Secret of the Slaves

by Alex Archer

  Whatever else he was, Dan Seddon was a hell of a combat handgunner. Accomplished herself, after considerable training, practice—and real-world experience—Annja could scarcely have done better herself.

  Dan stood. “Nifty piece of cutlery,” he said, looking at the sword. He had punched the magazine release and was pulling out the old box. He held a full reload, retrieved from an inner pocket of his vest, clipped between a couple of fingers. Annja had been meaning to ask why he encumbered himself with extra clothing in the unremitting wet heat. Now she knew. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Tell you later.” Her voice shook. Relief flooded her body and caused her legs to tremble.

  Catch a grip, she told herself sternly. The smoke was a bit thinner but flames cackled madly not far away. And she still had no idea how they were going to get out of the strange warren alive—much less the whole monstrous desolation of the colony.

  “I’ll be sure to ask,” Dan said. His eyes snapped past her. “Behind—right!” he shouted.

  She wheeled, not right but left, counterclockwise. It allowed her to lead with the tip of the sword, gripped two handed and held horizontally to her left.

  A warped wooden door had opened a yard behind her. A young man had emerged, bare chested, with a red cloth band holding hair back from a handsome Indian face.

  The sword punched right through his sternum, through his heart. Fixed on hers, his dark eyes widened. They stared a final question into Annja’s eyes. Then the light faded from them and he slumped. In sudden sick horror she banished the sword, as if that could unmake the wound. But life had fled the body huddled at her feet.

  “He—he was unarmed,” she said.

  Dan gripped her hard on the shoulder. “Suck it up,” he said. “He was one of them. See? He doesn’t look anorexic.”

  She was shaking her head in desperate denial. “He wasn’t armed. I killed him.”

  “He was an enemy. He ran up on you. And one thing you’ve got to learn about the real world, sweetheart—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  She turned an agonized look on him. Tears blurred her eyes.

  From behind them rang hoarse shouts. Ahead flames suddenly ate up another entry curtain and billowed out into the corridor.

  “Choose now,” Dan said. “Move or die.”

  She nodded. He turned and raced out ahead, weapon grasped in both hands. He didn’t even flinch from the flames that lashed at him and filled the corridor with a hellish orange glare.

  She followed. Dan vanished to the right around an unseen corner. She passed through the fire. She felt it sear her upper arm. The pain was like a penance.

  It snapped her back to the situation. Batting at smoldering hair, she turned the corner and found herself facing another long corridor. Blessed daylight shone at its far end, a dazzling white oblong a good twenty yards away. She saw no sign of Dan.

  But a figure blocked her path. It was short and unmistakably feminine. In spite of the way the flood of photons over her retinas blurred it to shadow, Annja recognized her antagonist.

  “Xia!” It was half surprised exclamation, half curse.

  “Annja Creed,” the woman said in English, “you don’t know what you do.”

  “I’m fighting to break free the secrets you’re selfishly withholding from the human race,” Annja stated, striding forward. “If you want to call that neocolonialism, go right ahead. But your murderous ways have shown you aren’t fit stewards of whatever power you hold!”

  “I see you’ve been talking to Isis,” Xia said. Her tone was conversational, almost light. “She can be a bit strident. I hope you didn’t damage her too badly. She has a good heart and great promise.”

  “If she’s the tall black woman with the green headband, she was alive when I left her,” Annja said tautly, “if not feeling too well. But what you’d know about a good heart I haven’t a clue.”

  “If you keep on this path I must fight you,” Xia said with what sounded like regret. Feigned, Annja was furiously sure.

  She held her arm out to the side, started to form her hand into a fist to pull the sword from its special place. Then she let her hand drop to her side.

  Treacherous as Xia and her people were, Annja felt she had sullied the sword—sullied her soul. She would not give in to damnation by deliberately striking down an unarmed person. No matter how deserving.

  She charged. Size and strength were her obvious advantages over her foe. She hoped they sufficed to overcome whatever skill Xia possessed. Closing on the much shorter woman, Annja realized Xia was fuller-figured than she’d looked in her exquisitely tailored suits in Belém and Manaus. She wore a dark green wrap around heavy breasts and a loose brown skirt like a sarong around full hips. Her belly was a dome of muscle like a belly dancer’s.

  Annja expected the woman to try to sweep her legs, tackle her or kick at her belly or pelvis. The low line was the strongest attack against a taller foe. Instead Xia leaped straight into the air. Her rump-length hair formed a dark nimbus around her head.

  Unable to stop, Annja ran right into her. Xia wrapped her legs around Annja’s belly as her arms tried to tangle the taller woman’s. The hair enveloped their heads like a cloud.

  Annja fell heavily on her back. Air exploded from her lungs, driven by Xia’s hard-muscled butt pounding into her solar plexus.

  For a moment they were nose to nose, completely enclosed by Xia’s amazing midnight hair. The Promessan smelled of sweat on clean female skin, and her hair like jasmine. Her nose was snubbed. Her big almond eyes, their jade-green hue visible even here, reminded Annja irrationally of the eyes of the golden onza she had seen on entering this hellish maze. That had been hallucination, she told herself.

  Xia’s hands were like steel clamps pinning Annja’s wrists to the floor. The wood was slimy and irregular beneath her. She felt ancient ooze seeping through her clothes at shoulder and butt.

  “It’s not too late for you, Annja,” Xia said. “You have been misled—”

  “By you!” Annja shouted. Planting her feet, she violently arched her back.

  Though Xia held the advantage—and, like Annja, her body was well packed with muscle—she had not managed to pin Annja’s hips. Rather she sat astride Annja’s flat belly just below her breasts.

  Annja used her strength to buck the smaller woman off like an angry rodeo bronco.

  Xia went tumbling down the passage. The way to outside lay clear. Annja doubted she could make it without her opponent taking her down from behind. And her nature rebelled against fleeing, though she knew it was the right thing to do.

  She rolled over and jumped to her feet. Xia was already up, clearing a curtain of heavy black hair from her face with a flip of her head. She grinned at Annja.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  Annja advanced. Not headlong this time, but behind a flurry of kicks and punches.

  Xia blocked or redirected them with apparent ease and a remarkable economy of motion. Even as Annja struck for her in dizzying combinations, she marveled at the other’s skill.

  Annja’s breath came in great gulps. Strength ebbed from her like blood from an opened vein. Along with total physical exertion loading up the lactic acid in her muscles came unrivaled mental tension.

  Xia, her oval face serene, looked as if she could keep this up for a week.

  Gasping raggedly, trying not to reel, Annja decided to try power where technique had failed. She threw a quick quartet of punches at Xia’s face—all blocked by scarcely visible movements—then shifted weight to her back foot to fire a side kick.

  But she had barely lifted her right foot to chamber the kick when Xia flowed toward her and slammed a palm heel into her sternum.

  Floorboards slammed her in the back. The air fled her body. A dark figure rose above her. It was Xia, hair flying around her again.

  From down the hall a noise erupted. Even with Xia suspended above her, Annja’s eyes were drawn away, back down the hall. A gang member stood in
a crouch, firing a Kalashnikov from the hip. The brilliant yellow muzzle-flare illuminated a face screaming almost in ecstasy.

  The dancing flame went out. The banana magazine was empty. Annja looked up, wondering why Xia hadn’t heel stomped on her sternum.

  The air was empty of all but roiling smoke and drifting motes of dust and spores. The hallway between Annja and the door to the outside world was a roaring hell of flame.

  The Promessan woman had vanished.

  It was time for Annja to do likewise. A hint of light showed beneath a blanket hung in a doorway to her right. She rolled through it into a tiny room as a fresh burst of automatic gunfire chewed up the planking where she had lain an instant before.

  A tiny off-square window let sunlight filter vaguely into the room through yellowed newspaper taped across its crossed slats in lieu of glass. Annja coiled herself and jumped through it. She carried with her not just the window but a good patch of rotted-wood wall.

  She put a shoulder down as she landed and rolled clear of the wreckage. She got herself to her feet by sheer willpower and desperation and bouncing off the walls to both sides of the narrow alley. Speed was her only slim chance at life.

  Coughing from the smoke she had inhaled, Annja tried to force her mind clear, assimilate surroundings and circumstances. She was alone in a tiny space that initially seemed to have no outlet. Then ahead of her she noticed the outward-leaning wall of the shack to her right didn’t quite meet that of the hovel beyond.

  She also noticed all the buildings around her were in flame to a greater or lesser extent. If she lingered another minute she’d best pray the Kalashnikov gang-banger blasted her from the blown-out window. Only that would save her from burning to death.

  Annja raced around the almost hidden corner. Running through coils of brown-and-dirty-white smoke, she saw ahead of her, thirty yards away beyond a cross alley, two men fighting.

  Dan. Looming over him was Patrizinho.

  She shouted. Smoke clawed at her throat. Dan, bare-handed, launched a savage one-two combination, left hook and right cross.

  The punches came at their target from the sides, outflanking most attempts to block them. Patrizinho leaned back away from his opponent, slipping the blows. His bare brown upper torso gleamed in the sun as if oiled. His dreadlocks, held back from his handsome face with a golden band, flew like a Medusa tail of serpents about wide shoulders.

  Dan’s right hand went behind him, came up with the handgun.

  “No!” Annja screamed. She reached the crossing alley. Firearms and energy weapons crackled to both left and right through the roar of flames.

  Patrizinho flicked the 9-mm pistol with the back of his left hand. It fired. The muzzle-flame must have seared his left biceps; unburned propellant and primer fragments must have peppered his bronze skin. Paying no mind, he stepped into Dan, dropping his weight and driving a compact vertical punch straight into Dan’s chest above his heart.

  Dan did not go flying back the way Annja had from Xia’s palm-heel strike between her breasts. Instead his body seemed almost to balloon away from the blow, up and outward. He staggered but stayed on his feet.

  “No!” Annja shrieked again. This time Patrizinho looked straight at her. His beautiful long face seemed full of infinite sadness.

  The black handgun dropped from Dan’s fingers.

  From her left, green beams flickered, crossing Annja’s path. Automatic fire answered invisibly from her right. Disregarding both, she plunged on, across ten feet of open death ground.

  No energy beam or bullet struck her. But flames suddenly roared from both sides and met in the middle, an orange wall. Just inside the cover of the far alley mouth Annja was forced to stop, safe from the firefight but unable to proceed to the aid of her friend.

  The flame curtains parted. As through an opened gate, Dan walked unsteadily toward her. There was no sign of Patrizinho.

  Annja ran to him. His face was horribly pale, his lean cheeks ashen beneath his fine two-day beard. He scarcely seemed to breathe.

  “My…heart,” he explained. “It’s my heart.”

  He staggered, went to his knees in the foul alley muck. One hand spasmodically clutched the front of her shirt. His pale eyes were wide.

  Then he smiled. It was the sweetest smile Annja had ever seen. It would haunt her dreams so long as she lived.

  “I see it all so clearly now,” he said as he died.

  24

  The massive double doors, oaken, stained dark brown, polished as mirrors, swung open violently to Sir Iain Moran’s shove. They would give me permission to enter, would they? he thought savagely.

  Beneath a chandelier like a wedding cake of light and crystal, deep in the bowels of a little-known château perched high in the Bernese Alps, there stretched a long, massive table of oak, dark stained and polished like the door. Around it sat a dozen men.

  They were old men. Sir Iain was junior in the room by a good two decades or more. Their hair was silver or white or absent, their clothes exquisite, with the unobtrusive perfection rendered by masters of the tailor’s art.

  These men brought unobtrusiveness to an art. Their names were unknown to the public, or only incidentally so. They sat on no thrones, in no cabinets, held no chairs in any corporate boardroom. No ties connected them to any government or corporation or recognized institution—visibly. They were as far above such things as eagles over ants.

  But every single person who served a government or multinational, no matter how low or high his rank, served one or another of them indirectly.

  Look at them, Publico thought with contempt, these self-anointed masters of the world. Withered old vultures is what they look like. But he knew them for what they really were. Jackals.

  The ancient at the table’s far end raised a head of hair like spun glass. On a face liver spotted and sagging with the weight of years, he adjusted his glasses. Like the presence he projected—even seated, even tethered by plastic tubes from his nostrils to an oxygen tank discreetly hidden behind his chair—the piercing blue eyes made no concession to age.

  “Sir Iain Moran,” the old man said in a high voice, upper-class English accent piping with outrage. “What is the meaning of this intrusion?”

  “I meant to correct a most unfortunate oversight on your part, gentlemen,” he said, his baritone Irish brogue at once rough and rolling. “You seemed to believe you could make me wait upon your pleasure like a lackey.”

  The chairman drew his head back on his skinny, wattled neck.

  “What do you think to gain by storming in here like this, young man?” a stout man halfway down the table’s right side demanded with Teutonic heaviness. He had white eyebrows that stuck out ferociously.

  “My rightful place,” Publico said.

  “That has to be earned, friend,” said a man across from the bristle-browed German in an elaborate Texas drawl. It was fake, Publico knew. The man in the pale gray suit and bolo tie with an immense silver steer head for a clasp had been born in Massachusetts and educated at Princeton and Georgetown.

  “Ah, but have I not earned my place and then some?” Sir Iain asked. “I’ve served you well, gentlemen. I’ve done your bidding and more.”

  “Do you imagine,” the chairman asked, “that we hand out memberships to the most exclusive council in the world like crackers at a child’s birthday party? You have served well, it’s true, Sir Iain. But you have likewise been well recompensed.”

  “You think to hire me like a tradesman, then?” His tone was silky.

  They said nothing. They simply sat and stared at him. They showed no discomfiture. Security in the château matched that of a thermonuclear-warhead assembly plant. No matter how robust and agile he was, he posed them no physical danger. At the least aggressive movement he would instantly die.

  Even the volcanic force of his own presence, his reproach, made no impression on them. They were men of necessity long inured to shame. And likewise to injustice.

  He leaned for
ward and dropped his big, scarred knuckles on the immaculate wood with a significant thunk. If he could make no overt threat he could still emphasize his very potent presence.

  “Some of you have lived even longer than your visible decrepitude would indicate,” he said, continuing to speak in the softest voice his scarred vocal cords could manage. “Your relative anonymity, thanks to your control of the world’s media, ensures that no one notices anything unusual about you. I know there are others. Members emeritus. Who yet have a voice in affairs.”

  He straightened, allowed his volume to rise. “Those of you who sit here today, sinking into the decay of your advancing years, do so because you either have physiological resistance to the current generation of treatment, or because you fear to step away from the table of power for long enough to undergo the full extent of rejuvenation. I know that at your level there is no friendship, no loyalty, no brotherhood. Only fear and interest—and your fellowship is that of a pack of wolves, always looking to rend the weak.”

  “Do you think to force us to admit you to our ranks by insulting us?” the German demanded.

  “I might,” he said, sticking hands in pockets and grinning, “if I thought you capable of being insulted. Any more than you are of feeling shame.”

  “Pray you are correct in that, Sir Iain,” said a Frenchman who sat closest to Publico’s right. “We might not make the truest of friends. But as enemies, we are dauntless!”

  Publico showed him a frown, then he glared about at the council members.

  “If you will not make a place for me at your table, gentlemen,” he said, “I shall be compelled to force one open.”

  “Others have tried that before, Sir Iain,” the American said with heartiness as false as his accent.

  “But never I.”

  Again, there was no reaction. A lesser man might have quailed at the utter certitude their blandness showed. But such a man would never have pushed his way in there in the first place.