“What happened?”
“I just killed two men who couldn’t follow orders. Drag them out into the village square and leave them there.”
They were a quiet and subdued group when they left the village the next morning. The villagers stood mutely around the two corpses as Alec lined his men together and marched them out the gate, down the westward road. Angela rode on the captured wagon beside Alec. Douglas’ man, unarmed, drove the horses.
She still seemed dazed. “You’re just going to… leave the bodies there?”
Alec had not slept all night. His head throbbed.
“Let the villagers bury them in the fields. Make good use of them.”
“Why…? You didn’t have to kill them.”
He turned on the hard wooden seat to stare at her. She looked as bleak as he felt. “Did you want me to leave them with you?”
“I…” Angela ran a hand through her blonde hair. “In some crazy way I feel like it’s my fault. Partially, at least.”
“I shot them. They deserved it. If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it exactly the same way.”
She shuddered visibly. “Because it was me.”
“Because they were acting like scum!”
“With me. If it had been one of the village women…”
“I’d have done the same thing,” Alec said coldly.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
They rode in silence for most of the morning, heading for the hills that bordered the western edge of the valley, under a sky of rolling fat cumulus clouds that checkered the landscape with warm sunlight and sudden cool shadow.
“Jameson found out last night that there’s a relay station for the horses over the first row of hills,” Alec said to her. “Is that true?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. And it’s built like a little fortress.”
“Can you talk the people there into giving us fresh horses peacefully, or will we have to fight ?”
“Why should I help you?”
“You’ve got a damned short memory.”
“No. A long one.”
“All right, be tough. We’ll get the horses anyway.”
Which Alec did, by the simple expedient of threatening to shoot Angela if the men holding the station didn’t give them all the horses in their fortified corral. Alec held Angela on a knoll, far enough from the station so that the men could see her plainly enough. Jameson did the negotiating.
Angela fumed, “You’re using me!”
“That’s right,” Alec replied, smiling. “But that’s better than killing people, isn’t it?”
She was too angry to answer.
Toward sunset, as they rode together on the wagon, he asked her, “Still angry with me?”
“Yes.” But she looked more sullen than angry.
“Are you in pain?”
“No.”
“There’s no soreness?”
“Of course it’s sore! But it hasn’t bled anymore. And the bandage is still in place. Want to inspect it for yourself?”
“Dammit, I didn’t do it to you!”
“You killed them. You shot that boy.”
“You ought to be glad that I did.”
“You’re a murderer and you expect me to love you for it?”
“You wanted me to leave you alone with them so they could carve you into little pieces?”
“So it’s my fault!”
He knew he was red-faced; he could feel his cheeks burning. The driver kept his eyes strictly forward, not daring to show any expression at all on his face.
Lowering his voice, Alec said, “Yes, it was your fault. You were right this morning. If it hadn’t been you I wouldn’t have killed them. I lost control. I couldn’t stand to see them with their hands on you. I…”
“All right,” Angela said soothingly. “It’s all right. I’ve been a terrible bitch. I’m sorry.”
They rode together in silence, Alec’s mind whirling in confusion, until it grew too dark to ride further.
Chapter 21
Alec slept with her that night. Without a word of prearrangement they walked off together from the campfire and took their blankets from the back of the wagon. Side by side, still unspeaking, they moved off into the darkness.
He made love to Angela gently, tenderly, trying to avoid hurting her. She held him, touched him, kissed him, moved with him until they both forgot about her injury.
In the morning they bathed together in an excruciatingly cold lake that stretched several kilometers wide. Alec still could not feel at ease using water so lavishly. This world is so rich!
By the time they were dressed and heading back to the camp again, Angela said, “You’ll have to go back to the Moon, won’t you?”
He couldn’t take his eyes from her gold-framed face: lovely, troubled, serious.
“Not without you,” he said.
Nodding, she answered, “I know. I’ll have to leave him…”
“Who?”
“Father.”
“You mean my father.”
She almost smiled. “Is there such a thing as foster-incest?”
“Will you come with me?” Alec asked.
She did not hesitate at all. “Yes,” she answered.
But her voice was so low that he could barely hear her.
They reached the camp by the side of the rutted road. The men were milling through their morning routine, cooking eggs from the village, grooming the horses, cleaning guns.
Alec said to Angela, “I’ll need a power source for our radio. Not for very long, an hour or two.”
Angela thought for a moment. “You won’t be able to get one without a fight. The closest power source I know of is at a perimeter firebase, about twenty klicks from here… up in the hills, off the road.”
A horse neighed somewhere behind them. The Sun was up over the distant hills now, burning away the fog that hung over the lake. The valley floor was still lushly green, the wooded shoulders of the hills an unbelievable pallette of reds, golds, oranges, browns, set off here and there by the somber deep greens of pines and hemlocks.
Angela said, “If I help you get a radio for a few hours, you’ll go back to the Moon?”
“With you?”
“You’ll give up the idea of trying to get the fissionables and go back?”
He hesitated, then lied, “Yes. I will.” She’s only trying to protect him, he told himself, although a deeper voice insisted, She’s trying to protect you!
Reluctantly, as if she knew she was doing the wrong thing no matter what she did, Angela said, “All right, I’ll show you where the firebase is. They have a radio there that can reach headquarters, and that’s about fifty klicks away.”
“That should be plenty of power for our radio,”
Alec said, trying to keep his voice even.
“I don’t like it,” Jameson said, staring off into the distant hills, sniffing the air for danger.
He and Alec stood at the edge of a gently rising meadow that ended in a thickly wooded hillside.
The road they had travelled was farther down the slope. The Sun was high overhead but the wind was cold enough to make Jameson push his hands deep into the pockets of his worn, tattered trousers.
“We’re deep inside their territory. They’ve got to know we’re here, they’re not fools. Now we’re going in even deeper.”
Alec disagreed. “You’re missing the point, Ron. This is their territory, all right. But look how big it is. They don’t have enough men to patrol every hectare. We can stay in the woods, keep on the move, until we rendezvous with the reinforcements.”
Still scanning the distances, Jameson countered, “And you think he’s going to let a few shuttles land within fifty klicks of his home base without opposition?”
“By the time he can get some opposition mounted we’ll have seized enough territory so that the shuttles can land and take off safely. Before they can organize a big-enough counterattack we’ll have reached his headquarters and found the fissionables.”