Free Rites of Passage by Eric Brown Page A

“or no deal.”
    I stared at the woman. She needed water more than we needed the arrays. I saw her look me up and down, and I felt suddenly, oddly, vulnerable.
    She nodded, then spoke rapidly to one of her guards in a language I didn’t recognise. Two of her men returned to their craft, the weight of the sun-shade taken up by the two who remained.
    I was reminded, by her regal stance beneath the shade, and her henchmen’s’ quick attention to duty, of an illustration I had seen in a magazine of an Ancient Egyptian Queen.
    Her big, dark eyes regarded me again. She smiled. I found myself looking away, flushing.
    Her men returned, hauling the solar arrays. They laid them on the sand and backed off. Samara gestured, and Danny stepped forward to examine the arrays while I covered him.
    He looked back at me and nodded.
    “They look okay,” he told the woman. “We’ll take them.”
    “I’ll have them placed between our vehicles,” she said. “If you bring out the water, we will meet halfway.”
    Danny stood and rejoined me. To Samara he said, “What have you been doing for water?”
    She paused before replying. “There is a settlement with a rig about two hundred kilometres east of here, along the old coast. They have a deep bore. We trade with them every so often. You?”
    Danny said, “We trade with a colony up in old Spain.”
    The woman nodded, and I wondered if she’d seen through the lie. She said, “And how many of you live in the truck?”
    “Five,” he said. He nodded at the hovercraft. “And you?”
    “Just six,” she said.
    “We’ll fetch the water,” Danny said.
    We turned our backs on the woman and her men and began the slow walk back to the truck. I felt uneasy, presenting such an easy target like that, but I knew I was being irrational. They wanted water, after all; they would gain nothing by shooting us now.
    “You hear that?” Danny said. “A mob has a deep bore, east of here. So there is water.”
    He unlocked the hatch on the side of the truck where we stored the water. We hauled out two plastic canisters and carried them back to where the woman’s lackeys had placed the arrays. She stood over the shimmering rectangles, watching us as we placed the canisters on the ground.
    She snapped something to one of the men, who opened the canister and tipped a teaspoonful of water into his palm. He lifted it to his cracked lip and tasted the water. After a second he nodded to Samara and said something in their language.
    I could not keep my eyes off the woman. Her legs were bare, long and brown, and I could see the cleavage of her breasts between the fabric of her bleached blouse. She saw me looking and stared at me, her expression unreadable. I looked away quickly.
    She said, “Where are you heading?”
    Danny waved vaguely. “South.”
    She looked surprised. “Tangiers?”
    “In that direction, yes.”
    She calculated. “Then we should travel together, no? There are bandits in the area. Together we are stronger.”
    Danny looked at me, and I found myself nodding.
    “Very well, we’ll do that. We stop at sunset, set off at dawn.”
    Samara smiled. “To Tangiers, then.”
    She said something to her men and two of them took the canisters. She turned and walked towards the hovercraft, flanked by her sun-shade toting lackeys.
    I watched her go.
    Danny laughed and said, “Put your tongue away and help me with these.”
    We hauled the arrays across the sea-bed and stowed them in the truck.
    ~
    W e stepped into the lounge to find an altercation in progress.
    Skull was standing at one end of the room, Kat and Edvard at the other. Skull’s face was livid with rage, his lips contorted, eyes wide with accusation.
    “You told her!” he yelled across at us as we entered. “You contacted her and told her I was here!”
    I looked across at Edvard, who explained, “He came flying from his berth, shouting insane accusations.”
    “That’s because you bastards told her!”
    I was glad he had a