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like a tsunami. She found herself sitting on the bed with Jadzia. They held
each other and cried into each other's shoulders.
Sometime well after dark they cried themselves out. Then Annja took herself
mentally by the scruff and shook herself. No matter how she thought things
through she could find reasons, and good ones, to blame herself for Tex's
death. But he had made his own choices at every stage. No one had held a gun
against his head to get him to join her quixotic quest. He had walked with
open eyes into a trap laid by someone he had mistakenly trusted.
In the end it didn't matter. What did matter was Tex was dead andAnnja and
Jadzia were going to have to work fast and smart and most importantly get
extremely lucky not to join him in short order.
"So we need to figure out how we're going to survive past tonight," Annja
said, as the two women sat on the bed with the TV on and the sound off, eating
delivery pizza.
"And avenge Tex," Jadzia said fiercely.
Annja nodded. That seemed right to her, even flying in the face of
contemporary morality as it did.
She took a deep breath. "I still think our best chance is to do what we've
been trying to do all along  recover as much of the contents of these scrolls
as we can and publicize them. The question is how? And also where?"
"Jet propulsion labs in Pasadena is where we sent them," Jadzia said
thoughtfully, folding a slice of pizza lengthwise. "They have a CT scanner and
an MSI machine."
"So it's a logical choice."
"Too logical," Jadzia said.
"Meaning what?" Annja asked.
"I bet that's where Gus Marshall is," Jadzia said. "Waiting for us in case we
decided to head straight there instead of to meet Mr. Hogue."
Annja sighed. "You're right. He's probably hired half the private
investigators in the greater L.A. area to keep an eye out for us."
"The police too, maybe."
Annja thrust her chin forward and tilted her head to one side. "Maybe. EP
seems to be as reluctant to involve the law as we are. But I agree, we can't
take the risk."
"The new university in Shenzhen has CT scanners and multispectral imagers,"
Jadzia said.
"China?"
"Just inland from Hong Kong, I think. It's sort of a boomtown. There wasn't
much there but farming villages twenty years ago. Now it's a big city with a
lot of high-tech manufacturing." Jadzia nodded. "They wanted us to send some
of our scrolls to them for processing. But there was some kind of trouble,
tension with the U.S." Annja knew the United States was a major subsidizer of
the governments of both Poland and Egypt, which in turn jointly sponsored the
Alexandrian library project. "Some kind of stupid politics."
"I'm with you there," Annja said. She was starting to feel as if they just
might have a shot. Not a good one, perhaps  but better than the blank nothing
of a future she had seen like a wall ahead a moment before. She thought out
loud. "So with China and the U.S. mad at each other  and with China a rival
with the big Western companies for oil, with their big boom going on  the
Chinese'd be pretty unlikely to be in bed with Euro Petro, wouldn't they?"
Jadzia nodded solemnly. "Sometimes you are not so stupid after all." She
upended her soda bottle and took a hefty swig.
"Uh, thanks."
Jadzia was frowning when she lowered the big plastic bottle. "But we have a
problem," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "It takes
forever to get visas for the People's Republic."
Annja's face lit up in a great big smile. "Not necessarily," she said. "The
network has a good working relationship with the national government, as well
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as Guangdong Province's. The Communist party bosses, too. And by that I mean,
massive bribery."
"The universal language," Jadzia said.
"It does seem to clear up one thing that was bothering me," Annja said,
studying the ancient text on the screen of the third-floor laboratory in
Shenzhen.
"What's that?" Jadzia asked.
"How the Athenians could possibly have defeated Atlantis, if the Atlanteans
really had all that marvelous high-tech stuff. No matter how brave or
resourceful you are, energy-beam weapons are going to confer a pretty decisive
advantage over your bronze swords and bull-hide shields. But if the Greeks
managed to get hold of some of those weapons  "
"It's what guerrillas always do," Jadzia said. "I need to pee now." And with
that bit of over-sharing she turned and walked out of the lab.
Chapter 22
"Annja, we have to go."
She looked up in surprise as Jadzia entered the room in a burble of noise from
the corridor outside. There must have been a class change. There seemed to be
a huge amount of traffic, moving both ways with unhurried speed. Nobody raised
his or her voice but everybody seemed to be talking at once, very intensely.
The PA emitted what sounded more like music than intelligible speech to
Annja's uneducated ears. The soundproofing in the lab was so good she'd been
unaware of the racket.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
But Jadzia only shook her head so hard her pigtails whipped her round cheeks.
"No time." She walked over and grabbed the satchel of scrolls and ran the
strap over her shoulder.
The local technicians paid no attention to either foreign woman. Yet another
page of text extracted from a burned scroll had just appeared on the big
screen. They were high-fiving and chirping and carrying on as if they'd just
scored a touchdown.
Jadzia never even glanced at the monitor. She just turned and walked toward
Annja.
"But there's a scroll missing," Annja said, belaboring the obvious. She meant
the one being run through the multispectral imager.
"Leave it," Jadzia said. "We have to go."
Annja followed her into the hall. "What's going on?" Annja realized the
students were moving along the hallway with a more set purpose than seemed
normal.
"You and Tex," Jadzia said incongruously. "You made me realize I could die."
Her voice sounded more clotted than tense.
"Huh?" Annja was getting annoyed by Jadzia's behavior.
"Hear that announcement?" Jadzia said. They were halfway to the stairs nearest
the computer lab. "They're saying a terrorist threat has been made against
this building. Students are to report to designated evacuation points while
antiterror forces secure the place." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]