It all sounded needlessly complicated to Yanni. But at least Uncle Ektor seemed to have everything under control.
***
“We need a victory,” Andrus told General Dayvson. They were riding two relatively compliant donkeys that plodded up the track beside the river at a pace that allowed ample time for conversation. “No, let me rephrase that. You need a victory – something to show the common people why we’re fighting this war – if you want to keep your position.”
“You think I’m that desperate to keep command? I will happily hand over the army to whatever poor fool the Committee taps next. Just as soon as I have Isovel back.”
“Then you need to buy the time to search for her. No, listen! I know you despise me and everyone in the Bureau for Concord. Sometimes I despise this job myself. But I do know politics. You don’t do politics; I respect that. But with even more respect, General, you may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you.”
“Therefore, your advice that I should win?” Rauf Dayvson snorted. “You know, I had actually been thinking along those lines myself.”
“My advice,” Andrus said stiffly, “is that you should pay heed to the political issues back home. This morning, when we crossed that ridge line, I was able to establish direct communication with headquarters for a short time. They passed on to me the latest news from Harmony.”
“So?”
“General, it’s bad. Very bad. Those stragglers who never caught up with the supply train after it resumed marching? They were tortured to death by guerrillas and left for the locals to find. Newsers got wind of it somehow, and got pictures which they’ve been broadcasting all over Harmony.”
“Discord. Dissonance. Sour notes! Are you telling me Harmony City knows what’s happened to my troops before I do?” Dayvson chewed on his short gray mustache. “I should have known about this. Who kept it from me?” He glared at Andrus.
“Communications are much better in the plains. And… um… there wasn’t a rider…”
“I sent Lieutenant Kenzi back to form up the last of the supply train. He should have…” Dayvson’s voice trailed off. “Was he killed too?”
“Probably.” Andrus swallowed. “It’s… hard to tell. I captured some stills from the holos on my wristcom. I can show you…”
“Tonight. My tent. This isn’t something to be discussed in the middle of the day’s march.” Dayvson dismissed Andrus with a sharp nod and urged his donkey forward to catch up with the staff officers at the head of the column.
The stills were bad enough; the messages from CenCom were worse. “What do they mean,” Dayvson exploded that night, “I’m instructed to withdraw my forces to the plains? Do they have any idea what it’s cost us to get them this far into the mountains?”
The costs were less than they had been, as each guerrilla attack and each loss made Dayvson aware of his oversights. The column marched in close order now, with scouts in the woods on each flank and taking point. The scouts were sent out in pairs, to discourage any individual from taking the chance to desert. And from tonight, the remnants of the baggage train would march with the main column at all times. There would be an armed rear guard to protect them, and riders to warn him if they began to straggle. He felt that he was finally figuring out how to run this war. Too late for Kenzi. But that thought made him even more determined to push on.
Andrus sighed. “I think the Committee are more concerned with what it may cost them to keep going. The marches in Harmony City are turning into riots. Our losses have been bad enough that we need to draft replacement soldiers.”
“So? There hasn’t been any trouble with the draft.”
“Not yet. But we ran out of slum dregs to draft some time ago. Each man we take now has a family – parents, maybe a wife and children – that resents our taking him. Has a job that goes unfilled without him, and that kicks the economy down even more. And now that these holos have been spread…”
Dayvson expressed himself pithily, if blasphemously, on the subject of a Central Committee that couldn’t even keep the newsers on a leash.
“Agreed,” said Andrus, “but they can’t exactly deport them, can they?”
“Draft’em,” Dayvson snarled.
“Not practical. All the newsers have connections in the Central Committee or high up in some Bureau or other. And in any case, it’s too late. Nobody is going to comply with a draft that sends them out to a rebel continent where they’re tortured and killed. Central needs you to get out of the mountains before there’s an outright revolt in the city. They’re afraid. They sent all their peace officers off with the army and now they haven’t the power to put down a riot. Once the mob finds that out….” Andrus shook his head.
“Let them quiver. They’re not out here where there’s something real to be afraid of. Tell them to find a pointy stake and sit on it, I’ll come back after I’ve found and destroyed these nests of traitors.”
“Yes, well… First find your traitors, eh? There’s a lot of territory to search, and these rebels know the land; we don’t. Their small groups can move fast; our column is tied to the speed of the slowest marchers. They can blend in with the locals; we stand out.”
“Doesn’t help, Andrus, to have you listing the problems. We can and will beat these raggedy amateurs. And – you know I’m not going to retreat without Isovel.”
Andrus bowed and eased out of the general’s tent, thinking furiously. This obsession with his daughter was going to ruin Dayvson. And it might ruin him too, as the political officer who couldn’t rein in his subject. Outright defiance of the Committee? Dayvson would be recalled in disgrace – most likely, so would Andrus – while somebody more pliable took over the army.
Which would, Andrus realized, mean more losses, more deaths, more soldiers vulnerable to these vicious traitors. Because Dayvson was the only remotely competent senior officer in Harmony’s hastily assembled army.
“What a war!” he thought. “The commanding officer reads history books to figure out how to lead an invading army. And the rebels are probably reading books on how to conduct an asymmetric war. We should all drop this nonsense and get back to things we know how to do.”
It was at that moment that he was visited by the blinding light of inspiration. He could save Dayvson. He could save his own career.
And he might just be able to save Harmony while he was at it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Renzi had been busy with the printer in the back of the library tent all morning, while Isovel sat at his table and read. This Reference Library the rebels set such store by was strange and hypnotically interesting. Some of the books contained such free-wheeling debates on dangerous ideas that she got confused and often felt that neither side was right and they were both insane. “States” were like Districts, she decided, but why debate over how much independent power they should have? The Districts simply implemented the Central Committee’s plans; how else could society have uniform harmony? Then they worried about whether a strong central government would protect or diminish individual liberty, as though liberty was a good in itself rather than a means for individuals to come to harmony. And then…
Isovel kept swearing that she wouldn’t go on looking at these risky, tricky books that seemed designed to destroy all her principles. But the ideas kept nagging at her mind, and every day she gave in again to the temptation to read what she would never, ever have a chance to read at home. Because it was perfectly clear why these books had been removed from Harmony’s collection; they were full of seditious ideas that would only whip up the mob and encourage them in discord. It would be a serious mistake to let just anybody read them.
She, however, was an educated person who collected and annotated references for the historical papers her father used to write when he was just a professor. She had the mental stability and the critical thinking to see through false arguments.
And puzzling out the meaning of these documents through their archaic language and s
pelling helped her not to think about people she would never see again and who were really of no significance at all in her real life. Back on Harmony. Where nobody ever argued. And that was better, wasn’t it? And didn’t she long to return to the comforts and peace of home?
Of course she did.
She just – well – wasn’t in any hurry to leave, that was all.
The tent was beginning to smell of the ink Renzi fed the printer. She wondered if he would help her move the table outside, so that she could read in the fresh air. But when she went back to ask, he was totally occupied in coaxing his printed sheets through the outdated printer which seemed to want to mangle each page as it passed between the rollers. Isovel shook her head at the elaborate insults he was heaping on the printer, which was apparently the offspring of a diseased donkey and a rabid greatcat.
Who even used 2-D printers any more, when for the same price you could get an all-in-one that would actually fab small items in its 3-D mode? she asked Renzi. This device couldn’t do anything useful like that.
He looked up and wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the back of one hand, in the process smearing the blotch of ink that he’d somehow gotten on one temple.
“Depends how you define useful. I’ve told you, ideas are our best weapons.” He thumped the small pile of finished sheets with one hand. “These will do far more than blasters to discourage the damned Harmonicas, oh sorry, your compatriots I mean.”
“Indeed!” Isovel extracted a sheet from the pile and wandered outside to read it in natural light, with a supercilious smile as she skimmed the bold printing. Renzi was delusional if he thought that this obvious pack of lies would have any effect on people like her father. Harmony forces defeated here, here, and here? The invading column losing men daily? All lies…
But would the grunts know that? And the last paragraph was downright scary. It urged the common soldiers to desert now rather than “marching through a hostile land to be picked off one by one, leaving your bones to crumble away in a foreign country for the sake of politicians who never did you any good.” Melodramatic language – but then, it was aimed at people who spent their free hours drinking and watching cheap holodramas. And the next sentences were genuinely worrisome, offering deserters a warm welcome, good food, and a section of Esilian land after the war.
Isobel’s brows were drawn together, two sharp vertical lines cut into her forehead, by the time she finished reading. Of course it was all lies and false promises; for one thing, only the governor had authority to approve land grants. But at home, one understood that the populace lacked critical thinking skills, and it would have been a crime to confuse them with stuff like this. Would this really affect the grunts?
She remembered the chip on Jonny Kelso’s shoulder. Yes. Some of them were primed and ready for any rabble-rousing rhetoric that pretended to offer them a better deal in life. These leaflets might be only a small irritation, but her father and his staff officers really had enough to worry about without having sedition preached through the ranks.
She folded the offending sheet twice and tucked it into her sleeve, then went back in to see what she could do.
The grating noises had stopped; so had Renzi’s inventive stream of insults. He was sitting on a camp stool, leaning his head back against the printer.
“Done?”
“Oh, hell, no. The colonel wants five times this many flyers by tonight; he’s going to distribute them to every band on the mountain, so they can seed the entire length of the column with them. We got a great response with the first flyer. I’m just tired and frustrated with nursing this aborted obscenity of a machine. We can’t afford to have every third flyer crumpled or smeared; I don’t have enough ink to waste it.”
“Will people be coming to here to pick them up?” Gabrel. Not that it mattered to her in the slightest. But, Gabrel, her heart insisted.
“Yup. That’s why I gotta finish the job today. Otherwise we’ll have every guerrilla captain and lieutenant on the mountain complaining about kicking their heels waiting for stupid paperwork. And their men without leaders.”
“You’d think they would send an errand boy instead of coming themselves.”
“Well, a few might have that much sense,” Renzi allowed. “But too damned many of them are glory hounds. They won’t delegate anything and they always want to get the latest gossip directly from the base.”
“And now the printer’s breaking down,” Isovel said sympathetically. “What a disaster for you!”
Renzi’s half-closed eyes shot open. “It’s not breaking down. It’s always been cranky like this.” But he looked alarmed. Good.
“Indeed? Funny, I took a course in tech repair, and your printer sounds exactly like one of the overstressed machines we had to refurbish. If the operators had only brought them to us earlier we could have recalibrated them so that they wouldn’t be stressed to destruction.”
“You took tech repair?”
Isovel shrugged. “Only two semesters. I can’t work with heavy equipment, just minor appliances like printers and chronos.” She waited, hardly breathing, to see if Renzi would take the bait.
“You can fix printers? Oh, my. We don’t have anybody who knows his way around these new machines.”
Isovel decided it would be tactless to mention that on Harmony, nobody would call an obsolete 2D printer a “new” machine.
“Could you – would you –” Renzi swallowed whatever he was going to say next. “No, it’s not fair to ask you to look at the spavined mule of a machine. I keep forgetting that you’re on the other side.”
“So do I.” Isovel switched on her Grade Three smile, the one that had distracted more than half of the colonel’s young officers. “But I’m bored, and I’d like to make some repayment for your generous hospitality. So why don’t you take your headache over to the mess tent and treat it with a cup of kahve, while I look over your printer and see if there’s anything I can do?”
The idiot actually fell for that. I can’t believe he was Gabrel’s best friend growing up… oh well, he’s not stupid. Just insufficiently paranoid.
Alone in the library tent, Isovel pushed up her sleeves, swung the camp stool around to face the back of the printer, and set out to see just what she could do. Hmm, the snap-in solar cells snapped out easily enough. She might be able to degrade the shiny contacts enough to spoil the power supply, but it would be more satisfying and wreak more havoc if she got inside and messed with the wiring… Ha! Here was a black panel covered with warnings from “Disable power before removing this panel,” to “Don’t immerse this machine in water.”
Isovel always wondered about those general-purpose warnings. Did anyone really have to be told not to put their home printer in the bathtub? Never mind, the first warning told her all she needed to know: the panel could be removed. And a look at the accompanying picture showed two pairs of tabs, one on each top corner of the panel, being pinched together. The tabs were stiff enough to hurt her fingers, but finally gave way and allowed her to fold the panel down along its hinged bottom edge. Success! Now she was looking at a tangle of wires running from the power points to the interior of the printer.
If she really had the tech training she’d implied, she might be able to do something subtle, like switching just enough wires to make the machine misinterpret every command. Oh, well, at least she knew enough to wreak her own kind of havoc.
Renzi kept a utility knife in his top drawer. Nice and sharp. Sturdy, too. Isovel used the knife to worry individual wires completely free, tucking them into her sleeve as she collected them. These people don’t do machinery; I bet they’ll have to send to the plains for more insulated wire. She used the sharp edge of the knife to strip the insulation from randomly selected samples of the remaining wires. What else? Ah, the feed thickness sensors. Destroy, or just disable? If she disconnected them but left the sensors in place, it would take them a while to figure out why the machine had become a paper-shredding monster. That was assuming th
ey could recover to the point of making it run again, of course… She snapped the panel back in, replaced the solar cells and occupied herself until Renzi got back by tearing up the existing flyers and hiding the shreds.
“Where are the flyers?” Renzi asked the minute he came back to the printing area.
Stuffing the chair cushions. “Oh, some guy came for them.”
“Which group?”
Isovel shrugged. “He didn’t say. And I was busy working on your printer.” Would it be wise to leave now, before Renzi found out what she’d been up to? Oh, well. It wasn’t like she could pretend innocence. And she did want to see if her improvised sabotage had worked.
“It doesn’t matter which group, Renzi. Whoever doesn’t show up tonight will be the one who collected his supply early.” That was Colonel Travis. Oh, dissonance! Renzi might lose his temper when the printer failed, but the colonel could have her executed. Except he wouldn’t do that. To a valuable hostage. She hoped.
“Well, I’d better get started again. I want to have some flyers in hand for the next early bird.” He glanced at Isovel. “Were you able to do anything with The Monster?”
“I hope so,” Isovel said.
“Guess we’ll just have to see how she goes.” Isovel moved out of the way so that Renzi could snap the solar power cells back in place. He checked ink and liquid flimsy levels and then flipped the switch that should start the printer generating a new flimsy with the programmed text inked onto the surface.
Sparks shot out of the back of the printer and Renzi hastily flipped the switch off again. “What was that?”
“Um, temporary power surge following an unscheduled disconnection,” Isovel improvised. “Sometimes these older units aren’t properly shielded, so you might want to stand back for a few minutes after you power on.” And with any luck, a few minutes of electricity pouring through crossed wires without insulation should weld some of those wires together and create solid disaster zones that nobody could disentangle.
Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 15
