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that were beyond
the capabilities of their own computers. They traded murylium for these
services.
Most Centers, however, were outfitted identically; only in the few whose very
smart and frustrated chief administrators worked clandestinely was there any
competitive edge. To keep freebooters from going off to another Center or even
another world meant treating them like royalty and anticipating their needs.
The chief deputy had decided that his favorite son was ready to experience the
real travails of having to deal with this sort of person, and sonny boy never
went anywhere without his concubine.
To Ikira, it was an experience that turned her entire world view upside down
and inside out. She had known there were other worlds and other forms of human
beings, but nothing had prepared her for the reality.
There were three of them, and two were women. First of all, they were
enormous, giants compared to even the largest men of her own race and world.
Second, while they were a bit rough and coarse and not really all that pretty,
they looked very much the way Ikira's own race looked except for the size, and
they had strong personalities that were in no way deferential to the man with
them. In fact, it soon became clear that one of the women was the captain, and
that the man worked for her. To Ikira, seeing her own men, arrogant big shots,
acting not merely civil but downright servile to these women whose services
they needed more than the women needed them was another revelation.
With a lot of guts, considering what might have happened had she been
discovered by her own, she sneaked away one day and approached the female
freebooter captain privately. Captain Smokevski was more than touched by
Ikira's plight and impressed with her intelligence and nerve. The captain was
none too pleased with the culture she was doing business with, but that Center
had a genius with an uncannily accurate system for locating new murylium
deposits. Now, at last, she had a way of thumbing her nose at this sexist
society. This time Ikira's diminutive size and defense skills came in very
handy, and Smokevski managed to smuggle the tiny woman onto the shuttle at
take-off. Ikira was in space and free of her culture.
Weightlessness was even more of a wonder to her. She could almost fly, and she
could move and even lift things that the strongest male of her own race
couldn't budge. It took months to hunt down a small enough pressure suit, but
once she had it she could do maintenance in places too small for others to
reach, and her long, tiny fingers and exceptional sight and hearing made her a
whiz at doing jury-rigged repairs on equipment that often had to be kept going
with nothing but a prayer. She was interested in virtually everything and
learned all she could. Of equal import to her future, she found that she
quickly lost the sexual compulsions she had lived with since puberty. In her
face, the arousal was strictly chemical, and without males of her own kind
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around, she simply did not
feel the urge. Not that she was sexless, but she was in now in total control.
It was a story of both liberation and compensation. Her size a major
liability, she simply worked six times harder and did everything six times
better. She learned how to think on her feet and be taken as an equal in
exotic and gigantic foreign locales. She began to make her own deals and, in
one of the apparently not uncommon fights over a murylium claim that wound up
in ship-to-ship combat, she had taken over for a captain who'd lost her
guts-and won. She parlayed her reputation and profits from that into an
ancient, creaking hulk that she redesigned and restored herself, with help
from the crew of that fighting ship who'd left their captain, as well, and it
became the Kaotan. The other two were
Dura Panoshka, the Lion Girl, and Butar Killomen, who'd met Raven when he had
boarded. Takya had joined later; she'd had trouble keeping jobs or berths
because of her need for regular immersions to keep her skin from drying out.
But there were very few freebooters who could deal with the water races, and
Ikira had seen the potential for information there that was virtually
untapped.
Takya had been both useful and dependable, and worth the extra weight and
expense of a true water-based rather than chemical bath system and all the
problems it entailed.
And, as far as they knew, all four were the only ones of their races in space.
It was a special bond, for each could understand the other's sense of
alienation when with others of the more common races.
"I had hopes, one day, of becoming so powerful that I could one day return
home and break that insidious system, but I'm old enough now to know that even
if I
gained such power and tried, it is probably easier to break Master System than
to change a culture, particularly one that is partly based on biology."
"The only way there's a shot is to break the big system," Raven told her.
"Then you start by introducing technology on a wide scale so that your people
become masters of the planet and not just inhabitants. Then that technology
can be used to alter the biology that limits things."
Am I really saying this? he thought suddenly. I think I just told her to turn
her people into white men and go rape their world!
It was only a two-and-a-half-day trip to the hideout. In that time Raven grew
to like the tiny captain, but he found it far more difficult to get to know
the other three. Of them, only Butar Killomen even seemed curious enough to
talk to him, and none were as secure as their captain and willing to talk
about themselves.
The refugee fleet was still cautious; passwords were required not just from
the ship and captain but from each of the other crew members in turn before
the sensors and automatic guns of the other ships were turned off. Only then
did
Ikira relax and put the graphics on the screen for him to see what was there.
"Most are light freighters built less for cargo capacity than speed and
weapons ability," she told him. "For the amount of murylium you generally find
out
here in months of trying beyond your own needs you don't need a very big ship,
but if you can't outrun and outgun the competition you might lose out to
somebody who found none at all. That's Espiritu Luzon in the
center-Savaphoong's ship. It doesn't look like much on the outside because
it's designed to alter itself to different common silhouettes on sensors out
here. It's a neat and expensive defense. Inside, I'm told, it's a luxury yacht
with all the comforts of
Halinachi in miniature."
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