Single Combat (7 page)

She cast it onto the ground. "Sure. My source has more." Her hands mimed a sign: Ethridge.

"I thought so. I wish he'd drawn my duty tonight."

"Maybe he will," she said, dripping saccharine sexuality.

"Unfuck you," Quantrill parried. "I was thinking about the docudrama that was made when they were forming S & R. One of our people met Eve Simpson then; said she was fat as a pig, no matter how she looked on holo." It had been the ex-Iowa State gymnast, Kent Ethridge, who'd made that discovery. Ethridge was still a rover but had suffered too many disillusionments. Now he spent most of his leaves spaced out on pills and booze.

"Rumor says Simpson's a washed-out druggie; that they use a double for her interviews," Sanger mused, then jerked around. "Is
that
who's going to, quote, interview you tonight? Doesn't sound like extra duty to me, compadre. Sounds like fun and games."

"Reciting cover stories for a cooing sow? Some fun. Some games," he muttered, and drew a polymer poncho from his medikit. "Here; let's just sit and cool off for a minute."

In the pale glow from distant fluorescents, Sanger's honey-tinted skin took on a deathly greenish cast. It reminded him that life was brief, and that they had little of it to call their own. And Control could always be listening. Their shoulders touching, he rested his forearms on his knees, stared out across the dark line of hills under a billion stars.

He felt her hand slide into his lap, provocative, familiar; but shook his head. "What's the point," he said. "I don't have the time."

"Or the urge," she said.

He took her hand, placed his fingers in her palm, began a slow laborious manual conversation learned through moonless nights to deny Control their communion. "
I could just forget the interview
."

She signed back: "
And find yourself packing chutes or overhauling choppers for a month at Dugway
?"

"
Done it before
," he replied. "
Can almost fly damn' things myself, been on so many test hops
."

"You'd hate me every minute of it."

"
Not hate
," his fingers insisted.

She willed him to say more;
not
to say more; avoided this booby-trapped psychic territory by-signing, "
If only Quinn had made it
."

"
We don't know he didn't; only what Pelletier said
," he signed.

"We know you have to go," she said aloud, rising, offering her strong hands to pull him up. They took little risk in allowing Control to suspect momentary sexual alliances, but there were some things as verboten as genuine love affairs. One of those things was talk about Desmond Quinn, who'd refused to accept the Army's word that a mastoid critic could not be removed. Quinn had disappeared at the war's end rather than continue his assassin's work in the new guise as S & R rover.

Max Pelletier, Quinn's closest ally, had backtracked Quinn months later. Apparently Quinn had found a Mexican surgeon willing to try removing the critic; a surgeon who had lost two fingers when the critic detonated during the operation, with poor determined Des Quinn the only fatality. Or so Pelletier had said.

"See you when I see you," said Quantrill as they parted near the monorail terminal. "Take it easy. I mean
easy
," he repeated, miming a sip from a nonexistent glass.

"Don't chide your elders, sonny," she said in false gaity, giving him a fanny-pat toward the approaching transit module. "And take a good deep breath before you submerge in all that blubber."

Quantrill squeezed his eyes shut, wrinkled his nose at this deliberate gross-out from Sanger's lovely lips. Taking the steps to the platform three at a time, he called, "You've turned words into a martial art; you know that?"

"Don't let it put you on the mat," she called back, made cheerful by their brief moment together, hands on hips, her head thrown back to let the chestnut hair fall free.

He fought down a nearly overwhelming impulse to return to her side, but imagined that Sanger would have considered it weakness.

Eve Simpson, alone in her suite, cancelled her outgoing video before answering the phone. What she saw incoming pleased her immensely.

"Ted Quantrill, ma'am; Search & Rescue." You couldn't tell a lot from a room video but he looked like a hunky morsel. Unconsciously she moistened her lips with her tongue.

"Of course," she said; cordial, not too cordial. "Come right up. I'll leave the door unlocked, Mr. Quantrill, I'm—doing a few things," she ended vaguely, and punched off.

Chiefly she was doing one thing: sloshing lobotol in the bottoms of the crystal goblets she had brought, except for the one she would use herself. Faceted crystal didn't reveal trace coatings as a clear glass might.

When the young rover arrived with a diffident tap on the door, Eve was carefully arranged on a couch amid pillows and a satin coverlet. She saw his bemused glance at her camouflage and did not give a damn. She was used to it. "I'm a little dizzy after all that rich food, Mr. Quantrill," she temporized. "Forgive me for taking my ease this way."

"Oh. You were at the awards banquet?"

"I was there," she agreed, her eyes approving their scan of this splendidly uniformed creature, then abruptly shifting ground. She waved a languid hand toward the inert holocam rig nearby. "I hope these things don't make you nervous."

His headshake was too quick. "We get used to 'em."

"Confidentially, I never do," she lied. "That's why I bring fortifications with me." She raised her goblet and grinned wickedly. Sipped. "There's fruit juice at the bar—and more of this naughty champagne if you'd care to join me. Please," she said it prettily.

Quantrill chose apple juice, a goblet, and the chair near her couch. His choice of liquids didn't matter, she thought; her gratification lay in the lobotol.

And she was half right, though it was disappointment and not gratification she had assured with the drug. One of the regular additives to the diet of S & R members was anaquery, a substance that migrated to the brain without obvious effects—unless certain physicochemical changes occurred in that brain.

Whether by hypnotic concentration or drugs, minute chemical changes accompanied the blocking of volition and judgment. It was those changes that triggered anaquery, with results that appalled Eve in due time. Anaquery prevented any agency, including S & R, from digging into a rover's mind. It was a small sacrifice, in Salter's judgment, for the added security. After all, you didn't have to care about the guillotine's internal stresses so long as it sliced unerringly.

"I get the feeling I've seen you on holo before," she said to prompt him. Lobotol did its erosive work slowly.

"Maybe in a group," he said, eyeing the holocam.

"No. By yourself—a long time ago. Um—talking with Juliet Bixby?" Eve managed to hide her loathing of Bixby, her svelte opponent on another network.

"Quite a memory, Ms. Simpson; I'd almost forgotten. I was on the delta airship
Norway
early in the war. We got waylaid by a renegade bunch but—we got away," he finished lamely.

Her eyes grew round. "You started a fire or something, I remember now. You saved the
Norway
and were wounded. You were wearing a thigh crutch, weren't you?"

"Took a round in the leg." He did not add that he had seen his first lover shot dead by renegade sentries and had made his first kills that night. It had all been a long time ago. Long enough, almost, to forget.

"Care to show us the scar?"

"Not particularly." Again a glance at the holocam. The lobotol was taking its own sweet time.

"The camera's not on," Eve murmured. "We're just getting acquainted, you and I. May I call you 'Ted'? And by all means, my name is Eve. Tell me, Ted; do you have any special lady? Or maybe a hotsy 'in every port'."

"I'm a rover, not a sailor, Ms.—Eve. But no; no one special."

"Surely a young man in his prime," she smirked, "enjoys a woman now and then. Do you like a strong full-bodied woman, Ted?"

Those piercing green eyes were slightly unfocused now as he took another sip of apple juice. "Sure I like 'em," he smiled uncertainly.

"Take another little sippie, Ted." She watched him do it, his motions less assured, his breathing now shallower.
Got him!
Softly, cooingly, with sexuality dripping from each word: "You know, primitive societies didn't care much for the slender-assed fragile little hotsies you see on the holo, Ted. We know, because they made effigies of their sex goddesses. Nice luscious great tits, round soft lovely ass, lots of woman to screw and screw and screw." She undulated slowly under the satin. "You look primitive to me, Ted Quantrill."

He just sat there, blinking, his respiration rapid and shallow as he watched her peel the satin away. Beneath it he saw her enormous breasts resting comfortably against a billowing ledge of fat. "May I show you what a sex goddess really looks like," she teased, pausing in her routine. Her legs, below the coverlet, were separate mounds spread for coming attractions.

He blinked. Swallowed. "I need to find the bathroom, Eve."

"To relieve your tummy or your tensions, lover? Maybe Eve can help. How would you like—"

She never got to describe it. Quantrill lurched up from the chair, but Eve caught at his trouserleg. He fell against her, shaking like a malaria victim, and vomited once, twice, squarely between her breasts, before she could get her great girth underway.

With a squall of revulsion Eve rolled aside, squirmed to her knees while trying to avoid the line of fire from Quantrill's much-used barbecue. She saw the finely corded muscles of his throat grow taut, another spasm building in his belly and working its way up his torso, and then she was reeling toward the bath.

The rover fell on his face as she slammed the door. She could hear him retching, gasping, as she turned the needle-shower on full force. If the little bastard suffocated in his own gorp it would be good enough for him.

Eve soaped herself furiously as she cursed and lathered, lathered and cursed. Eve was convinced that she had simply moved faster than the laggard lobotol; that the sight of her naked body had prompted this ultimate rejection from a man. Eve was not often embarrassed, and all her half-acre of skin blushed under the needlespray.

Reject her, would he? The scrumptious little hick would be sorry for this. She felt like rushing back into the boudoir to stamp out his life, and in mounting frustration Eve flung open the door.

Quantrill lay in his filth, repeatedly pushing himself up on trembling arms only to fall again, his limbs twitching in a way to make Eve suspect a seizure. To someone or no one he was grunting 'mayday', over and over.

She could not go near him, could not even stand his smell. She slammed the door; found that she liked the fury of it; slammed it again, and again, bellowing her rage and vindictiveness. She was still screaming when the hotel staff arrived.

Sean Lasser had grown too old for active training operations, but he knew far too much about S & R to be turned out to pasture. It was Lasser, alone among rover instructors, who drew the gentle chores.

"No question about it," Lasser muttered as he studied the printout of Quantrill's vital signs; "you took a fair-sized dose of some narcohypnotic, to judge from your condition when they brought you here last night. Anything from PZ to lobotol could have done it. We're assuming it wasn't an injection." Lasser tapped his front teeth with a thumbnail, usually a sign that he was brainstorming. "Did you sit down to watch the holo? God knows you're not a likely subject, but some people can be put under by the right holo presentation. Had you been drinking anything alcoholic?"

"Not even beer. I remember sitting by Eve Simpson with a glass of apple juice while she asked fool questions about the love life of a rover." Quantrill, propped up in a bed in a very private room in Los Alamos clinic, was still a bit gray under the eyes but obviously on the mend. "I don't think it was the holo. Could it have been during the banquet?"

"Too long a delay. My lad, I'm afraid it was Simpson herself who zonked you. Any idea why?"

"Jesus, Lasser, I was picked out of a hat for the interview! Ask Cross or Howell."

"I've already gone around and around with them both on this—and with Salter. Eve Simpson told them she wanted to record an informal chat with a rover. She didn't specify you. But we know something about that lady and—" Lasser grinned apologetically, "—there is evidently nothing she won't do for a roll in the hay with a studly young buck."

Through gritted teeth: "I'll give her a roll off Truchas Peak! What if she'd asked me something Control doesn't want answered?" Quantrill did not know he got regular doses of anaquery. He assumed that Control would sooner see him dead than see S & R compromised—a fair assumption.

Lasser's tongue filled his cheek: "Well,—I suppose that's a risk she was willing to take."

"So who's she really working for: Mexico? I don't envy the rover who has to stuff that broad in a bodybag."

"Eh? Surely you don't think—"

"Howell told us once, 'media star, bishop or bird colonel; if Control says he goes,—
he goes
.' I don't see why Eve Simpson should rate any special immunity."

"You don't? Well, she does." Lasser dropped the printout, clasped his hands over his little belly in a familiar lecture pose, and considered his words before using them. "Eve Simpson and Boren Mills are the heart and soul of IEE. Mills is as close to our President as Lon Salter—and we don't want to get into a pissing contest with the CEO of the most powerful industrial arm in Streamlined America. I may as well tell you: Mills was one of the few Navy people during the war who knew T Section's charter—and he knows about rovers too. We couldn't prevent him from telling the Simpson woman. It's my guess she was toying with you in several ways at once; don't underestimate her. Young and the Fed party owe more to Simpson and Mills than they do to S & R. Between 'em, those two can do more for an image through media than all the rest of us put together." The portly little man sighed, made a helpless gesture with one hand. "
Now
d'you see why we have to shrug this little fiasco off, Quantrill?"