The Liberty Con
TIMOTHY ZAHN
Pretty much everyone on New Vipitti hated the Benevolent Uncle’s elite Political Compliance Enforcement Agents. On some days, PCE Agent Rafe Bosphor agreed with them.
Today was one of those.
“June 24, 8:33 a.m.,” he murmured as he peered through the window from his café street-side table, watching the waitress bustling back and forth between the tables inside. “Subject has been at work for forty minutes. No unusual contacts.”
“Never mind the subject,” his controller’s clipped voice came back over his earbud. “We’ll pick her up later. Is the target in sight?”
“Negative,” Bosphor said. “But there’s no need to pick up the subject. She hasn’t done anything.”
“Everyone’s done something,” the controller countered. “Doesn’t cost anything to pick her up. If she’s not worth the paperwork, we’ll cut her loose.”
With an effort Bosphor unclenched his teeth. Yes, they’d cut her loose . . . but afterward she would spend the next days or weeks in a state of quiet fear, anticipating and dreading the day when they’d again come for her. “I don’t think you need to bother,” he said in his most diplomatic tone. “Unless I witness her in a criminal act, or she has contact with a known criminal, it would just be a waste of everyone’s time.”
“Time is cheap,” the controller said. “We’ll see. Keep an eye on her. If she contacts the target . . .” He left the threat unfinished.
“Acknowledged,” Bosphor said. “I’ll watch her.”
“You do that.” There was the faint click as the controller broke the connection.
Bosphor took a sip of his coffee and watched the waitress deliver two cups to a couple at one of the tables. Not everyone on New Vipitti was a criminal. Bosphor knew that, though he sometimes wondered if the PCE bosses did. This waitress certainly wasn’t one.
The man who called himself Uncle Timmy, on the other hand . . .
Bosphor glared into his mug. With burglars and thieves, at least, the victim knew they’d been robbed. With con men, sometimes they never figured it out. That was what made that class of criminal so despicable, and what made Bosphor determined to nail this one. As far as anyone could figure out, he’d been conning people for at least five years, maybe longer.
As for the whole Uncle Timmy moniker, that could only be a deliberate dig at the Benevolent Uncle’s title. To some people, Bosphor supposed, that might edge the man into folk-hero status. To the PCE, it just meant that much more incentive to nail his hide to the wall.
The waitress paused by one of her tables, pulling out her reader for the payment. Bosphor watched, staring at the back of the customer’s head, wondering if he would even know Uncle Timmy if he saw him. Every victim PCE had found—and there were a lot of them—had given them a description of the man who’d taken their money. The problem was that none of the descriptions matched any of the others.
Timmy was large, slender, tall, short, bearded, clean-shaven, bald and sported a retro mullet. He had a weakness for Jack Daniels whiskey, Starline coffee, cola, white wine, and never drank anything except water. He had a western accent, a southern accent, an Old British accent, and spoke only in a thick Creole dialect.
The one thing everyone’s bank accounts agreed on was that he’d taken a lot of money from them.
Five years. New Vipitti was a well-populated world, with plenty of cities and midsized towns where a person could hide. But in an era of chips and IDs and bounce-scanners it shouldn’t be so hard to catch even so accomplished a human chameleon.
That Timmy was still on the planet was a given. The Benevolent Uncle had long-since vacuum-sealed his world, creating unbreakable restrictions on who could come and go. There was no way Timmy could escape.
So he was still here. The big question was where?
The customer finished with his reader, and with a last inaudible exchange of pleasantries with the waitress he got up and left the café, using the side door away from Bosphor’s table. The waitress slipped her reader back into her side pocket and headed back to the serving window to pick up the next order—
Bosphor felt a jolt run through him. Her side pocket? But all the rest of the café staff kept their business readers in their apron pockets. So did she, for that matter—he’d seen her pull it out twice while he’d been sitting here.
She hadn’t been taking the man’s money. She’d been giving him hers.
Bosphor kicked back his chair and raced out into the street. But he was too late. The customer had already disappeared into the crowd of pedestrians. He continued on for another minute anyway, craning his neck in search of the shirt collar and back of the head he’d seen through the café window.
Nothing.
Cursing under his breath, he turned and headed back. The customer was gone, but the waitress would still be there. Maybe he could finally get a clear take on Uncle Timmy’s face.
The waitress was clearing a table near the door when Bosphor returned. “There you are,” she greeted him cheerfully as he walked over to her. “For a minute I thought you’d skipped out on the bill.”
“Just trying to chase down your last customer,” Bosphor said, looking around. None of the other patrons or waiters seemed to be paying any attention to them. “I need to talk to you.”
“All right,” she said, a slight frown creasing her forehead. “Can it wait? I’m kind of busy right now.”
“No,” he said flatly. “It can’t.” Turning his back to the rest of the room, he twitched aside his jacket to show the gold PCE badge glinting on his belt. “Right here will do. Sit down.”
She swallowed visibly, her hand fumbling for the back of the chair. He waited until she was seated, then sat down across from her. “What’s your name?” he asked.
She swallowed again. “Linda. Linda Vannucci.”
“How much did you give him?”
Her eyes widened. “How did you—?”
“Answer the question,” Bosphor cut her off. “How much?”
She lowered her gaze to the table. “Twenty thousand.”
Bosphor felt his own eyes go a little wider. “Twenty thousand?”
“My aunt left me some money,” Linda said, a little defensively. “He said . . .” She trailed off.
“He said what?” Bosphor prompted.
Her shoulders hunched. “I . . . don’t remember.”
“Of course you don’t,” Bosphor said with a quiet sigh. Once again, one of Uncle Timmy’s victims was showing an inexplicable reluctance to spilling the truth. “Let me make it easy for you. He said if you gave him all the money you had that he could get you off New Vipitti.”
She looked up again, her throat tight. “How did you . . . ?”
“Because that’s what he told all the others,” Bosphor said. “All seven hundred of them.”
“All seven hundred—? That many?”
“That many,” Bosphor confirmed. “He’s been running this scam for at least five years.”
“I didn’t . . .”
“No one ever does,” Bosphor said, suddenly tired of this whole sordid thing. “Unlock your reader and let me see it.”
Silently, she pulled out the reader, scrawled the unlock pattern and handed it across the table. Bosphor keyed for transfers and pulled up the most recent.
Twenty thousand, all right. This time, Timmy had had her send the money to an account simply called Rowland Liberty. Shifting Linda’s reader to his left hand, Bosphor pulled out his own reader and keyed for backcheck.
The track went nowhere, of course. Timmy’s money slipped in and out of dummy accounts like magic. So far the forensic accountants hadn’t been able to sift through it all and find where the money actually ended up.
But from the talks PCE had had with the victims they’d managed to identify, it looked like the con man had scored at least five or six million. That money had to be somewhere, and PCE was hell-bent on finding it.
“Are you going to arrest me?” Linda asked in a low voice.
Bosphor looked up at her. Her face was rigid, her eyes haunted. “Do you deserve to be?” he asked.
“I—no.” Another hunch of the shoulders. “But I heard once that people who fall for scams can be arrested.”
“The law states that anyone involved in a money scam above a specific threshold is in violation of the law,” Bosphor said. “Twenty thousand is well into that range.”
“But I’m the victim.”
“The law doesn’t make that distinction.”
And in fact, Bosphor knew that at least ten of Timmy’s victims had indeed been thrown in jail for a couple of weeks while PCE interrogators tried to figure out whether they were victims or secret accomplices. That was the reason the law had been written that way, not simply because a frustrated Benevolent Uncle had specifically targeted Timmy and his persistently successful and highly embarrassing operations.
Those ten victims had subsequently been released for lack of any evidence, though two of them—Baggott and a particularly feisty woman named Knowles—had annoyed the investigators enough that they’d been held a full month longer than everyone else.
But just because they were back on the streets didn’t mean PCE had forgotten about them. Sooner or later Timmy would be run to ground, and when that happened those ten men and women—and probably every other victim PCE had found—would be hauled back in for further questioning.
And, more than likely, made public examples of. One more kick in the teeth to go along with all the money they’d lost.
Bosphor should arrest her, he knew, or at least log her name. There were strict protocols PCE agents were supposed to follow, and this came under them.
But he’d been an agent long enough to have found a few cubic centimeters here and there where some personal discretion could be coaxed out of all that carved stone. “I’m not going to charge you,” he told Linda. “But in return, you need to promise that if he contacts you again you’ll call me immediately. And I mean immediately.”
“Of course,” Linda said. “I—thank you.” Her nose wrinkled. “Don’t know why he would come back. He already has all my money.”
Bosphor suppressed a grimace. There was that, of course. Once Timmy had worked his scam there was every reason for him to make sure he never saw her again.
But maintaining the fiction that he might come back would allow Bosphor to keep her off the record, at least for a while. “You never know,” he said. “My number’s on your reader. Call me right away if you see him or hear from him.”
“I will,” Linda said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He started to stand up. To his mild surprise she reached over and clutched at his arm. “What happens now? My money—that was all I had. Am I going to get it back?”
“I don’t know,” Bosphor said. “We’ll do our best, but I can’t make any promises. A lot depends on whether we catch him before he spends it or squirrels it away where we can’t find it.”
“But how will I live?”
“You’ve got a decent job,” Bosphor said, making a small gesture at the café around them. “And you’re good at it—I saw how you handled customers. You’ll keep this one, or get a better one. While there’s life, there’s hope.”
“My mother used to say that.” Linda sighed. “Okay. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Bosphor hesitated; but he had to say it. Timmy had offered her false hope in exchange for her money. Bosphor might not be able to return the money, but he could at least make sure no one else played on that same false hope. “But do realize that this was a complete scam. There’s no way you can get off New Vipitti without official documents and personal permission. Not for any amount of money, cleverness, or fast-talking. Transports, passenger ships, freighters, personal yachts—none of them can leave without complete scrutiny of passengers and crew.”
Linda lowered her eyes again. “I know,” she said in a small voice. “But I thought . . . like you said, while there’s life, there’s hope.”
“Hope is good,” Bosphor said. “False hope is bad. Just hold on to what you’ve got, Ms. Vannucci. Things on New Vipitti are going to get better—really they are. There’s talk in the Committee about easing restrictions and opening up more opportunities. Just be patient a little longer, and there won’t be any need for you to try to leave.”
“I hope you’re right.” Linda gave him a sort of tentative smile. “Thank you.”
It hadn’t been much of a smile, Bosphor reflected as he walked along the street toward his car. But it was more than he usually got from members of the public since the Benevolent Uncle rose to power.
It was certainly more warmth than Bosphor was about to get from his controller.
* * *
“You just let her walk?” the controller asked, his tone incredulous. “You didn’t even get her name?”
“Of course I got it,” Bosphor said, trying to sound indignant. “The reason I didn’t log it is that I’m using her to set a trap. If Uncle Timmy thinks we haven’t tagged her he might try to contact her again.”
“Kindly do not refer to him by that name,” the controller said icily. “If he wants to make a mockery of the Benevolent Uncle, that’s his business. But we don’t have to assist in his attempted subversion. Regardless, what does a trap have to do with logging this woman’s name? You seriously think Timmy has access to official PCE databases?”
“I don’t know what he does or doesn’t have,” Bosphor countered. “That’s part of the problem. None of our usual techniques have worked. I thought it was time to try something different.”
“Did you, now,” the controller said. The sudden calmness in his voice sent a chill up Bosphor’s back. “Perhaps you’re unaware of this, Agent Bosphor, but the Committee has had its eye on you for some time now. And they’re not entirely pleased with what they see.”
The chill went a little colder. “I find that remarkable,” Bosphor said carefully. “My success rate is certainly on a par with the PCE average.”
“It’s not your performance that concerns them,” the controller said. “It’s your attitude. They’re not convinced you have the proper degree of respect for the Benevolent Uncle.”
“I’ve never said anything against him,” Bosphor protested. “Nor have I ever criticized the Committee or any of the rest of the New Vipitti leadership.”
“Words are cheap and obvious,” the controller said. “It’s the more subtle attitude and actions that show true intent. This business of letting the waitress go without logging her into the system, for instance. Did you do that because you were setting a trap, as you claim? Or did you do it because you thought the system would be unfair to her?”
“I already told you,” Bosphor said. “If you think there’s no chance my trap will work, say so now and I’ll log her in.”
There was a brief silence. “No, it’s not a completely worthless idea,” the controller conceded. “I personally think it’s a waste of effort, but you can have a few days to see if it works. Uncle knows nothing else has worked.”
“Thank you,” Bosphor said between stiff lips.
“But if it doesn’t,” the controller continued, “you’ll bring the waitress in—personally—and hand her over to the interrogators. Understood?”
Bosphor glowered. “Understood.”
“Good,” the controller said. “Good luck, Agent Bosphor. For your sake, I hope this works.”
* * *
Bosphor had been through all the records of Uncle Timmy’s activities, both the ones PCE knew he’d been involved with as well as the more ambiguous crimes that had been tentatively attributed to him. His next step was to sit down in the records section and go through all of them again.
Five years at least. Seven hundred victims at least. Five or six million at least. A hell of a lot of people, and a hell of a lot of money.
Every narrative and tale the same: promising the victim a way off New Vipitti.
A part of Bosphor, the part that had grown up on this world, the part that had stood proudly and taken the PCE oath, wanted to be surprised at that. But the deeper, more honest part understood it completely. Life on New Vipitti had slowly become harder and more restricted under the Benevolent Uncle’s rule. People yearning for a better life would naturally look past New Vipitti’s atmosphere toward Old Vipitti, or Greater Leptra, or any of the other worlds of the Expansion.
Which was what had made Uncle Timmy’s scam so successful. Promising people an escape had hooked into a lot of yearnings and hopes, emotions that tended to shut down the brain’s logic centers and suppress the recognition that escape was impossible.
Bosphor hadn’t been overstating the case to Linda. Passengers off New Vipitti were few and far between, and every single one of them was scrutinized, vetted, and approved before they ever got within sight of any of the planet’s three spaceports. Cargo ships were likewise guarded, their crews undergoing the same scrutiny, and before lift the ships were scanned for possible stowaways. Diplomatic ships had their own restricted landing area, and underwent the same set of inspections before being allowed to leave the planet.
And that was it. Unless Uncle Timmy had a magic beanstalk stashed out in the jungle somewhere, there were no other ways off the planet.
Everyone knew that, or at least everyone who paid attention to the newsfeeds knew it. The occasional and universally unsuccessful attempts were certainly publicized enough, as were the punishments for the people who tried and failed. The only ships on the planet were isolated, restricted, well-guarded, and unreachable.
And yet, somehow, Uncle Timmy continued to persuade his victims that such a thing was possible.
Had everyone on New Vipitti started taking stupid pills?
He was at his desk, going over the list of Uncle Timmy’s victims yet again, when the alarm sounded.
Kirby, down in forensic accounting, answered on the seventh ring. “What?” she growled. “I’m busy here.”
“What’s going on?” Bosphor asked.
“Do I look like your controller?”
“My controller doesn’t know jack,” he said. “You’re the only one who ever knows what’s going on.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that sounded like a compliment,” Kirby said with a snort. “Fine. Someone just spotted a red flag that a thousand hunting rifles had been delivered to three General Merch outlets near the spaceports: the stores in Cartwright, Phillips, and Cochrane. We don’t—”
“Which spaceport?” Bosphor interrupted.
“All of them,” Kirby said. “I just said that. Anyway, the flag went up, the Committee went slug-slime crazy, and everything that can fly has been kicked into defense mode around the ports. We’ve got fighters and helos stacked ten deep up there, and the army’s on its way to cover the ground.”
“Yeah,” Bosphor said, wincing as he called up the schedules. Three freighters were on their way in, one due to touch down in each of the spaceports within minutes of each other. “How come no one noticed the weapons purchases until now?”
Kirby snorted. “Remember that burglary in the documents office two months ago?”
Bosphor winced. Like anyone was going to forget that fiasco anytime soon. Nearly fifty official form templates had been stolen, and up to now no one had been able to figure out what the thieves planned to do with them. “One of them was a weapons purchase and transfer authorization?”
“It’s a little more complicated but yeah, that’s basically it,” Kirby said. “We’re damn lucky we spotted it at all—if a glitch in the date field hadn’t flagged it we’d never have known about them at all.”
“Really,” Bosphor murmured as a sudden, horrible thought struck him. “Do you know where the money came from?”
“Still working on that,” Kirby said. “Look, I’ve got to go.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Bosphor said. “Do me a favor, will you? Check and see if any of the money came from an account labeled Rowland Liberty.”
“I thought that was your neighborhood con man’s account.”
“It is,” Bosphor said grimly. “Just do the check, okay?”
“When I can get to it,” Kirby said. “Just watch yourself, Bosphor. If this is a full-on insurrection, things are going to get bloody.”
“That’s why I want the money trail,” Bosphor said. “As fast as you can get it to me.”
He keyed off. For a few minutes he gazed at the window, the now-muted alarm echoing through his brain. Things are going to get bloody . . .
It was probably futile. But he had to try. Pulling out his reader, he keyed for the number he’d lifted from Linda Vannucci back at the café while he was giving her his.
“Hello, Ms. Vannucci,” he said when she answered. “This is PCE Agent Bosphor. I was calling to see how you were doing.”
“I’m fine, Agent Bosphor,” she said, her voice wary. “I’m afraid I haven’t been able to think of anything else I can tell you.”
“That’s all right,” Bosphor said. “I need you to do me a favor.”
“What kind?”
“I need to talk to Uncle Timmy right away,” Bosphor said. “Tell him you’ve found someone new who wants to give him money.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, sounding bewildered. “I don’t know how to find him. How would I even know that?”
“He called and arranged this morning’s meeting, right?” Bosphor said. “That means you’ve got a contact number.”
“But what if he doesn’t—? Please, Agent Bosphor, this is crazy. Even if I find him, he’ll never believe me.”
“You need to make sure he does,” Bosphor said, letting his tone go dark. “It’s important.”
She sighed audibly. “All right. I’ll . . . try.”
“Thank you,” Bosphor said. “Let me know when you’ve arranged a meeting.”
An hour later, she called to tell Bosphor that Timmy had agreed to the meeting, and gave him the place and time. By then Kirby had found the Rowland Liberty link to the hunting guns that Bosphor had known would be there. An hour after that, Bosphor slipped out of his office and headed to the place Linda had specified.
Hoping fervently that he wasn’t too late.
* * *
Given the disturbingly wide range of the victims’ descriptions, Bosphor had no idea what to expect. It was therefore something of a surprise, perhaps even a bit of a disappointment, to find a rather ordinary-looking man waiting for him at the deserted end of the park. With his dark hair and ruddy face, his white-flecked beard and cheerful eyes, he had the look of a man who’d spent his life making a living and collecting friends. Not exactly the smooth, refined look most con men nurtured.
He was also undoubtedly not alone. Any of the bushes, stands of waist-high flowering grasses, or clumps of trees offered good possibilities for a concealed sniper or two. Con men as successful as Timmy didn’t spend five years on PCE’s radar without taking precautions.
“Uncle Timmy?” Bosphor asked as he walked up to the bench.
“Yes,” the man said, cocking his head to study his visitor. “Agent Bosphor, I presume.” His eyes flicked around. “You came alone?”
“Every bit as alone as you are.”
Timmy smiled, his whole face crinkling behind the beard. “Touché,” he said. “Linda said you were a clever one. Please; sit down.”
“So Linda was working for you,” Bosphor said as he lowered himself onto the other end of the bench. “I had a feeling she was.”
“Did you figure that out before or after she arranged this meeting?”
“Before, actually,” Bosphor said. “Though it wasn’t until I ran her bank records half an hour ago that I confirmed she was transferring other people’s money to you in the café this morning and not hers.”
“Interesting,” Timmy murmured. “I thought I’d covered that. Yes, she’s been with me from the beginning. And don’t bother to call it in. She’s safely beyond PCE’s reach.”
“I’m not here to rain fire on you or your people,” Bosphor said. “Even if there was anyone left in the district for me to call.”
“Really?” Timmy asked, his face and tone gone all innocent. “Where could they all be?”
“I think you know,” Bosphor said grimly. “I came here to tell you to call it off. Now.”
“Or?”
“Or someone’s going to get killed,” Bosphor said. “And if they do, you’re the one who’ll go down for it.”
Timmy shook his head. “I think you’re laboring under a misapprehension, Agent Bosphor.”
“Am I?” Bosphor retorted. “Bad enough that you dangled your little escape con game in front of people and gave them false hope. Bad enough that you took all their money. But this is way over even those lines. To buy guns and send people off to try to hijack a freighter—”
“Whoa,” Timmy interrupted, holding up his hands palms outward. “Who said I gave anyone any guns?”
“Oh, stop it,” Bosphor growled. “We found the link to the Rowland Liberty account. You ordered the guns from General Merch. How the hell did you talk people into wasting their lives like that?”
“I don’t know if I’d call it a waste,” Timmy said. “There are a lot of people out there willing to take a chance to be free from the Benevolent Uncle’s boot.”
“This isn’t a chance,” Bosphor bit out. “This is a slaughter. The defenses are already in place around the spaceports, with fighters and helos stretched out twenty kilometers. I don’t know what this part of the game is, but the people you’re sending into that meat grinder haven’t got a chance.”
“And so they shouldn’t even try?”
“When the end is absolutely certain death, no, they shouldn’t,” Bosphor said. “Especially when all they’re doing is providing a distraction so that you can slip away in the confusion with the rest of their money.”
Timmy blinked. “Is that what you think this is about?”
“I took another look at the templates stolen from the document office,” Bosphor said. “One of them was authorization for offworld frozen-cargo shipments. I figure it shouldn’t be hard to rig something that looks like it’s running subzero temps while still staying warm and cozy in the middle.”
“Really, Agent Bosphor,” Timmy said reproachfully, waving at his ample girth. “Do you really see all this squeezing into a packing crate?”
“This isn’t a laughing matter.”
“It will be in a minute,” Timmy assured him.
“Listen—”
“There aren’t any guns,” Timmy cut him off.
The rest of Bosphor’s threat caught in his throat. “What?”
“There aren’t any guns,” Timmy repeated. “There never were.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I saw the order.”
“Oh, there’s an order, all right,” Timmy said. “But it was nothing more than a paper trail we set up to kick the Council into scrambling everything they had to defend the spaceports that we’re supposed to storm and the freighters we’re supposed to steal. Provided the troops don’t accidentally shoot each other, no one’s going to get hurt, let alone killed.”
“Lovely,” Bosphor growled. “So you didn’t even have to drop any of the money on guns. You get to leave with all six million?”
“It was closer to seven million, actually,” Timmy said. “And, well—” He pursed his lips. “Well, yes. I guess, technically, we are leaving with it.”
Bosphor stared at him. The man seemed rational enough, and a madman could hardly have conned so many people. But what had started as a straightforward con game was suddenly not making any sense at all.
“As I said, you’re going to laugh,” Timmy continued, staring back with the same intensity that Bosphor was giving him. “But a question first, if I may. I said there were people willing to risk everything for freedom. What about you, Agent Bosphor? What are you willing to risk?”
“Are you trying to con me?” Bosphor demanded.
“You’re the one who told Linda you wanted in,” Timmy reminded him. “But no, I’m not talking about a buy-in. The whole reason you’re here is to talk me out of wasting lives. That tells me you care about the people of this world. That, plus you didn’t turn Linda in when you knew you were supposed to. So if you want to come, you’re welcome.”
A cold knot formed in the center of Bosphor’s gut. “It’s not a diversion,” he breathed. “You really are going to try to steal a freighter.”
“Good heavens, no,” Timmy said, sounding scandalized. “We agreed we don’t want to get people killed, remember? Besides, why would we try to grab a ship? We already have one.”
“You—?” Bosphor broke off. “You what?”
“Where do you think the seven million went?” Timmy asked. “We bought a ship, piece by piece, and spent the past five years putting it together. Not entirely from scratch, of course,” he amended. “We started with the hulk from the Djeven crash. The thing’s not pretty, but my people assure me it’ll get us where we want to go.”
“You built a ship,” Bosphor said, still trying to wrap his brain around that. A small fact tapped his shoulder—“The freighter liftoff permission form. That’s what you broke into the documents office for.”
“Exactly,” Timmy said. “We just took the others to muddy the waters. You haven’t answered my question. Do you want to come with us?”
“If I say no?”
“We say good-bye and go our separate ways,” Timmy said.
“What if I don’t let you go yours?”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a question.”
Timmy shrugged slightly, the first hint of concern creeping onto his face. “Then my people leave.”
“Without you?”
“They have their instructions,” Timmy said. “This is our one and only chance, while all of the Benevolent Uncle’s gunships are busy guarding the spaceports. By the time anyone notices that our ship is lifting from somewhere besides an official field, it’ll be too late for them to get enough firepower out here to stop us.”
“It’s still going to be for nothing,” Bosphor said. “Even if you make it off New Vipitti, no other world in the region will take you in. Everyone within reasonable range has strict refugee laws.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Timmy said. “We have a lot of professionals aboard, with good and highly marketable skills. We’ll work out something. Once we’re into the general population, we’ll be able to blend in and disappear.”
“Maybe,” Bosphor said. “But you’re going to be a bit higher on everyone’s radar than the rest of your people. The government won’t like you talking about them.”
“All the more reason for me to go,” Timmy said. “The Benevolent Uncle’s stranglehold relies on neighboring systems turning a blind eye to what he’s doing. The less they’re able to pretend they don’t see anything, the faster New Vipitti will be free again.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That might happen even faster with a former PCE agent along to confirm our stories of the government’s abuse of power.”
Bosphor snorted. Finally; there it was. “So that’s why you offered me a spot? Because you need me?”
“Don’t you want to be needed?”
“I don’t want to be used,” Bosphor said. “You’ve used too many people. I won’t be one of them.”
“Good,” Timmy said gravely. “Because you won’t be. I’m offering you a spot because you have integrity, and because you care about your people and your world.”
“And because you need a PCE agent’s voice.”
Timmy’s face crinkled in another smile. “Actually, we already have two PCE agents,” he said. “No, Agent Bosphor. We want you solely for yourself. No strings, no obligations.” He cocked his head. “The question is whether you have too much pride to accept a free gift.”
Bosphor smiled back. He’d warned Linda about false hope. False pride was an equally dangerous affliction. “Not at all,” he said. “Besides, I figure the story will play better with three agents telling it.”
* * *
Bill Zielke, Uncle Timmy’s pilot, was not only highly competent, but also had a flair for the dramatic. As he took the crowded ship around on its spiral path toward freedom, he ran their vector so as to make New Vipitti create a brief eclipse of the sun.
“Let’s hope we can take the Benevolent Uncle’s reign into its own eclipse,” Timmy commented. He frowned at Bosphor. “What’s so funny?”
“I just realized something,” Bosphor said. “You really are a con man, aren’t you? Except that you weren’t conning these people. You were conning everyone else.”
Uncle Timmy chuckled. “I told you you’d laugh.”
“Yes,” Bosphor agreed. “You did say that.”
And so, for the first time in months, he did.
*
TIMOTHY ZAHN
My first recollection of Uncle Timmy was meeting him at the 1982 Kubla Khan in Nashville. He was hanging out, as always, with a bunch of friends—you were always one of Timmy’s friends, whether you’d known him twenty years or twenty minutes—and we all got to talking. Anna and I were new to the whole convention thing, and when the conversation turned to conventions he told us about Chattacon and invited us to come down to next year’s extravaganza.
We were interested, of course, but in those days I was a very struggling author and discretionary money was a pretty thin. That didn’t bother Timmy. He simply made a point, over the next few months, to offer some quiet assistance in that area. We did indeed make the 1983 Chattacon, followed by many more; and when Timmy started LibertyCon we were ready, able, and enthusiastically willing to once again make the journey to Chattanooga (and to join the tradition of Chinese Blizzards).
Oh, and I was wrong earlier about everyone being Timmy’s friend. Somewhere along the line, so smoothly that we never noticed the transition, we were upgraded from just being friends to being family.
Because that, too, was Uncle Timmy’s way.
—Timothy Zahn
Timothy Zahn is a Hugo award winner and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Heir to the Empire and several other novels in the Star Wars universe. Born in Chicago, Zahn earned a B.S. in physics from Michigan State University and an M.S. in physics from the University of Illinois. He sold his first story to Analog magazine in 1978 and immediately attracted attention as a new writer of science fiction based on real, cutting-edge science. Other Zahn works include the Conquerer and Dragonback series and now the Manticore Ascendant series, cowritten with David Weber. He is a frequent and popular guest at Star Wars and other conventions. His author page on Facebook has received over 50,000 likes and can be visited at http://www.facebook.com/TimothyZahn.