Single Combat (27 page)

Pacing silently away, Ba'al studied the compound as he tested the breeze and returned, this time downwind of the restive horses. By chance he chose to wait in the moonshadow of a darkened guest cabin. He waited with good cheer, for his questing nose repeatedly caught the promise of an oestrus female.

Eve found herself in an unfamiliar role. Her companions could not say enough for her courage in facing down the brutish apparition so that they might scuttle to safety. More irked than embarrassed, she accepted applause and one nightcap before pleading exhaustion. Accepting a chemlamp to light her way, she walked from the central lodge and gracelessly refused Hutch's offer of escort to her cabin. A vagrant breeze at her back tickled the base of her neck.

In black shadow, Ba'al heard her heavy footfalls and the rhythmic song of Eve's corduroy breeches, size fifty. More important, the odor of a ready female was now a steady reek on the wind. He heard her fumble at the front door of a cabin near the one where he stood. The cabins on either side of Eve's were unoccupied, drawing him to slip nearer in the darkness and to study this puzzle. It appeared that he was studying some new hybrid, an inexplicable cross between asiatic swine and human. He had met the person face to face, knew her to be a person and, moreover, one who did not panic at first sight of him. But her scent was now richly swinish and her great size richly suggestive. He moved to the rear of her cabin near its one feature, the broad sliding glass door, that clashed with its decor. He could not see through its inner partition, but snuffled against the glass.

Eve heard movement through the folding cedar partition; heard a soft explosive grunt. If that poor pitiful Cleve Hutcherson was trying for a late date, he could—well, maybe he could have one. Maybe something about their mutual experience had turned him on so that he would please her without lobotol. She turned off all but a single nightlight, drew the wooden partition back, and gazed at the demonic face that stood high as her own and near enough to touch were it not for the glass pane.

She stood transfixed, trembling in the grip of her glandular cascade. Ah, but it was unspeakably good! Her memory served up a scene from a porn cassette, lissome young Cow Patty with her lunging pony, and now the little studhorse seemed shoddy goods. Even if Russian boars were not hung so well, she thought wildly, it would be an ecstatic experience to couple with this devil; with the demon, Ba'al. She smiled and unlocked the glass door, then slowly slid it aside. With this act she did not merely overstep sanity, she flung it to oblivion.

Ba'al had rarely entered a human dwelling but showed no reluctance, snuffling in curiosity, stepping onto floorboards that creaked with his enormous weight. He ignored the distant sounds of merriment from celebrants in the lodge who were still toasting the escape. When he was inside, Eve managed to shut the glass door and the partition with fluttering hands. Now, no one could see or hear the apotheosis of Eve Simpson.

Even among lackluster domestic boars, certain forms of courtship are common. In Ba'al the instinct was tempered with high intelligence and despite goading from the command of pheromone he made haste slowly, emitting his soft insistent mating song as he did so. That song consisted of quick gutteral grunts in a truly subterranean basso with pauses for breath. He smelled fear in her too, a little, a person-sweat. He urinated briefly on the floor, also part of the mating ceremony, and gently thrust the tip of his snout against her side.

Eve could not recall her voice ever carrying such a tremolo as she heard the stream of urine. "Excited, lover? I'll bet you are," she breathed, shuddering in delight, daring to touch the monstrous ivory tusk behind his snout. He looked at her in bold curiosity, his grunting now insistent, and nuzzled her between her legs.

She took off her shirt quickly, ripped the brassiere away, whispering to this impossibly potent lust object in a way that approached prayer. He ceased his nuzzling to let her strip the corduroys away and she had to sit on the bed to accomplish it. She tried to part her oleaginous thighs for him, peeking to see if the devil's penis could rival a pony. But unlike some courting animals, the boar rarely unsheaths before the moment of mounting. Ba'al paused to glance at the object that flashed multihued splinters of light from between her breasts, sniffed at it, and found his head awhirl with the mating command. He placed one forehoof on the bed and rooted under her side to turn her over.

"Ah, so that's it," she teased. Why expect a boar to mount her face-to-face when they probably did it dog-fashion? She rolled over, found herself lifted by a bristly snout between her legs, and then she saw the incredible, endless unsheathment from under his belly. In that instant she scrambled to regain her sanity.

"Ohh, no you don't!" She frog-leapt to the head of the bed, writhing onto hands and knees, facing the great head that nudged and grunted in a demand she understood only too well. But she had erred horrendously in her expectation; this legendary brute carried a schlong like a barber pole! There was simply no question about it, she was far too puny to accept a partner as prodigiously endowed as this. In a clarity that arrived too late she knew that she had teased this minister of hell into expecting a great favor from her.

His grunts were louder now, his muzzle open in a satanic grin with grindings of teeth and copious foam dripping from his jaws in accompaniment. Again he tried to roll her over.

The bedframe splintered, dropping Eve so that she rolled almost under the beast. She reached up to grasp for a handhold, found that the upswept tusk kept a razor edge, bleated as she saw tendons bared in the palm of her hand. She wondered why it was not bleeding more.

Ba'al smelled blood, fear, and pheromone, stamped in impatience, nuzzled against the flaccid body of the sow-person. Her cries were not screams, not yet, but they were an irritant, and anger began to smoke in his red-rimmed eyes.

Eve saw and recognized the glare. In her extremity of terror she thought of a gift that any sane man would have preferred to her body. "Look, look," she babbled, unlatching the clasp at her neck. "I offer this in—in my place." She reclasped the chain, seeing that it would not reach around the vast pulsating throat, and then she held it aloft in sacrifice.

Ba'al saw the pretty bauble and her blood that smeared it; snuffled the acorn-sized yield chamber and wondered if its message was a lie; and finally he decided that the scent did not emanate from the screaming, praying person, and that he had somehow been cheated.

He might have acted differently had he perceived that Eve, eyes rolled up until only the whites stared blindly from their sockets, was praying directly to
him
.

Chabrier adjusted the image intensifier and wondered where this madman had sprung from, an intruder who wore no uniform but carried a handgun in an armpit holster outside his coverall. The stranger seemed bent on arranging tons of desiccant in a simple geometric pattern on the floor of the synthesizer rotunda. Could Mills have sent him? But mon Dieu, for what? And could Chabrier afford to simply stroll into the rotunda and ask him? Not while the man—all youth and spring steel, to watch him move—carried that weapon.

It would not be wise to alert his Chinese staff. Only one of them would be any good in a rough-and-tumble, and Chabrier did not want anyone to know of this security breach. If several men converged on the stranger it would only make him more likely to kill them all. Chabrier's schedule would slip and his friends would suffer. But without weapons, how could he disarm the man? None of Chabrier's drugs had enough potency to stop a man immediately without a killing overdose. He wanted to ask questions of that prowler…

Chabrier's fingers instructed the elevator to override any signals to the bottom level. There was no internal stairwell, thanks to the paranoia of Boren Mills. The intruder was now Chabrier's prisoner unless he could defeat the elevator doors and climb the sheer wall or the cables. Chabrier was nothing if not a gamesman; knew he would not be the young man's physical equal in combat. But he did have advantages; he knew his own turf and how to use it. He knew, for example, that the automatic sliding doors of the elevator were virtually noiseless. He knew how to cut power to lights inside the elevator or in any given passage in the lab. And he knew that, in common with hospitals and other limited-access buildings, the elevator had doors on two facing sides. With both sets of doors open, the elevator was simply a short passage through which Chabrier could move from his apartment into the rotunda with the prowler.

The man strode back to the palleted crates, removed a side panel by what seemed to be magic, began to hustle sacks that must have weighed ten kilos apiece—an infernal lot of desiccant, but who knew what Japanese packers would do next?

Chabrier, palms sweating, moved to his potted plants, removed one of his socks. He packed handfuls of damp sand into the toe of the sock and tied the knot to keep the sand compacted, darting glances at his video monitor. By the time he had located the sharpened letter-opener and thrust it into his belt, the intruder had started to disassemble the largest of the crates.

In fresh astonishment, Chabrier saw that his crew had off-loaded a crateful of hovercycle. Chabrier had requisitioned no such craft. He knew it would not have been forthcoming if he
had
asked. Someone—Mills, no doubt—had tampered with the shipment, sent the stranger in with his own devices.

The entire lab's support systems were Chabrier's responsibility and his portable control module had its own flat video screen. He could plug into the system from many stations, including the panel at each elevator call button. He took off his other shoe and sock for stealth, hurried into the main corridor, plugged his control module into the elevator call plate. Then he caused his corridor lights to die. On his module monitor he saw that the intruder was trundling the hovercycle on its small kickwheels to the elevator, having finished his peculiar ritual with the desiccant bags.

The man pressed the elevator call stud. Well, why not? Chabrier removed his prohibition, heard a faint whine in the shaft one pace away from him. He intended to open his own doors first until he saw the man draw the handgun, perhaps anticipating a violent welcome. Ever patient, Chabrier watched his monitor and waited, and cut power to the elevator's interior lights.

An eternity of seconds later the elevator stopped, and Chabrier's heart leaped; he had nearly, by mistake, opened both sets of doors simultaneously. With the intruder so clearly ready for confrontation, Chabrier now decided he could stop the elevator between floors to trap his opponent.

Through his video he saw the man vault into the darkened elevator, and heard the soft impact of a sidelong roll near him. No shots. A moment later the man emerged reseating his automatic, then heaved against the hovercycle so that it stood half on the cargo platform, half in the rotunda. As the man wheeled away with whiplash quickness, Chabrier realized that the hovercycle was a blockage against the recall of the elevator from any other level. The little salaud was canny—but so was Marengo Chabrier.

Chabrier did not know what the man had forgotten but felt a thrill of good fortune. His fingertips commanded his own door to slide back and then he was into the elevator, the door whispering shut behind him, trying to feel his way around the hovercycle in darkness. He was between panel jacks, his control module useless until he could grope his way to the panel inside the elevator and make a fresh connection.

Chabrier knew a surge of mixed emotions, a piss-or-bust amalgam of fear and readiness, even though he was having trouble getting around the damnable machine in the dark. He was sure that the intruder would not expect that sand-filled sock, a street-fighter's sap, to come whistling out of the blackness. He moved slowly to avoid any possibility of noise.

Had Chabrier peered into the faintly lit rotunda he might have wondered why the intruder engaged in a new madness. Six times Quantrill knelt, twisted a time-delay to its maximum setting, and thrust a detonator into a bag of ammonium nitrate before sprinting forward to kneel again. This was redundancy with a vengeance; any one of the detonators should start the chain reaction and six detonators made success almost a mathematical certainty.

Quantrill did not intend to be mangled by his own success and hurtled toward the elevator while fumbling for his tiny chemlamp. He placed it on the seat of the 'cycle, illuminating the elevator's interior and nearly causing cardiac arrest to the beefy Chabrier who crowded into the near corner, barefooted. Quantrill shoved hard, his head down against the fan skirt, and he moved forward with the vehicle. At virtually the same instant he saw a bare foot covered with black curly hair and a sodium-yellow sun that burst inside his head with a soundless flash.

When Quantrill's eyes finally focused, they traded solemn regard with the sad dark eyes of Marengo Chabrier. "I regret this, mon ami," sighed the Frenchman, "but you will appreciate my position."

His position was commanding at the moment. He sat on the edge of a chair and toyed with an ornate stiletto. Quantrill felt the bite of wire against his wrists and ankles; saw that he lay on a bed in a room that did its best to personalize concrete walls. He remembered setting the last detonator, manhandling the hovercycle, seeing a naked foot. "You're Chabrier." A nod. "How'd you get me out of the lab?"

"You are not a large man. I carried you here."

"Where?"

A shrug, a wave toward potted plants. "As you see—to my apartment, such as it is."

"How long ago?"

"Perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps more." In tones that carried a dark whimsy Chabrier added, "You will understand if I ask the questions?"

Twenty minutes. It might've been worse; it might still get a damn' sight worse if he was kept wire-wrapped in this hole much longer. Or had the Frenchman removed the detonators? "I can't very well stop you," he said, trying to smile around a pounding headache.