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

probably never even knew about all this. They went to sleep on Earth and woke up on a strange world.”
    “But not necessarily the way they left,” Raven noted. “I saw a Martian once. They came from human stock but there’s no way they’re human like us.”
    China nodded. “That was the primary function of the missing fourth module in the core. It was preprogrammed with certain necessary biological information. The cargo bay mobile transmitter made a new pass after all were aboard and the ship was underway. Each human occupant was once more dissolved to energy and then reformed as something else—a human able to live and survive on the target world. Otherwise, it would have taken thousands of years to change those worlds into places fit for human habitation. The transmuting of individual humans must be extremely precise and exacting, requiring a second core module and probably supporting data banks to get it right. Many human beings certainly died each time a new form was attempted before the computers got it right. Then they sent a small colony to the new world to see if they could and would survive there. Only then did mass transmutations and movements of large numbers of people begin. It was the only logical way such a plan could be carried out, but the cost in lives must have been quite high.”
    “Even when they got there,” Hawks put in, a bit awed and more than a little frightened by all this, “this would change the body, but not the mind, a mind used to thinking in human terms, to seeing things according to human standards, even themselves. They had to learn to be alien creatures. Many would be unable to do so. Many more would go mad.”
    “That’s true,” she agreed. “Although I suspect that the mindprinters were used to minimize it. Take data and information from the early colonists who survived and adapted, and feed it to the newcomers when they come down. The mindprinter taught most of us the English we are using, and made some of this possible. It could teach the basics.”
    Hawks had a sudden, uneasy thought. “You say it takes a receiving station to work as a transport mechanism? Then how will we get to wherever it is Koll is taking us? How will we get down there? And, when we go after the rings, how will we get to the target planet? Assuming the stations on the planets are still operational, we can’t use them. It would be like a thief walking up to the front door, knocking, and announcing himself to the intended victim.”
    “Getting to the surface of a world not in the system should be possible,” she told him. “Star Eagle assures me he can duplicate the necessary receiving station and get it down using one of the fighters, although I suspect it’s more complex than that. Getting into the other worlds will be much tougher. For one thing, the Thunder is going to be rather obvious in a stellar system controlled by Master System. We will have to work on that.”
    “Bah!” Raven snorted. “We are like children in this! The technology is so beyond us that we are no less ignorant than Cloud Dancer! We might as well be villagers faced with great magic!”
    “So?” China responded. “What difference does that make? Back at the Center where you lived and worked, did you really understand why and how the light came on when you touched the wall switch? Did you understand the process by which your food arrived, or did you just take it for granted and eat it? The same for the heating and the air conditioning and all the rest. I can fly a skimmer, but I have only a vague idea of how it works. I can use powerful computers, yet I do not truly understand how they think and the intricacies of their work. One does not have to know how something works to use it. Many people have been killed by guns wielded by gunmen who have not the slightest idea of the physics involved. Even Star Eagle does not understand some of that which he is doing. He was never intended to run a ship of this type and