Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

The stranger was rearranging his cargo. Carefully, thought- fully. He glanced briefly at the approaching enemy jeeps, the way a man would glance at a wristwatch. He turned to Laura.

"You ride in back and hold her."

"All right."

"Okay, help me with her." They set Katje into the vacated cargo space, on her side. Katje's eyes were open again but they looked glassy, stunned.

Machine-gun fire clattered off the wreckage of one of the half-tracks.

The lead jeep. suddenly lurched clumsily into the air. It came down hard, pancaking, men and wreckage flying. Then the sounds. of the exploding land mine reached them. The two other jeeps pulled up short, fishtailing in the shoulder of the road. Laura climbed on, throwing her arm over Katje.

"Keep your head down." The stranger saddled up, threw the buggy into motion. They whirred away. Off the track, into wasteland.

In moments they were out of sight. It was low, rolling desert, studded with red, cracked rubble and heat-varnished boulders. The occasional waist-high thornbush, tinsel-thin wisps of dry grass. The afternoon heat was deadly, blasting up from the surface like X-rays.

A slug had hit Katje about two inches left of the navel and exited her back, nicking the floating rib. In the fierce dry heat both wounds had clotted quickly, dark shiny wads of con- gealed blood on her back and stomach. She had a bad cut on her shin, splinter damage, Laura thought.

Laura herself was untouched. She had barked a knuckle a little, flopping down for cover in the back of the truck. That was all. She felt amazed at her luck-until she considered the luck of a woman who had been machine-gunned twice in her life without even joining a goddamned army.

They covered about three miles, careening and weaving.

The marauder slowed. "They'll be after us," he shouted back at her. "Not the jeeps-aircraft. I've got to keep moving, and we'll spend some time in the sun. Get her under the tarp. And cover your head. "

"With what?"

"Look in the kit bag there. No, not that one! Those are land mines."

Laura loosened the tarp and pulled a flap over Katje, then tugged the kit bag loose. Clothes-she found a grimy military shirt. She draped it over her head and neck like a burnoose, and turbanned it around her forehead with both sleeves.

With much jarring and fumbling she managed to get Katje's handcuffs off. Then she flung both sets of them off the back of the truck, flung away the keys. Evil things. Like metal parasites.

She climbed up onto the cargo heap, behind her rescuer.

He passed her his goggles. "Try these." His eyes were bright blue.

She put them on. Their rubber rims touched her face, chilled with his sweat. The torturing glare faded at once. She was grateful. "You're American, aren't you?"

"Californian." He tugged his veil down, showing her his face. It was an elaborate tribal veil, yards of fabric, wrapping his face and skull in a tall, ridged turban, the ends of it draping his shoulders. Crude vegetable dye had stained his cheeks and mouth, streaking his creased Anglo face with indigo.

He had about two weeks of reddish beard stubble, shot with gray. He smiled briefly, showing a rack of impossibly white

American teeth.

He looked like a TV journalist gone horribly and perma- nently wrong. She assumed at once that he was a mercenary, some kind of military adviser. "Who are you people?"

"We're the Inadin Cultural Revolution. You?"

"Rizome Industries Group. Laura Webster."

"Yeah? You must have some story to tell, Laura Web- ster." He looked at her with sudden intense interest, like a sleepy cat spotting prey.

Without warning, she felt a sudden powerful flash of deja vu. She remembered traveling out to an exotic game park as a child, with her grandmother. They'd pulled up in the car to watch a huge male lion gnawing a carcass at the side of the road. The memory struck her: those great white teeth, tawny fur, the muzzle flecked with blood up to the eyes. The lion had looked up calmly at her through the window glass, with a look just like the one the stranger was giving her now.

"What's an Inadin?" Laura said.

"You know the Tuaregs? A Saharan tribe? No, huh?" He pulled the brow of his turban lower, shading his bare eyes.

"Well, no matter. They call themselves the 'Kel Tamashek.'

`Tuareg' is what the Arabs call them-it means `the godforsaken.'

" He was picking up speed again, weaving expertly around the worst of the boulders. The suspension soaked up shock-good design, she thought through reflex. The broad wire wheels barely left a track.

"I'm a journalist," he told her. "Freelance. I cover their activities. "

"What's your name?"

"Gresham. "

"Jonathan Gresham?"

Gresham looked at her for a long moment. Surprised, thinking it over. He was judging her again. He always seemed to be judging her. "So much for deep cover," he said at last.

"What's the deal? Am I famous now?"

"You're Colonel Jonathan Gresham, author of The Lawrence Doctrine and Postindustrial Insurgency?"

Gresham looked embarrassed. "Look, I was all wrong in that book. I didn't know anything back then, it's theory, half-ass bullshit mostly. You didn't read it, did you?"

"No, but I know people who really thought the world of that book."

"Amateurs."

She looked at Gresham. He looked like he'd been born in limbo and raised on the floor of hell. "Yeah, I guess so."

Gresham mulled it over. "You heard about me from your jailers, huh? I know they've read my stuff. Vienna read it too-didn't seem to do them much good, though. "

"It must mean something! Your bunch of guys on little bicycles just wiped out a whole convoy!"

Gresham winced a little, like an avant-garde artist praised by a philistine. "If I'd had better intelligence.... Sorry about your friend. Fortunes of war, Laura. "

"It could have just as easily been me."

"Yeah, you learn that after a while."

"Do you think she'll make it?"

"No, I don't. If one of us took a wound that bad, we'd have just put a bullet in him." He glanced at Laura. "I could do it,"

he, said. He was being genuinely generous, she could see that.

"She doesn't need more bullets, she needs surgery. Is there a doctor we can reach?"

He shook his head. "There's an Azanian relief camp, three days from here. But we're not going there-we need to regroup at our local supply dump. We have our own survival to look after-we can't make chivalrous gestures."

Laura reached forward and grabbed the thick robe at Gresham's shoulder. "She's a dying woman!"

"You're in Africa now. Dying women aren't rare here."

Laura took a deep breath.

She had reached bedrock.

She tried hard to think. She looked around herself, trying to clear her head. Her mind was all rags and tatters. The desert around her seemed to be evaporating her. All the complexities were going-it was stark and simple and ele- mental. "I want you to save her life, Jonathan Gresham."

"It's bad tactics," Gresham said. He kept his eyes from her, watching the road. "They don't know she's mortally wounded. If she's an important hostage, they'll expect us to head for that camp. And we haven't lived this long by doing what FACT expects."

She backed away from him. Switched gears. "If they touch that camp the Azanian Air Force will stomp all over what's left of their capital."

He looked at her as if she'd gone mad.

"It's true. Four days ago the Azanians hit Bamako, hard.

Fuel dumps, commandos, everything. From their aircraft carrier. "

"Well, I'll be damned." Gresham grinned suddenly. No reassurance there-it was feral. "Tell me more, Laura

Webster. "

"That's why they were taking us to the atom-bomb test site. To make a propaganda statement, frighten the Azanians.