From the far end of the log the Captain stared, suddenly white-faced and foolish, at him.
"I meant…" the words stumbled on his tongue. "Not like this. A proper meeting with seconds—"
"Alas," said Barbage, "such games are unfamiliar to me. So I will kill thee now to decide whether we continue or turn back, since thou hast not chosen to obey my orders—unless thou shouldst kill me first to prove thy right to do as thou wishest. That is how thou wouldst do things, with thy weapons, and thy meetings and thy seconds, is it not?"
He paused, but the other did not answer.
"Very well, then," said Barbage. He drew the power pistol from the holster of the junior officer and levelled it at his equal in rank.
"In the Lord's name—" broke out the other, hoarsely. "Have it any way you want. We'll go on then, over the border!"
"I am happy to hear thee decide so," said Barbage. He replaced the pistol in the holster from which he had drawn it and stepped away from the young force-leader who owned it. "We will continue until we make contact with the pursuit unit sent out from the next district; at which time I will join them; and thou, with thy officers and men, mayst go back to thy small games in town. That should be soon. When are the troops from the next district to meet us?"
The other Captain stared at him without answering for a moment.
"It'll take them a few hours," he said, at last.
"Hours?" Barbage walked forward toward him; and the other stood up swiftly, almost as if he expected Barbage to hit him. "Why hours? When did thou message them to meet us?"
"We… generally don't message until we're sure the Children of Wrath are going to cross over into the next district—"
"Thou whimpering fool!" said Barbage, softly. "Hath it not been plain from the beginning that they were fleeing into the next district and beyond?"
"Well, yes. But we might have caught them…"
The other's voice hesitated and ceased.
"Message them now!" Barbage's eyes were absolutely unmoving.
"Of course. Of course. Chaims—" he turned sharply to the young force-leader whose sidearm Barbage had laid his hand on, "get a message off to Hlaber District Command and tell them the situation. Say that Captain Barbage, operating here under special orders, needs a pursuit unit out here to take over from us in one hour. Tell them to check with South Promise HQ on his authority to require that sort of special action. Well? Move! Move!"
The junior officer jerked to his feet and ran off down the column.
Hal faded back through the greenery until he was safely enough beyond observation to turn and run himself—for the observation point. Jason, sitting at the foot of the tree with Joralmon above him in the observation post, scrambled upright as Hal reached him.
"I've found out what we need to know," Hal said, "and I'm going to be making the best time I can to get the information to the Command. You two follow as fast as you're able to. As we estimated, it's two full pursuit units under Barbage, the captain who ran the ambush on us in the pass. They've just sent for help from the next district; and Barbage is going to keep this bunch coming until they can be relieved—then he'll switch over and travel with the new unit. Share that information with Joralmon, and both of you come after me as fast as you can."
"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 settle
d 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.
But the military answer was one that could coldly calculate a certain percentage of an available force as expendable for the purchase of a tactical advantage to the force as a whole. This was unacceptable, in the case of the Command, whose people were as close as members of the same family; and where the Captain would never order such an action.
So the question of what to do came back to turn upon his own actions. Both Barbage and Rukh were trapped in a situation where they could do little but wait for it to wear down. He, on the other hand, should be able to act. And should if he could. But until now, fogged by the arrears of tiredness, his mind had failed to come up with a workable plan.
The sound of coughing had ceased. A few moments later, his ears caught the faint sounds of Child making his way back to his tent. Hal got to his feet. As a sub-officer, he was supposed to be exempt from sentry, kitchen, and other ordinary duties so that he could keep himself ready and alert to his higher responsibilities. But in actual practice, like most of the Command's other sub-officers, he ended up a good share of the time filling in under emergency conditions for one or the other of the members of his own group. Just now he had taken over the sentry duty of one of the team he had inherited from Morelly, who had begun out of excess of exhaustion to nod off on post. But now the man he had relieved had had an extra two hours of sleep; and it was time to return him to his obligations. Hal got to his feet and went into the camp.
He pushed through the flap of a tent and shook the slumbering man.
"Moh," he said, speaking softly, so as not to wake the three other sleepers in the tent, into the ear visible above the edge of the sleeping sack, "time to go back on duty."
The sleeper grunted, stirred, opened his eyes and began wearily to climb out of his bedsack. Hal stayed with him until he was armed and on post, then went to check on the other two sentries posted about the camp.
The others, both women, were awake and reporting all quiet. The Militia camp was only an estimated twelve kilometers from them; and while a nighttime attack by the clumsier, city-trained enemy was possible, it was unlikely. Still, it paid not to take chances. On impulse, Hal went back into the camp, found the tent where Child slept alone, and let himself through the flap.
He squatted beside the Command's now slumbering Lieutenant. For a moment he watched the face, aged a dozen years or more by the exhaustion of the last week, further deepened into a mask of wrinkles and bones by its relaxation into unconsciousness.
"Child-of-God…" he said softly.
He had barely breathed the words. But instantly the other was awake and looking up at him, and Hal knew that inside the sack, one bony hand had closed around the butt of a power pistol with a sawed-off barrel, pointing it through the cloth at whoever had roused him.
"Howard?" said Child, equally low-voiced although there was no one at hand to disturb.
"It's close to the end of my watch," Hal said. "I'd like to make a quick run, by myself, to the Militia camp—just to see how tired they look; and, with luck, I might pick up one of their maps of this area. We could do with the chance to check our own maps against theirs. Also, with real luck, I could get a map marked with their rendezvous and supply spots."
Child lay still for a few seconds more.
"Very well," he said. "As soon as thou art off watch, thou canst go."
"That's the thing," Hal said. "I'd like to leave now, to make as much use as possible of the darkness that's left. I could wake Falt early, and I don't think he'd object to going on watch an hour or so before his time."
Child lay still again for several seconds.
"Very well," he said, "provided Falt agrees. If he hath objection, come back to me."
"I will," said Hal.
He got up and went out. Closing the tent flap behind him, he heard Child, awake once more to the irritation in his lungs, cough briefly.
Falt did not, as Hal had known he would not, object. Hal got his cone rifle and a small travelling pack to supplement his sidearm and knife, blackened his hands and face and left. An hour and eighteen minutes later he was crouching down in the darkness on the bank of a creek behind a stand of young variform willows, having crept up to almost within arm's-length of a pair of young Militiamen. The pair was apparently on watch by a fire at one end of the camp—a watch that presumably took the place of the sentries he had never known the Militia forces to put out.
"… soon," one of these was saying as Hal eased into position. They were both about middle height for Harmonyites, black-haired and fresh-faced—no more than in their late teens. "And I'll be glad to get back. I hath little stomach for this sort of plowing through the woods all the time."
"Thou hath, hath thou?" The jeer in the voice of the other was obvious. "It's I have little stomach, brickhead! You'll never make a prophet, old or young."
"You won't, either! Anyway, I'm one of the Elect. You aren't!"
"Who says I'm not? And who told you you were?"
"My folks—"
"Are we on watch?" Barbage was suddenly on the other side of the fire, shoulders a little hunched, eyes like polished obsidian chips in their reflection of the firelight. "Or are we playing the games that childhood hath still left i
n us?"
The two were silent, staring at him.
"Answer me!"
"Games," muttered the two, low-voiced.
"And why should we not play games when we are on watch?"
But Hal did not wait to hear the answers of the two as Barbage continued to catechize them. He moved backward, got to his feet, and slipped around the perimeter of the encampment until he was level with the tents of the officers, just a short distance from the fire and easily recognizable by their better cloth and greater size.
There were six of them. Hal slid out of the darkness of the surrounding undergrowth to the back wall of the first in line. With the razor tip of his knife, soundlessly, he made a small slit in the fabric and spread the slit enough to look within. It took a moment for his vision to adjust to the greater darkness within, but when it did he saw a camp chair, a table, and a cot—unoccupied. As the one in effective command of the expedition, Barbage had—as Hal had suspected—taken the first tent in the officer's row.
Hal crept quietly around the side of the tent and looked toward the fire. The rest of the camp slumbered. Barbage, standing, still had his back to his own quarters; and the two he was verbally trouncing would be blinded by the close firelight to something as far away as this tent row, even if all their attention had not been frozen on Barbage.
Softly and swiftly, Hal turned the corner of the tent, lifted its flap, and let himself inside.
He had no time to examine the interior in detail. There was a map in the viewer lying among papers on the table; but to take it would make too obvious his visit. Hal looked about and found what he expected, a map case at the foot of the bed. Opening it, he came up with a full rack of slides for the viewer. Hastily, he took them all to the table, took out the slide already in the viewer and began to check the other slides out in it, one by one.