The Legend That Was Earth (27 page)

"You like it?" Ramona said, seeing him looking around while she filled a pot and took cans and mugs from a closet. "Is not like your Hyadean places, eh? Like army barracks or factories. How can anyone live in those? I buy it from a Chilean girl who is singer with a band, but has big gambling problems. Owes maybe ten thousand dollars to the clubs. You don't mess those guys around. So she comes here to work in Uyali temporarily. Tells husband the band is on foreign tour. Is funny, eh?" Vrel wasn't sure why, but grinned obligingly. "Do Hyadeans gamble?" Ramona asked him.

"No. The statistical demotivations are too obvious."

"Oh? I guess I'm not too smart. What does that mean?"

"I'm beginning to doubt that. It means that nothing is more mathematically certain than that the class of gamblers as a whole loses. So why would anyone pay to belong to that class?"

Ramona put the coffeepot on and stared at it as if for advice. "Really so, eh? But what if you win?"

"It's possible, of course," Vrel agreed. "But the chance you buy isn't worth what you pay for it."

"Okay.... If you say so." She didn't seem convinced but wasn't about to make an issue of it. They tossed the matter back and forth while the coffee was making, then sat down with their drinks in a couple of easy chairs in the living area adjoining the kitchenette.

"So what's your story?" Vrel asked her curiously. "How did you come here? Any plans for the future?"

Ramona leaned back and sighed. "I am from Rio a long time ago, you know—over on east?" Vrel nodded. "Is big difference, who is rich and who is poor. I come from wrong part." She laughed suddenly. "Maybe you are right after all: Luck doesn't pay off, eh? The only way you're gonna get rich is maybe be big soccer star if you're a boy, or a girl, do this. Or maybe else you can sell drugs, either one. But is not for me. Too much nasty people—all the time killing, violence. And after?... I don't know." She winked. "Big savings already. Maybe buy my own bar someday. Lots of music, dance. I like to see people having fun. Maybe a Hyadean bar. They need teaching how to have fun, no?"

Vrel grinned tiredly. "Maybe." He looked at his wrist unit again.

"Where you go tonight if your friend don't show up?" Ramona asked him.

"I hadn't thought about it. I didn't think it would get this late."

"You think he is okay?"

Vrel shrugged. "I don't know."

Ramona looked him up and down over the rim of her mug. "You can stay here if you want." The color-enhanced eyes widened suggestively. "Maybe relax and make the best of it a little if you stuck anyway. Is okay, on me. I'm not working tonight."

Vrel found himself flummoxed, even after years on Earth. "Really, no.... It's a nice thought, but I'm okay. Aren't there any hotels, places that'll do a bed for the night?"

"I thought you say they look for you. Maybe is not so good idea out there. Better off here." Ramona emitted a sigh that said she really didn't understand but if he insisted, and waved a hand to indicate the part of the cabin beyond the living area. "Is okay, anyway. I have two bedrooms. One is for work, the other where I sleep. Just one would be like living in the office, eh? You take one of them. Either is okay."

At that moment, a call came in on Vrel's phone. He pulled it from his pocket. It was Hudro. "Can you talk?" Hudro asked.

"Sure."

"Okay, we have news. Where can I find you?"

Vrel paused, momentarily perplexed. "You're not going to believe it," he answered.

"Why? What's happened?"

Vrel couldn't think how to begin. "Look, I'll pass you over to someone else. She'll give you directions," he said finally.

* * *

Hudro recovered quickly from his astonishment. It seemed he had found more tolerant grounds for his religious convictions than some that Vrel had encountered on occasions. Vrel updated him on the message he had received from Luodine via Ramona, and offered his conclusion that Tevlak's had been raided as they had suspected, and that Luodine was now free but her movements were being tracked.

Hudro was able to confirm it. Since his business in the military base was not Ramona's affair, he spoke in Hyadean. Tevlak's house had been visited by a combined force of Terran and Hyadean security following a surveillance alert that Cade and Marie had been identified there despite their aliases. How surveillance had found them, Hudro's contact didn't know. Proof of criminal activity sufficient to justify detaining the Hyadeans who had been there— Tevlak, Thryase, Luodine, and Nyarl—had not been established, and they had been released but would no doubt be subject to continued surveillance—as Vrel had surmised. Cade and Marie, however, who were wanted by U.S. federal authorities, had been arrested. Finding out what happened to them had taken the contact a lot longer. The essence was that they were at a detention facility in Peru, awaiting some VIP with an interest in their case who wanted to conduct a preliminary interrogation personally. After that, they would probably be moved to a military prison farther east, in Brazil.

Hudro continued: "If that happens, it won't be good news, Vrel. What they know could be too damaging to some powerful Individuals, both Terran and Hyadean. They'd never get out alive. If we're to do anything at all to help them, it will have to be before they get there. That may not give us very long. So this is the plan.

"Do you remember when we were on our way here, I told you about a girl that I have here? I said that one day we intended disappearing to Asia or somewhere and living as Terrans? Well, she is the contact I've been talking to today. We have decided that the time must be now. My work here has brought me into contact with some of the Terran so-called terrorists that we are sent to fight, and I have found that more often than not they uphold Terran ideals more faithfully than the governments do. So I can no longer fight on the side of Terran governments—you heard me say all this at Tevlak's. I know some resistance fighters up in Brazil who I think can be persuaded to help."

"To rescue them?" Vrel checked. "Roland and Marie. You can get Terrans to work with you?"

Hudro smiled faintly. "I said I wanted to save somebody one day, didn't I? My name is clean so far—not on any watch lists. Tonight I will get regular transportation back north to Brazil as I originally intended. My partner and I will make our arrangements to meet a Terran guerrilla leader there whom I have known for some time—we have both helped each other in the past. We can only hope there will be enough time to come up with something. It would have to be while Roland and Marie are being moved."

Vrel was couldn't help feeling apprehensive. "You really think you can rely on Terrans that you're supposed to be fighting?" he said. "Is it wise to trust in them that much?"

"What other choice do we have?" Hudro answered. After a second or two more he added, "Anyway, I trust in their god."

Having established that much, they got Ramona to call Luodine's intermediary and pass on instructions for her and Nyarl to fly to Uyali the next morning, setting the regular air terminal as their destination. When they were on final approach but not before, they were to change the landing point to a pad area in the Terran sector, which Ramona said would be busy and crowded all day. Vrel would meet them and take care of things from there. With that, Hudro left for the terminal to find a ride back to Brazil. Vrel stayed the night in Ramona's "office."

* * *

The next morning, after preparing them a breakfast, Ramona took Vrel to the part of the Terran sector that she had told them about, which turned out to be a nonstop commotion of people, activity, and vehicles coming and going as she'd promised. Vrel used his phone to summon the flyer that he and Hudro had left at the construction site to the north. It arrived ten minutes later. A little under an hour after that, Luodine and Nyarl's blue-and-yellow craft appeared overhead, descending steeply. Vrel greeted them as they emerged and indicated his own waiting flyer. While Ramona and Luodine embraced and laughed like long-lost sisters, Vrel helped Nyarl transfer recording and other equipment across. In order not to be lose touch with other events that might develop, Nyarl set a link in the blue-and-yellow flyer's communications system to forward any incoming messages to a code that he set up in Vrel's flyer. Even if it were seized and the link code found, it wouldn't mean anything to anyone else. Finally, Vrel thanked Ramona and conceded a hug.

And then they were airborne, heading north to get clear of the area before anyone following the movements of Luodine and Nyarl's flyer would have time to react to what had happened. To add further confusion, Nyarl had set it instructions to take off again, empty, and head off in a different direction as a decoy. After a hundred miles or so it would land near a village picked at random off the map, and anyone monitoring it could make of it what they would.

They continued northward to be nearer to where anything involving Cade and Marie was expected to happen, and put down around midday in a remote spot past Lake Titicaca. They waited there through the middle part of the day, eking out the fruit juices and snacks that were all the flyer had to offer, talking over the events of the past days, trying to guess possible outcomes, and speculating about future plans. Vrel talked vaguely about making for Asia or Australia, maybe trying to join Krossig. Luodine wasn't sure she wanted to leave just yet. She was an investigative journalist, after all, and the things that seemed to matter were happening here.

Hudro called around the middle of the afternoon and informed them that the operation would take place tomorrow. He gave no details apart from the map reference of the place where he and the Terran guerrillas would meet them afterward, which was farther north, inside Brazil. Vrel and the others were to head there tonight and were expected. The name of the place was Segora.

AT LAST, LUODINE COULD BREATHE easily again, not feeling that their every movement was probably being tracked by surveillance computers.

From maps retrieved via the flyer's communications system, Nyarl had determined that Segora was in a low-lying forested and swampy area around one of the southern headwater tributaries of the Amazon. Luodine had expected it to be something like a village, in the sense of dwellings clustered in some kind of clearing, but it turned out to be more a general name for an extended area of huts, houses, and other constructions loosely strung together beneath the forest canopy with little attempt at forming any identifiable center. It could be an unconventional type of living arrangement that put seclusion before neighborliness, she supposed as the flyer descended out of gray overcast; equally well, it could have been contrived for harboring an illicit militia in a way that afforded anonymity, concealment, and dispersal.

The flyer landed in a slot cut between high trees, at the bottom of which nothing more could be seen than a strip of bare earth and a couple of tin-roofed shacks. On touching down, they found that the strip was just the edge of a larger, undercut space concealing an assortment of trucks, cars, and other vehicles that had been invisible from above. A group of figures in shirts and jungle smocks, some with weapons slung on their shoulders, watched the flyer roll in. Two of them directed it to park by several helicopters standing to one side. A reception committee came forward as the occupants emerged. Vrel was not conversant with the local languages and left the talking to Luodine. Her experience was more with Spanish whereas the prevalent speech here was Portuguese, but with help from her veebee and a smattering that Nyarl had picked up, they were able to manage.

The spokesman was small and wiry with a beard, wore a soft-peaked forage cap, flak jacket, and string vest, and carried a basic Terran automatic firearm. He didn't give a name but described the three Hyadean arrivals to the others as "the alien news team who are here to tell our story"—which, discounting Vrel, was close enough. The others seemed suspicious all the same, and regarded the Hyadeans warily.

They boarded an open-topped Terran military truck, along with the guide in the peaked cap, another, and the driver, while the rest of the party piled into a second vehicle behind. Whether they were guards or an escort, Luodine wasn't sure. As the vehicles moved away, she saw sandbagged positions under the trees commanding the landing strip and its approaches, with bunkers and entrenchments concealed among the vegetation behind. Farther on, they passed cabins and houses, what looked like a storage dump, some kind of a water landing, and a workshop for vehicles. The road became a leafy tunnel, in places crossing stretches of swamp on wooden causeways. There were tent cities mingled with the undergrowth; squads training with weapons; at one point, a pit with earth protecting walls under camouflage nets, that looked like a missile emplacement.

"This might go on for miles," Luodine said to Nyarl. "They could have the equivalent of a whole town hidden down here."

"Or an army," he replied.

Luodine became more certain in her own mind, and more excited.
"This
is the story we should be working on!" she told him. "Right here, not in Asia. I want to see for myself those things that Hudro showed us. What do you think? Would you stay if we could?"

"Yes, I'd stay," Nyarl said.

A spur off the roadway brought them to several low wooden buildings standing together beneath the trees. The vehicles pulled up in front of one, and everyone dismounted. While the guards or escorts—whichever—dispersed themselves around the outside, the leader in the forage cap and his second conducted the three Hyadeans in and through to a large room, bare except for several closets, a central table with chairs, and kitchen facilities at one end. An adjoining room contained six double-tier bunks arranged around the walls, and there were several more rooms with stacks of boxes, items of kit, and further oddments of furniture. Evidently these were to be their quarters for the night. In the meantime, apparently, they were to wait.

A window looked out toward the way they had come in off the road. As dusk was closing in, two trucks appeared, embarked armed figures from one of the other nearby buildings, and drove away again. The roadway itself seemed to be busy with an irregular but continuing flow of vehicles and porters on foot carrying loads. "Something's going on. There's a buzz in the air. Don't you feel it?" Luodine said to the other two. She asked the squad leader in the forage cap. He seemed uneasy but would divulge nothing.