Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

“Miss Jewell,” Prossie called. “Please, Miss Jewell…”

Amy continued to shout.

The others looked helplessly at each other, impotent and embarrassed, while Prossie tried to make herself heard without screaming.

All except Stoddard, who straightened up from where he had leaned against the wall. Without a word, he crossed the room and put a hand on Amy’s shoulder.

Startled, she broke off and looked up at him.

“Sit,” he said, pointing to a chair. “Listen. An you be not satisfied, I’ll side you, and we’ll have what you will of them.”

Slowly, Amy sat, watching Stoddard as if hypnotized.

When she was sitting, Stoddard turned to Prossie.

“And now, Mistress Thorpe,” he said, “what is it you would say?”

Amy, too, turned to look at the telepath.

Prossie paused to catch her breath and clear her throat, then began, “Miss Jewell, I’m very sorry for whatever indignities you may have suffered. You aren’t alone, you know; I was raped, too, and if you’ll look around, I think you’ll see bruises on several faces. And the preliminary report I got on your barrister seems to indicate she had it worse than any of us.”

“Susan?” Amy asked.

Prossie nodded. “She’s on her way. She’s all right, more or less-just as you are. No permanent physical damage. Not everyone was as lucky-Mr. Brown’s wife was killed, as were at least two of my crewmates, and some of the people from Emerald Princess . And there are some we still don’t know about.”

“So why didn’t somebody do something…” Amy began. Stoddard silenced her with a hand on her shoulder.

“We did,” Prossie said wearily. “I sent an alarm as soon as I knew Emerald Princess was under attack, and the Imperial High Command responded immediately-but space travel isn’t instantaneous, and there were no warships nearby. So Emerald Princess was captured, and all of us were taken prisoner aboard the raider. I was able to disguise myself as a civilian passenger, and the pirates never found out I was a telepath; if they had, they’d have killed me instantly. Since they didn’t, I was able to stay in communication with the High Command-but because telepathy is non-directional, they couldn’t use that to locate us. They knew where Emerald Princess was, but not the course the pirate ship took after capturing it.”

Amy started to interrupt again, then glanced up at Stoddard and thought better of it.

“I tried to ask where we were going, but nobody bothered to tell me-I was locked in a room, just the way you were, with nobody who knew anything. I read a few minds, very carefully, trying to find out something useful, but I never managed it. So the pirates were able to reach their home base unmolested-and that made the job harder, because you can’t defeat an entire planet with a single warship, no matter how much firepower it carries. You can’t even free a bunch of slaves, not once they’ve been scattered all over two continents the way we were-you’ll just wind up with a hostage situation, a stand-off where you have to deal with criminals. In case you didn’t notice, that isn’t what happened; nobody sent just one ship. The Empire put together a task force-Task Force Umber, it’s called, and you’re currently aboard its flagship, I.S.S. Emperor Edward VII . They put together a force that could do the job, could conquer the entire planet so fast that nobody would have time to fight back, to take hostages. They got eighty-two ships and eleven thousand troops organized and supplied in about two weeks, and then got them all here at top speed once my reports of the nighttime constellations had been analyzed and the planet located. It worked-you’ve seen that. It was a huge operation, but it worked, and it went as smooth as ice. They took the entire planet without losing a ship, without more than a dozen casualties, and you’re complaining because they couldn’t do the impossible any faster than they did.”

“I didn’t see any fighting,” Amy muttered.

“You were way the hell out on the southern plains,” Prossie reminded her. “Besides, they didn’t put up much of a fight.” She took a deep breath, and smiled crookedly. “I haven’t done this much talking out loud since I was a girl,” she said. “I think my voice is worn out!”

* * * *

Raven had three broken fingers on his left hand. He walked stiffly, slightly bent, like an old man, and flinched when anyone came near his back. Ridges of fresh scar tissue broke the line of the borrowed shirt he wore.

Valadrakul’s remaining braid had been cut off, but he was otherwise unharmed.

Susan Nguyen had burns on her back and arms, and scars on her back, but insisted she was fine. “I’ve had practice with this sort of thing,” she said bitterly.

Elani was found, finally, hiding in a cave-she had been the only one to successfully escape from slavery, using tricks learned in years of avoiding Shadow’s agents. She had, of course, avoided all contact with other people thereafter, so that she had been slow to learn of the planet’s liberation by Imperial forces.

Ben Lampert seemed to have disappeared without a trace. The auction records listed him as sold for three hundred and ninety crowns, paid in cash, no name or address given-a dead end. No one who had been at the auction and was still alive was willing to admit knowing anything about him. Prossie could not locate him telepathically-but because he had no trace of psychic talent, no particularly distinctive thought-patterns, that didn’t mean much. She couldn’t pick out one ordinary person on an entire planet without a little more to go on.

Several boxes of personal belongings were recovered from the auction house, to everyone’s surprise-apparently the people in charge of sorting and pricing such things for resale had not been in any hurry. Susan’s purse was found, apparently unopened, where she had hidden it-she would not tell the others where that had been-and it was returned to her intact shortly before Emperor Edward VII lifted off.

Prossie noticed Susan radiating a certain morbid pleasure upon the return of her purse, even while her face remained absolutely blank, and couldn’t resist snooping a little. She found that Susan was pleased because her gun was still there, untouched, apparently undiscovered.

Prossie also inadvertantly shared Susan’s wish that she’d had the gun with her on a few occasions during the past three weeks.

Emperor Edward VII launched on schedule, despite Pel Brown’s protests. Rachel’s probable location had been traced through the auction records and eyewitness reports, but she had not yet been found; Pel had to be sedated and confined to his assigned quarters to keep him from interfering with the flagship’s departure.

Prossie tried to tell him that she would stay in touch with the search teams on the newly-liberated Zeta Leo III, and would let him know the minute Rachel was found, but that failed to comfort him.

And in fact, it was a lie.

Telepaths can lie quite effectively when they choose to. After all, they can tell when they’re believed and when they aren’t.

It was only partly a lie, though. She had every intention of telling him immediately when Rachel was found, on one condition-that she was found alive.

And Prossie didn’t think she would be.

* * * *

Nothing would interfere with an Imperial fleet at full strength, and nothing did. Emperor Edward VII reached Base One on schedule and without incident.

The body now called Base One had once been an asteroid of no special distinction. It was mostly nickel-iron, but so were a million other asteroids. The only things that marked out Base One were that it was about the right size, and it was about where the Empire wanted to put their military headquarters. By hollowing it out and using the material they thus removed to build on additional sections the Empire had transformed it into a vast deep-space complex, the heart of the Imperial military, and home to the High Command.