There was a disbelieving murmur.
“Do what she says!” Gabrel shouted. “She’s a trained tech!” She felt him beside her, his hand covering her eyes. Why didn’t the man shield his own eyes? “What happens if I cut the power now?” he asked her. “Will that trigger anything?”
“No. It… just stops. Which would be good.”
And he went… where? Scraping noises. The idiot was going behind the printer to remove the cable. Shielding on the back of the printer was significantly less than elsewhere; if it failed now, Gabrel would probably lose not only his sight but his face. Isovel squeezed her eyes shut, fighting the temptation to look.
There was a crackling sound and then – blessed silence. Only in that silence did Isovel recognize that she’d been feeling the hum of the overworked printer all through her body. She turned and felt a bone-watering rush of relief at the sight of Gabrel, whole and intact, leaning against the rocks at the cave entrance with the cable in his hand. It was terrible, it was wrong to feel so happy that a terrorist had escaped mutilation.
Praise Chord and Consonance.
CHAPTER FIVE
“So how do we calibrate it?”
Isovel shook her head. “I’ve told you too much already. As far as I’m concerned, you can go on creating lumps of metal until you run out of ink.”
Gabrel heaved a mock sigh. “And here was I thinking you’d come around to our side.”
“I’m not a traitor!” Isovel spat. “I just, just –”
“Haven’t the stomach to see men blinded and mutilated?” Gabrel suggested. “If only your compatriots had such scruples. But in any case, I’m glad to see you have some confidence in us.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Well, you obviously know more than we do about how to run this thing. So either you don’t believe we’ll torture you for the information, or you think we’re bright enough to figure it out without any more help from you.”
“I don’t care what you do to me, I won’t tell you anything!”
Gabrel shook his head. “Now, that’s just dumb. You’ve just told me that you do have information I might want, and if I wasn’t thinking about hurting you before, you’ve just put the notion into my head.”
Isovel felt sick at her stomach and weak with fear, so she tossed her head and jeered, “Oh, now the hillbilly terrorist is giving me lessons on how to speak!”
“I’m suggesting you think before you speak,” Gabrel said wearily. “You must have realized we don’t deal in torture, but you might actually have to deal with bandits or other uncivilized people some day. You should have said something like, ‘Oh, I’m just a girl straight out of finishing crêche, I don’t know anything about those complicated machines, I was just repeating what my boyfriend told me.’”
“As if you’d believe that!”
Most of the men had left the cave by now, but Patrik was still there and watching them with bright-eyed interest. Now he began tapping his foot.
“If you two are quite through flirting –”
“We’re not,” Isovel and Gabrel said simultaneously.
“Not through?” Patrik inquired, too innocently.
“Not flirting,” Gabrel said.
“Bickering, then,” Patrik substituted. “How about we take this thing out in the light and have a look at it?”
“Rain,” Gabrel said.
“It stopped raining some time ago,” Patrik pointed out. “I expect you were too busy fl- bickering to notice.” He raised his voice. “Amari, could you come in and help me carry the printer outside? I wouldn’t want to stress the old man’s bum knee by asking him to take a load.”
As the two young men snickered and lifted the printer, Gabrel looked at Isovel. “There are times,” he informed her, “when I envy the discipline of a regular army. Chain of command is not a concept that has really taken hold among our people.”
Isovel sniffed. “I wouldn’t expect terrorists to behave like real soldiers. And anyway, I thought you were sneering at our methods.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean your lot,” Gabrel said. “I thought we’d agreed you don’t have an actual army. No, I meant a traditional army.” He looked wistful. “In Roman times, I understand that I could have beaten those two using a stick wound with nice, knobbly old grapevines.”
“The old folks are flirting again,” Patrik said from outside.
“The boy doesn’t understand the concept of a civilized discussion.” Gabrel levered himself to his feet. Isovel thought he was suppressing another wince; his lips were tightly compressed by the time he was vertical.
“You need a cane,” Isovel said, standing up and letting her smartcloth pants shake off the mud and dust of the cave.
“Are you trying to completely destroy my self-image?” Gabrel stepped onto his bad leg. It started to crumple, but Isovel ducked under his arm to support him before he could actually fall.
“Put your arm over my shoulders,” she instructed him. “Go ahead and lean on me, I can take your weight.”
“It wasn’t this bad yesterday,” Gabrel muttered through clenched teeth.”
“Maybe you hadn’t been abusing it yesterday.”
Together, they limped out of the cave. Isovel felt, rather than heard, a current of amusement running through the group. She held her head high, cheeks flaming. There was nothing shameful in helping a wounded enemy.
“One of you find a nice branch with a fork in it and make a cane,” she demanded. “This idiot is never going to recover unless he rests his knee.”
Gabrel lifted his arm off her shoulders and sat down on the grass, just slowly enough that it didn’t look like a controlled fall. “I suppose you’re a trained nurse as well as a tech. Or is that too lowly for a general’s daughter? Did you go straight for orthopedic surgery?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Isovel said. “I did a course of field first-aid before we embarked. I know how to lift and support a wounded man, how to treat minor wounds and sprains, and how to immobilize more serious injuries until the medtechs can treat them. After you get through playing around with your new toy you can take your pants off and let me check the bindings on that knee.”
This evoked a barely-controlled sputter from Patrik and Nikos and a less controlled growl from Gabrel.
Isovel stood very straight and looked Patrik straight in the eye. “On second thought, your commander might heal faster if a couple of you sat on him and held him down so he can’t keep abusing that joint.”
“Take more than two,” Gabrel snarled.
“That a challenge, old man?”
“While you’re cutting me a stick,” Gabrel said, “make it a knobbly one.”
And before he had that stick, he made a point of walking – well, limping – over to the printer, which was set so low to the ground that he could actually crawl around it inspecting the settings and controls without standing again. Men!
The sun grew hotter. Ravi took the forked stick Amari had cut and worked over it with his belt knife, removing the bark and smoothing the surface. Gabrel twiddled knobs, hummed to himself, called Ravi over for a consultation; with an apologetic look, Ravi left the improvised crutch beside Isovel.
“What’s the scale on the temperature setting?” Gabrel called to Isovel.
“I have no idea.”
“You,” Gabrel informed her, “are lying in your pearly white Harmonica teeth. Never mind. We can run some tests.”
And to her annoyance, they did just that, beginning with the lowest possible setting and working carefully up from there. The afternoon sun baked the clearing, making it as unpleasantly hot as the previous day had been unpleasantly damp and chilly. Didn’t this continent tend to anything but extremes? Isovel vengefully hoped Gabrel and Ravi and Patrik were miserable, working in full sun with no breeze to relieve the heat.
Her smartcloth garments kept her comfortable enough, but they wouldn’t protect her from sunburn. She moved into the shade at the side of the clearing.
Patrik was the first to take his shirt off. “Wish you’d let me keep that smartcloth uniform. Among other things, built-in air conditioning.”
“We might need it again. As a uniform. That’s the only reason I’m not having you turn it into dry socks for everybody.” Gabrel’s shirt followed Patrik’s.
Isovel studied the grass beside her and tried not to look. Patrik’s body was as smooth as Jonny’s, but for some reason that didn’t bother her. Gabrel, on the other hand, was borderline obscene with that dark mat of hair centered on his chest and running down below his waist. And every time he hitched himself around to study a different part of the printer, his pants seemed in danger of sliding off his hip bones. Well, she wasn’t about to get all hot and bothered about a hairy terrorist shedding his clothes. If the pants came off altogether, she’d be able to check the bindings on his knee; that was all she cared about.
“Ok, I think we’ve got it,” Gabrel announced. Isovel glanced up quickly and then looked away again. His chest was gleaming with sweat wherever it wasn’t covered by the dark triangle of body hair. She tried to think about how badly he was going to stink after this afternoon’s exercise.
“Pat, get a can of ink and… does anybody have a spoon? I don’t want to waste more than a dollop of this on tests.” Someone had brought Gabrel his reader; he looked down at it, holding his hand to shield the screen from the punishingly bright sunlight. “Should have thought of this before. The sintering temperature for steel is 1900 degrees, but we have to get there slowly. After the printing phase, we program the lasers to ramp up to 1000 degrees over an hour, hold it there for an hour to burn off the binder, then ramp up to 1900 degrees to sinter the molecules and hold for… ok, I’ve got it, here’s the chart.” Patrik and Ravi moved in closer to study something on the reader screen.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got hold of the printer manual!” Isovel exclaimed. If they could hack the system to download important documents… she shuddered to think what else they could read and what they could do, playing in a virtual landscape of the army’s information.
Gabrel looked up at her and winked cheerfully. “All right, then, I won’t tell you…. Truth, Citizen, this isn’t any of your precious manuals. It’s an antique book on a primitive method of jewelry making. I downloaded it before the war, when I was thinking of designing new machines.”
Why would she care when or why he’d gotten hold of the discord-take-it book? Isovel stared into the green depths of the forest while Gabrel went on rubbing it in, explaining exactly how he’d figured out the firing sequence for the printer. “When metal particles were first mixed with binders, only the jewelers were interested. They molded shapes – the early binders were quite thick – and since they didn’t have lasers for precise heat, they burned off the binder and sintered the metal in kilns. Every kind of metal required a different firing sequence. Fortunately, one of them wrote down her findings with accompanying charts. Lots of charts. I had to skim through silver, copper, and brass before I got to steel, and then there’s low-shrink steel and high-shrink. I expect our ink is low-shrink steel, wouldn’t you think?”
Isovel didn’t dignify that with an answer, though privately she was impressed by Gabrel’s creativity. She would never have thought of looking up printer settings by generalizing from a twenty-first century jeweler’s instructions.
When she got back, she’d have to tell Daddy to delete craft books from everybody’s reader. She bit her lip. Could Harmony techs delete books from these old-fashioned readers they used in the colony? There must be some way. The readers had to connect to a master library to download texts, and while that wireless connection was active they’d be vulnerable. Maybe they could just disable the readers entirely during that connected phase? No, not good. That would be noticed immediately, and every reader they didn’t get on the first attack would probably thereafter be physically disabled from connecting. That’s what she would do, anyway, and these bumpkins were ignorant but not stupid.
It was better, if not so satisfying, to quietly delete useful texts one at a time whenever a reader was connected. Could the communications techs force a connection? If only she were really the trained tech Gabrel had called her, she’d have a better idea what was possible. Oh, well, she would have done her part if she just reported on how the terrorists were misusing their library. People with real tech skills would take over from there.
The first test piece failed to burn off all of the binder, leaving a teaspoon-sized metallic lump that – once it cooled – Gabrel could squeeze in his hand. The second test produced an over-fired lump that shattered at a touch. Isovel gloated quietly over the failures. Very quietly. That big lump Jesse kept looking at her with his lips working silently. Gave her the creeps. If Gabrel weren’t there, would he try beating information out of her?
But Gabrel was there, cheerfully running tests and twiddling the printer settings. And after an afternoon’s testing, he finally managed to produce a solid, functional blaster. Nikos fitted it with a solar cell, removed one-third of a needle tree and whooped with delight.
“Glad to see you’re so lively,” Gabrel said. “You can take the first shift printing blasters. I need two volunteers to help you….” He gazed around the clearing. “You,” he said to Amari. “You keep the ink coming, and make sure you load the reservoir exactly to this fill line. And Wil, you keep an eye on all the settings before each print run, make sure they don’t creep off the marks. That job should suit you, you can do it sitting down.” He had scored deep scratches on the face of each dial and the surrounding metal; all Wil would have to do was to make sure the dial and the exterior lined up along the scratch line. Isovel would have said something rude about such primitive methods – but the fact was, the system would work just fine as long as all they wanted to do was to print blasters of the same design with the same quality ink.
Gabrel clearly wanted to start production immediately, but everyone needed a meal and a short break after the long hours of twiddling, testing, and waiting. He cursed under his breath. “Damn, I should have sent half of you off to rest this afternoon, we didn’t need everybody and his brother holding their breath while we fiddled with the machine. Never mind, but let’s be a little more efficient now.” With a few words he organized groups for latrine trips, washing, and guarding Isovel.
Nikos and Patrik were assigned to take Isovel to the latrine and then to the swift-running mountain creek where they washed. She had already visited the latrine site, but the creek was a shock; she gasped as she stepped into a knee-deep, pebbly pool whose icy undercurrents nearly swept her off her feet. “W-where do you g-get your water? From the river?”
“This time of year? Mostly snow melt. Some rain, but that’s only beginning to get serious as fall approaches. The Vanyan’s too far downhill for us to use it as a water source,” Nikos informed her. He was very correctly watching the tree tops. So was Patrik, but both boys stood loosely balanced as her unarmed combat instructor had taught her: ready to move on a moment’s warning. So, slithering quietly down the creek probably wasn’t a good way to escape. Not to mention that if she abandoned her smartclothes – which she’d have to do, since Patrik was between her and the pile of clothes – she’d probably be dead of hypothermia before morning.
When she was ready to dress again, Patrik averted his eyes and held out a hand to help her out of the creek, while Nikos held her clothes out and stared away from the water, into the needle trees. Gabrel might have some problems with verbal discipline, but he had clearly trained his people well. While remaining perfectly civil, Patrik and Nikos orchestrated each step so that she never had a reasonable opportunity to break away.
And if two hyperactive teenage boys couldn’t be distracted by a naked woman in a mountain pool, what chance did she have with any of the others?
Of course, they might simply find her too old to be a distraction. Isovel wasn’t used to thinking of herself as old, but she had to have at least ten years on Nikos, nearly a
s many on Patrik. They probably considered her and Gabrel, the ‘old man,’ a different generation.
“So the creek comes down from the high mountains,” Isovel said as she squelched back between the boys after hastily drying herself on a coarse blanket and scrambling back into her lovely, warm, temperature- balancing smartclothes, “and runs into this river you’ve been talking about – the Vanen?”
Patrik shrugged. “Vanyan. But who knows where this particular creek goes? This district is all mountains, creeks, and springs. Having been brought up in a civilized place with street signs, I can’t keep track of what goes where in the wilderness.”
Nikos, who was apparently a native of that village near the camp, probably could have described the creek’s path in tedious detail. But he’d stepped out in front of them and appeared to be suffering from temporary deafness. Isovel concealed a smile. If the answer to her question had been ‘No,’ they wouldn’t have bothered avoiding it. So she had two paths to the river: downhill along the creek, or across ridges following the power line. If she once got away, she couldn’t get lost; even a city girl should be able to follow such obvious routes.
CHAPTER SIX
Isovel had hoped that the inherent slowness of the process would prevent the guerrillas from producing many blasters, but Gabrel was disappointingly efficient. Not only did he have men running the printer all twenty-six hours of the day, but he found a way to speed up the work by removing the printed blasters from the build chamber with a pair of fireplace tongs – borrowed from Skyros, along with a comb for Isovel – after they had cooled enough to keep their shape but long before they were cool enough to handle. Each of his men acquired at least one burn from touching newly printed blasters in the improvised annealing chambers; Patrik had three.
“What part of ‘Just because it’s not glowing doesn’t mean it’s cool,’ don’t you get?” Gabrel snapped the third time Patrik yelped and stuck a finger into his mouth.
Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 6
