Part 21 (1/2)

Tarel looked fl.u.s.tered. Behind Gunnlag and Moise, I could see dad start to grin. He saw me watching, grinned wider, and winked at me.

Tarel nodded and talked it over with Moise. They shook hands on it; the pledge had been made.

Ten minutes later, with the destrier finally having let himself be caught, Arno was in the saddle, with Gunnlag up behind him, and they started down the road to the Varangians.

PART SEVEN.

DEPARTURE.

THIRTY-THREE.

I piloted to Deneen's island with dad sitting beside me. The others mostly napped. We talked off and on, and dad never questioned my decision to take Arno and Gunnlag, or Moise, with us when we left Fanglith. It was as though he'd go along with it, if I thought it was the thing to do. I wasn't surprised, but it made me feel good anyway.

The island was quite a bit west of Sicily-about a twelfth of a planetary circ.u.mference-so there was still a lot of night left there when we arrived. We could have landed right then, but if we'd wakened Deneen, there'd have been at least an hour more of talk. And we all needed sleep-it had been a long day, and a long, intense night. So we bunked down on the cutter. Only Bubba, Lady, and the pups had any conversation from one craft to the other-silent, of course.

Then we overslept sunrise by more than an hour. By the time we landed, Deneen was walking back to the Jav from tending her fish traps. Bubba hadn't said anything to her-let her be surprised, he'd decided.

And when she first saw us, at a distance, she was scared. That's when Bubba told her who we were.

Close up, of course, she recognized our family cutter easily. There were lots of hugs and some tears when we all got together.

Then mom and Deneen fixed breakfast on an open fire. The high point was Deneen's fish. Mom contributed powdered milk, two kinds of algae bars, and whole-grain crackers. On the cutter they'd been living mostly on condensed rations.

Even with the not-so-great cuisine, it was a party.

After breakfast, mom had Deneen power up the Jav and checked its computer for the medical manual and inventory. Then she went into the dispensary and came out a while later with powder that presumably would kill fleas, and some greasy stuff for lice. At least they killed known equivalents on other worlds. The wolves had been scratching; they'd already gotten fleas from us. After a swim and a scrub, dad used clippers on Tarel, Moise, and me, down to the skin. Then we smeared each other. I can see how the grease might kill bugs: It not only stung and burned, it reeked. After half an hour we scrubbed again, and like the wolves, got powdered. Then we put on clean jump suits.

Meanwhile, Deneen had thrown our clothes, and the pallets we'd used the night before, into the Jav's sterilization chamber. When the sterilization cycle was finished, she checked crystallization and turned off the power again. An hour with the power on hadn't set things back too badly.

Then we all strolled over to the ancient hut we'd found on our first trip, and sat around on the tumbled stone walls, dad and mom on one side, the rest of us on another. The esp wolves lay in the gra.s.s between us.

The first thing I wanted to hear was what had happened to Jenoor. When she'd finished telling us about her rescue, mom and dad wanted our story of the past few months. That took a while, and when we'd finished, dad grinned at us.

”I guess you're probably tired of sitting now. Your mother and I can tell our stories later,” ”Dad,”

Deneen said, ”that's not funny. Give! Now!”

He laughed. ”All right. When the Federation went Imperial, the underground on Evdash made some contingency plans: what to do when the Empire grabbed Evdash. Your mother and I, having a cutter, accepted the responsibility of getting Dr. Boshner off the planet. So when we left home, we headed for an estate in the mountains west of the capital, to pick him up.”

Dr. G.K. Boshner was a tall, white-haired man who was Evdash's most famous refugee. He'd been head of the opposition party in the Federation senate when the Glondis Party threw out the const.i.tution, and part of the Glondis justification for it involved making a lot of accusations against Dr. Boshner. He'd been lucky to get off Morn Gebleu alive, thirty years ago.

”In planning,” dad went on, ”we a.s.sumed that the Imperials would block off-planet escape attempts as soon as they arrived. It would be relatively easy for them. So our plan called for moving Dr. Boshner to a remote hiding place where he could be kept until off-planet patrols were relatively relaxed. By that time, hopefully, something might even be 'arranged' with naval personnel.”

Dad glanced around at us, smiling wryly. ”But there was one thing we hadn't been prepared for: how quickly the Imperials would take over the national police. I mean, the first day! Even when we heard it on the radio, we hadn't realized how widely Glondisan sympathizers had infiltrated the force. We a.s.sumed it would take a few days for the occupation administration to take extensive control.

”We were wrong. We were about sixty miles west of New Caltroff when a patrol floater spotted us, and hit us with a rocket.”

He shook his head ruefully. ”At that. We were lucky: The rocket was a solid round, not explosive. It holed us, which of course made us totally uns.p.a.ceworthy, wrecked the life-support system, and caused other damage, some of it to me. I had about a dozen wounds, fairly superficial, from pieces of metal.

”But we could still fly. And a good deal faster than a police floater.

Your mother lost them and hid in the anvil top of a thunderhead.”

”A thunderhead?” I said. ”The turbulence must have bounced you around something terrible, at the very least!”

”I suppose that's why they didn't look for us there. But in the anvil top, we were above major turbulence, and at the same time, effectively invisible to radar. We parked there and drifted southeast with it, to within twenty miles of a place we knew.”

They'd been lucky, all right. Then mom had flown them by night to the place, a backwoods hill farm forty miles north of Jarfoss. Dad had lost quite a lot of blood. The people who hid them put the cutter in a hay barn, surrounded it with walls of hay bales, then roofed it over with bales on top of planks. It took months to get repair parts. Commercial sources had been shut down by the Empire, and when they finally got parts, it was from the naval supply depot at Jarfoss-parts never intended for a small civilian cutter.

But they made do.

They never knew the pipeline the parts came through.

Dad had thought seriously then about staying on Evdash, and working with the underground, but the Glondis Party had old grudges against him, and there was a price on his head. He'd be a danger to anyone he might work with, a magnet to the political police.

A turncoat police unit, it turned out, had already arrested Dr. Boshner. He was hanged without trial during the first public executions. He'd been tried in absentia, back on Morn Gebleu, nearly thirty years ago.

The Glondis spy network really kept things hairy for a while. The resistance movement lost probably a third of its people the first week, and there was a continual trickle of losses after that. Mom and the people they were with doctored dad themselves, rather than risk getting a doctor. Mom sutured his wounds; his only anaesthetic was homemade whiskey.

Meanwhile a new underground was forming, and bit by bit, contacts were occurring with the old. It was hard to evaluate its size or much about it, because for safety, no one knew the names of more than a few others. But as far as he and mom could see, the nucleus seemed to be the military. And apparently the loyal police, when they'd adjusted to the new situation, started closing their eyes to underground activities as much as they dared.

By that time in dad's story, our behinds were tired of sitting on rocks, but we ignored the discomfort.

We wanted to hear the rest. ”How did you get together with Jenoor?” I asked.

”Jenoor,” dad said, ”why don't you tell him?”

”Well,” she began, ”it was quite a chain of coincidence. The sergeant transferred me to a delivery service van, where the driver gave me a shot to kill the pain. Then he delivered me ...” She paused and looked around. ”.. at from and Dansee Jomber's! Dansee was home when I arrived, and it hit her pretty hard to learn what had happened. Piet had been a close friend of theirs. And I'm sure she a.s.sumed that the rest of you had been destroyed by patrol s.h.i.+ps, though of course she didn't say that to me.

”They kept me in their bas.e.m.e.nt for three days. The first thing Densee did was clean and bandage my foot. I was sort of on a cloud from the painkiller then, and watched her. It was pretty gross.”

Looking at me, she smiled. I was cringing. ”The first night, a man came there who was apparently a doctor. He gave me another shot-the first one was wearing off-and repaired my foot. That I didn't watch.”

She turned to dad then. ”Klentis,” she said-not Uncle Klent anymore' why don't you and Aven tell them the rest? It's more your story than mine.”

Dad stood up before he spoke, and rubbed his backside. ”You'll just have to wait a minute. My bones aren't as young as yours.”

I became aware then of just how sore my own backside was from silting on rocks. ”Let's go sit in the Rebel Javelin,” I suggested. Everyone seemed to think that was a good idea, so we went in and sat on soft, contoured seats. And at mom's suggestion, Moise went into one of the cabins and napped. So much of what he'd been hearing meant nothing at all to him that he'd gotten groggy, and was having a terrible time staying awake Dad. it turned out, had gotten a pipeline to a warrant officer in naval operations at Jarfoss. The cutter had be paired by then, and the idea was for the WO to get information to dad, to help him decide when to try to get off Evdash. At the same time, from Jomber was looking for somewhere to send Jenoor. And the warrant officer, one of the few people who knew Jenoor was there, made a deal with dad. He'd provide him with information, if dad would take this young girl away.

So mom, in a borrowed utility floater, had gone the next night to pick up this young girl in a parking lot in Jarfoss. Each had almost come apart when they saw who the other was. On the farm, dad asked Jenoor where we'd been headed. Naturally she told him Grinder. He knew it wouldn't be in the astrogation cube by that name, and when he questioned her about it, she didn't know the planet's official name. When he told her-Tagrith Four- she said she'd never heard it before.

And if she hadn't, it seemed probable that the rest of us hadn't either.

They'd talked it over then, trying to figure what we might have done, in the unlikely event that we had gotten out-system alive. And decided the likeliest place to look for us was on Fanglith. If they didn't find us here, they'd head for Tagrith Four and hope we were alive somewhere.