Kate Elliott - Sunseeker

Adrenaline made her babble, that and her father's maxim: keep them talking. How successfully he'd used that ploy in Evil Em-pirel "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.

"Andale," 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 shortsighted 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 back 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.

The firefight streamed across the meadow so like one of her dad's acties that it was uncanny. Unreal. Shots spat out from the circling jungle, from behind low mounds. A man in technician's coveralls-not the one controlling the cargo hover-toppled, tumbled, and lay twitching on the ground. She couldn't tell who was shooting at whom, only that Yah-noo was limping and Zeno-bia's shift was torn, revealing her pale, voluptuous body, and Akvir was doubled over as though he had been kicked in the stomach, by force or by fear. She didn't see Eleanor or the woman in business clothes. A riot cannon boomed. Sparks flashed fitfully in the air, showering down over treetops. It boomed again, closer, and she flattened herself on the ground, shielding her face and ears. Esperanza shouted right behind her, but without her eyes open she couldn't see the sim-screen. A roaring blast of heat pulsed across her back as, in the distance, people screamed.

Now the cavalry would ride in.

Wouldn't they?

The screams cut off, leaving a silence that was worse than pain. She could not even hear any birds. The jungle was hushed. A footfall scuffed the ground beside her just before a cold barrel poked her in the back.