The Space Pirates

by E.E. 'Doc' Smith, E.E. ''Doc'' Smith

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Tedric the hero had become Tedric the pirate... He looked at his strange companions: Philip Nolan, an aristocrat turned mutineer; Keller, a subman with canine ancestry; Ky-shan, a huge blue-furred alien; KT294578 Wilson, an extraordinary anarchist robot. A weird band of thieves. But Tedric intended to use his crew for something more worthwhile than piracy. He had a plan to overthrow the tyrannical Carey family, the oppressors who controlled the Universe. All the rights and wrongs of the situation were clear to Tedric...until Alyc Carey, beautiful, blind daughter of the megalomaniac Melor Carey, was taken prisoner. She seemed sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, and yet, Tedric was unsure of her... Should he see her as a hostage...or a recruit?

Release date: November 30, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 158

Sample

Even before the space pirates of Quicksilver made her their prisoner, Lady Alyc Carey, only daughter of the richest family in the Empire of Man, loathed the pulse and pattern of her nineteen common-years of changeless existence. She yearned for something different, whether glorious or terrible, sweet or foul, anything that might interrupt the apparently eternal rhythm of what she was forced to call life.

This was her desire, but what made it truly dreadful for Alyc was her near certain knowledge that the odds stood at more than two hundred and fifty billion-to-one that no such interruption would occur.

That figure was the present estimated human female population of the Empire. In other words, as Alyc well knew, no remarkable changes had ever been known to occur in any woman’s life.

Why should Lady Alyc herself have been any more fortunate?

That fortune eventually came to her, when the space pirates captured her, in no way altered the inexorability of those odds. Capture by space pirates was a freakish deviation in the law of probabilities. As pleased as she was that it had happened, Lady Alyc never once lost sight of her own good luck.

To fully comprehend the limited nature of Lady Alyc’s life before her capture, it would first be necessary to understand two related items.

The first of these was the place of human females as a gender within the Empire of Man during the last years of the reign of Emperor Kane IV.

The second of these was the particular place of Lady Alyc Carey, granddaughter of Fraken Carey, daughter of Melor Carey, younger sister of Matthew Carey.

Alyc’s family was the most powerful in the Empire.

Women were not permitted to wield power in the Empire.

This second point was one that even historians tended to ignore. Women had been regarded as a secondary, a passive gender for so many centuries that few people realized this had not always been the case.

For instance, in the area of space exploration alone, of the forty-nine crew members aboard the starship Viola undertaking the first N-space voyage at velocities in excess of light, twenty-nine had been women.

Detailed records indicated – extremely detailed records, it was true – that the eighth ruling potentate of the Empire of Man was actually one Empress Neva I. She reigned fewer than two common-years and was assassinated by her own second son.

It was the same son, Emperor Kane I, who issued a declaration of war against the neighbouring Galactic Empire, the blue-furred aliens known as Wykzl. This war, which was to last slightly more than one thousand years, ended in a Wykzl victory.

If historians ever bothered to study the subject, they might well have discovered a connection right there: war meant the subjugation of women, and eternal war – or so it usually seemed – meant eternal subjugation.

There were few areas, objectively, where men and women were not equal. War – killing and being killed – happened to be one of these.

With war, too, came the need for bodies. Submen could be soldiers, but someone had to lead them.

That meant men.

And to produce men easily, quickly and effortlessly women were needed.

Within fifty common-years of Kane’s declaration of war, women had been reduced to the role of suppliers. They bore children, who entered the military, if they were men, or went on to produce additional children, if they were women.

To ensure the easy fulfilment of their feminine procreative role, women were made subject to a firm, detailed code of conduct. Among other things, the code stated that:

No unmarried woman shall speak to any unmarried man without the permission of her father. (The reason for this, quite simply, was to preserve the strongest possible breeding lines. In war, strength meant life.)

No woman, married or unmarried, shall hold property, possess credit, or provide necessary services. (The reason in this instance: money, jobs, and property took time away from childbearing.)

No woman shall glide, swim, skate, fly, run, hike, or engage in any fashion in an active sport or game. (People who did such things sometimes got hurt; an injured woman was a useless woman.)

And so on.

Besides, there were always the submen.

The rigid code of conduct applied only to human females. By the time of Emperor Kane IV, at least fifty percent of the imperial population was composed of submen and subwomen, descendants of successful genetic experiments designed to increase the native intelligence of various of Earth’s original animal species: monkeys, great apes, dogs, domestic and untamed cats. Throughout the Empire of Man, submen performed those common and menial tasks that could not be accomplished by robots or machines. Fully human beings of both sexes were thus set free to live lives of meaningful idleness and contemplation. During the Wykzl War this meant that the men served as officers in the military; but the war was now over, and the idleness of most men had become a good deal less meaningful than before.

Still, the existence of this separate, less than fully human race made it possible to devise and carry out the terms of a rigid code of feminine conduct.

When a fully human unmarried male wished to speak to an unmarried woman, he went and found a subwoman.

When a fully human male wished to have a woman help with his business, he hired a subwoman.

When a fully human male wished to engage in co-educational sports, he got a subwoman to serve as his partner.

It worked well. No one objected to this arrangement. It was part of the imperial way of life at the time of Kane IV.

The only trouble was, now that the war had ended, this code no longer made any sense at all. Its raison d’être had expired. Bodies were not needed to fight the war; the population of the Empire boomed beyond control.

Few people recognized these facts. One of them was Lady Alyc Carey.

But what could she do? Alyc was merely a woman.

She was also blind.

The accident had occurred some seven and a half years subsequent to her birth. So she remembered the visible world. It continued to live in her memories if not in her eyes, but it was a world frozen in time. It never grew or changed. Her father was still one hundred and twenty years old. Her brother was a little boy, despite his now surprisingly deep voice. Trees stayed green. Flowers didn’t die.

The accident had occurred because Melor Carey had dared to violate the established code of feminine conduct. He had allowed his unmarried daughter to leave the precincts of her own home. She was only seven and he was a rich and powerful man. He saw no good reason why he – and she – shouldn’t do whatever they wanted.

The trip had taken them through space to the star KC97L, which, as all astronomers predicted, was about to go nova.

It was expected to be the most stunning cosmic sight of its age. A dozen starships occupied by astronomers, physicists, and astrogators had flocked to the spot. Melor Carey was one of the few non-scientists permitted in the vicinity. (One other, the Crown Prince, Randow, had come all the way from Earth as the official representative of his father’s court.) Matthew and Alyc Carey were certainly the only children.

The imperial navy was also present in force, because the imperial navy was always present everywhere in force.

KC97L decided to go nova some fourteen minutes before the predicted time and caught nearly everyone by surprise; and someone aboard the Blue Eagle, the Carey family shuttle, accidentally left a porthole unsealed.

That last error seemed impossible. Melor Carey simply did not allow mistakes to be committed anywhere near his presence. Nine robot technicians had later been disconnected as a result. Two submen servants were discorporated.

Actually, it was the fault of none of these creatures. Alyc Carey had opened the porthole herself. Before she could confess, the disconnections and discorporations had been carried out. Normally, that would have been murder, but Melor Carey was permitted to make mistakes where he allowed none himself.

Alyc was curious. When the nova went off, she wanted to see it. Not on a screen. Not two-dimensionally. Not shrunken or edited or less than real.

She wanted to see it – the event.

So she opened the porthole.

The nova exploded. (Too early, it was true; perhaps Alyc never really intended to go through with the whole thing.)

She alone saw it occur.

And she went blind.

(But only afterward. For one infinitesimally brief microsecond, Alyc witnessed the raw naked power of the cosmos. It was a sight that frightened her and which she never forgot.)

After the accident, Alyc went to Earth for treatment. The medical technicians of the imperial court risked disconnection by pronouncing her permanently blind. Melor Carey took her home to the family planet, Milrod Eleven in the Quixmass sector. At one time, Milrod Eleven had housed a population of three million, but after Fraken Carey had grown rich and powerful, he had ordered all his neighbours to move. The Careys now occupied the entire world, with its ghostly cities and abandoned farms, but they seldom strayed far beyond the traditional boundaries of their own homestead.

It was anticipated by those who knew her story and the fact of the rigid feminine code of conduct that Alyc Carey (now officially a Lady by order of Emperor Kane) would live out the remaining hundred or so years of her life as a lonely invalid.

From the age of eight until she was nineteen, that was pretty much the case.

Her brother Matthew, three years older than she, spent his vacations from the imperial schools on Earth at the family homestead. Alyc didn’t like Matthew and spoke to him only often enough to make him irritated.

Other children came from Earth and elsewhere to play with her and serve as company. Alyc alternately ignored them or heaped abuse on them and their families. She never played with any of them. Once, when she was fourteen, she stabbed a persistent playmate in the chest, nearly killing the boy. Nobody knew where she had found the knife (actually, she’d made it herself), and after that, her visitors became fewer.

Her father was home only when business and politics failed to take him somewhere else. She enjoyed playing chess and other games with him, but when they talked, she couldn’t bear the pain and guilt that always filled his voice.

Her two good friends were Kuevee, a robot, and Kisha, a subwoman. Kuevee tended the family flower garden, where vegetation from half-a-hundred alien worlds grew in chaotic splendour. Kuevee always made her laugh and she respected his incredible knowledge of alien botany.

Her relationship with Kisha, her personal servant, was closer. She talked constantly with Kisha and rarely had to listen. Kisha had been given to Alyc shortly after the accident, so she was not part of the frozen world, either. Kisha’s ancestors had been lions. When she wanted, when she was alone with Alyc in the garden, Kisha could make a roaring noise that shook the highest trees.

Alyc spent most of her time alone. She enjoyed being with Kuevee or Kisha, but more than anything she liked sitting beside the rattling brook that ran behind the big house and listening to the voices that spoke in her mind.

They may have been her best friends of all.

She had first heard the voices on the Blue Eagle immediately following the accident. They had never gone away. What they said, who they were, how they spoke to her, Alyc never revealed. She heard voices but knew enough never to tell anyone of their existence, not even Kuevee or Kisha.

She often dreamed of how her life would someday change; but even though she dreamed, she was well aware of the odds of two hundred and fifty billion-to-one that this would never happen.

On her nineteenth birthday, she went to see her father and asked again about the space voyage.

She had asked the first time when she was sixteen and again when she was seventeen and eighteen. Every year on her birthday, Melor Carey said, ‘Whatever you want for a birthday present, just tell me and I promise you’ll have it,’ and she told him she wanted to take a voyage through space.

But that was in strict violation of the code of feminine conduct.

So Melor told her no, as much as it hurt him to do it.

This year, on her nineteenth birthday, she found him in his usual place in the big house in the electric room. She called it that because all she could recall of her father’s office, from her frozen childhood world of memories, was the maze of wires and circuitry. She pictured her father as she recalled him: a short, wiry, bushy white-haired man, with slim hands, thick brows, and an expression of incredible intensity.

He spoke from his desk imprisoned in a cage of black wires. ‘I’ll be with you as soon as I finish this call, Alyc.’

She nodded, found the easy chair in its usual place, and sat down. While Melor Carey talked with Earth, Alyc listened passively to the voices in her own mind.

She heard him click the receiver and turned her attention towards him.

He sighed. ‘Matthew may be coming home soon.’

‘I thought he was supposed to stay on Earth and take care of those criminals.’

‘He was. They got away from him. Can you believe that, Alyc? All three men – and a Wykzl – escaped from the imperial prison on Earth.’

‘I don’t suppose it was Matthew’s fault in the least,’ she said sarcastically. Despite her disinterest in any affairs beyond the precincts of her own home, Alyc disliked Matthew intensely enough to enjoy hearing her father berate him.

‘So he’s ready to claim at great length,’ said Melor.

‘And you believe him?’

He heaved a sigh. ‘Of course not. The damn fool. Somebody had better hope that I live at least as long as my fath. . .