Resistance: Hathe Book One (27 page)

“
So
everyone tells me,” bit back Hamon, keeping his voice as low as
possible. Too much exertion, he found, sent the pain level in his
head soaring into the nightmare zone.

“
You
can’t doubt it,” cried Ferdo, in a voice far too loud. “You’re her
only prop. Without you, she’d have none of this influence you
claim. You support her, then turn around and say she’s betraying
us. By the stars, Hamon, make up your mind. Do you trust her or
not?”

“
No,
I do not, but I am going to keep her beside me. For two reasons.
One, so that I can keep a close eye on her
machinations.”

“
And
two?” said Ferdo, his voice softening in sympathy.

“
She’s carrying my baby.”

The
torn face of the man in front of Ferdo was the only hint of what
lay within, but he knew Radcliff well. A friend since childhood,
he’d watched him many times bury other hurts. Long ago, he’d learnt
the futility of prying deeper. There was only one way he could
help, and he resolved to send an urgent, private message on the
next Terran link.

After
a long interval, Hamon sighed and eased his head up.

Ferdo
regarded him with concern. “Why not go home and make your peace,”
he told his friend. “You may not have it all, but you still have
more than is granted most men or women. And take something for that
head you’ve been suffering so heroically.”

There
was the faintest trace of a smile in answer.

Ferdo
watched Hamon leave, pondering the man’s earlier words. After a
time, he turned to a compartment behind him, pulling out from where
he had discarded it the strange patch of material seized from
Marthe at her capture. Fifty years ahead!

Hamon
made his way to his quarters as ordered. Reason told him he must,
if he hoped to crack the massive wall of silence surrounding
Marthe. His emotions drew him to this woman, so, so strongly; but
his deepest instincts said run, turn, keep out—said that all that
waited was misery, suffering and the destruction of what little
they now had. Did he want even his memories tarnished? Or wasn’t it
better to get out now and be thankful for what had been?

He
couldn’t do it, and snarled at his idiocy for thinking he could.
Not even his desperate concern for Earth could make him abandon
Marthe asn Castre to all the dangers and the brutality that must
come to her as a prisoner of the all mighty, common soldier. That
he could bear least of all.

Quietly he entered his rooms to come upon her sleeping soundly
in the bedroom and dressed still in her most elegant of tunics, her
vibrant curls escaping rebelliously from their elaborate
arrangement. He remembered his own sleepless night and day of
agonizing with bitter regret. Then he saw the smudges beneath her
eyes.

Gently, despite everything, his finger crept out to smooth the
creased cheek and strayed upwards to push back a wayward curl. Her
eyelids blinked open, and she stared wordlessly up at him, into the
trouble in his heart. An eternity later, she reached out one small
hand in uncertain plea. He hesitated still, then slowly his hand
stretched out to touch, then close, then grasp tightly.

It was
enough for a moment. Then he drew her urgently into him, enfolding
her as close as he could manage, striving valiantly to sear the
barriers that separated them. For a period, it worked. She joined
with him in denying their peoples for a precious interval as with
relief, with love, and with a great well of despair, their bodies
said what could not be put into words.

Later,
much later, the outer world again intruded. “Do you still want to
go ahead with the wedding?” she asked, her buried fear
emerging.

“
I
do,” he replied, hiding all bitterness. “Do you want to know
why?”

There
was a hesitant lift of her shoulder and half a smile. “I’m not
sure.”

“
It
was something Ferdo said. We may not have it all, you and I, but we
have more than is granted most men or women, he told me, and he was
right.” For an instant, a smile of pure joy lit her face. He should
have left it there, but he had promised her honesty in this. “Also,
we need to marry to keep you and the baby safe.”

“
Thank you, I think.”

He
wisely refrained from saying more, having reached a kind of
acceptance of his own degree of compromise.

“
What’s more, you may have your party. As big and lavish as
you like, though I do beg to be saved from three continuous days of
celebration.” He deliberately put a teasing slant in his voice, and
was relieved when she accepted the change of subject and followed
it.

“
Jocelyn and Helen got to you? I do admit to setting them on
you, though I’m not sure they were as subtle as I’d hoped.” Her
finger traced a soothing path over his brow.

“
No.
They pounced on me at the worst of moments and led me to believe
that I was the cruelest man in the universe.” He could laugh at it
now, the dreaded pounding dissolved by her warm sea of
refuge.

“
They did overdo it.” She gave him the lightest of smiles and
he basked in its warmth. “And the peasants? You will throw them a
party? It’s an old tradition, as well as a good
safeguard.”

“
Very well.” It was either true or, if a conspiracy, a way of
letting her own people share in her joy. “We’ll announce it
tomorrow, though no doubt the grapevine will have heard of it
already. How does it get to be so damned efficient?”

To his
surprise, she replied. “Simple. A party needs supplies to be
ordered, cleaning and cooking to be arranged. Peasants do all those
things, and they’re not deaf and dumb, only stupid. You may keep
your state secrets secure, but day-to-day you’re wide
open.”

“
Not
completely, surely?” he protested teasingly, petrified lest he stop
this sudden stream of confidences.

“
Completely,” she assured him. “For instance, you know fat,
old Captain Sandoff who’s always talking about his strict
diet?”

“
Uh-huh,”

“
His
room is stuffed with secret caches. There are sweets behind pot
plants, nuts in a box in the cleanser, about ten secret packets
within arm’s reach of his sleeper, for those midnight snacks, and a
big, recessed drawer just by the door pad so he can lock up and
grab a bite, all in one, easy motion.”

“
Do
the peasants really gossip so much?”

“
It’s all they ever seem to do.”

“
And
how, my lady fair, did you put up with them for so
long?”

“
Dreadful it was,” she murmured back, squirming in to his side
in a manner that sorely tested his desire to hear more of her past.
“If only I had met you sooner,” she added. “This is so much nicer
than some of the jobs I’ve had.”

“
Oh?
Just what have you been up to?”

“
Are
you asking for my recent life history?” she said, bestowing a kiss
upon his welcoming mouth and emerging long moments later as content
and relaxed as he could wish. If her habit of subterfuge was too
deeply ingrained too allow her tongue too dangerous a license, much
of what she said was still intensely fascinating to him,
professionally and otherwise.

“
Where do you want me to begin?” she said. “My first steps, my
first words or my first job, none of which were particularly
memorable?”

“
Your first job.”

“
Ah,
but that was quite recent. Four and a half years ago, to be exact.
It was when the Terrans first started making us carry
identification papers, after which we had to work if we wanted to
eat. Not being totally stupid, I managed to insinuate myself into a
road gang as a third cousin of the foreman. In those days, there
were a lot of displaced persons, house servants and the like
suddenly cast adrift. This particular girl had used to be with us,
so it was easy to pass myself off as her.”

“
Rather risky if the real girl turned up,” he
commented.

“
No
chance of that. She was dead.” There was a shockingly callous lack
of concern in her voice. He said nothing to break her mood, but
stored the memory up for later. “She’d been a table servant, which
explained my complete inability to wield a shovel. I never did
acquire the knack of it, and they demoted me to stone carrier.” She
snorted in puzzled amusement. “Isn’t it strange that such a doltish
people should be so much more physically dexterous than we Haut
Liege?”

“
Carrying stones about all day can’t have been easy
work.”

“
An
understatement, if ever I heard one; but by that stage I’d been
wandering about the place in a daze for weeks. I was hungry, and
terrified of what would happen if either the peasants or soldiers
found out who I really was. The relief of being in a secure place,
with regular meals, more than outweighed the misery of the
work.”

“
So
how long did you last at that?”

“
About four months. You should have seen the muscles in my
arms at the end. Then our gang was caught up in the conscriptions
to the mines. It was a good thing they were short of domestic staff
for the workers’ quarters at the time, or I doubt I’d be here
today. It takes a strong person to survive the maximum period at
the mines, and that was back in the early days, before they cut it
back to six months. The eight to twelve monthers were dying in
droves.”

He
shuddered, despite himself. The mines, that dreadful blot on the
Terran record. Workers still died there occasionally, but more from
accidents. The hundreds who had expired in the first year from
sheer exhaustion was a shameful crime that Earth could never
erase.

“
That you should be in such a place!”

“
Exactly what I thought myself. After two years, I’d had
enough. I’d done just about every kind of job possible: cleaning
toilets, scrubbing barracks, nursing the sick, cooking, laundry,
and even burying the dead. The last one decided it.” He pulled her
closer to hide the memories he saw fleeting across her face. There
was no doubt of the truth of her words and the pain of it scoured
him deeply.

Marthe
fell silent as she saw again all those brave faces that she had
meanly dragged to their last repose, bile gagging in her
throat.

“
Anyway, I escaped,” she finally said, shrugging off the
horror defiantly. “After that, I wandered across the plains for a
few weeks, eating berries, roots, whatever I could find. It was
lucky none were toxic because I wasn’t at all discerning. I came to
this town about a month later. There were quite a few mine escapees
here at the time, and the peasants do look after their own. I
managed to get taken in by a kind old lady. A lot like my nurse,
she was. She arranged a place for me in a work gang, and I’ve been
here ever since, mostly working on the surrounding roads. Then I
was caught, and the rest you know.”

She
paused reflectively. “And never again will I go anywhere near a
shovel. God, how I hate them. Almost as much as I despise the
peasants. Moaning all the time, yet they do nothing to help
themselves. It’s not as if their lives are so much better under
your rule than it was under ours, but at least they feared us, far
more than they do your soldiers. You’ll have trouble there, if
you’re not more careful.”

Much
to her chagrin, a light snore told of the deaf ears on which her
elaborately embroidered ending had fallen. She thumped the headrest
and flounced to the other side, gaining some comfort from the
temporary interruption in her partner’s sleeping rhythm.

Long
after sleep had claimed her, Hamon lay unmoving at her side, his
diplomatic snores abandoned. After finally hearing some truth, he’d
been in no mood to listen to the fabrications she’d added at the
end.

The
natives were clearly able to move about a great deal more freely
than the Terrans realized. By his reckoning, she’d travelled more
than a hundred kilometers on foot, undetected by air or ground
patrols. If the ease with which she’d been accepted into strange
work gangs was to be believed, then others could do the same. The
identification papers the Terrans made the peasants carry were
obviously a complete failure in controlling them. Or, more likely,
he thought ruefully, we Terrans have become far too careless.
Something that would change on the morrow.

Also,
she appeared to have been fully accepted by the natives, yet even
the most subtle of his men had never managed that successfully. The
peasants only ever tolerated them, his men said, and always seemed
to know they were planted Terrans. Was it some nuance of the
language, or had the peasants known all along who she was and still
accepted her? Then there was that other, struggling thought,
growing more and more plausible. That she and the peasants were one
and the same people—the grand drama, so impossible, surely. He rose
the next day with a new determination and left early for work. It
was more than past time for his men to earn their pay.

It
didn’t take long for the local Hathian commander, Gof deln Crantz,
to be made rudely aware of Radcliff’s newfound zeal. From the
Major’s first quick strides as he left his quarters, the Hathian
surveillance network was buzzing with ominous reports and overheard
Terran gossip that had Gof very much less than happy. He retreated
to the niche he had made his own at the back of the janitors’
locker room and plugged into the feed from the central monitors
covering the whole of the Citadel. He rubbed his
old-fashioned-appearing spectacles and set them on his nose as he
picked up the first of a set of metal bowls that needing polishing.
It was a mindless task that left him free to concentrate on a
summary of the day’s vids screening across the inside of the
spectacles, unseen by any Terran observer.