Rediscovery (42 page)

He patted the side of the hand-missile launcher, and Commander Britton frowned.

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” he asked. “What if they threaten to kill the Lornes?”

MacAran shrugged. “Empire policy; we pay no ransoms, make no negotiation with

terrorists and kidnappers, and if they kill the hostages, we kill them.”

Britton grimaced, but said nothing.

Aurora Lakshman made a gesture of protest. “Ralph—I don’t like the idea of

hitting these people who know nothing of explosives with a barrage of grenades. That’s the kind of thing people on Earth in ages past did all too often to underdeveloped nations

—we have a reputation for it. Do we really want to do that here and now?”

“It’s just a bang and a lot of smoke, it’s only to scare them, and if they have any brains, they’ll surrender right off,” MacAran replied, “And I wouldn’t do it if we had any other options. But we don’t and I have my orders.”

“And what if they still don’t surrender?” Aurora demanded. “What if they
do
kill David and Elizabeth? Are you going to incinerate them from above? Why not just

ignore the demands—pretend that we don’t care? Surely, sooner or later, these men will let the Lornes go!”

“If you abandon them,” Kadarin put in, “the bandits will almost certainly kill

them, once no one seems interested in paying a ransom. It is not in their interest to let someone go who knows where they are.”

MacAran frowned at the unsolicited comment; if he’d had his way, Kadarin

wouldn’t be along at all.
He
still wasn’t sure Kadarin had nothing to do with this—after all, it had been the Darkovan who’d picked the place for the Lornes to shelter from the

“Ghost Wind” in. Though why they needed to take shelter from a wind…well, it didn’t matter, what did matter was that Kadarin’s involvement in this seemed a little too pat.

He could not get over the idea that somewhere behind that imperturbable facade,

Kadarin was laughing at him.

He looked at the rest of his troops; tough men, many of whom had been in police

forces or other combat-organizations on different worlds before they joined the Service.

“All right, people,” he said, finally. “Move out, and get into place. With luck, they’ll believe us and turn the Lornes loose, and all this will just impress the natives that we don’t play footsie with terrorists.”

And if luck isn’t with us,
he thought,
I
hope to God they don’t call our bluff. And I
hope they’re still alive.

Elizabeth was very cold without the Terran sleeping bag which the bandits had

confiscated; it took her a long time every night to drop off, and even then she slept fitfully and restlessly. Each night she had nightmares. And each morning, as the red sun just cleared the mountain tops and rose out of a sea of heavy, grayish-pink clouds, she woke again with her stomach heaving.

This morning, the fourth of their captivity, was no different.

She pushed open the tent flap, and went past the sleepy-eyed guard to the crude

and barely-adequate lean-to in one corner of the roofless room that served as an equally crude bathroom. As she bent over the pot there, cramped with nausea, she could only think how unfair it was for her first bouts with morning sickness to begin here and now.

At one point in the benighted past, there had been a medical theory that women who suffered from morning sickness had a only psychological problem, that secretly they did not wish to be pregnant.

A theory put forth by male doctors, she thought. Just like the one that women who suffered PMS and other similar problems secretly did not want to be women. Or that they wanted attention.

Well, this had to be the worst way of getting attention that she had ever seen.

This was their fourth day of imprisonment, and she only hoped that Zeb and

Kadarin had not gone crazy, or walked off a cliff, or been caught by some other set of bandits. She was certain that if this particular lot had gotten hold of the other two, their leader would have lost no chance to gloat.

When her stomach finally settled, she wiped her mouth and wrapped her down

jacket about her shoulders, and staggered past the smirking guard back to their tent, shivering. Although the bandits had fed them, after a fashion, she felt perpetually hungry and cold. And dirty; her hair felt ready to crawl off her scalp. She felt she would have given her right hand for a good soak in a hot bath.

David had awakened as she’d lurched out to the primitive privy. “Are you all

right, love?” he asked in concern as she pushed her way back through the flap of the tent.

“Nothing that won’t correct itself in a few months,” she sighed, reaching for the cup of water he handed to her to rinse the sour taste from her mouth. “That’s the one good thing about pregnancy; it’s going to end in its own time.”

“It could be worse,” he said, trying to cheer her up. “Imagine having morning

sickness in zero-gee.”

She shuddered. “You imagine it; I’d rather not.”

He held her closer, and she snuggled into his arms, trying to get a little warmer.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he persisted. “I don’t like it that you’re sick, and we don’t have any medical care for you. This is the third day in a row that you’ve lost your breakfast.”

“No, it isn’t,” she replied. “I haven’t
had
breakfast yet. And women have been having babies and morning sickness for thousands of years without medical help. I’ll be all right.”

He tightened his arms around her. “I wish they’d just let us go—or something.

But since you’re out of contact with Ysaye—I’m not holding my breath waiting.”

“Surely by now at least Ysaye is raising a ruckus. I’ve never been out of contact with her for this long before.”

But David shook his head. “We’ve gotten used to having that constant contact, but before we landed here, that telepathic link was a pretty hit-or-miss thing. And we don’t know how distance affects it, so she might well assume that you’re just too far away to reach. Or too busy.”

Elizabeth bit her lip, and tried not to think how right he was. “Look, there’s

Kadarin and Zeb Scott, too—”

“And Kadarin could have set this up,” David interrupted. “Even if he didn’t, I’m not inclined to put too much faith in him. He has an entirely too peculiar a sense of humor for my taste. He might think this situation is all very amusing.”

That was so true that Elizabeth didn’t even bother to agree. She fell glumly silent.

After a while—a long while—one of their captors entered with what passed for their breakfast; some kind of stale bread and dried meat, and a couple of lukewarm cups of whatever that local equivalent of coffee was.

It was just as unappetizing as all the rest of their meals had been, and Elizabeth picked up a round of the bread and began to gnaw on it, dispiritedly. “I wish they’d tell us something,” she said, breaking the silence.

“Like what?” David wrestled with a scrap of the meat.

“Anything,” she said passionately. “Whether or not they’ve at least been in touch with Lord Aldaran. What if they go to him, and he counts noses and just tells them that he isn’t missing anyone? Where does that leave us?”

“Maybe they’ll figure out that we were telling the truth,” David offered, and

sighed. “But God only knows how long that would take.”

But something had caught Elizabeth’s attention—a sound that hadn’t been there

before. She cocked her head sideways, frowning. “David, do you hear anything?”

He stopped chewing and listened a moment. “Is that—no, that’s not the wind, is

it?” he said in wonder. “It sounds like a plane! There can’t be a plane on the planet that isn’t ours. Liz, they’re coming for us!”

His voice was drowned out by the roar of a flier making a low pass over the walls and returning.

“This is Captain Gibbons of the starship
Minnesota!” roared an amplified voice from somewhere outside the walls.

“No it’s not. It’s Grant Kelly—” David said, but Elizabeth hushed him.

“We have you surrounded. You are holding two members of the crew of the

starship
Minnesota.
You have five minutes to release them. We do not negotiate; we do
not pay ransom. If you release them, we will withdraw. If you do not, we will use
weapons on you. If you harm or kill them, we will kill you. Your time starts now.
”

“Yes!” David shouted, jumping to his feet. “That’s telling them!”

Elizabeth was terrified. “No!” she cried. “They can’t! They don’t know he’s

serious!”

“Then they’ll have to learn,” David replied heartlessly. “For all our people know, we’re already dead.”

The minutes dragged; then came the unmistakable sound of a portable missile-

launcher, and a pervasive, creeping smell of smoke, followed by the roar of the flier coming in again at tree-top level, and the sound of weapons’ fire.

Smoke poured into the tent, obscuring everything. Elizabeth coughed and choked,

and David turned stark white. There were shouts, and the tent walls shook.

Elizabeth flung herself to the floor of the tent; David threw himself on top of her to protect her. The next few moments were sheer chaos; filled with the screams of men and animals, the choking stench of burning, and shouts of “Fire! The woods are on fire!”

Then one of their captors tore open the tent flap and dragged them both out into the open, his face a mask of terror. He shoved them before him, through the haze of smoke, out into what had been the great hall of the place.

And Elizabeth saw, over the ragged tops of the walls, the wall of flames where

ages-old trees had been.

Elizabeth coughed and choked from the smoke as the bandits shoved them out

past the walls and into the open. She staggered forward, David at her side, even though she couldn’t see a thing through the thick smoke that made her eyes water and burn. In a moment, she was in Aurora Lakshman’s arms.

The bandit held onto David’s arm a moment longer. The linguist was astonished

by the depth of anger and bitterness in the man’s face.

“You think of
us
as barbarians,” he said. “But you are the ones who do not observe the Compact. You cannot be civilized. A brute animal has more morals and ethics than you people.”

Then he shoved David after his wife, and vanished into the smoke.

He goes to fight the fire,
David heard in his mind, and turned to find Kadarin waiting to escort him to the flier.
Even a bandit will fight a fire in these forests. And only
a madman would set one.

Kadarin nodded at David’s look of surprise, and turned grimly to lead him

through the smoke.

Lorill Hastur faced the Comyn Council with more of a sense of weariness than

anything else. He probably should have been trembling with fear at the idea of facing so many important people; instead, he was only tired. He still did not know how so many things could have gone wrong, and had no idea of how to right them. Perhaps there was no way to do so, ever. He had only spent days fighting the forest fire, but he felt years older.

“To sum it all up,” he concluded, “Even though I am not very old, nor very wise, and even though the will of Hastur is no more the law of the land than that of any other Comyn lord, if you were to ask me, I would say to have as little to do with these Terrans as possible. They are still in the back pocket of Aldaran, and we all know that the wishes of Aldaran are often at violent odds with the best interests of the rest of the Domains.

They are not evil people, yet Aldaran is all they know —and what Aldaran has told them of us. Their customs are so far from ours that it often seemed to me that they could hardly be considered human. But that is not the worst of it. The worst is the weapons that they hold.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to forget the things he had seen. He had gone to help fight the fire, as had every man, woman and child in the area. It had been a nightmare, and the memories would be slow to fade.

“They have terrible weapons,” he said. “Weapons that work at a distance, in

violation of the Compact. And they seem ready to use them with very little provocation, even when other choices are available. I cannot see how they can possibly be made to give those weapons up.”

At the murmur of disbelief, he opened his eyes and glared at the mutterers. “I tell you, I have seen those weapons at work! I watched how they accidentally set a fire in the forest, a fire it took three days and nights to stop, and which destroyed two dozen leagues of forest in that time! I fought that fire myself—and from there, I came straight here. Although the Terrans used special machines and liquids to help quell the fire which they started, without which we surely would have been fighting the blaze for weeks, I say to you, we must leave these people to themselves, for they are too perilous to have in our midst.”

“What of your sister, Leonie?” called one man. “She urged contact with these

people—what has she to say of this?”

“Nothing,” Lorill replied shortly. “She is in seclusion; she has begun her training at Arilinn as a Keeper, and she is not permitted to communicate with her kin. And at any rate, it would seem to me, sirs, that the wishes of a young girl are not to be weighed against the violence of men who would break the Compact.”

He took his seat, and the debate began. And as he sat there, he knew how it would end. He would have his way—for now. But not forever.

Leonie had been right; not all the will of the Comyn could hold these Terrans back forever. And he longed, with a longing that was an ache, that he
could
talk to her. A few days ago, he had believed that nothing in the world could cut Leonie off from him—not all the will of all the Keepers in the world.

He had been speaking with her right up until the moment he left Aldaran to return home; two days later, he had been held to shelter by a storm. He had tried to contact her then, and had been met only by a complete barrier.