It wouldn’t have happened to you, Holden, Terry thought as the lighted pad fell away below them. The man proved to be a superb pilot; he handled the shuttle effortlessly as if it demanded little attention, despite having used auxiliary lift power. He was wasted on a mere maintenance base like Stelo Haveno, and for him to have ended up here was no doubt another instance of Fleet’s bureaucratic inefficiencies. Perhaps he sought adventures like this out of boredom.
The comm blared, “Unidentified shuttle, report please. State your captain’s name and mission. Over.”
Holden ignored it. After several repetitions, with low orbit past establishing, he replied calmly, “Port Control, this shuttle is now past your jurisdiction and its captain’s name is of no concern to you. Out.”
Unsurprisingly, Control warned, “Unidentified shuttle, patrollers are being scrambled to make visual contact. You are not authorized to leave orbit, repeat, you are not authorized to leave. Either return and land or stand by for boarding. Acknowledge, please. Over.”
“Negative, Control. We do not acknowledge your jurisdiction and we will not permit boarding. Out.” Holden spoke with utter conviction, which was so strong telepathically that Terry could not doubt that he believed what he was saying. Then he turned off the comm pickup to allow Terry to speak.
“You have to land eventually, after you drop us off,” Terry said in dismay. “They’ll take you into custody.”
“No, they won’t,” Holden said. “Don’t worry about me. I know a few tricks Control’s not aware of.” And Terry realized, again through telepathy, that he would not be made aware of them either. Bribery? Blackmail? This clean-cut young officer didn’t seem like the type to resort to such things, but on the other hand, it would be in a good cause. . . .
They kept going, heading for deep space in a shuttle powered only to reach orbit, and Terry did not ask questions. Alison and the refugees, behind him, assumed all was normal; they didn’t know how long reaching Estel would normally take.
Finally, with only seconds remaining in the controllers’ shift, Holden switched off the transponder and put on a surge of power. Estel appeared almost immediately, and Terry realized that they had been in orbit—an elliptical orbit calculated to take them back to it at such an unusual angle that it would not have been tracked when the controllers were focused on the ship itself. Experienced though he was, he had not thought a shuttle’s AI was capable of such a calculation. He wondered how Holden had known.
“When we dock, get your people aboard fast and don’t waste any time checking status,” the officer told him. “Your hyperdrive engine has been serviced, so don’t hesitate to use it at minimum distance from the sun—your main engine’s faster than a shuttle’s, of course, but they may follow you in another starship.”
“I’m never going to forget what you’ve done,” Terry said. “If I accomplish anything from now on, the credit belongs to you, even though I can’t say so publicly.”
“The credit belongs to the Captain of Estel,” Holden said. “I’ll be watching for rumors about his success.” And silently, unmistakably, I think you and I may meet again someday. . . .
The docking light came on and Terry turned to transferring the passengers. When the airlock cycled shut behind them, he realized with shock that the shuttle had detached and that Holden was already gone.
He made a dash for the bridge and got Estel moving at top speed, heading for the nearest jump point. It didn’t much matter where it was, as long as the AI knew where, which it couldn’t determine accurately until out of the sun’s gravity well. Normally he would allow a couple of hours leeway to be safe, but the risk of being overtaken was greater than the risk of miscalculation; he would let the AI determine when it was ready to lock in the ship’s position. Meanwhile, he set to work programming the jump itself.
He had decided to take the refugees to New Afrika; they would be welcomed into its community of expatriates, and Alison knew people to whom she could introduce them without revealing to the Bramfield Club that she was back onworld. He himself couldn’t land, of course, except to drop them off at the spaceport and pick Alison up later; he would have to let her handle it alone. But Alison was very capable, and he knew he had no need to worry about her on a safe world.
The worry would come later. Earth was anything but safe, and he had not liked sending Jon and Gwen there. Any number of things could prevent making connections with them. . . .
Not the least of which, Terry admitted, was the possibility that he’d be caught before he could jump. He’d quickly passed out of shuttle range, but there were a number of starships in port, perhaps not Fleet ships, but they could legally commandeer a private one when in pursuit of a criminal. The AI had presented no alarms, but that didn’t mean he was out of danger.
His readouts showed the hyperdrive had been checked and fully supplied with antimatter fuel, as Holden had said. It seemed strange, now that he thought of it, that Fleet had fueled a ship they expected to sell. As it was, it had been done at no cost to him, putting him well ahead financially provided they hadn’t frozen his credit account—which it was extremely odd that they had not done at the time of his arrest. He’d been able to transfer credits to Jon without difficulty, yet Jenna hadn’t had to unfreeze it and there hadn’t been time for Zach to hear rumors that he’d been arrested. Terry wondered if perhaps Holden’s mysterious ability to put one over on Fleet extended beyond his actions as a pilot.
Estel hadn’t been pursued, he realized suddenly. Any ship capable of overtaking it would have caught up by now; Fleet probably didn’t even know it was gone. They were busy pursuing Holden—they had said they would send patrollers, and undoubtedly he could lead them a merry chase. Terry vowed that he’d live up to what his extraordinary ally evidently expected of him. He hoped they would meet again, if only to be assured that the man hadn’t gotten into trouble.
In due course the AI signaled that Estel was far enough out to jump, and Terry authorized it to execute. They were free! For the first time in weeks, he slept in peace with Alison close beside him. The days of normal-space approach to New Afrika were spent explaining to the refugees what they could expect there and, of course, switching the transponder to the one registered as Bright Hope. He would be hunted from now on; never again could the ship fly under its true name.
But when the Bartels asked what they should say if questioned about their escape, Terry said, “Tell everyone you were aided by someone acting in the name of the Captain of Estel.”
Part Five: Earth
44 - 45 - 46 - 47 - 48 - 49 - 50 - 51
~ 44 ~
Terry approached the Moon with mixed feelings. He had not been here since the day he’d set forth on his last trip in Promise, carrying the experimental ship Skywalker that had been destined to transform his life. He had, during the week he’d been checked out on Skywalker, renewed his acquaintance with Fleet Headquarters and the Academy where he’d spent his first years as a spacer. The old excitement had come back that week, seeing the port with its vast array of ships, ships that had once been the symbol of everything he had aspired to. But he had still been a Fleet officer then, in command of a ship crewed by Fleet.
Now he was a fugitive.
And now there was no friendly Admiral Frazer with whom to discuss the defense of Maclairn. Now Fleet Headquarters was a place to avoid, and any nostalgia he might have felt for it had been destroyed by the discovery of what kind of leadership was taking over. Yet conflicting emotions lingered as he put Bright Hope into orbit. He had come to Moonbase with Kathryn, visited League Headquarters with Kathryn. That was part of a life he’d put behind him, and the memory was bittersweet. He did not want to revive it.
So he was glad that he couldn’t go to the Moon’s surface any more than he could go to Earth itself. There might well be mentors there; Fleet might have extended its mind training program beyond Titan during Admiral Frazer’s tenure—though this would have been kept secret from all but a select few—and there
might be a Bramfield Club for civilian residents. Even if the Klan was active on the Moon, mentors could be living there secretly, and he couldn’t take the risk of encountering them. He’d explained this as best he could to Jon and Gwen, just as he’d explained his inability to go to the surface of New Afrika. The plan was for him to contact them by comm and then pick them up at the orbiting transit station, to which they would return on a commercial flight.
Since Bright Hope wasn’t a licensed transport vessel, Port Control assigned it an orbit much higher than was convenient; free traders had low priority. Still, Terry decided, since he didn’t plan to go to the surface anyway and didn’t want it noticed that he was continuing to orbit without any stated reason for his presence, this was probably a good thing. He sent text messages to Jon and Gwen under their new names for retrieval from Earth’s public system, which they had arranged to check every day. Then while waiting for a response, he considered what to do about his message to the Maclairn Foundation.
Its comm number was easy enough to find through a search of Earth’s Net. But if he sent the message from an orbiting ship its origin could be traced, and they might very well want to trace it. Furthermore, the conspirators within the government might be conducting general surveillance that would detect keywords—if not any specific to Maclairn, then at least those revealing that the writer had psi powers. The excuse he’d included for not identifying himself—that he feared being targeted by the Klan—was all too valid. Being wanted by bounty hunters and by Fleet was bad enough without adding a third group of pursuers to evade. Yet somehow, he had to get the warning through.
He expected contact from Jon within hours after messaging him, but none came. By the time a full Earth-standard day had passed, he began to worry. Jon and Gwen would surely have been able to orient themselves enough by this time to check for messages, and he’d given them ample funds. They’d never been to a world where criminals and desperate panhandlers roamed the streets as they did on Earth, still, he’d told them how to find safe lodging. What if all the hotels had been full—or worse, what if Jenna’s ID changes, which had been scheduled to go live after they boarded the Fleet transport at Stelo Haveno, hadn’t taken effect?
By the end of the third day he was frantic. Could they have been attacked by muggers? He’d heard of ID chips being cut out of people’s arms by thieves, sometimes for temporary identification and sometimes to access the victims’ credits. Obviously, the victims were first rendered incapable of fighting back.
“Maybe the messages didn’t go through—or the reply didn’t,” Alison said.
By this time Terry had sent two messages each to two people, both of whom would have replied; it was impossible that nothing had gone through unless it was the ID forgery. The ship’s comm system was working okay; he had clear Net access.
What he saw on the Net was also discouraging. Conditions had worsened on Earth in the years since he’d last been there. The crowding was worse, the poverty was worse, the crime was worse. He looked out the viewpoint at a blue and white jewel of a world, but the close-up satellite views showed mile after mile of drab, rundown buildings and factory farms, with little if any wild land separating them except in inaccessible mountainous regions. There were, to be sure, enclaves for the wealthy like the one where Kathryn’s grandparents had lived, but they weren’t noticeable except in commercials designed to inspire avarice. The vast majority of the population had stopped caring about anything beyond the dreary daily existence that had become the norm.
The enterprising people had gone to the colonies, the hope of humankind. But that hope must be kept alive, Terry knew, or sooner or later they’d be just like Earth—would succumb to the stifling bureaucracy the League imposed on all citizens who had no motive to resist conformity. There had to be something beyond the here and now, something to look forward to. He wasn’t sure what it was, but advanced mind-powers were a clue to it. The only means of transcending stagnation lay in the human mind.
And so those powers couldn’t be suppressed. The enemies of their development couldn’t be allowed to intimidate people. How was the Ku Klux Klan getting away with it? he wondered. Surely there must be some uncorrupted police, some who would try to prevent outright attacks. . . .
The more he studied the reports on the Net, the clearer it became why they didn’t. Violence by criminal gangs was so routine that a few more incidents were scarcely noticed. It wasn’t that people tolerated prejudice, much less physical harassment of the innocent; it was simply that there wasn’t enough drama in it to draw attention.
The Klan didn’t attack in force; its members didn’t gather in groups even as large as the average gang. They came a few at a time and were gone before understaffed police departments knew what was happening. The robes and masks they wore disguised them so that even when people knew who they were, nothing could be proven; all that was left behind was the frightening trail of burned crosses, burned houses, and sometimes dead bodies. Not a lot. Just enough so that when someone received a threatening message, it couldn’t be attributed to a mere maniac.
The role of the Captain of Estel was to counter the threats with hope, he saw. To take a few people to safety, so that even those he couldn’t take would know that escape might be possible. And to show the public that somebody cared even when the bad guys seemed invulnerable.
But how was he going to locate victims to help? He couldn’t even try, of course, before finding Jon and Gwen—he could neither keep refugees aboard nor leave his crew behind. Even apart from his concern for Jon, he couldn’t manage long without a copilot. He was helpless to proceed; he had no way to contact Zach, and he still saw no safe means of warning the Maclairn Foundation.
That night Terry lay awake while Alison slept beside him, unwilling to drop off through use of his volitional mind skills in case some urgent message from Jon or Gwen arrived. Finally, too restless to remain in bed, he went to the bridge and sat looking out at the sky-filling Moon, despite himself recalling times he’d orbited here in Promise. How many times? He’d come every sixty days or so for nearly two years. . . . And suddenly he was struck by a fact he’d overlooked—Promise must still be coming! There was no reason to think it hadn’t kept right on bringing mentors to Earth, and Laesara had told him that Kathryn was still Maclairn’s ambassador to headquarters.
So Kathryn would still be aboard.
Kathryn . . . she might be here now, only a few miles from him in orbit, or at least no more distant than the Moon. He had never expected to be near her again. He had made himself stop thinking about her because he knew that although he no longer grieved over losing her, his love for her would never completely fade. This in no way lessened his love for Alison. On Maclairn it was acknowledged that telepathic bonds were not exclusive and that it was therefore possible to love more than one person at a time. But he wanted to live in the present, not the past, and the thought of confronting his past left him deeply shaken.
Could he and Kathryn touch, telepathically, over this distance? If she was in orbit close to his, above the same part of the moon’s surface, they probably could. He would not do it, of course; it would be devastating to her. She too must have tried to push aside the memories, and the last thing she needed was to believe she was communing with a ghost. Still, he couldn’t resist the temptation just to look. . . . Terry reached out, for the first time in years consciously employing the long-distance remote viewing skill in which he’d been trained . . . and the familiar shape of the ship he’d once commanded loomed before him with a clarity that was more than memory.
Promise was there, in an orbit not far from his. Kathryn wasn’t, at least he sensed no trace of her mind; probably she was on the surface, at League Headquarters. The captain had no doubt gone down with her and there would be only one or two crew members on board.
Terry began to sweat, torn by the emotions he’d been repressing—and by a new idea that suddenly came to him. Promise was a link to the Maclairn Foundation, in fact a direc
t link to Maclairn itself. If he could get his prepared text message to Promise there would be no need to send it through a public comm system. Ship-to-ship comm over dedicated channels was not subject to surveillance. And he remembered what channel Promise had used for communication with Earth.
Dared he assume that it still used the same one, or that if it didn’t, the channel had not been reassigned? There would have been no reason to change it; dedicated channels were hard to come by. They would wonder how a stranger could possibly have learned its code. Well, let them wonder. The text would be transmitted instantaneously, and before their AI could alert them to it, his would have switched to a different channel. Perhaps he could time it so that he’d be on the other side of the Moon.
He would never know, of course, whether the message had been received. But he wouldn’t know if he sent it some other way, either; that had always been true. All he could do was make an effort to warn them. If they did receive it, they might dismiss it as the raving of a crackpot; they might even interpret it as a threat. Yet it still might keep them from taking intruders to Maclairn’s surface.
Terry set to work programming the AI to track Promise and transmit at the optimum moment for moving out of range. What, he thought in dismay, if Kathryn was there? No matter; she’d see it eventually anyway, and would have no grounds to suspect that it had come from him. To her and to everyone else connected with Maclairn, he was dead. And so he was, as far as that world was concerned, for he would never be in a position to make contact with it again.
~ 45 ~
The Net, Terry found, was already rife with rumors about Estel. Word had already reached Earth that the Captain of Estel had been arrested at Stelo Haveno and had escaped; either at least one talkative crew had arrived from there, or someone had thought the news worth transmitting by ansible. As long as neither Fleet nor the bounty hunters knew that his ship was now Bright Hope, this was a good thing. It would help to counter the vehement denunciations of psi that were also rife.
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 72