Chapter Nine
That Faithless Friend
Malcolm Reed
I've known Liz long enough to be immediately aware that something's wrong as soon as I clap eyes on her.
Even as she gives me this strained attempt at a grin from the seat of the cart, I know.
Something has happened. Something Madam doesn't want to let on about.
So. This could either be because she doesn't want to worry me, or because she doesn't want me to over-react to something she knows will flip one of my triggers. Depending on which one, this could result in anything from someone getting the shit scared out of him, to a sudden urgent requirement for a grave – or at least the disposal of an indefinite number of body parts that used to belong to one or more individuals.
Naturally, I applaud her ever-ready supply of the milk of human kindness. However, if this 'something' involves someone having been unwise enough to upset my wife, then whoever it was will have to be taught not to do it again. That is non-negotiable in my world.
Unloading and disposing of the shopping takes some time and effort. Ordinarily this wouldn't stop us talking, and it still doesn't, but the falsity of her cheer rings like an ill-cast bell in my ears, to the point where I actually walk away from her. When she persists with the I'm-okay-you're-okay charade by complimenting me on the cat flap, I respond by telling Grandmother how I cannibalised lumber and hinges from the chicken coop to make it and the shutters. I know what she's doing and I know why she's doing it, but though I'm really reluctant to turn around and call her out on it, this is verging on dishonesty. There's something I need to know and withholding it is not going to help. I'll put up with it for a while because I want to respect her autonomy, but this amount of discomfort means it's not something I can ignore.
I am sure Liz thinks I'm angry with her, and maybe I am, just a little. Mostly, I'm anxious about what might have happened. Should we be running for the hills right now? I mean, if Liz unwittingly drew the attention of someone who then called the authorities expecting to collect a huge reward for finding one of the Imperial Fugitives, then Grandmother needs us to get the hell away from her a whole lot more than she needs us to help her unload her cart. If, on the other hand, the military has decided to use this particular patch of desert for war games or something like that, we might have time to help the old woman pack up and move somewhere nicer than the horrible refugee camps they usually establish when they evacuate people to steal their land for 'Official Use'.
Whatever the case, I'm certain Grandmother knows exactly what's going on. I catch a few glances at Liz here and there, and though she doesn't say anything, at least in my hearing, she does try to force the issue by ordering Liz to help me finish unloading the cart while she feeds the animals herself.
If she thinks making us work together is enough to get us talking, she hasn't accounted for how stubborn I can be or how much abuse Liz is willing to take before she does something that might hurt me. So as Liz struggles to drag one sack of animal feed at a time from the cart to the stall where I stack it, I go back and forth carrying them easily on my shoulder and talking to Grandmother about the projects I have planned and the supplies I'll need. Only when it gets to the point that neither of us can reach the bags without climbing into the cart does Liz finally speak to me, and then it's only to call me a jerk and boss me around. I do as she tells me, mostly because I just don't want to argue, though for a moment, I consider it. I just glare at her instead, go back to carrying and stacking the heavy sacks, and agree to carry and stack more of them when Grandmother asks because it's so much easier for me to do it. When we finish, Liz jumps down without waiting for me to offer any help and the ladies go back to the house to prepare dinner, and I don't miss the pointed look the old woman shoots Liz when they walk by me, either.
I take a few deep breaths – in through the nose and out through the mouth the way Ginny taught me – and start loading the cart with the other half of Grandmother's surplus goods that she's taking to town tomorrow to trade for canning jars and sugar and pectin and other supplies she needs to make more of the same stuff she's trading away. If we really did need to run, Grandmother would have pushed the two little burros to make their best speed and they would have come rolling in here lathered with sweat. Liz would have jumped from the cart and told me right away. So, as much as I'd like to go confront her right now, there's work to be done, tasks Grandmother is depending on us to help her complete. This cart needs to be loaded before dark. It wouldn't do to walk off the job before it's done just to have a spat with my wife.
When I finally get into the house to freshen up before dinner, the two women manage to have an entire conversation with their eyes, though neither of them says anything to me. But whether or not anything has been said out of my earshot, when dinner is finally placed on the table and we've all eaten some of it in silence – my appetite rather reduced by a mixture of annoyance and apprehension – and without any more Meaningful Looks passing between my two companions, it seems even Liz realises that delaying the evil hour will achieve nothing except to make the inevitable reckoning worse.
She suddenly lays down her knife and fork and meets my eyes. "They had the News on when we were in the store."
A sudden severe shortage of saliva in my mouth makes me swallow with difficulty. The first thing I think is that Trip's been dealt with. The execution of State prisoners is standard fare on Imperial television, and for someone of Trip's stature, they'd devote a whole damned day's programming to it.
Some of me says it's too early and some of me says who says they've bothered with a court martial, but all of me recoils with a wave of nausea from the various ways in which he could have been made to pay for his sins with the whole Empire looking on.
Who am I to complain? Didn't I make it mandatory for everyone between a crib and a coffin to watch Sallis receive his just reward?
She must see I've gone white under my tan, and I know she understands my first and worst fear because she shares it. Her hand darts out and grabs my wrist. "No, it wasn't him!"
A lifetime denying the existence of God has the severe disadvantage of there being nobody in particular you can thank for small – or large – mercies. When my heart starts beating again it's working in jagged bounds, and my breath leaves my body in a broken little whimper I haven't even the courage to despise myself for.
It takes me a couple of moments before I can drag my head up off my chest. After another couple, I hear myself say, with a forced and completely unnatural calm, "Tell me."
So she does. Without any editorialising or references to the past because we don't want to give Grandmother any information that would put her in more danger than we already have with our mere presence here, she tells me about my best ever protégé and what he's achieved, how he's leapfrogged over both of our fallen bodies and straight to the top of the pile, and is now Empress Hoshi Sato's soon-to-be Consort, and how the two of them had the barefaced effrontery to take questions on a news broadcast and declare themselves in love.
In love! Oh, fucking hell! Spare me!
I know – I know, and none better – that after surviving the conditioning on Wolfplanet Mindfuck, none of us still has the mental equipment to be 'in love' in the standard sense. But for Ginny's endless, patient unravelling of the thorny tangles of my mental processes, I'm not even sure Liz and I could have had anything like the relationship we now have. I'd like to think I could still have felt gratitude towards her – even affection – but even if the events on Jupiter Station had never happened, I could never have allowed myself to become so vulnerable to another human being. Once you have the instincts of a wolf, it goes against absolutely every one of them to roll over and expose your abdomen, unless the only other alternative is having your throat torn out. And what Liz has seen of me is worse, more private, more vulnerable, than any expanse of naked belly and genitals; most of the serving personnel aboard Enterprise had a working acquaintance with my dick by the time I left, but not one of them had ever even glimpsed the existence of the parts of me I've dared show to Liz.
So. It therefore follows that Austin and Hoshi are not 'in love'. It undoubtedly suits their purposes to say they are, and from what Liz and Grandmother tell me between them, they did a reasonable job of proving it, at least for those gullible souls who believe in unicorns and the Tooth Fairy. The rest of the world will have to draw their own conclusions, and when I can swallow the initial wave of fury and start thinking with my brain as opposed to my disappointment, it soon becomes apparent that it's probably the best outcome. Setting aside the necessary farce of pretending to be in love with Hoshi, Austin is hands-down the best option to keep the Empire together. And more than that: I think, I believe, that he's been exposed to enough of Trip's way of thinking – our way of thinking – to have a go at implementing it across the Empire. Oh, he'll have to start small, and he'll need the patience of Job, but that's one thing I know he has in spades. And one thing he has got, possibly more than either Trip or I ever had, is a capacity for planning long-term. He won't think in years, he'll think in decades, possibly in lifetimes, whole generations; and that's something I could never have even aspired to.
So maybe, when the dust finally settles and present agonies are no more than dusty footnotes in the history books, it'll all be found to have happened for the best. Far better for it to be Austin than that bitch Hernandez, at any rate. To be brutally honest, if Austin can keep control of the Empire it'll probably work out infinitely better than it would have done if I'd succeeded.
It's just a pity he isn't wired to truly appreciate, on any level beyond the philosophical contemplation of her beauty, the more delectable attributes of the woman he's claiming for his Alpha bitch.
Obviously I can't expose Grandmother to danger by letting on who Liz and I really are. That's why we never use our given names, for one thing. She may well guess at our identity (I imagine my handsome visage will have graced the television screens from time to time while I was one of the Triad), but if she doesn't actually overhear anything incriminating, even the most sophisticated interrogation methods won't uncover any evidence to prove she should have reported us. I doubt if she'd ever be picked up anyway, to be honest, and if she was I can easily imagine her putting on the world's best impersonation of a witless old baggage who wouldn't recognise a truck if it ran over her, but we daren't put her in any unnecessary danger.
Nobody knows better than I do how good the BII are at extracting information. For that reason, I can't discuss the issue in the detail I normally would – it would immediately reveal far too clearly how close both of us had been to events. Maybe later, when we're alone, we can talk about it more fully; until then, I have to keep my reactions controlled in front of a pair of very observant old eyes.
It's taken me a while to struggle through these conflicting thoughts and feelings, and Liz has sat silent and allowed me to process it, though her grip on my wrist hasn't wavered. Finally I summon up a smile of sorts.
"Well, that's a turn-up for the book," I say with a sigh. "Nothing else?"
"Not about the Chief." But she looks down at her dinner again just a fraction too quickly, and if Grandmother doesn't know her well enough to pick up that tiny waver, I bloody well do. Still, I've already realised we're on risky ground, and if anything else is to come out, I'd rather it be in a far more controlled environment. So I pick up my fork too and start eating as if I believe her.
Over dessert, half (I'm saving the rest for later) of a huge slice of delicious pineapple upside down cake that sadly tastes like sawdust now that I know Liz has more news that can't be shared in front of Grandmother, I bring out my lists and discuss my plans for fixing up the place. Grandmother is delighted and incredibly grateful for everything I've proposed to do, but she nixes the wooden floors and the idea of having indoor plumbing and electricity in the house and stable.
"As they are, this house an' that stable are officially defined as 'shelters,'" she says tartly. "Addin' power, water, or anything but a dirt floor makes them officially a 'stable' an' a 'house', an' that triples the taxes. Wouldn't be so bad if they just taxed the buildin's that way, but it applies to the whole five hunnerd acres."
As Liz and I share an astonished look, she cackles her sweet witchy laugh and asks, "What, you think I been stealin' wolfberries from my neighbors an' sellin' 'em back in jam an' lettin' my animals graze on their land an' drink their water? Desert ain't a no-man's land, children. Most of it b'longs to dried-up old desert rats like me that know how to use it, an' while most of us are happy to swap an' share resources, don't nobody take kindly to outright theft."
She looks over my list of supplies and crosses off everything I've listed for the floor, the wiring, and the plumbing. Then she marks a few things with stars, caresses my cheek like my own Granny might have done when I was a boy, and tells me, "Once this fur on your face grows out enough for you to feel safe travellin', Grandson, I'll draw you a map to an abandoned town where the county government lets people salvage building materials an' the like. I ain't been out that way in years, but you should still be able to get all the lumber and insulation you need there. You might even be able to find shingles or enough sheet metal for a new roof."
Liz has had little to say about the work I have planned, except to ask if an outdoor bathtub or at least a shower might be possible. Grandmother replies that if she wants a bath, she just goes down to the creek in the arroyo (a thought which makes me shudder inwardly), but allows that a shower might be convenient. Then Liz falls silent again, not even interested in contributing to the discussion of how and where the shower should be constructed.
I've been stealing glances at her ever since she broke the news about Hoshi and Austin. Having every reason to believe Trip's still alive and no reason to think we've been discovered, I really can't imagine what might be worse than what she's already told me, but clearly, whatever it is upsets her more than the news that my former protégé has already usurped the nest I was feathering for myself. I'm confident she's not angry at me for the way I was acting. She understands me well enough to know I was anxious about what she had to tell me and that my anxiety made me irritable, but for all the enjoyment she seems to be getting out of her chocolate cake, it might as well be a hunk of Imperial Fleet field rations meatloaf, and like me, she's only eating her dessert out of courtesy to Grandmother, who was visibly pleased to have bought treats for us.
I'm satisfied that she's told me as much as she can for now, and I have enough to think about for the moment; but I have an evil little suspicion worse is to come.
=/\=
And come it does, in the privacy of our bed when a whispered conversation brings up the name of Amanda Cole.
God knows, after all I've been through, I should be beyond disillusionment with the capacity of the human (and partly human) race for betrayals. But this one hurts.
It wasn't just that she stood at Trip's side and obeyed him with the gallant grace of the best of hounds, or that she was a damned good soldier, or that she ran the distribution programme like a well-oiled machine. Maybe it was all of these things, maybe it was all of them and more, but if I'd have had to bet my life on the one of Trip's staff that would never have been found unfaithful, Amanda Cole would have been at the top of the list. As pathologically suspicious a bastard as I was (and probably still am), not one iota of anything I could find or sense warned me she was a traitor. God, she must have been good. Really, terrifyingly good.
Liz has contained her hurt over it out of necessity, but in my arms the dam breaks. And if I'm to tell the truth, my own eyes smart a bit, though to start with I try to cope with it by raging at myself for being taken in, even by a woman who must be the world's most convincing liar. Pity knows how and when Austin must have suborned her, but suborn her he must have done, and with her feeding him information, he had every member of the conspiracy on toast. It was only a matter of time until he saw the chance to strike, and when Hernandez launched her attack against the station, it came.
And now, she has her reward. I hope she sleeps well at night, because she just joined Eloise Chastain on my little list. Admittedly, positioned where it seems she is, she'll be a darn sight harder to get my claws on – I've a feeling dear Eloise may find Hernandez's protection not quite as all-encompassing as she hopes now she's no longer uniquely useful. (Which leads me to additional curiosity about exactly where our dear Magister Admiral will be fitting into the new scheme of things, and I have a feeling her position will not be an especially comfortable one.)
But I'm patient. I can wait.
"I believed in her!" Liz sobs softly against my shoulder. "And all the time, she was selling us out!"
As usual, I'm pretty useless with finding consoling things to say, especially when I'm pretty gutted myself – once the fury has ebbed, I reluctantly force myself to recognise how much of the fuel for it is pain. I believed in Cole too. I know Trip did, and what will he feel when he finds out a second and even more trusted member of his staff had betrayed him?
Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, once I think about it, I find it far easier to forgive Austin. After all, he's Pack, and Pack pursues power. There is no counter-argument to that. He saw it and he took it, and if that meant using whatever tools came to hand, that's what he did. He would have killed me without malice (and I'm still not sure why he didn't) and apart from using it to his own advantage, I don't think he could have given any material weight to how much pain Amanda's betrayal would have caused to her victims. I don't think he'd have been unaware of it, but Pack thinking has its own set of values; I can't blame him for adhering to them, because I understand them as well as he does.
But Amanda has no such – I can't call it an 'excuse', because Austin wouldn't see his behaviour as needing one. 'Reason' carries with it the suggestion that a member of the Pack has other options, which for most of us isn't true; even for me, there aren't always alternatives. 'Compulsion' is the closest I can come to it, but whatever it is, Amanda hasn't got one. She can't have believed Trip was doing wrong, she can't have thought betraying him to the Empire's Security services was anything but a crime against the Godforsaken civilians she'd put so much effort into succouring. My God, what did they offer her – or what inducements did they use against her – to do that to a man who'd have defended her with his last breath?
I can't imagine. I can't even summon up the belief to find excuses for her, for I, too, find her behaviour as unforgivable as it is inexplicable. I, too, find the world a sadder and a colder place than it was this morning, and God knows, it was cold and sad enough then.
All the more reason, then, to hold on to all the warmth and joy I have left.
At least Liz will never leave me.
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