Single Combat (20 page)

"Make it five minutes, will you?" So far, she had given Control no hint that she might be speaking directly to a fourth party. She gestured the priest on his way, looking about her for equipment she could use. In a thigh pocket she had the first item, the hypospray canister.

"Is that as loud as you can do it, Control?" Quantrill's forehead glistened with sweat, his eyelids flickering in tune with some maddening noise that Sanger could not hear.

Using muted gutterals that Control alone could decipher clearly, Sanger lied, "I think he's fainting. Control." If the bastards thought him unconscious they might not pull his plug. Oh, but they wanted him
bad
, she thought, so they could dissect him at their leisure. Well, they might just get some dissection—but not on their terms.

She noted the prewar dishtowels folded near the sink, the small hardwood cutting board that hung at the side of the chopping block. They would have to serve. She faced Quantrill, hurrying on with it, certain that if she faltered only once she would not be able to continue. She addressed him twice, once aloud and then in sign talk. "Quantrill, you're about to get your moment of truth." Pause, then, "I
love you
," said her hands.

He was plucking at his hair again, but stopped as he read a phrase he had never seen her use. Evidently the sounds in his head took a lot of cognitive jamming because his silent reply was jerky: "
Sorry I doubted you. Even if you took me out, I'd go loving you, Marbrye
." Aloud he managed to say, "We may just go out this way together, Sanger."

Lips and hands moving: "Don't try to scare me, little man." "
That's the way I'd want it, my love
."

She moved to him, raised a hand to his cheek, saw his eyes close as he kissed her open palm to seal a pact; one that might accept, if not mutual suicide, then double murder. It was then that she brought up her other hand with the tiny canister of hypo-spray.

Sanger's weapon was not as gentle as most drugs, but only curare was quicker. At least the stuff would put him out instead of leaving him paralyzed and fully conscious. She placed her mouth on his for one heart-rending instant before triggering the canister against the side of his head and then, as she pulled back, spraying it into his mouth.

Stumbling, wiping furiously, he backed against the chopping block. "Sanger! Oh Sanger, what the hell have you done?"

"Outlasted you," she said. She dared not approach him as he faltered; his dismay was tinged with fury. Yet her hands said, "I
love you, Ted. Trust me. Love you. Trust me
," as she watched him register betrayal and, mercifully, loss of awareness.

Control was braying for a report. "Hypospray," she gasped. "Got the little fucker but—inhaled a little." She pulled him onto the butcher block, face down, and snatched up a handful of clean towels. Two of them, folded thick, went under his chin. Her belt medikit provided sterile pressure patches which she lay face-up on the wooden surface. Her utility knife with its retractable blade guard was as sharp as a filleting knife. If Sanger could shave her legs with it, perhaps it would shave a patch of skull. She did, nicking him only once over the swell of mastoid behind his ear; and saw the thin scar appear, a neat job by men of great expertise and no vestige of human compassion.

The cleaver was her first choice but she feared it was too dull. The largest of the carving knives was almost as heavy, and wickedly sharp. She sterilized its blade with an ampoule from her kit, grabbed the small cutting board by its handle, laid it down again and gripped her hands tightly to quell their trembles. She might be killing him anyway, but if either hand shook she would surely fail.

Several long breaths, murmuring to assuage Control, and then she gazed again at that neat livid scar. Somewhere beneath it lay the small horror that had driven them both past cold-blooded murder and on to self-hatred. She wiped the shaved area to sterilize it, placed the heavy knife squarely on the scar, lifted the cutting board again, and with steady hands she readied for the blow. "I think Q is out, Control; but I intend to make sure." With that, she struck with her makeshift mallet against the back of the heavy blade.

Quantrill grunted with the impact; made no other sound. She saw that she had struck too lightly, peeled back a flap of skin and struck again, harder, from another angle. A rough trapezoid of tough spongy bone popped away. Sanger had watched training films of appendectomies and had spilled a lot of blood on her own account, but none of that had been Quantrill's blood. She bit her lip and continued, perspiration rivuleting her face.

Marbrye Sanger clung to the tatters of reason as she peered into the cleft she had forced into the spongy bone mass behind her lover's ear. Now she knew why surgeons rarely elected to work on a loved one. For the first few seconds, surprisingly little blood welled into the cavity she had driven nearly two centimeters deep and twice as long. In the deepest part of her brutal incision the hollow irregular mastoid cells were larger, and Sanger perceived a larger cavity the size of her fingertip before upwelling gore from surrounding tissue blocked her view.

She wondered if she were insane. She did not know what the damnable critic looked like, nor exactly where to look, and rumor claimed that it would explode at her touch. Yet she knew it must include a rechargeable energy cell and a gram or so of explosive. Surely, she insisted to herself, she would recognize such a foreign body when she saw it.

That little cavity at the deepest limit of her cut: was it larger than it seemed? The edge made a curve that seemed too regular to be part of the surrounding bone. Blinking against tears, her lower lip bleeding between her teeth, she swept the synthoderm face of a pressure patch through the scarlet mess; saw the tiny cavity; eased the tip of the knife in and felt nearby bony cells carved away like half-rotted wood under her careful assault. She flicked the knifetip out to dispose of bone fragments, swallowed against a bitter taste rising in her throat,—and then she saw it.

She nearly sobbed aloud, facing the hellborn thing. Gleaming unnaturally white in the pinkish gray of human tissue, wedged into the mastoid antrum cavity, lay Ted Quantrill's loathsome critic. Inside its firm flexible surface Sanger could see striations as of dissimilar materials stacked inside an oblong capsule. She carved away more bone, infinitely tender, willing her arms not to shake.

"Sanger!" Control's voice was strident in her head. "What is he doing? We're getting anomalous readings; how hard did you hit him?"

"He's flopping on—on the deck," she stammered. "Can't stop him. Need time. Woozy as hell." She did not know how her savage surgery was registering to Control, but they obviously did not like what they were monitoring. The God-damned critic was still intact, untouched; but now fully exposed.

She tasted salt when she swallowed, grasped the knife again.

When Sanger's sweaty grip caused the knife to slip, the blood-smeared blade carved neatly through the translucent plastic and some dark cheesy substance as well. No explosion.

There was no explosion!
. Now the monstrous, repulsive thing lay in two pieces, connected only by filament-slender wire which had resisted the knife. Whimpering almost silently, Sanger wiped away blood and tried to shave more of the bony material side. She flicked the blade, prying, and saw a half-dozen hunks of bloody debris spatter onto the butcher block and floor. Sanger laid down her knife, sobbing noiselessly as she stared.

Ted Quantrill might die now, or in a day, but he would not die from a detonator in his skull. Among the crimson debris were both wire-linked pieces of the mastoid critic.

From Control: "Ease up, Sanger! Are you beating his head in? Brief us; we get anomalous signals from Q."

She remained silent, controlling her gasping sobs, both hands held to her face in mingled revulsion and relief. With a featherlight touch, she pressed two sterile pressure patches into Quantrill's gaping wound; shuddered at the trickle of his blood that soaked the towels under his chin. Her hands were sticky with his blood. She could feel it drying on her cheeks, and this added sensation galvanized her once more.

Rushing to the sink, Sanger scrubbed viciously at her face and hands, willing her sobs to abate. She commanded herself to stand fast against emotional collapse, for her job had scarcely begun.

Rubbing hard with a dishtowel, she scanned the room for a terminal or chalkboard—anything to write with. At last the old clipboard with its pencil on a frayed cord arrested her gaze. She tore away a shopping list, began to scribble; slowed as she saw that her trembling scrawl was nearly illegible.

Escaped S & R rovers
, she wrote.
Mastoid-implant radios can be exploded by S & R leaders. I cut Quantrill's out. Must remove mine NOW!
She jumped toward the voices and hurrying footsteps; saw the priest from the window, and with him a swarthy man in shirtsleeves.

As Sanger darted to the doorway, Control spoke again. She wrote another passage as Control said, "We've made a command decision. Howell advises us of a disturbing possibility and we can't chance it. If near Q's head, move away or cover his head with something. Terminating Q's programs in ten seconds,
mark
."

Sanger did not answer but stood swaying before the two men who now entered the kitchen. "This the injured woman?" The doctor, gripping a scarred little bag, gaped beyond her. He saw the body of Ted Quantrill, and the thin drool of his blood from sodden towels, running down the flank of the chopping block. As he stepped around Sanger, she slapped his arm hard with the clipboard and held it before him.

She pointed at Quantrill, then at the debris on the floor. The doctor was reading, frowning, shaking his head. "Incred—," he said, as a high-pitched report echoed through the room. The sound was as thin and sharp as a scalpel.

The physician stepped back quickly from the small object that skittered across the floor to rest near his feet. The priest was now reading the note. "Father in heaven," he breathed, and crossed himself.

The physician pocketed the tiny device at his feet, hurried to Quantrill's side, felt for a pulse with one hand while carefully peeling back the gore-soaked patches with the other. "You've probably killed him," he said, then remembered Sanger's last scrawl. "And what makes you think we'd be likely to give anyone political asylum, young lady?"

Control was clamoring for a report but Sanger knew her best tactic was to feign unconsciousness. She snatched up the clipboard.
NOT sure
, she wrote; S
& R querying me now
. She circled a previous passage—
Must remove mine NOW
—then dropped the clipboard and, in what seemed one choreographed motion, swept her utility knife up with bared blade to shave away the hair from her own skull.

Priest and doctor froze, unsure whether this violent young woman was attempting suicide; but the doctor was quick to infer her real goal. "A hell of a choice you give me," he snarled at her, and motioned for her to sit on the rough bench near the window. "Guess I'll have to tend to you first."

He gestured for the knife, studied it expertly for a second, tossed a quick bitter glance toward the priest who was administering last rites to the unconscious Quantrill. "Save the hereafter for later, Klein, he needs help here and now. Apply finger pressure over those patches to lessen the bleeding—and tell me if he stops breathing!"

Fingers almost a blur, his bag open beside him, the medic bade Sanger lie prone on the bench. He bound her to the bench with velcrolok straps; began to shave the fine chestnut curls away, murmuring to Sanger as he worked. "Klein told me you weren't long on talk—and now I guess I see why. Search & Rescue runaways, hm?" He did not pause for answer. "Never believed those rumors, but unless you set this up to sucker me, guess I'll
have
to give it credence. Your bosses talking to you now?"

He held the razor-sharp blade away; saw her nod, and saw the scar behind her ear. "By God, here it is! Nice incision, whoever implanted the thing. I have a portable rotary bone saw, young lady, but I'll have to put you under first. God knows how the young fella stood it. These things take time."

Sanger ignored the irony—the doctor echoing Control's complaint about time—and signaled that she wanted to write a response. A bone saw would generate vibrations that Control might identify. And the brutally efficient S & R hypospray had put Quantrill under in scant seconds. It could do the same for her—if she could make the doctor understand.

"Not now," he said calmly, and triggered a spray of cytovar onto her unprotected skin.

She still had her spray in her pocket. "No!" She blurted it out, writhed aside, fumbled for her hypospray.

Control misunderstood. Someone imagined that she had seen Quantrill die. "Couldn't be helped, S," crackled in her ear.

Cytovar was among the best of the quick-acting anesthetics, but it overtook the mind in layered stages. The faculty of judgment was first to capitulate. Knowing this, the physician quickly climbed astride Sanger, his legs pinioning her arms as the heavy straps bound her to the bench. Even so, he took one solid blow to the kidney from her flailing feet before he leaned forward. He soothed, "Relax. You won't feel a thing."

Softly, desperately, hoping against all odds that Control might not understand, Sanger whispered, "Spray in my pocket—is faster. Use it!"

The physician heard. "I'll not take chances on anything like that."

Control heard, too. "Nothing's faster than a critic, S. Uh—hypospray? How can we use it from—" and then in sudden suspicion, "Who else is monitoring you, S? Report!"

Marbrye Sanger fought to resist an automatic response to Control's last command. Above and behind her came the sound of a small rotary tool being tested. With her last shreds of duplicity she muttered, "Hovering, Control. Can't—think."

The doctor fitted a sterile Week blade to its handle, prepped her skin with a chill anesthetic. And then he made a mistake: "If you can hear me, start counting down from twenty."