Freedom Star

Chapter 5

It didn’t take them long to find a soldier. They practically tripped over him, mainly because he was lying face down across their trail, very, very dead. Ellia turned him over matter-of-factly with her boot. “Throat cut,” she said. “I’m afraid the uniform—urk!”

“Dar, NO!” Jon screamed, just in time to keep Ellia from joining the dead soldier in a pool of her own blood. Dar rose up from her back, onto which he’d dropped from an overhanging branch, but he didn’t sheathe his knife. In his leather loincloth, smeared with mud and spattered with blood, he looked every inch a savage. His eyes, wide and bright, almost feral, burned into Jon’s.

“We can’t let her go. She’s—”

“She’s a friend.” Ellia hadn’t dropped her weapon even under surprise attack, Jon noted; he kept a wary eye on her to make sure she wasn’t tempted to use it as she rolled over and got slowly to her feet.

“A friend?” Dar looked at Jon like he’d lost his mind. “She’s a soldier!”

“And you, by all appearances, are an animal,” Ellia said. “Appearances can be deceiving—in my case, at least.”

Dar blinked, trying to decide whether or not he’d been insulted, Jon figured. He said quickly, “Looks like we’ll need two uniforms. Preferably,” he looked at the dead soldier and shuddered involuntarily, remembering the one he had killed in the pool, “preferably ones that aren’t soaked in blood.”

“It’s going to be harder now that your friend here has killed this one,” said Ellia. “One missing soldier could be lost or AWOL. Three missing is an Incident.”

“They’re already looking for us,” said Jon. “How much harder can they look? Come on.” He set off along the trail again.

“Hey!” said Dar, trotting after him and Ellia. “I’m no animal!”

Not yet, Jon thought. The wild gleam in Dar’s eyes had faded; but how long before it came back? The next time he saw an opportunity to kill a soldier, would it matter any more whether it was necessary or not? This one had apparently been trailing Jon—he assumed that was why Dar had killed him. But Dar seemed to need less and less reason.

So? a cynical part of him asked. Isn’t that what guerilla warfare is all about? Maybe what you need are more Dars. Maybe he should be the leader. Maybe you don’t have the stomach for what your little oath about striking back at the Commonwealth really entails.

I’ve proved that I’ll kill if I have to, Jon thought; and then wondered if that was something to brag about—or be ashamed of.

Ellia suddenly tapped his shoulder and motioned him to get down; a definite improvement over the tackling method she’d utilized up until then. This time she’d spotted something in the shadows that he, preoccupied, had missed: another soldier, back to them, scanning a clearing with binoculars. “He looks about your size,” Ellia whispered in his ear.

Dar started forward, but Jon stopped him. “No,” he said. “Let Ellia do it.”

For a moment Dar’s arm tensed in his grasp, and Jon thought he would pull free, but then Dar relaxed, and shrugged. “Be my guest,” he said to Ellia—a little belatedly, because she had shed weapon and pack and was already slithering forward through the brush toward her oblivious prey. As he and Dar watched and waited, Jon wondered how Dar would react if—when—he found out that Ellia was Carlson’s daughter. If he’d known when he jumped her, I wouldn’t have been able to stop him, he thought grimly. She’d already be dead.

He’d have to warn Ellia somehow, then they’d have to pick their moment for letting Dar know the truth. He shook his head. It was hard enough for him to grasp that their new ally was Carlson’s daughter. Just for a moment it occurred to him that she could be the bait in an elaborate trap, but just as he thought it she rose out of the bushes and pulled the soldier down, so swiftly and silently it almost seemed he had vanished into thin air.