Single Combat (26 page)

For the first time in her life Eve had faced a masculinity so full of clout that she had not dreamed of bending it to her will. Ba'al, the prince of hell, was not a thing you vied with; he was Something you paid homage to.

No one saw the long sensitive snout jerk up from the water, wriggling like the tip of an elephant's trunk, questing after the hoverbus. Ba'al remained indifferent to the dwindling thud and whirr, but was no longer indifferent to what he smelled. Unless his nostrils deceived him—and they rarely did—the noisy vehicle contained an oestrus female of his own breed. He had not happened across any females for over a year and the last had not been in oestrus, and had not been pleased at the size of her suitor. Any experienced female might suspect that, if the corkscrew-ridged penis of a standard feral Russian boar grew to nearly half a meter in length, then the organ of Ba'al would represent
much
too much of a good thing.

Hutch got the vehicle up to highway speeds once or twice, but at night in broken brush country he averaged scarcely half that pace. Ba'al, with a consuming curiosity and nothing better to do, followed at a distance-eating trot, undecided whether to risk the bangsticks of many men to satisfy his suspicions. In any case he could afford caution; he felt no compulsion but the urge of his scrotum.

Quantrill was tempted to leave his damaged critic in the care of the Brubakers before leaving on his mission of prepayment, but hit on a better ploy. He hid the vacuum vial with a note of explanation in a light fixture of old Brubaker's office in Eureka; wrote a letter addressed to Mr. Brubaker in a fictitious town in Nevada; and gave the return address as Brubaker's own in Eureka. In the letter was only a note giving the location of 'something of interest'. After mailing the letter, he told old Brubaker to check his returned mail carefully, if Quantrill himself did not return from his ride in the IEE delta. Anyway, if the letter went awry Brubaker would find the vial soon enough. Postwar incandescent bulbs seldom lasted a month before replacement.

Young Brubaker had fretted and sweated to copy the massive crates which had been offloaded from Japan and scheduled for one M. Chabrier of San Rafael Laboratories. The largest of the replacement crates contained a fast hovercycle. One of the others contained Ted Quantrill with weapons, heated bodysuit, rations for five days, and a ventilation slot fitted with a mass-motion sensor. When anything larger than a wharf rat approached Quantrill's crate, Quantrill knew it.

Most of the other crates were, in fact, the originals with tunneling equipment of Japanese manufacture. Carefully stacked in hoppers, battery pans, and in every unoccupied corner of those crates lay bags of granular material labeled 'desiccant'—moisture-absorbent chemical. Most dessicant's were harmless silicates. Old Brubaker had diverted the Japanese silicates in favor of a chemical so cheap it was employed as fertilizer: ammonium nitrate.

Like many a cheap substitute, ammonium nitrate had its side effects. It was fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate that once filled the hold of the freighter S. S.
Grandcamp
and, on the sixteenth of April 1947, blew the ship and most of Texas City, Texas halfway to Houston. Old Brubaker judged that four tons of it, confined in an underground lab, might well boost a hunk of the San Rafael desert halfway to Mars.

To Quantrill's dismay, his crate was lashed down on the aisle of the cargo bay in the IEE delta. Every time the cargo-master passed, Quantrill's motion sensor readied him for action. At least he was near enough to the cockpit to hear some of the conversation and in this way he gauged his progress.

Quantrill performed in-place calisthenics, read by the light of a pocket chemlamp, and felt the great airship respond to side winds as it slid toward Utah from Eureka. He heard the captain say they were maintaining one-fifty kph. groundspeed, and tried to place the voice. As a teen-ager, Quantrill had briefly served on the ill-fated delta
Norway
and had met men from other crews. The cargo master was 'Cole'; nothing to catch the tripwires of Quantrill's memory. But the captain, 'Steve', might be a man named Will Stevens. From the
Cayley
? The
Santos-Dumont
? one of the
Norway's
sister ships, anyway.

Quantrill's mission included leaving the crate to set a time-delay incendiary beneath the delta's gas cells. He heard the interchanges between Steve and Cole. The two men chafed aloud against their masters, spoke of their kids and their ration coupons. These were not the enemy, in Quantrill's mind; these were innocent teamsters of Streamlined America. It no longer mattered to Quantrill whether he had met either of them before; it mattered very much that they would fall as flaming crisps from a gigantic midair incinerator, casual victims of Quantrill's vendetta. He felt an upwelling of joy to realize that he had decided of his own free will—
free will! Thank you, Sanger
—against destroying the delta.

Eight hours and a time-zone later, the stirlings changed their whispery songs as the delta descended. Quantrill heard Steve's complaint, voiced to someone at the moorage: "Better get some floodlights set up, Chabrier. If you people don't get us a decent moorage, one of these days I'll put a strut through your roof. It'll be dark before we're snubbed down."

Quantrill ventured the private opinion that the lab would soon lack not only moorage, but roof as well. He sought handholds, waiting for a series of jolts, and silently praised the captain as he heard fondly remembered sounds; rasps of strut against concrete, creaks of a rigid spidery structure two hundred meters long as it became linked to the landing pad. It was a nice piece of work without mooring sockets.

Cole Riker inspected the strut anchors before hauling pallets to the cargo hatch and spoke briefly with Chabrier while directing the floodlights. Then as he rode down with the third pallet, Riker muttered, "That crazy Chabrier is either queer for me or he wants out of here mighty bad." A hand's breadth away, Quantrill stifled the urge to whisper an inane reply. Riker had told no one of Chabrier's pathetic attempts to befriend him, but after three meetings he began to suspect that he represented, to the Frenchman, some form of potential escape.

Quantrill's pallet thudded and jounced en route to the elevator. He heard a Gallic accent entwined with the cargomaster's, heard the same voice raised among those of cargo handlers in some oriental tongue. This was a complication: what if he had to face down a crew without an interpreter? The goddamn Brubakers might've handed him a translating voder—but they'd briefed him on the Chinese staff and he hadn't thought of it either. Quantrill resolved to waste anyone who couldn't follow orders; the SinoInd war was still too recent for him to harbor much pity for a Chinese national.

Forty seconds ticked by while the elevator lowered Quantrill to the guts of the lab. Very slow elevator—or very deep basement. He'd been trained to memorize every datum going in, the better to grease his skids coming out. He tried, thrusting aside the failure scenarios his imagination paraded before him.

Fiasco One: They had sensors so good they would discover him before he had time to leave the crate, and guards alert enough to surround him before he could find a way out. Fade to

Fiasco Two: His crate would be stored in a building completely removed from the others. He would have no explosives and no hovercycle. Fade to

Fiasco Three: They put all the crates into vacuum storage. Fadeout.

At least, he told himself, they were sliding the entire pallet load into the same place. That gave him the 'cycle and two hundred kilos of deadly 'desiccant'. Now if only they didn't start opening the damned crates immediately! Old Brubaker had manufactured a brief delay to make certain the delta could not arrive in the middle of the day.

Presently the alien singsong argot faded, borne away on shuffling feet. Quantrill's sensor, even on full gain, could detect no motion outside his crate. He eased noiselessly to the spyhole; put his eye to the lens expecting darkness. Instead he saw, dimly lit by fluorescents, a forest of crates on pallets. In the shadowy distance squatted a flat treaded earth-borer, its toothed boring bit erect on a cantilevered beam. He studied the rig for long minutes; it looked capable of chewing a tunnel all the way to the surface, if a man had the time and no concern for the noise he made—and if he knew how to operate the goddamn thing.

The concrete walls were featureless slabs except for two areas that drew his interest. In one place near the earth-borer, gray flatness gave way to soft contours in concrete that led into darkness. In another, a great white spinnaker of plastic bulged like a tumor into the storeroom, inflated from behind. Beside the velcrolok portal in the plastic, flexible conduits drooped from raceways in the ceiling to plunge like feeding tubes into the tumor. Whatever lurked behind that positive-pressure seal, he judged, must be very delicate to need clean-room conditions.

An orderly commotion of men and machines issued from somewhere beyond Quantrill's view. Moments later more lights flickered on. He saw that the dark contoured hole was an excavation, its rounded walls and domed ceiling sprayed with ferroconcrete, and that the job was not complete. Judging by the flexible seals where the concavity began, this excavation might eventually be sealed and pressurized with a twin to the portal nearby.

Four white-clad men came near, operating a pneumatic lift and bearing more crates that looked familiar. The men were orientals, one with his hair in a pigtail, and they did not have the bodies of laborers. Faces glistened with sweat. A grunt, a snarl of torn fabric, a laugh; no hint that they might be tense. On the contrary, they flopped onto whatever was handy to wipe a brow, investigate a hangnail, stretch kinks from shoulders. Quantrill damned them for making it necessary for him to squat immobile, but ten minutes later got his reprieve.

The thickset Caucasian who accompanied the last palletload spoke mostly in the same foreign intonations, but Quantrill recognized him from mugshots provided by young Brubaker. Marengo Chabrier spoke with authority and received deference without exuding arrogance or false
egalite
in the process. A harried man, Quantrill decided; a man consumed by details and gifted with languages. His speech was peppered with American phrases:
assembly line, overtime
, and to a refrain of snickers,
stoned to our follicles
.

Quantrill recalled a tip from a sly-bodied Army linguist, Karen Smetana: a few perfect unaccented phrases can let you pass as a native from another village—but make sure you
do
pass on, before somebody realizes you're faking it. Now Quantrill stared at the other side of that coin. The foreign crew might not know any more of Quantrill's language than those few phrases Chabrier used.

But he'd heard Chabrier topside speaking excellent American. If Quantrill couldn't find a way out without a guide, his ticket outside would bear Chabrier's likeness. A month previous, driven by Control, Quantrill might have taken extraordinary chances on such a mission—in part because he'd had no hope in the future. Now he dared hope, knowing that hope might make him hesitate at some vital instant when hesitation equaled death. Then he thought of Marbrye Sanger, and trembled with fresh intent.

When the Frenchman finished his spiel, one of the Chinese drew a note plate from his smock and encoded notes on its keyboard as Chabrier studied the crate labels. The other men wandered off to the elevator and Quantrill considered taking two prisoners as soon as they were alone. Chabrier rapped a knuckle on one crate, then another, then Quantrill's, then a fourth. Priority items, perhaps, for immediate attention. A hail echoed in the near distance; Chabrier turned with his assistant and quickly walked away. Quantrill's moment had not passed; it hadn't really existed.

He made himself lie back and recheck his equipment during the next half-hour, giving them abundant time. Better to waste a few minutes than to be surprised at his work. That surprise would work both ways, of course. His little Heckler & Koch automatic was hardly in the same class as a chiller, but for a silenced handgun its balance was respectable, and its Canadian
5
mm. rounds contained curare in their soft noses. They didn't blow you away; they just embalmed you where you stood.

His time-delay detonators remained a worrisome enigma because he had no idea how precise their rugged chemical timers might be. Young Brubaker had sworn by them. They would write like any other pens but, stabbed into a bag of ammonium nitrate with the top unscrewed and the timer set, were supposed to pop plus or minus one minute over a one-hour range. Sloppy in comparison to solidstate devices, they were invulnerable to electronic detection.

Quantrill was already setting the stuff up in his mind: a chain of bags overlapping in a vee along the base of two walls, with a shaped-charge mound piled between the legs of the vee. The blast waves would sequence themselves in milliseconds for maximum shock up through the building, pretty basic stuff for any powder money and just about the limit of Quantrill's expertise.

Sometime after nine P.M., he slid the catches from the door of his crate, grateful for the few glowing fluorescents. Working in furious haste, he took the sides from marked crates using detents as they'd shown him, then began to emplace the bags—and there were hundreds of them. He worked with the knowledge that he might be caught at it somehow, his coverall damp with sweat. He could not know that, as he spent his first breather inspecting the pressurized portal, an enhanced infrared video bug silently followed him with its snout.

Alone in his chambers at the other end of the lowest level, Marengo Chabrier watched his video monitor with cold shock.

The great boar let instinctive caution divert him as he approached the scatter of old-style ranch structures, low black silhouettes on a moonlit horizon. He saw distant figures scurry in patches of light as the ranch staff welcomed the 'chuck-wagon' occupants. He might have stood motionless and waited there, but the wind was not right and some of the stock in nearby stables had evidently caught his scent.