Spin State - Chris Moriarty [155]
“Forgive me,” she heard him say through the rising haze of a sedative that must have been specially designed to outsmart her internals, “but better safe than sorry. You see that van over there? The white one? The back’s open. Get in and shut the door behind you.”
Li walked toward the van as slowly as she could, trying to catch Bella’s eye. Who’s following us? she wanted to ask. Where are they? Is help coming if we can wait it out a little longer?
But no one came. No one was intended to come. And as Li stepped into the van she glanced up toward the garage ceiling and saw why: the van had been parked a little crooked in its space, tail end facing out into the aisle, just where the garage’s security cameras could catch prime-time quality spinfeed of the kidnapping.
“Smile for the cameras,” Louie said, and the last thing she remembered before she passed out was his wide-open Irish laugh.
The next few hours were a dope-smeared blur. Sprinting across a rain-swept landing pad, half-held half-dragged by Ramirez. A brief struggle with Louie during which she refused, childishly, to let him scan her palm implant and he pulled a knife and told her he’d damn well cut it off her if she didn’t cooperate. A thwonking, shuddering hopper flight.
When she woke they were still in the air and someone had strapped an oxygen mask over her face. She opened her eyes to a bird’s-eye view of the granite teeth of the Johannesburg Massif, the vast rolling red ocean of the algae steppes. She started, feeling as if she were falling forward into the abyss, then blinked and twisted her head around and made sense of her surroundings.
She was on the deck of an old cropduster-rigged Sikorsky, an Earth-built antique that must have been broken down to its gearboxes and shipped out in the airless cargo hold of some long-abandoned generation ship. Like most of Compson’s presettlement tech, the Sikorsky had been rerigged to run on fossil fuel—and Li guessed from the grumbling shudder beneath her that it had been flying seeder runs for the terraforming authority ever since then.
Li had been tucked between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats and was now staring straight through the smooth Plexiglas bubble of the windshield. When she looked up she saw Louie at the pilot’s controls and Ramirez on her other side, staring at a handheld navcomp and frowning.
“Where are we?” she rasped, and Ramirez looked down, frowning.
“I thought that derm was supposed to last longer,” he said.
Louie glanced over and shrugged. “Tough motherfucker, isn’t she?”
“I don’t have another one, though. And she wasn’t supposed to wake up until we got there.”
“So what? She’d know the place in her sleep anyway.” He laughed a laugh that didn’t sound quite as friendly to Li as it once had. “They all do.”
Ramirez scowled over her head at Louie, and she found herself wondering just who was in charge of this kidnapping.
They landed twenty minutes later, setting down on a dusty stretch of hardpan that seemed implausibly level until Li realized it was an old shuttle runway.
“We’re there,” Ramirez said unnecessarily. “We’re going to get out and walk to the buildings, okay? Just cooperate and it’s all going to be fine.”
She could walk under her own steam now, and as she stumbled along trying to clear her hazed vision she heard Bella’s thin-soled shoes whispering across the ground just beside her. She knew this place, though she couldn’t yet put a name to it. She’d been here, not once but many, many times. She knew that the rutted jeep track beyond the landing strip would take her through the foothills to Shantytown if she had the strength to walk for a few hours in the unprocessed air of the foothills. She knew that the box canyon hidden behind that ridge harbored a steep-walled wash that she and her father had once used for target practice.
But she didn’t quite understand where they were until she squinted at the long-empty airplane hangar looming over the lab building and read the words that sent an atavistic fight-or-flight reaction flooding through every cell of