Resistance: Hathe Book One

by Mary Brock Jones

  “Estimate of casualty figures following premature discovery is a thousand fatalities.” It was Marthe who replied, her voice flat, hiding all trace of the wearisome burden that number had become. “We will win, though. It is too late for you to change that,” she added, before again relapsing into silence.

  They were the first words she’d returned to his banter for a long while, and Hamon’s aching, angry heart cried out in disappointment that she didn’t fight back more. Did what they had mean so little to her?

  Marthe didn’t have enough energy left to wonder what lay behind that closed face. All she could do was endure. There was no hope of anything else, and now she must concentrate on what she could win, not on forlorn hopes. From the moment she’d been forced to draw her blaster, she knew she’d lost Hamon. For months, she’d been dreading this day. Unlike Hamon, she had never expected what they had to survive, but having failed so disastrously in her marriage, she must succeed in her duty. Her people must be safe.

  Yet need he make the end so hard? His taunts were all that penetrated the growing haze in her head. They had been in this room for days, it seemed. Soon, her concentration would break. She glanced surreptitiously at the clock. Not long now. Valiantly, she roused herself for the last spell. Just a little longer, stomach. Don’t forsake me yet.

  Always the shielded eyes of her husband watched her. Waiting for that final moment when she could no longer anticipate his subtle maneuvers. She’d had to use her blaster once already as he tested her concentration. It wouldn’t be long till he would do so again, and succeed.

  Their deadly play continued. The drift of the talk changed. No longer did Hamon prod and jeer. His words were now the ordinary gossip of their evenings, achingly familiar and even harder to endure. She could only retreat, deep into the fastness inside her. When would this day finish?

  Hamon watched her closely, searching for signs of collapse under the stony façade. It was usually Laren who met his sallies now, but from time to time Marthe would answer, her voice always the same. Dead and stripped of all that was personal. He asked about the crowd scene on the morning of their wedding, so obviously staged, now he looked back. He was not surprised to hear that the victims were mere dummies, only awed by the incredible skill required to hit two small targets so far away and so quickly.

  At last his waiting paid out, and not a moment too soon. There was less than an hour left. Quietly, he signaled to Ferdo, also intently watching the nodding woman as her blaster hand began to wilt. He pointed Ferdo to the control panel, signing that he would take the weapon and go for the door. A few minutes longer, the relaxed pose carefully held.

  “Now!” he cried. They leapt as one, Ferdo to the panel, Hamon to Marthe, grabbing the blaster as she collapsed in a heap on the floor. He ignored the wretched bundle and raced to the door, slamming it open…

  To meet Jacquel des Trurain, in military dress, with a patrol of strangely uniformed men. Still he refused to give up. He brought up the blaster and pressed the button. Nothing. He threw it away, thrusting madly through the body of men in front of him, but his enemies were too many. They beat him down, though more than one was left maimed on the floor, felled by moves learnt in the streets of Earth, and all would wear his marks for some days. In the end, des Trurains grabbed his lower tunic, raised it to slam a hand against his lower back, and next second a shock wave blasted through Hamon’s backbone, dropping him to the floor in helpless fury, his legs numb and unresponsive.

  “The effect is temporary—usually,” growled the Hathian. “I’ve patched you, so lie still or I’ll repeat the shock till it’s permanent.”

  From the look on the man’s face, he would be only too pleased for an excuse to do just that. Not that Hamon could move anyway, as other troopers swiftly bound him hand and foot, leaving him trussed up against the wall. From there, he saw Ferdo reach the controls and Laren an Castre politely relinquish them. Ferdo frantically attempted to raise some help. It didn’t need the silence to tell Hamon the result. The Hathians had already made that plain. No matter what Ferdo tried, the result was the same. Nobody answered. All that came from the console was an eerie whistle.

  “It’s no use,” said Laren apologetically, kneeling to check on her sister. “You made your move too late, Captain.”

  “But the attack was scheduled for 19.00 hours,” he heard Ferdo protest.

  “The Zenith of the Pillars of Mathe will begin at 19.00 hours. The unique alignment of our solar system, which causes the failure of all Terran equipment, took effect at 18.00 hours. Ten minutes ago.”

  Hamon heard the words. Too late.

  He felt his captors haul him up, felt the agony of his wound as they dragged on his arms. None of it registered. He was too late. He’d failed Earth and his people would die.

  Lying on her side on the floor, Marthe woke to the hard stare of her husband’s eyes from his position on the other side of the room. Eons away, she heard the words of a patrolman.

  “Shall we take the Terrans away now, sir?”

  “Yes, except Major Radcliff. As husband of Marthe an Castre, he merits privileged accommodation,” said Jacquel.

  He was interrupted by the harsh voice of his prisoner. “You are mistaken,” said her husband. “I have no connection to any Hathian. The union you refer to was nothing but a military stratagem.”

  He would not look at her again. She lay still, watching as they dragged him up and took him away, and could do nothing. She had lost the right. It had been so short, their time. Now it was over.

  Voices. That was her next memory. Voices forcing their way into her misty fastness. Anxious, fearful, nervous, the voices of love and childhood memories. Then smells, of anesthetics and disinfectants. I am in a hospital, came the thought, the smells familiar, the voices safe.

  “Wake up, Marthe, please.” Father, his voice deep, gruff, male.

  “Marthe love, wake up. Open your eyes.” Another voice filled with memories of childhood and love. Laren.

  “Agent an Castre, wake up. Now.” A military order from her commander, Gof deln Crantz.

  So many voices, all demanding she return. But none was the right voice.

  She kept her eyes shut and sought oblivion once more.

  Later, it was much later. More voices, the brisk talk of nurses and medics. The reality of her years before the war, when peace and routine filled her days. No more. There was an emptiness inside her now. An emptiness that could never be filled, not after what she had done to him. She fled to the darkness and welcomed the floating mists that kept out the world.

  A sharp sting, awareness spreading, unwelcome and unwanted. She had been trained in this. Someone, some doctor was forcing her to return to the world.

  “No.” Dry lips and a voice long unused. She heard only a cracked whisper. “No, leave me,” she tried again.

  “I am sorry but that is not possible, madame.” A new voice, and a new face leaning over her. The voice of an older man, vaguely familiar. Doctor, said a memory in her head. He has the manner of a doctor—like you.

  She had been a doctor once, a lifetime ago. Another trace of memory returned. She was one no longer. Now she was a soldier, now she destroyed lives.

  “You will wake, madame, for your baby’s sake. You cannot go, not yet.”

  She placed the voice now. Dr an Dothen, from her maternity care team on the moon base. She concentrated, let her senses test the gravity well. No, she was still on Hathe, still planetside.

  “You should be on Mathe, not down here.”

  “The war is over, madame. We are all returned to Hathe, thanks to the heroism of you and your comrades.”

  It was over? Yes, truth. A part of the memory she sought to escape.

  “All over, all gone, nothing left,” she murmured. “Time to go.”

  “Not yet,” said the voice of her doctor. “There is one more life left for you to save.”

  “I don’t save lives,” she muttered. “I destroy them.” Just as she had destroyed
her husband’s.

  A shaking, nurses forcing her to sit up. She tried to struggle, but her body failed her. So weak, so useless. She opened her eyes and saw tubing and grey walls, then her doctor’s face, grim and uncompromising.

  “There is an old saying, Madame an Castre. While there’s life, there is hope. So, equally, without life, there is no hope. Would you deny your baby all hope?”

  It was the one demand she could not refuse. Not even when the pain of it tore through her. She nodded her surrender. “What do I have to do?”

  This time when the grey mists claimed her, she knew she would be returning. She had made him a promise: her baby would survive, and he would see it.

  Thank you for reading RESISTANCE. I hope you enjoyed this start to the story of Hathe as much as I enjoyed creating it. Please consider posting a review or letting your friends know about this book. I appreciate all honest reviews.

  Read on for an excerpt from Hathe Book Two: Pay the Piper.

  PAY THE PIPER

  HATHE BOOK TWO

  BY MARY BROCK JONES

  Secrets are revealed; questions must be answered, as two lovers caught in a maelstrom of opposing loyalties face their toughest fights yet.

  For five years, the Terrans ruled Hathe, taking whatever they needed, especially the energy-rich mineral, urgonium, Earth must have to survive. For five years, the Hathians kept their world safe by hiding behind a façade, posing as subservient peasants and pretending all the wealth and knowledge of Hathe had vanished. Then came the time for Hathe to fight back, and for the Terrans to learn how wrong they were.

  Now the war is over.

  Hamon Radcliff was Head of Security for the Terran forces; his wife, Marthe an Castre, belonged to the Hathian resistance. Surviving the peace was always going to be tough for lovers caught on opposite sides. Both have done what they must to protect their home worlds and those actions have consequences. Nor does the end of war take away all the bitter anger between Hathe and Earth. When that anger finds an outlet, and turns its glare on Marthe and Hamon, peace time becomes downright dangerous.

  Please enjoy this excerpt from the next chapter in the story of Marthe and Hamon:

  The Hathians had trussed him like an animal and discarded him here in the corner of the room. Hamon Radcliff glared at his enemies.

  It was all he could do. He’d tried to resist, fighting back with all the bottled up rage within him. Bruised and battered, held down by enemy soldiers, still he kept punching, kicking, using every half remembered, low down street trick he’d learned growing up on Earth. But then the leader of the Hathian soldiers slapped one of their patches on his back and used it to blast his spine with a shock wave that dropped him flat, his legs flopping uselessly and refusing to answer his furious need for action. Defeated, swiftly bound hand and foot, he was left with nothing. All he could do was watch as the Hathian troops finished rounding up the rest of the Terrans in the communications wing.

  Cleaning up the leftover flotsam. That’s what it felt like.

  He’d nearly won. So close. After all the months of trying to pierce the enigma that lay behind the facade of this world, he thought he’d finally succeeded in keeping Hathe and its precious urgonium firmly in Terran hands. That was before he opened the control room door and met Jacquel des Trurain holding a blaster on him. Now, the Hathian was master and Hamon the conquered; very soon, by the look of it, the rest of the Terran forces on Hathe would join him.

  It was supposed to be the other way round, had been so for five years.

  Ten native soldiers were in the reception area, clearing out all the rooms in this section and commanded precisely and efficiently by des Trurain—for once, observed Hamon bitterly, dispensing with the foppish mannerisms the man had assumed during his imprisonment by the Terrans. Had they been as false as everything else about the Hathians during the Terran occupation? A character the man had assumed to cover his spying for the Hathian resistance?

  Few words were spoken by their captors, yet all the Hathians appeared to know what to do, working in an automated silence that frightened his fellow Terrans more than anything else their captors did. The Hathians were using those secret communication patches of theirs, he guessed, in that constant web of communication that had all unknowingly surrounded theTerrans. What words were spoken were in the native Harmish, a tongue alien to all except Hamon; and those were only single words or phrases, meaningless fragments that left him none the wiser.

  Too soon, all the Terrans were tied up and forced into a line, two by two. On the other side of the control room, the cause of his downfall still lay where she’d collapsed, held by her sister and worked on by medics. He watched them work, watched the faint rise and fall that meant life. Soon, he would be taken away and this would be his last sight of her.

  Her eyes opened then, to hear the Hathians speaking of their prisoners. He watched her face as they spoke his name and saw the change in her eyes as he answered their questions.

  As he denied all claims between them and declared himself for Earth.

  After that, he was dragged roughly from the floor and yanked into place at the back of the line of captured Terrans, the soldiers half carrying him as his legs slowly recovered their use. He stared straight ahead, refusing to look back at the inner control room and that crumpled figure. Whether from fear of what his blind anger at the sight of her would do, or from a desperately battened down streak of anxiety at his core, he refused to think. Instead, he shoved viciously at the Hathian soldier restraining him, sending the man tumbling backwards.

  All he gained for his trouble was a resounding blow from the soldier on his other side, strong enough to send him crashing against the door.

  “That’s for my brother, dead in your mines,” his assailant said, dusting his knuckles and helping up the soldier Hamon had pushed over. Both Hathian soldiers waited contemptuously while the throbbing waves in Hamon’s head receded enough to allow him to stand unsupported. He thought he heard a woman cry out, but deliberately ignored it and stumbled to take his place. Maybe he couldn’t fight back yet, but it felt mighty good to give these upstarts a taste of the future.

  He was shoved back into line and the pull of a force field captured him, preventing any hope of escape. His legs were untied and they moved off—the once proud conquerors forced to march pitiably from their former domain.

  Along the endless corridors of the Citadel they shuffled, at last reaching the vast assembly hall buried deep within the complex. En route, Hamon saw a number of other lines of his fellow Terrans, all marked by the same bewildered looks on their faces. Occasionally, there would be one, bruised and beaten as his own must be, telling of isolated rebellion but, for the most part, the Terrans appeared too dazed to fully comprehend their fate, let alone rebel.

  What, by all the stars, had happened? How could the whole fortress have fallen so quickly? This was the center of Terran control on Hathe, stuffed full with soldiers, weapons and the best surveillance technology available to Earth. He refused to accept it, futilely holding on to hope of something … anything.

  “Forget what you’re planning.” It was Ferdo, marching beside him, his best friend here and the chief communications officer in the Terran occupation forces. Captain Ferdo Braddock, who had finally given him proof of the existence of a Hathian resistance by cracking the secret of their communications system. Ferdo had been in that control room with him.

  “We nearly had them, Ferdo. We nearly beat them.”

  “Maybe, but nearly isn’t good enough. Not this time; and I don’t like that look on your face—not if it means what I think it does. If des Trurain can keep it professional, then so can you.”

  Hamon glared angrily. He’d done much on Hathe he would never forgive himself for, or forget, but his treatment of des Trurain wasn’t on his list of regrets.

  “The man was obviously a spy. If he’s a professional, as you say, then he knew the risks he took. Wait to see what they do to us, now they’re in charge, bef
ore you start regretting what we did to them.”

  “Maybe, but—”

  “Leave it, Ferdo. Not now.”

  For a minute, Hamon thought Ferdo would ignore the warning in his voice, but the Captain closed his mouth and obeyed. Thank the stars. There was so much fury boiling inside him, and talk of des Trurain was just what it would take to send him over the edge. He couldn’t afford that. Not yet.

  One day we would have married.

  She’d said that to him once, long ago in the days when he’d first held her captive. Marthe an Castre, his other Hathian Haut Liege prisoner—his wife—and the man she would have married, Jacquel des Trurain, who was now force marching Hamon to detention and who knew what else. Marthe who lay…

  No. Don’t think of that. Not yet. Not ever. He wiped his face clear and set his eyes forward.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mary Brock Jones lives in New Zealand, but loves nothing more than to escape into the other worlds in her head, to write science fiction and historical romances. Sedate office worker by day; frantic scribbler by night.

  Her parents introduced her to libraries and gave her a farm to play on, where trees became rocket ships and rocky outcrops were ancient fortresses. She grew up writing, filling pages of notebooks and filling her head with stories, but took a number of detours on the pathway to her dream job. Four grown sons, more than one house renovated and various jobs later, her wish came true.

  You can find Mary here:

  www.marybrockjones.com

  https://www.facebook.com/MaryBrockJonesAuthor