“You wanted me to leave you alone with them so they could carve you into little pieces?”
“So it’s my fault!”
He knew he was red-faced; he could feel his cheeks burning. The driver kept his eyes strictly forward, not daring to show any expression at all on his face.
Lowering his voice, Alec said, “Yes, it was your fault. You were right this morning. If it hadn’t been you I wouldn’t have killed them. I lost control. I couldn’t stand to see them with their hands on you. I...”
“All right,” Angela said soothingly. “It’s all right. I’ve been a terrible bitch. I’m sorry.”
They rode together in silence, Alec’s mind whirling in confusion, until it grew too dark to ride further.
Chapter 21
Alec slept with her that night. Without a word of prearrangement they walked off together from the campfire and took their blankets from the back of the wagon. Side by side, still unspeaking, they moved off into the darkness.
He made love to Angela gently, tenderly, trying to avoid hurting her. She held him, touched him, kissed him, moved with him until they both forgot about her injury.
In the morning they bathed together in an excruciatingly cold lake that stretched several kilometers wide. Alec still could not feel at ease using water so lavishly. This world is so rich!
By the time they were dressed and heading back to the camp again, Angela said, “You’ll have to go back to the Moon, won’t you?”
He couldn’t take his eyes from her gold-framed face: lovely, troubled, serious.
“Not without you,” he said.
Nodding, she answered, “I know. I’ll have to leave him...”
“Who?”
“Father.”
“You mean my father.”
She almost smiled. “Is there such a thing as foster-incest?”
“Will you come with me?” Alec asked.
She did not hesitate at all. “Yes,” she answered. But her voice was so low that he could barely hear her.
They reached the camp by the side of the rutted road. The men were milling through their morning routine, cooking eggs from the village, grooming the horses, cleaning guns.
Alec said to Angela, “I’ll need a power source for our radio. Not for very long, an hour or two.”
Angela thought for a moment. “You won’t be able to get one without a fight. The closest power source I know of is at a perimeter firebase, about twenty klicks from here... up in the hills, off the road.”
A horse neighed somewhere behind them. The Sun was up over the distant hills now, burning away the fog that hung over the lake. The valley floor was still lushly green, the wooded shoulders of the hills an unbelievable pallette of reds, golds, oranges, browns, set off here and there by the somber deep greens of pines and hemlocks.
Angela said, “If I help you get a radio for a few hours, you’ll go back to the Moon?”
“With you?”
“You’ll give up the idea of trying to get the fissionables and go back?”
He hesitated, then lied, “Yes. I will.” She’s only trying to protect him, he told himself, although a deeper voice insisted, She’s trying to protect you!
Reluctantly, as if she knew she was doing the wrong thing no matter what she did, Angela said, “All right. I’ll show you where the firebase is. They have a radio there that can reach headquarters, and that’s about fifty klicks away.”
“That should be plenty of power for our radio,” Alec said, trying to keep his voice even.
“I don’t like it,” Jameson said, staring off into the distant hills, sniffing the air for danger.
He and Alec stood at the edge of a gently rising meadow that ended in a thickly wooded hillside. The road they had travelled was farther down the slope. The Sun was high overhead but the wind was cold enough to make Jameson push his hands deep into the pockets of his worn, tattered trousers.
“We’re deep inside their territory. They’ve got to know we’re here, they’re not fools. Now we’re going in even deeper.”
Alec disagreed. “You’re missing the point, Ron. This is their territory, all right. But look how big it is. They don’t have enough men to patrol every hectare. We can stay in the woods, keep on the move, until we rendezvous with the reinforcements.”
Still scanning the distances, Jameson countered, “And you think he’s going to let a few shuttles land within fifty klicks of his home base without opposition?”
“By the time he can get some opposition mounted we’ll have seized enough territory so that the shuttles can land and take off safely. Before they can organize a big-enough counterattack we’ll have reached his headquarters and found the fissionables.”
“Maybe,” James said. “With a large scoop of luck.”
“Not luck! We don’t need luck. Just enough men and good timing.”
“Well...” Jameson looked at Alec at last, then stuck out his hand. “Good luck anyway. You’re marching yourself right into the bear’s cave.”
Alec let his hand be engulfed by Jameson’s. “I’ll be back tomorrow. And inside of a week or two we’ll be home.”
“Yeah.” Jameson’s voice went dead flat, as if the word home was starting to take on a different meaning.
Alec thought about that as he and Angela rode through the woods that afternoon, heading up the gentle slopes of the hills toward the firebase.
Home is the settlement. The Moon. Where it’s safe and clean. Where Mother is. But another part of his mind added, Where it’s cramped and small. Where life is rigidly determined by the amount of air and water available. Where the colors are whites and grays or pastels. Where you speak with polite restraint and wait your turn in the hierarchy that governs all.
Twisting around in his saddle, looking over the glorious autumn plumage of Mother Earth and the even wilder grandeur of the flaming sunset, Alec could understand why some of the men might be tempted to remain here. A flight of birds sped far overhead in a ragged vee formation and Alec’s heart leaped at the sight of them. Their queer honking sounds drifted across the landscape.
“Winter’s coming,” Angela said.
Alec nodded. The birds were heading roughly southward. He took another look at them as they faded into the distant purple-reds of the dying day.
It took an effort to force his thoughts back to the settlement. No winter there. No seasons at all. How is Mother holding out? Can she still handle Kobol? Is the Council still loyal to her?
