Single Combat (9 page)

"Blow it, Q."

He stared at the doughnut; licked his lips. The annulus was distorted now, almost closed at the far end. "Don't know if I can get there again, Control. The whole fucking rig is caving—"

"Blow it, Q. Set it for a half-hour. Nobody will be inside by then."

"Except me," he snarled, and felt for the doughnut's release valve.

He played the valve by ear, ready to sprint for the stairwell, hearing soft rustlings past the hole. Finally he could clamber over the pillowy fabric, saw that there was barely room to squeeze between an angled piece of shoring and the outside of the foundation wall. The chemlamp on his wrist was his only light source. A hundred tons of earth had fallen into the makeshift munitions room in the past five minutes, and a timber groaned only an arm's length away.

Quantrill drew his chiller; clasped it to his breast. Whatever happened, he was not going to suffocate. He reached his pack and with one hand he stripped the timer from its velcrolok clasp. He placed the pack against the nearest ATM canister. He did not bother to dump the 'candy bars' from their pocket; inside each wrapper was a tenth-kilo of explosive. He grasped the detonator buttons in his teeth, unwound them like a tasseled cord from the timer body, blew sweat from his brow, stuck three of the tassel buttons through innocent-looking wrappers into doughy plastique.

When the timber gave way, he just managed to flatten himself against the foundation so that the cascading earth buried him only to his knees.

"Control, you suck," he breathed, running his thumb along the ID plate on the butt of his chiller. Then he reached forward, groped blindly into the fresh earthfall, and at last felt the timer. He set the damned thing by feel, unwilling to move it, murmuring every outrageous phrase he could recall and investing it in Control. Then, for the first time in years, he had an inkling of what people meant when they spoke of panic.

He could not lift either foot.

Somewhere just ahead, the timer was slowly willing itself to die. When it went, it would take two hundred antitank rockets with it, unless the effing timber just overhead went first. And he could not even ask Control to pull his plug. Control could not hear him.

Well, wasn't that what he'd dreamed of for years? Bitch, bitch, bitch… He reached his decision, thrust his chiller into its clip, began to burrow with both hands at his right shin; sneezed. Clods of dirt were raining down on his neck as he wrenched the foot free, knelt, scrabbled at the stuff imprisoning his left leg.

When he lurched upward it was only to reel back, tumbling onto fabric that half-enveloped him; and then he was rolling backward, away from the rain of falling earth and timbers, through the foundation hole and onto concrete. He did not ignore the rumble behind him. He sprinted from it.

At the stairwell he remembered. "Message delivered, Control. The candy goes rancid in twenty-seven minutes do-you-copy?"

Faint but clear: "We copy, Q. Can you get out? If not,—can we help?"

Quantrill knew what kind of help they had in mind. How touching! "Twisted my knee. Stairwell is clear but getting up it will be a bastard. Can you send me an arm to lean on?"

Pause. A life depended on the answer. Not Quantrill's.

"We'll ask for a volunteer. All regulars are now out of the structure. Keep talking. Well done, Q."

"I won't faint on you." He climbed one level, paused to listen and to test the knee; he really had wrenched the bloody thing.

"Keep talking, Q."

"All I can think of is that old Chinese proverb: yuck foo," he said with relish. Somewhere above him, heavy concrete shifted. "Okay, okay, just kidding," he said to the cubic meters of concrete.

When he heard quick footfalls above, he reported them. It was Minnetta Adams. It would be.

"Get on," she said, all business, patting her shoulder. He realized she intended to bodily carry him all the way up.

"Just give me a shoulder," he responded, and proved that he could walk.

At the first basement landing he lurched as though in pain, staggered, fell and rolled. His chemlamp, still clipped at his wrist, shed a glow over the dusty forklift and, "Hey, Adams, is this a deader?"

She found the youngster as Quantrill had intended, but her joy was brief. "Maybe I can come back for him."

"In a pig's—ah, look, let's see if I can hobble alone, Adams. You grab the casualty." She was still arguing when he started up the last flight, one leg held stiff.

Minnetta Adams was
still
arguing, carrying one casualty and steadying another, when the three of them emerged from the wreckage of the trade center into open Indiana space, to a delighted roar from eighteen S & R regulars and twice that many holo newspeople.

And when the lower levels of the building disintegrated some twenty minutes later, holo pundits opined that the source had been a pocket of natural gas. By then, the commercial networks were in the process of lionizing Adams, announcing that she'd found the unconscious boy.

By then, too, Adams herself believed it. And by then Quantrill was at nearby St. Vincent's Hospital, hearing from medics that his knee cartilage wasn't seriously torn.

FBN holovision carried the story that night as Quantrill watched. Sixteen-year-old Geoff Townley was in satisfactory condition after his dramatic last-minute rescue from entombment just one level below ground floor in the trade center. Rescuer Minnetta Adams had also brought up an injured colleague—unnamed—minutes before a gas explosion completed the building's collapse.

The Townley boy, on summer hire from Nauvoo, Illinois, evidently recalled nothing of his day-long ordeal.

Quantrill winked at the holo set. If the kid was from Nauvoo he was probably LDS, and it was almost a felony to say 'rebel' and 'LDS' in the same sentence. The Townley kid was home free, whatever his political leanings, and no one but Quantrill—not even Adams herself—was the wiser. It was incredible, he thought, how much trouble you had to take, merely to do what the taxpayers thought they were paying you for. A damned shame that he'd never be able to share the joke with Sanger.

The broad-shouldered man steadied his monocular in a cedar crotch and from his cover, studied the little homestead for long minutes. Finally he turned toward the soft footfalls approaching behind him. "If you can't keep those horses quiet,

Espinel, move 'em further back into the cedar brakes."

Espinel started to complain; thought better of it. Judging from the squint lines at the corner of his leader's eyes, this was no time for debate. "They smell water, Lufo," Espinel shrugged, and turned back. Lufo Albeniz might be the toughest jefe in Wild Country but his big scarred, slim-hipped body only looked like that of a Mexican cowpoke. Lufo was TexMex, but city-bred and no vaquero. He'd been cursing those good horses all the way up from Ciudad Acuna.

Lufo ran a hand inside his mottled threadbare shirt, scratched his swarthy hide, spat cottony fluff. He wanted water as much as those scruffy horses did, but you didn't just ride up to some squatter's soddy in these parts without reconnoitering first. Lufo saw a flash of yellow hair and trained the monocular near the soddy again. After a moment he grinned to himself and, almost without sound, whistled his appreciation between his teeth. She was young and blonde, and he guessed that her husband would be inside.

Lufo flicked his comm unit on, speaking softly. "Espinel; Thompson; there's a cute little rubia moving out to hoe the far end of the garden. If I can get near the soddy on foot, I'll be between her and whoever else is inside. Tie up those goddam horses; bring your carbines and cover me."

Tinnily in his speaker, from Thompson: "I'm no good with a weapon, Lufo, you know that."

"But those folks don't know it, and you can pull a trigger for effect. We're not after trouble, Thompson, but we must make a show of readiness for it. Do you want a roof over your head so you can work, or don't you?"

"Got it," from the speaker.

Lufo stuck the monocular in his pocket, made sure his sidearm was hidden, and began a careful approach. He limped for effect, in case someone was watching from the half-submerged cabin with the log walls and sod roof. His pauses might have been frequent rests. But they weren't; he moved only when the woman turned away to chop with the hoe. The place wasn't much, but they had a wind-powered generator and a gravity-feed water tank. From the look of it, the place didn't support more than a small family. Perhaps there'd be only one man to watch for as long as Thompson needed the place. And if the man was in sympathy with the Indys, Lufo wouldn't need to use threats. In Wild Country, you never knew…

The high shrill tone stopped him in midstride, the woman turning, hurrying between rows of vegetables with the springing step of a girl. But Lufo was already near the doorway, calling out. "Hello the soddy! Can you spare a liter of water?" He saw the thin big-eyed child inside through the multi-paned window, did not realize such small lungs could generate such a piercing blast until she whistled again, thumb and forefinger curled at her lips.

He laughed then, raised his hands in mock surrender, put them back on his hips. The sidearm was only a flicker away from use as he awaited the man of the house.

No man emerged—but that proved nothing. The yellow-haired young woman approached quickly. "Welcome," said the shapely gardener, eyes wary, carrying her hoe in a way that was not quite a threat. She had a low husky voice but, Lufo realized, she couldn't be over eighteen. Strong-limbed, sun-bronzed with startling blue eyes, she reminded him that he hadn't had a woman in too long, not for nearly a week…

"Wondered if I could buy some water," he said, fishing with two fingers into his jeans.

She completed her half of the ritual by pushing with one hand, palm down. "No, but you can have some. Childe, fetch our visitor the pitcher," she said past him, then walked around him. He allowed it; even if anyone had a bead on Lufo, he'd be crazy to take chances with two vulnerable females so near.

Lufo followed the blonde's gesture, ducked into the soddy, let his eyes adjust to cool shadows. His nostrils tasted earth, smoke, cornmeal, goat cheese; the odors of a clean soddy. He smiled at the tiny girl as he took the plastic pitcher from her; paused before drinking. "Got a broke-down pony out in the brush. You suppose I could talk with your man?"

"I thought you were thirsty," said the girl-woman.

He nodded, took a mouthful, rinsed and spat it out the door onto hard-packed earth. Then he drank, feeling danger somewhere near. But perhaps it was only the low roof that seemed to threaten his head.

"I can look at your horse," she said when he handed the pitcher back.

"Well,—I'd like to talk to your man first," he said carefully. "I'm not alone, but I didn't wan't to worry you folks. The others are out in the cedars."

"I know," she said, smiling for the first time, showing strong small even teeth and a confidence that was downright unsettling. "You three have been out there for an hour with a half-dozen thirsty ponies. Anyway, consider me the man of the house."

"You weren't worried—without a man here?"

This time she made a distinct effort to
hide
a smile. "If I need help, it's a lot nearer than you think, buckaroo." She used the anglo pronunciation instead of 'vaquero'; it was a subtle shading of language that said she was not intimidated by this lean athletic macho.

"Thought it might be that way," he said, utterly failing to understand her. "But I do need to talk with whoever makes the decisions here."

"Talk away," she said. "But if you're running drugs, just keep running."

Negative headshake. "You don't mind any other kind of little independent operation then," he hazarded.

She reached out to tousle the hair of the small silent girl before saying, "We're pretty independent here ourselves. My name's Sandy Grange and this is my sister, Childe. She doesn't talk."

Now his answering smile was more relaxed. With the faintest stress on the word 'independent', she aligned herself with the Indy party. At the least, it meant a somewhat liberal interpretation of the law. At most, it meant you leaned toward the rebels—or were one of them yourself.

Lufo walked to the door, spoke into his comm unit: "Bring the horses in, Espinel, it's clear. I have some negotiating to do with a lady."

"First five-cylinder-word I've heard for months," said Sandy.

"Sorry."

"For what? Music to my soul," she said, then turned quickly to Childe and whispered something, patting the little backside as it whisked out the door. She stepped to the doorway and called, "And don't you dare let him come nosing around up here; I know how you love to show off!" Turning to her guest again, pleasantly: "Don't ask. I don't want trouble any more than you do. Now then: what do I call you, and what's your problem?"

You didn't ask for real names in Wild Country unless you courted violence. The title of a very funny new Southwest ballad was "What Was Your Name In Streamlined America?". It acknowledged that many a saddle tramp was a fugitive from Fed justice.

"Lufo Albeniz," he said, shaking her small work-hardened hand. "We're packing some things back to Ciudad Acuna—they strayed, you might say. Very delicate stuff but as you put it, don't ask. In fact, it's so delicate we need to repack it. What if I offered you two hundred pesos gold to go into Rocksprings for a day?"

She pursed delectable lips in a silent whistle, her brows arched. Then she reached under the silky blonde mane and scratched behind her ear in a gesture so artless, in a way so unfeminine, that he could have hugged her in sexless camaraderie. "I didn't realize I could be so easily tempted," she said.

She waved him to a homemade cane-bottomed couch, trundled her Lectroped to one side, and plumped herself cross-legged on the floor, fetchingly limber for a girl so nicely rounded. "This isn't the first time someone's borrowed my place for a day or two," she explained, "but the last time I came back to find the soddy just ruined. Somebody had spilled a lot of blood and mezcal in here, shot my mirror all to flinders, even disamorced my generator."