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

by Sylvia Engdahl

  That was not the biggest problem, however. More difficult was the fact that neither of them had enough money to pay more than a deposit on the bill. If they couldn’t sell the wine before the work was finished, Estel would be held as security until they could come up with it—a thought Terry found too dismaying to dwell on.

  As soon as orbit had been established and landing clearance for the shuttle had been obtained, Terry and Gwen went to the surface of the planet to pick up provisions, leaving Jon aboard as “captain.” Supplies had priority over other expenses—they’d been low on them in the first place, since they’d obtained none on Eden, and for the last few days two extra people had been consuming not only food but water and oxygen. Estel was too small a ship to have a self-sustaining life support system.

  Gwen piloted the shuttle; she was by now experienced in everything but landing, which at a spaceport was handled mainly by the AI. To get a license to fly solo with passengers, she would have to learn to land on rough terrain, but that could wait. Her student license authorized her to carry cargo for their own use and she’d had plenty of practice in docking, so with the purchase and loading of supplies taken care of, Terry sent her back to Vagabond alone and went in search of the dealer whose name Zach had given him.

  Stelo Haveno was a domed colony, the thick atmosphere of its planet being unbreathable without the respirator masks that all starships carried as standard equipment. It had little function beyond housing the Fleet personnel who worked on the starships in port for maintenance plus the services that supported them. There were a few civilians employed in high-tech industries, and there was a thriving recreational district that served everyone, composed of the usual assortment of gyms, cafés, bars, arcades, and brothels. From the initial greeting of the woman who answered his call, Terry half-expected the latter; but once he mentioned Zach’s box, her tone changed and he was directed to a respectable-looking restaurant with several wine kegs in plain sight behind the bar.

  Serving wine was not illegal in the colony, he realized, and apparently no questions were asked as to where restaurants got their stock, though surely everyone knew that it came from smugglers since official Fleet cargo ships rarely carried it. The woman, Jenna Fenway, and her husband Walt—warm, friendly people who reminded him of the retired couple who’d lived next door during his childhood on Earth—explained to him that there was nobody authorized to check. Because the charter of the colony stated that importing consumables without a license was forbidden, Fleet prevented their transport to the surface; but it had no jurisdiction on the ground except over violence, and the colony had no police since Fleet did control any violence that occurred. Therefore, if a shipment of wine or some other luxury got past the inspector at the spaceport gate it was safe from challenge.

  Nevertheless, getting it to the ground and past the gate would not be easy. And, Terry thought grimly, getting Becka and Josh past the gate would be even harder.

  There was no way to contact an ID forger except through this couple, and he did not know how to broach the subject—they weren’t the sort of people likely to be acquainted with the underworld. Though they bought smuggled wine, they weren’t breaking the law once it was out of their van and sold only by the glass. Zach had vouched for them, which meant they would not turn a lawbreaker in for any offense short of murder. But they struck him as too wholesome and unsophisticated to have friends among forgers.

  Which was just as well, since they were also unlikely to be watched by bounty hunters. All the same, he had no choice but to make some attempt at getting information. After the terms of the wine deal had been agreed upon, he ventured, “If there are no police here, I suppose there’s a lot of crime—nonviolent crime, that is.”

  “Well, that depends on what you call crime,” Walt said. “Just about everything is legal here except for League offenses, and most of us aren’t too particular about obeying bureaucrats’ laws.”

  That explained Zach’s approval of them, Terry thought. “But surely, stealing, forgery—”

  “We don’t tolerate thieves; Fleet transports them offworld once they’re convicted in our local court. There’s no way they can escape, after all, with no breathable air outside the dome. As to forgery, though—I suppose you mean ID tampering—that’s under League jurisdiction and there wouldn’t be enough demand for it here to warrant the risk.”

  “You see,” added Jenna, “Fleet checks IDs coming and going, and if someone boarding a ship didn’t have a record of having arrived, or the records didn’t match, it would show that there’d been tampering. We have only one public ansible, and it would be easy enough to find out who’d had illegal access to it.” She seemed rather uncomfortable with the topic, Terry noted.

  “How do you communicate with Zach?” Terry asked. Surely a mom-and-pop restaurant business wasn’t profitable enough to support ansible fees.

  “When he contacts us, we reply collect, and he’ll also accept collect messages in emergencies. I gather he’s got an ansible terminal of his own in the hidden box he told us about. He’s a wealthy man, you know.”

  Surprised, Terry said, “I didn’t. He lives in the back room of a store.”

  “But I’ve heard he’s got millions in investments—the kind of forging he does pays well, and he doesn’t do it for the money, he only cares about defying the League government’s red tape. And about helping people he feels have gotten a raw deal.”

  “He wanted a contact here because it’s a hub for traffic from all over, and a wine smuggler he knew recommended us,” Walt explained. “That was years ago. We pass on messages to captains if he asks us to, and he sends us sellers that we can trust.”

  And they could send text to Zach without paying, Terry thought hopefully, thinking of his letter to to the Maclairn Foundation—but how could he explain that it was an emergency? The rest of what they’d told him was even less promising. He had realized that Becka and Josh would either have to sneak off the ship and stay at Stelo Haveno permanently, or else be given IDs and transit permits without leaving the ship to receive them, in which case he would have to smuggle aboard a device for implanting the chips. But if there were no local ID forgers, they couldn’t get IDs at all. They couldn’t stay here without identification, and he would face the problem all over again wherever he went next.

  Walt agreed to have his van at the spaceport before dawn the next morning, and Terry prepared to leave. “Before you go,” Jenna said, “there’s something I want to ask you—I ask everyone I meet from offworld. There’s a rumor on our Net, and I don’t know where it came from, or whether there’s any truth in it. It’s said there’s a ship called Estel, and its captain helps people in trouble, and he promises that someday humans will be better off than they are now, happier, because their minds will have new powers and won’t be so vulnerable to control by the government. Have you ever heard anything like that?”

  Terry’s spirits rose. So it had reached even here—of course it would, since ships from everywhere came and crews on leave would talk. And from here, it would be passed on to many other colonies. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard it, and I believe it’s true.”

  “This Captain of Estel—does anyone know how to get in touch with him?”

  “Why would they want to?” Terry hedged.

  “Well,” Jenna said, “on Earth, I’ve heard, people are being attacked by gangs of terrorists because they have paranormal powers, powers like what the rumors say we’ll all have in the future. Some of their homes have been burned and they’ve had to hide their families, and they want to get away from Earth. But of course most of them haven’t got transit permits or money for passage. And I wondered if what I’ve read about the Captain of Estel helping people in trouble means he takes them aboard his ship.”

  Terry froze. He had helped two people escape persecution for psi, but from Eden, not from Earth, and she couldn’t possibly have guessed unless she was telepathic herself. And she wasn’t—her mind wasn’t open like a telepath’s, no
r was it intentionally closed. Yet the emotion he sensed in her suggested that her question involved more than mere curiosity. “I don’t think,” he said slowly, “that Estel ever goes to Earth.”

  “I don’t suppose it could,” Jenna agreed. “It would be caught by Fleet, wouldn’t it? But if a few people were smuggled aboard some other ship, a ship that couldn’t transport them to a permanent refuge, maybe Estel could be taking them on to a world that would welcome them. It’s—sort of a fantasy I have, because I don’t like the thought of those people being in danger.”

  A world that would welcome them? He wished he knew of one where he could take the kids. If they could stay here, Jenna would watch out for them, he thought ruefully; she was just the kind of person they needed. But without IDs, they couldn’t escape detection for long.

  He pushed the thought aside, knowing that he had more immediate concerns to deal with. The wine had to be delivered tonight—once the ship was in the space dock, its cargo bay would be under seal. Fleet couldn’t arrest him for carrying wine as long as he stayed in orbit, but if he was caught transporting it, or if the seal was broken, the game would be up.

  The shuttle hadn’t been inspected or challenged on the trip down; could he rely on that at all hours, or would they suspect someone landing at an unreasonably late hour of trying to avoid notice? Terry decided that they might. If he came at a time when he could have legitimate business and left the shuttle unattended with the wine stashed in its hold—something no smuggler would be expected to do—they’d get used to seeing it on the ground and wouldn’t bother to investigate.

  There remained the question of how to unload it and get it through the spaceport gate. Walt did it regularly, so it must be possible, unlikely though that seemed. Yet he too would be at risk as the driver of the van, even if they couldn’t prove he was a buyer. Why hadn’t he told him how to trick the Fleet inspectors? Terry wondered as he waited by the gate for Gwen to pick him up with the shuttle. He’d had to let his ID be scanned coming and going, and could only hope there’d be no permanent record that might fall into the hands of bounty hunters.

  He had no choice but to follow Walt’s lead. If the wine kegs weren’t sold before the ship went into the space dock, he wouldn’t have the money to get it out. There was no way to sell them without delivering them to Walt, and Walt hadn’t seemed to doubt that he could collect them. Either he trusted Zach’s recommendation of him—and his own telepathic impressions—or he didn’t. What good did psi-giftedness do him if he couldn’t rely on it?

  When he got back to Estel, Alison was at the airlock to meet him, obviously shaken out of her usual calm. “They’re inspecting all the ships,” she told him. “They’ll get around to us any time now—we were afraid you wouldn’t be back soon enough.”

  “It’s no big deal,” he said reassuringly. “They can’t accuse us of smuggling when we haven’t smuggled anything yet, and simply having wine on board isn’t illegal.”

  “You don’t understand. It came over the comm—there’s a report of two underage kids missing from Eden. They’re searching ships in all the ports within easy range.”

  “Oh, my God.” He’d been hoping against hope that sixteen was Eden’s age of majority.

  “What are we going to do, Terry? There’s no place to hide them.”

  “There’s the cargo bay,” he said grimly.

  “I thought of that, but Jon says it’s not pressurized.”

  “That’s why they won’t search it. We’ve got spacesuits to spare, all those from Bonanza as well as our own. They won’t notice that any are missing.”

  “You mean to say you’re going to put those kids into an unpressurized compartment?” Alison protested. “Becka can’t possibly deal with a spacesuit—even I couldn’t, without training.”

  “There isn’t any alternative short of sending them back to abusive homes.” Not to mention his own situation, Terry thought silently; there was no chance that he wouldn’t be arrested if they were found.

  Jon said, “I agree, but we don’t know how long they’ll have to be in there, and they certainly don’t know how to change tanks. Somebody’s got to stay with them, and I guess that’s me.”

  “It can’t be you,” Terry said. “Supposedly you’re captain, and the inspectors will expect you to appear. I’ll go in myself.”

  “You are captain, and we can’t spare you—some crisis may arise that you’ll have to handle.”

  Gwen spoke up. “I’m the logical person—Jon taught me how to use spacesuits while we were waiting for you to get back from Toliman, and the kids like me.”

  That was true, Terry realized. They did like Gwen and would feel comfortable with her, and an engineer’s absence wouldn’t be noticed. “Okay,” he said. “Call them in here, and we’ll get started.”

  Becka and Josh were in their stateroom—he had allowed them to share one because he hadn’t wanted to let himself think that they might be underage. Gwen went to get them, explaining the situation as they returned to the lounge. Becka was dubious. “A spacesuit?” she protested. “All sealed up in it where I can’t breathe?”

  “You can breathe. I’ll be there and I’ll make sure you always have enough air.”

  “Hey, it’ll be fun,” Josh told her. He had explored the ship during the past few days and had decided he wanted to become a spacer.

  “If you don’t do this, they’ll send you back to your father,” Terry told her, adding silently, I know it’s scary, but you’re a brave person—you stood up to your dad, and you climbed out that high window to escape.

  She nodded. “I guess so. Can you . . . talk to me in your mind while I’m in there?”

  “Maybe. But I’ll have to focus on talking to the officers.”

  They got Gwen and the kids suited up and into the airlock for the inner entrance to the cargo bay, first taking through a generous supply of oxygen tanks. Nervously, Terry pressed them to hurry; Jon had received word that the inspection team was on the way. When the lock closed behind them and the light showing it was occupied finally went out, he drew a breath of relief. Are you okay, Becka? he asked silently. Gwen had a comm unit, but they hadn’t dared give them to the kids lest they speak into a live mike accidentally.

  Yes . . . I’m all right. . . . Then, almost immediately, an officer’s voice came over the comm requesting permission to board.

  During the next half hour two grim-faced Fleet officers searched the entire ship, even taking up the cushions of the couches in the lounge to inspect the storage lockers underneath—a place large enough for a young girl to hide in, which Terry had known better than to use. “Don’t take this personally,” one of them said to Jon. “We have orders to be thorough; the missing kids may have left Eden voluntarily, but even so, kidnapping can’t be tolerated. When the ship that has them is found, its captain will soon be on his way to Draconis.”

  Inwardly, Terry cringed. Draconis was a League penal colony on a desolate world in the Sigma Draconis system.

  “What cargo are you carrying?” the officer asked.

  “Wine,” declared Jon honestly. “We know it’s not legal to import here; we’re just in for hyperdrive maintenance.”

  “Then you won’t mind if we seal your cargo bay here and now to save the trouble of doing it when you go into the space dock. We’ll get the outer hatch before we cast off, and the inner one right now.”

  As Terry and the others watched in horrified dismay, the man snapped an official seal onto the bay’s airlock and departed—with Gwen, Becka and Josh locked inside the airless cargo bay.

  ~ 36 ~

  “Do you think they suspected anything?” Jon asked when the officers were out of hearing.

  “Maybe. On the other hand, they would have had to seal it when we entered the space dock and they may be shorthanded there.”

  “It doesn’t look too hard to get off,” Alison said. “Will they notice when we go into the dock that it’s gone?”

  Terry broke the news as calmly as
he could. “It’s electronic,” he said, “and when it’s tampered with it sends a signal to the control base. If we break the seal, they’ll be back in half an hour to find out why.”

  “Well, we haven’t any choice—we’ll have to take our chances, and the sooner the better,” Jon said. Terry could feel the surge of desperation in him; Gwen was in there.

  They had not understood. “It’s not a question of chance,” he said. “There’s no other place to hide the kids. I’ll be arrested for kidnapping and illegal transport, and on top of that for breaking the seal, which is another felony. I’ll end up on Draconis, as they said.”

  Alison paled. Jon stared at him for a moment and then declared, “No, you won’t. You’re forgetting that they think I’m captain, and only the captain is liable.”

  “The record shows I chartered the ship, and in my presence I’m in charge,” Terry pointed out. “You can’t be held accountable for my decisions.”

  “Terry,” said Jon firmly, “long ago on Ciencia you gave yourself up to save me from spending the rest of my life in that hellhole of a prison there. Do you think I’ve forgotten? You’re always talking about how fate’s put you in the right place at the right time. Well, now it’s put me in the fortunate position of being able to pay back a debt I never thought I could repay. I’m believed to be the captain of Vagabond and we’re not going to tell them otherwise.”

  “Jon, I can’t let you—”

  “Of course you can. You went to prison for me, so it’s only fair.

  Jon had questioned the wisdom of rescuing Becka in the first place, Terry thought; it wouldn’t be at all fair for him to suffer the consequences. And in any case, he himself was captain of Estel, under whatever name it flew, and he was responsible for the welfare of his crew. Estel. . . .