Aftershocks by Harry Turtledove Page A

moment later, she wondered if she should have denied it, for the little devil gestured with his rifle and said, “You come with me. You two of you, you come with me.”
    “What have we done now?” Liu Mei asked. Her face stayed calm, though her eyes were anxious. As a baby, she’d been raised by the scaly devils, and she’d never learned to smile or to show much in the way of any expression.
    “You two of you, you come with me,” was all the little scaly devil would say, and Liu Han and Liu Mei had no choice but to do as they were told.
    They didn’t go to the administrative buildings in the camp, which surprised Liu Han: it wasn’t some new interrogation, then. She got another surprise when the scaly devils led her and Liu Mei out through the several razor-wire gateways that walled off the camp from the rest of the world.
    Outside the last one stood an armored fighting vehicle. Another little devil, this one with fancier body paint, waited by it. He confirmed their names, then said, “You get in.”
    “Where are you taking us?” Liu Han demanded.
    “You never mind that, you two of you,” the scaly devil answered. “You get in.”
    “No,” Liu Han said, and her daughter nodded behind her.
    “You get in right now,” the scaly devil said.
    “No,” Liu Han repeated, even though he swung the muzzle of his rifle in her direction. “Not till we know where we’re going.”
    “What is wrong with this stupid Big Ugly?” one of the other scaly devils asked in their own hissing language. “Why does she refuse to go in?”
    “She wants to know where they will be taken,” answered the little devil who spoke Chinese. “I cannot tell her that, because of security.”
    “Tell her she is an idiot,” the other little scaly devil said. “Does she want to stay in this camp? If she does, she must be an idiot indeed.”
    Maybe that conversation was set up for her benefit; the little devils knew she spoke their language. But they were not usually so devious. Liu Han had feared they were taking Liu Mei and her out to execute them. If they weren’t, if they were going somewhere better than the camp, she would play along. And where, on all the face of the Earth, was there anywhere worse than the camp? Nowhere she knew.
    “I have changed my mind,” she said. “We will get in.”
    “Thank you two of you.” The little devil who spoke Chinese might not be fluent, but he knew how to be sarcastic. He was even more sarcastic in his own language: “She must think she is the Emperor.”
    “Who cares what a Big Ugly thinks?” the other scaly devil replied. “Get her and the other one in and get them out of here.”
    He evidently outranked the scaly devil who spoke Chinese, for that male said, “It shall be done.” He opened the rear gate on the mechanized combat vehicle and returned to Chinese: “You two of you, get in there.”
    Liu Han went in ahead of Liu Mei. If danger waited inside, she would find it before her daughter did. But she found no danger, only Nieh Ho-T’ing. The People’s Liberation Army officer nodded to her. “I might have known you would be coming along, too,” he remarked, as calmly as if they’d met on the streets of Peking. “Is your daughter with you?” Before Liu Han could answer that, Liu Mei climbed up into the troop-carrying compartment of the combat vehicle. Nieh smiled at her. She nodded back; she couldn’t smile herself. “I see you are here,” he said to her.
    “Where are they taking us? Do you know?” Liu Han asked.
    Nieh Ho-T’ing shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Wherever it is, it has to be better than where we have been.”
    Since Liu Han had had the identical thought, she could hardly disagree. “I was afraid they were going to liquidate us, but now I don’t think they will.”
    “No, I don’t think so, either,” Nieh said. “They could do that in camp if they decided it served their interests.”
    Before Liu Han could answer, the scaly devils