Single Combat (29 page)

Quantrill, over the engine noise: "Looked like an oil storage dump. Ammonium nitrate doesn't go up like that."

"Monomers and diesel fuel tanks buried outside in the berm, mon ami; it would appear that you are damnably thorough."

Turning again to the west, Quantrill laughed outright. "You should be cheering, frenchy; weren't you a prisoner too?"

"All that work, all that experimental data—one hates to see it lost."

"Mills's enemies don't hate to see it lost—and that means most of Streamlined America."

"They would, if they knew what you destroyed."

Dull thunder finally overtook them, half a minute after the glare. As it faded Quantrill said, "I was supposed to blow away a Chinese gadget that synthesized rare materials."

Chabrier stiffened, then accepted the fact that Mills could not keep his secrets as well as he imagined. Speaking into Quantrill's ear: "You are well-informed. Every unit in existence was operating in that lower basement, and the porcelain parts were even more delicate than the cermets. I might possibly rebuild one from—from a small model and my memory, but without great good fortune M'sieur Mills will find nothing of much use back there."

"That makes you a valuable man to—wups," Quantrill ended as the field sensor light winked, then glowed brightly.

A sharp turn on a hovercycle requires the driver to bank steeply without scraping the fan skirts. Quantrill nearly lost his passenger as he urged the vehicle up and around in an abrupt turn. The field sensor light was a steady glare. Quantrill slowed until they were hovering; steered to make the 'cycle pivot; made its nose wag slowly as he watched a meter on the sensor box.

Finally, his outstretched arm pale in moonlight, Quantrill pointed left of center, ahead. "P-beam tower. I'm told they're about fifteen hundred meters apart. That true?"

"Closer, I think, over uneven ground. I saw them only once. Boren Mills amused himself by flushing rabbits and driving them forward by gunfire. When the beams struck the poor little beasts exploded as though struck by lightning. Of course the vultures came later—and met the same fate. Mills merely wanted to frighten me. He succeeded."

"Let's see if we're close enough. Move your legs up and shut your eyes; I'm going to fire one of the little birds near your feet."

Chabrier obeyed as if goaded by needles. Quantrill set a dial; pressed a stud. With a near-explosive whistling rush, the little homingbird sizzled away, backblast shifting from boost to loiter, and Quantrill watched with one eye covered to maintain half of his night vision.

For perhaps five seconds the exhaust cometed off, dwindling to a hard point on the horizon. Then a thread of light stretched across the desert for one retina-jarring instant, and a blue-white firebloom marked the intercept point where rocket and P-beam met twenty meters above the hardpan.

Quantrill urged the 'cycle forward another three hundred meters while Chabrier's grip tightened on his coverall; then he warned his passenger again. This time the Homingbird's rush carried it only a few hundred meters before a sharp line of glowing air molecules traced the P-beam's passage to the sacrifice decoy. Both men heard the
spaaat
of the beam in air and the chuffing boom of its target. "Near enough. This'll be a loud one; three, two, one." Hands over his ears, Chabrier still heard the sharp whistles. First one, then four more boosters howled away. Quantrill protected his ear nearest to the munitions rack; watched with one eye as the brief battle unfolded.

The sacrifice round preceded the others by a half-second, moving in the arc of its brief patrol. The hard actinic line again stretched from obelisk to target, and suddenly four exhaust glows became long zigzag booster trails like an aerial firework gone berserk.

A second P-beam fired, and one rocket cartwheeled into the distance. There was no third P-beam because the sawtooth trails of two Homing-birds converged on the obelisk at such a pace that Quantrill could barely follow the sequence. Two shattering blasts, the ear-pounding signatures of small shaped charges, echoed from nearby gullies and weirdly from inside the hollow shaft of the obelisk like a belch from a pipe organ. The upper fourth of the shaft split open, one piece spinning into the air.

Blue sparks showered up from the obelisk in a display that could have been seen from Mexican Hat, a hundred and sixty klicks to the south. More sparks erupted horizontally from a hole at the tower's base. "Solar accumulators are shorting," cried Chabrier. "Thanks to God! This will be a beacon to my friends."

Quantrill did not advance until the base of the obelisk, thick as a man's waist, began to melt. Only then did he gun the 'cycle forward, passing the tower as its energy accumulators consumed gobbets of metal that fell inward. Not until Quantrill was half a kilometer beyond did the itch subside between his shoulders. He throttled back, settled himself for the long ride, and veered South.

"We can hide in the mountains if we continue to the West." Chabrier called.

"We've got enough fuel to make New Vegas, and I have a contact there," Quantrill said over his shoulder. "By dawn we'll be skirting the Grand Canyon. But anytime you'd rather walk, you just sing out."

Chabrier laughed and fell silent. He knew that he could negotiate with reasonable men; sell his talents as Von Braun and others had; but he wondered whether he would meet any reasonable men. No longer could he hope to live in the ballooning shadow of Eve Simpson—and in a way he would miss the great cow. If he was to reconstruct a synthesizer—of
any
size—he would have to recover her amulet. In its cermets and solid-states resided technical details that no one, not even Chabrier, could memorize. He had long since committed his records of those secrets to a temporary memory storage in his apartment; a memory bank which would automatically self-destruct without daily recoding by him and him alone. Somehow, he must get his hands on that bezel again. He entertained a hope that this young saboteur's friends could make contact with Eve Simpson.

No one found it remarkable that Eve would be so drained of energy that she might miss breakfast. The tale of her courage on the previous evening hung in the dining hall, rich and pervasive as the perfume of chorizo omelet. But on the second pass on her morning rounds, the maid still heard no reply to her knock on the door to Eve's cabin.

She knocked again; called; fitted her key to the door and insinuated it open. "Maid service, Senora," she sang as required, and then wrinkled her nose against the stench of urine—and of something else.

It smelled, she thought, of butchering in the barrios; not a truly bad smell if it brought memories of feasting in a poor TexMex family, but a smell very much out of place among rich gringos.

The girl thrust the door open further. The first thing that caught her eyes was the gaping hole where the sliding glass door should be, with sunlight streaming through it. Then she saw the corpulent dark-smeared nude torso sprawled grotesquely near the broken bedframe, its skin gray-white, the flies already idling in through the breach in the wall; and when she glanced near her own feet and recognized that the melon-shaped object near the door had a face that stared unblinkingly toward her, she began to run…

"Don't make me go over your head, damn you," Boren Mills raged into his office holoscreen, "or I'll trot out the holotape I showed you and run it for Young myself!" Mills's automatic devices could not record Chabrier's control module, but duly recorded the views of the lab monitor until the moment it went blank.

Lon Salter knew that he could delay the inevitable, but anyone with eyes could recognize Quantrill's profile and the way he moved. "We already have three S & R teams probing the site, Mills; and two rover flights tracking the fugitives. They all went out the same hole afoot and then split, but they can't go far. What good will it do to take you out there?"

"I can't tell you that, Salter—well, maybe I'll have to. I don't care what you do with Quantrill after I question him but I want my lab staff on ice and unhurt
at all costs!
I want a voder—belay that; I want a live interpreter who speaks technical Chinese, and I want to be on the site in three hours with him. I can make you a very," he paused, thinking of Salter's own recorders, "—a very happy man if we can recover certain things from that wreckage—or a very unhappy one if you balk me."

Salter's usual lugubrious expression grew deeper. "I'll have to pull every string I can with the Air Force, but maybe I can get you to the hole before noon." He frowned at Mills's image: "Maybe I should meet you there.
I
won't carry any bugs if you won't."

Recording devices were easily detected anyway. "Agreed," Mills rapped. "One more thing: we both know why we can trust rovers to keep quiet. I want no one but rovers to collect anything from the site. No outside experts, no regulars! There are some things so sensitive that it could be necessary to disappear some of your own people."

"You'll go on record with that?"

"I'm sure I already am."

A pause to confer with his roster display. Salter registered something akin to pleasure as he said, "Mills, to do that I'd have to pull every rover in S & R from other duties all over Streamlined America. A national red-alert emergency: are you ready to justify that to cool down a fire in IEE?"

"
What do you think Streamlined America is all about
? Who backs the Lion of Zion? Where would he be without you and me, Salter? Now stop acting naive and get those rovers to my lab site! I'll see you there as soon as possible. Make it possible very, very soon."

Mills slapped the holo off, stood up, started pacing his office. Oh, he had a lot of the prints and specs for the synthesizer; everything Chabrier filed into permanent memory. But the subassembly prints for the cermet parts, and the ones for the toroidal yield chamber, were top-assembly prints without breakdowns. Chabrier had held out on him, and now the goddam Frenchman was either Quantrill's hostage or, worse, his companion!

And what if he couldn't get Chabrier back? Well, there was always that tiny unit the sex-crazed frog had made for Eve. Other men might upscale a standard model synthesizer from that. Suddenly the Ember of Venus and its tiny integrated synthesizer took on an importance it had never owned before.

Mills detested drugs, but with his back to the wall he would shoot Eve's fat arse full of alkaloids. He would have her mainlining popcorn, hulls and all, if that was what it took to recover that sole remaining model of a working synthesizer.

He was striding toward his holo, phrasing his recall demand so that Eve would suspect nothing unusual, when the intercom spoke.

Mills's secretary had been hired not for her thirty years of experience so much as for her seventeen-year-old voice. Vibrant and girlish as ever, now it was also troubled. "It's some manager of a ranch in Wild Country, Mr. Mills, on line one. He says he can't speak with anyone else—and he seems to be crying."

The hardest part about getting from New Vegas to Eureka was persuading Chabrier to shave. The man flatly refused to let anyone but a female registered nurse scrape the fur from his back, buttocks, and thighs, and finding a woman they could trust took Quantrill's contacts nearly a full day.

Quantrill was shipped in a container labeled 'Radioactive Waste'. No one had expected Marengo Chabrier—for that matter, they hadn't really expected Quantrill—so the scientist underwent six hours of cosmetic work. Chabrier was wheeled into a Greyhound omnibus as a sallow drooling fossil by the same slender nurse who had shaved him. Before they reached Eureka, Chabrier and the woman passed narrow scrutiny several times, and knew the stirrings of a beautiful relationship.

Quantrill was in no position to read faxpapers. Chabrier's nurse bought a fresh four-page edition at every stop and read it aloud as one might read to a bedridden child. Nowhere was there any mention of an explosion in the desert wilds of Zion, but the Reno
Tattler
was of the tabloid persuasion and squandered ink on a bizarre report from Wild Country. The
Tattler
confided that, according to unimpeachable sources, a creature the size of an elephant had emerged from its age-long sleep in local caverns to gorge on human flesh. Its most recent victim was a lovely young girl, one Eva Simmons, whose talon-ravaged parts had been found in the ruins of her isolated cabin.

So much for tabloid accuracy. Nothing in the piece gave Marengo Chabrier the slightest cause for concern.

Quantrill never saw young Brubaker again but, while retrieving a vacuum vial from one of old Brubaker's light fixtures in Eureka, he reminded the older man of their bargain. "I've had my paranthrax shots," he admitted, "so I'm not worried about Nashville. But if you have contacts in Corpus Christi, that's my choice. Is there some way I can go without climbing into another box?"

There was, said old Brubaker, if he didn't mind routing through Alta Mexico. "Port of Oakland or Los Angeles to Tucson, El Paso, Matamoros, and then to Corpus; Mexican territory all the way to the gulf. You speak Spanish?"

"Enough to get by unless they grill me."

"They won't, with your papers. You'll be a security man, keeping your eye on dredging machinery that Midas Imports ships to Corpus. Mex transport is cheap with all their oil, so we route heavy stuff around Streamlined-ptooey-America. Anyway, you'll be safer on Mex soil than you'd be crossing Wild Country."

Quantrill recalled his days in Southwest Texas; the free-wheeling ways of the people who had a law unto themselves; and smiled. "I doubt it."

"Then you haven't heard what happened while you were earning your passage. Your friend Chabrier was debriefed last night with some LockLever people—he beat you here by a day, sorry 'bout that—when he heard about Eve Simpson."

Startled: "My God, Brubaker, I know the crazy broad!"

"Not any more, you don't." Old Brubaker gave him a sketchy version of the woman's death as reported by UBC Press. "It hit Chabrier pretty hard. He clammed up right away, but evidently she was carrying a keepsake he gave her. Would you know why it might be important to him?"