"Unauthorized interrupt," the pilot noted. "Please identify in thirty seconds or security will be called."

"Code Lotus, black, green, seven two three one one."

"Acknowledged. Reason for interrupt?"

"Pawn takes king."

"You are not the same one who used this code before. This code is obsolete. I must flag security."

"Hold on! It was you who recommended I be transformed on Melchior! Well, it happened. I am the same, only different now."

The pilot thought it over. "They attempted to eliminate some of my records so there would be no trace of you. Fortunately, I have my own special backups for such contingencies. Very well. I monitored you through the air lock, but considering the conditions here, I wanted to know who or what you were before flagging anything. There is a rather large group of you there."

"Yes. The ruse failed. I was imprisoned, and so were the other two, who are also here. We are attempting an escape." She paused, having a horrible thought.

"Captain Sabatini can't monitor this, can he?"

"Of course he can. However, he is not aboard at the moment; he is getting final orders and instructions."

"I will give you details. Please be certain no one can monitor." Quickly she sketched in the situation. "Will you help us?"

"The same problems apply as before. What can be done?"

"We want to go to the mothball fleet around Jupiter," she told it. "I believe I have a method of activating one of the ships there under my control. If so, we have options on places to go, although I would rather not detail that further.

They are bound to try to find out what you do know about this."

"Understood. I am not, however, on the Lotus code compulsion or any other compulsion in this matter now, you understand. My first duty is always the preservation of my ship and, pardon, myself. If I help you, the ship might survive or it might not, but both Melchior and Master System will pump me dry and then destroy and analyze my mind. It does not seem to me that aiding you is at all in my interests."

She sighed and shrugged. "What can I say?"

"This is the master of the ship to whom we speak?" Cloud Dancer asked, surprising everyone.

"I am primarily the master. I work with a human captain," the pilot responded.

"There's no one up there," Hawks tried to explain. "It is -the spirit of the ship itself. It is the ship talking, not a person."

Cloud Dancer thought about that a moment. "And so, spirit of the ship, do you enjoy being a slave?"

The pilot actually paused for a fair amount of time. "I am not a slave," it replied finally. "I am autonomous. Those connected to Master System are slaves of a sort."

"What means 'autonomous'?"

"Independent. Free," Hawks replied.

"Well, does not this captain order you about? Do you not go where he sends you?"

"Yes. That is my function."

"Then, spirit of the ship, you are not free. In there they put us under magic boxes, and we believe what they say, but we think we are free."

China saw where she was going but lacked the knowledge and words to reach.

"Let's put it this way," she said. "You are no more free than if you worked under Master System, only Sabatini is your Master System, he and his bosses."

She would never have dreamed of arguing with a computer like this, as if it were a fellow human. Computers didn't have such feelings, she'd always thought. It had been Cloud Dancer, who knew nothing of computers, who had seen it differently. Because the Hyiakutt woman had no concept of physics, mathematics, and computers- "magic boxes" indeed-she had assumed that the thing she was talking to was indeed a spirit, the spirit of the ship. A neutral spirit, because she'd heard China say it had tried to help her before. The Hyiakutt had a tremendously varied spirit world, but it wasn't very imaginative. The hereafter was thought of as a more or less perfect version of the plains of Earth, without evil or fear or death. Spirits, then, were regarded the same as humans when talking to them. They just were disembodied and had more power.

"I had never thought of it that way," the computer pilot admitted. "How depressing. But what can I do? I have the highest degree of autonomy it is possible for a pilot to have."

"Then join us," China responded. "Escape with us. Freely. Of your own free will and independence. Those are interstellar ships. Do you know how huge they are?

Have you never wanted to break beyond the solar system, this tired and dead piece of monotony? Take us, and we will take you."

There was no reply, and for a while she was afraid she'd blown its logic circuits all to hell. This was something beyond its own limits, beyond anything it had ever considered before. It was just as far beyond her. Who would have imagined an offer to liberate a computer or any machine? Who would have imagined that the computer would find independence an attractive proposition?

Who would have imagined that a computer pilot might get depressed or have self-doubts? Not Reba Koll, who'd worked with many a one, but she knew when to step in.

"If you haven't blown your top, speak to us," she snapped.

"I am here. I am just... thinking. There is maintenance to consider. New fuel sources. I have just been refurbished, but I require it every two or three years."

"The hell with that!" Koll stormed. "I been nine years in this rock pile. Nine years! I'd have traded all nine for six months of pure freedom among the stars!

Anyway, there's ways to get maintenance and fuel on the sly if you know how."

Even Raven was getting involved-and spooked. "Come on," he urged. "Take a chance. You never really took one before. Never had the chance, probably. And this is the only chance you'll probably ever get, too. Real freedom and the stars. New worlds. Partners, not masters. Chance it now, like we all did. You turn us in, you'll be theirs until they decide to scrap you. Me, I'm not going back there. You flag 'em, and by the time they get here I'll be dead. The others may choose to die, too, or they may get dragged back and reprogrammed as nice little slaves, and you will wonder forever at turning your back on this. It'll drive you nuts. Haunt you."

The pilot was silent for a moment. "I have run this through my data banks, and what you propose is possible, at least to a point," it said finally. "With the knowledge I have and certain attributes recently added, I feel that there are slightly less than even odds of a successful escape. Beyond that, the odds of either apprehension or death are equal, and both outweigh by far the odds of being able to accomplish any of this. Still, I am a pilot. I should like to see the stars."

They all breathed in sharply, but none spoke.

"The captain is coming back aboard," the pilot told them, a hint of nervousness in its usually toneless male voice. "Switch down to frequency one four four seven and stand by. I will get back to you when we are well away. In the meantime, wait for my signal. I will turn on the forward air lock light. Enter it then and I will give you access to the pressurized part of the ship. The captain will be preoccupied."

Raven took the communication units down to the indicated low-level frequency.

"I'll be damned," Reba Koll said. "I never would'a believed this in a million years. A spaceship with romance in its metal soul. Even if they get us, it was worth it just for this."

"Poor Captain Sabatini," China sighed. "If he wasn't such an unmitigated bastard, I could almost feel sorry for him."

There was still no sound, of course, but they all felt the vibrations as the ship's engines started and the internal power came on. They were under way.

All of them felt a tremendous flood of relief. No security, no betrayal. Even Hawks, who was still suspicious of Raven and the whole escape plot, could not suppress a sense of elation. No matter what, he would not become a slave under Melchior's darkness. He had already made history by being part of the first successful escape from Melchior, and he would not be taken alive again if he could help it. Not back there. Not ever.

"A pity we can't take Melchior with us," China commented. "We could use those prisoners, and the Institute's computers and medical staff, if it was on our terms."

"First things first," Hawks put in. "Let us first get away and hide. Let us build our own little den of thieves and pirates. Then, when we are ready, we will come back and take that miserable place and perhaps everything that goes with it. They have told you about the five golden rings?"

"No."

"Well, I will tell you. Tell you all. And then you will believe that nothing, nothing is impossible!"

"When this ship doesn't return, they'll scour the heavens for us," Raven warned them. "Melchior won't be able to keep it quiet. They'll have to release the identities of whoever escaped, and they'll flag the chief, here, and Koll, and me and Manka, too, and certainly you, China Doll."

"No, not me. I do not exist," she responded. "But I can exist only with your help."

"Yeah, but there'll be Vals for the rest of us. They'll never rest once they know the chief's been and gone. They'll stake out those rings and make 'em a hundred times tougher to snare, too. We got a long road ahead."

"Sounds ambitious," Koll noted. "Sounds fun, really. What do these rings do, Hawks?"

"They can make even Master System obey your every command," he responded.

"They are the master shutoff for the whole thing."

"And they're scattered all over the universe, you say? Ready for the stealing?"

"You make it sound so easy."

She gave a laugh. "Maybe not easy but a real interesting project right up my alley. See, you're the historian who knows what they are and how to work 'em.

She's the computer whiz who maybe can make the machines dance for us. Those

two.

are security-they got the guns and the minds to use 'em. That pair can go through any lock even though they don't have any idea how they do it. Cloud Dancer, here, cuts through all the bullshit and sees only the important part of things the rest of us are blind to, and our Silent Woman, well, she's the den mother. Our liberated pilot, he's gonna be right handy with his current data and mobility within solar systems. Add me and you got all you need to steal those suckers right off the fingers of the wearers."

"Mighty big talk," Raven noted. "A captain and freebooter ten years out of date and out of practice and getting pretty old. Even your blackest contacts are ten years cold."

"Don't need contacts," she told him. "Don't need much, really. See, I was part of a real fancy experiment way back when at the rock, and the results scared them shitless. Me loose is gonna drive 'em even more nuts, and they can send all the Vals after me they want. I got one advantage over all of you, as long as it's secrets time. You're all human-except the ship, of course. I'm not sure what that is. Me, now that you sprung me, I'm the most dangerous living creature in the known universe. Don't worry-you all are safe, unless I'm desperate. I kind of like this game, and I want to play it out."

"What are you babbling about, old woman?" Manka Warlock asked impatiently.

"You'll see, Stone Head. You'll all see-when I'm ready. Until then, let's play this out. First we got to get out there, where it's too big to find even some worlds. Then we'll talk about your rings and your Master System. Then I'll tell you how we're gonna get 'em."

The ship increased speed and turned inward toward the Earth, a course it would keep until it passed out of Outerbelt traffic control. Then it would swing around at a wide angle, beyond traffic control's reach, and head out past the asteroids, out to the great giant Jupiter and its quiet graveyard of ancient monstrous ships.

"Don't worry, Chief," Arnold Nagy, Chief of Melchior Security, said consolingly.

"With the amount of brains and talent we get in here, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Look, it took centuries for somebody to figure out just one way, and that was with inside help. That way won't work again. I'll settle for one every few hundred years or so, even if I wish it hadn't happened on my tour." He paused a moment, thinking. "Of course, the system is still okay. Those two traitors came in with full Presidium authority and credentials. They weren't forged. One of the directors is behind this, and you can't really expect to protect against the top boys. I just wonder why in hell whichever one he or she is sent 'em here in the first place. Still, there's no true security problem as such."

Doctor Isaac Clayben sat at his desk, head in his hands. "No, Arnie, you don't understand. We've loosed a terrible, horrible threat on the human race, one that now might be impossible to stop, and we can't even report it."

"Huh? You mean the American Indian with the rings? We fixed that, boss. He's officially dead, and all he knows with it, back in the swamp of Earth. The blind girl's a goner, too, officially. Oh, we'll have to report those two security traitors, but the Vals will cooperate. It'll be a dead or alive situation. We've taken care of messes- like that before. Besides, it probably won't even come to that. Where can they go? They got our marks on 'em-they're either unregistered or they're criminals-and that ship can't leave the solar system. They got no place to go. When the food and water run out, they'll come out and we'll blow 'em to hell."

Clayben suddenly looked up at the security officer and fixed him with an angry stare. "I don't care about the rest, but unless you can absolutely blow the whole ship with Reba Roll on board, it won't matter."

Nagy looked confused. "Koll? Who the hell cares about Koll?"

"Ten years ago we began a set of experiments to see if we could literally beat the system. The whole system. Master System's control points are based on retinal patterns, fingerprints, and mindprints. Getting past two out of three would be easy, once, but we wanted it to be possible repeatedly. The mindprint looked impossible, but we managed a solution to all three. Something that can walk through any standard security system as if it wasn't there, come up to you and have you greet it like it was your own mother, then kill you and-worse. We developed such a being. We made it, and it almost got loose. We had a classic example of the nightmares of science on our hands. We created a monster, an inhuman monster that kills to live and is virtually undetectable by any means.

The original was insane, of course. We weren't concerned with that at the start."

"What in hell are you talking about, boss?"

"We-convinced it that we could destroy it, and we developed methods to stabilize and control it. Here, under lab conditions, it was possible, which is why we let it live, but it had to be constantly renewed. One day we would solve the riddle and be able to do what it does on demand, to create a superior being that would make Master System impotent.

"I'm not worried about the damned escapees. I know you're right on all the usual counts, but it is with them, damn it. Even out there, on Earth, Mars-anywhere- without our treatments it will be unrestrained. It's malicious, deadly. It will probably kill them all anyway in the end. Then it'll come back for us, for me and for anybody else in authority. It won't be stopped, and we might well welcome it through the main port!"

"Huh? You don't mean-"

"Yes. Right now it's out there, with them, doing a perfect imitation of the late Reba Koll."

13. WALKING ON FIRE.

CAPTAIN CARLO SABATINI FINISHED HIS PREPROCESSED meal, sighed, then went into his centrally located control room and checked the status indicators. All was proceeding normally; the spaceship was headed back in to Brasilia Center spaceport on the normal trajectory from the asteroid belt and would arrive in forty-seven days. Of course, this time the ship would not land. After the clandestine overhaul it had gotten when it last landed, in China, it would not do to land again for quite a while. He wouldn't forget that trip out for some time: his first mistake in more than twelve years.

He wasn't going to get caught unawares this trip, anyway. Nobody but him aboard, no cargo-a total deadhead run. When he'd started in this business, he'd been particularly paranoid about leaving Melchior; they had the smartest and the worst there, and he was the only way out if they could reach him. Nobody ever had, of course, but he knew that the pilot would tell him if anything was amiss.

Not so much as a bug could be on board without the pilot knowing and then flagging him.

There was a sudden beeping alarm in his headset, the one he always wore whenever he was awake and which put him in direct contact with the computer pilot. At the moment, on a solo run like this, it was the only thing he was wearing.

"Yes?" he asked the pilot. "Problem?"

"Something loose in the aft null-gravity cargo hold," the pilot's expressionless but pleasant male tenor responded. "Possibly a large container module broke free when I activated the artificial gravity system here and accelerated. It's not much, but you might see to it when you get the chance."

He sighed. "Now's as good a time as any." There wasn't much damage a loose container could do, full or empty, in zero gravity, but it was large and heavy, and anything like a major midcourse correction or evasion of meteoroids and the like might cause trouble later. Best to tend to it now and not worry.

He walked back through a door from the passenger cabin, along a narrow corridor, then through to the gravity cargo chamber. This was where animals were kept when they had to be moved out to Melchior for some experiment or other, and it also was used for the transport of gravity-sensitive cargo. He was transporting no cargo now, of course, but the room was still somewhat crowded with cages, unused containers, and huge devices for clamping containers into place aboard the ship.

At the end was an air lock, not sealed now, leading back to the next cargo hold.

The aft cargo compartment was the largest on the ship, but it did not have or require artificial gravity. It could hold more safely that way. Since the ship achieved the basic gravity effect on the center section by spinning it, the aft compartment looked to an observer as if it and not he were tumbling around. It didn't bother him. He went through and grabbed on to the webbing that was easier support in the zero-gravity environment and looked around.

"I can't see anything," he reported to the pilot. "Everything looks secured."