“You wish for another friendly chat about mutual interests,” he asked, irony touching that steady voice.
“If you please,” said Jacquel.
But there was no real choice in the offer. Amid a hissing chorus, they quickly retreated from the hall, and soon he had Radcliff back in his old quarters. In answer to his raised eyebrow, Jacquel said merely that it seemed the most appropriate place to detain him.
“You’re stirring up an annoying amount of trouble. It was decided that you should be made to cool your heels for a bit.”
Even now, the Terran refused to give any ground, refraining from asking for how long. Instead, taking advantage of the release from his not so friendly guards, he carefully lowered himself into a nearby cube, nodding to Jacquel to take the one opposite as if he were still in command and still owned this apartment.
As Jacquel sat, Radcliff leaned back and arrogantly crossed his legs while somehow managing to disregard his strapped hands. Flashing a challenge, he eyed Jacquel.
“Well. Out with it. It seems unlikely that you interrupted your busy schedule merely to ensure my comfortable installation here.”
“No,” agreed Jacquel, damnably pleasant. He leaned back himself, gazing at his former captor and now prisoner. To his disgust, there was no sign of discontent, though he would swear that cool, outer mask was a very thin veneer. The bitter lines about the hated faced were too well marked. Or perhaps hate was too strong a word, he conceded. He had always understood what drove this man, politically and personally, and long ago realized that his own bond with Marthe was quite unlike what Radcliff felt for her, or she for him.
Which made no difference to how he felt about Marthe. She was too much a part of his life for him to easily accept the Terran as a partner for her. She and her twin brother Bendin were his oldest and closest friends, as near to family as made no difference. Bendin was dead now, one of the pilots who had flown out in the suicidal attack that kept the invading Terrans off planet long enough for the Hathians to evacuate to a secret base on the moon Mathe those not needed for the resistance. A desperate space battle at the limit of their system from which all too few had returned.
Bendin must be writhing in his grave, he reflected in bitter grief. It was only his innate sense of humor, prompting awareness of the black comedy of the situation, that kept him from beating the man opposite to a pulp. He did, though, take great delight in riding the Terran mercilessly for the next hour, using all his skills to probe the Major’s stubborn resistance. They were as well matched as ever, and at the end Jacquel was forced to concede, grinning ruefully,
“I see I am going to get as much out of you as you ever wormed out of me.”
“Which was precisely nothing,” admitted Radcliff.
“You look tired. Not sleeping well lately?”
Radcliff refused to answer him, and suddenly Jacquel discovered a glow of victory among the ashes. “It comes of having too much on your mind. You should cut down your workload. I know how working nights used to get to me, when our positions were reversed,” he said. “Or is it sleeping on your own again? I daresay it is difficult to get used to at first,” and knew by the sudden clenching of jaw that he had scored a hit. As he stood up he smiled wickedly at the Terran suffering for his sins. “I’ll leave you to the enjoyment of your quarters. Just one more check and we’re gone.”
Turning, he spoke to one of his soldiers, who pulled out a scanner and swept it across the Major. Suddenly the man stopped and hauled the Terran out of his chair.
“There’s a large area of heat on his left side, sir. In fact, his body temperature is high all over.”
Jacquel gave a signal and two soldiers grasped either arm, Radcliff’s hands were untied and his tunic dragged off. Even Jacquel gasped. The faded yellow of severe bruising covered the whole of the torso and there was a large bandage covering the left side. Jacquel gestured again and one of the soldiers gingerly peeled it off. Beneath, the skin was an oozing, scabby mess, with angry streaks of redness reaching up to the armpit and down to the hip. Some effort had been made to keep it clean, but the wound must have caused unimaginable agony and, now that the bandage was removed, the smell sent Jacquel gagging.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Hamon stood still for a moment as he caught his breath. His side had been banged again as they dragged him up, but experience had taught him to cope with the pain. “I thought the sight would please you,” he said as soon as he could speak.
“Of course it doesn’t.”
“Strange. I would at one time have taken the greatest pleasure in seeing you similarly afflicted,” he said, unable to keep the touch of breathlessness out of his voice.
“Sit down, man, before you fall down.” Des Trurain turned to give an order to his second officer, his voice gruff with angry concern. “Get a medical team in here immediately. One of ours. Marthe tells me theirs are primitive.”
Hamon tried to protest. He mustn’t lose contact with his fellow Terrans. They had their orders, but would they keep their resolve without him? And he definitely did not want to be cared for by Hathians.
“The lady is no judge of medical care. It was she who singed me,” he managed to retort. Then the burning in his side cantankerously flared up again, just when he least needed it.
Those hostile words were the last, coherent speech he was to make for weeks.
Chapter Three
Marthe stared at the monitor. Inside the hospital room, a man lay on a bed. All she could see was the still shape of him and the shimmer of a med field covering his torso.
She reached out to touch the monitor, then pulled back.
“3-D,” she ordered.
“Privacy and security modes on. Access denied,” said the disembodied voice of the hospital control system.
“I have clearance. The patient is my husband.”
“Enter ID”
She put out her thumb, touching it to the soft pad below the monitor and waited while the system checked the DNA in her skin cells.
“ID verified. Subject: Marthe an Castre, registered wife of patient Hamon an Radcliff. 3-D on.”
She stepped into the sim field and entered a projection of his room Moving silently, she walked around the bed, gazing her fill at the man there. His face was as strongly marked, his hair as darkly vibrant as ever, and she reached out to touch it, but her hand passed through, insubstantial, the touch of a ghost. She was not here. Not truly, and couldn’t be here if he was awake. She was barred from this sterile room. His medical staff dare not risk his reaction to that.
She pulled back and leaned over him. His eyes were shut, and she could only wonder what color they would be if open. The soft hazel of their nights, the eyes of love? Or the hard green she had last seen as he rejected her forever? He was so big, so strong, so badly injured.
He slept still in the induced coma his doctors had kept him in since he arrived. She could see the bruises, see the healing wound of the burn that stretched over his side. She reached out a hand, hovered just above the field and traced the path of the yellow, black and angry red of his healing flesh.
She had done that to him.
Her hand punched down and the simulation vanished, plunging her back to the outer room. She lifted her hand one last time and placed it on the flat monitor image of him on that bed. “I’m sorry,” she whispered softly—and wondered whether he would ever let her say it to his face.
She pleaded daily with his doctors, but it wasn’t till weeks later that one of them let her enter his actual room. His burns specialist, Doctor asn Marvell, was still naive enough to fall for her pleas and unfamiliar enough with the changes the occupation had wrought in her. He remembered only the laughing med student of their shared youth. She needed to see her husband in the flesh, she said, to believe in his recovery. The good doctor had spent the occupation safely on the moon base of Mathe. Any dirtsider could have told him he was being taken in, but Marthe had no sympathy for him.
&n
bsp; She couldn’t stop the trembling as she went through the hygiene procedures before passing through to Hamon’s room. He was waking longer now, half aware of what was happening around him. Would he recognize her?
She clenched her fists, lifting her chin as she walked in. The doctors were finishing their daily checks, poking at the nearly healed skin and comparing readouts. She’d seen them already, had studied them hungrily in her lonely room at night. He would recover fully. Despite what she’d done to him.
She walked softly to the bed and leaned over, drinking in the faint hint of the smell of him, just present under the chemical blanket of hospital antisepsis. Something locked into place inside her again, a missing part of her that had been skewed out of alignment.
Then his eyes opened.
Cloudy grey-green at first, lost still in the haze of his dreams. Then she saw recognition, first a softening, then phasing into the brilliant green of his anger. He began to rise, a furious growl echoing the struggle of his arms to lift him. A guard snatched her back and the nurses hurried forward.
“You’d better leave now, Madame an Castre,” said the senior nurse in a tone that brooked no argument. She could do nothing but nod agreement and back off. All she could do here was hurt him, and she’d done enough of that already. She left, and did not return while he slept.
Time passed for Hamon in a haze of faces and disembodied words. How long, he couldn’t guess but, lying heavily sedated, his body finally got the help it needed to recover. Once, struggling out of a drug-laden nightmare, he saw her bending over him and strained upwards, growling angrily. At once, she disappeared, not to be seen again. When at last he was allowed to return to consciousness, he knew only an angry despair. How long he’d been incarcerated, he didn’t know, but was certain that he wouldn’t have been brought back to awareness if his influence was still important to the Terrans’ defense. His despair was not lessened by the face he saw bending over him.
“Mother! What are you doing here?”
“It’s a long story. Suffice to say, I’m holidaying here at the expense of the Hathian government.”
“A hostage!”
“You might call it that, but you’re not well enough yet to be worried by it. Rest a bit longer. I’ll come back later and tell you everything.”
“I have been resting. For years, it seems. The damned Hathians have had me drugged up to my eyeballs,” he growled, trying to rise but failing as an inexplicable tide of weakness engulfed him.
His mother cried out for a nurse. One came running, tranquilizer at the ready, but he swept a hand out with the last of his strength and smashed the vial to the ground. Then collapsed back, exhausted.
“You’re feeling more yourself then, Major?” remarked the young doctor who had followed the nurse in. He had spoken in Harmish, but quickly switched to Alliance Standard as the despised language made Hamon rise up again. “Nurse, we can dispense with the sedatives. His skin is sufficiently healed to withstand a few knocks. As long as the Major is not too foolish.”
Hamon had been aware of various manipulations of the damaged skin on his left side, and now strained to look at it. To his disgust, the effort was useless. His fit of temper had exhausted him and he could no longer even raise his head.
“Don’t try to do too much yet, Major. You were very ill and it will be quite some time before your body regains its normal strength. I should have known Marthe would finally choose someone like you for a husband. That scowl of yours is almost as fierce as the one she’s been wearing lately.”
Which was exactly the wrong thing to say. Hamon tried madly to rise again, then collapsed in defeat. “Who the hell are you? And let me out of here.”
“My apologies. Doctor Claud asn Mavell. For the past eight weeks, I have become so intimately involved with you that I forgot you wouldn’t know me. That burn was quite a challenge. Where did you get it?”
“You can thank my wife.”
He saw his mother’s shiver at the venom in his voice. Unfortunately, the young doctor didn’t know him as well.
“Marthe? She’s about the place somewhere, though busy at present. If you would like to see her, I can find out when she will be available,” he offered helpfully.
“Here!”
“Y-yes. Shall I fetch her?” The doctor was at least beginning to realize his error.
“No, thank you,” exploded Hamon.
Fortunately his mother had the sense to bustle the doctor and nurse out of the room before he reopened his wounds. Then, taking one look at him, she kissed his cheek and told him to get some rest, before absenting herself as well. It wasn’t until the next day that she returned, to finally answer the question that had been tearing him apart.
How was Earth faring?
He listened bleakly as she told him in a voice that gave no hint of what she’d been through. His mother had been living with the harsh reality of Earth’s situation too long to show emotion, but her report was fully as bad as he’d feared. Within four, short weeks of losing control of Hathe’s energy resources, cold and hunger had driven Earth to the humiliation of begging for help from the Alliance. She refused to speak of the scorn with which their pleas had been met, but he guessed much from what she didn’t say.
“They didn’t believe you,” he surmised flatly. “So how many people have we left?”
“We lost a number, yes, but it is not quite so bad. Fortunately, they were persuaded to change their earlier opinions. By a Hathian,” she added in response to his look of surprise.
He became very still. “Continue.”
“There isn’t much more to tell. Emergency supplies were sent in, along with an Alliance relief team charged with overseeing the rescue operation and assessing the state of Terran affairs. Following their report, an aid team is now being readied. To help us ‘catch up’, as they put it. I never knew we could be regarded as barbaric savages needing civilizing,” she laughed, not at all bitter. In truth, Hamon realized, a great weight had been lifted from her. For a change, someone else must shoulder the horrific responsibilities that had been hers for too long. “But as barbarians, we are still not fully trusted,” she continued, “which is why a number of prominent Terrans have been removed to various Alliance planets. Hence my sojourn here. In all honesty, I can’t say I mind in the slightest. This place has certainly improved since my last visit, and the Hathians are being quite delightful, everything considered.”
For the first time in his life, he glared at his mother in dislike. “You change your opinions very quickly.”
“No, just learned many years ago when to admit I was wrong … and it was wrong, what we did to these people.”
That was a mistake, too. His face told her this was a burden he had been forced to live with for a long time now, and she sighed for him. Why must life be so harsh to this one son of hers? Or perhaps, why must he be so harsh to life? “You are so like your father,” she exclaimed in exasperation.
His fists clenched. She had fallen into idiocy, and made herself step back, letting fall the mask of the Administrator to cover her mother’s worry and turning to fiddle with the buoyancy controls on his couch.
“Leave that,” he waved in irritation, “and tell me the rest.”
“That’s all I know. The Hathian side you’ll have to learn elsewhere.”
It was intolerable, but no more would his mother say.
Slower than he would have liked, his strength did return. Each day, he enjoyed his mother’s warm but stubbornly uninformative company. They talked of family matters, the new Hathians she had met, even once, angrily, of his father. He was, it seemed, busy negotiating at Alliance Central for an increase in aid for Earth … without the political controls on which the other planets insisted. Not surprisingly, it was proving a difficult battle. After the shock of Earth’s invasion of Hathe, it would be many years before Earth was trusted again. The Terrans’ long history of disdain for their colonial offspring—who, unknown to those on Earth, had raced past them to adu
lthood—was coming home to roost with a vengeance.
For the first time, too, he told her the tale of his years of self-imposed exile: all the trivia and the escapades of his travels, roaming the Alliance as whim suggested. He could see her surprise at the cosmopolitan education he’d picked up, both in the gutters and in the high academies of the worlds he’d passed through.
“Didn’t you have to take political science at the Military Academy on Earth? How we ever got you to finish that, I’ll never know.”
“It was a good, general education, and at the time I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Then why a Cantor degree?”
“Their course on interplanetary politics had a slant rather different from ours.”
As usual, she thought dryly, understating his point. In these few days, she’d learned much about the passionate animal this son of hers kept hidden so skillfully behind reserved words and a cold exterior, but still she refrained from discussing what, she was coming to realize, more and more occupied the greater part of his mind. Then came the day she found him up and about, restlessly pacing the hospital room like a caged tiger. It was time.
“You want to know how the Hathians routed us so easily.”
“Of course I do,” was the testy reply. “Are you finally going to tell me?”
“Not I, no, but I have brought someone who can.”
She called to someone standing just outside the door. There was a pause, then a woman entered—a woman bulky and slow with her seven-month pregnancy.
Hamon stared, his face white, fists clenched. Marthe. Her face a little fuller, the vibrant hair coiling about her head and shoulders as beautiful as ever, the large eyes dark and questioning. The high cheekbones were not as harshly outlined as when he had last seen her, nor her posture as upright, bent with the weight of her belly.
Pay the Piper: Hathe Book Two Page 4