Free Pirates of the Thunder by Jack L. Chalker Page A

Star Eagle can tell you the rest.”
    “They wanted to make certain she couldn’t pull a fast one on them,” the pilot told them. ‘That was how they hit on the blindness. She is not merely blind—she does not even have the processing inputs for visual images. The entire interconnection system simply isn’t there as it is in you. This is not a genetic modification; her children will see. There may be devices that bypass all of that that might just work, but I have no knowledge of them. She is also what might only be called a baby factory. Brain and body chemistry is set up for that. Her natural and normal condition is pregnancy. When she is not pregnant she will have almost no self-control. She will become increasingly frenzied until that condition is restored, after which she will again be as she is now. The combination of genetic work and Melchior’s modifications is astonishing. She is resistant to much of what inflicts others. She will age very slowly and heal very quickly. Her defensive and regenerative powers are enormous and automatic. She could very easily remain youthful and sexually functional for sixty or seventy years.”
    That got them all. Sixty or seventy years with pregnancy a natural condition...
    “Even in my day there was ways to beat that,” Reba Koll noted. “Fool the body into thinkin’ it’s pregnant, or, hell, take out the equipment if you can’t shut it off.”
    “Not here. Her body would treat any control method I might be able to come up with as if it were a disease and destroy it or render it ineffective. The same would go for psychochemicals. Surgical alteration would be repaired and healed quickly by the body and in the interim she would still be possessed of the lust and frenzy, which is induced by chemicals made in her own body. They knew she had used mindprinters before to her advantage, along with psychochemical alterations, and they wanted to be certain she could not do so again. To remove her reproductive organs would be far worse. It would drive her horribly and irreparably mad. A bullet in the brain would be kinder, and quicker. No, they fed her mindprint into their computers and their computers came up with an absolute system. I am not certain what Clayben intended—breed his own super race, perhaps. In the meantime, so long as she was pregnant, he had the complete services of her mind and abilities.”
    That stunned those who hadn’t already known about it, but Hawks had a different point to this information. “Understand this well, then. We need her mind and her skills; therefore, she will receive what she needs when she requires it. If we are to have a substantial second generation, then it might fall to them eventually to get the last of the rings. We require a colony.”
    “There’s darker stuff here, Chief,” Raven put in. “More than that problem. I been listenin’ to all this and, as you know, I followed it when we was still researching the whole thing, and when I first heard about these transmuters I figured our problem on getting into our target world was solved. We could change ourselves into what was needed. Now I see that’s not gonna happen. For one thing, old Star Eagle don’t have the codes and genetic shit to do it to any of us. For another, even if he did, it’s a one-way trip. There’s no way I’m gonna be changed into a monster for good, or, even if it was something I didn’t mind bein’, wind up bein’ left forever on some world while somebody else sticks them rings in Master System’s ass.”
    “A good point,” Hawks agreed. “I’m afraid we might have to face the transmitter to accomplish our goals, at least at the start, but while that sacrifice might have to be made by some or even all of us, I could not ask anyone to place him—or herself in the position of having to remain behind. I am personally prepared to make any sacrifice, including death or mutilation, to end the tyranny, but only if it means something. I would not shed