Out of This World

Chapter Nineteen

The corridors of the pirate ship-if that’s what it actually was-were gray-painted metal and resembled the inside of a submarine Pel had once toured. This vessel was far more what he had always expected a spaceship to look like than Emerald Princess had been.

He had little time to study it, though; he was hurried to a large, bare chamber, where he and some of the others were locked in, without any further explanation.

For a moment after the heavy steel door slammed shut Pel stared at it, expecting something more to happen. When nothing did, he turned to consider his surroundings.

A row of stained, bare mattresses lay along one of the long walls; at the far end were two small bathrooms, the doors standing open. There were no other furnishings, no windows, no other doors. In the room with him were Amy and Susan; the navigator of Emerald Princess; two passengers, one a young man, one a middle-aged woman; and of course, Rachel.

“What happened?” Amy asked. “Who are those people? Where are we?”

“Pirates, right?” Pel asked, looking at the navigator.

He nodded. “Pirates,” he said. “From one of the rebel worlds out on the fringe, I suppose. Though I don’t know why they picked on the Princess; I’d think there were juicier targets out there.”

“And those juicier targets are probably better-guarded,” the young man said knowingly. “The Princess was small enough that we weren’t worried about pirates, and we didn’t have any defenses. Made us a sitting duck.”

The navigator’s expression made it plain that he wasn’t impressed with this logic. “There’s a good reason we weren’t worried,” he said. “A gravity gun’s an expensive thing to operate, and bringing in a ship in mid-flight isn’t any picnic; the Princess shouldn’t have been worth the trouble.”

“Well, how much trouble was it, really?” the young man argued. “The ship itself-she’s a nice little boat, and they’ve got her for next to nothing, really. And the passengers-we had money and jewels along, some of us, and they can probably collect ransoms on most of us…”

“No, they can’t,” the navigator interrupted. “How the hell could they collect any ransoms? If they tell anyone where they are, so someone can make the payment, the Empire’ll hunt them down and wipe them out.”

“Well, there’s still the ship…”

“I suppose,” the navigator admitted. “But it still seems strange. The ship isn’t anything all that special.”

Amy, Pel, and Susan exchanged glances.

“Do you think it might have had anything to do with us?” Amy asked.

“I don’t know,” Pel said. “Could Shadow have tracked us somehow?”

“Why would it bother?” Amy asked.

“Does it need reasons?” Susan said. “It tried to kill us once, back in that forest; it could just be trying to finish what it started.”

“In that case,” Pel argued, “why didn’t it already kill us? I mean, why didn’t these pirates just shoot everybody?” A thought struck him, and he added, “And even if they aren’t working for Shadow, if it was the ship they wanted, why didn’t they shoot us?”

That question made everyone uneasy; Amy cast a glance at the mattresses.

“Those stains don’t all look like blood,” she said uncertainly.

Pel followed her gaze. “No,” he agreed. “They don’t. I think if they were just going to kill us, they’d already have done it.”

“They killed some,” the navigator said.

The others all turned to face him.

“They did?” Amy asked.

“Yeah,” the navigator said. “There was some fighting. One of the spacemen, that man Jim Peabody, he pulled a gun and picked off two pirates, and they blew his head off, in the starboard crew compartment. And when they found someone hiding in one of the storage lockers they dragged her out and beat her, and…” He glanced at Rachel, who was drowsing but not fully asleep, and then finished, “And worse, and I’m pretty sure they killed her when they were done.”

“Her?” Pel asked, suddenly nauseated, his ears starting to ring. He had seen Prossie alive and unhurt, and some of the original female passengers, and Amy and Susan were here with him. Nancy was missing, though. “Her?”

It didn’t have to be Nancy, he told himself. There were some missing females among the ship’s original passengers, too, weren’t there?

“A woman,” the navigator said. “One of your group. I saw part of it and got a look at her, when they were done, but I don’t know her name.”

Elani was still unaccounted for-but hiding in a storage locker?

“Nancy,” Pel said, gasping. “My wife.”

There was a long moment of silence as Pel’s strangled words sank in.

“Oh, God, Pel,” Amy said, “I’m sorry.”

“Mommy?” Rachel asked, waking. “Where’s Mommy?”

* * * *

Raven considered his surroundings with interested distaste.

It would seem that the luxury of the other ship was not a universal trait of sky-ships in the Empire’s world. This sorry vessel-assuming that this was indeed the interior of another ship-was just as drab as the Governor’s installation in Town, perhaps even moreso.

Well, he had endured hardship before, and would undoubtedly do so again, in his battle against Shadow.

All that troubled him was that he still had no notion of who had captured him, or why. Pirates, the others taken with him said-but pirates in whose pay? Freebooters or privateers?

* * * *

Amy watched miserably as Pel tried to comfort his sobbing daughter. She wished she could help, but she hadn’t been able to do any more than provide a used tissue out of her purse. No one had actually told the child directly that her mother was dead, but none of them had denied it, either.

This was perhaps the worst moment yet in the long string of dislocations and horrors that she had been living through ever since that damned spaceship fell out of the sky on her back yard. Monsters bursting up out of the ground, being stranded in an alien desert, all the other things had been frightening and uncomfortable, but nothing that equaled the feeling of sick helplessness she felt right now.

“Why didn’t they just shoot us?” she muttered.

The young male passenger heard her, and cast a sideways glance at Pel before muttering in reply, “I’ve heard some rumors.”

Startled, Amy turned to look at him. “What rumors?” she asked.

“Well, they are just rumors,” he said, “but you heard the crewman there mention the rebel planets. There are some nasty rumors about them.”

“What rumors?”

“Supposedly-and I don’t know, it’s just what I’ve heard, but supposedly they’ve revived the slave trade.”

Amy stared at him. For a long moment his words failed to connect with anything. Slave trade? What was that? What did it have to do with anything? What did it have to do with her?

Then it clicked into place.

She had been captured by pirates. Spaceships and drab grey uniforms notwithstanding, she had been captured by pirates.

And they were going to sell her into slavery.

The image of the “wenches” being auctioned off in Disney World’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” came unbidden to her mind. She had ridden through with her ex-husband years ago, and had found that bit of scenery slightly offensive and oddly uncomfortable, though she knew it was intended to be harmless fun. Now, in retrospect, it seemed downright horrible-there was nothing at all amusing about auctioning people off.

But this wasn’t the eighteenth-century Caribbean; she was in a spaceship. The Galactic Empire had anti-gravity and rayguns; didn’t that mean it was more advanced than Earth? Didn’t that mean they would have no use for slaves, would have no tolerance for slavery?

Didn’t they have robots, or something?

“What sort of slaves?” she asked.

The passenger shrugged. “Labor for the mines and farms, I suppose,” he said. “And… well, other things.” He blushed faintly.

He actually blushed. It wasn’t a bright red, but it was unmistakably a blush. Amy hadn’t seen a man blush in years. She didn’t inquire any further.

“I still don’t understand,” the female passenger announced, “why they picked on the Princess. There must be dozens of ships out there that would have been worth more-the big liners, or freighters. Why pick on us?”

“Maybe it was random,” the navigator suggested. “Maybe they just saw the gravity field and attacked because it was close, without even knowing what ship it was.”

“That seems stupid,” the young man said. “What if they hit a warship that way?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” the navigator admitted.

“They must have known what ship it was,” the woman said.

“I guess they must have,” the navigator agreed.

“How could they?” Amy asked. “I mean, aren’t we sort of in the middle of nowhere? And they couldn’t have gotten close enough to see it until after they’d decided to attack, could they?”

“Shadow,” Susan suggested, gripping her big black purse tightly. Noticing the bag, Amy wondered whether it had been searched; no one had bothered to check her own. “It was Shadow,” Susan said.

“What’s Shadow?” the female passenger asked.

Susan looked helplessly at Amy, then glanced at Pel and Rachel, still huddled together in the corner.

“It’s this thing from… from another universe,” Amy explained. “It’s why we’re here.”

“Why who is where?” the young man asked. “Do you mean why all of us are here, in this room?”

Amy shook her head. “No,” she said, “I mean it’s why Susan and Pel and the rest of us are in your universe.” She sighed. “It’s a long story.”

The passengers and the navigator glanced at one another, puzzled.

“Are you claiming you’re from another universe?” the young man asked.

Amy nodded.

“We are,” she said. “That’s why we were important enough to need your ship to get us to… to wherever they were taking us. Some military base, I think.”

The navigator nodded. “Base One,” he said. “It’s the headquarters for the entire Imperial military.”

Amy nodded again.

“So this Shadow thing,” the navigator asked, “it’s from your universe? It followed you, you think?”

“No,” Amy said. “It’s from a third one. There are three. Some of those other people are from Shadow’s world, but we aren’t.”

“But it followed you?”

“Maybe,” Amy said. “We don’t know.”

“This Shadow,” the young man asked, “just what is it, exactly?”

Amy looked at Susan, who shrugged.

“We don’t know that, either,” Amy said. “I don’t think anybody does, really.”

“How could it have known anything about us, anyway?” the middle-aged woman asked. “Does it have a telepath working for it, or something?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “Maybe Shadow didn’t have anything to do with it; maybe the pirates just have a telepath of their own.”

The navigator shook his head. “All the telepaths work for the Empire,” he said. “They always have.”

“Maybe one went rogue,” the young man suggested.

“If that ever happened,” the navigator said, “the Empire would hunt it down and kill it.”

“I wonder what happened to Prossie?” Amy said, more to herself than anyone else.

“Prossie?”

“Is that the bitch telepath that came aboard with you people?” the woman asked.

Startled by the harsh term, Amy didn’t answer immediately.

“She was in the lounge,” the navigator said. “I saw her there right before they brought us across.”

“If the pirates know she’s a telepath…” the young man began.

“She’s probably working for them,” the woman snarled. “She probably called them down on us!”

“She’s an Imperial officer,” the navigator objected. “And her entire family works for the Empire. Why would she work for pirates?”

“Because she’s a stinking mutant, and she hates everybody normal!” the woman replied angrily.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Amy objected. “I’ve talked with Prossie-I don’t think she hates anybody.”

“Well, of course you wouldn’t think so,” the woman retorted. “She can read your mind and act however you want her to act, do whatever it takes to fool you, and you’d never know the difference.”

Startled by the woman’s anger, Amy didn’t reply.

“If she’s not working for the pirates,” the young man said, “she’s the best hope we’ve got.”

Amy and Susan looked at him inquiringly.

“Well, it’s obvious-she can call for help. Maybe she already has. If she’s not working for them, they’ve made a big mistake, not killing her the minute they got aboard.”

“Maybe they don’t know she’s a telepath,” Susan suggested quietly.

“She was in uniform,” the female passenger said scornfully. “Of course they know.”

“But she wasn’t,” Susan said. “In the lounge she was wearing a dress.”

“Her uniform was aboard the Princess, though,” the young man pointed out. “When they find it, they’ll know.”

“Well, let’s hope they don’t find it, then,” the navigator said.

“Of course they’ll find it eventually,” the woman said. “I mean, won’t they strip everything out of the ship?”

Amy glanced at Susan’s purse again.

“They might not look at it closely enough,” the navigator suggested. “And even if they do, she’s probably already called for help.”

“But when they find it, they’ll kill her,” the young man pointed out. “That would make it harder for any pursuit to track us.”

“Serve the bitch right,” the woman muttered. “Snooping in people’s heads. Mutants.”

“They may have killed her already,” the navigator said, “but let’s hope not.”

“Can she really call for help from way out in space?” Amy asked. “I didn’t know telepaths could do that. I thought they had to be close to someone.” She remembered the distance from Town to where the portal had first delivered them all to Psi Cass the Deuce, and corrected herself. “I mean, on the same planet, anyway.”

“Oh, sure,” the young man said. “She could call the other telepaths from clear across the galaxy. I don’t know about reading minds, or anything to do with normal people, but telepaths can reach each other, no matter how far apart they are. That’s why the Empire uses them, they’re the fastest form of interstellar communication we’ve got.”

“Then the pirates couldn’t have a telepath working for them, could they?” Susan asked. “Wouldn’t he or she be spotted by the Empire’s telepaths?”

“What if he were?” the woman asked. “Those mutants all stick together against us. They wouldn’t squeal on one of their own.”

Nobody bothered to argue with that-not because they agreed, since in fact none of the others believed it, but because there was no way to prove anything.

A moment later, the young man said, “Suppose they had their own family of telepaths? I mean, suppose the telepathic mutation happened again, and this time working for the rebel worlds instead of the Empire?”

“The Empire’s telepaths would have spotted them,” the navigator said.

“Are you sure?” the young man asked. “Suppose they communicated on a slightly different level, as it were; suppose that there was some sort of mutual interference, in fact, so that the two families blanked each other out, couldn’t detect each other.”

“You’re just guessing,” the navigator said. “I never heard about anything like that.”

The young man shrugged. “Sure, I’m guessing,” he said. “But it could be true.”

“I still think it was Shadow,” Susan said.

* * * *

The discussion, and sometimes argument, continued off and on for hours, perhaps days; no one was quite sure how long they were confined to that room and ignored. Long enough to grow very hungry, certainly, and no one brought any food. They were left entirely to their own devices.

They took turns sleeping; there were enough mattresses for everybody, but it seemed like a good idea to always have someone awake.

Rachel gradually calmed down; sleeping helped. She and Pel listened to some of the conversations, but neither of them had much to add. Topics included the nature of their captors, their destination, the fate of the other people who had been aboard Emerald Princess, and other such matters.

The navigator confirmed, out of Rachel’s hearing, that the woman he had seen raped and murdered fit Nancy’s description, and not Elani’s.

More generally, the four Earthpeople learned that the Galactic Empire did not actually rule the entire galaxy, or even the majority of it; most of it was still uninhabited, at least by humans-and so far, no intelligent aliens had been encountered, though that didn’t mean there weren’t any. The female passenger, whose name turned out to be Arietta Benton, took any suggestion that a non-human could be sentient as a personal affront, apparently on theological grounds; the navigator and the other passenger were more open-minded, but neither one had ever heard anything more than tall tales about aliens.

Even among human-inhabited worlds, the Empire was not as all-powerful as it might have liked. The galaxy was vast, and space travel fairly cheap and easy; anyone who could get a ship could reasonably hope to find himself an uninhabited planet of his own. It might take a few years of looking, and if the Empire found the planet later it would promptly be conquered, but people were willing to try it. A good many of them succeeded, and set up their own little fiefdoms.

Nobody was sure just how many of these independent worlds were out there-that was inherent in their nature, since if they were sufficiently well-known to be counted, they would already have been conquered.

The male passenger, Alex Gorney, was of the opinion there were a hundred or more rebel worlds; the navigator, Lieutenant Martin, put the number much lower, at maybe half a dozen. “Ships aren’t that easy to come by!” he insisted.

Gorney argued that one ship could colonize a dozen worlds, and Martin agreed it could, but maintained it wouldn’t. One habitable planet, after all, was big enough for a few dozen miniature empires.

All three of them, Gorney, Benton, and Martin, agreed that the sort of people who wound up on the rebel worlds tended toward the fringes of sanity. The colonies the Empire had found so far had ranged from eccentric to downright bizarre; some had destroyed themselves before the Empire ever got there, and atrocity stories were common.

Naturally, some had turned to piracy. And some had turned to slavery. Not to mention those that had taken up communalism, theocracy, torture, murder, cannibalism, and any number of other barbaric practices.

The Earthpeople listened to these explanations-Amy with visibly-growing worry, Susan with a veneer of calm acceptance, Pel far too concerned with Nancy’s fate and Rachel’s reaction to care much at first.

As time wore on, though, the subject percolated in Pel’s mind, and finally he found himself sitting on his mattress grinning wryly at the thought.

The clean, hard frontier, where men were strong and brave; the fine new worlds beloved of science fiction writers, away from the decadence and bureaucracy of old, worn-out, overpopulated Earth-all that was a cliche, of course.

And here was the reality, it appeared-pirates and slavers and lunatics.

That he and his daughter were about to be delivered into the hands of these pirates, slavers, and lunatics did not fully register until the hour-day or night he could not tell-when Lieutenant Martin shook him awake and said, “The drive’s shut down. We’ve landed.”