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."
Annja felt as if a cold hand had clamped down on her. "Euro Petro?"
Jadzia's face crinkled with fury and disgust. "Who else? Bribery really is the universal language, I guess."
Though she was still loath to admit to herself the possibility there might be something to the Atlantis myths, Annja had to accept that someone at Euro Petro was a true believer.
"You're right," she said tautly. "We have to go."
"Where?" Jadzia asked. Her eyes were openly fearful now.
"Somewhere they don't expect."
The classrooms on the right faced the back of the building. Annja grabbed the latch of the nearest door.
She opened the classroom door, stepped quickly inside.
Jadzia followed tentatively. "We're on the second floor," she pointed out.
"Yep," Annja said.
The room was dimly lit with morning light through half-drawn shades. Moving swiftly between the desks, she reached the line of windows on the far side and examined them. They were built to angle open a handspan to permit airflow but no farther. One or two were open, allowing the smells of humid subtropical greenery to eddy in.
"This low down they shouldn't be shatterproof or anything," she said, thinking aloud. She went to the head of the small classroom. The professor's desk was large and heavy. A swivel chair rested just behind it.
Annja hoisted the chair over her head and threw it through the nearest window. The whole casement failed and fell away with a crash.
She stuck her head out into the humid air and looked quickly around. Below her lay a parking lot with a scatter of boxy cars of unfamiliar makes parked near the building. The far side was bordered by a taller-than-head-high hedge. It marked the northern edge of the campus. Beyond rose the blocky buildings of an industrial park. The sound of traffic was like the rush of a nearby river. On the west end of the lot stood a copse of lychee trees. To the east, Annja's right, a sheltered walkway with soaring, curving concrete pillars holding up an eccentrically angled roof led to a lot exit. She saw no one.
"What now?" Jadzia asked.
"Simple," Annja said, and jumped.
She struck a perfect three-point landing. She hit a bit harder than she'd expected but her powerful legs easily absorbed the impact of the fall.
"Annja!" she heard Jadzia scream.
A strand of hair fell before her eyes as she raised her head. Through the chestnut screen, turned auburn at the edges by the morning sun, she saw a squad of six soldiers in bulky camouflaged battledress trot into view, three to the left side of the parking lot, three to the right, machine pistols angled before them.
She looked up just in time to see the heavy bag of scrolls plummet down on her. She just managed to raise her hands to field the well-scuffed green-and-purple bag. It slammed into her chest and forced her back a couple of steps.
"You might want to warn me next time," she called up to Jadzia's pale pigtail-framed face.
"What about me?" the girl called back, ignoring the remark.
Annja dropped the satchel to the sidewalk. "Same way as the bag," she said. "I'll catch you."
One thing Annja had to give Jadzia. She didn't allow common sense to hold her back from much. The next thing Annja knew 110 pounds or so of lanky young woman was falling with all the skill and grace of a sock monkey.
She caught the girl and they fell in a heap.
"Are you all right?" Jadzia asked.
"Probably not," Annja said fuzzily. One of Jadzia's extremities had clocked her in the right eye. She stirred her limbs to prove to herself she could. She felt very feeble. "But that won't stop me."
She wondered in passing if Jadzia was showing actual concern for another person – or simple dread at the prospect of being stranded all alone in a parking lot in the People's Republic of China with fifty pounds of hot artifacts and a antiterror unit plus a probable multinational army of corporate thugs about to land on her like an imploded tower.
She realized she couldn't breathe. "Will you...please...get off?"
"Oh." Jadzia scrambled to her feet.
Annja arched her back and jumped up to her feet in an acrobatic recovery. Immediately she swayed and would've fallen flat down had Jadzia, either deliberately helpful or accidentally in the way, not propped her up.
"Okay, that wasn't bright," Annja muttered. "Let's go."
It was sheer bravado. But it worked. She engaged her will. And that, she knew, was a pretty powerful thing.
She took the scrolls from Jadzia. They'd move quicker that way. She led across the lot at a trot for the exits. The soldiers opened fire but were still too far away to do any harm.
Surprisingly the street beyond the hedge was not full of traffic. What there was ran to a lot more cars and a lot fewer bicycles than Annja had expected.
"What now?" Jadzia asked.
A white-and-red taxi approached from the left. Annja walked right out in its path, faced it squarely and held her right hand out in a stop gesture.
The driver locked up the brakes. The tires squealed. It shuddered to a halt with the chrome of the bumper all but brushing Annja's shins. The stink of burned rubber rose up about Annja, momentarily drowning out the exhaust fumes. Reaction-dizzy, Annja toppled forward. She caught herself with a hand with a thump on the hood. The metal was hot as a stovetop.
"Okay," she said. "Not a good idea."
The driver stuck his head out the window. He had a kind of pushed-in face with somewhat extruded lips that made him look like a cartoon duck, prominent ears that didn't and immense industrial-framed glasses that inspired little confidence in his visual acuity. "What matter you, crazy Western-devil girl? You wan' die?"
"We need a ride," she said.
"You pay American dollar?" he asked without hesitation.
"If you want," she said.
His manner changed immediately. "You crazy girls, need crazy ride. You come to right man. Hop in!"
They did. Annja shoved Jadzia in first, then the scrolls. As she leaned down to follow, Jadzia vented a squeal that went through Annja's head like a red-hot railroad spike.
"Annja! Behind us!"
From a pillared exit two blocks behind the cab, a glossy blue Mercedes sedan was howling through a turn. Despite the violence of the maneuver, not to mention a score of cars in between, a man hung halfway out the front passenger window. The muzzle-flash of his assault rifle was a brilliant dancing spark.