The Caryatids (32 page)

Plague and Starvation would be history. Their apocalyptic depreda-tions would be forgotten as if such things had never occurred. In the fu-ture, they would have to be explained to people. That still left Sonja's two other Apocalyptic enemies, War and Death, still very much in the planetary saddle, but nevertheless, in Jiuquan—-in Jiuquan! —she'd just been scorched by an antipersonnel bomb and yet she was going to be on her feet, healthy, unmarked, clear-eyed, and partially bionic, in a week. In ten days, at the most.

Developments of this scale, the most grandiose scale possible: These were the schemes that kept Sonja standing firm at her duties. Forged in the heat of combat, she was an iron pillar of the state. Except on Mr. Zeng's analytical screens, where the Angel of Harbin was not an iron pillar but a vulnerable fluffy blue cloud.

With her bioplastic notebook uneasily poised on her exfected knees in her watery hospital bed, Sonja saw, with a sinking, seasick sensation, that her blue cloud looked distinctly stormy. In Zeng's world, this was the hexagram sigil and omen signifying that one was (in a colloquial translation) "getting too big for one's boots," that "the heat was on," that "tomorrow's prospects were dim." As she studied these cryptic hints, Sonja realized for the first time that Mr. Zeng's service had a name in English: it was a "correlation engine." She had been using a correlation engine all this time, in another lan-guage and another context. Apparently these radical techniques had es-caped Chinese state secrecy, and become so common lately that even Western businesspeople like George saw fit to use them. Sonja certainly was not in "business." Sonja was a state heroine. Prof-its were not her concern — but purges were. As a state operative, if you didn't already know for sure who the chosen victim was and why, then that victim was probably you.

This established, Sonja had to discover who had tried to kill her. There were three basic varieties of killers in China: the people support-ing the state, the traitors against the state, and, worse yet, the people like herself and Mr. Zeng, the people definitely with the state yet not emi-nently of the state, people who were plausibly deniable and eminently disposable.

After some deft string pulling, the local police saw fit to share the re-sults of their investigations with Sonja.

The attack plane had been vaporized by its payload of explosive. However, one of its wings and parts of its landing gear had cracked and fallen off. Those fragments were rich with criminal evidence. For the Jiuquan police, any grain of stray pollen was a clue that blazed like an asteroid. The police knew the range of the plane, from its wing shape and its fuel capacity. They knew, roughly, what landscapes it must have overflown, because of the pollen lodged in its crude seams. They further knew that the plane had been hand-built, recently, in the desert, from snap-together panels of straw plywood. It was a toy airplane made in a secret bandit camp — made from pressed Mongolian hay. The plane's lightweight panels were so care-lessly glued that they might have been assembled by a ten-year-old child. As a further deliberate insult, the plane had somehow been salted with DNA from several high-ranking officials who had once been major figures of the Chinese state. Fake DNA evidence was no surprise to the local police, of course—even the cheapest street gangs knew how to muddy a DNA trail, these days. Still, given that the police in Jiuquan were absolutely sure to study DNA evidence, this was a nose-thumbing taunt, a knowing terrorist provocation. It showed a mean-spirited cun-ning that could only be the work of true subversives.

So, Sonja had the profile of her enemies: they were not of the Chi-nese state. They were ragtag political diehards, pretending to state con-nections, skulking outside the state's borders, and trying to liquidate her. They were anti-state bandits who wanted revenge.

It had never been Sonja's intention to provoke revenge attacks. Sonja had never wanted to kill anyone. Her first jaunt into China had been as a teenage camp follower in a medical relief column. Its poorly armored trucks were piled to bulging with rations, water barrels, tents, cots, band-ages, antibiotics . . . Not thirty kilometers from port they'd been am-bushed with rockets and small arms, their convoy shot to pieces and everything of value stolen by feral, screeching, dust-caked, rag-clad ban-dits who had scrambled back into the barricaded rubble that had once been their town.

That was Sonja's introduction to the true situation on the ground, and what followed had been unspeakably worse. As Sonja's first hus-band had put it: "It is necessary to incinerate the towns in order to save the cities," and he had incinerated many such before he met the death he'd always courted. Ernesto had been a brave man from a distant corner of the Earth who had come to offer his hands and his heart and his medical knowledge and his strong, shapely, noble back to a stricken people—and, as many did, Ernesto had swiftly found it necessary to shoot many of them. Specifically, Ernesto had to shoot the gangs of malcontents who inter-fered with his redemption of the masses. Nobody called Ernesto the "Angel" of anything, because when he sent his convoys tearing through the Chinese landscape he moved like a bloody hacksaw through a broken leg.

Sonja had been his wife, a caress and a whisper of comfort to Ernesto in his darkest hours, yet China didn't lack for bitter people who re-membered things they had done. Along with many similar things Red Sonja herself had done since, in the same cause.

So: This latest episode of attempted revenge was part of her older story. It was simply a smaller and more personal story, because the scale of the havoc had dwindled. Bandits had once skulked in screaming thousands in the ruins of China's major cities. Bandits were now skulk-ing in crazy dozens in the dusty wilderness far outside the state's armed boundaries. They were still bandits. Bandit warlords came in a thousand factions, but they were all the same. Most were already gone, and the rest had to go.

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AN UNMANNED POLICE VEHICLEdeposited Sonja and her new husband at the ancient slopes of the Great Wall. Then it turned and fled with an unseemly haste back toward Jiuquan, leaving the two of them abandoned under the dazzling blue tent of central Asian sky.

If they were lucky in their lethal venture, they would never be seen by anyone. Sonja and the Badaulet were now a two-person "Scorpion team." Their task was to venture across the wilderness, spy out the camp of their enemies, call in a covert strike, and have the bandits an-nihilated. They had both done such work before, so the chance to do it in tan-dem was a blessing to them as a couple.

The Great Wall of China was a sullenly eroded, ridge-backed dragon on the Earth. The color of dirt—for it was mostly handmade of dirt—it wriggled over an astounding expanse of central Asia. In the state's recent hours of need, technicians had brusquely drilled fresh holes and topped the Wall with the state's surveillance wands, transforming an ancient barrier into a modern surveillance network. The new Wall consisted of the old Wall, plus tall, thin, gently sway-ing observation towers. Each needlelike tower was blankly topped with a mystical black head, a sphere devouring every trace of light that touched its opaque surface.

No merely human being could outguess what the state watched with these towering wands, for, potentially, the state surveilled everything within the Wall's huge line of sight. Not just passively absorbing light from the landscape, but sorting that light as data, sifting through it, searching it, collimating and triangulating and extrapolating from it . . . comparing each new nanosecond, pixel by pixel, to the ever-growing records of its previous observations.

The state's impassive visual ubiquity rambled on for thousands and thousands of closely linked kilometers, rooted in the ancient bricks and dirt of the longest, heaviest human structure ever created, its black tow-ers like a fruiting bread mold in the immemorial substance of the planet's greatest fortress. There was not a single human guard along the new Wall. Like astronauts on the Martian surface, people were politi-cally glorious yet practically unnecessary.

Hand in hand, Sonja and the Badaulet skulked past the monster ruins of a once-thriving tourist town. A life spent on horseback had made the Badaulet bowlegged, yet now he had an odd, spry, hop-along shuffle, for the Jiuquan clinic had done extraordinary things to the bro-ken bones of his feet. The medical operatives had also tactfully replaced Lucky's bomb-blown ears, so that the two of them no longer needed any earplug trans-lation units. Their new language translators were sophisticated onboard devices the size of flecks of steel, and they ran on blood sugar.

These sensory devices in her head—alien impositions—joined the chips of bone shrapnel lodged deep in Sonja's body. For seven years, she'd been part of a zealot's personal graveyard. Tiny chips of the dead woman's bones were melting away in her flesh, year by year. Sonja was metabolizing them. Sonja was sure she would get used to her ears. As for the presence of another woman's bones in her own flesh: those had expanded her op-tions. Vera, Radmila, Biserka: they were merely identical clones, while Sonja had become a hybrid chimera. Life always had fresh options for survivors. This desert town in Gansu Province had once catered to wealthy tourists, gallivanting from around the world to tramp the Great Wall. Like all globalized tourist towns, the place had once been sophisticated. The town was now deader than Nineveh, for an urban water war had broken out here. Water wars had a classic look all over China. They were small wars, or large deadly riots, fought with small arms: with automatic rifles, shoulder rockets, and improvised bombs. The weapons were wielded by people who had once been cheerfully peaceable neighbors, but were crazed with hunger, thirst, and despair. It was dreadfully simple for China's host of workshops and forges to manufacture rifles. Cheap, simple rifles were much easier to make than, for instance, little homemade robot airplanes. Their computerized sights were brutally accurate. They were rifles reborn as digital cameras: point, click, and kill.

Some part of the civilian population here had hurriedly surrounded the last water wells. They had hastily piled up barricades to survive the stinging sniper fire from the excluded. Thereafter, the besieged held the water, but those outside the walls could run around to make more guns and bombs. The dead city was a visible history of wild sorties, doomed assaults, random acts of arson, mining and countermining.

The stricken town, which had once sold placid postcard views of its Great Wall, was a crazy mass of tiny walls. These small walls had been piled up, in thirst and heat and darkness, by thousands of human hands, using hand tools.

The walled divisions tore through former neighborhoods. They were probably ethnic divisions: between the local Han Chinese, the Hui Chi-nese, Uighurs and Kazakhs and Kyrgiz, as well as a few hundred trapped foreign tourists and businesspeople, unable to believe how suddenly their pleasantly exotic life had gone to the extremely bad.

With every human soul covered head to foot in windy torrents of black Gobi dust, with the air thick with miasma from merciless urban fires, no previous social distinction would have made much difference on the ground. A water war wasn't a mere civil war but a hell on Earth, where you either seized water or you died.

Breathing through cloth, bricking up the windows, heaving their pos-sessions from their homes and stores to form impromptu barricades, struggling to climb through burnt-out high-rises to dominate the free-fire zones . . . in a matter of weeks, with hand tools and their own backs, they had churned their urban fabric into this vast, scumbled-up, fatal labyrinth: a graveyard of sandbags, cruel palisades, sharpened stakes of iron reinforcing rod, high-piled, bullet-riddled washing machines, the twisted hulks of bomb-seared cars.

Eventually, the survivors had been led on an organized long march, the weakest of them dropping like flies, to some new locale where the state guaranteed them some water. The people of their city had never come back to their death trap. If they ever returned, they would never again live in this doomed, unsustainable way. They would be living in Jiuquan-style bubbles where every drop of the water was micromanaged by state machines.

The rains had been good this year. The ruined town was rankly over-grown with tall, weedy, sulfur-yellow flowers.

It took them four hours to march outside the line of sight of the Great Wall, with its mystically swaying and Taoistically impartial wands. This effort achieved, they stripped themselves and buried every traceable relic of China in a cairn of anonymous rocks.

Sonja then made a special point of plucking the state's radio ID tags from the flesh of their arms. That was a simple matter when you knew what you were doing, and, when done correctly, it was only slightly bloody.

They then climbed, barefoot, wincing, cautious, and entirely naked, over the crest of a long hill to the predetermined spot where George had hidden his bounty.

An unmanned cargo helicopter sat there. It was a kind entirely new to Sonja, though she considered herself a connoisseur of helicopters. Crazily lightweight and transparent, all veins and segments, it looked like a sleeping dragonfly.

It bore Indian markings, and if it had really fluttered in from whatever was left of India, it must have traveled a fantastic distance.

The cargo helicopter was lying precisely where its global positioning system had placed it, inside a rugged little declivity, with poor lines of sight but a decent amount of sunshine for its exhausted batteries. Sonja had a hard-won philosophy when it came to long marches through harsh territory. Sonja believed in traveling light. Her cargo con-sisted mostly of fabrics.

Everything else within the helicopter, she had ordered as a wedding gift for the Badaulet. The Badaulet had no such minimalist philosophy about his own goods. On the contrary: He had a gorgeously barbarian

"more is more" aesthetic.

The Badaulet's gifts were a sniper rifle, a plastic pistol, binoculars, a gleaming titanium multitool, self-heating meals for those of an Islamic persuasion, a canteen, chemical lightsticks, paracord, a radio, a razor-keen ceramic dagger, a global positioning system, ammunition, and a veritable host of horrible little marble-sized land mines.