Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 5

  “How do you know they’re not just taking a nap under the nearest shelter?”

  Gabrel grinned. The momentary smile made him look much younger, almost boyish. Then the usual tension returned to his face, and he looked what Isovel knew him to be – the ruthless commander of a band of terrorists. “Do your soldiers nap when they’re on sentry duty?”

  “I suspect some of them do,” Isovel confessed. “And you already know that they’ll get drunk, given the chance. The officers aren’t sure what to do about it. None of them have much training.”

  “I’m not surprised. Seems to me that the problem for your people is that you don’t know how to organize an army.”

  “And you do?” she snapped.

  “Well, it’s a bit different. We don’t have an army to organize. That saves us a lot of the problems you Harmonicas are having.”

  “My father,” Isovel said icily, “is Harmony’s foremost military historian. If anybody can organize an army, he should be able to do it.” She had given up the pretense that she wasn’t General Dayvson’s daughter.

  “Mmm. Military history tends to be long on theory and short on detail. I should know, I’ve been reading the books Colonel Travis recommended.”

  “Studying?” It wasn’t how Isovel pictured terrorists spending their spare time.

  Gabrel shrugged off the blanket and stretched his arms out in front of him, hands back to back and fingers interlocked. The action generated a ripple of muscle under his shirt. Not that Isovel cared about that. “What did you expect? We don’t know how to run a war either. I think Colonel Travis’s reading list may be somewhat… mmm… more practical than your father’s. When you get home, you might mention to your father that a usual military practice is to shoot anyone caught sleeping or incapable on sentry duty.”

  “Shoot? You mean kill them? Just for falling asleep? The newsers are right – you people are brutes.”

  “Apparently, if you shoot a few, the others are vastly encouraged to stay awake. Not that we have that problem. Our soldiers are all volunteers and totally dedicated to the cause, naturally. So what are your people doing with the sleepers and drunkards?”

  “They’re sent to the rear for an intensive self-criticism session until they understand the error of their ways.”

  “Mm-hmm. ‘Self-criticism’ well behind the lines sounds a lot pleasanter than being out on the sharp edge. How’s that working for you?”

  “I have every reason to believe it will work out very well,” Isovel said. “Our entire society is based upon harmony and consensus. We just haven’t had time to work with the draftees individually.”

  Gabrel snorted. “I guess your usual way of dealing with…mmm…lack of harmony won’t work here. The army’s already here, so you can’t threaten to ship ‘em out to Esilia.”

  “We wouldn’t do that in any case. Only the worst criminals are deported!”

  “Mmm. Depends what the meaning of ‘worst’ is, I guess. Nearly all the people sent out here are political prisoners. Have been from the beginning. See, that’s how Harmony maintains its harmony: just get rid of anyone who questions the program.”

  “That is not true.” Isovel said tightly. “Traitors are dealt with as compassionately as everybody else, by re-education and training. As they join the rest of us in correct thinking, naturally they cease to be traitors – just as our erring soldiers will cease to disobey the rules put in place for their benefit.”

  “Lighten up,” Gabrel advised lazily. “I’m not a public meeting. And I don’t mind if you Harmonicas are hopeless at discipline. Makes our job that much easier.”

  “Your job! Running around the mountains in rags, raiding our outposts when you get up the courage? When are you idiots going to give up this farce?”

  “The question is,” Gabrel said, “when are you going to give it up? How much longer will Harmony keep paying for men and supplies when all the army does is sit behind its rings of defenses and send out little groups to oppress helpless farmers on the plains? That’s one hell of a logistics chain you’ve got to maintain – the width of the ocean. And I hear the war’s not so popular in Harmony even now.”

  “It will be different now that my father is in charge. He won’t just sit behind his defenses. He was already thinking of leading an invasion force into the mountains to put you rabble down once and for all. Now that you’ve kidnapped me, he’ll definitely do that.”

  “Will he?” Gabrel murmured, an infuriating smile on his face. “Oh, I hope so. I do hope so.”

  “Do you think a handful of – of peasants can stand up to a real army?”

  “Well, now,” said Gabrel, “I thought we’d agreed that your people don’t have a ‘real army’ but just a bunch of amateur Harmonicas falling over their own feet and getting in each other’s way.”

  “Why do you keep calling us – that – ‘Harmonicas’? We refer to ourselves as Citizens.”

  “Um. Well. ‘Harmonians,” sounds kind of silly, don’t you think? Like an ancient tribe.”

  “Whereas an invented word like ‘Harmonicas,’ makes perfect sense.”

  “Well, in a way… It’s an antique musical instrument, see. Doesn’t take a lot of skill; you make the notes by blowing through this mouthpiece…”

  “An instrument that works on a lot of hot air!” Isovel snickered. She was quicker on the uptake than he’d expected. “Oh dear, I shouldn’t laugh… but when I think of all the consensus-building meetings I’ve sat through…”

  “Well, you won’t have to worry about that here.”

  “No? But I won’t be here for long. I told you, the Expeditionary Force is probably mobilizing to conquer the district at this very minute. Our people will just have to come up here and pacify your precious mountains the same way we did your plains farms and your pathetic excuse for a city.”

  “Will they? And this time,” he said, looking affectionately at the printer and ink cans, “this time we won’t have to settle for the arms we can steal from you.”

  “Hah! You haven’t even managed to get it working yet!”

  “We will. That thing’s a real energy hog; I’ll admit I hadn’t accounted for that. Even with sunshine every day we’d be hard put to charge enough solar cells to keep up production.”

  “Of course it’s drawing too much energy. You haven’t even cal–” Isovel stopped and pressed her lips together. Had she really been on the verge of treason, just because she wanted to impress this arrogant man with her technical knowledge? That was the trouble with talking to rebels. Traitors. Dissidents. They could covertly undermine your beliefs and lead you into cooperating. Hadn’t she been warned about that in the finishing crêche? After Sofiya started talking political nonsense, and then disappeared. The headmistress had called a special meeting to warn against the dangers of talking with non-conformists, and explained that Sofiya had been sent for re-education before she could contaminate the other young ladies.

  That local man Sofiya had been sneaking out to see, Josip or Josaf or whatever his name had been – he’d disappeared too; there was an old man running his stall the next time the girls had been allowed to go to town. Isovel frowned. The Committee would hardly have sent Josip to the re-education camp together with the girl he’d been trying to brainwash. Were there multiple camps? Or could Gabrel’s claim have been partially true? She knew the worst criminals were deported to this primitive continent, everybody knew that; perhaps some political dissidents were among them.

  If Josip had been deported, more likely than not he’d joined with the rebels. It would be worse than creepy to run into him among the rabble…

  But there was no danger of that happening, because Gabrel was simply lying to undermine her standards and beliefs. No doubt he thought she’d be more favorable to people who’d been exiled for political reasons than to murderers and rapists.

  Since she stopped speaking, Gabrel had been watching her with a quizzical smile on his face. “Do go on,” he said now. “You interest me ex
tremely. What have we failed to do with the printer?”

  “I don’t know anything about machines,” Isovel lied. “I’ve just heard the techs talking, that’s all. I think there’s some special stuff you have to do when you set the machine up, like… like… “She searched her memories for something totally unhelpful. “Well, I do know you’re supposed to make sure it’s perfectly level.”

  “Mm-hmm. We’ve done that, actually. And being on a tilt might affect the production, but it wouldn’t suck an entire array of solar cells dry with its first print effort.” Gabrel looked ruefully at the misshapen lump of metal that had been the printer’s first product. “So. What haven’t we calibrated?”

  Isovel shrugged. “How would I know?”

  “How indeed? But you sounded pretty confident just now. You wouldn’t happen to have read the operating manual for this gizmo, would you? Our intrepid traders seem to have left that behind.”

  “Are you rebels so backward you have to have a dead-tree manual? All you have to do…” Isovel stopped again.

  “How did you get to know so much about this stuff? Somebody as high up as your father, I bet you went to a finishing crêche instead of university. And I thought girls in finishing crêche didn’t talk about anything but fashion and boys.”

  He was close to one hundred percent right on that, but Isovel wasn’t about to admit it.

  “I don’t want to talk any more. You’re just trying to fool me into giving up useful information.”

  Gabrel shrugged the shared blanket off his shoulders, rose stiffly and limped over to the side of the cave to get another one. He folded this one lengthwise and lay down on it. Isovel pulled their shared blanket closer about her. The side where Gabrel had been sitting by her felt suddenly cold and lonely. But if this move was an invitation, she was absolutely not going to recognize or respond to it.

  “Don’t worry,” Gabrel advised her. “I’m just trying to find a comfortable position. I think the wrappings Jesse put on my knee are too tight; no matter how I sit or stand, something hurts.”

  “How unpleasant,” Isovel said, trying to copy the tone of her old headmistress heading off a conversation that was veering towards inappropriate subjects.

  Gabrel rolled over and lay on his side, propped up on one elbow. Isovel had to admit that he did seem to be in pain, given the tight line of his lips and the beads of sweat gathering on his forehead. To distract herself from the desire to brush them away, Isovel concentrated on the place where a rebellious dark curl fell over his forehead, reaching almost to his eyebrow.

  “Now,” he said, “what was the subject before we were so rudely interrupted?”

  “There wasn’t one,” Isovel informed him. “I’m not going to say one more word about Harmony tech.”

  “Ah, but we’re done with that subject. Now we’re talking about you. It’s strange to meet a Harmony girl who chats about calibrations and levels. Did you train as a tech after you got out of finishing crêche?”

  “I wanted to,” Isovel admitted, “but the Committee said it would be a waste of the social skills I’d acquired in the crêche. For the last few years I’ve just been running the house for Daddy… and hanging out with the techs in my spare time. I’ve got some practical experience, but to really understand our technology I’d need to know, oh, stochastic calculus and operations theory for starters.”

  “You’d have to study those in tech training,” Gabrel pointed out. “If they’re too hard for you now, they’d still be too hard in the training course.”

  “I didn’t say they were too hard!” Isovel snapped. “But I can’t go to the university or even take online classes without the Committee knowing, can I? And they don’t look fondly on people who reject their labor assignments. I’m in the labor base as a hostess and housekeeper and I can’t figure out any way that either job would require advanced mathematical skills! Anyway,” she admitted ruefully, “they might actually be too hard for me by now. I haven’t done any math since secondary crêche. Four years of mind-rotting finishing crêche followed by playing a society hostess; I’ve probably lost my edge.”

  “That’s a long sabbatical,” Gabrel agreed. “And I understand it’s much harder to learn higher mathematics after thirty-five.”

  “I’m twenty-eight!” Isovel snapped.

  Gabrel grinned again. She had a feeling that he’d been steering the conversation just to get this information. But why? Her age had nothing to do with the technical problems of setting up a printer, and that was all he cared about. Wasn’t it?

  “How old are you, anyway? Having a little trouble keeping up with your crew? Is that how you twisted your knee – trying to outdo guys like Nikos and Patrik?”

  Gabrel shifted position and winced slightly. “Damn knee… For your information, I was putting my body out of range of one of your blasters. Into a ravine. It was the right decision, even if I did come down on a slippery rock. Nikos made the jump okay.”

  “And he’s how much younger than you?”

  “That’s a painful question. Let’s just say that like you, I’m still on the right side of thirty.”

  A long whistle came from outside the cave. “They’re back!”

  “That was fast!”

  Isovel quietly retreated to the niche where she’d slept while the cave filled with sweaty, exuberant young men.

  “I didn’t expect you to be done before nightfall!” Gabrel told them, his voice warm with commendation. “How did you lay cable and disguise it so quickly?”

  The level of exuberance dropped suddenly. “Disguise it?”

  “Idiots. Don’t you realize the enemy could follow that cable straight to this camp?”

  “Well, there aren’t any Harmonicas in the mountains…”

  “That you know of,” Gabrel interjected.

  “And we couldn’t really cover it up as we went because we had to keep working around obstacles and make sure nothing broke…”

  “So, we thought we’d go back out and cover it…”

  “Now. Good. Go!”

  “Hadn’t we ought to make sure it works first?”

  “Fair enough. Pat, can you bring the end in here? And Nikos, would you get my pack?”

  Gabrel rummaged in his pack and drew out a short cable with pen-like metallic tips at each end and a box with a dial in the middle.

  “A voltage indicator!” Isovel was surprised into speech.

  Gabrel gave her that disarming grin again. “You really do think we’re ignorant hicks, don’t you? What do you think lights up the city? Half the electric power in Esilia comes from the dams we put up along the Vanyan River, and the first hydroelectric power plant is right up here in the mountains. Didn’t you see the lights in Skyros last night? True, a lot of villages don’t use electricity yet, because laying cable and maintaining it is more expensive the farther you get from the power source. We were planning to do something about that before the war.” He patted the cable now lying across his knees. “This came from the expansion project. I’d like to give it back to them in good condition after the war.” He applied the two pen-like ends of the voltage tester to the exposed wire at the end of the cable, and the needle of the dial spun from “Zero,” to “Maximum.”

  “Okay, it’s live,” he told the intent watchers. ”Now you can get right back out there and cover the cable with leaves, needles, rocks, dirt, whatever works for each area.”

  “We won’t really be sure it’s ok until it powers the printer.” Patrik was looking at Gabrel with big, sad puppy eyes.

  “Oh, all right. I guess you’ve earned the right to see it work.” Gabrel handed Patrik the cable end but nodded to someone else. “Nikos, you helped wire Skyros, didn’t you? Why don’t you connect this for me?”

  Nikos grinned, took the cable from Patrik and slithered around to the back side of the printer, where the cave’s slanting roof didn’t leave a lot of room for him.

  Isovel folded her hands in her lap and stayed absolutely still, but inside she wa
s jubilant. She could not possibly get lost now! All she had to do was follow this cable to the power plant on the river, then follow the river down until it reached civilization. It was just a matter of picking the right time to escape. Now would have been good, with the scouts crowding into the cave with the other men to watch the demonstration. Unfortunately, the crowd was between her and the cave entrance. Oh well, there would be another chance. And if this demo went as she expected, it should be a pleasure to watch.

  The printer powered up without a hitch. Patrik filled the feeder to the brim with the heavy ink, Amari pressed a button, and the mechanical arm of the printer began to hiss and tap as it laid down lines of steel “ink” in the shielded build chamber.

  “Amari, quit trying to peek into the build chamber! The sintering lasers could blind you!” Nikos scolded.

  Ah, yes. The lasers that were supposed to bring the steel printout to just the right heat to burn away the clay-like emulsion and sinter the steel particles into a solid mass. Isovel fought to keep her lips from twitching. She was going to enjoy this next part.

  The printer arm retracted and the walls shielding the build chamber began to glow… and glow… and glow. On their previous attempt, the glowing had died away at this point, the printer having drained the entire array of solar cells hooked up to it.

  This time there would be no power failure to stop a disaster.

  The watching men held their breath. Isovel looked away.

  If they kept staring like that, and what she expected happened, they would be blinded.

  Not that she cared about a bunch of terrorists, but what if they took out their anger on her? It was simple self-protection to warn them.

  “All of you – look away! Now!” Her voice was high and sharp enough to cut through the buzz of casual commenting. “This machine isn’t calibrated; when it fails, the shields will fail first and the lasers can blind you!” Not to mention burning your faces off. People aren’t designed to withstand temperatures that can melt steel.