The Lost Scrolls

by Alex Archer

  She lunged, thrust. The sword punched through his sternum, through his heart and lungs. His eyes went wide.

  "Come on!" she shouted in the door. She heard voices from inside, as well as from around to the rear of the house.

  Jadzia stumbled out carrying the scrolls. She was full-on crying, with great whooping sobs. "Tex," she moaned. "They killed him!"

  "They'll kill us, too, if we don't move." Putting the sword away, Annja seized Jadzia's arm and led her half stumbling toward the airboat.

  "Do you know how to drive this?" Jadzia asked, scrambling in. She seemed not so much to have stopped her crying fit as put it on hold as curiosity got the better of her.

  "Not yet," Annja said. "Hold this."

  She handed the shotgun to the girl, hoping it would distract her, hoping she'd have the sense not to shoot Annja, herself or the engine by accident.

  A red button by the high driver's seat started the engine with a cough and a snarl when Annja stabbed it with her thumb. Evidently Joey had felt confident about leaving it unlocked in front of his uncle's grand hunting lodge. Joey had been confident about a lot of things that hadn't turned out so well.

  She guessed the tiller worked in a fairly intuitive way. Push it left to go right, but no reverse lest the huge fan blow driver and passengers right out of the shallow skiff hull. She pushed the stick forward. The engine noise rose in pitch and the boat commenced to move.

  She powered it around in a semicircle. That seemed to be the plan anyway, and it moved readily enough with the long moist grass as a sort of lubrication. Nothing ripped the bottom out of the airboat as it slewed about. The engine and fan were unbelievably loud in the driver's seat. Annja was suddenly much aware of the chopping power of those blades spinning a few feet behind her. The craft reached the water. Annja's heart almost stopped as the bow pushed down into it as if to break the surface and head straight to the bottom. Instead it bounced back and obediently lit out across the water.

  She steered it back the way they had come. "Why are we going this way?" Jadzia yelled at her.

  "We know there's a ride this way," she shouted. She didn't see any point in trying to lead the inevitable pursuit on a wild goose chase. She was willing to gamble Sulin would not yet have bothered sending men to secure Joey's Grand Cherokee. They had other priorities.

  "Do you think they'll chase us?" Jadzia asked. Again she showed a tendency to snap out of it in actual danger, and lapse back into hysterics when things calmed down. While Annja could have done without any hysteria whatsoever, she was grateful it only came out when it did.

  "I'd be amazed if they didn't," she replied.

  "Here they come!" Jadzia screamed, pointing past the starboard edge of the fan cage.

  The airboat swerved slightly as Annja turned her head. A big boat came powering around a bend in the bayou beyond the lodge. It pushed a big foam-edged wave of tea-colored water before it. Its wake threw dirty water across the dock.

  A man in the powerboat's prow shouldered an M-16 and fired. She didn't see where the bullets went, wasn't sure if she'd even hear the cracks of their supersonic passage above her engine's howl. Two other men hung on the rail behind him holding long guns. Sulin wasn't there. Annja guessed she had busted some ribs for him.

  Another burst ripped a line of miniature waterspouts past them on the right. Jadzia cried. Annja veered the boat starboard through the falling spray of the last one. A plan formed in her mind.

  As she suspected, the next burst tore the water more or less along the line she had followed a moment before. She felt her gut tighten. The mass of the automobile-style engine would easily absorb the needle-like bullets – protecting her body. The engine would likely suck in a lot of them before it stopped running. But she feared a hit on one of the propeller blades would leave them literally dead in the water.

  And shortly after that, just plain dead.

  She began to weave the little craft back and forth across the bayou, which ran relatively broad. The powerboat's engine roared, audible above the airboat's own motor, surging in predatory pounce-reflex as its crew sensed vulnerable prey.

  "Don't be stupid!" Jadzia screamed. "Quit swerving! It's catching us!"

  "It's faster anyway," Annja called back grimly. Their only advantage was maneuverability – and with a drowned forest coming up even that would shortly be restricted. "Anyway, we can't outrun bullets."

  To Annja's horror the girl stood up, pale legs braced, and fired the shotgun from the hip. She had presence of mind – or luck – enough to shoot on a turn so that the shot charge cleared Annja and even the wide sweep of the prop. But she hadn't anticipated the savage 12-gauge recoil, which Annja's old combat-shooting instructor had confided was almost impossible even for a strong, trained man to control effectively in rapid fire. The single blast was enough to tear the gun out of Jadzia's hands and knock her on her rump in the bilge. The shotgun fell overboard to vanish with a splash.

  Annja hoped Jadzia hadn't hurt herself too badly. The girl seemed mostly stunned. As for the shotgun, it had formed no part of the plan flash-formed in Annja's mind anyway.

  She heard the powerboat's roar grow louder. She threw the airboat broadside across its path. She chopped the throttle and let the engine die.

  Annja could hear Jadzia's despairing wail as the airboat wallowed and stopped. It rode up on the great swell pushed before the onrushing powerboat's bow. Annja saw the men on deck, taken as fully by surprise as she had hoped, jostling to try to get to the port rail to shoot as the boat's driver swerved alongside the airboat.

  As it did, Annja sprang. Time seemed to slow as she hung suspended in air between the craft. Then she caught the chromed rail with her left hand.

  The impact almost wrenched the shoulder out of its socket. She twisted. Her hip slammed against the slick white hull. The sun-heated metal rail seared her palm.

  A face stared over the rail at her, a comic mask of surprise, eyebrows arched, eyes and mouth ovals of astonishment. The man was holding a CAR-4 automatic carbine. Annja summoned the sword and thrust it up through the open mouth.

  She felt a moment of resistance, a squishy sensation. He collapsed instantly to the deck as she pithed him like a frog. Six inches of blade protruded from the back of the man's head. The sword shone pristine, as if its metal refused to be sullied.

  She got the soles of her shoes against the hull, using her legs, as well as her grip on the rail to vault onto the deck, which now ran pink. Her motion yanked the sword free on its own.

  The other man who had stood behind the bow gunner swung his full-size M-16 in a clumsy attempt to club her. She easily fended off the lightweight weapon with her left hand. She slashed him diagonally across the chest, high right, down left, then took a return backhand cut across his belly.

  As he fell screaming, the man in the bow aimed his long black rifle at Annja from his shoulder. She raced toward him, sword raised. As he fired she veered right, hacked across her body. The blade sliced through the M-16's receiver.

  The shooter screamed as a cartridge, severed in midignition, vented furnace-hot gases into his face. She brought a short chopping stroke down on the left side of his forehead. His shrieking stopped. He toppled backward. She wrenched the sword free and he flopped backward over the rail like a fish released to the waters of the bayou.

  The big powerboat coasted to a stop. The engine idled beneath her feet. She felt a crawling sensation between her shoulder blades. The immediacies of survival – as in, fending off certain death – had forced her to expose herself to the boat's pilot, in his cockpit aft. She expected to hear the shattering crack of a shot, feel a bullet lance her back.

  She wheeled around, sword ready, gleaming like a ray of light in the brilliant sun. The pilot sat with his hands up and his eyes, staring at her in almost mindless horror. She might have been some kind of movie monster emerged from the swamp to kill his mates.

  It was, she reflected, no less likely than what he had just seen happen.

&n
bsp; Sword in hand she stalked toward him. He got up and turned as if to flee straight astern. There was nothing back there but the aft rail and black water. She darted forward, grabbed him by the back of his green polyester shirt, spun him to face her.

  He gibbered. She didn't need him intelligible anyway.

  "Listen," she said, grabbing him by the shirt-front so that his terrified face was looking down at hers. "You're dealing with things you can't handle here. You realize that, don't you?"

  He just stared at her. He was a young man, maybe early twenties, and seemed fit. But his muscles were as slack as his lips in his fear.

  She shook him until his head nodded.

  "Fine," she said. "Make sure you tell your bosses that. Do you understand?"

  This time he nodded in pathetic haste.

  "Great. And tell Sulin the next time I see him he's a dead man. Got that?"

  He nodded again. "What are you going to do with me?" he asked.

  She frowned. "This," she said, and threw him over the stern.

  He landed with a great splash. In a moment his head bobbed up. He flailed furiously with his arms.

  "I can't swim!" he screamed at her.

  "Learn," she said. She sat down behind the wheel to take the boat back to pick up Jadzia and the scrolls.

  Chapter 21

  "And so, using the lightnings stolen from the gods, and the lights that seared at a distance and other wonders, which they had taken from their foes, the brave Athenians defeated the Atlanteans and drove them from their land."

  Jadzia sat in a swivel chair staring up at the huge plasma screen in the third-floor lab. The recovered text, the black of carbonization stripped away by software filters, still looked to Annja as much like happenstance scrawls and scratches as writing. Yet Jadzia was clearly in her element.

  "Afterwards, when the favor of the gods was withdrawn, the weapons soon ceased to function. Some said the gods disfavored Athens for using the great magics the Atlanteans had wrongly employed, which by rights ought be reserved for the Olympians alone, and that was why the great disaster wrought by the gods struck Greece even as it sank the isle of Atlantis."

  She turned to Annja. In the half light her eyes were blue lamps of excitement. "Annja, don't you see? This proves it!"

  The Cantonese techs spoke excitedly among themselves in their own language.

  "Proves what?" Annja said.

  "Why – all of it," Jadzia said. Her cheeks were flushed, her voice breathless. "Atlantis. Unknown energy sources." Her eyes got even wider. "Free energy."

  Annja frowned, gazing at the screen as if to suck comprehension out of it by sheer force of will. "I'm not sure I'd go that far," she said uncertainly.

  "How far will you go? What more do you need? Don't be so stupid."

  Annja's frown cut deeper. After all that had happened, Jadzia was still Jadzia.

  When they'd finally returned to Joey's Jeep, Annja discovered he had left the driver's door unlocked. In fact the lock was broken. That he hadn't got it fixed and hadn't warned them, but let them solemnly lock all the other doors as if it mattered, seemed to speak volumes about him.

  Vearle did not emerge from his shack at the sound of the airboat's return. Annja hoped it didn't mean that Euro Petro goons had paid him a call. She suspected they had not. Sulin had put everything into the trap at Hogue's lodge.

  Deep into dusk, when the light was soft and gray and dangerous – because it took the edges and points off things and distorted perspective – Annja found a backwater motel. The clerk was a middle-aged woman who was far more interested in her television than the two self-professed college students from Biloxi, although she did show a grateful smile at being paid cash for a night's accommodations. She didn't bother asking for a license plate number.

  Annja got a room around the back, "where it was quiet," as though a car happened down this dismal back road any more than once every ten or twenty minutes. What it really meant was that any EP searchers driving by wouldn't instantly spot their late informant's rather distinctive vehicle. She parked the Grand Cherokee under a big black oak tree to make it hard to spot from an airplane. Or a satellite – she was darned if she wanted their getaway car to turn up in a few hours on Google Earth.

  She made the still-weeping Jadzia carry her own bag inside, on general principles. Jadzia was too distraught even to complain. Annja carried the scrolls and the rest of the gear. A pair of full-auto .223s and six full 30-round magazines would go a way toward alleviating those pesky nocturnal fears.

  She had suspected Jadzia of being overly theatrical. But when she closed the door with a bump of her butt and let the last bags thump to the thin vomit-colored carpet, the wave of sadness and loss and fear rolled over her like a tsunami. She found herself sitting on the bed with Jadzia. They held each other and cried into each other's shoulders.

  Sometime well after dark they cried themselves out. Then Annja took herself mentally by the scruff and shook herself. No matter how she thought things through she could find reasons, and good ones, to blame herself for Tex's death. But he had made his own choices at every stage. No one had held a gun against his head to get him to join her quixotic quest. He had walked with open eyes into a trap laid by someone he had mistakenly trusted.

  In the end it didn't matter. What did matter was Tex was dead andAnnja and Jadzia were going to have to work fast and smart and most importantly get extremely lucky not to join him in short order.

  "So we need to figure out how we're going to survive past tonight," Annja said, as the two women sat on the bed with the TV on and the sound off, eating delivery pizza.

  "And avenge Tex," Jadzia said fiercely.

  Annja nodded. That seemed right to her, even flying in the face of contemporary morality as it did.

  She took a deep breath. "I still think our best chance is to do what we've been trying to do all along – recover as much of the contents of these scrolls as we can and publicize them. The question is how? And also where?"

  "Jet propulsion labs in Pasadena is where we sent them," Jadzia said thoughtfully, folding a slice of pizza lengthwise. "They have a CT scanner and an MSI machine."

  "So it's a logical choice."

  "Too logical," Jadzia said.

  "Meaning what?" Annja asked.

  "I bet that's where Gus Marshall is," Jadzia said. "Waiting for us in case we decided to head straight there instead of to meet Mr. Hogue."

  Annja sighed. "You're right. He's probably hired half the private investigators in the greater L.A. area to keep an eye out for us."

  "The police too, maybe."

  Annja thrust her chin forward and tilted her head to one side. "Maybe. EP seems to be as reluctant to involve the law as we are. But I agree, we can't take the risk."

  "The new university in Shenzhen has CT scanners and multispectral imagers," Jadzia said.

  "China?"

  "Just inland from Hong Kong, I think. It's sort of a boomtown. There wasn't much there but farming villages twenty years ago. Now it's a big city with a lot of high-tech manufacturing." Jadzia nodded. "They wanted us to send some of our scrolls to them for processing. But there was some kind of trouble, tension with the U.S." Annja knew the United States was a major subsidizer of the governments of both Poland and Egypt, which in turn jointly sponsored the Alexandrian library project. "Some kind of stupid politics."

  "I'm with you there," Annja said. She was starting to feel as if they just might have a shot. Not a good one, perhaps – but better than the blank nothing of a future she had seen like a wall ahead a moment before. She thought out loud. "So with China and the U.S. mad at each other – and with China a rival with the big Western companies for oil, with their big boom going on – the Chinese'd be pretty unlikely to be in bed with Euro Petro, wouldn't they?"

  Jadzia nodded solemnly. "Sometimes you are not so stupid after all." She upended her soda bottle and took a hefty swig.

  "Uh, thanks."

  Jadzia was frowning when she lowered the
big plastic bottle. "But we have a problem," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "It takes forever to get visas for the People's Republic."

  Annja's face lit up in a great big smile. "Not necessarily," she said. "The network has a good working relationship with the national government, as well as Guangdong Province's. The Communist party bosses, too. And by that I mean, massive bribery."

  "The universal language," Jadzia said.

  "It does seem to clear up one thing that was bothering me," Annja said, studying the ancient text on the screen of the third-floor laboratory in Shenzhen.

  "What's that?" Jadzia asked.

  "How the Athenians could possibly have defeated Atlantis, if the Atlanteans really had all that marvelous high-tech stuff. No matter how brave or resourceful you are, energy-beam weapons are going to confer a pretty decisive advantage over your bronze swords and bull-hide shields. But if the Greeks managed to get hold of some of those weapons – "

  "It's what guerrillas always do," Jadzia said. "I need to pee now." And with that bit of over-sharing she turned and walked out of the lab.

  Chapter 22

  "Annja, we have to go."

  She looked up in surprise as Jadzia entered the room in a burble of noise from the corridor outside. There must have been a class change. There seemed to be a huge amount of traffic, moving both ways with unhurried speed. Nobody raised his or her voice but everybody seemed to be talking at once, very intensely. The PA emitted what sounded more like music than intelligible speech to Annja's uneducated ears. The soundproofing in the lab was so good she'd been unaware of the racket.

  "What do you mean?" she asked.

  But Jadzia only shook her head so hard her pigtails whipped her round cheeks. "No time." She walked over and grabbed the satchel of scrolls and ran the strap over her shoulder.

  The local technicians paid no attention to either foreign woman. Yet another page of text extracted from a burned scroll had just appeared on the big screen. They were high-fiving and chirping and carrying on as if they'd just scored a touchdown.