Lawrence Watt-Evans - In the Empire of Shadow

But they would listen to her as a relay.

So Prossie had lied. She knew that Valadrakul and Ted needed help immediately, that saving Valadrakul was vital, and she had said they should be saved.

And by doing so, she had committed a capital crime. The technical term in the Imperial Articles of Service was “usurpation of representational authority by specially-empowered communications personnel,” and it was an offense invented as a direct result of the widespread fear and mistrust of telepaths. No non-telepath had any way to verify what a telepath reported, but telepathic communication was too valuable to leave unused; the Empire had responded to this dilemma by setting up draconian rules for all telepaths. From birth, they were trained to tell the truth, to obey non-telepaths, never to venture their own opinions-they were communication equipment, not people; spies, not soldiers.

And one reason that the Empire had only four hundred and sixteen telepaths, out of thirteen billion citizens, was that in the years since telepathy first appeared, forty-three telepaths had died for violating those rules.

If the Empire ever learned what Prossie had done, she would be the forty-fourth.

And since one of the other rules required that any telepath who learned of a violation and failed to report it was subject to the same penalty as the person who committed the original violation, she had dared not let Carrie know what she was doing.

Pel Brown had started it, asking for a decision from Base One, and Dibbs had objected; he didn’t need to have headquarters overseeing his every move.

“What do they say?” Pel Brown had demanded, as Dibbs continued to protest.

Carrie was not listening in; she was still asking if there might be more monsters, and ignoring Prossie’s own questions.

“Carrie, calm down,” Prossie had sent, trying to hide what she intended to do, “I’m fine. We’re busy here right now; I’m going to break contact for now. Find me again in about twenty minutes, all right?”

“Prossie, are you sure?” Carrie’s concern was touching-and also annoying.

“Yes, I’m sure. Now get out of my head!”

No telepath ever refused that order; it was a family rule. Carrie broke conscious contact.

“We might as well settle this,” Dibbs had said. “Thorpe, report!”

“Yes, sir,” Prossie had said, snapping to attention, long habit overcoming her weaknesses.

And then she had lied. “General Hart says that the survival of extrauniversal personnel is absolutely essential and must take first priority, sir! Please use all efforts to uncover Raven’s man Valadrakul and the solicitor Deranian.”

“Damn,” Dibbs said. “I think they’re making a mistake, but an order’s an order. All right, Singer, Wilkins, the wizard was right by the ship, he could be under the curve of the hull-see if you can crawl in there and find him. Maybe take a couple of those branches to shore things up. Hollingsworth, Moore, you others, we’ve got half a dozen lumps under the wing-some of them are wood or rocks, but that one by the rib must be the Colonel, and those two close together are probably the dead woman and the one we’re after. See if you can pry up the edge and get a look at them.”

Prossie watched with an odd mix of emotions. She admired the way Dibbs and the soldiers set out efficiently to get the job done, once they accepted an order-she’d seen it before, of course, hundreds of times, but it still amazed her that non-telepaths could work together so well without direct communication.

And tired as she was, she felt a peculiar sensation of pride and pleasure because the men were obeying her orders-they didn’t know it, they would never have obeyed if they had known, they would kill her for it if they ever found out, but they were obeying her orders.

This, she realized, was the feeling of power, real power; she had never felt it before.

And tied to it was a feeling of terror. She had broken the law, the law that was all that kept non-telepaths from murdering every telepath in the galaxy. She was a criminal, an outlaw.

If Carrie ever found out…

Would Carrie tell, or would Carrie risk her own death sentence?

Prossie didn’t want to find out. She had fifteen minutes before Carrie would call to her again; in that fifteen minutes she had to forget what she had done. She could never dare think of it again.

Not that the Empire could put her to death here in Faerie, of course. Not that Dibbs and the others could ever find out what she had done-she was their only link to the Empire. But if she ever wanted to return home, if she wanted Carrie to be able to live a normal life, she had to never again allow herself to consciously remember her crime.

* * * *

At the age of eighteen, Albert Singer had signed up to be a soldier. He had enlisted because he was thoroughly bored with farming, because he liked the way the fancy purple uniforms looked, and most importantly, because he saw how much the girls liked the way the fancy purple uniforms looked. He had signed up for space service because it looked a lot more interesting than hanging around the little garrison at Cochran’s Landing, and he figured it would impress the girls even more.

It had never once occurred to him that this would one day lead to crawling through the stifling, malodorous darkness underneath a wrecked spaceship and the corpse of a gigantic monster bat, shoving his way through damp earth and brittle dead leaves, trying to rescue a fat little foreigner who was probably already dead.

He couldn’t see a thing, not really; a little of the afternoon light filtered in around his own boots, but the dust from the leaves was a thin haze everywhere around him, grit had gotten in his eyes, and there wasn’t anything to see, in any case. He sneezed, spraying warm goo on his upper lip and the back of one hand, and could hardly wipe it off. The entire front of his uniform, chest to toe, was becoming coated with dirt-he could feel it, could feel the cool moisture and the grainy texture.

He belatedly decided that he should have taken off his boots; the shiny finish was going to be ruined, and he thought he’d have been able to crawl better without them.

He pushed with his toes and elbows, forcing himself deeper into the narrow passage. One shoulder brushed against the steel of the ship’s hull; the opposite knee rubbed against the furry, rubbery flesh of the dead monster.

Why the hell did the lieutenant have to pick him for this? And why had he not argued when Wilkins had said to go in first? Good old Ronnie Wilkins was squatting back there watching, not doing a damn thing except staring into the dark, where he probably couldn’t even see the bottoms of Singer’s boots any more.

The first part had been easy, crawling under the ship’s starboard guidance vane, but this part…

Singer coughed, without meaning to, and hoped very much that he wasn’t going to cough up anything that would wind up smeared on his chin or his uniform. The dust from the leaves was ghastly.

As much to clear his throat as anything else, he called, “Anyone in here?”

To his utter astonishment, a voice called back weakly, “Aye, lad.”

Not only was the bearded foreigner still alive, Singer realized, but he was conscious, and only a few feet away.

“Hold on, sir, we’ll get you out,” Singer said, trying unsuccessfully to sound reassuring. Then he coughed again. The powdered leaves felt like ground glass scraping the back of his throat.

He saw something flutter indistinctly in the dimness ahead, and suddenly his throat cleared. He swallowed experimentally, and everything worked.

Singer remembered that the man ahead was supposed to be a magic-worker of some kind. “Did you do that?” he asked.