by Alex Archer
She formed her right hand as if grasping a hilt. Obedient to her will, the sword appeared to fill it.
She jumped to her feet. Her enemy stood on a single crate. Taking the sword in both hands, Annja swung blindly right to left at the level of her shoulders.
The sword's blade bit deep into the wood of a crate on her left. But not before passing, with the slightest of hesitations, through the lower legs of the laser wielder.
She heard a thump as he fell backward onto the crate. With a scream half of fear and half of fury she wrenched the sword free.
Her vision cleared. To her astonishment she saw the person whose legs she'd just slashed, a young man whose face was probably not usually this paper-pale beneath long brown hair and a backward baseball cap. He was levering himself up to a half-sitting position with one hand so he could point his matte-silver hand weapon at her with the other. Reversing her grip on the sword, she stabbed forward and down with frenzied speed. The blade punched through his sternum to split the heart beneath. He sagged. The laser fell from lifeless fingers to the top of the crate.
Rather than try to wrench her sword free from the embrace of his rib cage, she released it. It vanished. She grabbed the pistol.
Another beam ripped the top of the crate.
Two loud cracks echoed through the warehouse. These differed from the thunderclap sounds of ionized air rushing back into the temporary vacuum created by the beam's incredible heat. They were deeper, louder. Handgun shots.
Annja looked up to see the figure who had shot at her from the catwalk slump down to the perforated metal walkway.
Her first thought was amazement that Dan had risked packing a firearm. The second was that she was lucky he had. Even a magic sword was not the ideal weapon to bring to a gunfight. Especially when the guns were wonder weapons that apparently shot energy beams instead of bullets.
"Remember Mafalda!" she heard him call from somewhere away to her left. She nodded, as if he could see her. Maybe mercy was misplaced with these people, she thought.
Moving bent over down the line of crates toward the warehouse's side door, Annja reminded herself she had no way of knowing if any of these people were actually involved in the shopkeeper's death. But she could afford to hold back no longer.
Gunshots cracked, then two more of the differently pitched thunderclaps she had learned to associate with the beam weapons. She reached the aisle's end. The doorway waited invitingly, barely twenty feet away, although out of her direct field of vision.
It might as well have been a thousand feet away if an energy gunner covered it. She had no illusions of being able to move faster than light. Nor was she going to be able to read the intent of a shooter half a room away.
Still bent over, she chanced a three-second look right. She saw nothing. Lowering herself to a squat, in case she'd been spotted the first time and a shooter had sights lined up at the level her head had last appeared, she peered the other way.
Sixty feet away Dan stood by a wall. A slight woman with long black hair crouched on the catwalk above him, holding an energy pistol in both hands with the barrel pointed toward the ceiling. The woman kept leaning cautiously over the rail, evidently reluctant to expose herself to the unseen intruder's fire.
Peering intently upward as if he could see through the catwalk, Dan didn't notice Annja. Instead he leaned out and triggered his semiautomatic handgun blindly.
Annja guessed he hoped to make his unseen antagonist flinch back long enough for him to break for the cover of the crates, or even to the door. It backfired dangerously. Despite the muzzle-blasts going off almost under her feet, the Promessan woman never flinched. Instead, learning exactly where her opponent was, she vaulted lithely over the rail and dropped to the concrete floor with apparent unconcern for injury. Her hair waved above her head like a black banner. She twisted in air like a cat. With a recoil-free weapon she could shoot as soon as she saw Dan, before she even landed –
Annja leaned out with her left hand bracing her right and fired as soon as she got a sight alignment on the woman's khaki-clad back.
It was a strange experience. Other than a click of the trigger breaking – felt rather than heard and almost certainly engineered so a shooter would know when the weapon fired – there was no reaction. Then a green line of light, dazzling in the gloom, appeared between the muzzle and a point between the woman's shoulder blades.
Steam exploded from her back. She arched convulsively backward, fell hard on her back, thrashing. Dan snapped his weapon down and pumped three shots into her as she writhed. She went still.
"I'll cover you," Annja called. "Go!'
He sprinted to the door, yanked it open. Stepping out into the spill of yellow light from the lamp above the door, he pivoted, dropped to a knee to aim back into the warehouse from the cover of the door frame.
There was no response, either shouts or shots. Annja waited a beat, then darted straight for the exit. Her cheeks went taut with anticipation of a lethal light blast between her shoulders.
But she also made the door without drawing any reaction from within the warehouse. The security response team was either all out of action or hunkered down.
She did not slow down. She turned right to run toward the waterfront. The upstream docks were dark. Seemingly derelict warehouses lay that way.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Dan was still crouched in the doorway, handgun leveled, looking at her oddly. "Come on," she shouted to him, scarcely slowing down. "Follow me!"
After a moment, during which Annja resolved to let Dan make his own escape if he failed to follow, he did. She reached the corner of the next building and ducked into the enfolding shadow of a loading bay. Suddenly winded, by the fight more than the brief flight, brisk as it had been, she bent over, braced her palms on her thighs and tried to catch her breath.
Dan caught up. "Another dry run," Annja panted. She knew trying to breathe hunched over and tensed up like this was self-defeating, but it took her a moment to tame her body's oxygen panic and force herself to stand erect. "Lives lost – for nothing."
"Not so," Dan said. He held up something small and dark. The lights of the docks downstream shone through it vaguely blue.
"Thumb drive," he said with a grin.
****
"Fascinating," Sir Iain Moran said. He turned the captured energy weapon over and over in his hands. They were big hands, as Annja would expect – he sometimes played guitar or keyboard with the band, although he primarily served as vocalist. But they were more square and powerful looking than she'd expect from a billionaire musician, scarred and callused in ways that wouldn't be accounted for by hours of practicing on hard steel strings. She wondered what he'd done to earn such hands.
The three were gathered in his top-floor suite in the Lord Manaus. It had the same somewhat raffishly gaudy color scheme as Annja's more modest room. His Croat bodyguards were nowhere in evidence. Dan sat on a sofa tapping industriously on the keyboard of a notebook computer opened on a coffee table in front of him. The thumb drive full of data from the warehouse computer was stuck in a USB port.
The weapon Annja had taken from the young man she had killed was utterly unprepossessing. She expected an energy weapon to be futuristic looking. Instead it looked like a handgun, very compact and solid in its lines. Its finish looked like the brushed-stainless-steel revolvers she had seen. But instead of having a slide that reciprocated to eject an empty casing and chamber a fresh round, it seemed made all of one piece. And instead of a hole in the end it had what appeared to be a glass lens, about half an inch wide.
Publico tossed it on the bed.
Annja raised an eyebrow. "That's it? I bring you back a genuine ray gun, and you toss it on the bed?" She had initially assumed it was a laser. On reflection she decided she had no grounds to assume even that. It was an energy gun that appeared to involve a beam of emerald-colored coherent light. But the laser might be a low-powered sighting mechanism for all she knew.
"It's
a pretty toy, I grant," he said. "And a lethal one, to be sure."
"But – doesn't that prove everything? The existence of some wildly technologically advanced civilization – somewhere, anyway, and most likely up the Amazon where you thought it was all the time."
"It hints. Not proves."
"But – "
"It's not that big an advance over what exists now," he said. "Indeed it may not be an advance at all. You'll have to trust me on this, Annja. I have certain contacts. Along with which goes access to certain information not precisely widely known."
"But I thought lasers still needed these huge, unwieldy energy supplies."
He just smiled a craggy, knowing smile. Annja frowned, genuinely puzzled.
"If somebody's got handheld energy weapons now," she said, "why haven't we seen them in action on the news?"
Publico shrugged. "What kind of advantage did they give our putative Promessans? Dan brought a person armed with one down with a common handgun. You yourself won this one away from an enemy despite being unarmed."
Annja brushed a hand back through her hair to distract the older man's attention from her face. Evidently the crates had hidden her use of the sword from her partner. Or perhaps he'd been distracted by staying alive. And what he had seen that night at the toque – well, he must have decided his memories of that night, if he even had any, were not to be trusted.
"Think about it," Dan said from the computer. "What good would ray guns do against enemies who use ambush tactics, like rocket-propelled grenades?"
"I just have a hard time believing the government would cover something like that up," Annja said. "It smacks of conspiracy theory."
Dan snorted. More diplomatically, Publico smiled. "What d'you think it means when they classify something top secret, then, lass? What's that but a cover-up?"
She sighed and waved a hand. "All right."
Dan slapped his thigh. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "Got it."
Publico and Annja looked at him. "Broke the encryption." He shrugged and smiled self-deprecatingly. "Don't give me too much credit – it's really all down to the software on this box."
Frowning slightly, Annja looked from him to Publico. The older man shrugged.
His mouth twisted in an ironic smile. It struck Annja she had often seen the same expression on Dan's younger, less weathered face. She wondered if the young man had copied it from the older. She knew Dan idolized his boss.
Or maybe they're just two of a kind, she thought.
"In the course of my humanitarian work," Sir Iain said, "my aims have at times coincided with those of certain – let's say, powerful entities. To help me do this work, these allies – temporary, I need hardly add – have seen fit to share with me certain tools not available to the public at large."
Her eyebrows rose. "No Such Agency is sharing its decryption tools with you?"
"Now, lass, I never said NSA," he said.
"You wouldn't," she said. "I thought you got to be a billionaire by being an antiauthoritarian rebel."
"Annja my love," he said, "nobody gets to be a billionaire by being a rebel. Never by its lonely self. Indeed, I didn't make most of my money through music at all. Rather it's the outcome of ethical, and judicious, investing."
"When you've got as much loot as Sir Iain," Dan said, "you're a powerful entity all by yourself. But don't worry. He's still a rebel. Just a rebel who fooled the straights into letting him get power."
"Now, don't go exaggerating my influence, Dan my lad," Publico said. "A billion doesn't go near as far as once she did. So – "
He walked over to the table rubbing those big, well-used hands. "Now, what have you to show us today?"
Dan turned the computer so its wide-screen monitor faced Publico and Annja. "The bad news is, it's in Portuguese. I think."
"And the good news is – " Sir Iain turned and performed a courtly mock-bow and hand flourish in Annja's direction.
"I guess this is where I earn my plane fare," she said. She knelt on the floor by the table.
"You want a chair, lass?" Sir Iain rumbled.
"I'm fine." She waved distractedly. Dan had opened what looked from its formatting like an e-mail.
"It talks about a place called Feliz Lusitânia," she said. "Somebody injured there, badly. Could be dying. They seem to think it's important to get to him before he says something dangerous."
"They're cryptic even in their encrypted communications?" Dan asked.
"Not really. Or not necessarily. It's like a lot of conversations – sometimes you get what look like gaps to an outsider, but they're really things that both parties know and so go without saying."
She looked up at her employer. "I saw crates of medical supplies consigned to Feliz Lusitânia in the warehouse."
Publico, leaning attentively forward, reared back at the words. His high cliff of forehead rumpled in concern. "I know that name," he said.
"What is it?" Dan asked. "Some kind of theme park for ecotourists?"
"Only as envisioned by Hieronymus Bosch, my lad," Publico said. "It's a gold camp. Or put another way, a blight on the face of the Earth. Or put yet a third, a wee taste of Hell on Earth."
"You know about it?" Annja asked.
The leonine head nodded heavily, as if weighted with sorrow and world-weariness. "Aye. Too well. The world as a whole does not. There are interests far more powerful than I who prefer it that way."
He put a hand each on Annja's and Dan's shoulders. "But there you must go, if you are willing. You must find this injured person, aid them if you can. But you must find out what he or she knows."
"I'm in," Dan said promptly.
"I didn't come this far to back out now," Annja said, a little more emphatically than she intended. She wondered if she herself had some kind of secret agenda – secret from herself, as well.
"What about you, Publico?" Dan asked. Annja noticed that when he called his employer "Sir Iain" it was always with a slight edge of irony. When he used the name "Publico" he sounded almost worshipful.
Moran shook his head. "I'll see travel arrangements made for you, of course," he said. "You must go by air – time presses, and a riverboat moves too slowly. As for me, my responsibilities, you know, are wide, as well as vast. I'm called overseas on business that cannot wait. Even for such as this."
He patted their shoulders. "But I know whatever must be done, the two of you are right to do it. None better in all the world."
Chapter 18
"Look out there!" Dan shouted.
He had to yell to make himself heard over the whine of the turbines and chop of the rotor blades. The vibration of the machine made itself known both audibly and in alarmingly tactile ways. It felt as if it were in the process of shaking itself to pieces a thousand feet above the verge where river met rain forest.
Dan sat strapped in a seat at the cabin rear. Annja sat in the open port-side door of the helicopter for whatever cooling effect the humid, heavy, stinking breeze of their passage could bring.
For hours she had watched the green of the triple-canopy forest, all but unbroken for mile after mile. The airfield where the de Havilland Canada Twin Otter had deposited them had seemingly been scraped from the forest in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in evidence to justify its existence but a little stream rippling along one side, past some warped plank buildings that constituted whatever facilities the place possessed. Annja and Dan had not entered them. They had been shepherded immediately from the twin-engine passenger plane to the olive-drab helicopter waiting with rotors lazily turning on a single square of warped and melting asphalt twenty yards wide. Without ceremony, or even a word spoken, it had risen into the hot, hard sky and flown away to the west northwest, following the wide brown undulation of the river.
Inside, the chopper stank of grease, of sweat and fear, of lubricant spilled and burned, of old gunsmoke, of hot metal and mildew and dust. The air was so thick with smell and humidity that breathing it was like trying to inhale through a linen clo
th. Easier breathing was worth risking sitting in the door that lay open to emptiness, as far as Annja was concerned. She didn't know a lot about helicopters, but she suspected from the start this one was a UH-1, the famed Huey. Of Vietnam War vintage.
If it was a person, it might have kids old enough to vote, she thought grimly.
The rain forest flowing below was almost hypnotic. It was all but monochromatic, the jungle, but its green had a million shades, if you stared at it long enough. It could absorb you, draw you back into nature, to your constituent raw materials... .
Dan's cry had broken Annja's reverie. Maybe that was a good thing. He was leaning to his right in his seat and pointing forward. Two muscular black men in green and tan sat like sphinxes flanking the hatchway to the cockpit, one holding a long black M-16 muzzle up between his knees, the other a stainless-steel-and-black shotgun. They had nodded in polite, if grim, acknowledgment when the two North Americans came aboard. Then they had simply refused, after the fashion of stone statues, to respond to any conversational overtures, in English or Portuguese or Dan's halting but serviceable Spanish.
Annja wondered if they were there to keep the passengers from rushing the cockpit and hijacking the ancient helicopter.
She rolled back toward the cabin's center. She wasn't prone to fear of heights, but somehow moving away from the open door and that next long step made her stomach roll and the skin between her shoulders creep. Trying not to bump into one of the long-gun guards, she came to a three-point stance and peered out the front windscreen.
It wasn't that easy. She suspected the windscreen hadn't been all that clean to begin with. And after fifty or a hundred miles of Amazon Basin bugs – serious buggage – it was like trying to peer through green jam smeared on the walls of a jar. Between that and the glare of the setting sun, a little off their bow, she wondered how the pilots saw to navigate.
After a moment she made something out – a wide yellow gouge, not just from the jungle's green hide, but from one side of the river itself. For a moment Annja wondered if some giant meteor had struck recently, blasting a crater a mile or more in extent. But no, that was ridiculous; it would have knocked down trees for many more miles all around – not to mention been all over the news for weeks.