Paradox

by Alex Archer

  The cry snapped Thompson's face around. The beginning of a triumphant leer died on his face as the muscles of his mouth went slack with total overpowering surprise. His eyes went round. The pupils expanded to crowd the pale blue irises to tiny halos.

  With all the force of her righteous wrath Annja swung the sword. It took Zach Thompson at an angle across his face.

  Feeling no impact she thought she'd missed. He still stared at her. She managed to stop herself short of piling into him. She drew back the sword for another strike.

  The color red began to bloom on Zach Thompson's white-and-blue stocking cap. A line of red appeared, running from his left brow, right beneath the knit cap, across his nose to the edge of his right jaw. His eyes, still wide and staring into Annja's, dulled. She had the quick impression of Zach's face turned into a horrible caricature of a Picasso portrait. His body slumped to the black rock beneath his boots.

  She lowered the sword to the rock and leaned on it, panting. She felt sick and utterly spent.

  "Thanks, Levi," she said.

  "Least I could do." He had settled his glasses back on his nose. One arm had snapped off. He started casting about for his goggles. "You're, ah—you're sinking!" he exclaimed.

  "What? Oh, holy—" The tip of the sword's blade had already sunk four inches into the hard volcanic rock. She had just kept leaning on it, leaning farther forward without being aware of the fact as her weight drove it in. She pushed herself back upright, letting go of the hilt. The sword vanished.

  "Once again, thanks," she said. "I probably would have fallen over if it had continued to sink like that."

  Levi found his goggles and pulled them on over his knit cap, pulled them well away from his face so as not to dislodge the one-winged glasses perched precariously on the bridge of his nose. Then he let them settle onto his face. It was rapidly puffing up and going pink from the effects of Zach's backhand.

  "There," he said. "I hope that holds them in place."

  He turned to look at her with a silly smile.

  "Zach!" Leif Baron's voice ricocheted down to them from above. He was obviously not close; but he wasn't high enough or far enough away for any kind of comfort. "Zach, you idiot, where are you?" they heard him calling out.

  "Can you keep going?" Annja asked the rabbi urgently.

  "As well as I could before. I don't walk on my face. Although it sure feels as if I have."

  She reached a hand to him. They gripped each other, forearm to forearm. She hauled him to his one good foot. He swayed against her, then, pushing off with an apologetic smile, straightened himself.

  "Let's get going," Annja said. "Only a few thousand feet left."

  "Piece of cake," Levi said, without much conviction. She had to give him an A for effort, though.

  They were getting near enough the bottom that they could get a good detailed look at the terrain awaiting them below. A fairly substantial stream seemed to wind around the base of the mountain, sporadically visible as they picked their way from cover to cover. Beyond it stretched a mile or so of flats, tan with dry bunch grass and dotted with dark scrub. Shiny patches of white showed where snow remained. It seemed the recent fall had concentrated on the peak. Annja frowned slightly, remembering Levi's half-joking assertions that gods were battling each other over their destinies. West of the flats the land rumpled up into sinuous black ridges separated by narrow gullies.

  Annja kept getting bad vibes from the landscape below. She couldn't see anything that looked more dangerous than a thorn bush. Not consciously, anyway. But she couldn't shake a nagging sensation she was missing something potentially major. And possibly deadly.

  She said nothing about any of that to Levi. They had too many clear and present dangers to worry about possibly phantom misgivings.

  As she looked down to pick their dubious way through the scree and obstructions Annja felt a cool touch on her face. Her vision seemed to dim slightly. Raising her head to look out she saw shadows swiftly coming over the panoramic landscape of Ağri Province.

  She looked up. Between the two struggling human specks and the sun the clouds were gathering. Though the light from above turned their edges to incandescent silver, their bellies were an ominous slate-gray. They seemed to be moving with unnatural speed. Where they came together they visibly churned.

  "Wow," Levi said. "Looks like a movie."

  "Do me a favor, rabbi," Annja said. "No editorial comments on the meteorological phenomena. Please."

  "Anything you say, Annja." But his eyes twinkled behind his one-winged glasses.

  In breathtakingly short order Annja and her companion found themselves hobbling through premature twilight. They descended by steep slopes covered with black gravel that had a dangerous tendency to slip out from under foot. Their progress was a halting three-legged dance, with Levi right behind Annja clutching onto the back of her harness for dear life.

  At least here if they slipped on loose gravel and fell, there was much less risk of shooting off over a precipice to certain death. But an uncontrolled tumble down a rocky slope wasn't fun, nor safe, either. Especially when you were being hunted by religious fanatics fanatically intent on letting out your blood.

  They entered a fantastic-looking landscape of violent juts and frowning looms of rock, rough granite, smooth-textured basalt and sharp-edged lava, pitted and matte-black. Annja picked her way between the great outcrops, using her hands to support her on the surrounding rock when she could to counteract the chancy footing.

  "It's like being in some kind of old black-and-white movie," Levi said.

  "It is, isn't it?" The rock looming around them was predominantly black to begin with, as was the gravel and soil underfoot. The granite did muster shades of dark gray; the crisp bunch grass that sprouted from the gravelly slope and niches among the outcrops was leached of color and moisture by premature winter. In better light it might've been at least a wan tan.

  But the oddly sudden overcast's half-light leached even the much brighter colors of Annja's and Levi's jackets to the point they only suggested hues. The grass came out looking a vaguely silvery-gray.

  The land leveled. It was temporary; they were still several hundred feet at least above the base of the cinder cone. It was a relief all the same.

  Annja was becoming acutely aware of how loud the black gravel was crunching under their boots, when Levi said, "I wonder why they haven't attacked us for so long?"

  She almost laughed. She'd started wondering the same thing.

  "I think they probably decided there was no point either in wasting bullets or attacking us where there was a real lively chance they'd wind up splattered on some rock without us even having to do anything. We still have a long way to go. Maybe they even thought we'd figure we were about out of the woods and get careless," she said.

  "What do you think they'll do now?" Levi asked.

  She shrugged. They mounted a low rise to get between rounded house-sized protrusions. Annja winced as the dry branches and gray leaves of a bush rattled at their passage. Hearing her own words had led her to decide to take a route offering better cover in preference to following the path of least resistance.

  "Baron's the professional tactical guy. Which sucks from our standpoint. I'm not a professional. But if it were me running the circus I'd split the group up."

  "Divide your forces? I thought that was a major nono," Levi said.

  "Okay, I'm not a big military historian, either, and there's a limit to how much my knowledge of, like, the Battle of Pavia in 1525 is going to be applicable to this happy twenty-first century of ours. But I've, uh, I've been in some fights. Battles, you might even call some of them. Small ones. Mostly," Annja said.

  "Somehow, I rather figured that."

  "So anyway, if you're going to try a pincers movement, a very basic tactic to catch your enemies on the flanks, what you have to do split up."

  As she spoke she began to swivel her head more constantly left and right. They came out into a shallow bowl
covered with dead grass, that stretched maybe twenty-five yards between big outcrops.

  "Hitting flanks are important for all kinds of reasons. One is if you get your enemies looking left, your pals coming from the right get free shots at their backs. See?" she explained.

  "All too clearly, I'm afraid."

  "Yeah. Well, stay alert. Also, the better trained your troops are, the more leeway you have to do things like split them up."

  She sighed through briefly gritted teeth. "And I'm afraid Baron and Eli Holden are both really good at this sort of thing. I bet they run the students through all kinds of tactical field exercises at the academy. If they didn't before Baron signed on, they sure do—"

  She actually felt the bullet pass her face to strike the basalt boulder ten feet to her right.

  Chapter 28

  The wind of the projectile's passage brushed the bridge of her nose and her cheeks with a dainty touch creepily reminiscent of the television show's makeup people dusting her with a powder puff to take the shine off freshly applied makeup. The hard flat rap of the handgun shot overlapped the noise of the slug striking rock. The bullet whined upward and away.

  "Down!" she said in warning.

  Figuring Levi would either have the presence of mind to follow her lead or, failing that, simply lose his balance and fall on top of her, Annja threw herself facedown on the gravel. The rabbi landed not on her, as expected, but beside her, promptly enough that she figured he had gone down on his own instead of toppling when his support went suddenly missing.

  "Oww." Levi managed to keep his voice low. His face was pale behind his grown-out beard, thin mobile features twisted in pain.

  Annja bit down on her impulse to ask if he was all right. Clearly he wasn't. He had a broken ankle. Falling down, even though not on it, must have hurt like hell.

  She looked around. Past the outcrop to their left a black promontory rose a story or so higher. The shot had come from that direction, right enough. But the higher projection was also one hundred and fifty or so yards away. For the shooter to hit that close to her head with a handgun at that range, firing at a downward angle, he had to be either way better or way luckier than he could possibly deserve to be. She knew, or anyway suspected strongly, that among the Christian leadership skills Rehoboam Academy taught its pupils was the gentle art of combat handgunning. That type of training concentrated strongly on the short ranges at which handgun fights almost inevitably took place, not long-range shooting. She suspected the shot had actually come from a closer, lower height now masked by the nearby black boulder.

  A muzzle flash caught her eye from a pile of rusty-tinged black rock topped with wind-gnarled brush just past the end of the boulder that screened them. She grabbed Levi and rolled over with him, toward the loom of rock to their left. She tried to ignore the groan of anguish he wasn't able to stifle.

  Another bullet kicked up gravel a couple of feet away from where they'd lain. Annja's move hadn't come quickly enough to save them if it had been going to hit them anyway. The missile had come from about fifty yards away. It was still an uncomfortably good shot with a handgun, even if the shooter were prone and had the piece well braced.

  They were out of sight of the spot where she'd seen the muzzle-flare bloom like a lethal yellow-light flower. For the moment. "Get on my back, Levi," she ordered.

  "What?"

  "On my back. Quickly."

  He hesitated a split second, which was long enough for her to fight and at least temporarily win against an impulse to grab him and give him a good shake. Then she felt his weight sprawl on top of her.

  With a reverberating groan of effort she pushed herself up to all fours. I knew someday I'd be grateful for doing all those push-ups in my daily routine, she thought. She hated push-ups. She did her best speed crawl—more of a vigorous slow-motion crawl with the doubled weight reminding the muscles in her shoulders and forearms of the abuse they'd been through in the last day and a half—right up to the side of the big basalt jut to their left. There she collapsed, panting, her arms and shoulders feeling as if they were on fire.

  Levi's breath was loud in her ear. That's why it's hard to catch your breath, she told herself.

  "You can get off now," she said in a strained voice.

  "What—oh. Sorry, sorry. Ouch." The last came out as an involuntary exclamation as he rolled off too fast and jarred his damaged ankle again.

  "No need to apologize," she said. She looked around. Ten or twelve feet behind them a smaller rock outcrop maybe three feet high stood near the boulder. There was at least a shoulder-width distance between them. Some bunch grass sprouting around it offered some additional concealment. Anything helped, she thought.

  "Levi, can you get yourself back in between those rocks there?"

  He drew a deep, shaky breath. "Yeah, I think so," he said.

  "Okay. Hide as well as you can and keep your head down."

  "What's going on?" he asked.

  She paused, sucking her lower lip. "I think the shooter is trying to drive us. Like a beater for wild game. Chasing us toward the hunters to get shot."

  "What're we going to do?" he asked, finally sounding alarmed.

  "You're going to make yourself scarce like I told you. I'm going to try to even the odds."

  It took a massive act of will to wrench herself out of the gravel's embrace, sharp and cold and as comfortable as the finest bed she'd ever slept in. Her every joint creaked and every muscle screamed protest. Leaving behind her companion and any objections he might care to voice to her plan, she started running bent over, back the way they had come.

  At first she moved like a none-too-spry octogenarian who'd lost her walker. But movement quickly made her feel better. Just as she knew it would. Even if it was entirely in her mind, she felt no more than a rusty forty by the time she'd passed the little clump of rock she'd told Levi to dig in behind and started climbing up the steep bank that would lead her up and over the protective cover of the boulder.

  Possibilities flashed through her mind. Were there two shooters off to her left, which was south? Was it just one, cunning enough to hurriedly shift positions so he could fire on the fugitives where they'd dropped into what they thought was cover after his first shot? Was that even their plan, what she had suggested to Levi? What if instead of waiting the other half of the pincers was closing in even now as she scrambled over the sliding, rustling black surface upslope of the boulder, ducking from lesser rock to rock cluster? With Levi left behind, unarmed, injured, helpless? Was she focused too much on Baron and his youthful red-haired acolyte, and underestimating the threat of fat, middle-aged Charlie Bostitch?

  As quickly as she could she moved back down the far side of the boulder that hid Levi from the shooter she was sure about. Ahead of her two squat pillars of dark stone rose a couple of stories in the air. Slim as she was there was just room to slip between them.

  She clambered up six or eight feet to the crack. It was a tricky climb; she had to stuff the handgun she'd taken off Josh Fairlie's body into her belt to make it. Then, turning sideways, she forced herself between the columns. It was tighter than she'd thought.

  She emerged onto flat ground at just under the level of the cleft. Thirty feet away Eli Holden stood on top of another basalt outcrop about four yards high. He held his SIG Sauer muzzle up and shifted weight from the front of one booted foot to the other, as he craned to try to spot the quarry he was trying to creep up on and surprise in their hiding place. His jacket hung open and his close-cropped red-haired head was bare.

  He and Annja locked eyes. For what seemed a very long time they simply held that tableau, staring at each other.

  "It doesn't have to be this way, Eli," she at last managed to say in a low voice jagged as an ancient lava tube.

  His cheeks drew back, tightening his mouth into an almost sweet smile. "Yeah," he said, so quietly the word was almost lost on a rising breeze. "Yeah. It does. I wish it didn't, too."

  He sounded entirely reaso
nable. It was odd; she had sized him up as a stone-dumb fanatic who let others do the talking as well as the thinking. Instead he sounded wistful, and his voice was that of a man who was thinking, and was pained by his thoughts.

  He moved first. For all Annja's lightning reflexes he would have had her cold had she not expected it.

  But all he had to do was lower his P226, get a flash sight impression, shoot her. She had to draw from her belt. Which put her fatally behind the curve.

  She threw her left hand straight up over her head, cupping the fingers as if gripping something.

  The sword appeared, glinting dully in the twilight.

  She saw Eli's head jerk back in surprise at the impossible appearance of such an utterly unlikely weapon out of thin air. Then her right hand was up, the front sight of her weapon at the level of the center of his mass. She fired twice, trying not to yank the trigger and jerk the weapon offline. Shooting one-handed she had to fight hard against the bite of rifling grooves into the fast-moving projectiles that tried to torque her sight off-target and pluck the piece from her hand.