Oh, my God, Terry thought. He sat paralyzed, not knowing what to do. “I’m going back on foot,” Lorenski said. “I just came to tell you folks, and to get the wine into my groundcar in case they close the dome entrance to vehicles—they’re not going to want it blocked by traffic.”
“We’ll come along,” Walt said. “If he’s really here, we don’t want to miss him.”
Appalled, Terry stood up, trying to catch Walt’s eye. Don’t! he thought desperately, hoping he or Jenna had enough latent telepathic ability to catch the gist. I can’t speak in front of Lorenski, and you need to hear what I have to say. . . .
Jenna turned and abruptly changed course. “On second thought, there’s something we have to take care of first. Thanks for telling us, Lorenski.”
The minute he was out the door they converged on Terry. “You do know him—I could tell from your face. Are you planning to meet him here?”
“He doesn’t want his movements known,” Terry said, not answering the question. “He certainly doesn’t want to draw a crowd. There was an unfortunate incident on Centauri a while back—people had gotten the idea he could heal the sick, and he was mobbed. That kind of thing has to stop. He never meant to become an idol, and in any case, you know what will happen if bounty hunters locate him.”
“Can he heal the sick?”
“No. The reports were exaggerated, as many of the rumors about him are.”
“But if there’s a real Estel, it could carry refugees. Can you tell us how to reach the captain privately?”
“First, some way has to be found for him to escape the crowd at the spaceport. Any ideas?”
“If he’s already in the dome, he doesn’t need to escape until after we’ve met him,” Walt pointed out. “Except that when the crowd discovers an empty shuttle no one recognizes, people will guess that he’s here. If you know how to contact him, you’d better tell him to hide in our place before they hunt him down.”
God, he’s right. Terry thought. There was no way out—he would have to tell them the truth. “Can I count on you to keep his identify secret?” he asked slowly.
“Of course.”
“And you’ll hide him until the crowd goes away?”
“Yes. We’ll help him any way we can,” Jenna declared. “I can hardly believe all this is real, and that we might be lucky enough to have that honor.”
“Okay, then,” said Terry, drawing a deep breath. “I’ve never told anyone this except my crew—not even Zach, though I now think Zach has a right to know. My name is Terry Steward, and I am the Captain of Estel.”
~ 38 ~
Walt and Jenna stared at Terry in astonishment. “You? You’re the Captain of Estel, and yet you work as a smuggler?”
“I’m not some sort of superman, you see,” Terry said. “I’m merely a star pilot who happens to have some uncommon mind skills, many of which anyone could learn if the proper training were available. And as I told you, Walt, I’ve done a lot of things that are against the law. But I’ve made a commitment to spread what I know about the powers of the human mind.”
“People sometimes get hurt for believing in such powers,” Walt said slowly. “People like the ones being persecuted for it on Earth. And like Becka.”
“Yes. There’s always opposition to anything new because some are afraid of it and don’t want to know that their old way of thinking might be wrong. And there are always evildoers who strike out against anybody different from the herd. But what’s true is true—no good can come from denying it, only harm. So standing up to those who try to suppress it helps humankind evolve toward a time when people won’t put up with the kind of thing that’s going on now. They needn’t go on thinking there’s nothing ahead to look forward to. Anyway, that’s what some very wise people have told me.”
“You write like that on the Nets,” Jenna observed, “and it’s said that you make speeches. And those who hear are convinced, and are happier for it. Now I see why—it’s more than what you say, it’s what you feel inside.”
“You’re entitled to know that there’s more to it than that,” Terry said. “I’ve got a gift like Becka’s for communicating directly with minds, so that they sense what I’m trying to convey.”
“Why has nobody ever seen your ship?” Walt asked after a pause. “We weren’t even sure it was real.”
“And I wish it could have stayed that way, for one thing, because I don’t want bounty hunters to know where it is. So it flies under a false name. But I’ve had to use its real identity this time to keep Becka and Josh safe. Now Port Control knows it’s here, and I asked them to keep it confidential, but evidently they didn’t.”
“That’s odd,” Walt said. “They must know you’re famous, and they should have foreseen what would happen.
Terry nodded. “Fleet banished me from Centauri when the crowd got disorderly there, and the same thing will probably happen here, if not worse. Yet I can’t just leave, even if I can get back to Estel, because the hyperdrive engine hasn’t been serviced yet and it hasn’t enough fuel for more than one jump.”
“There’s a maintenance dock at Moonbase,” Jenna said.
“Yes, but there are reasons why I can never go to Earth or the Moon. Besides, hyperdrive service there is more expensive than it is here, more than I can afford. And anyway, I can’t take the refugees back where they came from.”
“We can hide the refugees for awhile,” Jenna said. “And just going to a space dock isn’t the same as landing on the Moon or on Earth, is it?”
He had not thought of that. He wouldn’t have to land, any more than he’d landed on New Afrika after he’d learned there were mentors there. There would be no mentors in orbit, and if any business had to be done on the Moon, Jon or Gwen could take the shuttle down. But there was still the cost—although, Terry thought suddenly, cost was no longer an insuperable barrier. He would have the charter fee from Zach.
Except that he wouldn’t have the charter fee if he didn’t take the refugees; he could hardly expect payment in advance. He might be caught by bounty hunters and killed, or the ship might be destroyed, and they would be stuck here with no money to pay some other captain. He explained this to Jenna, but she was unperturbed. “How many refugees does Estel have room for?” she asked.
“Well, the legal maximum is twelve, and there are four of us in the crew, so we can take eight.”
“Which is two more than are already here. You could pick up another couple, or even a family, from Earth and take them all to a new colony together. Small children wouldn’t need separate beds, so they wouldn’t count against the maximum.”
They would, but since he would be carrying the passengers illegally anyway, that scarcely mattered. There were only eight bunks in staterooms, but some people could sleep in the lounge. He’d have to replenish the consumables on every trip, but again, the expenses were going to be covered. . . . And if he went to Moonbase, he could send the message to the Maclairn Foundation over an ordinary comm channel without having to pay for ansible access.
“If Estel were destroyed or its captain killed, a lot more would be lost than a little of Zach’s money,” Walt declared. “I’ll take a chance and give it to you now, and if for any reason you can’t use the space dock here, then go straight on. We’ll trust you to come back for the refugees.”
“I won’t be able to come back under the name Estel,” Terry realized, “and Vagabond may not be safe either—they may have figured out a connection by then, or suspect that Becka and Josh were on Vagabond. Can you forge ship IDs, Jenna?”
“I’m not familiar with that database, but Zach probably is.”
“Yes, he changed my former false name to Vagabond, so he can change it again, if your ansible connection is secure. It better be done now before I leave, in case the name I suggest is already taken.”
Jenna went off to to colony's ansible office to communicate with Zach, while Walt took Terry along with Becka and Josh to the Fenways’ apartment. There they met the
other refugees, Pavek and Eurika Bartel and their daughters aged three and five. Their home had been burned to the ground by Klansmen and a note had been left threatening the lives of the two girls, targeted because Eurika had used remote viewing to help the police find a neighbor’s missing child. The police had not appreciated the help; to his horror, Terry concluded from the details he heard that they might have alerted the Klan. He spent the afternoon listening to a first-hand account of its activities, feeling sicker than ever about his inability to do more than transport a very few psi-gifted victims to safety.
The crowd at the spaceport had thinned by afternoon, Jenna told him when she returned between the restaurant’s busy lunch and dinner hours; but there were still more people there than seemed reasonable in view of the fact that Terry hadn’t shown up. Surely he was not important enough to justify curiosity-seekers sticking around all day—this time, the issue of healing had not even arisen. Furthermore, Fleet officers were not doing much in the way of crowd control; there were only two at the gate, Lorenski reported, and Terry began to worry about the shuttle; if it was identified as his, people might attempt to get in and take souvenirs.
It was evident that there would never be a time when no one was watching, so he waited for Lorenski’s shift and got through the gate in the back of the van. Walt drove it directly to the shuttle; Terry scrambled in quickly and sealed the airlock behind him, unable to do a preflight walk-around despite having left the shuttle unattended. He’d contacted the crew earlier by comm, but had been unable to say anything that would identify him although Alison, speaking as if she were a disinterested observer, had described the crowd. “What did you do to tip them off?” she asked when he boarded Estel. “I thought Fleet was going to keep our presence quiet.”
“So did I,” Terry said. “They weren’t happy about the crowd on Centauri, where they didn’t even know I’m really Estel’s captain. I’d have thought they’d want to avoid attracting attention to me—the League government wants to suppress awareness of psi, after all.”
He was more uncomfortable than ever about entrusting the ship to Stelo Haveno’s maintenance dock, and decided to take the Fenways’ advice and go to Moonbase. After explaining his new commitment to the crew and informing them that from now on Estel would fly under the name Bright Hope—chosen by Zach from traditional ship names he thought appropriate—he prepared to depart, glad that he hadn’t scheduled the work. But he’d been back in the ship no more than an hour before the comm announced the presence of Fleet officers requesting permission to board.
“They’ve already searched us for the missing kids, haven’t they?” Terry asked, puzzled. “I thought they’d do that within a few hours of our arrival.”
“They did,” Jon told him. “And they were different inspectors, as you said they’d be. They didn’t act suspicious.”
“Well, I don’t know what they could want from us now, but I guess we’ll soon see.” A request for boarding permission from Fleet was not a request, but an order.
Two officers including a lieutenant commander appeared at the airlock, looking anything but friendly. “Are you Terry Steward, the captain of this vessel?” the younger officer asked without preamble.
“I am,” Terry replied, suppressing his annoyance.
“And this is the ship named Estel?”
“If you’ve checked its transponder, you know it is.”
The commander stepped forward. “Terry Steward, otherwise known as the Captain of Estel, you are under arrest and this vessel is impounded,” he stated coldly. “You are to come with us now, and in due course your crew will be taken to suitable quarters pending deportation to Earth.”
~ 39 ~
In the patrol ship, Terry was so stunned that he could scarcely hide his feelings. Estel impounded? Alison, Jon and Gwen sent away fundless to a world none of them had ever seen before, where he himself could not go even if he managed to break free?
The officers would tell him nothing about the charges against him. He didn’t see how they could have discovered the connection between Estel and Vagabond, but they must have, since the smuggling hadn’t been detected and apart from that, he had not done anything illegal here besides transporting and hiding Becka and Josh—and, he supposed, “kidnapping” them. Plus operating a starship under a false name, if they did know the connection. All these things were felonies, and he had been well aware of the consequences if he was caught. He hadn’t expected to be caught.
After being informed that he had the right to remain silent, he was taken to Fleet headquarters on the surface of the planet. As on Centauri, he had a strange feeling of déjà vu on mingling with uniformed officers and hearing their manner of address, but this time he was too preoccupied to notice. Draconis, he was thinking in horror. It was not merely a penal colony, but one where most prisoners were assigned to hard labor. . . .
It would not be as bad as the prison on Ciencia, of course. He would not be condemned to lifelong solitary confinement in a cramped cell, wondering when they were going to start testing illicit drugs on him. But he had gotten out of that prison. Could he possibly have such luck a second time?
They left him alone in a holding cell for several hours. Then he was led to an interrogation room to confront an officer who introduced himself as Commander Flanders.
“Don’t expect my sympathy, Steward,” Flanders declared. “You have caused too much trouble for us, for too long, to receive leniency, and I for one have not been taken in by your claims. Fraud is fraud, however altruistic it is made to sound.”
Fraud? Bewildered, Terry managed to say, “I have the right to know the charges against me.”
“If you insist, although you’re well aware of them. You are charged with fraudulently claiming to have supernatural powers, with inciting revolution on Ciencia with the intent to extend rebellion to other worlds, and with hacking various public databases to promote your lies. Not to mention lesser charges such as escaping from legally-imposed imprisonment on Ciencia and creating public disorder in Fleet installations, both here and on Centauri.”
At a loss for words, Terry addressed the last point first. “I had nothing to do with attracting the crowd at the spaceport today—I wasn’t even there. I took pains to avoid being there.”
“No doubt, but you engineered it to gain exposure for yourself and your wild claims. We know how you work your scheme. You don’t show yourself, which makes people all the more likely to believe the foolish ideas you try to foist on them.”
Though there was an element of truth in this, Flanders’ distortion of it was startling. About to protest, Terry suddenly grasped what was happening and knew he had no recourse.
He had not engineered the disorder at the spaceport—Fleet had. That was why they’d leaked the information that he was in Stelo Haveno, and why they had made no attempt to control the crowd; probably they had gone on fostering rumors of his presence all day. They had needed a specific, verifiable incident in order to arrest him, but they had been preparing their case for a long time, waiting for the ship named Estel to turn up.
Why had he not foreseen this? He had known that conspirators within the League government wanted to suppress awareness of psi, that they had been behind the attempted terrorist attack on Maclairn and were now surreptitiously backing the Ku Klux Klan in an effort to discourage people from believing in the so-called paranormal. He had suspected that they were funding the bounty Quaid had put on his head. How had he imagined that they wouldn’t try to stop further action by the Captain of Estel?
At least Fleet evidently didn’t know about the alleged kidnapping or any of his actual crimes. They could put him away for those far more easily than they could convict him on these other charges.
“You accuse me of inciting revolution on Ciencia,” he said, “but Fleet has no jurisdiction over Ciencia’s internal affairs. In fact, you have no official knowledge of anything that happens there, as it’s a closed world.”
“It’s closed no lon
ger, since a few days ago the revolutionary party there—the party that bears your ship’s name—seized control of the government. And we indeed have jurisdiction, because you have declared that your advocacy of such revolution is interstellar in scope.”
“I have never advocated violent revolution, and I don’t for a minute think that’s what happened—the Estelans must simply have won an election. And I’ve never suggested that people should oppose their government anywhere else,” Terry protested. How fortunate that he hadn’t posted all that he’d started to write on Undine. . . .
“No? Let me quote from the transcript of the speech you broadcast from orbit. ‘I am going now to give hope to other worlds. You need me no longer, for you are freeing yourselves from the tyranny of your government’s false view of humankind.’ The implication is very clear.”
Oh, God. He hadn’t meant it that way, but it was true enough that if he happened to be in another colony with unduly restrictive laws, he would encourage its people to work toward changing them.
There being nothing more he could say on that point, Terry tried another approach. “As to my supposedly fraudulent claim to have so-called paranormal powers, I do have some, as I will demonstrate anywhere not within sight of the Ku Klux Klan. The reports of my abilities have been exaggerated, but that is not my fault. And in any case, how would I profit from encouraging others to believe they have them?”
“There are no such powers—they are all fantasy, as you very well know. Profit? How does any demagogue profit? By receiving the adulation of the people taken in. In your case you receive it mainly online rather than in person, but the satisfaction you seek is the same.”
It was quite possible that Flanders believed this. The majority of the population, after all, assiduously avoided letting themselves think that psi might exist, all the more because any slip might put them within the purview of the Klan. Terry knew better than to try to convince him. “Whether you call them fantasy or not isn’t important,” he said. “Under the League Constitution I have a right to my own beliefs. That’s known as freedom of thought.”
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 69