Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Read online

  Krayg had assured him that all the prohibited liquor had been destroyed. Kamron was privately skeptical about that, but he felt quite sure that any party sent out from HQ would find nothing but some broken jugs. He told Krayg that he had better be quite sure the lightning jack had been destroyed, because any further reports of drunken parties in B ring would result in his demotion. That was probably enough of a warning to make Krayg cautious about letting any of B ring get hold of enough of the stuff to become more than cheerful and slightly cross-eyed. As long as there were no more drunken orgies, Kamron was willing to turn a blind eye to the quantities of lightning jack on the ring. The possibility of getting a drink from the sergeant should, if anything, improve response time and accuracy from the outposts in B ring. Hard liquor might not be officially permitted in Harmony’s army, but the prospect of an unofficial drink or three from time to time was an excellent motivator for bored soldiers.

  There had seemed, then, no reason to bother the general with a story of soldiers misbehaving as all soldiers would, given the chance.

  Now there were two papers on Jaymi Kamron’s desk that could, if mixed, prove dangerously combustible.

  One was a note from Sergeant Krayg asking what should be done with the single-seater flitter found at post B12, which all four soldiers denied knowing anything about.

  The other was… or purported to be… a message from the Free Esilian Army, saying that they had Isovel Dayvson and promising that no harm would come to her as long as there were no more reprisals carried out on the innocent farmers and craftsmen of Esilia.

  Dayvson was pacing his office – formerly the Governor’s Small Dining Room – when Jaymi knocked at the door.

  “Any news?” he demanded, and in almost the same breath, “Sit. I’ve thought of some new search orders.”

  “I… uh… thought you should read this first.” Kamron handed him the crudely hand-printed flimsy purporting to be from the Free Esilians.

  Dayvson did not shout, curse, or throw small pieces of office furniture as he read the flyer. He did, however, emit a small hissing noise that made Kamron look for a sheltered place to dive in case the furniture-throwing started.

  “It’s a threat,” he stated.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A damned impudent threat!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And stupid beyond belief! Don’t they understand that the random reprisals were that idiot Serman’s idea, and that I’m here to – among other things – stop them?”

  “It seems they may not be entirely clear on that point, sir.”

  “Well, we can’t let them get away with this.”

  “Ah… no, of course not, sir.”

  “I’ll say one thing for that sadistic idiot Serman, the City and the plains villages are quiet now. Not the way I would have chosen, but not unknown in the history of warfare.”

  “Sir?”

  Dayvson tapped his reader. “I was just reading about a similar policy this morning. ‘They make a desert, and call it peace.’ An ancient historian on his people’s habits. He also says… Well, never mind. Why are you distracting me with these nonessentials?” He tapped again to shut down the translation of Tacitus and glared at Kamron. “These louts kidnapped my daughter! We have to send out an expeditionary force immediately to teach them a lesson.”

  “And rescue your daughter?” Kamron added after waiting a moment in case the general wanted to say anything more.

  “Hm? Oh, yes, yes, and retrieve Isovel. What was she thinking anyway, to get herself kidnapped by the damned rebels? How could it have happened?”

  “She might have been… um… closer to the outer ring than was advisable. Her flitter was found at an outpost in B ring.”

  “Which outpost? Have the soldiers been questioned?”

  “Yesterday it was not possible to question them thoroughly. They all had blinding hangovers – though one man claims he didn’t drink anything, he was caught by a stunner beam. And Sergeant Krayg said that he did seem somewhat more… neurologically impaired… than the other three.” What Krayg had actually said was more along the lines of “about as sharp as a bowl of sludge before they started drinking.”

  “Discord! You knew about this yesterday? Why wasn’t I told?”

  “I didn’t know about the flitter yesterday, sir. That wasn’t in the reports. At that time it looked like a simple case of disorderly conduct, nothing worth bothering you with.” Kamron proffered the two flimsies relating to the B12 incident, the one from yesterday and the inquiry about the flitter from today.

  Dayvson scowled over the flimsies. “Did anybody think to ask how these grunts got hold of a roomful of lightning jack jugs in the first place?”

  “I don’t know,” Kamron admitted. “Sergeant Krayg didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Sloppy work. Damned sloppy. I want all four of these men here within an hour. Well? What are you waiting for?”

  “On it, sir!” Kamron took this as permission to escape.

  Left alone in his office, General Dayvson picked up his reader again. Tacitus’ reflections on the decline of political freedom in the Roman Empire had given him some insights into the history of Harmony, but that wasn’t what he needed now. He needed some account of an expeditionary force into hostile territory, preferably with details – lots of details – about organization and logistics.

  That was the trouble with making this up as he went along. As the only sovereign nation on this world, Harmony had never fought a war, never anticipated having to fight one, and did not maintain a standing army. The revolt in the colony took them by surprise, and the Committee had attempted to create an army on the spur of the moment. Or rather, they had tasked Dayvson, the closest thing Harmony had to a military historian, with doing so.

  He’d only had time for a quick overview of ancient military organization and ranks, and the main thing he got from that was that an army ran on the competence of its NCO’s. So Harmony’s peace officers became sergeants and corporals in the new army, and the ranks were filled with draftees. He sometimes shuddered at the necessity of allowing the soldiers in the outer defense rings fully charged weapons on the basis of three days’ training, but what could he do? They couldn’t be expected to defend the capital against a rebel attack by throwing rocks, could they? But ever since he’d set up the rings, he’d been expecting some disaster.

  He just hadn’t expected Isovel to get herself embroiled in it.

  Dayvson tried to put the girl out of his mind and concentrate on his reading. Either she was all right or she wasn’t, and in any case he expected to learn that she had got herself kidnapped by taking some idiotic risk and it was all her own fault. And knowing Isovel, he expected that her kidnappers were almost certainly regretting their action by now.

  Which was neither a comforting reflection, nor a help in concentrating on his new reading matter: a translation of Caesar’s Gallic Wars describing his multiple invasions and campaigns in the barbarian lands beyond the Roman empire. As a history professor Dayvson had cited the clarity of the writing and had invited students to consider the political consequences of Caesar’s campaigns. Now he was looking for a much lower level of detail. How were the legionaries armed? What was the order of march? How did they protect the marching column from sudden attacks by hostile natives?

  “And I strongly suspect,” he murmured, “that my opposite number in the Esilian Free Army is reading Mao and Guevara on how to conduct guerrilla warfare.”

  Until Kamron brought the grunts to his office, Dayvson dictated notes on whatever he found in Caesar’s book into his wristcom, more as a way of forcing himself to concentrate than because he was getting a lot of useful technical information.

  One look at the four miscreants who had formerly staffed B12 clarified a great deal for the general.

  “Private Kelso. I begin to understand… much.” Kelso, being even more lacking in military skills than the average draftee, had begun his army career as an orderly worki
ng for the staff in the governor’s mansion. Dayvson had sent the man to relieve some other private in an outer-ring guard post when he began to suspect that an unsuitable friendship was growing between Kelso and his daughter. He never had understood that: Kelso was nowhere near up to Isovel’s weight, culturally or intellectually, and he would have thought the private would have bored her silly within a few weeks.

  And so he might have, Dayvson thought ruefully, if he himself had had the good sense to ignore the incipient affair. By transferring Kelso, he had given the young man the glamor of the forbidden. Isovel doubtless had a holo to keep her reminded of his striking good looks, and now he was not present daily to remind her of his stupidity.

  “Night before last. While you four were singing, dancing, and showing the neighboring outposts all you’d got. Dare I hope that my daughter had left before you began your swinish display?”

  “Haven’t seen Citizen Miss Dayvson since I left service here, sir,” Kelso lied gallantly.

  “Stop trying to protect her reputation!” Dayvson snapped. “The issue now is saving her life. I want to know everything about your movements – and hers – on that evening.”

  Within short order he got most of that information: the acquisition of a large supply of lightning jack from “a couple of guys from C ring,”; the sequence of toasts that had left the other two privates and the corporal somnolent on the floor; Kelso and Isovel in the back room, somehow not noticing all this activity; the spat which had sent Isovel stamping out the side door and into the arms of the C ring guys; their tossing her into the float and taking off while Kelso gave a futile chase that was ended when his head crossed paths with a stunner beam.

  “Be glad it was only a stunner,” Dayvson told him. “I would have used a blaster. I still might.” He looked wistful. It would probably be wrong to kill Kelso personally; he’d have to look at that other book, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to see just what the leader of an army was permitted to do to traitors. Because he was quite sure that, knowingly or not, these four had conspired to commit treason.

  “You haven’t told me everything. No,” he snapped as Kelso began a stammering, roundabout reply, “I do not want to know why you were naked at the time. I do want to know why you did not immediately report my daughter’s abduction.”

  “Sir,” said Kelso with an air of conscious virtue, “due to my attempts to rescue Isovel, I was stunned and remained unconscious for thirty, no, thirty-two hours after the incident.”

  “And you three?” Dayvson whirled on the drunks, who still looked rather pale and greenish even thirty-eight hours after their jack party.

  “When we came to,” Corporal Bollinjer explained, “we didn’t know anyone had been abducted. Kelso was unconscious, his girl wasn’t there, and our – some of our stuff had been stolen by those bastards from C.”

  Bollinjer remained adamant that none of them had known the identity of Kelso’s girl friend, but under Dayvson’s sharp questioning the rest of the story came out – most of it, anyway. The men at B12 had somehow got hold of a 3-D small-arms printer and a generous supply of the steel particles in colloidal solution that constituted its “ink.” Since they already had their issue blasters, they had been looking to trade the printer for something they could actually use. When the native orderly who looked after B10, B11 and B12 told them he knew some guys on C who wanted more small arms, it had seemed like a reasonable story to them; the C ring guard posts were out there on the edge of civilization and in the event of a rebel mob attack, they might well want to have a good supply of blasters charged and ready. The offer of a float load of pure mountain lightning jack in trade had short-circuited any critical thinking they might have applied to the story.

  “It did not occur to you,” Dayvson inquired awfully, “to ask how a couple of privates on C ring acquired enough lightning jack to make all of B12 drunk and leave more to use as trade goods?”

  Corporal Bollinjer shuffled his feet and studied the toe caps of his boots. “Sir, it’s sort of an accepted rule out there. You don’ ask how anybody else acquired stuff to trade, and they don’ ask about your stuff.”

  “And since Kelso woke up and told you that they’d taken my daughter as well as your – er – trade goods, it did not occur to you that she could have walked back from C ring by now? Or returned to B12 to get her flitter?”

  “Sir,” the corporal said desperately, “we din’t know she was your daughter. We din’t know she was missing. We been in trouble ever since we come to, and din’t nobody tell us anything. They sure axed a lot of questions, though.”

  “I put it to you,” General Dayvson said, “that the people who ‘bought’ your printer and ink were not from C ring at all. They brought that lightning jack all the way from the mountains. They were, in fact, members of the Esilian Free Army – and I can have you all up on charges of treason for selling munitions to the enemy!”

  “They was wearing regular army uniforms!” O’Flangan protested.

  “You can’t know they was rebels!”

  “Din’t anybody search C ring for the printer and ink… and… your daughter?”

  Kelso was the only silent one. Perhaps he was brighter than Dayvson had estimated.

  Marginally.

  “What about the native who brokered the trade?”

  He wasn’t really surprised to hear that the man had failed to show up for work and that his address had turned out to be a deserted patch of red rocks.

  Dayvson shoved the flyer from the Esilian Free Army at them. There was a certain amount of mumbling and sounding out words – Harmony really had given him the scum of the country to build into an army – but as the meaning sank in, they paled and sagged slightly – all but Kelso, who took two strides to the desk, leaned over to get closer to the general, and shouted, “Why are you wasting time? We have to rescue her before – before those savages –”

  “I,” General Dayvson said icily, “will lead a column into the mountains to rescue my daughter. You, having demonstrated your criminal incompetence and stupidity, will be here – in the stockade – where you may think over your defenses.

  “We have a stockade?”

  “We will by tomorrow.” Dayvson made a mental note to tell Kamron to detail men and supplies for an instant stockade. A small one should do. “Until then we will keep you in the basement.”

  “Defenses? Plural?” That was Kelso again.

  “You will be brought up on charges upon my return, make no mistake about that. If Isovel cannot be rescued, you will most certainly be charged with treason and found guilty. I believe that is a death penalty offense.” And if the Universal Code of Military Justice disagreed, it would just have to be edited.

  “If Isovel returns unharmed... “He paused for a long moment, “the charges may – may be slightly reduced. I strongly recommend that you spend your time in the basement tonight searching your memories. Any detail that you can recall might be useful to us.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A light drizzle was enough to make the mountainside cold and damp. It had inspired most of Gabrel’s group to sleep inside the cave the previous night, but apparently it wasn’t enough to stop them setting off on their project – whatever it was – that day. Isovel had been unhappy about sharing sleeping space with what she privately called “the rabble of rebels,” but now she admitted to herself that it hadn’t been all bad. The guerrillas had mostly stopped staring at her, they’d been generous with their offers of blankets to soften the cave floor and to keep her warm, and the temperature-balancing smartcloth together with their combined body heat had made the cave almost comfortable. Apart from the crowding, she’d gone on camping trips with her crêche-mates that had been worse.

  And Gabrel had assigned her a niche at the base of the cave wall, and had slept with his body interposed between her and the rest of the rebel rabble.

  Not that that had made any difference, or mattered in the slightest. They were all rebels, terrorists, probably murdere
rs and rapists to judge by the newsers’ broadcasts, and there was no reason to trust this Gabrel any more than the rest of the rabble. Maybe less, considering the way he’d been swaggering around without his shirt yesterday.

  So, logically speaking, she should have been terrified to be left alone with him today. Isovel tried to encourage the fear any decent woman of Harmony would feel in such circumstances, and found only a deep, traitorous sense of contentment. If you were under shelter, it could be soothing to watch the light rain falling just outside. The presence of the terrorist leader reassured her that she hadn’t been abandoned. And there was something almost – pleasant – in the warmth of two people sitting together, sharing body heat under one blanket.

  “So where have the rest of your crew gone, and why aren’t you with them?” Isovel asked idly.

  “Twisted my knee last week. And they’re not all gone,” Gabrel told her, “they’re just not in here. I’ve got one man at the regular guard post, one watching from the trees, and one waiting to receive and relay messages. And one watching the captive – that would be me.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” Isovel said. “I couldn’t even begin to retrace the path we took to get here – especially the part we traversed in the dark.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Gabrel said. “I’m just not entirely sure you know it.”

  “I lived my whole life in Harmony City. I’m lost without a map and street signs.” She hoped that sounded convincing. How hard could it be to get to the plains? All she’d have to do was go downhill.

  “So you are,” Gabrel agreed, “but it would be much simpler for everybody if you actually believed it. For now, though, just in case you’re thinking you could get away from a man with a bum knee, you might want to consider the sentries I’ve set out.”