It had turned out well in more ways than one, thought Terry. He had worried about Jon feeling lonely while he himself was with Alison, as well as about his having to stay aboard alone when they went to a planet’s surface and go down by himself when it was his turn. Besides, some of what had to be done might require an extra person. Gwen’s courage and initiative would be an invaluable asset.
“What sort of things did you do in the Estelan party?” Terry asked. “Besides read, I mean.” Alison had mentioned that Gwen was enthusiastic about its aims.
“Well, I talked to people, brought in recruits. And monitored some of the files in the cloud.”
“That’s great. You can help keep track of the response to the hacking I do in data clouds of other colonies.
“I thought all the texts are already in their knowledgebases,” Alison said, “and that people can freely discuss them on the Nets. So why will you need to hack?”
“Well, I don’t have all the details worked out yet,” he admitted, “so let’s wait till we’re underway to talk. Right now we should get some sleep. It’s been a long day and as soon we rendezvous with Estel we’ll have to work hard moving everything in this ship over to it.”
“I’m too excited to sleep,” Gwen said. “I’ll just sit here and enjoy seeing the sun.”
“Gwen, there’s one thing you need to get straight right away,” Jon said. “You’re part of Estel’s crew now, and Terry is captain. What he tells you to do isn’t just a suggestion.”
Jon had been Captain Darrow for the past twenty years, Terry thought ruefully; until this morning he’d expected that he would have that status for the rest of his life. Now, unless they parted ways at some time in the future, he would never be a captain again. It would be a hard adjustment to make, yet he’d showed no reluctance, though part of him would surely grieve over the destruction of Bonanza.
All four of them lay down on the bunks; unlike larger vessels, mining ships normally carried only one pilot and didn’t require a continuous watch to be kept. Terry fell asleep quickly but was wakened by the AI’s insistent warning horn, aware that a red light was flashing in the cockpit. He was instantly alert and got there fast, with Jon right behind him.
The long-distance comm had recorded a message; Jon played it back. “Ciencia control, this is HS El Dorado, inbound from New Afrika, requesting permission to approach. Over.”
“Of all the luck,” Jon growled. “There was a ship here only a week ago; I didn’t think there’d be another so soon.” Permission to approach Ciencia would be denied, of course, since no starship traffic was permitted; the transmission was simply a means of informing local smugglers that El Dorado was in the market for cargo. The government, which secretly profited from smuggling, would ignore it, and the ship would stay around waiting for miners with ore or goods to offer. “If Estel’s in high orbit, at least one of them may detect it,” Jon declared.
“No,” Terry said. “It’s playing dead electronically; it won’t be seen unless someone happens to come close enough to spot it visually, which is hardly likely. But they’ll detect us, because we’ve got to use a beacon for Estel to find us, and their AI will pick it up.”
“Do you know just where in its orbit your ship is right now? Maybe we can keep on the other side of the planet.”
“I have no idea, and it wouldn’t make any difference if I did; Estel’s faster than any mining ship and it’s programmed to rendezvous when it gets the signal from the tracker I’m carrying. I haven’t any way to control it from here.”
“In other words, there’s a chance that the rendezvous could be detected.”
“A small one—but yes, it could happen. What would a mining captain do if his AI showed a local ship in contact with an unknown starship?”
“Some would ignore it; they wouldn’t want to get involved. Others, if they hadn’t sold all their own cargo, would want a piece of the action. And,” Jon added grimly, “there are a few who’d hope to cash in by reporting it to the police—the government would pay well for information about a rendezvous with a starship it’s not monitoring. I’ve been suspected of concealing transactions ever since you were caught flying my ship to Freerunner, after all.”
Terry heart lurched; that was an episode he didn’t want to relive, and its outcome would be the same—worse, because this time Jon would be convicted too, not to mention Alison and Gwen. “We can’t risk it,” he declared. “When we reach high orbit I can’t turn the tracker on.”
“How are we going to connect with Estel, then?” Jon asked.
“We’ll have to wait until El Dorado is gone. Our only option now is to proceed out to the asteroids as you normally would, just as you told Mendoza we’d do.”
Jon said slowly, “We may have another problem. If Gwen did tell anybody that I called her this afternoon, Mendoza may get wind of it. And if he hears that there’s a ship soliciting cargo, he’ll assume that I meant to deceive him when I said there isn’t.”
“You think he’ll be mad enough to turn you in?”
“Probably. We could be pursued, just as you were last time.”
“But we won’t be anywhere near El Dorado. They can’t come after you for what you haven’t done.”
“They can arrest me for what I’ve done in the past if Mendoza files a report. They suspect me of holding back profits, and we’ve got platinum aboard plus cargo that’s technically illegal for me to carry. The fact that I’m not in the process of selling it makes it worse, because there’s no potential gain for them in letting me go through with it.”
“Well,” Terry said, “the first thing is to find out if we’ve got reason to worry.” He called out to Gwen, who had stayed in her bunk as ordered, and she came to the cockpit. “Did you mention to anyone—anyone at all—that you were going to work on Bonanza this afternoon?” he asked her.
“I said hello to the guy who runs the hotel café, like I always do.”
“Oh, God,” Jon said grimly. “Mendoza said he was going to the bar. He’s likely to ask if anyone’s seen you, and whether you started the repair job earlier.”
“If he finds out you didn’t, he’ll know Jon lied when he called off the crew,” Terry explained. “We’ve got to assume he’ll suspect he’s being cut out of a cargo sale, and may sic the police on us.”
He kept his voice steady, but inside his head was whirling. History was repeating itself; he had run from the police in Bonanza before, and last time they’d caught him. Now it would be prison for the others, too; shut away in the cramped cell, never again to see daylight, he would not know when, or if, any of them were released. Jon wouldn’t be; ironically, he would receive the life sentence Terry’s first arrest had saved him from. And he, Terry was to blame; if he hadn’t come back to Ciencia. . . .
Gwen had turned pale. “It will be my fault if they arrest you,” she said contritely.
“You had no way of foreseeing this,” said Alison, coming forward to join them. “I’m just as much to blame; if it weren’t for me Terry wouldn’t be here—”
“And if I’d handled Mendoza better he wouldn’t have cause to be suspicious,” Jon said. “But I suggest we stop blaming ourselves and figure out what we’re going to do.”
“Can’t we outrun them?” Gwen asked. “We’ve got a head start.”
“Their ships are faster than this one; eventually they’ll catch up.”
“I thought the police didn’t have jurisdiction past high orbit,” Alison said.
“They do over local ships, just not over starships.”
Resolutely Terry put aside his remorse, but the memory of his other flight from the police nagged at him. “Jon,” he asked after a pause, “Do they track ships they’re after, or just guess where they’re going? Last time I assumed they were expecting me to head for your asteroid claim. I thought that when I changed course to rendezvous with Freerunner, they’d keep going in the opposite direction. But they didn’t. They were waiting for me when I left the starship.”
“Yes. So they stopped following and went where they thought I’d turn up. If that’s how they operate, we shouldn’t try to hide. We should contact El Dorado and make it look as if we’re going there.”
“You’re right!” Jon exclaimed. “They’d prefer to catch me in the act of smuggling, of course, and they’ll wait for the cargo sale to be completed so they can confiscate the proceeds. By the time they figure out we’re not going to show up, we’ll be aboard Estel.”
“We can hope so. We’ll be much farther ahead of them, anyway. Hail El Dorado, Jon, just as you normally would when selling to a smuggler.”
Jon hesitated. “We could be asking for trouble. Mendoza may have friends who’ll hear the transmission, and if by any chance he hasn’t guessed I’ll go there, this will clinch it.”
“In that case, they’ll be too far behind for it to matter.”
“Unless there’s a police ship already in orbit.”
“We have to gamble one way or the other,” Terry said. “Make the call.”
Jon did so, assuring the starship captain that he had cargo of exceptionally high value, and arranged a rendezvous. Meanwhile, Bonanza continued at maximum speed toward the asteroid on which he had staked his claim.
During the hours it took to get there Terry sat tensely, clenching his hands and with difficulty controlling his heart rate and inner biochemical reactions through the use of his mind training. Luck had been with him so far, he told himself. Surely it wouldn’t run out now, with the freedom of everyone he cared about at stake. . . .
And with the fulfillment of his mission at stake, too. He had committed himself to spreading hope to the colonies. That might have some impact on the future of humankind. Was his belief in its importance just an illusion? If not, then perhaps returning to Ciencia hadn’t been justifiable, yet it had felt right, which might have been precognition—but on the other hand, so might his irrepressible fear.
~ 9 ~
It was evident, once Bonanza reached the vicinity of the asteroid, that if the police had indeed been called they were no longer in pursuit. Presumably they’d waited in vain near El Dorado and then decided that they couldn’t be sure of Jon’s destination. It would be easy enough, after all, to intercept him on his way back to Ciencia; there being no life support anywhere else in the solar system, every local ship had to return sooner or later.
Actually, the threat that had made them contact El Dorado had been a benefit, Terry reflected, somewhat awed by the way fate had repeatedly helped him out. Since the police couldn’t have known that Jon suspected a trap, they’d see no reason for his failure to meet the starship as he’d arranged to do—and that would support the assumption that his ship had met with an accident.
No one had gotten much sleep, and by now they were hungry as well as tired. As they ate, Terry said, “I’m changing the original plan. Since we’re far past the range of the local ships’ tracking systems, I can turn my tracker on now and bring Estel out to us. I’d expected to board it as close to Ciencia as possible, but it’s not safe to go back where we might be caught and in any case, by rendezvousing here we’ll save the days that we’d have to wait to stay clear of El Dorado.”
“If the other ships can’t detect us, then how can Estel?” Alison asked.
“Its comm facilities are much better, and more sensitive—and of course it’s searching for my signal.”
“But if our sensors can’t pick up Estel until it’s closer, how can we tell whether it’s headed for us?” Jon said skeptically. “At least now we know more or less where it is—though I still wonder why you’re so positive that it hasn’t been tampered with. Once it breaks orbit we can’t find it if it fails to appear.”
“It will obey the signal it gets,” Terry said firmly. Would it, he wondered, or would the Elders who were guarding it think the signal was false? They wouldn’t expect him to have come all this way past the planned rendezvous area. And they had the ability to take over its AI at a distance.
On the other hand, they also had far greater remote viewing capability than his. They might be able to sense his location by psi, or at least sense that the signal was authentic. He would have to trust that they wouldn’t interfere. Reaching into his pocket for the tracker, he clutched it and pressed the switch.
It didn’t take Estel long to get within range of Bonanza’s tracking system, and Terry drew deep breaths of relief. He had been away from it only three days and had not doubted that it would be waiting for him; nevertheless, the separation had been painful, not to mention the recent fear that he’d be recaptured and would never see it again. His ship, the starship he had always wanted and never believed he would acquire—the miracle of it was still new enough to excite him.
They watched through the viewport once the AI announced that Estel was near enough to be observed. At the first sight of it Alison exclaimed, “It’s beautiful! I never imagined starships were like this, clean lines instead of pieced together like the mining ships.”
“It’s quite new,” Terry said, “and was built as a charter vessel. So it’s better designed than most.”
Jon agreed. “I’ve boarded plenty of smugglers’ ships,” he said, “and this one has them all beat for looks. Of course they’re mostly old interplanetary freighters converted to hyperdrive, with parts cut off to stay within the legal size limit.”
Alison looked puzzled and Terry explained, “Private ownership of large starships isn’t allowed—Fleet has a monopoly on interstellar traffic to prevent any world from developing military ships.” And, he thought, to provide ongoing work for the trained officers whose existence kept the galaxy free of armed conflicts. Fleet’s merchant starships far outnumbered its explorers and police ships.
“Why does Estel have solar panels?” Gwen asked. “I thought hyperdrive ships didn’t need them.”
“Small ones use them when near a sun to save as much fuel as possible for multiple jumps.”
“You’d never know it had crashed,” Alison said. “Your friends who repaired it must have been experts.”
“It crashed?” Gwen asked. “Were you on it?”
Terry froze, and Alison gave him a look of contrite dismay. Only now had she realized that mentioning the crash would lead to questions that would be difficult to answer.
“That’s one of the things in my past that I can’t discuss right now,” he said. He could not tell her about Maclairn yet. He wasn’t sure he could trust her to keep the secret, though more and more he was inclined to feel that he wanted to. It was going to be very awkward for the three of them to avoid referring to it in her presence.
The reminder of the crash triggered another thought, and he wondered why it hadn’t immediately occurred to him. “There’s something else I want to do differently,” he said. “Jon and I have agreed that once we’ve moved everything into Estel, Bonanza must be destroyed so the authorities on Ciencia will believe we all died in an accident—that’s necessary to protect friends who might be suspected of having helped us escape. We’ve been planning to do it with Estel’s laser cannon. But since we’re near the asteroid, it will be much better to crash it there so that to people who don’t know about the smuggling, it will look like we were on an ordinary mining trip. There won’t be any mystery about our death, and no one will guess that we’d had any idea of leaving.”
“That’s true,” Jon said. “They’ll search there when we don’t return, since they know where my claim is; they may even send a rescue ship. And the evidence of an accident will be conclusive.”
“They won’t find our bodies, though,” Alison pointed out.
“We’ll plant mining explosives to make sure the cabin is completely demolished,” Terry said.
“I assume you’re not going to be aboard this ship when it crashes,” Jon said. “So how are we going to keep the AI from preventing an impact? We can’t turn it off; we’ve got to program a course that will co
llide with the asteroid at high speed.”
“We can program a time-delayed shutdown.”
“Not on my ship, we can’t. Its AI isn’t that smart.”
“If you’re going to use explosives, why crash at all?” Gwen asked. “Can’t you just land, and then plant them?”
“You’re right,” Terry said. “I had crashing on my mind, and didn’t think it through. We wouldn’t have had enough explosives to destroy the ship without a trace, which was why we were going to use the laser cannon. But on the asteroid we want to leave the bulk of it to show we were there.”
“But what will they figure caused the cabin to explode?”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Jon said. “Mining ships carry explosives and crews are sometimes careless with them. Nobody’s going to investigate once they see we’re not around to be rescued. And anyway, there won’t be much left to investigate; an asteroid’s gravity is so low that debris from an explosion will just float off into space.”
“Right now we’ve got to transfer all our stuff into Estel,” Terry said. He waited impatiently in the captain’s seat while the two ships rendezvoused and then docked—an AI-controlled process, but one that required a pilot on hand to deal with emergencies. Once the airlocks were safely joined, he told his crew to bring the stored platinum ingots plus everything they could carry and led them triumphantly into their new home.
“There are four staterooms,” he pointed out. “Alison will share mine, and you two can take your pick of the others. We’ll use the fourth one for storage to keep the clutter out of the lounge.”
He and Jon got into spacesuits and started moving cargo from Bonanza’s hold to Estel’s, taking Jon’s mining equipment—except for the store of explosives—as well as the boxes and blanket rolls. “Some of it’s set up on the asteroid,” Jon said. “I leave it there between trips. If you think you’ll want to do any prospecting in the future, we’d better retrieve it with the shuttle when you pick me up, though using it may not be practical for so few of us.”
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 50