Her father’s voice jerked her attention back. “I would suggest that we revise our plans. We’re only three days from Jefferson, which means federal troops can’t react fast enough to eliminate every Granger community and farmhold, particularly not if they’re kept busy fighting Commodore Oroton’s people for control of the prison camps. The commodore is already organizing Granger civilians into self-defense militias, particularly in the Damisi canyon country. Oroton has already warned Grangers to abandon indefensible farms and take shelter where blockades can be held by relatively few defenders.
“The rebellion is also funneling weapons into the hands of the militias, including a few heavy artillery guns to hold the mountain passes and canyon entrances until we can arrive to help. It won’t take a lot of firepower or manpower to turn places like Klameth Canyon into fortified strongholds. Frankly, it’ll be much harder for POPPA to take Klameth than it was for the Deng. They can’t mount an air assault, because POPPA doesn’t have a functional air force left. Without Sonny, they don’t have the firepower, either. So…” Her father flicked his glance across the crowd. “Estevao.”
Her mother’s cousin responded crisply. “Yes, sir?”
“Our combat veterans have just become the backbone of the civilian defense effort. We’ll allocate part of our equipment and supplies to your mission, arming residents and showing them a few tricks of the trade, defending entrenched positions from aggressors. How much we allocate will depend on events between now and the time we make orbit. I’ll keep you updated as we receive word from Commodore Oroton.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yalena.”
“Sir?” She jumped half out of her skin, gulping as she met her father’s gaze.
“Your group has just been promoted from supply delivery to command-liaison and infiltration duty.”
“Sir?” she blinked, totally confused.
“You,” he said with a strange glint in his eye, “have more experience operating inside the POPPA propaganda machine than anyone in this combat force.”
Her cheeks stung with sudden heat, then ran chill again as every person in the room turned to look at her, eyes shuttered.
“Instruct the other students, please, in how to think inside the POPPA paradigm. Commodore Oroton thinks we can make contact with the urban group that’s taken credit for today’s bombing. We need somebody who can speak their language, who understands the urban mindset and can help us forge an alliance with these folks.”
Yalena nodded, feeling almost numb. Working with urban guerillas was a far cry from courier work, distributing guns, bullets, and food to Granger camps. The lives of her friends — and potentially many more brave people — lay in her hands, in the job she must do, training the other students to understand how the masses, brain-washed for twenty years by POPPA hogwash, might think as their loyalty turned to hatred and the will to kill. She found herself reaching back through time and memory, trying to recapture the nasty blend of arrogance, greed, selfishness, and stupidity that had been her entire life for fifteen years.
It was more distasteful than she’d expected. And easier than she would have liked to admit. Thinking for herself and making her own decisions was hard work, nearly as hard as trying to be Simon Khrustinov’s daughter — or Kafari Khrustinova’s. The lure of letting someone else do one’s thinking and make one’s decisions was a siren’s song, fatally attractive, and the entire urban population of Jefferson had spent two decades living under its spell.
It wouldn’t be easy to teach self-reliant infiltrators how to behave like people who had abdicated responsibility for virtually every decision an ordinary person made a thousand times a day. The size of the job she faced was daunting enough to terrify her. Worse, in its way, than the idea of going into combat. It took a different kind of courage.
The rest of the voyage rushed past in a blur. Yalena worked twenty-hour days, drilling the students in POPPA’s mindset, belief structure, and behavior. They were appalled by the culture she was preparing them to interact with, but they also worked like fiends, trying to understand and get it right.
When she wasn’t teaching, she sought out her cousin Estevao and the other combat veterans, listening to their plans, trying to learn how they thought — and why they thought that way. She listened until weariness dragged her eyelids down, then she toppled into her bunk and slept long enough to start again the next day. She didn’t feel nearly ready enough when they shifted out of hyper-space and dropped into Jefferson’s star system, shedding velocity for the cross-system approach to Yalena’s homeworld.
They gathered in the ship’s mess to watch their progress across Jefferson’s star system from the big viewscreens installed there. The students watched with sharp, puppyish excitement. The combat veterans watched in tense silence, a controlled tension like caged lightning, waiting for the thunderclouds to part, allowing them to release the pent-up need for violent action. Yalena found herself watching their faces far more than she did the viewscreens, which showed very little of their passage through the empty reaches of in-system space. Jefferson’s planetary neighbors were sprawled in their orbits like a child’s set of scatter-jacks, some of them on the far side of Jefferson’s sun, others whirling far to port and starboard as they plunged sunward.
The only thing to see, as a result, was Jefferson, itself, which was slowly growing from a pinprick of light to a garden pea to a marble. The sight of her homeworld set up a longing Yalena couldn’t deny, along with a complicated ebb and surge of fear and fierce protectiveness and sharp, rapier-keen hatred. Her lovely little homeworld, shining like a bauble around God’s wrist, was ruled by people with hearts as cold and empty as the darkness in which Jefferson floated. The faces of the veterans as they, too, watched and wrestled with disturbing thoughts, were far more riveting than the blur of color they were all trying so hard to reach.
So she watched the veterans, trying to read the complex kaleidoscope of emotions shifting behind their eyes. When Estevao noticed her attention, he held her gaze, started to speak, then paused, visibly baffled by the attempt to communicate the incommunicable. She managed to produce a wry little smile, trying to let him know that she understood, at least a little, about his inability to talk about it. He held her gaze for a long moment, then gave a sharp little nod of satisfaction and turned his attention back to the viewscreen. Yalena discovered tremors in her hands. That silent exchange, so brief it hardly qualified as a conversation of any sort, had shaken her deeply. It also served to tell her that she couldn’t learn the one thing she needed to know, not just by talking to or watching men and women who’d been there when worlds died.
She didn’t want to think about worlds dying.
As they settled into final approach, guided in by the navigational buoys marking the clear lanes past Jefferson’s moons, Yalena didn’t want to think about anything at all, because every thought rattling around in her mind was a frantic flutter of panic, like terrified birds’ wings trying to batter their way to safety. There was no safety. Not anywhere on Jefferson. Not even on this freighter which would, in all too short a time, be opening her cargo bays and boarding hatches to the enemy.
Moving quietly, Yalena left the crowded room and headed for the cabin she’d shared with eleven other people, sleeping in shifts. Let the others watch their final approach. Yalena needed to be alone with her thoughts, for a little while. All too soon, she would be walking into the lion’s den. And after that…
She would no longer have to guess the thoughts behind a soldier’s eyes.