Resistance: Hathe Book One (30 page)

“
Well,” She paused guiltily, “he hasn’t actually mentioned
one.”

“
Then you’d better,” was her friend’s caustic reply. “That man
has caused enough of a stir already. He has to be stopped. Instead
of which, you seem set on spurring him to even more dangerous
activities.”

Her
angry reply was stopped only by the arrival of the subject of their
discussion.

Hamon
had finally lost patience and forced Citadel control to override
the lock on the door. He still entered cautiously.

“
Is
it safe to come in or am I liable to have that bandage thrown at
me.”

Marthe
bit back her temper. “Sorry. Being hit by that rock rather annoyed
me. Overly brave rabble,” she practically spat.

“
At
least they’ve been reminded of reality,” soothed Jacquel, “and our
Terran friends will hopefully exercise more care in
future.”

Hamon
was shocked to see the underlying seriousness in the searching look
the hated Hathian gave him. Just this once, they had a common bond,
rankling though it was to both.

“
Just what would happen if you were let loose in the streets?”
Hamon asked.

“
We’d be lucky to last ten minutes,” was the man’s
matter-of-fact reply.

“
You
seemed to have exercised a remarkable degree of control over the
mob today.”

“
Armed, on a balcony and backed by soldiers,” Marthe reminded
him.

“
You
didn’t appear to need us. Your own powers of persuasion were most
effective in quelling the rabble.”

“
That would give us the ten minutes mentioned,” said Jacquel
sardonically. “In a pair, we might survive quarter of an hour, but
alone, now that the mob have seen our faces? No, the chances are
small. You have us under tight security, but there’s no real need.
We’ve both spent five years hiding from the peasants, knowing they
would kill us on sight if they realized we were Haut Liege. Right
now, we’re safer than we’ve been any time since our people
left.

“
My
own men are not particular either, if it comes to that. Don’t count
on Terran protection forever.”

“
We
survive here by dint of the claim Marthe’s child has on you, and
the rather tenuous fascination I hold for your female staff. We
will not forget it,” said des Trurain coldly.

“
There is more between Marthe and me than the child,” snapped
back Hamon.

“
You’d do well to remember it then,” said the Hathian, before
taking his leave.

Hamon
glared at the departing back, hating the implication that he had
other priorities that came before this woman’s safety. Yet it was
only the truth. He still took the Hathian’s words to heart, hearing
the underlying thread of deadly purpose in the man’s voice. He
continued to stare after the closed door for quite some time and it
was only the gentle stealing into his arm of a trusting hand that
drew him back to his surroundings. His name was spoken softly. He
turned, caught the tentative smile spreading across her finely
rounded features. The glinting sparkle and flushed cheeks were
gone, chased away by a questioning light in her warm
eyes.

He
drew her within the circle of his arms, tilting her small chin up
to let him gaze deep into her face. With delight, he saw the ever
ready mischievousness rising in her, the sweet smile dissolving to
a laughing grin.

“
Will there ever be a day when I see you and Jaca meet in
friendship?” she exclaimed, half exasperated, half
teasing.

“
Never,” he replied, forced in turn to laugh at himself,
letting his face relax as he could only with her. “Does it bother
you much?”

“
Of
course it does, you rogue. Just as it would bother you if Ferdo and
I were unable to come within shouting distance without a danger of
coming to blows.”

“
You
can’t tell me that what des Trurain feels for you is a platonic
friendship.”

“
Did
I say that?” she retorted. “But if you expect me to fall into a
decline because a handsome young man is attracted to me, then
you’ve spent too much time in deep space.”

“
Finds you attractive? The man imagines himself to be madly in
love with you.”

“
1
know,” she gloated, her dimple twinkling larger. “It would be a
tragedy, if this fierce emotion hadn’t arisen just about the time I
fell madly, passionately in love with you. Jaca has been as a
brother to me as long as I can remember. It’s a bit late now to
suddenly discover a fatal attraction,” and she reached up and
pulled his head down to hers. The hunger in her soothed him as
nothing else could.

Ages
later, he pulled back and, still holding her close, teased gently,
“Don’t evade the issue, little minx. Didn’t you once say that you
probably would have married the man?”

“
So
I would have. A very good match it would have been, too,” retorted
the practical side of her he’d noted more than once. “We would both
have been perfectly contented, after a fashion,” she added with a
gurgle. “Now come along, we have an important matter to
discuss.”

“
Oh,
and what might that be? The state of the world? Your intrusions
into my security? Your safety?”

“
No,
far more important. Our honeymoon.”

The
pronouncement left him in no doubt of the seriousness of the
matter. “Our what?”

“
Honeymoon. Or do you count our marriage of so little
consequence that you don’t plan to bother with one?”

“
What, by all the stars, is a honeymoon?”

She
stopped dead in her tracks, pulled him round, held him at arm’s
length and fixed him with a gaze of utmost astonishment. “You’re
joking, surely!” He no doubt looked as blank as he felt, but he
really had no idea what she was talking about.

“
Earth has certainly lost much,” she said with a
harrumph.

“
You’d better explain it to me, then.” He pulled her back into
his shoulder as they wandered along to his quarters.

Marthe
hadn’t anticipated this. She hesitated, unsure how to begin. “It’s
a sort of holiday. After the wedding, the newly married couple goes
off on their own, to … get to know each other, I
suppose.”

“
Rather like our time together after I had tortured you so
abominably.”

She
heard the pain of memory in the harshness of his voice but chose to
ignore his reminder. They both knew what that had cost him.
“Something like that. Only now, there is… She stopped again,
laughing ruefully. “Oh, it’s just too hard to explain. Really, a
honeymoon is primarily an excuse to escape from the horde of
relatives one is plagued with at a Hathian wedding!”

Then
his face relaxed, a dawning grin tugging at the corners of his
mouth. “In other words, I drag you off to a secret hideaway to
perform a variety of hideous ravishments upon your delectable
body?”

“
Yes, please.”

“
Wench.” His fingers reached up to softly stir the dark clouds
falling about her shoulders, already escaping from the formal
style. “How can I leave this precinct with so much
unrest?”

She
didn’t have to fake her disappointment. “You can leave orders for
your men. I could spare you for possibly half an hour a day to keep
track of things.”

He
looked long at her face, studying her till she wondered what he saw
there. Then he smiled, giving her hope. “Is it important to
you?”

“
Yes, Hamon, it is.”

“
Then it will be done. For now, though, you’ve had a busy
morning and no breakfast. Would you join me for lunch, madame?” and
he bowed her on with a flourish to his quarters.

Her
world sparkled into life again. “Thank you, kind sir; but
afterwards I must get on to Jacquel’s rooms. I cannot leave for my
wedding from my husband’s quarters, or the shades of a myriad
great-aunts will come to haunt me.”

It was
a more relaxed lunch than any they’d had for weeks. For a time, she
thought she’d managed to drive away his cares and suspicions, and
even some of her own. The memory of it stayed with her through all
the afternoon’s lunacy of preparation. Agnethe had come, checking
that all was as it should be and doing what Marthe’s own mother
would have done, if she’d been alive still. There was so much to be
done. In a growing flutter of nerves, Marthe reread the vows again
and again, doubting more and more as the time drew near that she
would be able to remember anything at all.

Jacquel was there too, to make sure that all should proceed as
planned and according to the strict time schedule he’d been given
by the resistance, so critical to a number of other engagements set
for that evening. Little side affairs, as he termed them, which
would have seriously vexed the Terrans if they’d known of them. It
was ironic, signaled Jacquel through her patch, using the secret
Hathian codes, that her great blunder and apparent treachery should
turn out to be so useful to the cause. The resistance had never had
such an opportunity to pry into the Terran section of the Citadel.
Even her so proper cousin Griffith was grudgingly satisfied, he
reported.

As for
the public unrest among the peasants, better to allow the release
of dangerously hot air now than on the final, crucial day, had
declared the Council, conscious as they were of the need for a
peaceful return to power by the Hathians if they hoped to retain
the backing of the other Alliance worlds.

Unfortunately for her good standing in the eyes of her people,
Marthe was unable to regard these political machinations as other
than minor diversions, decidedly secondary to her own affair, the
wedding. ‘Dried up old men’s ditherings’ she laughingly labeled the
steady stream of incoming orders.

“
Do you have to go into hysterics every time we get an
order from Central?”
signaled Jaca.”

“
That last one wasn’t totally ridiculous?”
she signaled
back, feeling no sympathy at all for him. He looked like he’d
swallowed a can of swamp worms anyway, as he struggled to hold in
his own laughter.

“
So
what? You know we can’t stop the surveillance in these quarters.
Too suspicious. And what am I going to tell the Terrans if they ask
what’s causing those giggling fits of yours?”

Marthe
just gave him a ‘what do I care’ look and switched back to watching
Agnethe fix her hair. The older woman was far more sensible. She
bustled on regardless, secure in her own priorities.

However, even Jacquel’s determined air of authority was
shattered by one request, and he was barely able to repeat the
message.
“They want an exact time for the ‘concelebration of the
couple’s personal junction’, at which time they ‘feel that a visual
survey of the Major’s quarters will go unobserved’”.

“
They can’t possibly mean… They intend to spy on us when
we… No!”
Marthe was so shocked that hilarity seemed the only
safe emotion.
“And to perform to a set time? Ask him how long he
estimates such ‘concelebration’ to take,”
she silently
screeched via her patch. Her tapping in this case was so shaky as
to be almost inaudible, but her meaning was blatantly clear to
Jacquel, lying prostrate on the floor and vainly clutching his
stomach in an effort to control his jolting chuckles.

Hamon
chose that moment to go into the Terran surveillance rooms to check
on the vid monitors watching over the Hathian quarters. He wondered
why everyone seemed to be glued to one monitor in particular, and
strode over to join the group clustered around it and muttering in
puzzlement. He shoved through the crowd and stared at the
screen.

The
technician in control of the station looked up at him. “Some secret
Hathian ritual?” the man said. “These Liegers are
crazy!”

Hamon
couldn’t figure out what was going on either but knew Marthe well
enough to realize that something was making her very angry. As well
as decidedly merry. A sneaking suspicion entered his
head.

“
Has
any liquor been taken into that room?”

“
Only the occasional bottle, sir.”

“
Yes, but what was in them?” he wondered out loud, surprised
at seeing his bride apparently inebriated. Not that he should have
expected any less in the company of that reprobate, des Trurain. He
just hoped she wouldn’t be too far gone by the evening.

Leaving the chamber, he spent an unprofitable hour trying to
analyze exactly what it was he was getting in to. It didn’t help
much. The only conclusion he came to was that he was a lunatic.
What else would you call a man about to become joined by an
anachronistic ritual to a woman who didn’t conform to any pattern
of expected behavior in the known universe? Doing away with
marriage was Earth’s only true gift to human
civilization!

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The
thought refused to be banished by the chaos of the afternoon and
still buzzed in his head later that day when Hamon found himself
standing in the main assembly hall, the centerpiece of an alien and
entirely ridiculous ceremony. In a semicircle behind him stood the
three witnesses required to stand up for him by Hathian protocol,
with Ferdo in the middle as chief. Around again in an expanding
ripple of gawping circles he could swear stood every single Terran
who wasn’t absolutely needed elsewhere. He’d reviewed the security
rosters himself, to make sure some staff were still on duty. If
not, he suspected that the Citadel would have been left completely
unguarded.