The Very Best of Kate Elliott (35 page)

“What did you mean about keeping a rabbit in the hat?”

“Planning for contingencies. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, I really admire your father.
Sheh.”
She gave a breathy whistle.“I had a holo of him in my room when I was younger. You’ll be free to go in an hour or so.”

“What’s going on?” This request, Rose knew, would be followed by the Bad Guy telling all, because Bad Guys always told all. They could never resist the urge to reveal their diabolical plans.

Eleanor slammed the door shut—not because of anger but because the door wasn’t hung true and was besides swollen from moisture and heat and that was the only way to get it to shut. Left alone in the room, Rose tested the door at once, but it didn’t budge. She stuck her ear to the keyhole but heard nothing, not even footsteps. At least the itching had begun to subside. Finally, she turned and surveyed her prison.

It was an ugly room with concrete rebar walls, a molding ceiling sheltering two timid tarantulas in one corner, and a floor made up of peeling rectangles of some mottled beige substance. The tarantulas made her leery, but she didn’t fear them; she knew quite a bit about their behavior after living on the set of
Curse of the Tarantula.
The rest of the room disquieted her more. The floor wasn’t level, and the tiles hadn’t been well laid, leaving gaps limned with a powdery white dust. Two old cots made up of splintery wood supports with sun-faded, coarse burlap stretched between stood side by side.

Ugly puppies.

She winced, remembering the businesswoman’s casual words. In one corner someone had set up a shrine on an old plastic table, one of whose legs had been repaired with duct tape. Two weedy-looking bouquets of tiny yellow-and-white flowers resting crookedly in tin pots sat one on either side of a plastic baby doll with brown hair, brown eyes, and painted red lips. The doll was dressed in a lacy robe, frayed at the hem and dirty along the right sleeve, as though it had been dragged through dirt. A framed picture of the same doll, or one just like it, lay at its feet, showing the doll sitting on a similar surface but almost smothered by offerings of flowers and faded photographs of real children, some smiling, some obviously ill, one apparently dead. Someone had written at the bottom of the picture, in black marker in crude block letters,
El Niño Doctor.
Doctor Baby Jesus.

Rose knew something about the Kristie-Anne religion. Jesus was the god-person-man they prayed to, although she had never quite understood how you could be both a god and a mortal human being, more or less, at the same time. “The gods are everywhere,” her mother used to say.“They are what surround us, Mother Sun and Father Wind, Aunt Cloud and Uncle Moon, Sister Tent and Brother Sky, Daughter Earth and Son River, Cousin Grass and Cousin Rain. Gods are not people.”

Yet some people thought they could be. Rose sniffled. She wanted to cry, but because crying made her eyes red and puffy, unattractive, she had learned to choke down tears. But she was still frightened and alone.

She tongued the emergency transponder implanted in her jaw, but it was dead, killed by the crude blast of the pulse gun. Everything else she had left on the
Ra.

“I want my daddy,” she whispered.

A flash of light winked in the staring eyes of the baby doll. It began to talk in a creaky, squeaky, distorted voice, stretched, tenuous, and broken with skips and jerks.

“Si habla Español diga, ‘si.’ Nahuatocatzitziné, amehuantzitzin in anquimocaquilia, in anquimomatilia inin tlatolli, ximotlatoltican. If you speak English, say ‘yes.’”

Startled, she took a step back just as she said, scarcely meaning to, “Yes.”

“Please wait while I connect you. A medical technician will be with you in a moment. Catholic Medical Services provides sponsored medical advice free of charge to you, at any hour of the day or night. Help will be given whatever your circumstance. Please wait. When the doctor comes on line, state your location and your—”

A fluttering whir scattered the words. After a pause, a barely audible squeal cut at her hearing. The doll spoke again, channeling a real person’s voice.

“Please state your location and need. I am M. de Roepstorff, a medical technician. I am here to help you. Are you there?”

She was so stunned she forgot how to speak.

Patiently, the voice repeated itself.“Are you there?”

“I am. I am! I’m a prisoner—”

“Stay calm. Please state your location and we’ll send a team out—”

Static broke the connection.

There was silence, stillness; one of the tarantulas shifted, moving a few centimeters before halting, suspended, to crowd beside its fellow.

“Are you still there?” Rose whispered.“Are you there? Yes. Yes, I speak English.”

“Please wait while I connect you. The medical technician will be with you in a moment. Catholic Medical Services . . .”

The doll’s recorded voice squealed to a bruising pitch, ratcheted like gears stripping, and failed.

A grinding, grating noise startled her just as the kiss of cooler air brushed her face. The table rocked, tilted to the right, teetered, and crashed sideways to the ground, spilling pots, flowers, picture, and doll onto the concrete floor. Nothing broke, except the floor. One of the rectangular tiles wobbled, juddered, and jumped straight up. Rose leaped back, stumbled against a cot, and sat down hard as a man dressed in dark coveralls with a crude burlap mask concealing most of his face emerged from a hole in the floor, climbing as if going up a steep staircase. All she could see was his mouth, undistinguished, and his eyes, the iris dark and the white bloodshot with fatigue or, maybe, some barbaric drug intoxication.

“Quién eres?” he demanded. He carried a scatter gun. With it trained on her, he called down into the hole. “Esperabas un prisionero? Es una muchacha.”

Be cool and collected. That’s what her father always did in the acties.

“Eleanor put me here,” she said aloud as calmly as she could, hoping Eleanor was on their side. She was so scared her knees actually knocked together. “I don’t know what’s going on. Please don’t hurt me. I’m only fifteen. I can’t identify you because you’re wearing that mask, so I’m no threat to you.”

The man climbed out of the hole, crossed to the door, and tested it.

“It’s locked,” she said helpfully. “I’m a prisoner. I’m not a threat to you.”

He cursed, trying the handle a second time. A nasty looking knife was thrust between belt and coveralls, blade gleaming.

A second figure—head and shoulders—popped up in the hole. This one wore an old com-cap, with a brim, the kind of thing people wore before implants and sim-screens rendered such bulky equipment unnecessary. She was also holding an even more ancient rifle, the kind of thing you only saw in museums next to bazookas, halberds, and atlatls under the label
Primitive But Deadly.

Had the pulse gun killed her implant? She didn’t think so; it was technologically far more sophisticated than plain jane location/communication transponders and phones. She blinked to trigger it, caught a sigh of relief as the screen wavered on. Sotto voce, she whispered, “Spanish translator, text only. Cue to voice.”

The one with the rifle, dark eyes unwinking as she studied her captive, lifted her chin dismissively.

“Termina ya.” A woman’s voice, hard and impatient. Words scrolled across the sim-screen as Rose pretended she couldn’t understand them. “No podemos dejarla aquí . . .
cannot leave her here. She will go and tell of our hiding place.”

Adrenaline made her babble, that and her father’s maxim: keep them talking. How successfully he’d used that ploy in
Evil Empire
! “Is that an AK-47? I’ve seen one in nesh but never in the flesh before. Is that a thirty-round magazine?”

“No puedo hacerlo . .
. I cannot do it,”
said the first terrorist.“
She is too young. She is too innocent.”

“No [untranslatable] is innocent.”

The itch on her ears returned until she thought it would burn the lobes right off, but she clutched the side of the cot hard and the pain of the wood digging into her hands helped keep her mind off the itching and the fear.

Don’t give in to it. Once you gave in, the itching—or the fear—would consume you.

“Look at the mark on her face. It is real. It is not a tattoo of a rich child. No one with this type of mark on the face can be our enemy.”
He took three steps, close enough to hit her or stab her, but his touch—fingers brushing the blemish—was oddly gentle.

“I shoot the street dogs,”
said his companion.
“Things like this will be the death of you.”

“Then how will the outcome change? I do not like to kill. And I question what this locked door signifies. It should have been left open.”

“We’ve been outmaneuvered. There’s another party involved who wants the same thing we want.”

He nodded decisively, the kind of man used to being obeyed. She knew that look, that stance, that moment when the choice was made. She had seen her father play this role a hundred times: the charismatic leader, powerful, strong, ruthless but never quite cruel.
“I thought we could use this as a base for storage, but it is compromised. Let us go. They will not take our prize so easily.”

“The girl will make a good hostage.” “You believe so? I do not believe that anyone preoccupies themselves over her.”
He turned to Rose and, for the first time, spoke in the Standard she knew.“Does any person care for you? Will any person pay a ransom for your rescue?”

Was it fear that made her tremble convulsively? She snorfled and hiccuped as she tried to choke down her sobs. Never let them see you cry. Never let them see how unattractive you are. How scared you are.

Beautiful people were less likely to die.

He gestured with the scatter gun, the universal sign:
Get up.
She got up, shakily, followed them down a short wooden ladder into a low tunnel weeping dirt, hewn out of rock and shored up by a brace work of boards nailed together and old rebar tied tightly with wire. Down here they paused, she crouching behind the fearsome woman while above she heard the man moving things before he climbed back down into the tunnel and levered the tile into place. The woman spoke a command to make a hazy beam of light shine from her cap.

Rose blinked down through menus, seeking information on San Lorenzo. It ran across the lower portion of the sim-screen as the man poked her in the back with his gun.

Miocene sedimentary formations . . . salt domes . . . the entire San Lorenzo site is a great mound in itself, largely artificial in construction.

“Ándale,” he said.

The screen read:
Move now. Imperative!

They crawled until her hands were scraped raw and her knees were scuffed, reddened, and bleeding in spots. Neither of them spoke again, and she dared not speak until spoken to. Not soon enough, gray light filtered in. They pushed out through undergrowth into a ravine where a pair of young people waited, their faces concealed by bandannas tied across nose and mouth, their bodies rendered shapeless by loose tunics worn over baggy trousers. They each carried a rifle, the wood stock pitted and the curved magazine scarred but otherwise a weapon well oiled and clean. The man spoke to them so softly that Rose could not hear him, and as she and her captors hiked away, she glanced back to see the other pair disappear into the tunnel.

They followed the rugged ground of the ravine through dry grass and scrub and past stands of trees on the ridgeline above, Rose stumbling but never getting a hand up from her captors. The sun stood at zenith, so hot and dry beating down on them that she began to think she was going to faint, but they finally stopped under the shade of a ceiba and she was allowed to drink from a jug of water stashed there. The ceramic had kept the water lukewarm, although it stank of chlorine. Probably she would get some awful stomach parasite, and the runs, like the diamond smuggler had in
Desert Storm,
but she knew she had to drink or she would expire of heat exhaustion just like the secondary villain (the stupid, greedy one) had in
Knight in the Jungle,
despite the efforts of Monseigneur Knight to save him from his own short-sighted planning.

The man had brought Doctor Baby Jesus with him, bound against his body in a sling fashioned from several bandannas so that his hands remained free to hold the scatter gun. The bland doll face stared out at her, eyes unblinking, voice silent. As her captors drank, they talked, and Rose followed the conversation on the screen that was, of course, invisible to them.

“We have to fight them,” he said wearily.

“I knew others would be after the same thing,” she said. “Bandits. Profiteers. Technology pirates.”

He chuckled.“And we are not, Esperanza? We are better?”

“Of course we are better. We want justice.”

“So it may be, but profit makes justice sweeter. It has been a long fight.”

Distant pops, like champagne uncorked in a faraway room heard down a long hall, made the birds fall silent.

“Trouble,” Esperanza said.

Rose had hoped they might forget her if she hung back, pretending not to be there, but although Esperanza bolted out at a jog, the man gestured with his gun for Rose to fall in behind his comrade while he took up the rear. The pops sounded intermittently, and as they wound their way through jungle, she tried to get her bearings but could make no sense of their position. After a while, they hunkered down where the jungle broke away into the grassy clearing she had seen before, the Zona, but now a running battle unfolded across it, figures running or crouching, sprinting and rolling. A single small-craft open cargo hover veered from side to side as the person remote-controlling it—was that him in the technician’s coveralls?—tried to avoid getting shot. All the cattle were gone, scared away by the firefight, but there were prisoners, a stumbling herd of them looking remarkably like Akvir and the other Sunseekers, shrieking and wailing as they were forced at gunpoint to jog across the Zona. The nesh-reenactments had spun into life; from this angle and distance she caught flashes, a jaguar skin draped over a man’s shoulders as a cape, a sneering baby, a gaggle of priests dressed in loincloths and feather headdresses.