Insurgents (Harmony Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  “They’re just, just so beautiful,” Patrik sighed.

  “Good, you can carry the next batch to…” Gabrel glanced at Isovel. “I’ll tell you where a bit later.”

  The distribution of the blasters was as efficiently organized as the printing; there were seldom more than a dozen completed weapons at this site. Isovel tried to work it out in her head; burnoff and sintering times should have meant that they could produce fewer than eight blasters a day, but somehow there seemed to be far more than that in play. At least twice a day someone took off to give newly printed blasters to some other group. Had Gabrel worked out a way to speed the production even more? It was hard to tell.

  Whatever he was doing, it was efficient and competent. On most days he found time to rest his bad knee, usually while talking with her. Unwillingly, Isovel credited him with efficient use of resources; she entertained him while he had to sit down, and his rest breaks freed someone else from guarding her. More importantly, it showed that he was able to delegate tasks. Daddy had always said that an effective leader could do everything he expected his men to do, but would do those things only as a demonstration; he should have trained his subordinates to function without his looking over their shoulders.

  Daddy would probably consider Gabrel a very good leader indeed.

  Between the things she couldn’t tell him about Harmony’s war effort and the things he wouldn’t tell her about the rebels, the war was not a fruitful topic of conversation. During the warm, slow afternoons they fenced around important information with casual small talk, or so it seemed on any given day. It was only after several days that she realized he had actually told her a great deal about his pre-war life in this primitive colony. He’d been and done so many things – student, inventor, and now guerrilla leader. She was envious. All she could talk about was what now seemed an intolerably sheltered experience in primary crêche, finishing crêche, and political dinner parties.

  At times each of them horrified the other with unexamined assumptions.

  “I’d never have made it into the university if I hadn’t had my parents and six older siblings pushing me,” Gabrel reminisced. “From the day I learned to read there was always somebody strongly suggesting that I read something informative instead of watching space-war holos, or that I practice arithmetic if I couldn’t keep my mind on my assigned readings.”

  Isovel wasn’t quite clear what all those siblings had had to do with it, but she could sympathize. While most of her crêche mistresses had been quite happy to let Isovel sit in the back of the room reading, there’d been a few who claimed to recognize her potential and felt it a duty to see that she realized it. She’d learned a ridiculous amount of mathematics and physics for a girl whose only future was to play housekeeper at home until she took on the job for real with a suitable young man from her social circle.

  Maybe some of those crêche mistresses had refused to recognize her limited options?

  “And what would you have become without the pressure?”

  Gabrel was lying down on the flat part of the knoll, hat tipped forward to shade his eyes. He flipped up the brim to smile at her. She was beginning to watch for that brief smile. It made his whole face light up. “Eh, who knows. At ten I was planning to become either a needleship pilot or a space pirate. After that I was too busy for fantasies.”

  Isovel almost gave vent to an unladylike whistle. “You must have gone to a tough crêche! They didn’t start leaning on me and gabbling about ‘wasted potential’ until I was nearly fifteen.”

  “Ah, that’s probably because they didn’t know you well. See, we don’t have crêches here. Our parents teach us, or a group of parents with school-age children organize a school to get us out of their hair for part of the day. In my case, with six older brothers and sisters still living at home, there was no shortage of people willing to tell me ‘You’re too bright to settle for that sloppy reasoning.’ After a while I even believed it myself.”

  Isovel felt sick. “You grew up – in the same house with your parents – and –”

  “Alen, Mari, Vesper, Milla, Jimm, and…” Gabrel counted on his fingers. “Damn, I always forget one. Oh, yes. My oldest sister. Alis. She married and moved out while I was still a toddler, so she didn’t get as much chance to nag me as the rest of them.”

  “That’s practically child abuse!” Isovel was too shocked to be polite. “How can children develop their individuality if they’re always smothered by a mass of relatives?”

  “If you figure out a way to stop children doing that,” Gabrel informed her, “my mother and a lot of other parents would like to know about it. Mom’s been trying to stifle my individuality ever since I plucked the big rooster bald to make myself wings so I could fly off the top of the henhouse.”

  Isovel snorted. “Did it work?”

  “Mom’s lectures? No. My wings? Nup. But the broken ankle? That slowed me down for a while.” Gabrel nodded. “And it certainly taught me never to try that particular stunt again.”

  “It hurt that much?”

  “Not exactly. But Vesper decided that while I was immobilized would be a good time to teach me trig. That persuaded me never to risk being pinned down again. Fortunately, Mom was very generous with the sweets while I was healing. I was usually able to hide some pastries to bribe Milla into bringing some of her friends over to distract Vesper.” He shuddered. “If it hadn’t been for Milla’s sweet tooth, I’d probably have learned not just trigonometry but spherical trigonometry before I was twelve. Now that was child abuse, if you like.”

  Talking with Gabrel distracted Isovel from her own worries.

  She still hadn’t found an opportunity to escape. And with every day that passed, the rebels were better armed. If she couldn’t get away to warn the invading column what they’d be facing, the least she could do was wreck the production line. That wouldn’t be easy either; running the printer 26/7 meant there were always two men watching the dials, feeding in ink, and removing partially cooled blasters to the annealing chambers.

  Isovel made a habit of walking around the clearing ‘for exercise,’ and casually strolled past the printer whenever possible. Sooner or later the guys watching production would get tired of staring at dials that never wavered. It wouldn’t take her long to change the settings so that the printer wrecked itself. If only she’d let them destroy it themselves when they first got it powered up! She was too squeamish, had been ever since she sneaked a look at that training holo with its compilation of industrial disasters. Probably that had been an exaggeration. An overheated printer wouldn’t really melt its own build cage and then melt off the faces of anybody watching. The holo had been meant to scare beginning techs into paying very, very close attention to each step of the process. It had certainly worked on her.

  In the meantime… well, she could borrow Gabrel’s reader and peruse the surprising number of novels loaded on it, or she could talk to Gabrel. The latter option was beginning to feel dangerously – what? Personal? Nonsense. It was just that they were both so guarded about anything that might be relevant to the war, there wasn’t a lot left to talk about but their personal histories.

  And there was a bit of her own personal history that Isovel had been avoiding.

  Come to think of it, so had Gabrel; every time they got close to mentioning that she’d been kidnapped from B ring with a naked private trying to rescue her, the subject seemed to change. Well, she supposed everybody knew about that, and they were politely not going into the details. But Gabrel didn’t know why she blushed every time the subject almost came up, and for some reason Isovel wanted him to know.

  At the first opportunity after that decision, Isovel grabbed the subject with both hands. It was much like grabbing stingflower blossoms. Ripe ones.

  “You and your men have been very polite,” she announced. “I’m sure they are all laughing about the way I got captured, but at least they don’t do it to my face.”

  “Nobody thinks the less of you for bein
g in love,” Gabrel said, staring out at the blue valley just visible where the plateau broke off so sharply. “I expect we’ve all done some stupid things for love; I know I have.”

  It was tempting – very tempting – to follow that up. Isovel grasped her imaginary bundle of stingflowers a little harder. “If it were for love – maybe I wouldn’t mind so much.”

  “You don’t love him?”

  “I thought I did,” Isovel said. “In the last week, though, I’ve had a lot of time to think… And what I think now is, I was behaving like a silly young girl. Playing at love to amuse myself. It was so boring being Daddy’s housekeeper and hostess here. I couldn’t even go out to visit my friends, the way I could on Harmony. And Jonny was always doing little things for me. Being unobtrusively in the way when Governor Serman tried to maneuver me into the conservatory. Finding native spices that I couldn’t go out and shop for myself. It’s, it’s hard to explain…”

  “Oh?” Gabrel turned to face her. “I don’t find it at all hard to understand why a young man would go out of his way to make a good impression on you.” The look of frank admiration in Gabrel’s eyes made Isovel blush. Again.

  “Yes, well, he did,” Isovel blurted. “And he was somebody I could talk to without all the political fencing and game-playing of the senior Committee officers, and he was sympathetic, and… that was really all there was to it before Daddy put his foot down, said I was going to be talked about if this went on, and had him sent to the front.”

  “Hmm. If you’ll forgive me saying so, your father doesn’t have much of an idea how to handle young girls. He was practically forcing you to be in love.”

  Isovel flushed painfully. “Well. I’m not exactly a young girl. And I – was stupid. I loved the secrecy and the difficulty of getting out to B ring. It was… exciting. I thought what I was feeling was love.” She twisted her hands. The imaginary stingflowers burned. “The truth is – I was using him. And I’m eight years older than he is!”

  Gabrel choked.

  “It’s not funny!” She eyed him cautiously. “But you’re not shocked.”

  “Mmm. You’ve never been a twenty-year-old man being led around by your hormonal urges.”

  “Obviously not!”

  “Let me just say… from the depths of my experience as a man… I doubt very much that your private would have any objection to being ‘used’ in that fashion. He probably thought he’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “Oh….” An invisible weight slid off Isovel’s shoulders. “I… hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “And you did say he was incredibly good looking. He might have been using that to influence you.”

  “I don’t think he’s that subtle,” Isovel said regretfully. “But he is amazingly good-looking, especially for someone whose parents didn’t have access to a gene scanner.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, all of the Central Committee families are scanned for optimal attributes. That’s why we tend to be rather boringly tall and blonde with regular features.”

  “Right. That explains why I find looking at you such a bore. Appearance is so superficial. I’m sure I would find it much more interesting to look at your short, cross-eyed sister with a monobrow.”

  Isovel laughed. “Now you’re being silly. I could never have a short, ugly sister.”

  “Your parents’ genes are that perfect?”

  “No, stupid, but any non-optimal chromosomal combinations are deleted as soon as they can be scanned – usually in the first month.”

  She felt Gabrel stiffen beside her.

  “You abort babies for not being pretty enough?”

  “Delete fetuses,” Isovel corrected his wording.

  “All right. Now I’m shocked.” Gabrel stood up stiffly. “Your pardon; I must get back to work.”

  For the next couple of days, Gabrel took his breaks with his e-reader instead of seeking out her company. Isovel had more than enough time to think – and instead of thinking about sabotage and escape, she thought about that last conversation. Gabrel hadn’t condemned her for what she still considered an ethically ambiguous relationship with Jonny. She’d thought of him as broad-minded and easy-going… and then he’d suddenly acted as if he wanted to put half a province between them, just because every family she knew used gene scanning to optimize their progeny. What was wrong with gene scanning, anyway? Wasn’t it a good idea to be warned ahead of time if you’d conceived a child with a fatal disease, one that probably wouldn’t live to be born anyway?

  But crooked teeth and a snub nose aren’t fatal diseases.

  Unless you had the bad luck to be conceived by a high-ranking Committee member…

  I’m an only child. I was born late in Mother’s life; they tell me that’s why she had such a hard time with the pregnancy and never fully recovered from my birth.

  How many of my brothers and sisters were deleted for not being perfect?

  Isovel told herself to forget it, and to start working on escape/sabotage plans. She was glad Gabrel was keeping his distance; she didn’t need that distraction.

  Two days later most of the men who weren’t working directly on production went out hunting, looking for some of the native wildlife to give a little variety of texture and flavor to their diet of sludge. Patrik and Wil were left in charge of the printer, and Gabrel had his nose in his reader. She wouldn’t have a better opportunity to make mischief.

  She walked briskly across the clearing several times before slowing, as if tired, near the printer. “So tell me, Patrik,” she asked casually, “how did a nice boy like you wind up in this gang of ruffians? Did they force you to join them?”

  “Drafting really doesn’t work so well for irregular forces,” Patrik said.

  “So what’s your story? I know you’re not from around here. Did you grow up on a plains farm?”

  Patrik pretended to shudder. “Farming? A delicate lad like me? Please! Mom and Dad are totally city people.”

  Isovel sat down with one fluid twisting motion that highlighted the length of her slender legs under the dark green smartcloth. Those tedious Modern Dance classes were finally coming in handy. “How fascinating! What’s their profession?”

  Patrik shook his head. “Sorry. We’re not supposed to say anything that could identify our relatives.”

  “Why?”

  “Reprisals.”

  “Oh… but Harmony would never hold a man’s family guilty for what he did. At worst your parents might be invited to join a self-criticism group where they could reflect on where they went wrong in your upbringing.”

  Patrik laughed sourly. “Is that a fact? You don’t know Governor Serman. His ‘self-criticism groups’ come with handcuffs and blasters. That’s how I got into this line of work.”

  “He threatened your parents?” Isovel didn’t even have to pretend to be shocked. “He vastly misunderstood his authority. But you don’t have to fear for them now. My father is in charge and he would never countenance that kind of thing.”

  “Not my parents. Mother of a girl I knew. She’s dead now.”

  “The mother?”

  “Both of them. So I think I’ll just wait a while before trusting in your father’s justice and clemency, okay? And in case you were wondering… Patrik isn’t my real name.”

  Well, so much for that. As a seductive spy, she was a really good untrained tech. Instead of distracting Patrik with flirtation, she’d made him furious.

  Of course, anger was also distracting. She was within arm’s reach of the controls…

  “Is Wil asleep?”

  “Quite likely. He’s the laziest son of a… doat I’ve even known.” But Patrik stood up and went around the printer to stir Wil with his toe.

  It was in the sintering phase. Isovel reached for the temperature controls and paused, one hand on the first dial. If she turned it all the way up the printer would definitely fail.

  And if that training holo hadn’t been an exaggeration? Isovel’s mental vision off
ered up a vision of Patrik, his face melted off but somehow not dead, screaming… Discord! She couldn’t do it. She would have to figure out a less fatal way to cripple the printer.

  “What are you doing?” Patrik came charging around the machine and tackled her, throwing her back and away from the printer’s control panel. “Wil, you lazy son of a doat, check the settings! What did you do to it?” he demanded.

  Absolutely nothing. Because I’m a hypersensitive girly-girl. But maybe she could salvage something from the wreck.

  “You’ll never know! You won’t see anything different on the control panel.” That was certainly true. Isovel decided to throw a giggle in, and was shocked at how easy it was to sound hysterical. Well, with a furious young man pressing you down, his hands tightening around your throat…

  There were these strange spots floating in front of her eyes. “If you strangle me,” she managed with her last thin thread of air, “you won’t know what happened until your precious printer self-destructs.”

  Patrik’s hands loosened. “Tell me!”

  “No!”

  He banged her head on the ground. “No!” she shrieked again.

  “Dear me, Patrik,” drawled a familiar voice, “didn’t your mother ever teach you that no means no?”

  Patrik’s weight lifted off her. “I wasn’t trying to…”

  “I didn’t really think you were,” Gabrel said. “Even Patrik, I told myself, wouldn’t be stupid enough to rape the girl in broad daylight and before witnesses. So tell me, Patrik, what were you stupid enough to do?”

  “I took my eyes off the control panel for a moment. Caught her monkeying with it. Trying to make her tell me what she did.”

  “Mmm. Forgive my slowness, but I can’t understand why it would be easier to attack a woman than to look at the control panel.”

  “She claimed whatever she did wouldn’t show on the controls.”

  “Ah. A secret self-destruct button? I very much doubt that. Wil, does everything look normal to you? Good. Patrik, let the girl go, she’s playing you for a fool.” Gabrel offered a hand; Isovel ignored it and stood as gracefully as she had first sat down. It made her feel slightly better about being found flat on her back, flailing to get away from Patrik.