Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) by Mark Wandrey (great books for teens TXT) 📕

behind him. Then he backed slowly toward the car’s door, never taking his eyes off the big man or the woman.

“Glad to see you got the Æsir working,” she said. “See you around, Taiki.”

“Who was that, and how did she know about the armor? I thought you just designed it recently.”

“I thought so, too,” Sato said as they walked. He looked back repeatedly, expecting the pair to follow them through the door. Then he remembered her name. “Adrianne McKenzie,” he said. “Her name is Adrianne McKenzie.”

“Who is she?” Rick asked.

“I wish I knew,” Sato admitted.

* * *

Staying in the same compartment was no longer an option. Neither was upgrading to First Class. Shortly after the encounter, they stopped briefly in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. There the train shifted some cars, losing the only remaining First Class car in favor of a trio of Coach. Instead, they went all the way to the rear. They found the last car about half empty, with only the lowest of the low huddled there.

Many of these passengers carried all their worldly goods. They had bundles of clothing, food, even some furniture or handwoven cages holding chickens. Rick didn’t care as they couldn’t be attacked from the rear now.

He berated himself for not going with Sato in the first place. The man excelled at finding trouble in the most innocuous of places. Leave it to him to find some old girlfriend or professional adversary on a dilapidated maglev train in Central America. Only it looked like she’d found him via security cameras. If she knew they were on Earth, that meant others did, too.

The train stopped briefly after crossing the border into Nicaragua. The little town of La Virgen, perched on the shore of Lago Cocibolca, was an industrial location where many got off for work, and a few got on. Rick and Sato were two of those who got off, quietly and without fanfare. The conductor didn’t give them a second look.

Rick had to scramble to get their luggage. He would never have been able to locate it himself. Instead he slipped one of the station baggage handlers a 10-credit chit, then two more when the man recruited two other workers. They had the Wrogul support case and a pair of crates offloaded minutes before the train wheezed back out of the station on its route north.

“Okay, now what?” Sato asked, watching wistfully as their train left.

“We drive,” Rick suggested and pointed. It was mid-morning in La Virgen. A flickering ancient neon sign announced, “Ventas de Autos.”

“You want to buy a car?” Sato asked.

“You’d rather walk?”

The overweight and balding salesman watched them walking down the dusty sidewalk with confused interest. Rick had bought one of the baggage handlers’ rusty old hand trucks for another 10 credits, or around ten thousand pesos. Everything was piled on the truck, which creaked and groaned ominously under the load. The salesman spoke as they turned into his lot; luckily it was translated for them.

“Can I help you, sirs?”

Rick gestured to the cars. “We want to buy one.”

The man’s eyes narrowed as the translator rendered it into Spanish.

Rick left the handcart and Sato, walking down the line of cars. Of course none of them were fliers; he couldn’t get so lucky. A bunch were medium-sized sedans dating from around 2110 at the newest. They were all electric, a bad choice for their situation. Then he saw a pair of delivery trucks and zeroed in on them. The salesman followed him without comment.

The first ran on hydrogen, which would be difficult to find outside of a city, both in Central America, and even Mexico. But the next one ran on good, old-fashioned diesel. He popped the hood and found a bonus; it had a fuel cell backup, which meant it was a hybrid. In addition to the diesel engine, it had an electric drive that could be powered by the fuel cell, which in turn could operate on anything with an octane rating.

The side had a logo from a supply house in Cartagena. There were a couple of bullet holes in the box, and the remnants of a police impound sticker helped fill in the story. “Does it run?” he asked the salesman.

The man slid past Rick and pulled a locking chip from his pocket. He clicked it into the dash, and all the displays came alive with a series of clicks and hums. A single button push, and the diesel engine turned over with a roar and a jet of black smoke. Whoever had owned it had removed the catalytic system, probably for increased power.

“The fuel cell?”

The salesman pushed a control. The engine stopped, and a power display slowly lit up. Rick could tell the fuel cell had seen better days. Probably needed a new catalyst layer, but it was working. Good enough.

“We’ll take it.”

“One million Córdoba,” the salesman said, showing rotted teeth.

Rick did the math. Converted, it was about 30,000 dollars. “For this piece of junk?” The man shrugged. He reached into a pocket of the robe and produced a 100-credit chit. The man’s face froze, and a look of hunger replaced the indifference. Rick added two more for 300 credits, roughly what the man was asking in equivalent currency.

“You have ID to fill out papers?” the salesman asked.

Rick shook his head and produced another 100-credit chit. The salesman licked his lips. “We’d need a license, too. One that won’t get us pulled over by the policía.” Two more 100-credit chits made a total of 600 credits. “No questions asked, amigo.”

The man turned and waddled quickly toward the office.

“How do you know he isn’t calling the cops?” Sato asked, taking off his coat in the quickly growing morning heat.

“Because the police won’t pay him as much as we are.” A minute later