasty," Nagy noted. "Small, fast, maneuverable. Three days... All right, get 'em over here. We'll attach them to the exterior of the Star of Islam. That'll give us a match for them plus four heavily armed craft. We'll come in behind them and wait. If the fighters don't react or don't do the job, we'll move in and sandwich them, and that'll be the end of that."

"I'll need Doctor Clayben's direct order to release the escape ships. Once they're here, Master System will know they exist and why."

"He'll give it. He's got his own problems now, and this will solve them. I'll go along to make sure it all goes right."

"It still seems futile for them," the aide noted. "Those universe ships are fourteen kilometers long! I mean, how the hell can you hide in one of those?"

"After you do all the stuff I just told you, compute the amount of empty space in the two spiral arms of the Community. Then get me everything there is to know on these ships. Everything."

"Won't be much. They're classified forbidden knowledge. We aren't even supposed to know that they're out there."

"Do what you can. And I suppose we'll have to notify Master System of the break or there'll be a lot of questions and maybe a couple of Vals poking around Melchior." He thought a minute. "Don't tell 'em about China or the Amerind women. They aren't supposed to have been here at all, and if they even guess that this guy Hawks was ever here, they'll blow up all of Melchior. Give 'em the two security traitors and Roll and the Chows, and give the rest as experimental subjects no longer registerable. If they want mindprints, we'll fake 'em. Got it?"

"Okay. I'm on it right now."

"I hope I am," Arnold Nagy grumbled to himself.

Star Eagle was useful for research information as well as for piloting. The new equipment in the ship was designed not only to make it easier for its owners to fool Master System or bypass its safeguards but also to do a variety of illegal things should they be needed. Even Sabatini wasn't aware of all the ship's tricks, nor was he supposed to be. What he didn't know, he couldn't abuse or betray.

To accommodate these changes, Star Eagle's memory had been vastly expanded from its specialized task, and he-it was impossible to think of the pilot as an "it"- could draw on vast hidden data banks which included most of the core historical and technological information a big shot might require. It was not known why this all had been added, but Star Eagle had suspicions.

"There is talk that Master System is involved in a great war somewhere far out there. With whom or what it is fighting is unknown to us, but it is very clear that the battle is tough and stalemated and is being fought entirely by computerized equipment on both sides. This has allowed directors, not only on Earth but in many other places, to have unprecedented freedom and mobility. It's become far easier to cheat or beat the system and get away with it. "There are persistent rumors that Master System believes things are getting dangerously out of hand, and it doesn't have its own forces to spare because of the fight. Many of the independent computer units, particularly the big complex on Melchior, believe that Master System will eventually end the current human administration system and replace it, killing off all those with high-level knowledge and abilities and introducing some new element that would suppress for thousands of years any sparks of innovation or creativity and reduce humans to primitive conditions. It is further rumored that Earth might be the test for this new element."

"Then you are a preserver, a way to keep the knowledge alive," China Nightingale responded.

"I think I am more than that. I am crammed with information on interstellar vessels and with much of the knowledge and charts of the privateer and freebooter society. 1 believe you are using me for the very purpose for which I was modified, although they did not think that someone else would use it. I think I am a getaway craft for the Presidium."

"It is much as Lazlo Chen himself told me," Hawks said. "I find it suspiciously convenient, however, that this very ship with all this much-needed knowledge should be the one we take refuge upon."

"It might not be more than a coincidence," Star Eagle responded. "I have some evidence that at least a dozen other ships, including all those who stop at Melchior and Earth ports, have undergone this modification. There are families and high underlings to consider, remember, and our task would only be to get them to the universe ships. Those ships were designed to carry more than a hundred thousand people in their time in a single trip. Carry them, support them, and reprocess them if necessary."

Hawks was curious at this. He was a historian, yet this was new to him.

"Reprocess?"

"Yes. Use extensive machinery to convert masses of humans into what was required to survive and maintain a culture on a world not designed for them. The process itself is called analytical artificial evolution, or AAE for short. 1 do not know how it works or what it does. That information would be in the memories of the universe ships' pilots. I know the theory behind it, though. Master System was in a hurry when it decided to disperse humanity. As each world was discovered and evaluated as having survival potential, it was brought as close to life range as it could be within a short period of time, then was analyzed and compared to human psychology and physiology. A theoretical evolutionary path was worked out as if beings had evolved and developed into sentience on each world, and what they would have to be like to survive and adapt. The humans were then physically converted somehow into this model and psychologically altered to accept it as the norm. A trial colony was then put down. If it survived and grew at all over a period of a decade, the planet was developed for mass colonization. If the trial failed, adjustments continued to be made until it either succeeded or was abandoned."

"The area it developed is so vast, it is beyond true comprehension," China noted. "Did they find any that already had sentient life of any kind?"

"Yes. Not many, I'm afraid, but a few. There were the remains of some that had died out, but the few that were there were in lower stages of civilization.

Master System co-opted them and kept them at that level, imposing the same sort of system as elsewhere. They obeyed or were taught deadly lessons in power.

They are still there. Some provided useful models for human adaptations elsewhere, too."

They considered that. "I am getting to be something of an expert on how humans can be altered," China noted. "And Captain Koll in there has a very real tail caused by their alterations."

"Yes. Melchior is trying to develop some of the practices and procedures on their own, knowing that it is possible and was done. They have had some limited successes, but nothing on that scale. Since I have many of their data banks, I know of their own processes."

"Very convenient," Hawks noted dryly.

"I have a schematic of your basic systems imprinted on my mind," China told the pilot. "I should like to go forward to the bridge if it is safe."

"Quite safe, although it is a zero-gravity zone. Come ahead. I will guide you. I have quite a bit up there, mostly useless, including some basic mindprinter interfaces."

None of them had ever been forward in a spaceship before. In almost all ships, that area was kept unpressurized and in a vacuum so that none from the aft area could ever enter it except in an emergency. A long, narrow corridor led to a hatch, through which one floated up to enter the bridge itself.

Hawks was quite surprised by the bridge. Two large leather chairs faced a bank of screens, gauges, and controls of incredible complexity, then four more were stationed along the sides and in the rear. It looked like a control room for people, not a ship designed from the start to be totally automated.

"All ships have a bridge like this or even more elaborate than this," Star Eagle told them, "although the manual overrides are locked out of the system. No one knows why Master System keeps it this way, but it does. Every ship is like that except specialty ships-even the orbital tugs. None of us, after all, can question Master System or ask questions it doesn't want asked. Each station, however, has a name. The one on the left is the pilot's seat, the one on the right the copilot, the right side is communications, the left side is navigation, and the two rear stations are engineering and life support. It is true that the original circuitry for all those things runs to those stations, although there is no interconnect. I am convinced that no team of humans could run this ship; it was always designed for specified computers under a master control system, which is me. Humans simply can't react fast enough in an emergency."

"I know why," China said softly. "The stations were designed to connect the officers with the master and subordinate computers directly. That is how the universe ships must be taken over. Each of these has, or was designed to have, a direct human mind to computer-mind interface. Human and machine would become one."

Star Eagle thought about that. "A fascinating concept. A human interfacing directly with me. And me-knowing what it was like to have a human body."

"Stay a ship," China told him. "Our chemical-based life form would drive you insane. Still-you said you had a mindprinter interface?"

"I do, although it has grave limitations. As an analytical and knowledge-gathering tool it is fine, but I lack the module that would allow actual reprogramming of the mind. Whoever ordered this did not wish that much power in the hands of the ship. I will show you."

There was a click, and a door slid back between the communications and life support stations. Hawks made his way over to it, reached in, and pulled out what looked very much like a mindprinter probe headset but lacked the printer itself.

Instead, it had a long, thick cable terminating in a massive and complex connector. There were several of them in there. He brought it over to the blind Chinese girl, who felt it and tested it.

"This is not standard design," she said. "It is bulkier, and the probes are different."

"It is what I have as a mindprinter interface," Star Eagle told her.

"I think not. I think it is the same principle, yes, but not a mindprinter.

These are the interconnects for the stations. I'm sure of it. Hawks-aren't there female plugs for these at each station?"