Single Combat (24 page)

"There's no sea water in the middle of Utah," young Brubaker muttered, "so our guess is that the enterprising Mr. Mills has a synthesizer operating there. We can't find out much about the layout, beyond the fact that it's underground. But it should be possible to get a man stowed away on the IEE supply delta—which, by the way, is filled with hydrogen and has only a two-man crew. Mills is buying tunneling equipment for the lab from overseas. We just might be able to switch some crates of machinery in the Port of Eureka for a few crates full of greeting cards.

"Our man could be put down at that lab inside one of our crates. It'd be nice to pick a team but we're afraid time is short, and we'd be willing to go with one man. If he were a one-man team, that is."

Quantrill felt a distinct tingle at the base of his skull; the signal that his muscles could tap a great surge of noradrenaline on command. "And you're asking me to raid the place for some kind of machine?"

"It's probably the size of a barge, so we're asking you to blow the whole place sky-high," old Brubaker murmured.

The crates, young Brubaker added, would also contain weapons and explosives, all untraceable. "We've established that the lab perimeter is guarded by P-beam towers. Nothing you can't get past with a hovercycle, provided it carries a covey of little Homingbirds. If you get back in one piece, you've got a free ticket to anywhere he can route you." He nodded toward his companion.

Quantrill resisted the urge to run. No professional would outline such a plan to a stranger with such vague credentials as his. Lazily, as though he were not humming with readiness: "For a couple of guys who don't know me from Adam you're telling, and asking, a lot. Hell, I could just boost a 'cycle and head for Nashville on my own with less risk than you're suggesting."

Young Brubaker lay back on the grass, face up, fingers interlaced behind his head in a position that could not have been more vulnerable. He smiled and said, "Don't kid yourself. D'you think Canadian intelligence would send me here without proper briefing? The offer is absolutely valid. We happen to know you're familiar with the innards of a delta. Also with munitions, and the word is that a little extra risk hasn't stopped you yet.

"We don't often get a man and a mission that fit together this well—but as you can see, I'm, ah, bending over backwards to keep from putting you under any pressure. The decision is up to you, Ted Quantrill."

Sandy's journal, 11 Sep'

Lufo accompanied 'Mr. Gold' back as far as my soddy & lingered alone for the night. I do not mourn the shortened days when nights are this rewarding!

We talked for hours, straining to find common ground for small talk. Since I had no news of interest, I told him stories of my childhood. He avoided the past & spoke of the future. Told me that an old companion has fled the life of a slave-assassin & may migrate to these parts soon. No name, but if Lufo is to be believed, the man must be the equal of
him.
No doubt a hard-faced old lobo, for he has killed easily and often in the service of our enemies. Lufo spoke of him with brevity & perhaps envy. Already I loathe him. Why would good men want to associate with the likes of such a monster? La-de-da: who am I to speak ill of monsters?

What was the point in being a mover and shaker, Eve asked herself as she lazed at a window of her delta stateroom, if a girl couldn't have a few amenities for her troubles? In Eve's case those amenities were more than a few. She alone occupied one of the rearmost rooms near the delta's center of balance, where the gentle maneuvers of the great craft were least disturbing. The engine pods were so far away, so muted, that only a whisper reached her. And she'd had caterpillar treads affixed to her motorized chaise so that she would not find it necessary to waddle back and forth on the long voyage from Salt Lake City in a gondola that might undulate a bit.

But if her status was high, her spirits remained low. She ignored the ever-changing view as United's behemoth—one of five which offered expensive passenger service—ghosted to the high rolling wind-racked grasslands of Cheyenne, to the awesome abrupt crunch of flat plain against majestic gray-blue peaks near La Junta, to the vertiginous bluffs near Lubbock where plains crumbled into river valleys in their long slope toward the Mexican Gulf hundreds of klicks farther off.

She did not rejoice to know that a rack of lamb awaited her at dinnertime. The plain fact is that Eve Simpson had been bored out of her mind since her second hour in the delta. She knew her antidote, and learned that it was not to be found aloft; most of the delta staff were colorless middle-aging men, and the rest were svelte young women. Eve told herself that she had high standards, and cursed the delta staff collectively.

Her mood was not improved when she found that dinner would be no leisurely feast. Favorable tailwinds were boosting the great delta toward Kerrville Municipal Airport and Eve had barely sealed her closet-sized wardrobe when the craft slid down to grapple against mooring sockets built during the war. This was as far into Wild Country as commercial airship skippers cared to risk their craft, a full hundred klicks West of the rebuilt ring-cities around the ruins of Austin and San Antonio.

Though the platform lowered her as smoothly as any elevator, Eve's uneasiness mounted. Across the field were the lights of the old Mooney aircraft plant where, if Eve's briefing was correct, assembly bays were sometimes used by Texas renegades to refit or overhaul rebel equipment. And despite advertised claims of safety, the Shreiner hoverbus would waft her another fifty klicks into this lawless region.

To bolster her confidence, Eve touched the bubble-smooth surface of the Ember of Venus that lay cushioned between her breasts. Mills had argued against her taking it, but Eve had not been swayed. Confidence rekindled, Eve guided her chaise from downramp to bus, alert lest United mishandle her luggage. You couldn't trust the idiots, she reflected, to shift a cube of solid armorplate without shattering it in the process. And only if you were an Eve Simpson could you depend on fair compensation. But that was how it went in Streamlined America; as long as reconstruction lasted, the name of the game would be screw Joe Small.

In no respect could Eve be considered small. United took special care with her wardrobe and dropped it only once.

Soon the lights of Kerrville swept by on her right, and then the hoverbus was droning on its diesels through hamlets and between limestone bluffs. The other passengers, two sporting types and a middle-aged couple, chattered away in what could have been Arabic. Eve was not surprised; the cost of such a spa was most easily borne by Islamics, who had not fought the war but nonetheless had won it. The combatants had all lost.

Soon after the bus passed the ranch entrance, Eve perceived that she was truly in a different world, one in which vehicle headlights might pick out exotic ibex, aodad, or bounding gemsbok as often as native wild whitetail. The hearty, "Howdy, and welcome," by a squint-eyed young man in tight jeans and dusty boots filled her with suspicion. Surely, she thought, these people were putting her on. She would learn that century-old habits were genuinely alive and well in Wild Country.

She trundled to the main stone lodge, trading frank states with the ranch staff who found her as arresting a spectacle as she found them. Yet the curious glances were friendly and the twangy greetings more so. Nobody who'd seen Schreiner's albino elephant would think Eve particularly unusual.

She tried to work up a small fury on learning that her spacious, bath-equipped cabin had no telephone or holo, but found the effort taxing. The western trappings in pavilion and cabin, and the trim lank rumps that paraded past her in worn denim, pierced the dikes of her reserve and let the anger leak away. Eve retired to her cabin an empty vessel—but she knew how these cow-pokes could fill her.

Two days later, she felt privation. From the phone in the central lodge, Eve coupled a scrambler module to the jack in the bezel of her amulet and let her tiny computer talk to CenCom in its lair under Granite Mountain near Ogden. Satisfied that her synthesizer was accumulating a dollop of lobotol at last, she used her scrambler for a second call.

Her initial words to Mills were, "Talk about primitive! I can't even talk to CenCom without a goddam telephone, that's how far I am from a relay. Do you know what it's like to be without a snort of THC in these parts?"

"I'm sure it must be just sheer hell," was his laconic reply. If this were all she could bitch about, the accommodations must be very good indeed. Mills waited until she had adumbrated a media freak's list of horrors: no terminals to electronic sugartits. He tut-tutted at the right moments and finally said, "Nobody's checked with me about your authorizations from IEE. Haven't you told Schreiner's management you're not down there just for the atmosphere?"

"Not yet. This is one hell of a big operation, Boren; I've got a floppy cassette half-full of notes and I haven't seen more than a fraction of the place. Most of the guests are foreign, and half of 'em even
you
couldn't buy. I'll say this: if it isn't making money, they don't know how to run a hidden casino."

"No sign of anything like that?"

"Not a scintilla. Doesn't surprise me; a bunch of ecology nuts living in a purified version of the Old West. They're pretty open—naive, if you ask me—about needing water. I'm amazed that somebody like LockLever hasn't already bought 'em out."

"They've considered it," Mills said, withholding details. "But Latter-Day Shale has just discovered a site for a limestone quarry on a rise near Schreiner's boundary. When they show you the books, you can drop the word that IEE owns
a
nearby site for an LOS tower. With cheap power, the ranch could draw water to spare. We've got to convince these bumpkins that we mean to keep the place unspoiled."

Her chuckle was rich with shared cynicism. "Why,
shore
we do, podnuh. Can you believe some of the help actually talks like that here? Incidentally, this might be a good route for a bit of midnight export of precious metal like, say, platinum, through Mexico. I don't suppose that had occurred to you."

Mills's turn for irony: "Never crossed my mind. Speaking of precious metals, you might be happy to know our friend Chabrier is stepping up his production of certain strategic materials—from Eureka, of course."

"He'd better not be your friend like he's my friend," she teased.

"Obdurate bitch. Look, I'm busy. Call me when you know more about the financial end there, hm?"

"It may take awhile. I'm off tomorrow for a three-day outing." It pleased her to imply that she would be roughing it. No point in adding that she would ride the 'chuckwagon' hoverbus, nor that she had her eye on the rangy snuff-pinching guide who bossed these photo safaris. Pleased with herself, Eve rang off. It wasn't every day that she could render Boren Mills speechless with one of her adventures.

Sandy's journal, 15 Sep'

No wonder Indians loved Indian summer: they didn't have to work then! They merely starved later. This Sunday has been my last day of rest until all our canning & preserves are done. Childe is old enough to help, this year, & took me seriously enough to shoo
him
whistling down the wind for the duration. Why toward the ranches of the East, I wonder? And how do they swap such explicit tidbits? Childe said
he
went toward the sunrise, though she knows the word 'East' as well as I. There is more to their eye-and-head tossings than I can decipher
.

I hope
he
is satiated with wild game & does not go far afield. I recall one ride when he carried us both halfway across Edwards plateau in one muscle-cramping day. I have grown too old for such meanderings—& I wonder if
he
feels the onset of age
. He
may have five or ten more good years—or the Texas Aggie research people may have bred
him
for longevity as well as size and intelligence
!

Moral question: were the breeders right to make
him
thus? There is as much wisdom in that terrible great head as there is ferocity in the sabers of
his
muzzle. Now the breeders are long dead, & now it is I who worry
…

No sign yet of the turncoat Lufo spoke of. Good! The presence of such an old devil would disturb me as others might quaver before
Ba'al.
Yet—if one demon has
his
good side, why not another
?

Over the years, said Cleve Hutcherson, the huge private preserve had spread nearly to the Kerr County line. He'd been raised in adjoining Edwards County, and figured the abandoned old Hutcherson place might one day be 'his' range again. The redbone guide spat unerringly, anointing a lizard as it sat sun-stunned on a limestone outcrop. Of the three camera-toting tenderfeet, only Eve appreciated Hutch's little joke on the lizard; and Hutch was a man who liked being appreciated.

That first night in bedrolls, as the mesquite fire dwindled, Hutch had thought the fat gal almost too attentive to his yarns. There was something unsettling about being responsible, in Wild Country, for a city gal whose ass wouldn't fit in a Number Three washtub. Well, at least she didn't go wandering off to get a hock lamed in a prairie-dog hole the way some did. Fact was, she stuck very close to Hutch.

Eve gauged her image carefully. Just because this juice-projecting trailboss was insular, that didn't make him stupid. His stories of raw violence, and his obvious courage in trimming down that pack of wild dogs that surrounded their group, made Evie itch. Here was a man who could handle a six-gun, and presumably a woman, of any caliber.

Since puberty Eve's weakness had been for men of spirit, and of clout. In this country, Cleve Hutcherson's dusty denims were packed with clout. She took genuine delight in counting every scar she could see, and wondered how many more she might tally after the others were asleep, with a smidgin of lobotol in Hutch's coffee. It was now late afternoon, not far from a favorite camp spot Hutch knew. On all but the driest summers the spot boasted a languid 'dripping spring', he said; a trickle of water that bled from a limestone bluff and fed a patch of green grass amid the surrounding parched tan countryside.