“I don’t plan on murdering you at all.” Romeo still won’t meet my eyes. “That might be your first instinct, but it’s not mine. You’re going to get me inside the facility you’ve been hiding from us and show me exactly what you’re doing in there.”
“My first instinct was to arrest you,” I snap. “You’re the one who brought a gun to my bar.” I keep staring behind us, but there’s no sign of the lights from the military base. “What facility?”
“The secret base to the east. It wasn’t there last week, and now there’s a full setup. Buildings, security fencing, the works. I’ve seen it, you don’t need to pretend. I want to know how you got it set up so fast, and without anybody knowing. I want to know what it’s for.”
My hands go still, my attempt to escape momentarily forgotten. “Secret base,” I echo, trying to quell the dread rising in my gut. It’s one thing to be captured by a rebel. It’s another to be taken into the swamp by a delusional madman.
“Act as surprised as you want,” he replies with a shrug. “But you’re getting me inside that facility.”
His face is impassive, but he’s not as good at concealing his hand as he thinks he is. There’s a thread of white-hot desperation in his features, a tension pinching his lips and eyes I’ve seen before, countless times. For the first time, I wonder if he was telling the truth before, that he really was in the bar looking for information—and not a target for that antique gun of his.
My mind races. There’s no base to the east of us—even if the military had the funding to expand to a second base in this part of TerraDyn’s territory, which we don’t, there’d be no reason to keep it a secret. But he believes it. I can see that as clearly as I can see his desperation.
This is a good thing, I tell myself. Even if he’s mad, he’s still only one guy. If I’d ended up in their rebel hideout, I’d be dead for sure. But here…there’s still a chance I could escape. For now, my only hope is to play along.
“So what is it you think you’re going to find in this secret facility?”
Romeo doesn’t answer straight away, leaving me watching as he poles the boat through the swamp. Though there is an engine hanging off the stern, he hasn’t touched it since I came to. This poling technique is one a few of us have campaigned for training on from HQ, but to no avail. We’re forced to navigate the swamps with noisy engines that get clogged every five minutes with swamp debris, while the natives slip through the narrow corridors soundlessly. A military patrol could pass not fifty yards away from us and never know we were here.
He pauses, withdrawing the pole and laying it across the boat so we merely drift along with the sluggish current. He’s favoring his leg, which has a makeshift bandage tied around it where I embedded that plastic cocktail sword. It gives me a surge of satisfaction to think that he probably doesn’t have the tools out here to fish out the broken piece. He drops down onto the bench, letting me see his face more clearly. He still looks oddly familiar, though I’m sure I would have remembered him if we’d met before tonight. “What am I going to find?” he asks, reaching for a canteen stowed underneath the seat and taking a long drink from it. “You tell me.”
“I can’t tell you,” I say, trying to hide my irritation. And my thirst, watching him swallow. Play along, I remind myself savagely. Earn his trust, such as it is. Use it to get out of this mess. “I would if I could, but I’ve never heard of a facility to the east.”
Romeo rolls his eyes. “Right. Well, there could be anything in there. Weapons, maybe. Some new tool to flush us out of the caves, for all I know. It has to be out of the ordinary for you to get it set up so fast, and with such secrecy.”
I peer through the fog. It’s growing lighter, which means I must’ve been unconscious for at least a few hours. Dawn is approaching. “That’s what you risked capture for, snooping around on my base? We already have weapons that outmatch yours ten to one. We’ve already tried every state-of-the-art technology to find your hideout. This swamp of a planet makes it impossible.”
Romeo grins at me, a smile that would be charming if there weren’t something darker behind it. “All that effort to find me, and you say you don’t like me?” He winks, holding the canteen up to my lips like it’s a peace offering. I could kick at his knees—he didn’t tie my feet, and he’s within reach now. I could knock him from his seat, have him in the swamp before he knew what was going on.
But then what?
I give in to my thirst and lean forward to take a pull from the canteen. I watched him drink from the same flask, so it’s not going to be poisoned or drugged. Avon’s muddy-flavored water never tasted so good.
Romeo sighs, setting the canteen back down when I’m finished. “Look, Captain.” He regards me with keen, thoughtful green eyes, as casual as if he were chatting with a friend and not interrogating his enemy. “I want a way out of this war for all of us. But first I want to know why Avon is generations behind where it should be on its terraforming schedule. You say that facility out there isn’t military; if that’s true, then it belongs to Terra Dynamics. I’m tired of them keeping secrets from us. The planetary review’s coming up, and if someone’s deliberately slowing down Avon’s progress, our side wants to know how.”
Surprise robs me of any clever retort. “You think there’s a secret facility in the middle of the swamp where we’re controlling the climate.”
His eyes cloud over, and without further warning he gets back to his feet, bracing them against the ribs and reaching for the pole once more. “I wouldn’t expect one of their hired guns to care anyway.”
Hired gun? I swallow down the impulse to lash back at him. If all I wanted was money, there are about a thousand careers I could have chosen instead of volunteering to get tossed onto this mudball and paid next to nothing to keep the peace. I grit my teeth. “Why would we want to stop Avon from developing, even if we could? What could the military or TerraDyn possibly stand to gain from that?”
“If Avon stays like this, too unstable to support a bigger population, we’ll never have enough leverage to pass the planetary review and be declared independent. We should be farmers by now, not fighters. We should be leading our own lives, earning wages, trading, able to come and go from Avon as we please. Instead we’re stuck here. No voice in the Galactic Council, no leverage, no rights.”
He’s got a surprising grasp of the politics of the situation, for someone who probably stopped going to school before he was ten years old. “You really think TerraDyn’s goal is to sit here and oppress a bunch of backwater terra-trash? They paid good money to create this part of the world. I don’t see how they start making that money back until Avon starts producing enough goods to export.”
Romeo’s jaw tightens. “They must. Otherwise, you tell me why nobody’s trying to find out why we’re all still algae farmers and water testers.”
“Not all of you are,” I point out dryly. “Some of you are thieves and murderers and anarchists living underground.”
“Why, Jubilee,” he says, grinning when the use of my full name makes my cheek twitch with irritation. “I had no idea you admired me so.”
I refuse to dignify that with a response, and fall silent. I have no answer to his question. Terraforming experts come and go, but Avon never changes. And it’s true that while Avon’s lack of development prompts a new investigation every few years, the results are always the same: cause unknown. If Romeo would stop asking so many questions, he and his so-called Fianna would be a lot better off.
Dawn has well and truly broken now, as much as dawn ever comes on Avon. In the thick, cold fog, the edges of the world slip away, leaving only our little boat and the sloshing of the water as the pole dips in and out. Romeo’s breath catches with each effort, hitching and stopping as he strains against the pole, then exhaling the rest of the way as he eases back and lifts it for another stroke.