Why was he so determined to stay? Earth needed him, needed his skills very badly now.
He sat down and tried again. Taking a deep breath, he pulled out his next card.
“Let me access my financial records on your screen.”
Deln Crantz showed real interest for the first time. Hamon didn’t fool himself into thinking that meant the man was bribable. The amused grin on the small man’s face confirmed it, even as his fingers reached out and activated his screen.
Then he sat back and waved his arm in invitation. “It’s all yours. Input your access data.”
Hamon leaned over, let the light beam read his skin cells then added his code to the system, making sure all the while that deln Crantz had full view of what he did.
A few more entries and then he was finished. He switched it round to let deln Crantz see the full display on the screen.
“That’s my current financial position. As you can see, the connections I mentioned aren’t confined to Earth alone.”
Deln Crantz looked at the screen, his face a bland mask, then it changed. Hamon wished he could take some pleasure from the shock on the man’s face. The Hathian leaned forward, his fingers reaching to the figures, poking at each balance and tracing down the lists.
“You own all this?”
Hamon nodded.
“You’re worth… Is that figure at the bottom accurate?”
Hamon nodded again. “You can have your finance ministry run through the data. Most of the companies are owned by double and triple blinds, but my ownership is traceable if I tell you where to look.”
“How did you accumulate so much? You were serving here the last five years. And kept busy at it. Our agents can attest to that.”
Hamon shrugged this time. “I found I had a knack for reading economic cycles and I needed a hobby to take my mind off my work here.”
“Some hobby. You do realize this makes you wealthy on an Alliance scale?”
Hamon nodded again. It was getting to be repetitious. “So does that make me important enough to be a hostage? If anything happens to me, a number of significant Alliance companies would be badly hit.”
Deln Crantz nodded this time, very slowly, then stared at the figures one last time before switching his attention back to Hamon.
“Why?”
“I want my mother home, safe.”
“No harm will come to her here. You know that. Try again.”
Hamon refused to answer. He’d hoped not to, not unless he had to, but it looked like he wasn’t going to be so lucky.
“Does Marthe know about this?” the other asked suddenly.
“No,” he replied curtly. “Nor do I want her to.”
“One of our best agents doesn’t know she’s spent months living with a man this wealthy?”
“She knows some of it,” he conceded. “That I have off-planet interests and enjoy following the markets. The extent of it? No. I tend to accumulate rather than spend my wealth. If it’s news to you, she obviously doesn’t know,” he couldn’t resist pointing out.
Deln Crantz acknowledged the hit, then placed his hands together again, still studying him like some prize specimen.
“Tell me again. Why do you want to stay? And make it the truth this time.”
Hamon had never felt so trapped. He thrust back up, pacing hard, but could see no escape. He stopped, caught.
“Because I made a promise, that’s why. I promised to stay here till my child is born.”
Deln Crantz must have been laughing his head off inside, but outwardly he merely gave a small smile of satisfaction, as of a complex puzzle now solved.
Hamon stepped back in disgust, hating the sense of failure. “I’ve taken up enough of your time. Please call the guards.”
“You can stay, Major. Until the child is born and properly settled. Your mother may go whenever she decides to.”
He stopped short and stared. The man was serious. Deln Crantz nodded confirmation.
“Thank you,” said Hamon. And wondered why he suddenly felt free.
Chapter Five
Madame Freya MacDiarmid sat lost in thought, faced with the all too familiar dilemma of a problem that seemed to have no solution. This time, though, it wasn’t the strident needs of Earth gnawing at her. It was her son. Her son and her barely known daughter-in-law, Marthe an Castre of Hathe.
She was at an evening reception, her chair placed near the railing of the balcony to allow her to look down in pensive contemplation on the room below. She could see Marthe there, seated in the middle of a crowd. Yet she seemed utterly alone.
Fear struck the older woman anew. They’d had a bad start, this new daughter-in-law and she, and were still not close. But since the stunning end to the occupation, Madame Freya had been forced to review many of her past attitudes and not least this one. The Hathians had lifted the worst of burdens from her; she could afford to be generous in return. The sheer relief of turning Earth’s problems over to the Alliance couldn’t be put into words. For the first time in generations, there was food for all Terrans. To the loss of liberty to run their own affairs she gave never a thought. There was little enough before.
She’d arrived here dreading the imprisonment she expected as hostage for Earth’s good behavior only to find that her status was more that of honored guest than captive. She was free now to return home if she wished, and must leave soon. Earth needed her, but she hadn’t expected to be so torn between worry for her son and her home.
Not that she was blind to why she’d been among those originally taken. She knew too much about how Earth worked and was too important a member of the past government. The Alliance had wanted gone from their home planet any who might be involved in founding a resistance to the new order—such as her own son, she acknowledged ruefully. The stars help the Alliance if he were to be let loose on Earth in his present frame of mind.
That brought her back full circle to her first worry. She looked down again at her daughter-in-law, heavy with child and slumped in a seat. Her face was pinched and withdrawn, so different from the rest of the lively crowd of women surrounding her. Then Freya noticed again what she had seen on other nights. There was a space around Marthe, an unconscious shrinking away from her by the other Hathians. No trial, however fair and open, was going to wipe that gap away.
Not that Marthe appeared to notice. She sat, still and quiet, making no attempt to join in any conversation, and soon, Freya saw, she rose and made her discreet farewell. Her walk as she left was slow and ponderous—not just the slowness of pregnancy but as if a great burden of grief and despair was upon her. Her son might claim that Marthe had lived with him out of duty only, but Freya seriously doubted that—though not that Marthe had used her position to spy on the Terrans; it was what her loyalty to her people had demanded of her, just as loyalty to Earth had forced her son to interrogate and extract information from this woman he adored.
Why, Freya wondered, having been forced to act so contrary to all that love and trust demanded, could he not understand the forces that drove Marthe, so exactly his mirror? Instead, he wallowed in his pain, hiding from the truth behind its buttressing shield. Without that defense, he might have to come to an evening like this, might see what his mother saw—what this cruel separation was doing to the mother of his child.
Marthe had withdrawn behind a high wall of despair. Daily, Freya listened to her family’s fear as they saw the shadows beneath her eyes deepen. She ate, yes, but only enough to keep going. Not enough to nurture her and the child she carried. Her burgeoning pregnancy seemed as nothing. Yet Sylvan had told her of a Marthe once fiercely driven by the need to provide a safe home for her baby. And Freya knew fear again—fear for her yet-to-be-born grandchild, fear for its mother, but most of all fear for her son. She knew what he said, but if anything happened to his wife and child, how would he survive it?
Down below, Marthe knew of her mother-in-law’s scrutiny, but gave no sign of it. Madame MacDiarmid and her own family mi
ght guess at the cause of her decline, but they couldn’t know the whole—that inside, Marthe was more deeply lost than they imagined. All around lay nothingness. This new Hathe was too foreign, too bereft of any guidelines. Long forced to survive in a double-edged world of shadows, deceit and danger, the normal, peacetime world seemed instead a place beset with hidden snares.
It was a world that had rejected her. Her family may think she no longer noticed the unconscious recoil by all who met her, with the exception of the close circle who knew the truth of her history, and Marthe had no intention of spoiling their illusions. To her, it was but an inescapable part of the grayness, not worth fighting.
Looming over her too was her coming trial. To be condemned to a public display at the whipping stand was more, she thought, than she could bear. Not after all she had endured.
Overriding all was losing Hamon. She sank into the shadows, seeking oblivion as pain cut in anew.
He had known the rules they lived by, had always accepted, she assumed, that she must act against him; but that didn’t mean he would one day come to understand what she had done to him that day. His pride was too strong and his commitment to his people too deep ever to forgive her triumph—not betrayal, no, despite what he thought. Merely the last chapter in that awful game they had played so long. She had always known it would end like this, but it hadn’t stopped her fighting for an alternative while she was with him.
Now, there was no hope, nor ever would be, she realized bleakly, threading her way out of the garish reception. She’d felt his mother’s eye upon her and knew of the Administrator’s attempts at reconciliation. She could have told her not to bother; it wouldn’t work. But why, please God, did she have to miss him so badly? Like a great gash in her side that bled and bled and bled.
That last interview haunted her. How angry he’d been and, damn it, how angry she had become. She laughed mirthlessly, amazed that she could ever have felt so much emotion. Now, mere weeks later, it was all she could manage to get through the daily rituals of living. Periodically, unknown to her family, she would escape the protective guard they insisted on, concerned still with the anger of the crowds in the street. To someone of her training, it was easy enough to evade her escort. Unrecognized, she would take her skimmer up and over the lush, down-country lands, across the harsh dividing range, to seek solace once more in the emptiness of the high plateau. There alone, it seemed, she could find rest. There, where a moment’s neglect could lead to death. That she could understand; but this peacetime world, with its petty intrigues, its trivial concerns and twisting of facts. Here, she was lost in an ever winding maze … and had no guide. The only one who could have helped was barred to her forever.
He was still in the City. Barely a mile away in a carefully guarded military complex, so close she could almost feel his arms reaching for her; but he might as well have been on another planet. Once his child was born, he would be gone … taking the baby with him, she didn’t doubt. Not after his angry words. So her son, too, was gone. No point in dreaming of days of playing with tiny hands and feet.
Her doctor was concerned. The physician in her recognized it, as if she were looking over the case notes of a colleague’s patient. He urged her to eat, to rest, to talk out her fears and worries, urged her for the sake of the baby. She tried—she had made a promise to Hamon that his son would be safe—but couldn’t. Couldn’t stop the restlessness. Couldn’t face the food they shoved at her. Couldn’t even begin to talk. That might make her begin to feel again.
Her medical training told her the truth of it. She’d been pushed too far, too often. She recognized the breaking points but only as words on a chart, unconnected with reality. Worn out with lack of sleep and overwork, by the end of the occupation she’d been in no state to cope with the devastation of Hamon’s loss. On top of that, she’d been thrust into an environment even more hostile than before. Deprived of revenge against the Terrans for the horrors of the occupation years, her own people had instituted a witch hunt, and she was the target. Facts were lost in popular myths. She was guilty and must pay, said the pop banners.
The Council had no choice but to agree to her trial. Anything else would look like a cover-up. They promised her it would be a formality, but coupled with the hate and fear she met every time she braved the streets, it was too much. Her overstressed mind and body reacted in the only way it could—denial. This strange new world did not exist, the baby was coming to another woman, this growing body belonged to someone else, and Marthe an Castre the person retreated to a refuge deep within the worn out, listless shell that was her body.
Her father had tried to shake her out of it; Jaca tried and failed; her mother-in-law was most persistent of all, goaded, Marthe guessed, by the need to have her own son whole again. In vain. Deeper and deeper Marthe fled, coming to dread their kind thoughts and words. Increasingly, she shunned those public engagements she wasn’t forced to attend. The birth was so close now, it was easy to make her excuses. One by one, the number of her friends shrank down to a close, loyal circle, and even they didn’t bother her much.
So it was with detached surprise that she heard her door chime one day. Listlessly, she signaled the unknown guest to enter, all the while continuing to gaze blankly out the window. She had no welcome for this intruder who bearded her in her private chambers. She sighed heavily and turned slowly to meet the interloper.
A wave of nausea and fright surged up from the bowels of her stomach. She sat down abruptly on the nearest chair and stared in dismay. For once, the lethargy had fled.
“You! What are you doing here?” she managed to gasp, staring at the cold face of her husband. Goosebumps tingled all over her and she hugged her arms to her body. Stars, but the sight of him warmed her. The dark hair curled as crisply as ever at his temples. Still that harsh mouth sent a shiver to the base of her spine. Then she saw his eyes, cold jade, and the growing hope within her was abruptly quenched.
“Glad to see me, madame? You shouldn’t be. I have come to put a stop to this ridiculous charade of yours.”
“Charade?” she stammered uncertainly.
“What else would you call these claims of illness my mother keeps forcing down my throat to get me here? Though how you managed to fool her is beyond me.”
There was ice in his voice and he had come no farther into the room than was absolutely necessary.
“I’m not ill.”
What role was required of her, she worried, dragging a lock of hair back from her face.
“Then why does my mother continually nag at me? Are you deliberately starving yourself just to spite me? I had thought even you would have some feeling for your own child’s safety.”
“The child? I know I owe you that. Your child, whole and well, I mean. He’ll be all right, you can take him away safely,” she said earnestly, trying to assure him of this, at least.
To Hamon, her voice possessed a weird, otherworldly quality, as though she were speaking from a far distance, he realized suddenly, really looking at her for the first time. Her eyes were not quite there and dark shadows clung beneath them. Nor was her hair as glowing and full of life as once when it had clung so closely to his hands, and the bones of her face made cavernous hollows and ridges. As if on a skull.
He checked himself hard. One more maudlin thought and he might almost begin pleading with her to come back to him, on any grounds.
“What do you mean, take him away? The baby’s yours. Did you really think I would relieve you of the burden of our union that easily? Deny myself the pleasure of knowing that, as our son grows in your loving care—and by all the Pillars, it had better be loving—all the while you will see me in him? ”
He took a step toward her. “And when he is old enough, then I will teach him what he needs to know. Of loyalty, of trust and love, of faith in people. All that he cannot learn from you. That is, if he’s ever born. Do you hate me so much, that you neglect your own unborn child?”
His strode over, grabbing
her to shake a response from her, some lie to his words. And, yes, to feel if she hurt the way he did. No sooner had he touched her than he sprang back. As on that last occasion, it was more than he could bear.
She was not dropped this time, at least. Marthe stared at his chest in confusion, He couldn’t mean those ugly words. No. She clung instead to the new hope. The child—her child, she remembered with shock—he said she could keep him. She could cuddle him, feed him, love him as she had not dared to dream of since that angry day of their last meeting.
As for the rest of his words? The fury-filled hate filtered through, but not the sense. How could it, when all she was aware of was the sweet smell of him filling her senses once more? Here was the only home she would ever have. Crazily, she reached out and lifted her hunger-starved mouth to those haunting lips.
It was the worst thing she could have done. Hamon couldn't stop himself. His mouth must answer her call and he drowned in her sweet magic, even as his mind raged at this attraction he couldn’t deny. Disgust and shame conquered. He tore himself away from her, to stand caught by the far wall.
“Keep back,” he cried out, panting harshly in desperate flight. “Surely you’ve done enough. What more do you want?”
She stood where he had left her, still caught in the magic. On the far side of the room, she heard him fight for control. His slow, harsh breathing filled the air, the jagged edge of it amplified by the imprisoning walls. A little only of his anguish came to Marthe, still dazed by the sudden joy, then loss. Her mind no longer able to think, formulate, say whatever were the words needed to banish this dreadful time. All she could do was stand, caught in bewilderment. And that was no help at all.
Defeated again, admitted Hamon in despair, drinking in the sight of her. It was no good. Always, it would be like this. That the woman he loved had probably never existed was irrelevant. Maybe he had dreamed her. Whatever, this shell, this body, was hers, and he could not deliver himself of it. He breathed once, praying to be capable of cool speech.
Pay the Piper: Hathe Book Two Page 7