Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

They had more gruel, with lentils in it this time. Then they were off again, the usual thirty miles an hour, jouncing hard, bruised and sucking dust from the two trucks ahead.

They had told each other everything by now. How Katje had grown up in a reeducation camp, because her parents were verkrampte, reactionaries, rather than verligte, liberals.

It was not bad as such camps went, she said. The Boers were used to camps. The British had invented them during the Boer

War, and in fact the very term "concentration camp" was invented by the British as a term for the place where they concentrated kidnapped Boer civilians. Katje's father had actually kept up his banking job in the city while rival black factions were busy "necklacing" one another, cramming tires full of petrol over the heads of victims and publicly roasting them alive... .

Azania had always been a series of camps, of migrant laborers crammed into barracks, or black townships kept in isolation by cops with rhino-hide whips and passcards, or intellectuals kept for years under "the ban," in which they were forbidden by law to join any group of human beings numbering more than three, and thus forming a kind of independent tribal homeland consisting of one person in a legal bell jar... .

Laura heard her say all this, this blond woman who looked so much like herself, and in return she could only say... well

... sure, I have problems too ... for instance my mother and

I don't get along all that well. I know it doesn't sound like much but I guess if you'd been me you'd think more of it....

The trucks slowed. They were winding downhill.

"I think we're getting somewhere," Laura said, stirring.

"Let me look," Katje said casually, and got up and shuf- fled to the back of the truck and peered outside around the back of the canvas, bracing herself. "I was right," she said.

"I see some concrete bunkers. There are jeeps and... oh, dear, it's a crater, Laura, a crater as big as a valley."

Then the half-track behind them blew up. It simply flew to pieces like a china figurine, instantly, gracefully. Katje looked at it with an expression of childish delight and Laura suddenly found herself down .on the floor of the truck, where she'd flung herself, some reflex hitting her faster than she could think. Roaring filled the air and the maddened stammer of automatic weapons, bullets piercing the canvas in a smooth line of stitching that left glowing holes of daylight and crossed the figure of Katje where she stood. Katje jumped just a bit as the line of stitching crossed her and turned and looked at

Laura with an expression of puzzlement and fell to her knees.

And the second half-track tumbled hard as something hit it in the forward axle and it went over smoldering, and the air was full of the whine of bullets. Laura slithered to where

Katje crouched on her knees. Katje put both hands to her stomach and brought them away caked with blood, and she looked at Laura with the first sign of understanding, and lay down on the floor of the truck, clumsily, carefully.

They were killing the soldiers in the front truck. She could hear them, dying. They didn't seem to be shooting back, it was all happening instantly, with lethal quickness, in sec- onds. She heard machine-gun fire raking the cab of her own truck, glass flying, the elegant ticking of supersonic metal piercing metal. More bullets came and ripped the wooden floor of the truck and bits of splinter flung themselves gaily into the air like deadly confetti. And again it came across, the old sword-through-a-barrel trick, thumb-sized rounds punch- ing through the walls below the canvas mounting with joyful shouts of impact. Silence.

More shots, close, point-blank. Mercy shots.

A dark hand clutching a gun came over the back of the truck. A figure in dust-caked goggles with its face wrapped in a dark blue veil. The apparition looked at the two of them and murmured something unintelligible. A man's voice. The veiled man vaulted over the back of the truck; landed in a crouch and pointed the gun at Laura. Laura lay frozen, feeling invisible, gaseous, nothing there but the whites of eyes.

The veiled man shouted and waved one arm outside the truck. He wore a blue cloak and woolen robes and his chest was clustered with blackened leather bags hung on thongs. He had a bandolier of cartridges and a curved dagger almost the size of a machete and thick, filthy sandals over bare, cal- loused feet. He stank like a wild animal, the radiant musk of days of desert survival and sweat.

Moments passed. Katje made a noise deep in her throat.

Her legs jerked twice and her lids closed, showing rims of white. Shock.

Another veiled man appeared at the back of the truck. His eyes were hidden in tinted goggles and he was carrying a shoulder-launched rocket. He aimed it into the truck. Laura looked at it, saw the sheen of a lens, and realized for the first time that it was a video camera.

"Hey," she said. She sat up, and showed the camera her bound hands.

The first marauder looked up at the second and said some- thing, a long fluid rush of polysyllables. The second nodded and lowered his camera.

"Can you walk?" he said.

"Yes, but my friend's hurt."

"Come on out then." He yanked down the back of the truck, one-handed. It screeched-bullets had bent it out of shape. Laura crawled out quickly.

The cameraman looked at Katje. "She's bad. We'll have to leave her."

"She's a hostage. Azanian. She's important."

"The Malians will stitch her up, then."

"No, they won't, they'll kill her! You can't let her die here! She's a doctor, she works in the camps!"

The first marauder returned at a trot, bearing the belt of the dead driver, with rows of bullets and a ring of keys. He studied Laura's handcuffs alertly, picked the correct key at once, and clicked them loose. He gave her the cuffs and keys with a little half-bow and an elegant hand to his heart.

Other desert raiders-about two dozen-were looting the broken trucks. They were riding thin, skeletal dune buggies the size of jeeps, all tubes, spokes, and wire. The cars bounded along, agilely, quiet as bicycles, with a wiry scrunching of metal-mesh wheels and faint creak of springs. Their drivers were wrapped in cloaks and veils. They looked puffy, huge, and ghostlike. They steered from saddles over heaps of cargo lashed down under canvas.

"We don't have time." The big raider with the camera waved at the others and shouted in their language. They whooped in return and the men on foot began mounting up and stowing loot: ammo, guns, jerry cans.

"I want her to live!" Laura shouted.

He stared down at her. The tall marauder in his goggles, his masked and turbanned face, body cinched with belts and weaponry. Laura met his eyes without flinching.

"Okay," he told her. "It's your decision." She felt the weight of his words. He was telling her she was free again.

Out of prison, in the world of decisions and consequences. A

fierce sense of elation seized her.

"Take my camera. Don't touch its triggers." The stranger took Katje in his arms and carried her to his own buggy, parked five yards from the truck.

Laura followed him, lugging the camera. The bulldozed roadbed scorched her bare feet and she hopped and lurched to the shade of the buggy. She looked down the slope.

The iron stump of a vaporized tower marked Ground Zero.

The atomic crater was not as deep as she'd expected. It was shallow and broad, marked with eerie streaks, puddles of glassy slag broken like cracked mud. It looked mundane, wretched, forgotten, like an old toxic-waste excavation.

Jeeps were peeling away from the bunker, roaring upslope.

They had soldiers in back, the test site's garrison, manning swivel-mounted machine guns.

From half a mile away they opened fire. Laura saw impact dust puffing twenty yards below them, and following that, languidly, the distant chatter of the shots.