Resistance: Hathe Book One

by Mary Brock Jones

  “She was sent back to the cells. Reports are she’s had a couple of sessions with the guards, but nothing came of it. The medicos tell me that coma she fell into is normal for Hathians. Their eyes glaze over, and any further treatment is a complete waste of time.” His brow creased and he shook his head. “Why Johne persists in using sessions on prisoners is beyond me—unless it’s to give those thugs of his a bit of a thrill. Go ask the guard on duty if you want to know more; but not now,” he added hastily, as Hamon began struggling to his feet.

  “No time. I have to get to the bottom of that girl urgently, and I’ve already lost five days.”

  “You’re not fit. Stay a bit longer.”

  He left Ferdo protesting to thin air.

  Marthe was woken by the clash of the outer door then her own cell door shot across.

  “Up, girl. Major Radcliff wants you,” from the surly guard was her sole warning before the tall figure of the Terran officer briefly glanced in and snapped at the guard to bring her to his quarters. Then there was only the major’s rigidly held back, striding a few paces in front of her.

  He’s in pain, was her second thought. He should still be in bed, she decided next, watching his stilted gait and the tautly held head as she was hurried on behind him by the guards. Her professional eye analyzed her memory of that brief glimpse of his face: the pallor, the harsh darkness of the hollowed eyes. What could have caused them? For an instant she recalled a distraught man clutching her at the end of that session, but dismissed the memory almost as quickly as she shoved away the strange sense of worry it brought her. She was still in a puzzle when they arrived at his rooms.

  “That’s all. You may leave the prisoner with me,” the major growled in a tone even harsher than usual. The guard obeyed only too quickly, clearly recognizing this was no place to linger.

  “Now, girl. You’ve had five days’ reprieve while I’ve been otherwise occupied. There’s no time for more stupid prevarication from you. Take off that silly hood and let me see if you are as much a liar as ever.”

  “Sit down before you fall down,” came her equally sharp retort. “Even in prison the guards gossip, and you shouldn’t be out of the medical wards yet.

  He gasped in anger, pulling his shoulders up stiffly as if to deny her claim. “They gossip too much.”

  Hamon had spoken too loudly, far too loudly for the hammers banging in his head. He winced, and hated the sign of his weakness, even if it did get him what he wanted. The girl threw back her hood, revealing the hair he had once thought so beautiful but now could only dimly notice. She took his arm and led him to the nearest cube chair, forcing him gently down.

  “Major, you’re not well. I can help you, but for now you must sit still. When did you last eat?”

  He shook his head carefully. “Not sure.”

  She disappeared, causing a momentary worry. Hamon had just begun to struggle to his feet when she returned, carrying a bowl of hot broth.

  “Shh, lie back. I’d only gone to fetch a snack. You have my word I will not leave. Please, Hamon, lie down.”

  Some part of him marked her first use of his name and liked it. The rest of him was beyond caring. She soothed the hair back from his brow, slowly easing him down, before offering the broth spoonful by careful spoonful.

  He eyed her suspiciously, too conscious of the closeness of her yielding body as she cradled him to her shoulder. For a few moments more, he held back. This was Marthe asn Castre, his enemy and the woman he had dreamed of for so long. But none of that mattered now. With a silent sigh, he relaxed, allowing his throbbing head to find solace in the peace of her cushioning arms.

  “Your head’s on fire isn’t it?” she whispered softly, seeming to know what loud sounds did to his jangled nerve ends. “Do you remember much of the last few days?”

  “Not much,” he admitted. “I woke this morning for the first time.”

  “Yes, and left the wards rather sooner than you should have. Do you never admit mortality? No, don’t answer, just drink up.” She leaned over to place a kiss on his forehead.

  It seemed that a reverse had occurred, and at the touch of her chaste lips a part of him wanted to reach up and grind her mouth under his to assert his ward ship over her. But later, he again shrugged, as he let himself slip into deep and dreamless sleep.

  For a long time Marthe sat there, at peace in a way she had not dreamed possible as she sheltered in her arms this strong and arrogant man. In repose, the stern face was softened, a smile lurking about the thin mouth; but it was offset by the dark shadows under the eyes, the gauntness of the high cheekbones and the pale, shocked skin. The doctor in her could not be silenced. A stress coma, she would have said. If he’d been under her care, she wouldn’t have brought him to consciousness so soon. But, then, what else could be expected from primitive Terran hacks.

  After eons, his hazel eyes opened lazily and looked upwards. Entranced, she returned his searching gaze, all thought of purpose, duty, role, fleeing out the windows of space, and saw—something. A commitment. The linking of that part of each, unencumbered by loyalty or tribe, unique to them.

  “Truce,” she heard or felt. She nodded dazedly. Then drowned in the warm lips reaching up to enfold hers.

  In the following weeks, Marthe barely recognized the person wearing her voice and body. The truce of that strange evening persisted, as if both had agreed to call ‘time out’ in their battle of wills, had sealed with that overwhelming kiss some mutual pledge. Hamon made no apology for what he had put her through—he couldn’t, both of them knew that—but it was there in his care of her and in the secure isolation he created for her, free of other Terrans. The weeks became a time of exploring what little each of them was able to offer openly. Marthe was still Hamon’s prisoner, as was Jacquel; and she guessed, from the secret transmissions she received from Jaca, that her friend’s treatment remained cruelly different from her own.

  It troubled her less than it should have. She reasoned it was because she could do nothing to change Jaca’s conditions without putting at risk her own cover. Or tried to imagine she was distracting Hamon from inflicting any worse damage on her friend. She filed the matter of Jacquel as business pending and gave herself instead to daydream days spent wrapped in the fragile bubble of her growing enchantment with her Terran captor. For now it was only Hamon and Marthe. Anything else they refused entry.

  Together, they explored this world of hers. She showed him all the gaunt wonder of the upland plateau’s grasslands, etched in clashing beauty under a full moon. First, the bright iridescence of the primary, Dromorne. Then, on one memorable night, there was the rarely seen, translucent glow of the smaller Mathe. They sampled music, and the simple delight of sharing a meal, then afterwards, a kiss and, one night, almost, there was more.

  But not yet. For all that this man made her sing in a way she had never known before, she was not yet ready to let him take her fully. If her masquerade were to succeed, it would be inevitable—or so she told herself, knowing it for a half truth. She had come to want this man, this Terran, as she had never wanted a man before. Yet for now, she held onto this one thing, the inner hold of self, this one part of herself that she still owned.

  It didn’t fool him. By now he knew her, waited for the first, upward tilt of the outer corner of her mouth before she suddenly relaxed into laughter, gloried in her acceptance of him, knowing that she could be one with his thoughts in a way he had never till now found. Certainly not in the entanglements of his family, or the grappling, mercenary place-seeking necessary among his friends as he grew up. It was the search for such understanding that had first driven him to leave Earth. He had roamed the galaxy, acquiring qualifications in various Alliance universities, or dipping into the less exalted schools of the docks, the factories and the ships that happened upon his erratic passage, ever searching but never finding.

  Now the loneliness could be banished. In this woman of his enemy, he had found his other half, though had not yet made h
er his own … maybe never could. Too much lay between them.

  There was no time to change that. This was only an interlude, temporary as were all such. One inevitable day, reality shoved itself back into their life. Hamon was called to his colonel’s office and in short, chilling sentences, his commanding officer destroyed any hopes that Hamon might hold to the contrary.

  “Have you made any progress at all,” the Colonel finished in an exasperated tone.

  There was a worrying threat implicit in the words. Both men knew the mantle of Hamon’s Earthside connections limited Johne’s authority over his subordinate. The Colonel resented it with all the bitterness of the also-ran, and right now Hamon dared not forget it. Within that protective mantle, he could keep Marthe safe, but only if he could furnish a reason.

  And then there was duty, never to be long forgotten. Who was he to put the only chance at joy he might ever have ahead of the lives of millions of his fellow Terrans?

  He did not answer his commander immediately. For days he’d been arguing with himself. Now, he used all those arguments he’d been turning over in his head, all the for and againsts, trying to find what would work best. He began to talk.

  He could yet disarm her, he said. Trick her into revealing what she knew, as he had first proposed. Since then, he’d learnt even more of the toughness and courage she tried to hide and was convinced no other method would work. He’d tried harsher methods on des Trurain, the other Hathian Lieger, to no effect, and he had no reason to believe that Marthe asn Castre would react any differently.

  “What about the other men who were caught wearing patches?” the Colonel asked at the end, having heard him out in a discouraging silence.

  “We’ve nothing on them. Des Trurain was the only one to appear in our pre-conquest records. The rest have been given routine interrogation and are being held pending further developments.

  “Are they a security risk?”

  Hamon had to shake his head.

  “Is there any point in holding them for longer?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t keep them in custody if you want to gain the trust of the asn Castre woman. Especially if they are her confederates, as you claim,” pointed out the Colonel. “Put it out that you can find no case to answer and release them back to the Citadel workforce. Under full surveillance, of course. As for des Trurain, bring the two Leigers together. If they’re in collusion, something should happen.”

  Hamon nodded, giving no sign of his inner dismay, and knowing it had nothing to do with duty or his plans to break open the peasants’ secrets. He did not want Jacquel des Trurain anywhere near Marthe. ‘We would have married.’ The words rang in his brain, a constant companion to all his encounters with the Hathian man.

  There was a nasty smile on Johne’s face at his junior’s reticence. “You could always release des Trurain to house arrest in one of the guest quarters. See what happens if he has the freedom to mingle with the girl in company.”

  “Not a good idea, sir,” was all Hamon could come up with.

  The colonel eased back in his chair, one hand fingering the badge of his rank pinned to the hat placed on one side of the desk. He surveyed Hamon, standing to attention before him. “The girl—is she your mistress yet?”

  Hamon felt his body go rigid. “That is none of your business, sir.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Major. I want this girl broken. You can continue with your scheme, but I expect you to give it your fullest attention—and that means the use of all your considerable talents.”

  Hamon could almost smell the stink of degradation. Not that he didn’t want Marthe, and in exactly the way Johne implied. He needed very badly to explore her body as he had begun to explore her mind; but he had hoped to do it in their own time, needed her to come to him of her own free will.

  Time had just run out.

  Marthe welcomed him home that night with a friendly smile, and anything else she felt at the shadow she saw in his eyes locked tightly down. He was exceptionally tender with her as they lay together for hours, bringing her to delight with the treasures gleaned from his eclectic education and with the caresses of his hands and lips and body.

  And almost she would have let him love her, if she had not recognized in his careful embraces the end of their idyll. His hands traced her body as if trying to imprint her shape on his mind, as if she were some fragile memory to be stored away in the protective tissue paper of his deepest heart. It was an ending. Tomorrow would see the start of the ugly game they must play. For this one, last evening, Marthe would remain herself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Hamon felt the tension brimming from Marthe. They were locked together in the shielded cab of an all terrain rover driving towards the irradiated and abandoned capital city of the Haut Liege and forced by the small space inside the vehicle to sit close together. He could feel the rigid tautness of her body and, with just a slight turning of his head, could see the tight set of her jaw. More was hidden by the all enveloping outer mantle she wore today, a finer version of the peasant’s concealing robe.

  “Would you rather we hadn’t come?”

  “No, no.” She spoke too quickly. “I haven’t been back here since the day of the fall, that’s all.”

  “If it’s the radiation you’re worried about, don’t. We have full hazard level shielding in this thing, and I brought our best protective hazbubble with us. Or is something else bothering you? You’re acting like a cat facing a large dog. Unsure whether to run or stand.”

  “Nonsense, I’m fine. It’s only that I haven’t been down this road since the day your people landed. When I walked out of town that day, I never expected to be able to return.” Under the fall of her sleeves he saw her hands twisting into knots. A sudden tilt of chin as if she swallowed, yet her voice held firm as she added in explanation, “The Council had given plenty of warnings they were going to put the field in place to make sure your people couldn’t touch the City. The peasants all knew to get out if they wanted to survive.” More twisting of hands. “What’s a cat anyway?”

  “A small Terran animal, once kept as a pet, and don’t bite my head off.” He leaned over to draw her close, only partly in reassurance.

  He’d known The City might distress her, but he also knew her well enough now to be aware of the steel beneath her gentle exterior. So why this barely held, tightly coiling of nerves? So different from his entrancing companion of the last weeks. The memory of those weeks shunted his guilt burden up a notch and it was high enough already.

  Those weeks had been a precious gift of time. Ephemeral, yes, but during them she had allowed him glimpses of the woman he remembered from that long ago visit to Hathe. The woman he had fallen in love with. Her courage and grace he knew; her delicious sense of fun had been a rare bonus.

  All that was now banished and it was back to work after the holiday. He had known to expect it as soon as Johne had issued his ultimatum, but that didn’t make the change any easier to bear. At the same time, and despite hating himself for it, his professional side couldn’t stop puzzling over her reaction to this place. The grief he had expected, but why the fear?

  Sensing his curiosity, Marthe attempted to quell her growing sense of doom. She fixed her gaze on the passing scenery, taking care not to look ahead at the white spires, the dreadful emptiness of the once great city now filled only with a sprawling scramble of shrubs and trees that still showed signs of the radiation which protected the capital city of the vanished Hathians from its enemies—or, rather, the machine readings of radiation the Terrans thought protected the City. What would happen if they discovered the deadly levels registering on their equipment were as false as everything else they thought they knew about Hathe’s people—that the signals, the burnt traces of exposure on the plant life, the deadly readings from the small animals that still haunted the area were all a fabrication, a vast blanket of deceptive camouflage blasting out from the resistance’s planet-wide network of transmitters? The
Terrans had no idea of the level of technology available to the Hathians and had nothing in their own techno arsenal to detect it.

  They would remain in ignorance only as long as she could keep her secrets from this man beside her, this wonderful man who could see her soul, this man bringing her to the one place that could break her resolution.

  The City, home for her and all her family and friends. So secure and safe, we thought—teeming with the life of the metropolis and housing Hathe’s government. It had been a place of bureaucracy and individuals—such individuals! But she must not remember, for they had children, sons and daughters who had died in the last battle, children and grandchildren now hiding on Mathe, or eking out a perilous existence planetside, their very lives threatened if any hint of the startling truth should be leaked to the Terrans. The faces of people long gone crowded in on her.

  No, don’t think of them. Look to the side. See the beautiful Pathan tree, the long leaves still swooping in gentle cascade to the ground, so wonderful as shade for picnics.

  “The Pathan trees, they used to be lovely at this time of year,” she said too brightly, as she strove to break the echoing silence.

  “Those drooping ones?” he asked. “They still are, despite the energy burn scars. Particularly the one up on that small rise.”

  He was startled to catch a glimpse of a tear, quickly flicked away as she moved back a strand of hair. “You know it well, I daresay.” he said casually, hating himself.

  She nodded. “It was a favorite spot for lovers.”

  She took swift revenge, he thought savagely.

  “Bendin and I used to spy on them as kids.” A half sobbing laugh accompanied this, then silence.

  “I wonder if your people, wherever they are, also remember it.”

  “My people?”

  “The Haut Liege. I don’t suppose you have any idea where they had planned to go?”