The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame

by Sylvia Engdahl

  “And if there is trouble you’ll stay with Becka, take care of her as long as she needs you?”

  “Of course. We want to get married.”

  Terry had assumed this was the case, but was relieved to hear it stated. Running away to get married would be more understandable to Fleet than running from an accusation of witchcraft, which was so ludicrous as to sound fabricated, and married couples had more rights than unattached young people—although not many when it came to unauthorized transit. “Okay,” he said. “We haven’t any time to waste if we’re going to hide Becka in the shuttle before the truck comes to deliver our wine. Will you follow my orders even if you don’t understand what’s happening?”

  “Yes,” Josh promised.

  “All right, then, after you show us Becka’s window, come with me to the chicken coop. We’ll have to be quiet and so I’ll say this now—when the coop catches fire, I will go back for Becka. Wait till you’re sure it’ll be hard to put out, then run to the house and pound on the door to tell her parents that it’s burning. You’ll have to help them fight it and keep them at it as long as you can without letting them suspect you of anything.”

  “But Becka’s never seen you,” Josh protested. “If I’m not there, she won’t dare try to escape with someone she doesn’t know.”

  “She will know me. I hear thoughts just as she does, Josh, and if she’s been telling the truth about herself, she will be able to hear mine.” He hoped she would, anyway; even if psi-gifted she might be too inexperienced or too scared to grasp them.

  He and Jon loaded their camping gear into the shuttle, ready for a quick getaway once the wine arrived. “We’re crazy, you know,” Jon said morosely.

  “I know. But have we got a choice?”

  “No, I don’t suppose we do, though it’s an uglier situation than I’d choose to get mixed up in.”

  “Even if they catch us, they can’t kill us or even detain us when they don’t know how many people are aboard our starship,” Terry pointed out. “They can’t be sure an armed party won’t come to our rescue in a second shuttle. Anyway, while fighting the fire they’ll be too busy to think about us; it won’t occur to them that we might meddle in their affairs. I’m more worried about what’s going to happen when we get to Stelo Haveno.”

  Noiselessly, they set off toward the farmhouse, Josh leading the way. No light shone from it at this late hour, so they had to trust his familiarity with the path; Terry didn’t dare use a flashlight. When they got close enough to see the windows, Jon stationed himself as close as possible to Becka’s while Terry and Josh went on around to the other side and crossed the wide driveway to the chicken coop. Fortunately there were no trees around and the ground was bare; there was no danger of a fire spreading.

  Terry pressed close to the wire fence that surrounded the chicken yard and focused on the coop at the center of it. He had warned Josh to ask no questions and to do nothing to distract him. Straw, he told himself—think about the straw, not the chickens that would be prematurely roasted. He had done this once not long ago; to save an innocent girl he could do it again. . . .

  With all the intensity he could summon, he envisioned a small circle of heat within the straw getting hotter . . . and hotter. . . After a few minutes flickering light from within signaled the kindling of flame.

  Josh stared at it, bewildered. Under his breath he murmured, “How did you—”

  “Never mind!” Terry whispered. “Wait till it’s past control, then run to the house and wake them. Yell ‘Fire!’ as loud as you can when they come out, but not before, so I’ll know it’s safe to take action.” He headed back to where Jon was waiting.

  They approached the window, which was a dormer high above the ground. Becka! Terry called silently. Becka, wake up! Wake up and come to your window! If she was latently psi-gifted she would hear him more clearly in her sleep than if she were already awake. Becka! Becka, Josh sent us to free you . . . We’ll take you to Josh. . . .

  Before long a faint stirring could be seen behind the glass and the window opened a crack; she had sensed his presence. Josh sent us, Terry repeated. We’re going to get you away from here. Speak to me in your mind if you understand.

  Josh? Josh, are you there? He had come to her window before, so she wasn’t surprised by the possibility. But she was aware that this was different.

  We’re Josh’s friends. He’s not far off, and we’ll take you to a place he can find.

  I can’t get out! she protested despairingly. And if my dad hears me try, he’ll beat me again. Terry could tell that she was suffering not merely from fear, but from pain; but he could do nothing to relieve it while she needed to be alert.

  Your dad won’t hear you. He’ll be out of the house in a minute, and then we’ll help you climb down.

  But my mom—

  She’ll be outside too, around front. The chicken coop is on fire.

  On fire? How could it be? I think I’m dreaming this, I have strange dreams sometimes. I’d better get back into bed.

  No! No, don’t do that! Terry burst out in dismay. You have to open the window wide and climb out just as soon as Josh lets us know it’s safe.

  “I’ll fall. And I’m hurting too much to run, even if there were someplace to run to. If it weren’t for that, I’d have jumped out before now.

  At that moment Josh’s yell startled her into full wakefulness. “Fire! Fire!” Terry rushed forward, urging, Now, Becka! Open the window now and climb out onto the roof where I can reach you! With a lift from Jon, he scrambled up to a place from which he could catch her.

  Becka had heard Josh’s voice, and that galvanized her; she climbed over the sill into Terry’s waiting hands. I have to pass you down to Jon, he warned. Just let go, and we’ll keep you from falling. Silently, she complied.

  Somehow they managed to get her onto the ground, where it became evident that she was indeed too weak to escape under her own power; with shock, Terry perceived that she had been not only beaten, but starved. They would have to half-carry her to the ship. There wasn’t much time; the sky was already brightening. At least there was now enough light to see their way. With Becka in a daze, supported between them, they retraced their path as quickly as they could. Not until they were safely inside the shuttle was he able to examine her injuries.

  She was wearing a thin shirt that clung to her back, and to his horror he saw that there was blood on it. She winced at his mere touch. “Where’s Josh?” she asked weakly. “You said you were taking me to him.”

  “He’ll be here as soon as the fire is out and your parents have gone back inside,” Terry said, hoping it was true. Surely they’d expect him to go home when he was no longer needed; for him to disappear wouldn’t raise suspicion. But it wouldn’t be safe to wait for him past the delivery of the wine shipment. They would have to lift off immediately, before Becka’s father discovered that she was gone.

  He turned to relieving her suffering, reassuring her, connecting with her mind as he’d done with the patients on Toliman. Being psi-gifted, she responded and went quickly into rapport with him, letting the pain of the belt lashes drain away. He made sure her back was no longer bleeding, but left the raw wounds for Alison to bandage once they were back aboard Vagabond. Jon went out to complete the wine transaction; not until it was time to load the boxed kegs did Terry have to leave Becka’s side. Shortly after that, Josh showed up, and he knew that for a time at least, his own presence was no longer needed.

  Which left him free to acknowledge, for the first time, the enormity of the mess he’d gotten himself into.

  Part Four: Stelo Haveno

  34 - 35 - 36 - 37 - 38 - 39 - 40 - 41 - 42 - 43

  ~ 34 ~

  Once enroute to Stelo Haveno, the problems Terry had pushed from his mind closed in on him. Mustering his limited healing ability, he did what he could for Becka’s lacerated back and dealt with her remaining pain during frequent neurofeedback sessions. But where in God’s name was he going to take these kids?
Well, not actually kids, at least he hoped not. Becka had told him they were sixteen, the age at which children became adults in most colonies—but in a culture as hidebound as Eden’s, where parents evidently claimed the right to tight control over adolescent offspring, it might be higher. In that case he would be guilty not only of unauthorized transport but of kidnapping.

  Assuming he was caught at it. Fortunately, he had not told anyone on Eden his name or the name of his ship, so its authorities couldn’t put out a specific alert. If he were headed anywhere but Stelo Haveno, he could buy forged IDs for them and drop them off. There, however, it wouldn’t be so simple. Starships putting in for maintenance at Stelo Haveno were closely observed, and there were few civilian residents of the colony; it was mainly a Fleet installation. Moreover, he wouldn’t have money for forged IDs or anything else until he could smuggle in the wine.

  And of course, the maintenance facilities at Stelo Haveno being a magnet for starships from all over this part of the galaxy, it was also a place frequented by bounty hunters.

  On top of this was the question of how he could get the money to keep flying. His intention had been to buy more wine, several shuttle loads; but they’d had to get out fast with just one. Assuming it was sold immediately, it would bring enough pay for provisions and hyperdrive maintenance; but there would be very little left to invest in cargo, and what would happen if he couldn’t make enough on the next trip to support himself and his crew?

  Despite these worries, they were not what bothered Terry most during the slow days spent in normal space after emerging from the jump. Becka’s suffering at the hands of a fanatic disbeliever had left him shaken, for it was a reminder that on Earth many were undergoing even worse ordeals as victims of the Klan. And about that, he could do nothing. He was pledged to promote hope for the future spread of advanced mind faculties, yet when people did believe in them, they sometimes got hurt. Whether or not he was responsible for endangering them—and Alison insisted that he wasn’t—they were vulnerable to harm he was helpless to prevent.

  The situation on Earth haunted him more and more. Besides, he was all too aware that Maclairn’s enemies might try bioweapons again; the fact that they were strong enough to be instigating Klan action made it even more likely that they would find another pair of suicidal terrorists, and this time he wouldn’t be around to stop them.

  “If only there were some way I could warn Fleet,” he said to Jon when out of the kids’ hearing. “The plan has been to keep intruders on Maclairn so they couldn’t get away and reveal the secret. It didn’t occur to anyone that taking unarmed men to the surface could pose a danger. But now that should never be allowed, at least not without a strip-search and perhaps a CAT scan.”

  “But if no one but the mentors knows Maclairn exists, and you can’t contact any mentors—”

  “There are a few Fleet officials who know—and the people connected to the Maclairn Foundation, of course, including former visitors taken there to observe. The trouble is that I can’t reveal that I know. Any warning would have to be anonymous, and it couldn’t mention Maclairn specifically or they’d fear the secret was out. So they’d dismiss it as coming from some crackpot.”

  “I thought you said there are psi-gifted people who can foresee the future. Mightn’t one who’d seen a disaster coming try to contact psi experts?”

  “Perhaps. It’s public knowledge that the Foundation does research on psi; that’s their cover. But they wouldn’t connect such a report with Maclairn. Unless—” Terry pondered it, his excitement rising. “Unless the person had picked up some identifying feature through remote viewing, something that no outsider could have known.”

  That night, alone with Alison in their stateroom, he began composing a message. “I don’t dare approach you openly,” he wrote, “since if it were known that I have psi powers I’d be targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. I’m too much of a coward to risk that, or to risk my loved ones, so don’t try to find me—you can’t, and even if you could I wouldn’t admit having written this. It may mean nothing to you, yet I know that the Maclairn Foundation studies psi phenomena, and if what I’ve seen has any substance, someone ought to know about it. I have been blessed—or cursed, some would say—with psi all my life, and my precognitive flashes have often proved to be true foresight. I hope this is an exception, because it’s worse than any of the others.

  “For six nights now the same vision has come to me. There is a world—I don’t know its name—with just one small colony, and a ship approaches it, and it is captured by patrollers from a larger ship; but then a shuttle lands. And I know, in the vision, that the shuttle has brought evil, because everyone begins to die. All the people in the colony sicken and die, and there are piles of bodies—I try to close my mind but I can’t, I can’t see the world from space anymore, just the decaying bodies of its people. They lie where they fall, for the sickness strikes too fast for there to be any help for it; they gasp for breath, but the air is poisoned and they writhe in agony as they collapse. And the crew of the large ship can do nothing, because once the shuttle reached the planet’s surface it was already too late.”

  Terry paused, wanting to delete the words from his tablet as he’d tried to delete the image from his mind. What if it was true? What if it had come through his own precognitive gift rather than from his memory of what had nearly happened? For too long he had suppressed his knowledge of the danger, telling himself that it was out of his hands. . . .

  “Each time it happens I come to myself in horror, knowing that if this is true the colony must be warned,” he continued. “But I don’t know where it is. I’ve looked through the atlas in the knowledgebase, and I don’t see any world like it—a golden planet with just one settled area, and a dam that holds back a long, narrow lake in the center of a deep canyon. I can’t find a lake like that in any pictures of colony worlds. So maybe it is a false seeing, as precognitive ones often are; but if anyone else has reported something like it, this message may have value as confirmation. The people of that world, if there is such a place, must be told never to let strangers land.”

  He passed his tablet to Alison, and she read it frowning. “Do you have to put in the part about how people die? If they take it seriously they’ll be terribly scared.”

  “They should be! I am. Oh, God, Alison . . . it’s been less than twelve weeks since I stopped the last attack, and there’s no reason to think Maclairn’s enemies have given up. I’ve kept so busy being Captain of Estel and planting hope on the Nets, and taking crazy chances like I did on Undine, that I didn’t have to remember that killing those terrorists might not have done any permanent good.”

  She pressed close to him on the bed where they were sitting and put her arm around his slumped shoulders. “It doesn’t help to remember it. You couldn’t do anything to stop the conspiracy even if you were free to go to Earth, any more than you could defeat the Klan. But you’re helping a lot of people by spreading the Estel symbol.”

  “Am I? Look what it did to Becka.”

  “Becka chose to stick by what that symbol led her to believe in, knowing the price she’d have to pay, and she’s better off for it—won’t she be happier away from Eden than being dominated by men like her father all her life?”

  Miserably, Terry protested, “What if we hadn’t happened along to save her from that?”

  “You can’t look at it that way. Fate has helped you many times—do you think you’re the only person it helps? Some are spared harm and others aren’t, and it’s not up to you to decide who. Nobody is happy without believing in something, so when you give them that, they’re ahead.”

  Terry turned to her and held her close, allowing himself to be comforted by her warmth, and after awhile they made love. But his depression did not lift. Though he did his best not to let it engulf them during the telepathic merging of their minds, he knew that Alison was not fooled, and that she grieved over it.

  The only thing he felt sure of was that someday, somehow
, he would have to take action; otherwise he would be crushed by what he alone knew of the danger. Not just Maclairn’s danger, but humankind’s, because if belief in new mind faculties was stamped out, the bright future the Elders had told him about would never arrive. . . .

  The first thing was to send the message to the Maclairn Foundation. But how could he? It would have to go either by ansible or by courier, and he had access to neither. To transmit it via public ansible would cost more money than he could raise. He should have sent such a message when he was with Zach, he thought in dismay. It would have been impossible to explain, but he could probably have talked Zach into taking his word that it was important.

  Would some friend of Zach send it? Probably not, not for free. All ID forgers had ansible access; that was one reason they charged high fees for their work. He was going to have to pay plenty to get IDs for Becka and Josh, if and when he acquired some credit from sale of the wine. He had the name of a dealer in Zach’s network, which Zach had given him knowing he’d eventually need to refuel his ship at Stelo Haveno. But getting in touch with the man was not going to be simple. First he would have to get Estel into a maintenance dock without letting anyone discover that he had unauthorized passengers aboard.

  ~ 35 ~

  Terry had had plenty of experience in lying to starport controllers, since when bringing mentors to Earth in Promise he’d had to conceal the fact that it had visited a planet not on the charts. So he decided it would be best not to mention Eden, just in case the kids’ flight from home had been reported. He stated that he’d last been to Undine but had been denied permission to land, which was verifiable if anybody cared to check.

  He also lied, of course, about the number of passengers aboard. If there was an inspection, Becka and Josh would have to hide, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. And finally, he lied about Vagabond’s captain, again naming Jon. This was going to be awkward because while the captain would be expected to make the arrangements for maintenance and refueling, Jon knew nothing about the hyperdrive; some excuse would have to be offered for his delegating the necessary paperwork.