“Yeah, but his girl will sneak back home in a couple of hours. And we’ll still have the lightning jack.”
“Shhh! Want her to hear? And tell?”
“She won’t,” the corporal said confidently. “Would Kelso get involved with a girl who’d split on us? Besides, there’s no way she could tell anybody without also telling them where she’d been.”
Heads nodded as the other two accepted their leader’s reasoning. “All the same,” said Druett, “it’d be cruel to interrupt Kelso now. We can make the trade without disturbing the lovebirds, and tell him about it after she’s gone.”
It was at that auspicious moment that Ravi scratched on the door.
***
If Ravi and Patrik had ever enjoyed the illusion that the trade had already been negotiated by Peres, Corporal Bollinjer of B12 destroyed it efficiently. “Not enough,” he said bluntly after he stepped outside and played a beam of light over the contents of the float. “Only, what, twenty, twenty-five jugs. We agreed to trade for a full float-load of jack. You could have got a lot more in there. You trying to short us?”
“Oh, stop,” Druett mourned under his breath at the corporal. “What if they go away again?”
“This is what we could get.” Patrik felt it would be inadvisable to explain that the “extra” space had been taken up by two men hiding in the back of the float. They were out now, presumably being very quiet and immobile until they were needed. But there’d been no time to rearrange the jugs to make them resemble anything close to a full load.
“Tell you what, you can have the printer for this but not the ink. To get the ink you’ll have to bring us this much jack again.”
“What if we can’t get it?”
“Then you won’t get the ink. And good luck printing air.”
“Fair enough,” Patrik conceded suddenly. If the plan he’d just thought of was to work, they needed to have nominally friendly relations with the four guys manning the post. “Damn natives cheated us too, they’re bound to be holding more back. We’ll just explain to them that cheating the cream of Harmony’s army is a very, very bad idea.” Ravi made a choking noise and Patrik stepped on his foot. “Meanwhile, want to give us a hand unloading this lot? Wouldn’t do to break any jugs.”
The three soldiers who’d greeted them were quite willing to carry jugs of lightning jack to the closet-sized “store room.” Even with them helping Ravi and Patrik, it was a lengthy job. First the printer had to be removed; then they had to stack the jugs in the space around the cans of ink.
“Be a lot easier to store this if we just got the ink out of the way for you,” Patrik mentioned casually.
The corporal’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t do us any favors. When you bring the second load, we’ll let you take the ink.”
“Where’s your fourth man?” Ravi asked casually as he staggered inside with two jugs hanging from each hand. “Don’t tell me the army’s so hard up that they have to shortstaff the B ring too!” Actually, do tell me that. It would be an excellent piece of news to bring back.
To Ravi’s disappointment, the guys of B12 chuckled and one of them jerked a thumb towards the closed door beside the storage closet. “Kelso’s girl came visiting.”
“We figured it would be cruel to interrupt them.”
“Yeah, cruelty to dumb animals.”
“And it’s Kelso’s problem if he’s not out here for the first five… or six… or however many rounds.”
When the last jugs were stacked, and the printer had been carefully conveyed to the float, Patrik sank down on the floor of the common room, leaning against a wall. “I’m bushed,” he announced. “So’s he,” jerking his head at Ravi, who opened his mouth to deny it and then closed it again as he sat down beside Patrik.
“You guys on B ring must actually do all the calisthenics in the manual,” Patrik said in admiring tones, “to be in such good shape.” Actually he figured all three soldiers had aching muscles that would be painfully stiff by morning, but that wouldn’t have been a friendly way to start the conversation that he wanted.
“Can’t get out of it,” Druett said, “not with an officer in every third outpost. You C-ring bastards have it easy.”
“Guess so,” Patrik agreed amiably. He locked his fingers together and stretched both arms forward, moaning slightly as he did so. “Whew! My back is killing me. How about a friendly drink, to set the seal on our new deal?
Bollinjer looked unhappy at the prospect of opening even one jug of the newly acquired treasure. Greedy bastard.
“Tell you what,” said Ravi, “let’s call this jug mine, and I’ll bring you 26 jugs instead of 25 when I come back. Now how about a drink all round?”
Ravi opened the jug beside him and handed it to Bollinjer. “You guys go first. We can wait our turn.”
All three soldiers reacted to the undiluted jack by coughing, gasping, and wiping suddenly watering eyes. None of them were paying enough attention to see how much Patrik and Ravi took.
“Another!” Ravi urged after pretending to take a deep swallow from the jug. “I see you’re real men, with steady enough heads to take your liquor straight!”
That was good enough for another round, and also ensured that the men of Outpost B12 would have died before being seen to dilute the drink.
After those first two rounds, it became increasingly easy to find excuses for more. They drank to the C ring men who were the first line of defense, to the lazy privileged bastards sitting it out in A ring, and to the even lazier bastards living in the city, in real houses commandeered from the wealthier natives. Then they drank to Kelso’s girl, to Kelso, and finally to Druett’s dog back on Harmony.
The bottom of the jug was dangerously close when Corporal Bollinjer’s head fell back and he began to snore.
“Can’ holdsh liquor,” Druett jeered. He tilted his head back to take one more swallow and just kept on leaning back and back until his head hit the syncrete wall and he slumped down beside Bollinjer.
“Don’ worry ‘bout Druett,” O’Flangan reassured them, rescuing the jug. “Head’sh solid wo – woo- shtuff grows in the forest. Sholid trees. No, thash no’ right.”
“Have a drink to jog your memory,” Ravi suggested.
O’Flangan looked surprised. “Ex’lent idea. Le’s all have little drink. You too. They went off to sleep an’ lef’ me. You guys my boon c’mpanons now. All drink together.” After that surprisingly lucid suggestion, he drained the jug and leaned back on Druett. “Nice sof’ pillow. Haven’t had pillow since I joined up. Druett’sh good guy.” He rolled over on his back and began snoring.
“Actually,” Ravi said as they began lugging the cans of printer ink out to the float, “that was impressive.”
Patrik preened slightly. “Yes? And it was also impressive how quickly you picked up my idea and played along.”
“Not you,” Ravi said, “those guys. You realize it took almost a third of a jug of lightning jack each to put them out?”
“Let’s just hope it keeps them out,” Patrik said. Loading the ink was twice as hard as unloading the jugs, because the ink cans were small and extremely heavy and lacked handles. The job was further complicated by the fact that he and Ravi had to be careful not to step on any bits of drunken soldier sprawled out on the floor of the smallish room. They developed a sort of system: he and Ravi, the ones with uniforms, carried the ink cans to the door and handed them off to the other two for careful distribution around the float to balance the load.
***
“You don’t have to go already, do you?” Kelso reached out from the floor, caressed Isovel’s ankle and ran his hand up the back of her leg.
“I have to get my flitter back before the servants start work.”
“Forget them. You don’t need to worry about a bunch of native servants. They’re all liars anyway.”
“All Cretans are liars?” Isovel stood again and, hopping on one leg, drew on her trousers.
“Cretans? I thought they call
ed themselves Esilians.”
“Oh… Never mind.” Isovel looked at Jonny Kelso’s body in the shadowy room, remembered the sweet, gentle pressure of his lips, and reminded herself that there were more important things than being well read. It was unfair to be irritated with Jonny just because he hadn’t had her opportunities.
“Stay a little longer?” Kelso returned to his main point.
“Do you want me to get caught?”
“At least then we wouldn’t have to sneak around to be together.”
“True,” Isovel said. “We wouldn’t be together at all, because Daddy would have me on the next ship back to Harmony! Don’t you ever think beyond getting what you want in the moment?” The tunic was sticking to her hands and arms and crumpling at the back of her neck; with an irritated gesture she yanked at the back panel with both hands.
Naturally, nothing happened. You couldn’t bully smartcloth; you had to persuade it. Isovel slid the tunic off again and stroked the back panel with both hands until it stretched, smoothed itself, and fell into a new shape loose enough to pull over her head and down over her slightly damp body. In a moment it would absorb the sweat on her skin and she would feel less irritable.
“You liked it well enough when I was concentrating on you in the moment,” Jon said sulkily.
Isovel sighed. “Jonny, that’s different –”
“’S what you always say. That and ‘Never mind now.’” Jon said the last words in a high, squeaky voice that she supposed was an imitation of her own. “You think I’m too stupid to be worth talking to!”
“Don’t be –” Isovel swallowed ‘stupid’ and substituted “annoyed, Jonny! If I thought you were stupid, would I take all these risks to be with you for a few hours?”
“Sure you would. That’s how you get your kicks, innit? Slumming it with a grunt?”
Isovel slid her feet into her sandals. “That does it! I’m leaving now!” She’d had just about enough of that chip on Jonny’s shoulder. She shoved the outer door open and stormed out into the night. With luck she could be in her flitter and headed back to the city before Jonny pulled his clothes on and came after her.
She walked straight into a patch of darkness that was, she belatedly recognized, just slightly denser and solider than the rest of the night. As she recoiled from the warm, solid chest she’d walked into, an arm around her waist kept her in place. Her captor spun her around effortlessly and put one hand over her mouth. “Patrik, don’t come – ”
He broke off as a young soldier stepped into the light from the open guardroom door, with something small but heavy in his hands. Not anyone she recognized from B12. And they seemed to have been loading up a heavy transport float. Stealing something from B12? Served the scroungers right – but where were the guys?
“Blast it!” said the young man called Patrik. “We were almost done. Ravi, we’ve got a problem here.”
A second man in uniform came out. “I know. They’re starting to wake up. We need to get going.”
“Another problem,” said Patrik, and at a nod of his head her captor stepped forward, pushing Isovel into the light.
“Kelso’s girl?”
“What do we do with her, tie her up and gag her so she can’t raise the alarm?”
“No time, and when they find her they’ll know something happened. She’ll just have to come along for the ride.”
Isovel twisted desperately, bit, and got her mouth free for just a moment. “Jonny’s right behind me. He’ll kill all of you if you hurt me.”
Her own scarf was crammed into her mouth and tied twice round her head.
The last thing she saw, just before she was thrown into the float, was Kelso running towards them.
He hadn’t, after all, waited to get dressed.
CHAPTER TWO
The cave had a wide mouth that let in plenty of daylight for all practical purposes; all the same, Gabrel preferred to sit outside on sunny days. Like the solar cells that were brought out whenever it was dry enough, he felt that he was soaking up the sun’s energy and recharging himself. This morning was so warm that he took off his shirt and set it on a nearby rock, folding it carefully. If only Esilia were allowed to produce its own smartcloth, clothing wouldn’t be such a problem – warm layers for winter, waterproof ones for the rain that fell two days out of every three, dry socks – if he had a couple of yards of smartcloth, the first thing he’d do would be to make socks for everybody and then it wouldn’t matter that they had to squelch through streams in their leaky boots.
Gabrel put his antique e-reader down on top of the shirt so that it too could recharge itself and limped back to the rock he had designated as a chair. He wished he could go down through the needle trees to meet his men. He should have been with them, dammit! But Jesse had threatened to hold him down and kick the other knee in if he wasted a good job of strapping by slithering down the mountain. Chain of command wasn’t an idea that had a strong following among the rebel groups.
His mouth twisted wryly. Some leader, lounging around and reading while other men took the risk! And now he wasn’t even taking in the book he was supposed to be studying. He had wandered off into his own thoughts and hadn’t actually read the last few paragraphs that his eyes had passed over.
Not that it really mattered. Principles of Asymmetrical Warfare didn’t say anything about being a laundry master, a cook, a logistics clerk or any of the other roles that took up most of Gabrel’s time. The section on logistics mostly dealt with carrying ammunition, which wasn’t an issue with modern weapons. Food, the book said, would be supplied by loyal villagers.
The villagers were generous in sharing what they had – soft white cheese made from the milk of the native mountain doats, thin sour wine, the maize that was left after most of the crop went to the stills. But they couldn’t be too much of a drain on any village’s resources, and they had been in this location just an hour’s climb from Skyros long enough that the villagers weren’t exactly eager to give the guerrillas more than they had to. Which left Gabrel trying to figure out what he could use to make nanosludge taste like something. Well, at least Harmony had been generous with sludge; the first ship, so the story went, had arrived with five separate food-growing nanoswarms among a scant hundred deportees. Gabrel had to grant them that much. They hadn’t meant to starve the people they exiled – just to separate them from all of civilization.
In the generations since then, the deportees had learned how to irrigate the forbidding red plains that made up ninety percent of the continent, to grow their own food and to herd the native harbeests and doats for meat. As well, they’d developed a system to integrate the new deportees who came on each ship, endlessly, until you would have thought the entire population of Harmony was being exiled as political criminals.
Nearly a quarter of the first deportees had been of Greek origin, and a hundred years of life on this planet had not erased their cultural memories. Where sane people looked at the mountains and saw harsh rocks, not enough soil, and an endless battle to catch the snow melt that came down from the freezing peaks, Greeks saw home and freedom. They disappeared into the hills where Harmony’s authority barely reached, built stone houses clinging to the mountainsides and thrived. But life was still hard in the mountains by plains farmers’ standards. There was little space for crops, they depended on the scrawny mountain doats for meat and milk, and the lack of transportation held the whole district back.
The long morning shadows were shortening. Why weren’t his men back yet? Had they failed? Been captured? How long could it take to drag a train of donkeys up the mountain?
Gabrel looked around the small grassy patch in front of the cave, with its guardian ring of close-packed needle trees. The trees baking in the sun released their sharp, resinous scent, intoxicating in the mountain air. It was a good location; on two sides the plateau broke away in steep cliffs, while behind the cave the mountain went up almost as steeply, with patches of pebbly scree that would rain down warning pebbl
es on them if anybody tried to approach from above.
Nikos would be perched on a ledge up there, ready to give a warning whistle if anybody they didn’t know was spotted coming this way – though the danger of being found was slight. The only way to reach this dell was via the labyrinth of winding, narrow trails through the needle woods, and in their first days here Ravi and Nikos had made a point of trampling and enlarging trails that led only into thornberry thickets, while training vines over the almost invisible paths that led to the cave. Gabrel hoped that Ravi remembered how to get from Skyros to here. Maybe he should have sent Nikos so that he could act as a guide for the last leg of the journey. But Nikos was only seventeen… The path would, of course, be much more obvious after he and Patrik brought the pack donkeys along it; well, no help for that. They’d just have to try to obscure it again afterwards.
The other men had casually wandered off after breakfast, one to hunt for anything that would improve the non-flavor of plain sludge, the other two most likely to visit one of the home-made distilleries that clung to the mountainside in secluded places. The governors of Esilia had long felt that lightning jack, the mountain region’s most valuable product, should be taxed; the mountain people, naturally, disagreed. They were unfriendly enough to plainsmen to discourage all but the most enthusiastic tax gatherers, and for double security, they set up their distilleries in places that you’d think even a mountain doat would have trouble reaching.
Plainsmen like Patrik said that of course the villagers had a natural advantage, being half mountain doat themselves. They had a number of jokes about cloven hooves, hairy tails, and branching antlers.
Give the boy credit: he’d learned quickly not to make those jokes where the mountain villagers could hear him – and more than half the men in Gabrel’s band were mountaineers. It only took one black eye and a couple of bruised ribs for him to get the message.
A piercing whistle from high on the mountainside broke Gabrel’s reverie. He scanned the close-packed needle trees for any sign of movement. The dark green needles were shaking over to the left… and there, and there…
Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 2
