by E. E. Knight
“Perhaps Fermi has returned,” Frys said, a quaver in his voice. He went to the window, then ducked back. “Those are men from the ruins!”
“Not such a secret hideout after all,” the Tomb Raider said, mentally kicking herself for not going to the ruins the previous evening despite her fatigue. Or setting a watch. Sloppy, Croft. She closed the VADS belt around her waist and slipped on the headset. The belt-box computer winked green at her, and her headset gave a confirmation tone.
“Are you going to fight them?” Frys asked.
“Got a problem with that?” Lara asked in turn.
“Well,” said Frys, “there are an awful lot of them. Maybe we should just surrender.”
“They didn’t let your father surrender,” Lara said. “And they won’t let us surrender, either.”
From far below came the sound of boots clattering up the stairs.
Lara looked at the staircase again. The tight spiral would provide ample cover for the men until they were almost at the top. The attackers would be able to use tear gas, shotguns … If only she could get at the stairway from the side…
The hammocks caught her eye, especially Alex Frys’s. It was huge, with elastic cording at either end.
She took it off the wall and hurried over to the little hatch in the center of the hut that allowed access to the underside, presumably to trim branches and repair the network of cables securing the platform to the treetop.
“Lara, what are you doing?” demanded Heather. “There’s got to be fifteen or twenty men out there!”
Lara pulled open the hatch and looked for footholds, a way down below the platform. “They’re not professional soldiers, Heather,” she said meanwhile. “Professionals wouldn’t have run in a mob, all bunched up like that.” Nor would they have run pell-mell for the stairs as though in a race to be first to the top, but she didn’t have time to explain everything.
The voices of Borg, Heather, and Frys, all offering conflicting advice, blended into a babble. Lara shut them out. She dropped through the hatch, crouched on a branch, and threw one end of the hammock around the three-meter-wide trunk. Catching it, she fashioned the hammock into a lumberman’s belt.
The Tomb Raider needed her hands free.
Borg’s face appeared above the open hatch. “What can I do to help?”
“Close the hatch and pray,” Lara said.
Then, trusting her life to something designed for a summer afternoon, she leaned back against the nylon and elastic of the hammock. It held. She gripped the smooth gray bark between her knees and lowered the belt, then her knees, then her belt again, being careful to stay opposite the spiral stairs.
She risked a peek around the tree trunk.
The black-and-tans pounded up the stairs, some carrying assault rifles with bayonets fixed, others with Taser guns mounted under the barrels.
The Tasers looked like flashlights with pistol grips; they fired a pair of needles with wires leading back to a capacitor in the handle. Upon impact, a 50,000-volt charge, enough to incapacitate anyone, completed the circuit.
She’d been hit by a Taser once. It felt like being struck between the shoulder blades with a mallet. Her heart hadn’t settled down for fifteen minutes afterwards.
The man first in line on the stairs carried an assault shotgun. He could kill everyone in the canopy tower by just sticking the muzzle over the lip of the floor and sweeping the room. The question was, were they here to kill or to capture?
“VADS: right rubber.”
A clip appeared at her right hip point. She slammed her gun down on it, leaned around the tree using the elastic lumberman’s belt, aimed, and fired.
The Tomb Raider bounced a rubber bullet off the lead man’s stomach. He dropped his shotgun, gasping. The man behind him crashed into him, and both sprawled on the narrow staircase.
“Turn around, boys,” she shouted in English. “Trespassers will be punished. Severely.”
Her second rubber bullet caught the third man in the temple. Muzzle flashes against the green canopy and the angry chatter of automatic weapons fire sounded across the treetops. She heard bullets thunk into tree trunks behind her and punch through branches with cracking sounds. She supposed that answered her “kill or capture” question. Back behind the tree, she used VADS to load fléchettes into both her pistols. “Not easily discouraged, don’t want to play nice,” she said to herself.
Swinging on the pivot of her hammock, she popped out from the other side of the tree and opened fire. The brass cartridge cases tumbled far, far down to the forest floor. Blood spray from the stairway followed the cartridge cases down, and she hid behind the bole again to the sound of curses, screams, and moans.
Bullets whizzed through airspace she’d occupied a moment before, ripping the skinlike bark off the three-meter-thick Samauma.
She scooted out and dropped two more of the men on the stairs. This time she felt the bullets hit the tree near her feet. She drew them back, relying on the hammock to hold her up. They shot at the hammock, but the web of nylon cording couldn’t easily be cut by gunfire.
A pair of hissing grenades—she caught a whiff of tear
gas—flew past her before spinning downward.
Not overly bright, or perhaps just overexcited.
The Tomb Raider heard footfalls between the gunshots at the tree. The black-and-tans were rushing the platform despite her. She swung out again and cut three more down.
A whistle sounded. “Back to the boat!” someone shouted in Spanish.
On her next swing outward, Lara saw that it wasn’t a trick. The black-and-tans were hurrying back down the circular steps, carrying or dragging their wounded.
The Tomb Raider could have put more bullets between the retreating pairs of shoulderblades, but there were already four dead on the staircase. The hot USP Matches went back into their holsters.
Lara Croft worked legs and hammock to get back to the treetop before one of the black-and-tans reached the bottom of the stairs and took advantage of the better shooting position.
“Are they gone?” Frys asked as he extended a hand to help her through the trapdoor.
The look she gave him made him pull it back.
“They’re running. Leaving dead on the stairs, too.” She hauled herself up through the hatch.
“Are you okay?” Borg asked.
“It was like hitting targets on a range. They were totally exposed from the side on those stairs. Slaughter.”
“How terrible,” Heather said.
“I like my fights as one-sided as possible,” Lara said. She went to the window and gazed down at the fleeing men. One turned and ran backwards down the trail, emptying his magazine at the canopy tower until he tripped and flipped over. Not a single one of his bullets hit the structure, though it was nearly as wide as the broad side of a barn.
“Let’s see that map.” Lara strode over to the east-facing wall, which had a smaller window than the others. She traced the river, looked at the elevation marks.
“Think they’ll take the river all the way back?” she asked Frys.
“The hike would be formidable. Solid forest between here and the ruins, and there’s no trail that I know of.”
“That’s what I thought.” Lara smiled grimly. “Borg, you up for a run? This might be our chance. We could get in ahead of them.”
“Help me with my arms, please.”
Another time she would have been interested to learn more about the elaborate connections between Borg’s stumps and the mechanical arms. But with time an issue, she just followed his directions. Attaching the arms was no more difficult than putting a lens on a camera body: All she had to do was line up a red triangle and a red square, then turn, and the arm clicked into place. Then she plugged in the USB cables.
Lara and Borg helped each other into the special packs they’d brought, and slung water-carrying camel packs over those. The packs came equipped with straws to make for convenient rehydrating on the move.
�
�Are those parachutes?” Heather asked, indicating the closure on the larger packs Lara and Borg wore beneath the camels.
“They are,” Lara replied.
“Umm, so where’s the plane?” Heather continued.
“There isn’t one,” Borg said. “It will be a base jump, from the edge of the Whispering Abyss.”
Heather blinked her eyes.
Lara adjusted the straps on her lucky pack so that it would sit nestled atop the parachute. “Don’t let me forget to change this before we jump.”
Borg nodded. “Of course.”
She went to the window. The healthy survivors of the attack on the canopy tower were splashing into the river, to be hauled up on board the Plato.
“Bring the telescope over here.”
It took her a moment to get it aligned. She looked through the eyepiece, searching for the face she’d seen on the back of the book jacket, that of Tejo Kunai. Instead, she saw someone else.
Ajay.
Her old schoolmate stood at the front of the boat, one booted foot on the rail. She had machine pistols strapped in holsters on either thigh, a tank top, and wraparound blue sunglasses. Her hair hung from the back of her head in a single braid.
Perhaps Ajay saw the distant flash of telescope glass in the morning sun. She stared straight at the canopy tower, slapped her pistol butts.
Then Lara recognized another face. Fermi, the Peruvian park ranger, was helping the wounded to board the boat.
She turned away from the window, addressed Heather and Frys: “There are bodies on the stairs. You two can bury them while we’re gone.”
“Shouldn’t we put them somewhere for the police?” Frys asked.
“Leave them out, then. Just make sure it’s downwind. The ants and the flies will leave less for the Peruvians than if you just buried them.”
“I’ll radio Fermi,” Frys decided. “He can bring the police back with him.”
“I doubt it,” Lara said. “He’s already back, aboard the Plato.”
“No!”
“I just got a good look at him through the telescope. It’s him, all right.”
“But that means…”
“Right. They’ve known you were here the whole time. You can’t trust Fermi, and that means you can’t trust the park service, either. Radio Williams. Get him to call in the police. Whatever’s going on at Ukju Pacha, the Méne are willing to kill to keep it secret.”
12
Lara Croft ignored the bodies on the stairs, but not the blood. This wasn’t the time for a slip: It was a long way down. At the bottom, Lara and Borg dashed for cover in the great roots of the tree. Lara listened for a few minutes for footfalls, conversation, any sign that the black-and-tans had left a team behind. Nothing. She pulled out her global positioning system, a handheld device about the size and shape of a pocket PC, and checked the location of the first waypoint on the route to the ruins.
Then they ran.
After the first sprint, they settled down into a jog. Only a few broad-leafed shade plants and spiky ferns thrived beneath the thick canopy. The spongy footing endangered them only on the slopes.
Dead branches lay on a carpet of dead leaves, and fallen trees were being slowly consumed by moss and lichen. Lara had been in enough rain forests to know that it took only a year or two, if that, for even the biggest deadfall to become nothing more than a fern-nursing clump of compost on the forest floor.
They jogged for thirty minutes, stopped for five, then jogged for thirty minutes more, sucking water from their camel packs. The run became more difficult as they headed uphill. She spotted a familiar looking plant, and stopped to gather its plump leaves. Borg asked to be shown her GPS.
“I thought so,” he said. “Why this course? The ground isn’t much easier, and we’re taking the long way to the ruins.”
“But it’s the short way to the river gorge. I want to go to the cliff here.” She tapped the waypoint on the green screen.
“Why? To see how far upriver the Plato has gotten?”
“We’d win the race to the ruins, but only by an hour at most. I want to try to slow them up a little more.”
“There’s water at the ruins, I hope,” Borg said.
“I can’t see them making the climb down to the river every time someone needs to brew coffee.”
“Coffee. That sounds good right now.”
She extracted the leaves she’d gathered. “Try this. It’s muna, a native remedy for headaches and fatigue.”
“What’s in it?” “
“Don’t worry, it’s not a local methamphetamine. The biochemistry, as I understand it, just helps your body move oxygen around more efficiently. Salicylic acid, too, for the pain, probably.”
They both chewed the slightly bitter leaves. She felt her batteries recharge.
Borg looked over his shoulder at a sudden crunching noise. A furry face blinked out at them from behind a fallen trunk, its jaws working on a tuber of some sort. The animal squeaked, turned tail, and disappeared beneath two roots of an upright tree.
“A sloth?” Borg asked.
“No. It looked like a guinea pig.”
“I have never heard of a guinea pig of that size.”
“They grow them big around here, I guess. Perhaps Frys can explain … if we ever see him again, that is. I’ve never tried a BASE jump like this.”
Borg lifted his classic chin, and his seafarer’s eyes met hers. “I have much experience with such jumps, Lara. We can do it, as long as the legend of the Whispering Abyss hasn’t grown in the telling. All it takes is nerve and skill, and you have no shortage of either.”
“How could Ajay have left this man? Every time he spoke, Lara had a hard time not daydreaming about climbing into a seagoing yacht with him and sailing up a fjord.
***
The Plato hadn’t rounded the southern hairpin turn before the gorge when Lara and Borg reached the cliff. They were on the shoulder of the mountain holding the ruins of Ukju Pacha, but those ruins were still a few kilometers away, at the narrowest point of the river. Lara placed her feet carefully at the edge of the cliff and looked down six hundred meters of sheer rock, thankful that she didn’t suffer from vertigo. Pure whitewater flowed beneath, with a tow path running along their side of the cliff.
The river made two turns here, like the letter zed with a short middle line. At the top corner of the zed was the ruins, and another cliff. She and Borg stood downriver at the bottom corner of the zed. She picked up a rock, tossed it underhand, and then watched, timing its descent into the foaming water far below.
A moment later, the Plato came into sight, pulling up the rapids at the end of the zed. A team of horses or, more likely, mules—she couldn’t tell at this distance—had a line out to the Plato, hauling it up through the spots of rushing water too swift for the boat’s engines.
“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” Lara observed.
Borg adjusted the straps over his beefy shoulders with his claw hand. No wonder he had a frame like that, if he spent much time with those heavy arms attached. “And how will you shoot? You have perhaps a rifle in sections packed away?”
“I don’t need a rifle.” Lara picked up a cricket-ball-sized rock she’d spotted earlier. “Find a few about this size, would you?”
“You will stop them with rocks?”
“I will stop them with physics. Force equals mass times velocity squared.”
“Meaning what?”
“You’ll see.”
Borg searched the cliff’s edge for rocks as Lara planted herself on a prominence. She threw her stone cricket-bowler style. She watched it fall as Borg handed her another stone of similar size.
The pop-pop-pop of small-arms fire aimed back up at her echoed in the canyon above the rush of water, but the bullets fired straight up at the cliff top were no more of a threat at this distance than the hummingbirds that flitted among the blossoms at the cliff’s edge.
It took her three tries before she hit. The fourth rock
went through the canopy and out the boat’s bottom, judging from the frantic bailing that commenced. She threw two more rocks. She saw one splash beyond the boat, but the other hit dead center.
The black-and-tans fled the filling center of the boat, shouting at the man with the mules in harness. She saw water come in over the boat’s side, dusted her palms off, and pulled her minibinoculars out of her pack.
The black-and-tans worked like demons to save their wounded. She watched a man, helped by Ajay, pulling another through the water using the towline to get to the shore. If nothing else, the Méne were loyal to one another.
Borg gasped. “Give me those glasses.”
“Yes, Ajay is down there. She’s a strong swimmer. The current is quick, but it’s not that dangerous. All the white water is at the turns in the river.”
“I want it anyway.”
Lara adjusted the straps on her pack. “There’s no time, Borg. We have to get to the ruins.”
“We are here for Ajay.”
“Yes, but she’s down there, and we’re up here. Unless you’re Superman, there’s nothing you can do from this distance. Besides, it’s more than Alison now. Haven’t you been paying attention? We’re going to get Ajay out, yes, but the Méne are up to work I haven’t quite fathomed yet. Murder, attempted murder—I don’t like anything I’ve learned about them. We need to find out more, and the ruins are the best place to do that.”
Borg nodded. “All right. I will wait. I know one thing, though. The Méne have brainwashed her. Alison would never be with such people, a murderer like this Kunai, willingly. I’m sure of it.”
Lara wasn’t so sure, but Borg was already running toward the ruins. The sight of Ajay had renewed his energy even more than the muna leaves.
***
Far above Ukju Pacha, condors circled on their spread wings, tiny black crosses against a blue sky. Crouched out of sight behind a fallen tree, Lara examined the Méne camp through her minibinoculars, but saw no one moving either among the tents or within the ruins.
The “expedition” had camped under the three-meter-tall walls of Ukju Pacha. Their garbage was bagged according to customary practice, but rain forest raiders had torn open the sacks to get at the refuse within. Lara nodded at Borg, and they rose from concealment and approached the seemingly deserted camp from downwind, masking their scent with the odor of the garbage in case the Méne used dogs to guard their enclave. But there was no barking, no sound or movement at all from within the camp.
