"Right," said Jason; and Hal, turning on his heel, set out in pursuit of the Command.
The distance before him now was shorter than that he had had to cover the day before. He ran, therefore, at a steady ground-covering pace through the sunlit afternoon woods, his cone rifle clipped vertically to the harness of the light pack on his back, bouncing rhythmically upon his shoulder blades. When he caught up at last with Rukh and the Command, his shirt was dark and sodden with sweat.
"Jason? Joralmon?" Rukh said, as he stopped before her.
"They're fine. They're behind me. I came ahead to get word to you as soon as possible. Barbage - the officer in the pass - is the one running the pursuit. He's got special authority, it seems…"
Hal ran out of breath. Rukh waited while he got it back.
"He's bullying the local Militia officers to keep after us until they can be joined by a unit from the next district - and they've just now sent for that other unit under pressure of Barbage's special authority, to get it out in an hour. There's not going to be the chance to pick up additional lead time and distance the way you told me the Commands usually do."
She nodded slowly, listening, and he gave her, word for word out of that perfect recall of his, exactly the conversation he had overheard at the head of the Militia column.
When he was done, she breathed deeply once and turned to Child, who had come up while Hal was talking.
"You heard, James? They're going to stay right behind us."
"I heard," he said.
"You've been through these foothills before. How far are we from the next district?"
"A day and a half, thirty-six hours if we go on without stopping," he answered. "Up to three full days with normal rest; and thy people are already short of sleep, Rukh."
"If it weren't for the donkeys we could disperse into the mountains and leave them nothing to chase." Her eyes studied the ground, thoughtfully, as if she read an invisible map there. "But if we abandon the donkeys, we also have to abandon the fertilizer and the finished gunpowder we picked up as a primer for it; and with that, over a year's work to sabotage the Core Tap goes down the drain."
She raised her eyes and looked at Child.
"To say nothing of the lives that have been lost to get it this far."
"It is God's will," the older man answered. "Unless it is thy wish to stand and fight."
"This Barbage has taken that into account, it seems," Rukh said. "With two full units, there're too many behind us now to hope to fight and get away from safely. Presumably, the new Militia replacing these are going to be in the same kind of numbers and strength."
She turned and walked a few steps away from both Hal and Child, turned and came back again.
"All right," she said. "We'll try laying a false trail and see if that can't buy us some time. James, we'll need to give up at least a dozen of the spare donkeys. Rope them three abreast so they leave the most noticeable track; and bring up the rear with them. Luckily, our wounded have gotten away already. Now the rest of us will have to do the same thing, taking off one or two at a time without leaving any sign for the Militia to pick up. Howard - "
"Yes?" Hal said.
"With Jason not back, it's going to have to be you sticking with these particular donkeys until everyone else is gone. Once that happens, keep leading them on straight for at least half an hour more. Then hitch and leave them for the Militia to find, and get out yourself without leaving a trail, if you can. Then come join us at the new rendezvous we'll set up."
"There's no way to really hide the sign of the loaded donkeys you'll be peeling off earlier," said Hal.
"I know." Rukh sighed heavily. "We'll just have to gamble Barbage is following too hotly after us to look for signs of anyone leaving our line of march; and that the plain tracks of the dozen beasts in the rear makes too attractive a trail for them to suspect anything."
Chapter Twenty-seven
From nearby in the shadowed woods, as he sat wrapped in a weather cloak on sentry duty on a cool, cloudless night, and some twenty meters from the winking coals of the burnt-down campfires and dark tents of the Command, Hal heard the sound of coughing. But he did not turn. It was Child, gone off a little from the camp into the night - no longer to hide his now-frequent discomfort, but to find a small amount of privacy in which to live with it.
Under the stupidity of his own numbing accumulation of fatigue, Hal's mind was working - slowly, but effectively. He was employing an Exotic technique in which he had been drilled by Walter. In essence, it was like reading a printed page with a magnifying glass that gave him one letter at a time. Plainly, some kind of decision had to be made. Unable to catch them, Barbage and his unlimitedly available Militia forces had settled for harrying them into the kind of exhaustion that would make their eventual capture certain.
Rukh's trick with the donkeys had won them enough of an initial lead on Barbage and the Militia from the second district, so that the Command had been able to get safely over the border into the third district; and there, luck, or an uncooperative local Militia official, had stretched that lead into enough of an edge so that they had been able to get clear of that district and into a fourth one. By that time they were into a different type of countryside; one that worked to their advantage more than it did to that of their pursuers.
Here, the foothills had spread out and become an open, rolling territory of sandy and stony soil replacing the flat, rich farmland they had left behind them. They were no longer penned closely between the lowlands and the mountains; the mountains were far off, blue on the horizon, and the lowlands were lost beyond the opposite horizon, even further.
In this different land of scrub trees, bushes, and narrow streams, was their eventual goal, the city of Ahruma itself, which enclosed the power plant built over the Core Tap they planned to sabotage. There were farms in this territory, too, but they were poor ones, scattered, small, and served with a meager network of roads. For Militia, it was bad country in which to mount a pursuit; but for a Command, it was even worse country in which to survive. As Rukh had said, without their donkey-loads of potential explosive, the Command could have dispersed and effectively ceased to be. But as long as they held tenaciously to the fertilizer and the gunpowder - and therefore necessarily to the donkeys themselves - they could not lose the troops that followed them.
For that reason, they dared not move into Ahruma as planned and contact local sympathizers there for help and to begin mounting their attack on the power plant. The end result of this situation had been that they were continuing to wander the dry hill country around the city at a distance far enough off not to arouse Militia suspicions as to their true destination.
They had stripped the Command to its essentials - those beasts and people without whom the mission could not be accomplished. Now the attrition of being hounded day and night was beginning to wear down both those on two legs and on four. In the end, if this kept up, Barbage would run them into an exhaustion in which they would be forced to stand and fight; and which would give him an easy victory.
The military answer, Hal's early lessons told him, was to attack the Militia camp at night with a small number of the Command; who would then throw their lives away, but do enough damage to render the troops incapable of further pursuit until they could acquire replacements of men and equipment - buying at least twenty-four hours. In that space of time the rest of the Command could force-march to the outskirts of Ahruma and lose themselves, with what their donkeys carried, in the city with their sympathizers.