Read Online Pirates of the Thunder by Jack L. Chalker - Free Book Online

of prying. It appeared that “punch” was indeed as good a word as any for what it did; it appeared to focus forward, open up some sort of hole in space-time, and allow the ship through, encased somewhat in an energy field to protect it from whatever forces were out there now. The massive rear drives were strictly for in-system movement and docking, and were not used in interstellar flight at all.
    The top of the ship, as oriented from the bridge, consisted of massive tanks of gases, fuels, and all else needed both to sustain the human cargo and to provide whatever was necessary to the ship’s systems. If the Thunder had a weak point, this was it, but the tanks were armored to an amazing degree and atop them were complexes of defensive weapons. If a potential attacker somehow got past the fourteen small automated fighters that provided the ship’s primary defense, there would still be no easy taking of the main ship.
    Below were the four massive cargo bays, in one of which sat the remains of the interplanetary ship that had brought them from Melchior. Each of the bays had extensive equipment for moving and reaching almost any point in the cavities, and independent medium-sized transmitters.
    “One thing I haven’t figured out,” Raven said, “is how they got all those people in here and back out again. There’s no docking piers for support ships.”
    “This ship could never land anywhere,” China explained. “The transmuter is the heart of Master System’s whole scheme. It is the heart of everything that also makes the rest possible. Some are used simply to manufacture spare parts, repairs, and to recycle everything that can no longer be used. The corps of robots Star Eagle is using were nothing but plans in the ship’s data banks, fed to transmuters along with something of necessary mass-exhaust gases, waste products, debris, garbage. The mass is transformed into energy and then reformed as whatever solid matter the ship might need. There are transmuters in the bow which can literally scoop up space debris-rock, dust, gases—and feed them into the storage tanks above us in compressed form. When we’re inside a punch, as now, the ship uses this stored material to keep itself and everything else going. These were very low when we moved out, but in the transit of Jupiter the ship picked up enough to fill those holding tanks.”
    “Yeah, but—people?”
    “In the same way that the things can change one form of matter or energy into another, it can also maintain a specific object. All of it is catalogued when it is picked up, so if necessary it could be reformed as itself. We could put you in a transmuter, reduce you to energy, then beam that energy to a receiving transmuter along with that pattern. You would then be converted back into yourself. The process would take only as long as light required to travel the distance.”
    “Space travel without spaceships,” Hawks commented. “Incredible.”
    “But very limited. First, there must be a matching transmuter at the destination. Second, the signal must be very powerful to retain its full consistency from station to station, which limits its range. Third, it is strictly line of sight, and conditions must be perfect. In the old days, initial setup ships must have been sent to all the new worlds and transmuter receiving stations established at various points on each planet’s surface. Then, when the passengers came along, they could be beamed serially—one at a time —to the receiving stations. What you send from here is precisely what you get down there. There is a mobile transmuter system in the main cargo area that seems almost like a gun; it is designed to move along guides on the catwalks and line up to each cargo cavity. It is connected to the external system, so we know that the people were put to sleep on Earth, then beamed up to here and inserted sequentially into the holding modules. Upon arrival at the new world, the process was reversed. They