The Enigma Score (31 page)

‘Any relationship to Basty Pardo?’ she asked.

‘An uncle, actually. Well, the General – he’s retired, but everyone still calls him the General – advised some of the PEC members, and the Council managed to muster a majority of vote support for investigation. CHAIN began by hiring some investigators, a few like me, love. Enough to find out what’s really going on.’

‘So you really are a PEC agent! I thought you were joking. Then it isn’t hopeless.’ Her face lit up, that glowingly childlike look he had grown to love. Sternly, he kept his hands away from her. No sense making it harder than it was.

‘It isn’t hopeless providing this message can get off-planet and reach the right people, May Bee. But Justin has the planet sealed off. I didn’t expect that. Shortsighted of me, but I just didn’t expect it. All communications are monitored. No one and no thing is being allowed to leave without a priority voucher, and no priority vouchers are being issued except for the few issued by Justin himself or those we’ve wangled through the Governor’s office. You’re the Governor’s daughter, and you’re known to be hopelessly naive and gauche and remote from anything important. You don’t even take part in most social events. Everyone thinks you’re a little odd and I’ve been hinting for weeks that you’re perhaps a trifle stupid. You’re simply the least suspect person we know.’

He touched her cheek, smiling, not letting her know how truly desperate he felt the need was. Everything that was happening on Jubal told Rheme that only force would work, and yet so far as he knew, no one in CHAIN had taken that into account. The Governor would go off-planet in his own good time, and the PEC authorities could pick him up on Serendipity or wherever he landed. But Justin wouldn’t leave, and Justin wouldn’t resign, and Justin wouldn’t obey an order from the PEC.

No, Justin would dig in. Justin would start a war on Jubal rather than be taken into custody. Justin would have to be dug out, or blasted out, or Jubal would have to be put under siege.

And by the time the siege was over, it could be too late for a few million people. And for Jubal as well.

13

It was midafternoon. Left to themselves, Tasmin and Donatella had ridden farther south and laid a few false side trails, which they hoped would be confusing to the followers.

‘The valley gets narrower from here on,’ Don said. ‘We won’t be able to escape them, Tasmin, except by keeping ahead of them. What are you doing with those mule shoes?’

Tasmin looked up from the shoes he was fiddling with. ‘I traded these off Clarin’s and Jamieson’s animals,’ he said. ‘The pattern on each set is a little different. If we put them on two feet of each of our mules, maybe they’ll think there are still four of us.’

‘Do you think they’ll pay chits for that?’ Donatella asked him, one eyebrow raised in doubt, as he slipped two of the marked shoes over the mule’s hooves, like slippers. ‘Do you think they’ll really believe there are still four mules?’

‘They might. Unless they’re smarter than some people are, yes.’ He tried for a rueful laugh. ‘I just invented the trick, Explorer. It made me feel I was doing something. I deceive myself probably. It’s either do something or fret. Fretting makes my stomach ache. Maybe they won’t realize how inventive we are.’

She acknowledged this with a slight, barely ironic smile. ‘It could work. I don’t recall anyone talking much about doing tracking on Jubal. What is there to track? On Heron’s World, of course, they do. Lots of hunting on Heron’s World.’

‘You’ve been to Heron’s World?’

‘Of course not, Tripsinger. I was born here. My mother got a bonus for me, as a matter of fact. I was her third.’

‘It saves shipping when you can manufacture locally,’ he responded.

‘Many thanks, Tripsinger.’

‘No strain intended, Don. I was just wondering how you knew so much about Heron’s World.’

‘Library stuff. Adventure stories.’

‘Adventure stories?’ he laughed. ‘After being an Explorer on Jubal?’

‘You know it’s not always that exciting,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it’s anything but.’

‘As when?’ he asked.

She had stories, her own stories, others’ stories, tales of defeat and pain. They were not the stories Explorers told one another, and she didn’t know why she told Tasmin except that they were stories needing telling and she might not have another chance. During the trip, she had learned all about him and Celcy. Now she wanted to talk about her and Link.

‘Some things you bury,’ she said. ‘I believe in burying many things. Not denying they happened, you understand, but just getting rid of them. Putting them away somewhere where you don’t stumble over them every day. But with Link … there’s no way I can bury that. I used to delight in the Presences. Since one of them almost killed Link … since then I don’t like them as much.’

He considered this, wondering why it didn’t apply to him. Celcy had died on the Enigma, and yet he, Tasmin, still felt as he always had about the Presences. Perhaps women were different. His mother had always told him that they were. ‘And you’ve been alone since then?’ he asked her.

‘Not exactly alone. I have good friends. And there was a talented services man in Northwest City. I took advantage of his good nature from time to time. Zimmy. Of course, Zimmy was spying on me, as I should have known he would. I saw his face the last time I returned to Northwest. You’d have to know Zimmy for it to make sense, but he didn’t expect me to be back.’

When she explained how she knew, Tasmin commented, ‘Not a lot to go on. Just the expression on a man’s face,’

‘I said you’d have to know Zimmy. Believe me, he expected never to see me again.’

Tasmin’s eyes narrowed and his mouth stretched in a silent grimace. ‘Who’s the one who gave the orders, Don? Who hired him?’ The man who hired Zimmy had hired the assassin. The man who hired the assassin was the man who had driven Don Furz underground, causing her to conspire with Lim. And that man was ultimately responsible for Lim’s and Celcy’s death.

‘The top of BDL, most likely. Harward Justin is an evil man. I know that about him for sure.’

‘I’ve never met Harward Justin.’ But that’s where the ultimate responsibility probably lay. Tasmin nodded to himself over this. If there was fault, that’s where it lay.

She shivered. ‘I met him once. Luckily, I’d just come back from a trip and I looked like a wet viggy.’

‘Why luckily?’

‘I’ve been told I’m attractive. And I’ve been told that Justin has an appetite for attractive women. And he doesn’t let them tell him no.’

For a moment he thought she was going to say something more about this, but she fell into an abstracted and painful silence that it would have seemed impertinent to interrupt.

By late afternoon, they had begun to climb once more, and well before dark they had reached a crest of hills lined with tiny amber ’lets, no higher than their knees. Far to the east stood the golden Presence from which these small crystals had come.

‘An old streambed,’ Donatella explained. ‘It washed the seed crystals down here in almost a straight line. I believe that’s how a lot of the straight ramparts formed originally. A million years ago, there was nothing there but a river. Now there’s a mountain range.’

‘We’re moving onto high country,’ he agreed. ‘I want to get a view behind us if I can.’

He dismounted and lay among the crowded ’lets, peering through his glasses back along their trail. At last he spotted them, moving figures well inside the limit of vision. ‘They’re there. Still coming, and they’re past the side trail where Clarin and Jamieson turned off.’

‘How many?’

‘All six. None of them have gone after the youngsters. I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry.’

‘They’re closer than when Jamieson saw them, aren’t they? Only two or three hours behind.’

‘My guess would be yes.’

‘If we only had a moon, we could keep going late tonight, walk and lead the mules.’

‘They may keep coming anyhow,’ he said, staring through the glasses back the way they had come. There was something implacable about the lead rider, something relentless in the angle of his body. He exclaimed, ‘Damn!’

She peered through her own glasses. Now for the first time, they saw, trailing the group, a mule hostler with a string of unburdened animals.

‘They have fresh mounts,’ Don whispered. ‘No wonder they’re moving so fast. If they catch us before we reach the south end of the valley….’

‘We can’t outrun them,’ Tasmin said. ‘We’ll have to think of something else.’

He thought as they rode, stopping twice to pick over bunches of green settler’s brush, which he whittled at on the way.

‘What in hell are you doing?’ Donatella asked.

‘Being inventive again, Donatella. I’ll let you know if it works,’ he told her, trying to sound more confident than he felt. Half an hour later he had four flat disks of settler’s brush, thick spirals of narrow branches, made to fit tightly inside mule shoes.

He showed them to her. ‘We’re going to tie these onto our feet, just as soon as we find someplace we can hide the mules. Then we’re going to go on, leaving a false mule trail, until we can find a place to hide ourselves – a small place that they won’t think of searching, because they’ll be looking for people and mules, not people alone.’

‘Hide the mules! Where?’

‘I don’t know where. I’m praying we can find a place.’

They did find a place, across a little stream and up a draw, a dense grove of Jubal trees in a tiny box canyon on the opposite side of the narrow valley from the trail. They rode their animals down to the stream, leaving a clear trail, and taking time to water the animals well. Then they led the animals over rock up the curving draw and tied them deep among the trees. On their return, they wiped out all prints, then donned the false mule shoes and walked back to the trail from the stream, leaving clear but infrequent imprints.

‘We’ll come back for them when the pursuit passes us by,’ Tasmin asserted, allowing no doubt to creep into his voice.

Donatella stopped on the trail to wipe her forehead and settle the straps of her pack. They had left most of their gear on the mules, taking only what was needed for survival. ‘What if we didn’t get the tracks into that grove completely wiped out. What if they don’t believe the tracks? What if they go down into that draw?’

‘Then they’ll have two more mules and most of our equipment. But they still won’t have us. Now we have to leave as much trail as we can before dark.’

Walking on the false mule shoes was neither easy nor quick. Twice in the following hour they spied on their pursuers, who were drawing frighteningly close. The second time, Donatella saw them clearly and she put the glasses down with an expression of horrified surprise that she didn’t offer to explain. Tasmin let her alone. Attempting a mulelike pace while keeping his balance on the false mule feet required total concentration.

They had not gone far enough to satisfy him when it began to grow dark. ‘We can’t go much farther, Donatella. The soil is getting shallower along here. If we just keep going, we may find ourselves on a barren slope when they catch up with us. I wish I knew for sure what they intended. It might make a difference….’

Her abstracted silence broke with a rush of words. ‘I know what they intend. Killing. Torture. One of them is a man I know about, Tasmin. I saw him through my glasses, saw him clearly. I’ve seen that face before. I know who he is.’ Her voice faded to silence, as though the name could not be uttered.

‘Tell me,’ he ordered.

‘His name is Geroan,’ she answered. ‘He works for BDL, for Harward Justin. He’s an assassin. A hired killer.’

‘How do you know?’

‘A friend of mine met him. She told me about Spider Geroan.’ Donatella had turned white herself, for something more than mere recollection of what a friend might have said. Tasmin waited for her to go on, but she bit her lip and was silent.

‘We have the rifle,’ he offered.

‘We daren’t use it. The moment we use it, they’ll be sure we’re here. And we only have one rifle. They probably have six or seven.’

‘True,’ he nodded. ‘You’re right. They can’t know we’re here. Not yet. Not for sure.’

‘It’s been a long time since I came this way, but I don’t think there’s anything ahead of us to help. It gets more and more barren the farther up this valley we go, and narrower. There’s no way out on either side. Just precipices with no passes through them. The only ways out are back, the way we came, where the pursuers are right now, or at the southern end….’

Where they were seemed barren enough, a slope of hard igneous rock that looked as though it had not changed since it had been spewed out molten except to be sparsely netted with soil-filled cracks. There were only a few stunted Jubal trees, their meager fans trembling in the chill wind. Occasionally there were veins of softer, lighter stone running parallel with the trail: pale, sedimentary strata, the bottom of some ancient sea, layered between stripes of the harder stone by cycle after cycle of vulcanism and alluvium, one replacing the other.

As they moved on, these veins tilted into a wall on their right, at first low, then towering, a striped and undulating outcropping where the softer strata had been eaten away to leave shadowed pockets between the wind-smoothed shelves of harder rock.

As his eyes and mind searched for a hiding place, Tasmin chewed over what Donatella had said about the man following them. There had been fear in her voice, abject fear, more fear than would have been occasioned by no more than she had told him. It was not merely that the man was an assassin. Tasmin started to ask her, then caught himself. She was already afraid. Talking about it might only make it worse.

He turned his mind to the stone, concentrating on it, searching for something his traveler’s sense told him must be there, somewhere….

‘Stop,’ he cried. The trail curved to the right around the slope where wind had chewed deeply between the layers, making horizontal crevices that held darkness in their depths. One of these pockets, slightly above their heads, was almost entirely hidden behind fragments fallen from the shelf above. ‘There,’ he pointed. At one side of the shelf a hole gaped, thicker than their bodies, accessible from the trail by a tumbled stairway of fallen rock.