Secret of the Slaves

by Alex Archer

  She reached the supply tent and squatted. A moment later her fire team’s other members joined her—Xingu and Isis. As promised Patrizinho had smoothed the slashed wire back into place, so deftly Annja couldn’t see the cut from a few yards away. He took Lys and Julia and vanished into shadows to the left.

  Isis clearly commanded this team. She acknowledged Annja with a simple nod. Whatever Isis harbored in her heart toward her, Annja felt confident it would in no way affect what she did here inside the wire. The life the Maroons had chosen to live was quite Darwinian, for better or worse. Those who indulged their emotions at the wrong time died.

  Annja didn’t know what criteria had been used to select the team. She didn’t even know who did the deciding, since Promessa had no visible government, and seemed more a tribal collection of clans than anything else. But she had no doubt her comrades would be professional in action.

  They slipped to the tent’s far end. Isis did a three-second lookout, then gestured for Xingu and Annja to advance while she covered.

  With Xingu on her right Annja moved into the open. There was still shadow, thanks to the haphazard placement of the lights. But she felt naked anyway. Worse, they would have to transit a good ten yards of brightly lit open space to reach the huge multiroom tent where Publico, according to their Indian spies, held court.

  From the right came voices. Male, young, full of boisterous energy, although held fairly low to keep from attracting the ire of their superiors. They spoke Spanish. Xingu held up his hand. Annja froze, wondering if stopping in the open was a really good idea.

  Xingu carried two projectile weapons. Slung behind his back, barrel down for ready access, rode his compact electromagnetic rifle. He held a second weapon, about half its size and with a single pistol grip, in both hands. It had a bulbous body and a long narrow barrel. He snugged it to its shoulder and aimed it toward the voices.

  Two men in cammies strolled out from around the corner of another tent ten yards away. They were so engrossed in their clowning that neither so much as glanced toward the two people crouched in plain view.

  Not until it was too late, anyway.

  Xingu shot the man on the right in the throat. His weapon made no sound. The merc dropped instantly. The other faltered in midstep. Annja could see the look of baffled surprise come onto his lean young features.

  He started to turn, reaching clumsily for the M-16 slung over his own shoulder. But Xingu calmly shot him under the right ear. He folded like an empty raincoat.

  “Curare-derived toxin,” Xingu told her as they scuttled for the cover of the tent the two had emerged from behind. “Rapid propagation. Death instant.” They were the first words she had heard the young man say.

  Once at the tent they covered as Isis joined them. “Why don’t we just use that, then?” Annja asked.

  “Clothing stops projectiles. Have to hit skin,” he said.

  They held position as Isis ghosted on right and inward, to a pile of crates covered with olive-drab tarpaulins. They kept working their way toward the command pavilion from its end. Such action as was visible was all going on to the river side of the camp, where a stream of trucks came through the gate and off-loaded. As Annja and Xingu darted around the end of a darkened tent from which snoring emerged in several keys, Annja dared hope they’d make it undetected.

  Then the door to a latrine to their right opened and a geeky guy with glasses came out fiddling with the fly of his camo pants. His eyes and mouth flew wide.

  “Alarme! Alarme! Alarme!” he shrilly screamed.

  Xingu shot him twice through the open mouth with two curare darts from his high-tech blowgun. By then it was too late, of course. The soldier got what his last words called for—alarms fired up all over the camp. It flashed through Annja’s mind how all her special-war-fare buddies would sagely nod their heads—another flawless op ruined by a totally random event.

  She darted for the cover of the latrine, a long shack walled with what looked suspiciously like prefab fence sections from Home Depot, with a slanting roof of corrugated tin. A heavy weight hit her from behind.

  The world exploded in flame and noise from scarcely fifteen yards away.

  Even as she was falling she felt impacts, heard grunts. But the impacts weren’t on her. Rather they were transmitted through the lithe, strong body that had hit her in a flying tackle. They landed. Isis’s forehead slammed hard against the hard-packed earth beside Annja’s face.

  Annja rolled the woman off her. She was limp. She was surprisingly heavy for one so lean. Like Annja herself, she apparently packed lots of muscle on a rangy frame.

  The anthracite eyes focused on Annja’s face. “Do what you must,” Isis said.

  Annja’s heart fell into her stomach. Life fled the Promessan warrior woman’s eyes. Her head lolled to the side.

  Looking up through tears that threatened to blind her, Annja saw Xingu running to her, firing his electronic rifle toward where the terrific light and noise had come from. From beyond the latrine came more bright flashes and crackling explosions, full of supersonics that seemed to go through her skull like needles despite the sound dampers in her ears. She expected to see the man shot down.

  Instead he dived down beside her, intact and breathing hard. Annja low-crawled to the corner of the latrine to risk a look around.

  Fifteen yards away a huge Hummer was going up in flames. A big pintle-mounted machine gun sprouted from its roof. Fire jetted straight up through the mount. Men bailed out the doors, screaming, shrouded in flames.

  Annja dropped to her belly, stuck her rifle out with her left hand, fired two quick bursts. The screams cut off. The men dropped. She wasn’t sure whether it was an act of mercy or to ensure they didn’t somehow extinguish themselves and come after the infiltrators again.

  She ducked back and looked at Xingu.

  He patted his rifle. “Selective load,” he said, almost apologetically. “Explosive shells.”

  She started to demand to know why she hadn’t been told about that feature. She stopped herself before wasting the time and breath. She had gotten the basics she needed to fight. It was for the best and she knew it, no matter how badly she wanted to resent the fact.

  She got up on her haunches, transferring the rifle back to her right hand. She looked down at Isis. The woman seemed at peace. She had fought her best and died the death she had chosen. She might even be envied.

  She had also displayed inhuman fortitude to be able to so much as talk. The Hummer had mounted a.50-caliber machine gun. The special suit was no protection—it was probably all that kept her being blown to pieces.

  Annja reached down her left hand and closed the staring eyes with a quick motion of her first two fingers. “We have to go,” she told Xingu. He nodded.

  The camp was alive with shouting, shooting men. They all seemed to be blazing away at random. Looking back across the compound, Annja saw two men go down, apparently hit by friendly fire.

  By unspoken consent she and Xingu both took off around the latrine shack’s far end, ran between it and the burning Hummer despite the big machine-gun cartridges cooking off inside the inferno. There was no point in any fancy bounding overwatch now. Their only hope of reaching their goal was speed.

  Once inside—well, they had to get there first.

  They almost made that final dash. Then a burst of gunfire, from what direction Annja couldn’t even tell in the pandemonium, raked Xingu’s torso from the left. He sprawled on his face.

  Annja glanced back in an agony of indecision. She burned with desire to go back to help her wounded comrade. But that would doom her and the mission. She could not let herself die and fail.

  Xingu heaved himself up. The grin he showed her from his dark, handsome face would have carried more reassurance had it not been crimson with his own blood.

  A single shot punched through his temples left to right. He fell on his face in the dirt.

  Annja turned and sprinted for Publico’s tent. Letting her rifle h
ang by its sling, she summoned the sword.

  34

  Inside the big tent Sir Iain smiled as he heard sirens howl and guns speak.

  “Annja, dearest girl,” he said. “I’ve been waiting.”

  He reached into an interior pocket of his linen jacket, produced a small object. It was blue plastic and shiny metal and resembled an asthma inhaler.

  “What’s that? Drugs?” Colonel Amaral demanded from across the tent. The color had dropped from his plump, dark-olive face, leaving it ashen behind his beard and moustache.

  “Transformation,” Publico breathed as power rushed through veins and nerves like a shock wave from a bomb.

  A flap at the tent’s rear flew open. Eight men charged into the room. They were tall men, wide men. They were made even wider by the bulky olive-and-earth-tone-painted suits of bullet-resistant polycarbonate armor they wore. They carried curved polycarbonate shields on their arms, and held yard-long shock batons in gauntleted hands.

  “Who are they?” Amaral demanded, gaping in amazement.

  “My bodyguards.”

  Fat jiggling above his too-tight web belt, the colonel tried to force his way into the protective circle the armored men formed around Publico. They thrust him rudely back.

  “Sorry, Colonel,” Publico said. “They’re for me, not thee.”

  Amaral’s dark eyes bulged. Publico laughed, a huge roaring laugh that rattled the tent walls. The drugs always had that effect on him—filled him with the sense of invincibility.

  And why not, he thought, when my enemies are bringing everything I desire right to me?

  A ripping sound from the weatherproofed fabric behind Amaral made him turn. His right hand clawed at his holster flap.

  Something silvery flashed in out of the humid night. There came another sound like tearing cloth. He felt a burning sensation at his throat.

  Amaral spun back to face Publico, visible past the armored shoulders of his guards. Then he dropped to his knees and pitched onto his belly, as blood drained from his gaping wound.

  A young man, at least six-four and built like a greyhound, stepped into the tent. His midnight-blue body-suit fit his muscle-rippling torso like skin. Chestnut dreadlocks hung about his shoulders. He held a Japanese-style short sword naked in his hand.

  He stepped over the colonel’s shapeless lump of body. Ignoring the huge armored guards, his eyes fixed like golden spotlights on Publico’s blue ones.

  “Welcome, my friend,” Publico called to him as a slender blue-eyed blond woman stepped in quickly to the young man’s left.

  Moran held up a huge hand and beckoned. “Come on and die.”

  ANNJA SLICED a six-foot vertical cut in the tent and stepped through.

  The pavilion’s main room was a good ten yards long and six or seven wide. Despite its size it was crowded.

  In the center of a circle of enormous men in bizarre plastic armor carapaces painted in camouflage patterns, Patrizinho was slashing at Sir Iain Moran with his sword. The big Irishman was easily dodging the serpent-fast sword cuts and laughing uproariously, as if he were having the time of his life.

  Annja’s eyes narrowed. No normal human could have evaded Patrizinho’s attacks so fearlessly. Sir Iain was into his chemicals again.

  On the far side of the wall of goons Annja glimpsed blond hair. She heard a hailstorm sound. Lys was shooting her noiseless electromagnetic rifle, trying either to chop a path clear or drop Sir Iain, their most vital target. But the big men just held up their Roman-style shields. The projectiles rattled off them as harmlessly as Ping-Pong balls.

  Three of the thick men charged Lys. She let go her rifle and whipped out her sword. She uttered a falcon scream of challenge.

  Publico darted in to rock Patrizinho’s head back with a fast straight right. The Promessan staggered back. Blood streamed from his nose.

  Annja charged. Shield to shield, two of the bulkily armored men advanced to meet her. She swung the sword overhand at the one on her right, figuring to break or even sever the man’s shield arm.

  The blade bit right through the upper rim of the shield, cut deep. But after a bit more than a foot the blade stopped.

  Grinning behind the faceplate of his helmet, the man on her left jabbed his stick toward Annja’s ribs. He had a big brutal face. She thought to recognize either Goran or Mladko.

  She pulled on the hilt of her sword to yank it free of the shield. It stuck fast. Belatedly she realized why the cut had stopped—it wasn’t that the tough polymer material of the shield defeated the sword’s edge. It was because the plastic sides of the cut had gripped the flat of her blade tightly as a vise.

  She released the sword and danced to her right. Goran, as she chose to think of him, didn’t have a lot of range, trying to reach around the big shield. He could not stretch far enough to hit her.

  The man at his side yelled in surprise as the sword simply vanished.

  Annja smelled ozone. She realized the batons were tipped with electric leads. If Goran’s had struck her she would have received an incapacitating shock along with any other damage the blow might do.

  She scampered back to reassess the situation. Patrizinho was battling with Publico. The rock star stood with his head tipped forward, his lightly silvered dark blond hair framing his face. Two other bodyguards were stomping something on the floor. To her sick horror Annja realized she could no longer see Lys.

  The two men closest to Annja, having absorbed the fact that one way or another the woman in front of them was now unarmed, glanced toward each other and charged as one. Annja was fairly certain the second was Mladko.

  She lunged toward Goran on her left. Turning sideways, she slammed into his shield. Taken by surprise, he rocked back onto his heels. Then he swung the shield outward with all his strength, hoping to fling her to her back, where she’d be helpless against a baton thrust.

  But Annja had grabbed his shield’s upper rim with both hands and let all her weight hang from its inch-thick polycarbonate. Adding her weight to the momentum Goran had imparted caused the shield to swing open to his left like a gate.

  Before an almost equally surprised Mladko could strike at her Annja had swung past the business end of his baton. She found herself right between the hulks.

  With her right foot she kicked hard at the back of Goran’s left knee. It wasn’t a blow that could break the joint. But it did buckle it.

  Already overbalanced Goran dropped to that knee. Annja got her feet beneath her, stood. She glanced quickly over her right shoulder to make sure none of the other bodyguards was trying to club or zap her from behind.

  But they had clearly been ordered to stay surrounding Publico at all costs, in case more would-be assassins turned up. Patrizinho and Publico continued their death dance, oblivious to the world. For the moment she was clear. And a moment was all Annja Creed needed.

  She let her weight fall back again, locking out Goran’s shield elbow. Mladko had turned toward Annja. He thrust his baton at her. Her latest move caused him to ram the tip of his baton against the inside of his partner’s shield instead.

  Goran’s armor could not prevent Annja’s using legs and hips to torque the shield and pop his elbow joint with a nasty crack. He bellowed in agony and pitched forward onto his face.

  Mladko pulled his shield between himself and Annja. She grabbed its top as she had his partner’s. He was ready for that. He braced and stood like a rock.

  She was ready for that, too. Jumping and pushing hard with her arms, she scaled the shield as if it were a solid wall. So strong was the polycarbonate that the cut she had made didn’t open a millimeter. As she came over the top Annja bounced a shin kick off the side of Mladko’s head. His helmet took the force of the blow—most of it. But it gave her the split second she needed to scramble astride his shoulders like a monkey behind his head.

  Roaring with rage, he teetered in a circle. He tried to reach her. The armor bound his joints, rendering him clumsy. He slammed himself in the faceplate with t
he upper rim of his shield, stunning himself enough for Annja to catch hold of his baton right behind its live tip, use the leverage advantage to twist it from his hand and fling it away.

  He had turned 180 degrees. Still riding Mladko’s shoulders, Annja saw Publico lunge toward Patrizinho. Instantly Patrizinho’s blade flashed in a backhand slash for his enemy’s eyes.

  Patrizinho was fast and skilled. But in the grip of his drugs Publico was faster. He reversed motion, bending backward like a limbo artist. The short sword’s razor edge clipped a lock of hair from his head before swishing harmlessly past.

  The outward cut left Patrizinho totally open. Publico snapped forward and seized his foe. His right arm went beneath the Promessan’s left. His left hand caught the biceps of Patrizinho’s outflung sword arm.

  Patrizinho tried to head-butt him. Publico buried his face in the juncture of Patrizinho’s right arm and neck, jamming the attack. With his right arm clamped up at an angle between his opponent’s shoulder blades for leverage, Publico pushed back on the trapped arm with all his augmented strength.

  Patrizinho groaned as his shoulder joint was forced from its socket.

  His sword fell to the floor of the tent. Everything froze. Mladko stopped ineffectually trying to bat at Annja, momentarily more fascinated by his boss’s fight than his own seemingly comical predicament. Sensing the climax had arrived, the other guards had turned to watch their master’s combat.

  It all burned itself into Annja’s brain—the guards, faces obscured by visors. The sad crumple of Lys in a pool of blood at the tent’s far end, pathetic as a kitten hit by a car. Beside her an armored bodyguard lay on his back, unmoving arms outflung. The woman had not died without exacting a blood price of her own.

  And then Annja’s vision contracted to a tunnel around Patrizinho’s beautiful face, contorted with agony and effort as he still strove to break free.