“Get her out of here,” Hamon shouted.
It was his mother who left, giving his enemy an encouraging smile. Marthe stared at him with a face that showed nothing. It took Hamon some minutes to regain sufficient control to speak.
“I wonder you dare come here. Or have you a blaster hid somewhere about your no longer so beautiful body?” he sneered, subsiding into a nearby cube and wishing with everything in him that could be the truth. It wasn’t. She was as beautiful as ever.
“I am weaponless, and the surveillance is switched off,” she said.
“So you are at my mercy again. It’s a good thing for you that I don’t harm pregnant women … even such as you.” His hands gripped the sides of the cube, but he blocked every other sign of the fury raging within him.
“I apologize for inflicting my presence on you, but I owe you an explanation and you are going to get it. I promise you that after this I will not bother you again.”
Her voice was quiet and steady and she sat down opposite. He noticed that she held herself rigidly upright, her back propped hard against the cube. He glared at her, hating the riot of feeling clashing through his body.
“I can learn all I need from other sources. You will leave,” he shouted, jumping up and crossing over to grab her arm and push her out of the room but, at the touch of her, he leapt back as if burned. Even now, he could barely control the impulse to pull her into his arms.
Marthe flinched at his touch. She had once meant everything to this man. Now she must watch him range about the room seeking escape.
“I cannot leave till you know the full story. After that, I promise, swear by anything you wish, you will not see me again.”
“All right. Give me your excuses, then go!”
It was the barest of capitulations and he stood now as far from her as possible, caught in the far corner of the room. She forced herself to ignore his distance and ploughed on with the words she had rehearsed so hard all the way here.
“First, I must go back five years, to when your people initially landed.”
“Just get to how you so effectively sabotaged us. This is no place for old melodramas.”
“It’s necessary,” was her steady reply but she couldn’t prevent a pause before she continued.
If she didn’t look directly at him, maybe she could get through it all without being stopped. She took a deep breath and started. “No one could believe it, you see, when your ships appeared in our skies and you fired on our welcoming barge. We were at war, and it was all too obvious we would lose. Our only chance lay in subterfuge, to pretend to be less than we were until we could find some means of defeating you. So we hid in the one place you would never think to look—right under your nose. To give us time, we sent out what few fighters we had to attack your ships—that paltry holding action you so easily defeated. Not surprising as most had never fired a shot except in practice or play. But they were there only to delay your ships while the rest of the planet did the real work, turning hunting villages and camping shelters into the crude towns you found. The township at the Citadel was once a popular outdoor education center. The scientific settlement on Mathe became our headquarters in exile. A refuge for the councilors, technologists and scientists. We abandoned the cities, evacuating to the new towns, and left behind radioactive signals to guard our homes.”
“Signals?” interrupted a startled Radcliff.
“Yes. The readings you picked up were false, artificially generated. We knew your equipment would accept them as real. We’d learned early in the holding battle that, technically, we were well ahead of you in many areas.”
He started to move again, raging back and forth. She fixed her gaze on a spot on the wall behind him.
“And the dead plants? The whole city stank of decay.”
“An olfactory and visual illusion, borrowed from the theatres.”
She waited, letting his pacing burn off the worst of his anger. At least he was listening to her. Yet still he stayed as far away as possible—out of disgust at her presence, she presumed miserably. She ploughed on. She would have one chance only to say all this. One chance to tell him everything.
“It may please you to know that we nearly didn’t finish in time,” she offered, steeling herself to continue. “The protection of the cities and mines did get done before you landed. It seemed they would be your first targets.
The next year was chaos. There were flaws in the rushed transformation to a race of peasants, and the construction of the Mathe colony and the underground control centers still had to be completed. It was six months before we even discovered that you were technically so far behind us—that you were solely dependent on urgonium-generated, electromagnetic energy and knew nothing of infrareactor pulses.”
She ignored the question in his sudden stillness, knowing if she stopped she would never be able to start again.
“As soon as we discovered that, things became easier. We could move about much more freely. In the second year, an effective communication system was developed and a clearly defined goal established, with a time scale to guide us. We found that we could readily subvert your surveillance devices and so, at the start of the third year, could begin regular flights to and from Mathe. We hadn’t dared to risk sending out ships before in case you detected them but, now, we could give those based on Hathe some badly needed respite and shift the sick back to Mathe for proper treatment. Up till then, we could only patch them up in makeshift field centers and hope for the best.
Then it was just a matter of gathering as much information as possible so we’d be ready to move on the Zenith of Hathe. This year. It would be our only chance to defeat you without bloodshed. We were cutting it fine all the same, hence the heavy workloads of the past months. I was starting to feel like a walking data bank.”
Her weak attempt at levity fell flat. “Why the Zenith of Hathe?” he wanted to know.
“The magnetic fields of Hathe, Mathe and our sun overlap at that time, creating an anomaly which disrupts any electromagnetic field. None of your machinery could operate while the effect lasted, but our own was unaffected, leaving us free to take control again. Thankfully we didn’t have to wait the full ten-year cycle.”
“And the time difference? You made your move before the Zenith.”
“The fields overlap enough to cause the disruptive effect one hour beforehand, when Hathe appears to stand over the third of the Seven Pillars on Mathe. The time we call the Zenith starts when Hathe first casts its shadow over the Fourth Pillar. And when Hathe is placed squarely over the Fourth Pillar at midnight, as seen from the ancient observatory on Mathe, it is the time of full Zenith.”
She stopped, unable to dredge up any more trivia to fill the silence, and sat stiffly to await his reaction.
She saw amazement amidst the fury. Then acceptance.
Hamon had heard of the pillars found on Mathe by the first colonists, had seen the holovids of the Zenith showing the white globe of the planet Hathe standing high over the central pillar and casting long shadows over the eerie lunar landscape. Shadows that converged, to some unknown purpose, in the center of the strange, bowl-like valley that held the alien structures. Some kind of observatory, it was thought.
Yes, he had heard of the Pillars, and what she told him set him thinking furiously. Her singsong recitation had made the fantastic story seem quite unreal. Yet the more he thought about it, the more plausible it sounded. Humiliation set in, adding to the anger. “The planning, the detailed knowledge of us it required!”
“We had three years and, fortunately for us, you relied mostly on automatic surveillance not human patrols. By feeding our own vids through your receivers, we were free to move about as we liked. The only places we couldn’t study were those under permanent manned guard, such as the Terran section of the Citadel. Then you captured Jacquel and me, and we were brought to live there permanently. It was the closest the resistance ever came to being discovered, but it did have a very useful side effect. For the first time,
we could directly access your central data banks, confirming much that we had only been able to extrapolate from the peripheral centers. It cut down the possibility of failure significantly. It also allowed for the peaceful takeover of the Citadel, with no serious injuries to either side.”
She was babbling, she knew, but forced herself to keep talking. Anything to ward off his response. But this last claim proved too much.
“No serious injury? Your little pot shot laid me up for eight weeks.”
“You shouldn’t have gone for that side weapon. I had to stop you.”
“Just as you had to use our so convenient arrangement to steal all our secrets? No wonder you were so worn down, what with keeping your entry ticket satisfied and amiable, and delving into our terminals. I’m amazed you found time for it all.”
He threw himself back into the cube again, his chin buried into his chest as the hawk-like eyes bore in to her. It drove all life from her voice, reducing it to a mechanical whisper.
“The data gathering had of necessity to be done at night.”
“You were in my bed at night. I checked the records each morning.” Then he stopped. “You mean..?”
“Yes. I substituted the vids and drugged you before I left.”
“You were busy! And the rigmarole you gave me that night? How hard life had been for you since we arrived?” His chin jutted forward, as if to stab her deep to her heart.
“It was based on truth.”
“Very loosely,” he sneered back. “Perhaps you’d better tell me the whole. What you were really doing these last five years.”
So she told him. It was a bald recital, leaving out much. Despite all, she hadn’t yet been reduced to begging for pity.
She told him of the first year, travelling by foot to carry messages between groups before the communications network could be set up, and assisting the medical teams—both during that first holding action and later, after the conquest, in the mines. A makeshift effort that had been, patching up where they could without letting the Terrans know, burying their patients more often than not. Even as her voice brushed lightly over that time, she could still remember how pitifully relieved she’d been when she was recruited to the special training schools in the second year. She had frequently tramped in the desert before the war and showed a real aptitude for undercover work in her early assignments, so had been co-opted into the elite section.
Of the next three years of grindingly hard and dangerous work, she gave a bare sketch only—the facts but not what lay behind them. Always her assignments had been of the worst. Roaming from group to group, it had been she and others such as Jacquel who had crept right under the enemy’s nose to set up the surveillance devices for monitoring Terran personnel and their routines. On occasion, they would also sabotage the supply trains to steal the equipment they needed.
“If you stole from us, how was it we never found out?” demanded a disbelieving Hamon.
“We altered the lading bills. Your clerks could never remember exactly what they’d ordered.”
“You seem to have little respect for Terran clerks.”
“Or Hathian ones.” But the placating sop was a failure.
She hastily continued her recitation, still giving only the cold facts and leaving out what had accompanied them: the deadly fear that threatened to sap her will to go on, the hunger and cold, the beatings, and the many times she had narrowly escaped discovery or death. She finished with that last day. The day neither of them would ever forget, when she had held him at the point of a blaster in the communications room, watched and listened as he taunted her, until, finally, it was too late for him to do anything to stop the Resistance takeover and she could give in to the weakness of her body. The day she had shot him.
“I woke five days later, here in First Hospital.”
“And since then?”
“Helping in the hospital and catching up on medical studies,” was her only reply. Nothing would induce her to tell him of the unpleasantness she had faced since Hathe ruled its own again, that this time of freedom for which she had waited so long was proving to be the hardest of all to endure.
Most especially, she would not tell him of the coming trial. For ‘undue fraternization’. Her superiors promised that it would be a mere formality, but how she dreaded such a public exposition of her private affairs.
He stared at her for some time, all the while keeping as far away as possible. For a moment, a suspicion of doubt crept across the harsh features. Then it was banished. She had lost.
Her fingers brushed across her swollen belly, nervously pleating the lower edge of her tunic. But that was not permanent either, the shimmering material falling softly back to its pristine silkiness as soon as her fingers released it. Bitterly, she sighed and looked up again, then wished she hadn’t.
“Is life not as salubrious as you anticipated, then?” His eyes held hers and the sudden blankness of face she could not control confirmed it for him as much as her hasty disclaimer. “What a pity,” he murmured.
To what he referred, she was unsure, breaking off that disturbing eye lock and bracing herself for the last, and hardest, part of this most difficult of interviews.
“There is one more matter we must discuss.” Her lifeless voice came out a shaky quaver.
Hamon straightened instantly. Before this, though he might ask all the pertinent questions, he had kept hidden the utter concentration with which he’d listened to her words. Her hesitation was the signal for that to cease. Abandoning all pretense of disinterest, he strode forward, coming to a halt right in front of her and forcing her to look upwards if she wished to see his face. The deadly tone of his “Oh?” killed any such attempt.
“You hesitate. Is it possible you finally feel some guilt? Some hint that you acknowledge your betrayal?”
“It’s not that. I’ve explained the reason for my actions. I didn’t intend it to be seen as an apology.” The words might be defiant, but her voice had sunk even lower. Again she hesitated. Then: “It’s the baby.”
“What about it?”
He stepped forward, menacingly closer.
She braced herself before continuing, taking a deep breath to make her voice a fraction stronger. “Since we’re unlikely to meet again, I have to know whether or not you retain a claim. If so, we must decide his future.”
Suddenly and viciously, he caught her by the elbows, hauling her up till her feet barely touched the floor. The white fury etched on his face made her flinch as if struck.
“Understand me, and understand me well, madame,” he snarled. “You will not steal my child from me.
“I never said that,” she exclaimed. Then blanched. “You wouldn’t! You couldn’t be so cruel as to take him away?”
“It’s what you were planning to do to me, wasn’t it?”
“No, never that. Only to work out some sharing arrangement.”
She was pleading now, her arms aching where he still gripped her. Wordlessly, she stared up at him, too aware of his closeness and filled with a dreadful yearning that he would hold her closer still, but in another way entirely. Something of the same must have been in his mind for, with no warning, he let her drop, snatching his hands hastily back.
She landed on the cube in a thudding whoosh. Thankfully it gave on impact, cushioning some part of her fall, but she was badly jarred. Her attention bent urgently inward, all other worries driven out in panicked fear for the baby.
“Much more of that and we won’t have a son to worry about,” she snapped, forgetting everything she’d come here for as her hands cradled her belly protectively and her temper flared.
It was the worst possible moment. Hamon had almost begun to lose the black rage that had driven him so long, dismayed by the flash of panic washing her face. Then her black eyes sparked into fury, telling him she was safe. Freeing him to discard the tenderness, and once more give into his craving for revenge.
“You dare to pretend that losing my son would worry you unduly,�
�� he jeered.
“The child is also an Castre. That is sufficient to cancel out any flaws in his genetic make-up,” she jeered back, every bit as arrogant now as he and bent only on causing him as much pain as she felt.
“The records will designate asn Radcliff. I doubt even your father can get the almighty Hathian genealogies tampered with.”
“Perhaps. But I can spare my child from knowing the truth of his father. What you really are.
“Which is?” he asked dangerously.
“Terran rabble. A ragtag adventurer, scorned by his own father, whose only claim to fame as far as I can learn is that he is known among all the scum and dregs of the Alliance. Well, you needn’t think you are going to bring my son up like that.” She had shot back up again and stood, leaning forward in her fury, the bulge of her stomach stretched tauntingly towards him.
“If you value your life, you had better leave. Now.”
He was a magnificent sight, and even in her anger she drank him in. But his eyes were fully green and brittle and his skin was dark with flushed rage, a stark contrast to the white hospital gown. Deliberately he turned away, white knuckles grasping the edge of the sleeper as he stared fixedly out the window at the opal luminescence of the Hathian sky.
“I am counting. You would be wise to be gone before I reach ten.”
Cold sense came crashing back. What had she done? She stood a brief moment longer, looking at the unrelenting line of his back, then turned and left, unnecessarily slamming the door panel shut behind her.
Once outside, she held tightly to her facade of control, walking out between his guards and around the first corner. Then she found a quiet side hall, and there, the trembling won. She leaned back against the cool hospital walls, her mind as whirling and smoky as their marbled blues and whites. She had fouled that up nicely. She cursed long and silently, heedless of the cascade of tears streaming down her face. Stumbling, she turned and crept slowly down the endless walls, intent only upon her flyer.
And then? Home. Home and the privacy of that sweet room where, undisturbed, she could drop her hateful front of self-control. Safe in that fortress, the tears would come, the pain break out and the howling within her be released.
Pay the Piper: Hathe Book Two Page 5