Resistance: Hathe Book One

by Mary Brock Jones

  “Maybe, but Marthe was telling me of the deficiencies of Terran technology last night. She said that in communications we’re fifty years behind. A well endowed scientific community can learn a lot in fifty years. And even if ignorance of the field leads her to exaggerate, it still suggests they are well ahead of us.

  Ferdo suddenly sat up, a tight frown creasing his face.

  “Ignorant? Not the daughter of Sylvan an Castre. Even on Earth, we heard rumors of the work he was doing. Unfortunately, no one in authority thought it worthwhile finding out more. But if only half the stories of his work are true and he talked to his daughter about it, then she’d know exactly how far ahead of us they are.” Ferdo paced once, then turned back to stare at him.

  “Fifty years, you say?” He looked at the ceiling and Hamon could almost see him turning over ideas. Then he turned back in disgust. “If that’s true, why haven’t they made any attempt to interfere with our transmissions? If they’re that far ahead, they should be able to bring us to a standstill, but we’ve never detected the slightest hiccup in the network.”

  “Not even a twitch?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Radcliff slumped back. He was grabbing at phantoms, but something was happening. He knew it.

  “One more flaw in your argument,” said Ferdo then. “The beautiful Marthe, your First Union partner. You obviously don’t suspect her, not with this marriage thing you’re planning. I understand it’s fairly binding?”

  “For life.”

  “So you trust her.”

  “Quite the contrary,” said Hamon bitterly. “I’m more and more convinced that she was planted deliberately in the Citadel. Her intuitive understanding of our real lines of influence is amazing; and she knows how to use them. On two occasions already, she’s been able to manipulate our affairs enough to threaten the security of the Citadel, while at the same time increasing sympathy among her supporters.” He gripped the arms of the chair as the pounding in his head suddenly exploded.

  “You exaggerate, surely.” Ferdo was too innocent still, too unaware that even the most trustworthy of people would stab you in the back when it suited. He was glaring at Hamon as if he’d said something absolutely unforgivable. “If you mean her introduction of des Trurain, it’s only natural she’d wish to help a friend. As for the wedding, I’ve never seen a woman yet who didn’t want an affair of which she was to be the centre of attention to be as large and grand as possible.”

  “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.

  The vids started with Radcliff’s entry into his office first thing that morning. The blasted Terran strode into the security wing’s rooms with cold determination in his dark eyes. Gof saw recognition of that look on the faces of the veterans on Radcliff’s staff and the excitement blooming in them. He listened intently to the buzz of gossip that followed in the man’s wake. His inner frown deepened.

  The Major had been letting things drift, they said, while he dallied with his little native, but no longer, by the looks of him. In his periods of bright, fiery activity, th
ey’d follow him anywhere, and did he ask some marvelous adventures of them! But these spells of delving into people’s psyches, as he put it. Bah! The young ones could have that. Far better those first, heady days of the occupation when there was going to be urgonium enough for all of Earth, land for the taking, plunder and spoil for all, with rumors of the most beautiful women in the Alliance when they finally unearthed the damned Liegers.

  Then, they had strode the streets like kings, free to remind the natives just who were their new masters, and all the security wing had to concern itself with was procuring workers, watching for rebellion and scouring the planet for Liegers.

  As for the Major! The devil himself, he was. Here, there and everywhere, his finger in every pie going. He’d been but a captain then, said the oldest man in the room, sent here to assist the occupying forces because of his previous experiences on Hathe. In truth, there hadn’t been a branch of the services that didn’t end up with his mark on it. Even then, there had been the sign of the leader on him. And look at him now, second in seniority only to Colonel Johne. Second to none in real power, they joked. Not that he chose to use it often, unfortunately.

  But when he did! The older ones laughed quietly, wondering whether the Commander had ever quite learned of all the measures that had been implemented.

  Yes, those were the days. He had swept in like now, that dark devil in his eyes, snapping out orders that changed the whole face of the planet. It was he who had rearranged the work schedules, doubling the natives’ output—and lengthening their life spans, admittedly. He who had set up their mighty intelligence network, delving into all aspects of native and Terran life. Now, here he was, those crisp, sharp orders of his snapping out again. The men all jumped to attention and shut up as their Major came back into the common office.

  “Jones, get onto Security and tighten up the native checking procedures. Hawarth, your area is the local work force. Update native lists and bring me a comparison of work output in the different sectors. Markham, background all native domestics in Terran quarters. Reason for imprisonment and length of duty, then interrogate any who seem suspect. By my methods,” he added, turning to fix a black stare upon the unfortunate man. “You’re apt to discover more than by the Commander’s methods.