Secret of the Slaves

by Alex Archer

  Annja frowned. How does she know my name?

  Dan’s hand dipped under the loose tails of his shirt. It came out holding the same handgun he’d used in the warehouse in Manaus.

  “They’re surrounding the hootch!” he shouted as he raised the handgun to point at the tall newcomer.

  With startling speed she crescent kicked the pistol. She failed to knock the weapon from his hand but did kick it aside. It went off with a noise that seemed to billow the torn cloth hangings that served as part of the shack’s walls.

  She spun rapidly into a back kick that caught the young activist in the stomach and knocked him crashing out into daylight. Other figures moved outside. Even in a glimpse Annja could see they lacked the scarecrow gauntness and feral furtiveness that characterized colony inhabitants, even the armed gang members.

  Shots went off outside. But Annja snapped her attention back to the tall woman as the most immediate threat. Reaching behind her shoulder, the woman produced a machete and swung it at Annja’s head.

  Off balance and with no time to concentrate the sword into being, Annja fell over to her right. She landed hard on her right hip. The floor was packed earth topped by a layer of unidentifiable muck.

  The Promessan rushed at her, raising the machete for a killing downstroke. Just as simply Annja fired out with both feet, kicking her attacker in both shins and knocking her legs right out from under her.

  Annja rolled to her right as the woman sprawled across the corpse. Immediately Annja reversed, rolling back to use her right hand wrapped over her left fist to piledrive her left elbow into her opponent’s kidney. The woman screamed in pain and arched her back as if being electrocuted. The machete flew from her hand.

  Annja sprang to her feet. Motion blurred in the extreme right corner of her peripheral vision. She ducked left and spun away. The motion took her farther from the doorway to outside. An interior wall, augmented like the exterior walls with random sheets of drab cloth, partitioned the shack into at least two rooms. From a dark doorway in the wall something long and mottled and as thick as Annja’s thigh appeared.

  It crashed against the outer wall. Annja straightened to find herself confronting a giant anaconda. She knew anacondas were contenders for largest snakes in the world. But its sheer size was almost as great a shock as the fact it had appeared from nowhere.

  The snake reared up to fully her height and turned to gaze at her with large golden eyes. It sent a chill down her spine.

  The serpent opened its mouth wide. It was pink and edged with an alarming array of back-curving teeth. It struck right for Annja’s face.

  She dived to her right, back toward the dead body and the writhing woman. She put a shoulder down and rolled as the anaconda struck the wall. Planks cracked loudly.

  Annja came to her feet. The woman suddenly rolled and tried to grab her legs. Annja kicked her hard in the face, felt as much as heard her jaw break.

  The sword filled Annja’s hand. The anaconda coiled by the wall, preparing for another strike. It seemed to recognize the sword as a threat. With a speed that belied its bulk it turned to its right and slithered out through a low gap in the wall. Momentarily transfixed by the creature’s length, Annja leaped forward to slash belatedly at its tail. She missed. Her blade bit deep into the mud-scummed earth floor.

  She heard noises behind her. She ripped the sword loose and turned in time to smash a machete blade descending toward her head with a clumsy forehand stroke. She put her shoulder down and slammed it into her attacker’s chest. He was so surprised that Annja virtually clotheslined him, despite hitting him so close to his center of gravity. His legs ran out from under him and he fell with a squelch in the mud.

  Outside she heard shots. Several from close by she guessed were Dan’s. Other guns were clearly firing, too. What’s going on? she wondered.

  As she was distracted a second man swung a machete diagonally at her. She barely managed to block it with the flat of her blade.

  The man looked European, possibly even American. He was taller than Annja, with rippling spare muscles in arms left bare by a tan shirt with the arms torn off, a stubble of dark blond beard, glaring green eyes. Those eyes widened in surprise.

  Nobody expects a broadsword, she thought. She took advantage of his lapse to get her right knee up to her chest. She pushed hard with the sole of her shoe against his sternum, throwing him back.

  The sound of the thin scum of mud sucking at a shoe brought her around fast. The first man, whose machete she had smashed, was trying to plant a combat knife between her shoulder blades. She ran him through the heart with her sword. He gasped and goggled at her as life fled him. She tore the blade free and turned to meet the attack she knew was coming.

  The blond man cried out hoarsely as he saw his comrade die. Annja’s blow slashed his descending forearm and connected with his chest. He fell, pumping blood into the muck.

  More men crowded in through the hut’s entrance. They held weapons of various sorts. She turned and hacked at the planks of the wall and snapped a way clear into the unforgiving light of day.

  Not four yards away she saw Dan crouched behind a line of big red plastic drums. He was jamming a fresh magazine into his gun. Two bodies lay in the street. A wide, grooved trail with hints of red led to the mouth of an alley across the road, suggesting someone may have been hit and dragged to cover.

  “Get down!” Dan whispered. As he glanced toward her she made the sword disappear. She dived toward the barrels.

  A boom buffeted her ears. Something clattered above her as she tucked and rolled and came up next to Dan, trying not to be aware of the hideous stinking muck that smeared her from knees to hair. Glancing up, she saw a pattern of small holes in the planking. She knew instantly it was buckshot.

  “The Promessans are using shotguns?” she asked.

  Dan leaned around the side of the barrel barrier and fired twice at a target Annja couldn’t see. “I don’t think so.”

  “I thought the camp guards didn’t come here.”

  “I don’t think it’s them, either. This looks more like gangs, converging to defend their turf.”

  Annja was looking back toward the hole she’d made in the wall. She was surprised the Promessans hadn’t come boiling right out after her. Perhaps they were tending to their fallen comrades inside. Just as likely they were none too eager to blunder after somebody who’d single-handedly put three of them down, two probably for good.

  “We have to go,” she said.

  From somewhere behind and to their right a green beam winked. A corner of a plank structure exploded into a gout of steam.

  “Right,” Dan said. He jumped up and ran for the far side of the street.

  The shotgunner, a feral-looking man in a filthy headband whose refugee gauntness clearly marked him as a denizen of the colony, leaned out to take a shot at them as they broke cover. A green beam speared into his right eye. There came a grenade-like bang and he fell. Annja did not look too closely as she and Dan flashed through the open, uneven doorway of the hovel across from the one in which the wounded Promessan exile had died.

  From her left Annja heard a snarl. Hair rising at the nape of her neck, she turned.

  A big cat stood ten feet away. It was heavy bodied, although no more than two yards from nose to tip of thick, twitching tail. Its fur seemed almost to glow with a light of its own through rosettes like sunspots; its eyes were huge and green. It was clearly what the natives called a golden onza, a beast the educated city folks at least affected to believe was mythical.

  What it was doing in the midst of this man-made hell made Annja’s brain ring with cognitive dissonance. Yet it was no more strange than the twenty-foot anaconda.

  Dan snapped two shots at the cat. The creature spun away and vanished into a back room.

  “What the hell was that?” Dan demanded.

  Annja shook her head. For a moment she had been entranced by impossible thoughts. Can’t give into fantasy, she told herself sternly.
Especially now.

  From the street came angry shouts. Annja heard gunshots and the sharper snaps of energy beams ionizing air. “Nothing,” she said. “We need to keep moving.”

  The look he shot her was skeptical. She knew it was nothing to what he’d look like if she told him what she’d dared imagine, just for an instant. “We’re right up against the jungle here,” she said.

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. Now, go. We need to get back to the citadel before the whole colony lands on our heads!”

  He nodded. A passageway lay open right before them. As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom again after the dazzle of outdoors, Annja could make out that it led back to what seemed a jog or juncture, for dozens of yards. They ran down it.

  From all around them came the sound of fighting. They heard it through the makeshift walls and ragged filthy hangings all around—the ringing clash of metal on metal, shots, curses, the screams and groans of the wounded. Annja wondered how many fighters the Promessans had infiltrated into the camp.

  A figure appeared in front of them. His eyes were wild in a skull-like face. He pointed a sawed-off single-barreled shotgun at them.

  Dan shot him twice in the chest. The short slight man fell backward, discharging his weapon into the ceiling with a crash that brought a cascade of dust, rank with mold spores, raining down on their heads.

  “The gangs are starting to fight with each other,” Dan said, as if discerning Annja’s thoughts of a moment before. “Like packs of jackals fighting over a water-hole—just flashing into rage because they’ve blundered into each other. This is all getting way out of hand.”

  They ran on through the cramped, gloomy, reeking space. As they reached the end of the passage to find themselves in a dogleg right they heard a whomp and instantly smelled gasoline burning. Annja had seen for herself the energy pistols were poor fire starters, especially in this waterlogged environment. But now she heard the greedy crackle of flames, smelled cloth and wood burning, as well as petroleum.

  “Somebody threw a Molotov,” Dan said. “Or maybe one of those lasers set off stored gas. Either way, we’ve got to get out of this maze quick or fry!”

  Around the dogleg they faced more claustrophobic corridor with doors or rough hangings to either side. Maze seemed about right. Despite bad light and headlong flight Annja had the impression that rather than one big purpose-built building, they ran through a warren of shacks that had simply sprung up together, following some obscure logic of the builders or none at all. The ceiling changed level, from flat to pitched to slanting at a crazy angle as they rounded random jogs and junctions and stumbled over thresholds of varying heights. The passage twisted and turned without perceptible plan.

  “It’s like a bad wooden model of someone’s intestines,” Dan grunted.

  A shot bellowed behind them. The bullet gouged a furrow in a plank by Annja’s shoulder before punching out. Dan spun to shoot back as Annja’s ears rang from the noise.

  Smoke had begun infiltrating the weird, winding passageway, hanging at head level. As Annja coughed, three figures materialized in front of her. From their hard, fit appearance and athletic posture she saw at once they were Promessans, not starveling colonists. One held two two-foot sticks of polished black wood. The two in front carried machetes.

  Summoning the sword, she rushed them. The passageway was only wide enough for two people to pass abreast, no higher than a couple of feet above Annja’s head. It wasn’t the most cramped stretch they had run through but left little room to swing a weapon. Fortunately the same limitation applied to Annja’s attackers.

  Once again her opponents were surprised at seeing a broadsword appear from thin air. Annja took her advantage. With the hilt in both hands she hacked through the machete of the man on her left. The one on her right recoiled in surprise, bumping into the stick-wielding man behind. Annja slammed her hilt against the side of the first man’s head and side kicked him through a decayed hanging.

  The second machete-wielding man struck for her head. She was out of position to chop through the short, broad blade. She brought it up before her face. The cut was a semifeint. The wide machete kissed off her sword with a sliding ring and then swung back down in a cut at her hip.

  She managed to drop her hands fast enough that the machete clacked against the cross-shaped guard. She swung her left foot up and around in a roundhouse kick to her opponent’s right short ribs, exposed by his low attack on his left. He was good—he got his right elbow down, fouling the blow and absorbing most of the fierce hip-turning kick, although a bit of air chuffed out of him as her shoe’s reinforced toe drove the elbow into his side.

  To block the kick he had to hunch forward, bringing his machete with him. Annja tipped her sword back over her right shoulder and cut down, as always putting her hip into it and driving with the legs. It wasn’t a long cut but a very powerful one. It sliced almost effortlessly through his clavicle, right beside his muscle-corded neck, sank deep into his chest.

  Gunfire roared like constant thunder in the passageway behind. Annja’s shoulder blades kept trying to crawl together in anticipation of a bullet between them. She realized late she should have ducked into a side chamber herself. But her blood was up—and apparently Dan was mainly keeping the gunman pinned.

  As long as his magazine held up.

  Her stricken opponent slumped across the corridor, blocking the man behind him. The first machete wielder erupted from the chamber into which Annja had kicked him. He swung a small wood crate at the back of Annja’s head.

  She spun into him, kicked high, almost into a vertical split. Her painful hours of gymnastics-style limbering exercises paid off. The rotten-wood crate shattered. The Promessan blinked as splinters and dust fell into his eyes. She brought the heel of her foot crunching down in an ax kick that mostly by good fortune hit him square on the left wing of his collarbone and snapped it loudly.

  He went down in a heap, moaning in pain. It was impossible for him to raise his left arm.

  She faced back the way they had come. Yellow muzzle-flame dazzled her. A bullet cracked past her head, struck the ceiling a few yards farther down. At once Dan popped out of a side door and fired four rapid shots as the dimly glimpsed gang gunman ducked back in turn.

  She heard a scuffle of rubber sandal on wood. Annja had been hypnotized by the firearm, which appeared to be a rifle or carbine, going off almost in her face. And now the stick fighter had gotten past the dead man in the hallway and was about the crack her skull open with one of his batons….

  Holding the sword diagonally upward, she twisted her torso counterclockwise. At the same time she let herself fall to the floor. It gave her the split second she needed. Ebony wood clacked against the sword’s flat blade three inches in front of her nose.

  The man knew how to use the sticks in combination attacks. As the first, held in his left hand, kissed off the blade, he aimed the second for the crown of Annja’s head. Her shoulders slammed the wood floor. She rolled into him fast. The stick smashed into the uneven planking as her long legs slammed against his.

  It wasn’t any kind of proper sweep, just desperation. But Annja was tall and strong and her opponent had sacrificed balance to strike at his falling foe. He went down in a tangle across her legs.

  She lay on her belly with the sword trapped beneath her. Fortunately it had already been flat against her body; otherwise it would have gashed deeply into her rib cage.

  The stick fighter was good. He reared upright, straddling her thighs, raised his right stick for a shot at her unprotected neck.

  The sword was an impediment. She let it go back to the otherwhere. Then with all her strength she whipped her body clockwise, pushing off with her left hand, lashing out with her right.

  The stick fighter’s nose broke with a crunch of cartilage. He reeled back, blinking in agonized surprise as blood covered his upper lip.

  She wrenched her right leg free, drew back the knee, pushed hard. The stick fighter s
tood almost upright. He slammed against the far wall of the corridor. His head cracked back against the planking so hard the wood split vertically. He groaned and sank to his knees.

  From back up the corridor, she heard the heavy ringing slam of the gang member’s carbine. Dan grunted.

  A body thumped on the floor. Annja heard her partner moan, “Oh, shit,” in a ghastly voice.

  23

  As Annja rolled back to face him, the gang member strolled from a doorway on the right as if he wanted to give the appearance he was going for a walk in the park.

  Annja jumped to her feet. The rifleman ignored her. She summoned back the sword, knowing already it was futile.

  Smiling, the man raised the stock of his rifle to his shoulder, sighting down the barrel at Dan, who had slumped out into the corridor doubled over his knees, a knot of helpless misery.

  Suddenly he twisted sideways, bringing his gun up in both hands, thrusting them out to extend his arms fully in an isosceles triangle. The handgun cracked twice.

  Dust flew from the rifleman’s grimy shirt at belly and breastbone. He reared back, more in surprise and shock than pain. The metal butt plate slipped from his shoulder.

  Dan rotated to a sitting position. He fired again. The man’s head snapped back. He fell backward in a lifeless sprawl.

  “Fell for it, asshole,” Dan snarled, getting a knee up and starting to stand. He turned a grin of triumph toward Annja.

  It froze. “Look out!” he shouted, bringing the handgun up again. It seemed to be pointing right at her face.

  Annja’s eyes widened. She was looking straight down the black muzzle.

  Flame blossomed in her face. Hair that had fallen loose at the left side of Annja’s face stirred as if brushed by careless fingers. Shock waves of the bullet’s supersonic passage slapped her cheek with surprising force as its miniature sonic boom temporarily deafened her left ear and filled her head with ringing.

  She spun. The stick fighter stood behind her. Or rather, he was falling away from her, weeping scarlet from where his right eye had been.