“Jesse.” Could she talk him out of this traumatized state? “That’s over. It won’t happen again.”
“Over and over, every night in my dreams,” Jesse whispered. “Now I’m going to do it differently. You, Harmonica – now you can run and try to hide, and after I kill you the dreams will go away.”
He swung her round so that her back was to the creek, let loose of her and stepped back. He’d jammed her blaster into a pocket. His blaster was in his hand, pointed at her, safety off. Never point your weapon at something you’re not prepared to burn. Never slide the safety off unless you’re ready to burn your target.’
“Run and hide, little girl,” he whispered hoarsely. “Run and hide.”
Isovel raised her chin. “I won’t.” Her voice shook, betraying her.
“You have to!” Jesse snapped. Back to his regular voice. That’s good. Maybe he’s stopped reliving the massacre.
“That’s how this works,” he went on. “You run and duck and hide and beg for mercy until I kill you. Then my Raychel won’t come into my dreams again. I have to kill a Harmonica for her, don’t you see?”
If you’re not going to kill me until I try to run away, then by Chord and Consonance I’m not going to run! “I won’t. And you can’t make me.”
Jesse chuckled. “Oh, yes, I can. Did you ever see a woman with half her face melted off? I did. Did you ever wonder how that must have felt? I didn’t need to wonder. I heard her screams.” He raised the blaster and caressed her cheek with it, almost tenderly. “Now run!” He grasped her shoulder with his free hand and pushed her away from him. She lost her footing on the slick rock and fell into the icy stream. Instead of climbing out, she twisted so that her face was under water. Maybe that would protect her.
CHAPTER TEN
Somebody was shouting. Had to be Jesse. Sounded far away because her ears were under the water.
A brilliant beam of light, round and tiny like a pen, lit up the water in front of her. How odd. He missed? A new sound, like a sack full of sludge falling onto the rock. A hand in front of her, reaching blindly, poking her face.
She bit it and heard a most satisfying cry of pain. If that’s the last sound I hear before I die… Could be worse.
She didn’t see the grabbing hand this time, it came from behind her and the first thing she knew was that her collar was stretching, somebody was trying to twist it and the smartcloth was reacting by changing shape.
“Stupid smartcloth!” That wasn’t Jesse’s voice, she was hallucinating.
The hand let go her collar, grasped her elbow and dragged her out of the water an inch at a time.
“I know you’re not really here,” Isovel said to Gabrel’s pale face, “but it’s a really good hallucination. Could you bear to stay that way until you kill me? Because I’d rather you did it than Jesse.”
“Isovel. Stop babbling.”
“The voice is good too.” How had she come from standing on the rock to sitting on the ground with her head leaning against somebody’s chest? The icy water dripped off her clothes; the smartcloth was working overtime to shed it and warm her up. She tilted her head up and looked at Gabrel, and he wasn’t a hallucination. He was an exhausted man who, for once, looked his age. Or more.
“Jesse?”
“Dead.”
She thought that over for a while. “I thought I’d missed him.”
“You missed,” said Gabrel tersely. “I didn’t.” He started to do something very like babbling. For him. “I heard the last few minutes, when he was threatening you. I thought he was disturbed. I hadn’t realized that he was criminally insane and had to be put down. And he kept moving and swinging you around and it was a minor eternity before I could get a clear shot.”
He’d had to kill one of his own men to save her from the consequences of her inept escape attempt. He must really hate and despise me now. Isovel leaned back against him. If this was her last chance to be in his arms, she intended to make the most of it.
“Do you think you can walk? We really need to get moving.”
Isovel frowned. She didn’t feel any need to move. And from what she could hear in this position, Gabrel had no business pushing himself immediately. “We should wait until you catch your breath.”
“What an assumption. I am not out of breath.”
But he was breathing rapidly, and… “That’s not what your pulse says. I can feel your heartbeats and they’re much too fast.”
Gabrel flinched away from her, stood, took her hand and pulled her upright, dropped her hand. “Oh, that? That’s not from over-exertion. It’s just what happens whenever I’m around you. Don’t worry. I do not plan to follow killing my own man with raping a hostage.”
Isovel’s own breaths went shallow and rapid as she visualized herself pushed down into a bed of dead needles, Gabrel touching and kissing… Idiot. What makes him think it would be rape? But it didn’t matter, did it? They couldn’t… not within a few feet of Jesse’s body… She told her own body to calm down.
“I – I really hadn’t any fear of that.”
“Good. By tonight you will be doubly safe.” What did that mean?
As it happened, she had a good hour of sitting against a needle tree, nibbling a piece of the stale flatbread Gabrel had stuffed in his pockets, while she got used to the concept of another forced march through the mountains. It took Gabrel that long to collect enough rocks and pebbles to cover Jesse’s body. Should she help? No. Bad enough that she’d caused Jesse’s death; helping Gabrel now might ease her guilt, but it would be… tacky. Which should be so much less important than evil; but in her crêches nobody had talked much about evil, and the instructors were vigilant to expose and root out any traces of tackiness. She might be a murderer, but at least she could be a polite murderer.
Finally Gabrel finished the job and extended a slightly grubby hand to help her up. “Now we can get moving.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Isovel said an hour later, while they rested at the top of a ridge that looked exactly like every other barren ridge in the mountains. “When we get back to the camp, I think we should say that I killed Jesse.”
“No.”
“The others might be… disturbed… if they thought you did it.”
“What part of ‘no’ did you not understand? My action, my consequences. I. Will. Deal. With. It. Besides, we’re not going back to my camp.”
“We aren’t?”
“Do you have any idea just how lost you were?”
“I was going to follow the creek to the river.”
“Oh, brilliant. Except this creek doesn’t flow to the river. It flows to a reservoir. Last night you not only lost our creek, you got totally turned around and headed even deeper into the mountains. We’re closer to Colonel Travis’ base now than we are to mine. So that’s where we’re going – just as planned.”
“Oh.” Isovel thought for a minute. Something didn’t add up. “You don’t mind letting me find out where the base is?”
Gabrel’s smile flashed for a second. “You have already demonstrated your utter lack of any sense of direction. Since our base doesn’t have a street name and number, I think we’re safe from any more – from any betrayal. Have another piece of nice stale flatbread.”
“Um, no thank you, I’m not really hungry.”
“That was an order, not an invitation. You walked and climbed yourself to a standstill last night, and there’s more walking and climbing ahead of you today. Eat. You’re going to need the energy.”
Gabrel put another rectangle of flatbread in her hand. Reluctantly, Isovel took a bite and chewed. And chewed. “This is like trying to eat a carpet,” she muttered.
“What? I didn’t catch that.”
“Oh, I was just saying that… that… it’s better than sludge.” She was really a very polite murderer.
Two hours and several ridges later, Isovel was fast forgetting the notion of politeness. “Don’t you ever rest?” she protested after Gabrel hauled her u
p over three feet of sheer rock. Her own pulse was pounding like a demented drummer, and it wasn’t just because Gabrel was holding her hand.
“If you hadn’t been in such a hurry, you could have been riding a donkey to the base,” Gabrel informed her. “Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the donkey when I tore out after Jesse.”
And killed him. To save me. Another thing that wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t run away. And a little discomfort on a difficult hike… was nothing compared to that. Right. She wouldn’t complain again.
Wouldn’t, for instance, mention what scrambling over rocks was doing to the lightweight sandals she’d been wearing when captured.
Gabrel set a slower pace after that. The next part of the hike was steep and Isovel had no breath left to make conversation. Even if there’d been anything to say. By the time they crested the ridge and started downhill, she had become aware of the black brooding silence wrapped around Gabrel; it was almost tangible.
The sole of her right sandal pulled loose from its front straps and began flapping and trying to trip her up. She kicked it off and limped on, feeling slightly unbalanced. It was almost a relief when the other sandal fell apart. She might be able to fashion something from a strip of her tunic, except you couldn’t tear smartcloth. Well, if Gabrel had a knife. If he were willing to stop.
She wasn’t willing to ask him to stop. It couldn’t be that much farther, and her bare feet gave her a better grip on the rocks than the sandals had done.
They were challenged long after she had privately given up hope that they would ever reach the base. Gabrel and the sentry exchanged complicated passwords and they were waved on.
This happened twice more before they reached the base. Was Colonel Travis paranoid, or simply thorough?
“Incidentally,” Gabrel tossed over his shoulder after the third exchange, “we change passwords regularly. So you needn’t bother trying to memorize these. They’ll be out of date long before you have a chance to tell them to anybody.”
Isovel bit her lip. Did the man have eyes in the back of his head? All right, she’d been moving her lips slightly as she tried to fix the last password sequence in memory. But there was no way he could have known that.
It didn’t matter, anyway. Memorizing the passwords was just a way to keep from thinking about how much her feet hurt – particularly the left big toe, which had experienced an extremely unpleasant collision with a bruising rock.
But she couldn’t stop a sigh of relief when her feet were on hard-packed earth instead of rocks.
The base camp looked much larger and better organized than Gabrel’s ad hoc camp outside a convenient cave. For the first time, Isovel felt a hint of fear that these guerrillas might actually win in a fight against an organized army. This place looked… serious.
Paths worn down to the bare earth threaded clumps of grass and rocky outcroppings between tents of various sizes. Gabrel led her to a smallish tent, its entire front rolled up to give light to a middle-aged man seated at a table strewn with flimsies – maps, lists, what else?
“So this is the famous hostage who inspired Dayvson to invade the mountains?” The man pushed his chair back, stood, and bowed. “Welcome, Citizen. I hope that we will be able to provide you with a few of the amenities of civilized life that may be lacking among our mobile units.”
Isovel felt tongue-tied. She couldn’t unleash her usual defense of rudeness against this courtly man. She wanted to defend Gabrel’s temporary camp, to say it hadn’t been all that bad. And by Chord and Consonance, she wanted a bath.
While she stood trying to think of what to say, several guerrillas had drifted closer. Probably wondering why a valuable hostage looked so scruffy.
A very young-looking man with badly cut floppy brown hair inspected her from top to toe and gasped when he reached her feet. “Colonel! This woman needs medical treatment!”
No, she didn’t. She needed to hear what Gabrel reported, and to interrupt if he tried to take responsibility for everything that had happened.
But she was whisked off to the medical tent anyway, where two women exclaimed over the state of her feet and applied soapy water, an antibiotic gel, pressure bandages for the worst cuts, and a wrapping over each foot and ankle.
“It’s the best we can do,” said the tall dark one, frowning as though Isovel had injured herself on purpose. “I’m afraid you’re going to lose that toenail, though. Whatever possessed you to tackle the mountains barefoot? Did you expect paved roads?”
She stalked out without waiting for a reply. The short plump woman patted Isovel’s hand. “Don’t mind Grayce. She accuses every patient she treats of having injured themselves on purpose. Mind you, in a camp full of young men and heavy equipment, she’s right about two-thirds of the time. We lose more men to stupidity than to the war, though that may change when your father gets into the mountains. Would you like to wash up now? I’m afraid it’ll have to be sponge and bucket; Grayce will probably kill both of us if your dressings get wet.”
Isovel wanted a wash more than the ultimate redemption of her soul. “Thank you. Maybe later? I need to, need to…” get back to the Colonel’s tent before Gabrel accuses himself of every crime in the book.
Fortunately, her companion finished the sentence for her, even if slightly erroneously. “Colonel Travis wants to see you at once? Men! Never mind. Just you come back here afterwards and I’ll see you get a little privacy to wash and… do you need a change of clothes?”
Isovel shook her head. “This entire suit is smartcloth. It traps dirt and sweat and all that. It’s overloaded right now, but all I need to do is take it off and shake it a few times so that it releases everything it’s holding into the air.”
“Oh, real smartcloth! I’ve never actually seen any. Is it true that…”
Isovel shifted restlessly and the woman stopped mid-sentence. “Never mind, can’t keep the Colonel waiting, can we? Maybe later…”
“Later,” Isovel reassured her.
But Gabrel was already gone when she reached Colonel Travis’s tent. Isovel’s heart sank. She’d assumed that at least – at least – he’d stay the night before heading back to his own camp and the forbidding duty he would face when he got there. Even if he did hate her now, she’d have had a few more chances to look at him, to memorize his face.
At least the Colonel was alone at the moment. And after acting as her father’s hostess for years, she knew how to deal with high-ranking men. Didn’t she?
Isovel took a deep breath and mentally put on the character of the Society Hostess who wouldn’t dream of waiting for an inferior to offer her a chair. She swept into the tent and took a seat on the folding camp stool in front of the table. Possibly a bad move. It’s lower than his chair; I have to look up at him now. She didn’t allow any uncertainty to creep into her voice. “Colonel, I’m glad to find you alone. I’d like a chance to clear up any misunderstandings about how I came to be here.”
Travis looked up and raised one eyebrow. “Young Moresco – Gabrel – has already made a full report. I’m not aware of any misunderstandings.”
“We may have… a different perspective on events. Did he tell you about the man who, ah, died?”
“I can’t release the contents of a military report to an enemy alien, Citizen. But I suppose, since you were personally involved, that it would be permissible for me to reassure you that I am fully apprised of the circumstances surrounding the death of Jesse Barash.”
“I’m concerned that Gabrel may have taken full responsibility for that unfortunate, um, incident.”
The Colonel leaned back in his chair but kept his eyes on her face. “Since his was the hand that fired the blaster, that would seem appropriate.”
“Not if you know all the circumstances, sir. I had put myself in danger by attempting to escape. Jesse tracked and caught me. Sir, he is… was… the tragedy of Dry Creek had warped his mind. He wanted to kill me in revenge for his wife’s death, I think. Did Gabrel tell you that at
the moment he fired, Jesse was holding a blaster to my face?”
Colonel Travis’s brows rose. “Indeed? He omitted that little detail.”
“I thought he might. Sir, it is against the laws of war to harm an unresisting hostage. When Gabrel fired, he was acting correctly by those laws. So you see, it would be unjust to punish him for it.”
“The so-called ‘laws of war,’ are little consolation to someone who has just killed a comrade in arms. Captain Moresco has burdened himself with more guilt and grief than any other person could lay upon him, and he is now on his way to tell his other men what he has done. I could scarcely invent a punishment more painful than what he has taken upon himself.”
She would not cry. “Thank you for your time, sir.” She rose to go.
“Wait!” The Colonel’s voice held the snap of command.
“Sir?”
“Dine with me tonight. After you’ve had time to recover from the rigors of travel, of course. Shall we say at 2100 hours?”
“I should be honored, sir.”
Isovel left the tent, her face burning. That crack about “the rigors of travel” had reminded her that she had conducted the entire interview with her feet swathed in bandages, her smartcloth suit clogged with dust and sweat, her uncombed hair falling loose down her back. She had been willing to sacrifice dignity for a last chance to see Gabrel; now she’d lost both that and whatever poise she still possessed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dinners with Colonel Travis became a regular feature of Isovel’s time at the base camp, sometimes tête-à-tête, more often with two or three of his subordinates attending. The food was of variable quality; the conversation predictably good. When there were no other guests, they dined with the front tent flap completely rolled up, which was sometimes a nuisance.
“Is that done to protect my reputation?” Isovel asked on that first evening when the seventh guerrilla strolled past, slowly taking in the view.
“The thought had occurred to me,” Colonel Travis said. “If the gawkers annoy you, I might invite some of my officers to join us. Would that be an acceptable substitute?”
Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 11
