Amari and Jesse on the right, and Wil on the left, broke through the screen of needles almost simultaneously. Nikos could be heard incautiously scrambling down to them across the patches of scree, and incidentally sending down a shower of pebbles and raw shards of rock that inspired all of them to duck under the cover of the cave’s wide mouth.
“They’re back!” Nikos announced before he was quite level with the rest of them. He made a flying leap from the ledge over the cave to the patch of grass below, and landed so lightly that Gabrel envied him. When he’d been seventeen, he would have made the jump too. Dammit, twenty-three wasn’t exactly old; he could leap all over the mountainside just like Nikos if he wanted to, he told himself. It was the responsibility of command, the understanding of how even a minor injury could fatally slow a man, that forced him to take the safer paths.
And, of course, his own – not quite so minor – injury, incurred on last week’s raid. Gabrel’s knee twinged in protest as he stood to greet the returning men.
Besides, Nikos had grown up in one of the mountain villages that clung to the sides of these hills, so he had a built-in advantage.
“How many?” Amari demanded, and simultaneously Wil asked, “Did they get it?”
Nikos looked first at Amari, opened his mouth to speak, caught Gabrel’s eye, swallowed, and stood at attention looking only at Gabrel. “Sir! I have to report a large party advancing. Leaders are identified as Ravi and Patrik, and… somebody I don’t know. Riding a donkey. The guy I don’t know, I mean. And they’re bringing a train of a dozen pack donkeys. Heavily loaded.”
“They got it! Hai yi!” Amari shouted.
‘Hai yi yi yiee!” Nikos joined in, sending the call to bounce off the mountainside and echo on the far side of the valley.
“Don’t let’s advertise our presence to everybody in the valley,” Gabrel suggested mildly.
“Aw…. They already know we’re here. We get eggs and cheese from Skyros ‘most every day,” Nikos argued.
Gabrel quelled him with a look. “Consider it practice for the day when a Harmony patrol shows up in Skyros.” He turned back to the others. “All right, they’re going to be tired. Make a chain to unload and place the supplies back in the cave.”
“I’d just killed,” Wil objected. “A nice plump wild doat. She’ll be dragged off by scavengers before we finish unloading.”
“Are you absolutely sure she hasn’t already been dragged off, and you stuck with spending an hour looking for her with no result?” Wil did seem to have urgent tasks elsewhere quite predictably when there was heavy labor to be done. He hadn’t been there when it was time to dig a latrine, or when they built the wall of woven needle tree branches for extra cover.
Wil held up his hands, palms outward to show the blood. “I swear on my mother’s grave, this time I’m telling the truth.”
That would have been slightly more impressive if Gabrel hadn’t known that Wil’s mother was alive and energetically managing the family farm down on the plains. “Very well. You can go, but if you don’t come back with a field-dressed doat, don’t bother to come back at all, understand?”
“Stupid,” Amari murmured as Wil disappeared behind the green wall of needles, “and lazy. Who’d miss the triumphant return just to avoid carrying a few packs of supplies to the cave?”
The needles quivered violently again and Patrik pushed into the clearing. Gabrel let out his breath in silent relief. He’d sent four men, nearly half his group, on this mission. He hoped to get back four men in reasonably good shape. But Patrik, just two years older than Nikos and not noticeably more mature, had been the one he worried about most.
“Everybody all right?” he demanded sharply.
Patrik was breathing heavily. “Better than all right,” he announced with a seraphic smile before taking another gasp of air. “Got what we came for, and a bonus!”
“What’s that?”
Patrik slowly folded his lanky frame down upon the grass where he’d been standing. “Only two things wrong with the mountains,” he announced. “You people don’t keep enough oxygen around, and there is way too much vertical.”
“So hang onto a donkey’s tail, next time, instead of rushing ahead to be first back,” Gabrel said crisply. “The bonus?” Dear God, had Patrik gotten creative again? He’d been counting on Ravi to restrain him.
“It’ll be here in a minute.” Patrik pulled off the top half of his uniform and used it to mop his forehead. “I think it should be a surprise, and Ravi thinks it should wait until he has a chance to explain.”
Gabrel’s forebodings grew. It sounded as though Ravi hadn’t been quite as successful as he’d hoped at keeping Patrik within bounds. But he could hear the donkey train now, crashing through the woods and, no doubt, turning the narrow path to their camp into something more like a construction road. No need for a show of authority; he’d know the worst within minutes anyway.
The first donkeys came through the trees, with Ravi tugging on their headstalls while the donkeys looked this way and that and indicated that they’d just as soon wander off into the woods if only this stupid person weren’t being so insistent. One of the first pair of donkeys was loaded with nets on either side, each holding two cans that looked very much like the ink they’d gone to get. The other – was being ridden by what Gabrel supposed was Patrik’s ‘surprise.’
“Pat! You’ve never gone and brought me a girl for my birthday?” Amari was the first of them to overcome his shock and find his voice.
“You have succeeded,” Gabrel told Patrik. “That is definitely a surprise. Ravi, I’m told you can explain?”
Before Ravi could speak, the girl slipped off the donkey and addressed Gabrel directly. “Are you in command of this rabble?” The cut-glass, icy voice seemed incongruous, coming from a sweat-stained and dusty girl with a mop of pale hair falling around her face. Her long dark green trousers and lighter green tunic appeared spotless and unwrinkled and generally in much better shape than the girl. Smartcloth, then. And that accent had never come from Esilia.
“One moment, Citizen.” The girl’s expression told Gabrel that he’d guessed correctly. He turned on the men, who were all staring at the girl like idiots, and probably frightening her. “Ravi, what part of ‘inconspicuous’ did you not understand? And the rest of you ‘rabble’, don’t just stand there. We’ve got a pack train to deal with. All of you get to work! Unload the donkeys, put the ink in the cave, and the printer – you did get the printer?”
Ravi nodded. “Martin and Isak are preventing it from falling out of a sling between the last two donkeys. Hell of a thing to wrestle up a mountain.”
“Printer at the front of the cave, when it gets here. Take the donkeys to water as they’re unloaded, then get them back down the mountain as far as Skyros; we paid enough to use them, we’re not going to feed them as well. Do I have to spell out everything for you?”
“Water?” the girl repeated, then closed her mouth with a snap. Obviously she’d be damned if she asked them for anything.
“Allow me.” Nikos had kept his wits; while everybody else was staring, he’d taken his flask to the spring and filled it. Now he handed it to the girl, who took the flask in her bound hands, sipped cautiously and then tilted her head back to inhale the entire contents of the flask. “Skyros water is known to be the best in all the mountains,” Nikos boasted, “and Skyros gets its water from our spring.”
“Skyros is also known for its talkative men,” Gabrel said drily. “Nikos, get to work. Ravi, you’re excused from unloading duty while you give me an explanation.”
Ravi and Patrik alternately described the scene outside B12 as they had just finished loading the cans of ink: the girl appearing out of nowhere, the hasty decision to throw her in the float and take off, the naked man pursuing them. “Once she’d seen us,” Patrik pointed out, “’inconspicuous’ was really no longer an option. Whether we took her or left her, somebody was bound to notice.”
“Ask them wh
at they did to Jonny,” the girl interrupted. “They wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“Jonny would be the – ah – scantily dressed gentleman?” Gabrel inquired. He cocked an eyebrow at Ravi.
Ravi shrugged. “We didn’t even bring any lethal weapons. All we had was two stunners. Martin and Isak both aimed at him. He hit the ground hard. He should be all right now, except for stunner hangover.”
“And his buddies,” Patrik said with a smirk, “are probably having a multi-colored lightning jack hangover.”
“All right. That explains why you took off with her,” Gabrel said, “you were stupid, and you panicked.” Ravi’s brown cheeks flushed, but Patrik clamped his jaw with an expression remarkably like a donkey’s. “But you had forty kilometers of plains to cross before you had to hide the float and load the pack train. Why didn’t you stop somewhere, put her off and let her walk back? Leave her far enough from any farms, she wouldn’t have been able to raise the alarm in time.”
“Well, Patrik thought…” Ravi began.
“Was Patrik in charge of this expedition? I thought I put you in charge.”
“He had a point…”
“I recognized her,” Patrik said proudly. “She’s General Dayvson’s daughter.”
The girl laughed. Loudly. “Oh, you idiots. Do I look like a general’s daughter?”
Even after a forced ride through the mountains, Gabrel thought, she looked exactly like a general’s daughter – or the daughter of somebody else from the top rung of Committee families. It wasn’t so much the long, slim legs, clad in perfectly fitted smartcloth; or the once-white hands, now marred with several scratches and a broken nail; or even the patrician profile. It was the way she lifted her chin and talked down her elegant nose at them, he thought. And she did resemble the girl he’d seen on holocasts, except for being considerably more disheveled.
“I’ve seen the newscasts,” Patrik insisted. “They showed you debarking with your father, off a troopship from Harmony.”
“That was nearly two months ago. Don’t you keep up with the news?”
“We can’t get the ‘casts in the mountains. Only when we go down to the plains.”
“Well. I suppose that explains it. You yokels obviously haven’t heard. Isovel Dayvson went back to Harmony after a week.”
Among the men unloading the donkeys, Jesse paused with a can of ink in his hands, put it down and drifted closer to the group. Gabrel noted the movement out of the corner of his eye. He’d deal with Jesse later. In this case he couldn’t simply shout and trust his authority to get obedience. They needed Jesse for his medical training, but it was a hard bargain. Jesse was the kind of built-in discipline problem that could wreck a group; ten years older than Gabrel and so bitter about Harmony’s treatment of his family that he was a simmering mass of barely-contained violence.
Patrik scowled. “And you just happen to be her identical twin separated at birth, I suppose?”
“You. Captured. The. Wrong. Woman,” the girl insisted. “I’m just a commissary clerk. Don’t tell me you really believed those stories about Dayvson keeping his own daughter in an occupied city! Haven’t you Esilian hicks ever heard of propaganda?”
“Well, you see,” Gabrel said apologetically, “It’s not just that idiot Patrik. All of us hicks get to see some of them flashy holos when we go down-country. And you do look a lot like Isovel Dayvson to me.”
“And me,” Ravi chimed in.
The girl shrugged. “I daresay all civilized women look alike to you bumpkins. No wonder this is the poorest sector of the colony. Look at you men lolling around here half-naked instead of doing some useful work!”
Patrik flushed and pulled his shirt back over his head. Scowling at Patrik, Gabrel stuck his thumbs in the waistband of his pants and pushed them down another inch, until they were hanging off his hipbones. They weren’t going to take lessons in etiquette from some Harmonica snob of a girl, and the sooner she grasped that, the better.
Her fair skin showed a flush more clearly than did Patrik’s olive complexion. She blinked and stared Gabrel directly in the eyes.
Her own eyes were a light golden brown, about two shades darker than her tumbled hair. Of course, there was no reason to suppose any of that was natural. Gabrel didn’t know what kind of mods a top-level Harmony cosmetic stylist was offering these days, but hair and eye color coordination was probably the least of it.
“I suppose you think you’ll get a fortune in ransom for me? Well, don’t blame me when General Dayvson laughs in your faces.”
“If she’s the wrong one,” growled Jesse, “why shouldn’t we kill her now and save the trouble of keeping her?” He stepped forward so swiftly that he had her by the shoulder, his knife bright against her throat, before anyone else could react.
“Oh, she’s Dayvson’s daughter, all right,” said Gabrel tiredly. “She just doesn’t know when to give up. Just like her father. Stand down, Jesse. Or – if you feel an uncontrollable urge to use that knife – you might cut her hands free.”
She yanked her bound hands back when Jesse touched her wrist. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Yet.”
“I’m not afraid, I just don’t want you destroying the only sash I’ve got! Can’t somebody just untie it?” She extended her hands to Gabrel, who looked at Patrik’s work with dismay. Patrik had wound the soft, voluminous silky fabric several times around the girl’s wrists and had finished with hard, tight knots that sank into the fabric.
With a conscious effort, he did not limp for the three steps that brought him close enough to work on the sash. His knee flamed white-hot agony on the second step, but he could live with that; better than appearing a cripple before this rude, scornful young woman.
He had to stand quite close to her to pick at the knots; close enough to notice that although she smelled primarily of sweaty human female, there was also a hint of a gentle floral fragrance about her. Wisps of her loosened fair hair brushed his face.
His hands were not shaking, it was just difficult loosening the knots. He bent his head over them and concentrated on the sash, not on the fine white hands and delicate wrists it bound. Patrik had made this mess, it would serve him right to have to fix it. But Patrik was young, not so steady, and he might be influenced by the scent, the closeness. He, being more mature, could take it in stride… She was tall for a woman, just his height, presumably staring out over his bent head while he worked… There went the last knot.
Freed, she shook out her wrists for a moment, then lifted her hands and tried to run her fingers through the long hair that rippled in the sunlight where it wasn’t hopelessly tangled. “I don’t suppose anyone has a comb? No? Why am I not surprised?”
“Us bumpkins don’t comb our hair much,” Patrik said.
“And neither, it seems, will I. Until you come to your senses and send me back. Kidnapping me was a very big mistake, you know.”
Gabrel was more than half inclined to agree with her on that point.
“Send who back?” Patrik challenged her. “Isovel Dayvson – or the conveniently anonymous clerk?”
The girl caught her hair up in both hands, twisted it at the back of her head, and quickly wrapped it into a loose bun, with a final twist that tucked the loose ends under the rest of the tangled, cloudy mass. “You can call me Tiffni.”
“You don’t look anything like a Tiffni!”
She sighed. “All right. If you want me to be Isovel Dayvson, then I’m Isovel Dayvson. Happy now?”
CHAPTER THREE
General Dayvson’s first act on disembarking on the rebel continent had been to commandeer the governor’s mansion as general headquarters for the army and living space for himself, his aides, and Isovel. Governor Serman was not happy about being booted down to the next-best house in Colony City, whose space and amenities were far below those of the mansion. Since Dayvson regarded Wilyam Serman as a fool whose cruelty had directly inspired the present rebellion, and himself as the sensible man who’d been sent to r
etrieve the situation, he was impervious to Serman’s grouching. The governor’s mansion was the only building in Colony City that could house him and his immediate staff and still provide rooms for meetings and staff work. The governor’s creature comforts were not his concern.
Jaymi Kamron, Dayvson’s secretary, was not an imaginative man. On most days he enjoyed his job, which he understood to consist of filtering all the demands for the general’s attention and directing them to the appropriate staff member while bringing only the potentially immediate disasters to Dayvson’s desk. “It’s the perfect job,” he would say to young line officers who twitted him about never getting actual combat experience. “All of the power of command and none of the responsibility. I wouldn’t want to deal with the baskets of unexploded bombs I pass on to the general, but then I don’t have to; I just need to recognize them when they come in.”
Up until yesterday, that had never been a problem.
Now something with the potential to explode right in his face had come across his desk. The obvious thing to do was to pass it to the general immediately, before it stopped ticking. But that would involve confessing that he’d mistaken a bomb for a minor clusterfark yesterday, and the general just might explode in his face over that.
Chord and Consonance knew, the atmosphere in HQ had been explosive enough since the general discovered yesterday that his daughter had left the mansion the previous night and had never returned. Corporals were reporting to sergeants, sergeants were standing at attention and reporting to lieutenants, lieutenants were tearing out their hair and having every house in Colony City searched.
In the midst of all that, Kamron had not thought the report from B ring about a single outpost’s bizarre breach of discipline worth bothering any of the general staff. The corporal and the three privates posted to B12 had apparently been reported to B-Sergeant Krayg for drunk and disorderly behavior, indecent exposure, and possession of a truly amazing number of jugs of prohibited liquor. Krayg wanted Corporal Bollinjer busted down to private and transferred to C ring, the three privates transferred to C ring with an emphasis on latrine duties, and four steady men sent out to replace the delinquent foursome. All that required no more than drafting a series of routine staffing directives which Kamron was fully empowered to sign on his own authority.
Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 3
