Eva gratefully found the pond the next morning, found the tree where she’d stashed the microrecorder the previous evening, but didn’t find the microrecorder. An orchid lay in its place.
They’d seen her. They must have tracked her with infrared. Juan and Mark were close. She risked a tiny wave in a direction away from the castle. It made her feel better.
She ran at least ten miles that day, needing the exercise, needing the complete cessation of thought that came when one was too exhausted to think of anything but exhaustion and pain. Passing Jim’s grave on the way back made all the emotional pain return. The physical pain wasn’t enough to keep it away this time.
She didn’t even consider showering or changing. She went straight to the gym where she knew punching bags had been set up. She found it empty. Not many Hrwang had been around on the grounds either. She wondered what was up.
She strapped on gloves and kickboxing shoes and went to work on the bag. Everything she hated went into her punches. Everything that angered her went into the bag.
Everything that frightened her joined it.
Eva felt like a fraud. She wasn’t a real spy. She wasn’t following some carefully crafted plan, a well plotted operation, nothing left to chance. She was winging it. And winging it was getting people killed.
Dogs, too.
She punched and she punched and then she kicked when punching wasn’t enough. And when the bag swung away from her, she drove into it, hitting it and keeping it from swinging back until she was ready.
Her muscles, already screaming from the ten mile run, ached and complained and she ignored them. Her clothes were drenched in sweat, her hair matted from the exertion, and she didn’t care.
She didn’t know what she was doing.
She almost sat down on the floor mat and cried, but the stubborn part of her kept punching. Perhaps in completely giving over to the moment, she would experience some form of clarity. If she still believed in a god, she would have almost described what she attempted as prayer.
And the blows continued to fall on the bag.
God, or non-god, he, she, or it, whatever the Universe described itself as, didn’t answer her. But she did hear a voice.
“You have excellent form today,” she heard the Lieutenant Grenadier say. “If you had hit that spy the way you’re hitting that bag, he’d still be alive for interrogation.”
Which is exactly why I didn’t, she wanted to scream back at the lieutenant. In that moment she knew nothing was this alien’s fault. Even if he had killed Jim, it wasn’t his fault. If Eva killed the Lord Admiral, the madness would end.
Her life would be forfeit, but she would have done something useful for the Universe. Maybe then her prayers would be answered.
“Where’s the Lord Admiral?” she asked, turning suddenly away from the bag and toward the Hrwang lackey. The man was just a security chief, someone who had to do his master’s bidding. Nothing more than that. Eva was going to go for the top. She was going to go find the Lord Admiral then and there, seduce him enough to get close, then strangle him. Right on the spot. And she wouldn’t stop, even if they shot her. She would squeeze and squeeze until no life remained. It was the only solution.
“He’s not on Earth at the moment,” the Lieutenant Grenadier replied.
“What?”
“He left with the Ambassador a few minutes ago. He asked me to check on you. He said you were taking the attack hard. He’s worried about you.”
He had promised to take Eva with him the next time he left Earth. She wanted to go into space. It was so easy for the Hrwang. They just told their combat craft to jump, and the things jumped into orbit. She wanted to go. Disappointment almost made her forget the reason she wanted to see the man in the first place.
“Hit me like you were hitting that bag,” the Lieutenant Grenadier instructed.
Eva shook her head at his change of subject.
“What?” she asked.
“Hit me like you were hitting that bag.”
“I’m tired, Lieutenant.”
“Just for a minute. I want to see how good you can be,” he said and he pounced on her. She reacted instinctively, tucking low and rolling the man over her and onto his back. She turned and kicked out, but despite his size, short and barrel chested, he was also fast and rolled away from her and was back on his feet before she could press the advantage.
She pummeled his defensively raised arms and he reached inside her blows, allowing two to strike his head, and grabbed her shirt, pulling her off balance. She tried to grab his hands, but the boxing gloves prevented it. She leaned backwards, trying to control her fall. She twisted as she went down and the Lieutenant Grenadier landed on the mat instead of on her and she had broken his grip. She kicked him hard in the side.
Instead of getting up, he exploded in a lunge at her legs, trapping her where she had gone down on the mat, and now he was on top of her.
She didn’t know why she did what she did next, but she put her hands up behind the man’s head and pulled it down. He angled his face, anticipating a head butt, but she kissed him instead, completely catching him off guard. She turned his head so she could kiss his mouth instead of his cheek and he responded, hungrily kissing her back.
He jumped off her just as quickly and looked around.
“The Lord Admiral doesn’t need to know anything about this,” she said.
“Do you know what he would do to me?” the lieutenant cried.
She shook her head.
He said a word in Est, then fled. She remembered the word and looked it up on her tablet later. It meant ‘to flay alive’.
She understood the fear she’d seen in the man’s eyes.
The Lieutenant Grenadier studiously avoided Eva after that, and it allowed her a certain amount of freedom to mingle with other soldiers and even with the kitchen staff. She and Noah became friends and he never questioned her about anything. They just shared jokes and stories.
For the first time since she had begun this mission, Eva felt relaxed. She pushed the trauma of Jim’s killing and of the fight with the border guard deep down in her memories. Not being afraid of the Lieutenant Grenadier and not having the Lord Admiral around was like a breath of sea air on an open balcony.
She changed up her running patterns, now having nothing to give to Juan and Mark, and followed trails that led down to the beach. Her initial motivation had been simply to run to the beach, to see the ocean and run on the sand, but as she passed the site where the old visitor’s center stood, she recognized the opportunity to learn more about the Hrwang soldiers. The original visitor’s center building and parking lot had been destroyed by the meteor induced tsunami and the Hrwang had built a new command center there, taking advantage of the level ground and what was left of the parking area. Hrwang combat craft came and went constantly, their commanders uploading and downloading information, swapping food and stories, and even playing sports against each other.
Eva watched soldiers play a game that was sort of like volleyball, although the participants could catch the ball and throw it up to be hit over the net. They also ran, wrestled, and swam in the ocean, just like any other group of healthy young men might do.
And they watched Eva as she ran.
The second day she ran down to the beach, she took her shoes off and went into the water in her running clothes. Her clothes showed nothing through them when wet, but the soldiers watched her closely anyway. Despite their stares, she felt comfortable with so many of them present. The Hrwang had strict, even fatal, rules about rape, which Eva had already used to protect herself, and the more men present, the less likely any of them would be to do something foolish.
When the Hrwang soldiers watched her run or play in the water, it made her think about the Lieutenant Grenadier, and she felt bad for him. She had forced him into doing something that could get h
im killed. But it protected her.
Kissing him had been a stroke of genius. She hadn’t thought of all of the consequences when she did it, but afterward she decided it gave her an opportunity to blackmail the Lieutenant Grenadier whenever she needed to. Plus, he stayed away from her, so he couldn’t watch her.
The soldiers who did watch her didn’t realize how much she watched them back. She watched how they interacted, how they conducted themselves, how they operated their equipment, and contemplated how they could be defeated. She noticed that most of them, when they carried weapons, now carried human weapons. MP23s, Koch 23.4s, even ancient AK-47s. She saw Glocks and Mausers and Remington pistols on soldier’s hips. She even recognized U.S. Army grenades in Hrwang crates.
They must be running low on Hrwang ammunition.
She watched the Hrwang to learn everything she could, as quickly as she could. She knew as soon as the Lord Admiral returned, she’d no longer have this opportunity.
She continued running down to the beach, watching everything.
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