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backfired dangerously. Despite the muzzle-blasts going off almost under her
feet, the Promessan woman never flinched. Instead, learning exactly where her
opponent was, she vaulted lithely over the rail and dropped to the concrete
floor with apparent unconcern for injury. Her hair waved above her head like a
black banner. She twisted in air like a cat. With a recoil-free weapon she
could shoot as soon as she saw Dan, before she even landed
Annja leaned out with her left hand bracing her right and fired as soon as she
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got a sight alignment on the woman's khaki-clad back.
It was a strange experience. Other than a click of the trigger breaking felt
rather than heard and almost certainly engineered so a shooter would know when
the weapon fired there was no reaction. Then a green line of light, dazzling
in the gloom, appeared between the muzzle and a point between the woman's
shoulder blades.
Steam exploded from her back. She arched convulsively backward, fell hard on
her back, thrashing. Dan snapped his weapon down and pumped three shots into
her as she writhed. She went still.
"I'll cover you," Annja called. "Go!'
He sprinted to the door, yanked it open. Stepping out into the spill of yellow
light from the lamp above the door, he pivoted, dropped to a knee to aim back
into the warehouse from the cover of the door frame.
There was no response, either shouts or shots. Annja waited a beat, then
darted straight for the exit. Her cheeks went taut with anticipation of a
lethal light blast between her shoulders.
But she also made the door without drawing any reaction from within the
warehouse. The security response team was either all out of action or hunkered
down.
She did not slow down. She turned right to run toward the waterfront. The
upstream docks were dark. Seemingly derelict warehouses lay that way.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Dan was still crouched in the doorway,
handgun leveled, looking at her oddly. "Come on," she shouted to him, scarcely
slowing down. "Follow me!"
After a moment, during which Annja resolved to let Dan make his own escape if
he failed to follow, he did. She reached the corner of the next building and
ducked into the enfolding shadow of a loading bay. Suddenly winded, by the
fight more than the brief flight, brisk as it had been, she bent over, braced
her palms on her thighs and tried to catch her breath.
Dan caught up. "Another dry run," Annja panted. She knew trying to breathe
hunched over and tensed up like this was self-defeating, but it took her a
moment to tame her body's oxygen panic and force herself to stand erect.
"Lives lost for nothing."
"Not so," Dan said. He held up something small and dark. The lights of the
docks downstream shone through it vaguely blue.
"Thumb drive," he said with a grin.
"Fascinating," Sir Iain Moran said. He turned the captured energy weapon over
and over in his hands. They were big hands, as Annja would expect he
sometimes played guitar or keyboard with the band, although he primarily
served as vocalist. But they were more square and powerful looking than she'd
expect from a billionaire musician, scarred and callused in ways that wouldn't
be accounted for by hours of practicing on hard steel strings. She wondered
what he'd done to earn such hands.
The three were gathered in his top-floor suite in the Lord Manaus. It had the
same somewhat raffishly gaudy color scheme as Annja's more modest room. His
Croat bodyguards were nowhere in evidence. Dan sat on a sofa tapping
industriously on the keyboard of a notebook computer opened on a coffee table
in front of him. The thumb drive full of data from the warehouse computer was
stuck in a USB port.
The weapon Annja had taken from the young man she had killed was utterly
unprepossessing. She expected an energy weapon to be futuristic looking.
Instead it looked like a handgun, very compact and solid in its lines. Its
finish looked like the brushed-stainless-steel revolvers she had seen. But
instead of having a slide that reciprocated to eject an empty casing and
chamber a fresh round, it seemed made all of one piece. And instead of a hole
in the end it had what appeared to be a glass lens, about half an inch wide.
Publico tossed it on the bed.
Annja raised an eyebrow. "That's it? I bring you back a genuine ray gun, and
you toss it on the bed?" She had initially assumed it was a laser. On
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reflection she decided she had no grounds to assume even that. It was an
energy gun that appeared to involve a beam of emerald-colored coherent light.
But the laser might be a low-powered sighting mechanism for all she knew.
"It's a pretty toy, I grant," he said. "And a lethal one, to be sure."
"But doesn't that prove everything? The existence of some wildly
technologically advanced civilization somewhere, anyway, and most likely up
the Amazon where you thought it was all the time."
"It hints. Not proves."
"But "
"It's not that big an advance over what exists now," he said. "Indeed it may
not be an advance at all. You'll have to trust me on this, Annja. I have
certain contacts. Along with which goes access to certain information not
precisely widely known."
"But I thought lasers still needed these huge, unwieldy energy supplies."
He just smiled a craggy, knowing smile. Annja frowned, genuinely puzzled.
"If somebody's got handheld energy weapons now," she said, "why haven't we
seen them in action on the news?"
Publico shrugged. "What kind of advantage did they give our putative
Promessans? Dan brought a person armed with one down with a common handgun.
You yourself won this one away from an enemy despite being unarmed."
Annja brushed a hand back through her hair to distract the older man's
attention from her face. Evidently the crates had hidden her use of the sword
from her partner. Or perhaps he'd been distracted by staying alive. And what
he had seen that night at the toque well, he must have decided his memories
of that night, if he even had any, were not to be trusted.
"Think about it," Dan said from the computer. "What good would ray guns do
against enemies who use ambush tactics, like rocket-propelled grenades?"
"I just have a hard time believing the government would cover something like
that up," Annja said. "It smacks of conspiracy theory."
Dan snorted. More diplomatically, Publico smiled. "What d'you think it means
when they classify something top secret, then, lass? What's that but a
cover-up?"
She sighed and waved a hand. "All right."
Dan slapped his thigh. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "Got it."
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