by Alex Archer
"What about the Indians here?"
"Our ancestors sought a completely receptive environment," Xia said. "The land, the water, the creatures and the people. We found the proper combination here. The local tribes agreed to cede us land in return for our protection and our knowledge. The arrangement continues to this day."
Annja sighed. "I've got a lot to learn."
"Yes," Xia said. "And not much time to learn it. So why not go ahead and ask the question that's really on your mind?"
"Such as why you do not hate me," Patrizinho said. "For which I am thankful, by the way."
She shook her head. She wasn't ready.
"I'll go ahead and play the bad guy," Xia said, "and tell you the truth about your friend Dan."
Annja looked at her with a mix of dread and eagerness.
"He branched out early on from violent street protests into extortion and the odd assassination," Xia said. "The latter came after Sir Iain scooped him up and provided advanced training. He was an apt pupil, you might say.
"As Moran told you, Dan was his troubleshooter. I gather he didn't fill in many details. Among other things, despite his tender years Dan served as advisor in such matters as the campaign of genocide against nomadic peoples certain African governments are waging, with the complicity of the UN and the West. Not unlike the way the Brazilian government is trying to destroy the Indians of Amazonas – and us – by wiping out the rain forest upon which we all depend for survival. Except the African governments cloak their crimes in the name of the Earth. The Brazilian government uses economics as its pretext."
Annja walked between the magnificent buildings, hugging herself tightly. Her reflex was to reject all this information as slander.
Didn't I notice disquieting things about Dan from the very outset? she asked herself. I suppressed them, in the heat of our shared cause.
"He was... a good man," she said. "In his way."
"But too angry," Patrizinho said.
"Why – why would he take part in mass murder?" she asked.
"He did care deeply about his fellow humans, I think," Patrizinho said. "What he saw they were capable of doing to each other disgusted and confused him. It became easy for him to rationalize anything, I suppose, as long as he believed it served his cause. I think that was largely what Sir Iain told him it should be."
"So you're saying he did terrible things because he was a good man?" Annja asked in confusion.
Xia shrugged. "The passionate best – or those who believe they know best – always commit the greatest crimes. For those who believe they serve some ultimate good, the sky's the limit."
"I regret that it came to pass that he and I fought," Patrizinho said. "In that we did, I do not regret I killed him."
Annja drew in a deep breath and exhaled. "I understand," she said in a shaky voice. "I feel the same way about the people I killed." She looked at them with tears blurring her eyes. "Why don't you hate me, for killing your friends?"
"Some do," Xia said. "Isis isn't alone."
"Yes," Patrizinho said, nodding, for once unsmiling. "But we each walk our own path. Those whom you killed accepted the possibility of their own deaths the instant they set foot upon the warrior's path."
"As for responsibility for their deaths," Xia said, "we bear our share. We chose to bring you here."
Annja stopped and stared at them. "You're saying you influenced Sir Iain to hire me?"
"Not at all," Patrizinho said. "Once we knew he had recruited you, though, we made our decision. Xia, myself, certain others in the city. You have the potential to be an enormous force for good in the world, Annja. You carry the sword. We wanted to help you learn a bit about what that means. We also wished to try to show you how to avoid... certain pitfalls."
"If it seems as if Patrizinho's skating around the subject," Xia said, "it's because he doesn't want to point out just how easy it would be for the sword to turn you into a monster."
Annja looked down. "I know. There were times on this journey – "
She stopped and raised her head to stare at them. "Wait. You set this up as a test, didn't you?"
"You had to earn your way here, Annja," Patrizinho said. "If we gave you gifts without your proving worthy, we would compromise not just your destiny but our own."
"So you set up your own people for me to kill as a means of testing me?" Her voice rose with outrage.
"Blame me if it makes you feel better," Xia said.
"You weren't the only one being tested, Annja," Patrizinho said. "Those whom you fought had their own tests to pass. Some did not. If that horrifies you, it saddens me, but so be it. We did not survive this long by making things easy on ourselves." He smiled. "Don't let our beautiful surroundings mislead you. We have provided comfort for ourselves. That is part of the reason we must continually test ourselves. That, and the desire to expand our understanding."
They had halted by another fountain. Annja walked a few paces away from her escorts. Her thoughts were a turmoil. She was fighting against a feeling of overwhelming relief combined with guilt.
She sat down on the lip of the fountain and wept bitterly into her hands.
When she had cried herself out she raised her head. Patrizinho held out a hand to her. "Now – let us do what we can, while we can," he said.
Chapter 31
Away off in the night, a sudden nova flamed. Aircraft-engine whine turned to the scream of tortured metal as the plane plunged out of control. A comet of yellow flame arced down behind black trees to the east. A flash lit the sky. A column of cloud rose, underlit by a dancing orange glow.
"Attack airplane," Xia said. "They're flying out of a base near Lake Aiama."
The forest and fields were quiet. The rumble of nearby battle had suppressed the normal nocturnal sounds. The Promessans and their Indian allies fought a hit-and-run battle against the Brazilian forces Publico had brought in. Even the bugs were quiet, except for the irrepressible buzzing of the small, and not so small, biting insects. Nothing except the city limits of Promessa daunted them, Annja had found.
I wonder what this war will do to Publico's peace-activist image, she thought. Probably nothing, she had to admit. If word of his involvement ever got out, which was doubtful in itself, Sir Iain Moran employed phalanxes of expert spin doctors. For evidence she had only to recall the news broadcasts Xia had shown her several days earlier. Never had she heard mention of his name.
"That sounded like a propeller plane," Annja said, puzzled.
"It was," said Xia.
"You're kidding. I thought Brazil had a pretty modern air force."
"It's the very latest thing in the Brazilian air force," Xia said. "Embraer ALX, light attack fighter variant of the Super Tucano."
"You sound like an enthusiast."
Crouching there at the verge between jungle and another abandoned rubber field, Xia shrugged and grinned. "A girl has her hobbies. Even in Promessa."
"Don't they use jets?"
"They're mostly too fast," Patrizinho said. "Prop planes can fly slow enough to really see and hit smaller ground targets." He shrugged. "Like us. This aircraft is designed to murder helpless native people on the ground, such as so-called insurgents, guerrillas and bandits," he said.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. "Helpless? You shot it down! What was that, some kind of death beam?"
The dozen or so Promessans of the infiltration force laughed. "You want them to nuke us, outsider?" Isis asked. Her voice, not surprisingly, was not friendly.
"Shoulder-launched modern man-portable air-defense missile. Russian made. We tweak the nitrogen-cooled indium antimonide seeker head to give it all-aspect tracking capabilities against reciprocating engines – meaning, prop planes. They run lots cooler than jets. Another reason they're better for close air support," Burt, a young Asian-looking man who was one of their team of twelve, said.
"Our capabilities, advanced as they are, aren't anywhere near sufficient for us to take on the whole world," Xia said. "Not eve
n the U.S., which still boasts a big chunk of the world's military capacity. We're using our energy hand weapons sparingly, because they're not really anything that couldn't be duplicated and we don't want to announce to the world that, here we are, lost city with supertechnology, just waiting to be plundered. It'd be a feeding frenzy."
"And that," said Burt, "would be why we're off on a good old-fashioned decapitation strike."
****
Annja was unsure how far they had hiked. She knew Promessa lay well inland of the main river, although lesser streams skeined the land as they did most of the whole basin. She guessed it was at least twenty miles away; she didn't know the quilombo's full size. Xia and Patrizinho and the others she had met the past few days had smilingly refused to answer questions about specific locations.
Along with Annja and Xia and Patrizinho the group included Burt, stocky and round faced with his hair in a long queue down his back, and a pair of young women, Lys and Julia. Lys was blond and slender, a few inches shorter than Annja. Julia was average height, sturdy and broad shouldered, brown skinned and eyed and with short black hair. Everyone spoke English around Annja. Lys spoke with what sounded to Annja like a Midwest American accent.
Everyone was dressed in practical combat gear. She was told the specially developed fabric used the wearer's own metabolic energy to optimize their body temperature. It was also waterproof, as the diminutive and very dark armorer explained as they were fitted for the suits. Likewise the combat suit resisted cuts and bullets – though was far from bulletproof – as well as fire. The clothing reduced the wearer's heat signature, although since the team wasn't using any kind of face masks or shielding, infrared detectors would see their heads as bright balloons bobbing above the ground. No one else seemed bothered by that, so Annja didn't worry about it.
A lot was not being explained to her, she knew. Some was because she didn't have the referents for it. Some was because what she didn't know she couldn't tell. She had not been taught the willed-suicide technique of the Promessans – her head had been stuffed too full of knowledge in too short a time as it was, and she wasn't even sure how she felt ethically about using it.
For the same reason she had also refused any kind of suicide pill. She hoped she didn't regret it. If Publico thought she had any information that might serve him, she didn't doubt he was capable of handing her over to his local allies for torture.
She also refused the treatment some Promessans going out in the world took. The chemical injection turned their bodies into incendiaries or bombs in case of death. Hoatzin Nest, Isis's lover whom Annja had killed, had taken the former route. Upon his death, his body had spontaneously combusted and burned Mafalda's shop to the ground. Annja had to admit part of her found that idea appealing. But she'd never be able to rest for fear the stuff would accidentally go off while she was still alive. Or even cause her to die of some horrid hitherto-unknown cancer ten or fifteen years down the line.
****
"And here I was thinking you two were otherworldly spiritual types," Annja said once they started moving again. All of the team wore harnesses of some dark, tough synthetic over their midnight suits, with light packs on their backs. Each carried a weapon that vaguely resembled a modern bullpup carbine. Over each Promessan's shoulder rose the hilt of a short sword.
What seemed to be a derelict field turned out to be a bog. Warm water squelched to just above Annja's ankles. It made her very glad for their special suits. She knew what kind of things lived in Amazon waters. Not that the creatures crawling through the leaf litter ubiquitous on more solid land were any friendlier or more reassuring.
"Did we give that impression the last couple of days?" Patrizinho said. He chuckled. "Forgive it, please. The spiritual part of what we had to teach you in such short time was the greater. Your physical skills are already superb."
"Haven't you figured it out yet?" Xia said. "We're in the same business as you, Annja – defenders. Physical combat in all its aspects is only part of our jobs. But it is a major part. And like anyone you're likely to encounter among us, the jobs we do are the ones we're most attuned to."
The sky lit with a flickering white glare to the accompaniment of a snarling thunder. Though Annja, like the others, wore small buds in her ears to dampen the supersonic harmonics of gunfire and explosive blasts, she could tell the noise was savagely sharp.
"Twenty millimeter machine cannon," said one of Isis's team they had joined up with on the ground. He looked like a pure Amazonian Indian, short, spare built but broad across the shoulders, with long black hair tied back from his handsome face.
They advanced into more dense forest. The two squads walked roughly parallel, staggered so that no one walked exactly behind the person in front, apparently to reduce the likelihood of a single burst of gunfire that would take them all out at once. Annja, in the middle of her group with Patrizinho's comforting presence behind her and Lys in front, tried to walk as soundlessly as the others. She didn't find it as easy as the others seemed to not squelch in muck, rustle in leaf-litter or swish and crackle through branches.
Each of the midnight suits had a small panel on the breastbone and between the shoulder blades that glowed faintly, a different color for each team member. The others had laughed at Annja's vocal alarm at having an illuminated target right over her heart, front and back. No one not on the team, Burt explained, could see the panels. How that was even possible Annja had no clue. The Promessans offered no explanation.
Isis led the second group. Despite her barely shielded enmity toward Annja, Annja had to admit she seemed quietly competent.
The chief of the strike team was named Marco. Instead of the harness the others wore, he sported a web utility belt heavily loaded-down with instruments.
Xia held up her hand. The two squads came to a halt in the midst of a particularly thick stand of underbrush. A small figure materialized soundlessly as a shadow right by her left elbow. He grinned at her with teeth bright white in a black-painted face. He was no taller than Annja's shoulder, with a bowl haircut and a skimpy loincloth. He also had a Kalashnikov assault rifle almost as long as he was tall.
Xia conversed in low, fluid syllables with the small, nearly naked man who suddenly crouched beside her. Annja couldn't understand a word. It was obviously a local Indian dialect. The crouching man answered softly, nodded, stood. Then he simply became one with the night.
Xia turned back, beckoning the others to gather near. "We've got our allies passing word we're coming through so they don't bushwhack us," she told the team. "They say the invaders are patrolling very aggressively."
"Aren't they bushwhacking them?" Burt asked.
Xia nodded. "The commander is showing the degree of regard for human life you'd expect. They care about their own troops only a little more than they do about us. The only real difference is, they actively want us dead."
"So it is in the Third World," Patrizinho told Annja softly. "Life isn't cheap to the people. It's the rulers who don't value the people's lives."
"They're getting ready to make a big push," Isis predicted.
"At night?" Burt shook his head. "No way."
Xia held up a hand. "Not our concern. We just have to be ready for anything."
They moved on again. Twice they stopped and crouched immobile as enemy patrols crashed by. The first spoke in semimuffled Portuguese. The second was mostly being harangued in English by somebody with an unmistakable American accent. Annja wondered if it was one of Publico's mercenaries.
In both cases the patrols blundered within a few feet of Annja and her friends without showing any evidence of suspecting they were there. Annja could smell the sweat soaking their fatigues – and smell the fear in that sweat, as well as traces of the alcohol and tobacco they'd recently consumed.
The noise and glare of battle increased as the team proceeded. Mortars and grenades sounded. Automatic weapons popped and snarled. Tracers arced against the sky. Annja couldn't tell how much, if any, fire came fr
om the defenders. The invaders let off rounds in truck-loads, whether against actual targets, or to suppress suspected enemies or simply to make themselves feel better, she couldn't tell. It occurred to her that her group risked getting hit purely by accident.
Gradually they moved beyond the sound and light show of the ongoing firefight. The invaders pushed to the west-northwest, angling inland from the river. Xia had led her infiltration team north and east, swinging wide around the main thrust.
Now they turned back toward the river and the headquarters the Brazilian commander shared with Sir Iain and his men. They began to advance by impulses. One squad hunkered down, rifles ready, covering as the other moved. Then the group that had just advanced would go to cover and keep watch while their comrades leapfrogged out ahead of them.
Xia raised her hand. Her five followers sank into a stand of brush. Annja raised her rifle and snugged its padded butt to her shoulder as Isis got her people up and led them forward.
Annja peered through her sights. She had been checked out with the weapon at the armory that afternoon. It fired semi-or full-automatic, quite silently. It reloaded from the top with blocks of fifty projectiles. The chief armorer told Annja the rifles used electromagnetism, whatever that meant in this context.
Atop her rifle, conventional night sights glowed ghostly in the darkness. With a pressure of her right thumb she was provided with infrared vision.
At once she saw big blobs of yellow so bright they were almost white, right ahead. "Isis, get down!" she hissed, knowing the communicator woven into the fabric of her suit would transmit the warning.
The night was ripped apart by white fire and horrific noise.
Chapter 32
Helpless, Annja watched as a pair of Isis's squad members, silhouetted against a colossal muzzle-flare, were shredded by a burst from a machine cannon. The rest of the armored car's 20-mm shells cracked over the heads of Annja's squad to rake the jungle line forty yards behind them.
