Edward Grant - Rebellion

He grabbed her wrist, and she squealed as he twisted her arm behind her. “That hurts.”

“Not half as much as your friends hurt my friend when they fired a rocket through his guts. You got any rope on that horse of yours?”

She shook her head.

“You sure? Because if I can tie your hands up, I won’t have to worry so much about you running away.”

“I haven’t got anything like that.”

The horse snorted as it twisted on the end of the reins in the far corner of the barn.

He’d never ridden a horse before. Never seen one up so close before. Or smelled the stench of hay, crap and sweat. A few of the bosses’ kids back home had horses, mostly the girls. That was about all he knew about them. They couldn’t carry a man in an assault suit, so the Legion had little use for them, only on special missions where a suit would be hindrance.

A couple of small bags hung from the saddle. But who knows what she had in them?

“Where’s your metal suit?” she said.

“It was easier to sneak up on you without it.”

“So how did you know I would come this way?”

“We have our sources.”

“Where are your friends hiding?”

“They’re out there, watching us.”

“Then why do you want to tie me up?”

A wooden ladder led from the floor of the barn to the half-floor above them, stacked with more hay bales and straw. A short rope dangled from the pillar near the top of the steps, with a harness at the end that looked like it would go over a horse’s head. Logan reached up and pulled it from the pillar.

“What are you doing?”

He dragged her closer to the wall, then wrapped the rope around her wrists, and tied the other end to the pillar. She could still stand and sit, but wasn’t going to be going anywhere in a hurry. Even if she could get her thin fingers close to the knots in the rope, they didn’t look like they’d be strong enough to untie them.

He found a spot a couple of metres away, and sat himself.

“Don’t just ignore me,” she said.

“If I was ignoring you, I wouldn’t have tied you up.”

“You can’t just leave me like this.”

“Sorry, but I have to get some sleep. And it’s either tie you up, or shoot you. I think you’ll prefer it this way.”

She wriggled against the pillar, and the rope rattled against the wood. “I can’t sleep like this.”

“I’ll make you a deal. You admit to being on the other side, and I’ll move the rope so you can sleep. Can’t say much fairer than that.”

She said nothing.

Fine, then.

He wriggled on the straw until he found a comfortable spot, then closed his eyes. That felt good after so long on his feet. But there was still something wrong. Something that had bugged him since they arrived there in the village.

The insurgents hadn’t taken Gallo’s rifle. They hadn’t even taken the grenades from Gallo’s suit. The rifle needed power to operate and kicked too hard to use without a suit. But surely they would at least have taken Gallo’s grenades. He would have, if he was one of them. And they’d cleared up their own dead and taken their weapons away, leaving none behind that were still usable. Were they really in such a hurry to leave and chase the truck? As slow as it was, it could easily outrun a man on foot, so they had little chance to catch it. They’d have shot at it a few times, then turned back when it passed out of range.

“Alright,” the girl said. “I was the girl you met in Gries. But I didn’t know what they were planning to do. They just asked me to get you to walk down that street, past the houses. I didn’t mean anything.”

Logan chuckled. “You knew where to find an insurgent base. You hid after the firefight, rather than talk to us. You took the boy’s body back to the insurgents. I think you knew exactly what was going on.”

“I was scared that you’d torture me. I’ve heard the stories about what the Legion does to rebels. And I’d heard people talk about the rebels hiding in Valenciennes. I thought they could help me.”

“Who was the boy? The one who shot at us.”

The one he killed. Did she even know he did that? She’d been hiding in the street the last time he saw her in Gries, and probably running away by the time he shot the kid.

“I knew him at school. We both grew up in the same village He just asked me to help him. That’s all I know.”

Yeah, whatever. You didn’t just agree to help an attack on the Legion. That was the kind of thing that signed your death warrant with your own blood.

“What’s your name?”

“Why would I tell you?”

“Fine. I’ll call you Alice. Is that OK?”

“No. That’s not my name.”

“It is now. Unless you feel like telling me what it really is.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she scowled at him. She didn’t like him very much. Not that he was surprised. He wasn’t sure he liked her much.

“Well,” he said, and shoved more straw beneath his head. “I’m exhausted, and I’m going to sleep. You can spend the rest of the day working out your story for when I wake up.”

“I can’t just stand here all day.”

Logan closed his eyes, and wriggled his head on the straw until he found a comfortable spot. He could already feel the world beginning to fade away into sleep. “Unless you’re going to tell me who you really are, I don’t really think you’ve got much choice.”

“I don’t think I know who I am any more.”

He opened his eyes again, and yawned.

“What do you mean?”

“It all seemed to make sense. My father died in the mines, my mother brought up five of us on her own. We just wanted freedom, so we could make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Half the kids I know lost their fathers to the mines, or working out in the sun storms.”

“And freedom is supposed to end that?”

She pouted as she spoke. “At least we’d keep the money from selling what we mine, and it wouldn’t all go to the aristos back home. We could make sure no-one else has to die in the mines.”

“And that’s worth killing your own people, and putting their heads on spikes because they disagree with you?”

“We didn’t. We wouldn’t. We want to be free, together. Why would we kill other colonists?”

“You haven’t seen the vids?”

Her face dropped at Logan’s words. She spoke more quietly as she responded. “That wasn’t us. It was the Montagnards. We’re not with them. I knew no-one had heard from Saint Jean for weeks. No-one’s heard from the mine, either. After I saw the vid, I came here to make sure my aunt was safe.”

“We spoke to the mine yesterday.”

“Not to anyone we know.”

Logan crawled through the dark night, staying as close to the ground as he could. The sky above glowed with stars, and the lake beside the mine entrance, about a hundred metres wide and maybe five hundred long, glittered in the starlight through his goggles’ light intensifiers.

Without the goggles, he’d barely have been able to see as he moved through the moonless darkness from Saint Jean. With his naked eyes, the only way to tell where hills and mountains ended and the sky began was by the sudden appearance of the stars when the mountains no longer got in the way.

Through the goggles, the mine entrance was little more than a dark blob against the slightly lighter hillside. Drill holes and the weathered scars of shattered stone ran across the rock wall beside the three-metre tall, metre-thick wooden beams that supported the entrance, and showed where the miners had blown their way in with explosives when they built the tunnel.

Piles of dark rubble at least ten metres tall surrounded the entrance, where the miners must have dumped them when the mine was being built. A dozen or more wooden carts sat in a group beside the piles, and wooden rails ran toward them from the mine entrance.