Single Combat (10 page)

"Dis-what?"

She grinned. "Remember the Rosicrucians? A M R C? The light and power of the universe, and all that. Well, those ladrones took away my light and power. Disamorced me for a month. That's worth more than two hundred to me."

Lufo nodded uncertainly; this anglo hotsy had more kinds of language than a polyglot parrot. "We intend to work, not play—but you don't know that. Okay, I give you four hundred, just about all have, and you come back in a few days and give half of it back. Fair enough?"

A slow smile: "Four hundred pesos? What if I don't come back?"

He met it with one of his own, feral, canny: "That garden's too well-tended, hija. You'll come back."

"You're right, I—uh-oh," she said, starting to rise. Lufo beat her to the doorway; he'd heard the commotion as soon as she.

Something had made the horses-skittish as they approached the soddy, for the wiry latino, Espinel, had all he could do to keep his mount and the two he led under control. Behind him were three pack-horses in a string, carrying polymer-wrapped bundles much too long for any pack animal. Thompson, a medium-sized anglo afoot, hung onto his leadrope with foolhardy courage as the pack-horses milled and bucked around him, their ears laid back, nostrils distended, eyes rolling in fear.

Lufo sprinted around Espinel's remuda of three and hurled himself into the melee heedless of flying hooves and dirt clods, snatching at leadropes, making things worse by rushing headlong at the already panicky animals. Abruptly, one horse went down in a tangle of lashings, its almost weightless bundles rolling free. Lufo took a deathgrip on the second animal, the third growing calm after Thompson wiped his bandanna across its nose. Lufo saw that Espinel was leading his animals away from the soddy, found himself jerked off his feet, was thrown bodily under Thompson's horse and rolled stunned in the dust.

The pack-horse sunfished once, its bundles slipping, and set off for distant places. "There goes the rectenna," screamed Thompson. "For God's sake, Espinel!"

The latino's head jerked to and fro like a puppet's as he surveyed a situation gone to garbage and getting worse, and his restive mount helped his decision. Espinel vaulted from his saddle in one fluid instant, unslinging the wire-stocked carbine from his shoulder; staggered upright, spent two seconds aiming, and fired a brief burst at the fleeing animal. The pack-horse jerked, continued at a canter, then faltered and fell.

Sandy was running toward the groggy Lufo but Thompson waved her forward to Espinel's horse. "Grab the reins, lady, and stand fast!" Sandy did as she was told, reflecting that these men had priorities they valued more than their skins.

Espinel remounted then, and with Thompson's help managed to get the five horses tethered at the nearest cedar. Thompson wiped the nose of each animal, muttering. Sandy helped Lufo to stand and gasped as she saw the bare patch of skin on one side of his head.

"You're lucky he didn't kick your head off," she said with more tenderness than anger, and started to inspect the wound.

But Lufo shook his head and drew away. "That's an old scar, hija," he said, almost chuckling, "and I'm kinda sensitive about it. Here's where he got me," he finished, pulling up his shirt.

The hoofprint was an angry blue crescent at the side of his belly. The lowest rib was cracked but not floating free, and Lufo insisted on walking alone to his comrades. Sandy studied them, then the horses nervously testing the breeze, and walked back to refill her pitcher.

The three men paused outside the soddy to lay their bundles down before knocking. "You've rented it," Sandy called, "so don't stand on ceremony."

It appeared, as she ministered to them, that the rental terms would have to change. As Thompson put it, "We have no choice now, Lufo. We'll have to launch from here if I can repair the damage. It could take a week."

It was Lufo's decision to offer the four hundred in gold to Sandy in exchange for meals and her silence. "We'll sleep out with the stock, hija, but there's something we have to keep inside, and it's big. We can't take chances on anybody seeing it. If you have visitors you'll have to keep 'em out of here."

She looked at Thompson, whose quick precise speech tagged him as a nor'easter. "Sorry, but that's the way it is," he said. Espinel only shrugged as if willing to accept whatever the others decided.

Sandy had options none of them could know; and had she chosen, she could have arranged their departure in one Godawful hurry. But Sandy did not feel threatened; she would accept the situation. "You'd best hobble your mounts and take them down in the draw yonder," she said. "Less breeze down there, and some forage."

"Something in the air, es cierto," Espinel agreed. "No bear or cougar in these parts, senorita?"

They had moved on in the interests of health but Sandy only said, "No. By the way, Mr. Thompson, what's on that bandanna of yours? It certainly worked miracles in calming your ponies."

"Mentholated jelly," he said. "A horse can't smell anything past it. Espinel taught me that."

"Kerosene works okay, but not so good," Espinel said shyly. "Lufo, can you ride with that rib stove in?"

"He won't have to for a week," said Thompson, "but he may have to do some digging."

Lufo: "What for? The launcher?"

"No, to bury that damn' pony. It'll draw buzzards."

"I had no choice," said Espinel.

"You did right," Lufo said quickly.

"Don't worry about the pony," Sandy put in. "I can butcher it out, and what I don't smoke or tan will go into my compost heap."

"I hadn't thought about that. You've got your own cottage industry here, don't you," Thompson said admiringly.

"Yes—but keep wiping your ponies' noses," Sandy warned. "As long as they're here they'll be spooky."

"You must have one hell of a compost heap," Thompson joked.

"It has an air about it," Sandy admitted. "And those big bundles of yours have an air, too—of mystery. What is it, some kind of secret weapon?"

Silence. Then, "She'll see it anyhow," Thompson mused.

"And she'll be an accomplice, which should keep her quiet," Lufo said, grunting in pain as he stood up. "Let's go get the stuff. We can lay it out inside the soddy while Espinel stakes the horses out."

"You've really piqued my curiosity," Sandy murmured, watching as the men carried the bundles in.

"Young and the Feds wouldn't put it quite that way," said Thompson, peeling back the polymer from one bundle. "They know Mexico can't afford holo satellites, and they didn't expect anybody to build an antenna thirty-five klicks high along the border. This one strayed too far into Wild Country and somebody nailed it with a laser—but it landed a few klicks North of here. We hoped to get it back across the Rio Grande for repairs but now I'm afraid I'll have to fly it back." He spread his hands above the naked bundle as if it were self-explanatory.

Sandy saw a protective framework of cot ton wood, bound carefully with cord. Inside was an intricate gossamer structure covered with an almost invisible film and supported within the framework by a jury-rig of rubber bands as protection against shock or abrasion. Nevertheless, the elegant structure was ripped and buckled in places. Certain that she had misunderstood something, Sandy said, "You're telling me this is part of a tower that's thirty-five
kilometers
high?"

"Does the same job—and relays holo programs that the Feds manage to keep off their captive networks in Streamlined America," Thompson nodded. "That includes anything Governor Jim Street and the Indys have to say about little matters like industrial cartels, strike-breaking goon squads, and a team of what seem to be government assassins. What the governor has here," he tapped the gossamer structure lightly, "is a medium that's out of control. Blanton Young's control," he amended, beaming. "It's called a Boucher relay."

Sandy smiled while she wrinkled her forehead in amused disbelief. "But—but it looks like a huge model airplane!"

Thompson's hand formed an 'OK' in the air. "Dead center," he said.

The
Boucher relay
was no model, but clearly reflected its modeler's origins. Kukon and MacCready, both pioneers, had both drawn on model techniques to develop aircraft that were ultralight for their times. It had been a third modeler, Boucher, who proved that balsa and plastic film could be mated to solar cells for a permanent media relay in the sky.

Essentially the Boucher relay was an incredibly lightweight aircraft driven by an electric motor, its wing panels glistening with the fire-opal glitter of featherweight photovoltaic cells. Catapulted like a sailplane, a Boucher craft used both multichannel radio control and sun-sensors to provide its orientation. The earliest of these superb devices had boasted wingspans of nearly ten meters with overall weights under ten kilos, thanks to handforming techniques.

For two generations, said Stan Thompson as he worked, Americans had been urged to buy prefab toys that gradually deprived fledging engineers of construction techniques, stress-analytical knowledge, and optimum performance—for no prefabricated gadget could compete against the best hand-crafted models. A 'Wakefield' model, hurtling almost vertically upward with a propeller driven by only forty grams of rubber band, was a culmination of science and art; and looked it. Soviet-influenced countries seemed to understand the research value of the small Wakefield models, for their craft often won Worldwide competition events and enriched their understanding of high-efficiency aircraft while Americans watched and ignored the implications.

By the end of the Twentieth cent, only a few enthusiasts built these gossamer brutes; but those few tended to be stress analysts, architects, aerodynamicists. Wakefield techniques tended to interest those who could combine the mind of a theorist and the hands of a watchmaker. Stan Thompson qualified on both counts.

Sandy Grange watched Thompson uncrate the ultralight craft with dwindling disbelief and growing appreciation as he spoke. "What Boucher proved was that you could build an aircraft that would fly for years," Thompson said, pausing to cluck over a cracked spar. "Once you get the little bugger up above the weather, fifteen klicks or so, there's not much to impede sunlight."

"Except nightfall," Sandy murmured.

"That's where Boucher's vision came in. He designed 'em to climb so high that, by nightfall, they're over thirty klicks high. They go like hell in that thin air but so what? They're radio-controlled and they keep circling—more or less geostationary over some chosen spot.

"With such ridiculous wing-loading, the sink-rate is lower than a lizard's navel, and the aircraft carries storage cells to keep the propeller going at night. By dawn, it's still fifteen klicks up and sunlight recharges the accumulators—which are over there in the fuselage," he said, nodding to the package Lufo was unwrapping. "So up it goes again until nightfall."

"I don't see any propeller in front," she said.

"It's a pusher. The first Boucher relays were conventional, but this rig is a 'Daytripper'—designed around the rectenna for a holo system. The fuselage must be almost a meter wide to hold that gear, so somebody thought of making a lifting-body fuselage. Actually it's a triple-delta shape with air-control vanes to keep airflow where you need it for maximum lift. The Day tripper has a nine-meter span, with a butterfly tail up front for still more lift, and wings at the rear. The technical term is 'canard'," he finishd.

Pregnant silence from Sandy before, "That means 'hoax' in French, doesn't it?"

He blinked. "Does it?"

Her gaze was a challenge. "Are you pulling my leg, Mr. Thompson? Look at it from my view: I'm being offered four hundred pesos so you can use my soddy to repair an airplane that flies
forever
.

But you brought it here on pack-horses! And if that doesn't stick in my craw, you ask me to swallow the idea that it beams forbidden media into Wild Country."

Stan Thompson pulled out ancient bifocals, chortling as he adjusted them. "Actually, they're scheduled to come down in Mexico once a year for maintenance—but yes, that's about it. We knew this one had gone off-course and landed in this area, and for our purposes, for a low profile, a horse is still the best way to travel. I figured I could trouble-shoot the Daytripper and get it launched again, but I found it had been damaged too much. First by a beam of some sort that melted part of the film, and then in landing. Took us days to find it.

"I decided it'd be easier to dismantle it and take it back to Mexico for repairs, but I was wrong; it won't take rough handling.

"Now I either repair it and launch it from here—primitive as our accommodations are for it—or we destroy a hundred thousand pesos' worth of Boucher relay and go back empty-handed."

"Well, I'll believe it when I see it," Sandy replied.

Lufo had been listening. Now he pointed to Sandy's old holovision set. "Does your holo work?"

"Usually. For the past week I haven't been able to get XEPN, the Piedras Negras chan—." She turned back, mouth open slightly, to gaze at the disassembled craft. "Well I be damned," she whispered.

"Nine days, to be exact," Thompson muttered. "By the time I get it back on station, a lot of nice folks in Wild Country will have been without Indy media for two weeks."

"I thought you were working for the Mexicans."

"I am—because Governor Street asked me to. How else can he get media coverage into Streamlined America?"

Sandy mulled that over for long minutes. The credentials of James Street were well-known: Major General, USA, (ret.); Governor of Texas; Undersecretary of State; then unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency on the Independent ticket. In Texas he was still 'the governor', a man who could sit a horse or kiss a baby with the best of them. But Street's anti-Federalist rhetoric had hardened after the war; Blanton Young labeled his trenchant truths as sedition, and saw that the label became official. Old Jim Street found himself branded a rebel fugitive from justice, and knew what brand of justice he could expect. Thus the official label became the fact: James Street was the guidonbearer for rebel forces in Wild Country.