RESISTANCE
HATHE BOOK ONE
BY MARY BROCK JONES
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All material contained herein Copyright © Mary Brock Jones 2015. All rights reserved.
Published byMary Brock Jones at Smashwords.
ISBN: 978-0-473-31999-1
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is coincidental.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
EXCERPT FROM PAY THE PIPER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DEDICATION
To my sons who grew up with Hathe.
Here it is at long last.
RESISTANCE
HATHE BOOK ONE
By Mary Brock Jones
When two, opposed worlds must fight for their very survival, what chance is there for a pair of duty-plagued lovers caught in the middle?
Five long years ago, the Terran invaders appeared in the skies above Hathe and life on that peaceful and wealthy planet changed forever. Now, the time has come to throw the invaders out. The Hathians are about to reclaim Hathe.
Hamon Radcliff is one of those Terrans. He must use any means available to keep Hathe in Terran control, no matter how much he hates it, for Earth cannot survive without the urgonium found only on Hathe. It’s their main energy source. But all the rules change when he captures a woman of the long-lost Hathian ruling class, a woman he strongly suspects is an undercover agent for a secret Hathian resistance movement.
Now he must choose. Protect the woman he loves and let millions of his people die. Or break her, find out what she knows and save Earth.
INTRODUCTION
The stars beckoned and man went, spreading out to populate the new worlds with new ideas and new ways. Shining among those new worlds was Hathe. It had peace, stability and wealth, all in sufficient abundance to bring forth a world in which there was a blossoming of the arts, the sciences and sheer curiosity.
Particularly, it had wealth.
But that was before the Terran ships appeared in Hathian space.
Before a raw and untried Hathian fleet flew out in futile battle against the invaders.
Before the Terrans stole the most precious jewel in the Hathian treasury:
Freedom.
CHAPTER ONE
Voices, coming closer. Too close. Marthe asn Castre tapped urgently on the small, clear patch on her wrist. After four years of occupation, the secret code of the Hathian resistance was as familiar to her as her own Harmish tongue.
“Terrans. Everyone out, now.”
The reply came straight back, a sharp tattoo in her earpiece.
“You too. Move it.”
Too late. The voices were nearly at her position, and footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. Marthe looked around the room. Banks of com instruments and control panels, a simple table and chairs at the center. There, in the far corner, a space between the wall and an equipment stack. She flattened herself back against the wall and eased into the gap. It was tight. For once being small was a blessing. She checked the shadows on the floor. Straight lines only—no telltale, dark fingers of a human shape.
“Ten point kitty, fives high.”
The ugly sound of the Terran Standard words stopped just outside the door. She froze. A narrow gap between the equipment banks allowed her to see the doorway and part of the room. One man walked in, then two more. A scrape of chairs and the clatter of men settling at the table in the centre of the room.
“Get ready to be fleeced, boys.”
“Sure, Charlie. Like last time,” came the sardonic reply.
A rattle, then the unmistakeable jingle of chips hitting the tabletop.
Fiver players. Just her luck. Officially banned by the Terran administration, the gambling game was rife among the rank-and-file occupation troops—and a game could last for hours. She peered through the slit towards the far bank of controls. This room was the heart of the Terran communication system controlling this sector of Hathe, her home world. Sitting in the input slot was a thin sliver, her sliver, downloading all the essential data captured in this room. A minute more and she would have her treasure. If the Terrans didn’t see it, and if they didn’t notice her before their stupid game finished.
“Marthe, are you clear?” said the rapid fire of tappings in her ear. She barely had room to reach her wrist to send a reply.
“Go ahead without me. I’m stuck here. Three Terran soldiers playing Fivers.”
The reply was crystal clear and emphatic—her oldest childhood friend Jaca, Jacquel des Trurain, suddenly remembering he was the appointed leader on this mission.
“Report,” he ordered.
She told him all, using terse shortcut codes, and could imagine his face at the other end. Jaca would not be happy.
She looked out at the room. Her sliver was still safe, still unseen. So far.
“We’re coming in to get you,” threatened Jacquel.
“No.”
He had to give her time.
Jacquel was as stubborn as she. “Don’t expect me to leave you alone. Would Bendin?”
How could even Jaca use her twin like that? “Leave him out of this,” she stabbed at her wrist. No, Bendin would not have left her here. Nor could he now do anything to help her. No longer. The code she sent back was not in any official manual, but Jaca fully understood it. The silence in her ear lasted a long time.
Hours later the Terrans still played. Marthe blamed the first man who had walked into the room. Did he not know when he was beaten? She kept herself amused by totting up the phenomenal sums he was losing and wished it was Hathians benefiting from his obstinacy rather than the hated Terran soldiers. Mind you, maybe the winners would reward their Hathian servants. If she remembered rightly, her second cousin Jessamie had been assigned to this post, and was working as a general maid in the troop barracks. Imagining the look on the means’ faces if they ever learned that Jessamie was actually a highly trained chemical engineer helped pass the hours. From there, she moved on to dreaming of the day the Hathians would take back their home, and formulating ever more painful and embarrassing punishments for the Terran troops to avenge every single incident she and her fellow Hathians had endured since the Terrans seized their world.
It was a delicious pastime, but even such happy dreams couldn’t take away the growing pain in her knees, bent tightly under her. She dare not move for fear of making a sound that might attract her enemy’s attention. Despite the enveloping hooded cloak
of the so-called Hathian peasantry she wore, she could not risk capture. There was no way to explain how a backward pleb could have bypassed the sophisticated alarms that protected these rooms. The Terrans must never learn the truth behind the mask of their Hathian serfs.
Finally. The loser flung down his chips, growled at his one-time mates, and stomped out. Marthe peered hopefully through the crack at the winners. They leaned back in their chairs, grinned and clapped each other on the back.
”Down to the bar?” said one. A heavy jingle as they collected up their chips. “Or winner take all?”
“You think I was born yesterday?” the other man said, laughing. “Just hand over half that credit balance and let’s go.”
The first man looked about to argue. Marthe held her breath. Go, go, she urged, trying fruitlessly to flex her numbed muscles without moving. The man stared belligerently at his mate, totting up the balance on their tablets, then moved his fingers as he split it into two. Then he relaxed, reached out a hand for his tab and stood up with a resigned chuckle. “McElroy’s or the Crew Stop?”
The second man clapped him on the shoulder. “Crew Stop. No greasy Hathians there. And the first round’s mine.”
Finally, finally, they were both standing, both walking out the door. They rounded the corner, footsteps tromping down the corridor. They were gone. She could no longer hear their boots sounding against the hard floors.
Marthe carefully eased herself up, gritting her teeth against the agony of long-cramped muscles, throttling back the cries that rose in her throat.
“Marthe?”
“The troopers?” she queried.
“Cleared the building. You are safe to move. Now get out of there.”
“Yes, sir,” she messaged weakly. Jaca would know exactly how much she meant that.
An hour later, he was still massaging her aching legs. They were in the back room of the Hathian quarters, under full surveillance protection. Jaca had thrown back his hood and leaned over her, his face still half angry, half desperately frightened. “Don’t you ever put me through something like that again.”
“Just ’cause you’re bigger than me, doesn’t mean you can boss me around.” The old joke fell flat, as usual. He was tall, Jaca, almost as tall as Bendin, but his lean frame had never been a match for her brother’s broad build; and she had never let Bendin order her around. Just because since babyhood they had both imagined their purpose in life was to protect her didn’t mean she had to buy into it.
“If Bendin—”
“Well, he can’t,” she shot back. Which silenced Jaca immediately. “I’m all right now,” she said gently to his bowed head after a time, and wriggled her feet to prove it.
He looked up, was about to open his mouth in apology.
“No, don’t.”
He shook his head, rubbing his hand through his hair. Then took a breath, stepped back and gave her the lopsided grin that spoke of unvoiced trouble.
She pulled the sliver from her inside pocket and passed it over to him. “This make it worthwhile?”
“No, but it’s a start.” He took the sliver, inserted it into the reader he carried under his cloak, and shook his head as to clear it. “So where are you off to next?” he said.
She allowed him the change in subject. “Furlough. A month of long showers and soft beds, then back here for pick-up duty. You’ll be pleased to know I’m to be stuck on a road gang, part of dear cousin Griffith’s crew.”
His grin returned to normal. “How … fitting.”
It was the same hill.
Marthe’s hand reached up and tugged her hood forward to hide her face. The guards were patrolling nearby. She looked carefully around the circle of Hathians huddling around the miserable fire then lifted her head as slowly as possible to look beyond them and up at the skyline behind. She took the risk of lifting her head a fraction more to see clearly, following the angles and planes of rock standing up from the wide flat lands all around her, the solid black outlined against the shifting light of the evening sky. Yes, there was the ridge leading to the top. There, the jagged block of stone standing alone on the flat platform of the summit. And there was that same pile of rocks she’d stumbled over that long ago night, the night after graduation, banging her toes and setting off the ever ready laughter in her twin’s eyes as he’d reached out to haul her up to safety.
Her hand reached up now, but it was to pull her hood closer still about her face to hide the memory of a grin she couldn’t prevent touching her mouth. She’d always hated needing to be helped, the only throwback to her mother’s genes in a family of fair-haired giants, and Bendin knew it. She remembered how she’d scowled back at him that night, making it quite plain whose foot she wished had stumbled. Jaca had been with them and watched warily, caught too many times in the middle of an asn Castre twin flare up. But Bendin knew when she was really hurt, and this was nothing, said the laughing gleam in his eyes. There was nothing for it but to burst into matching laughter.
“Come on, Mimi,” he’d said impatiently, using her childhood name. He kept his hold on her until she was over the last of the rocks and standing on the summit with the two young men.
Both moons were out that night. The larger Dromorne was already high in the sky, its solid bulk starting to wane. Far off at the edge of the horizon, the smaller sliver of Mathe was caught in its endless struggle to be seen, disappearing against the battling clouds and dying shards of sunlight.
The three of them had stood there in silent awe, for that brief moment at one with the vast wilderness of the high plateau lands. They had been free, that night, as they stood on the flat top and saw their dreams reflected in the vast plateau lands spread out below them—wild, empty and filled with endless possibilities.
She hunched closer to the fire. That was then and this was now. So much had changed in the four years since. The world had turned, and she no longer stood free. Now her twin’s body lay deep in the soil of this world they all loved—forever young, forever asn Castre, never to change to the an Castre of a married Hathian, never a father, grandfather, grey-haired old curmudgeon. And now, far across the plains, Jaca played a truly dangerous game.
A road over the plains had since been cut, scarring the land with its raw newness. On that lost night, there had been no road, no huts … and no Terrans.
Yet the night was the same—dark clouds scudding across an unsettled sky and surging waves of movement spreading over the vast tussock plains. The land endured and, for this brief time, it was hers. With the wind up, fewer guards patrolled the camp and her small huddle of Hathian workers would be left undisturbed for a while.
She edged closer to the warmth of the fire. She had the information she needed, stored in the thin sliver hidden in the ragged depths of her cloak and, for now, there was no more to be done.
Almost, she smiled. Not the wide, laughing smile of her youth, more an easing of the muscles of her face. For a rare moment, she could pretend she was free as she lingered outside with the other Hathian road workers. Soon, her group would be forced into the huts for the night. But not yet.
She stretched her back slowly, feeling the twinge of newly abused muscles. Three days of carrying stones had awakened muscles she’d forgotten she had. Didn’t the Terrans have any modern construction equipment? Of course they do, came the unbidden retort, but why use machines when you can have the pleasure of watching Hathians toil.
No, don’t think of them. Pretend instead that this is an evening on one of her childhood outings to the high plain. She’d always loved this wild and empty corner of Hathe.
Never had she imagined she would one day live here.
She made the mistake then of looking at her companions, saw engrained in their faces the harsh suffering that had not been there on those long gone evenings. One hand twitched at her outer robe, pulling it tightly around her as if to ward off old memories. It was no use. Memories such as hers were hard to deny. Faces from the past danced in the firelight: funereal fa
ces, crying faces, faces bleak with shock and bewilderment. The face of her brother.
Let me be, she begged.
Not while Terrans rule our home.
A stray beam of moonlight brought her group to the guard’s attention. The Terran strode across, his military bearing unmistakable, then halted and nudged the man beside her with the butt of his weapon. There was no argument, not from any of the Hathians. They rose and moved off towards the confinement of the huts. She stood to go with the rest. The guard watched them and then turned back, his heavy boot scuffing at the dirt to destroy the last, glowing warmth of the fire. Intent upon his actions, he failed to notice her slip away from the others. With a quick farewell sign, Marthe melded into the shadows then disappeared into the ever moving tussocks and the vast lands beyond.
Griffith an Castre saw his cousin leave but gave no sign of it. To the guards he was only Griff, the big foreman of the work gang. They looked for no more, and he was not about to let them see more. He continued with the rest in their shuffle into the hut. Once inside, he closed the door against the night and their persecutors, glanced once round then gave a tired stretch, his arms reaching upwards as a yawn overcame him. On its way down, one hand grazed the rough wall, leaving behind a thin patch of translucence against the top stud.
He turned, the yawn suddenly stifled and his weary stoop abandoned.
“We’re safe now.” He jerked his head up at the top corner where his patch now fed a fake Hathian vid through the Terran scanner, blocking the Terrans’ surveillance. Then he threw back his hood. The rest copied him, throwing back their hoods with a newfound eagerness belying the tiredness that lined their faces.
Resistance: Hathe Book One Page 1