But, fighting as best she could, she was a youngster pitting the strength of her small body against the large and powerful adult one. Hal held her fast and backed with her out of the hutment. "Onete! Old Man!" he shouted.
He heard the sound of two pairs of running feet, but it was Old Man who first stepped around from behind him to face them. He twitched the weighted sock so suddenly from Cee's grasp that her fingers failed to hold their grip on it, and tossed it aside. Her gaze noted where it fell and returned instantly to glare at him. "Child, child," he said sorrowfully to her, "don't you know that nothing is ever settled, nothing is ever gained, by killing?"
She stared back at him with savage, unrepentant eyes. "Take her," Hal told him. "Hold her." Onete had now joined them and was talking rapidly and soothingly to Cee, who ignored the woman completely. "Old Man can hold her," Hal said to Onete. "You try and make her understand that we're here to rescue her uncle and take him to someplace where he'll be safe, but her killing Liu just now..." "She killed the officer!" Onete said. "I'm afraid so. I should have realized she might."
Onete stooped and picked up the officer's sock Cee had dropped, held it upside down and shook it. A short, heavy energy pack for a power pistol dropped out of the end of it. "She must have got them from Liu's uniform belt, " Hal said, "and thrown sock and pack together, the way she'd send a rock from her sling. Those two dead in the forest will have been her doing. The two we saw on the screen, who fell when they rushed in to catch her. But never mind that now." "What are we to do with her?" Onete said, distressed. "As I say, Old Man can hold her. It'll be up to you to make her understand that we're here to rescue her uncle, but she's already made a problem for us by killing Liu. If she kills anyone else, we may not be able to cover it up and send the soldiers away believing things that'll keep them from coming back. If they don't believe and do come back, they'll find and kill us all, including her uncle, after all."
Onete nodded. "I'll try," she said. "Don't just try. She's got to understand and go along with us. You've got to get through to her, somehow. She's got to understand that we have to take Artur back up to the Chantry Guild to fix what the soldiers did to him, and she's got to help us do that, not hinder!" "All right," said Onete. "Take her, Old Man," said Hal, "but be careful. Loosen up for a second and she'lI get away, and we'lI never catch her. "
With her weapon taken from her, Cee had stopped struggling in Hal's arms, but he was very sure she would explode into action the moment she felt any loosening of the grip upon her. He waited for Old Man to take the child into his own arms, but instead the other merely reached up and began to stroke the back of Cee's neck, meanwhile crooning to her, a wordless melody that consisted of the same series of musical phrases repeated over and over again. "Artur told me about that," Onete murmured to Hal. "It was one of the things Cee's mother used to hum when Cee was a baby and even after, to put her to sleep. Artur thought he could use it to make Cee trust him, but maybe he just didn't hum it right. Old Man must have learned it from him."
Hal nodded. The neck-stroking, he knew, was one of the Physical aids to hypnosis. In any case, he felt the tension gradually going from the small, tight body he held, growing less and less until eventually Cee hung almost limply in his arms.
Old Man stopped his crooning. "I think you can let her go now," he said to Hal. He took one of Cee's small, hard and dirty hands in his own. "Come with me," he said to the girl.
He led her off. Onete followed. Hal turned back with a feeling of relief, mixed with urgency, to the matter of taking care of the soldiers, on whom the drug would act for only a limited amount of time.
The first thing to be done was to get the Urk up, and bring him out under hypnosis to ostensibly explain things to equally drugged and to-be-hypnotized soldiers. Hal's original story that he had planned they would carry back to their headquarters was to have been given them by Liu, and would have simply told them that both Artur and Cee had died under torture - the last stage of which would have been supposed to have taken place privately at the hands of Liu himself in one of the hutments, that the two had thereafter been buried and, since Liu had learned enough from them before they died to be certain there were no other people around in this area of the forest, they would all be returning to headquarters.
Now, his story must not only be given by the Urk, which weakened it, the Urk being no more than a noncommissioned officer, also it must explain Liu's death, which would raise a great many more questions than if Liu, himself, had returned with only two soldiers lost. Particularly when the loss could be blamed on the great strength of the adult they had captured. And it would be Liu's word that there was nothing more to be found up here.
In time, of course, that hypnotic memory would wear thin, and some memory of what had actually happened to each of them here tonight would have surfaced on the minds of all of them, officers and men. But by that time, the subject would have been closed and filed away some time since, and none of them, even Liu, would have any good reason to make extra work and trouble for himself by digging back into the records and looking for the truth of what had actually happened.
Hal stepped into the Urk's hut, still wrapped in thought. It was not until he actually opened the top flap of the Urk's sleeping sack and put his hand on the man's throat to both rouse him and begin the process of hypnosis, that the coolness of the flesh he was touching brought his attention back to what was before him.
The coolness was very slight, because of the shortness of time that had passed since they had reached the camp. But it was noticeable enough now to alert Hal, and now that he looked closely at the man under his hand, he saw that the Urk was also dead. Almost as immediately as he registered the fact of death and his eyes found what had killed the man, his memory clicked back with something he should have remembered, but had not until this moment.
When Cee had dodged under his arm and out of Liu's hutment before he could catch her, she had been swinging two of the officer's weighted socks. There had been one in each hand. This, in spite of the fact that Liu had died of a crushed throat like the two dead soldiers they had disinterred on the way here. Since Liu presumably had been wearing only one sock on each foot, and had taken those off for the night, she had been able to turn them into weapons after she had stolen silently into his hutment. She would have loaded them with energy packs from the carrying loops in the man's belt. Then she must have thrown, and picked up again, the one she had used to kill the force-leader.
But when Hal had burst into the Urk's hut and wrapped his arms around her as she was just about to throw, she had been carrying only one of the socks with which she had left Liu's sleeping place. Somehow she must have gotten off one throw before Hal had caught her, and since it had been a hurried shot at the target, she must have been about to follow it up with a second cast when Hal had seized her.
There was an ordinary battlelamp on the chair holding the Urk's clothes. Hal turned it up and in the wash of reddish light that spread over the form on the cot the face stood out clearly. The right temple was plainly indented. The Urk must have died instantly from the first energy-pack loaded sock, but Cee, who had most probably been aiming at his throat as she had in all the previous cases, must in the dimness of light reflected from the outside of the hutment, have realized only that she had missed her target. So she had tried, but failed, to get her second weighted sock thrown before Hal had stopped her.
He stood, head slightly bent under the low roof of the hutment, which had been tall enough for people like the Urk and Liu but was not for him. Now, the situation was even more complicated.