Single Combat (34 page)

"No, sir." Mills kept his head down in his best display of contrition. Given the least chance, Young was increasingly capable of indulging in violent tantrums. He had seen the man rumble and groan in his own personal earthquakes before, but until now Mills hadn't found himself at the epicenter. Face turned to heaven, bellowing of Gadianton robbers and of terrible retribution, Young stumbled over the brunette and kicked out viciously. She scurried out of the way, holding her ribs, making no outcry. Presently his furies subsided and Young stood over the other men in the stance of one who has gained some gallant victory. He waited until his breath had steadied.

"Boren Mills," said the President, "I'm told you have a pair of Chink scientists left and a roomful of pieces to put together. And you are going to see that it all gets put together. Tomorrow morning, you'll get a call from a fellow in Technology Assessment about a certain top secret project that you will lead. Personally."

"Yes, Mr. President." Mills wondered if the crazy bastard thought he could dragoon the head of IEE into such a farce—then reflected that the President of Streamlined America could do
exactly
that. He could kick Mills's brains out right here in the executive apartment, and no one would ever find out. On the morrow, one of the Twenty-First Century's shrewdest organizers would be juggling a hopeless synthesizer project and an animated holo scheme that might just backfire on him, to satisfy the inspired hallucinations of a crackbrained dictator. Mills could think of several absolute rulers before Young who'd followed the same pattern, and three of them had eventually turned on their best men.

Smug in his assurance that God would not let him err, Blanton Young stared down at Mills. "Consider this a trial, Mills. There is only one indispensable man in Zion, and you are not that man. Now get out of my sight. I want to see that animated holo of yours in three days."

Mills knew better than to argue about deadlines. He was as powerless in Young's presence as that big brunette hotsy and he made his exit a quick one. At least he still had some freedom of movement, and a fraction of his once-stupendous fortune converted to gemstones. He would simply have to abandon the rest.

Just as travelers in the old West moved from waterhole to waterhole, travel in Wild Country depended on precious liquids. If you were on a horse you still watched for windmills and learned which rivers were running: Rio Frio, Llano, Pecos. If you rode a fast
hovercycle
you needed diesel fuel, and rebel fuel dumps were hidden near places like Hondo, Del Rio, Alpine. With their pannier tanks, Lufo confided, they could make the round-trip from Jim Street's ranch to Rocksprings and back. Unless of course they got jumped by brush poppers, outlaws whose only allegiance was to booty—and in that case he and Quantrill were ordered to disengage. Translation: run like hell. Their mission had nothing to do with cleaning out the brush poppers; old Street needed that little SinoInd nuke and he needed it yesterday. Did it really exist? Quien sabe?

The dust trails of the two 'cycles varied with their speed and the terrain, and Lufo knew the proper pace to minimize a dust signature. Long ago he had trained Quantrill in unarmed combat; now he was once again the instructor.

Skating along a dry creekbed their passage might have been heard a few hundred meters distant and when they talked, it was with their scrambled short-range headsets. "So this ol' woman brought me to Odessa and seein' it was a head wound with a few birdshot, they X-rayed me and found my critic. By the time I woke up, I was a man without a name or a critic, and I liked it that way," Lufo said, explaining his defection from Army Intelligence. "Always felt bad about getting you in, compadre, because of that chingada critic."

"S'all right," Quantrill lied. "Hey: tripwire ahead!"

Lufo jerked his head around. "O-ho. Watch your right skyline and squeeze off at anything that moves," he said, splitting his own attention between the high ground to their left and the glistening wire ahead. "Now you'll see how the antenna works," he added, continuing at the same pace.

The 'antenna' formed a parabolic arch from the front end of the hovercycle, over the rider's head, to the sturdy pillion behind the jumpseat. Its spring aluminum alloy was triangular in cross-section with a stainless steel blade set into the top edge and Lufo's first warning to Quantrill had been to avoid grasping it. The damned thing would slice through a glove and the tendons beneath it—or sever a thin wire strung across its path.

Lufo gunned the engine to get additional lift as he neared the cable. His vehicle bobbed lower as it swept under the taut wire, polymer skirts scuffing the creekbed, and then Quantrill encountered the same effect. He saw the cable vibrating in Lufo's wake, felt a solid thump as his own 'cycle kissed the creekbed, and then he was past it, craning his neck to the right with his H & K out and ready.

Lufo laughed at Quantrill's cursing. "No sweat. Next time you'll know just when to gun the engine, and then you won't bounce your cojones off. It's a knack. Anyway, that was just an old sucker cable, nobody layin' for us, but if it's braided cable like that sometimes it won't break."

"Nice folks out here, Sab—ah, Lufo. How do they know when they've bagged somebody?"

Lufo pointed aloft. "Buzzards. One of these days, compadre, you'n me can take some time off, set some traps of our own out here for those ladrones."

"What'll the Governor say?"

"Shit, he don' know everything," Lufo scoffed. "You think your 'migo Ethridge won't go lookin' to settle old scores when he gets to Utah? Out here it's every man for himself. Until we get a few U. S. Marshals in Wild Country, it's vigilante time." He pronounced it TexMex fashion,
veeheelahntay
. Quantrill admired the wild free spirit of his friend, whom he still thought of as Sabado; but a Sabado by any other name was still basically a vigilante, a man who'd sooner dispense justice of his own than leave it to a Marshal or a jury. When the Marshals came to Wild Country they might find Lufo Albeniz more trouble than help. And with that thought came another which Quantrill filed away…

Presently Lufo led the way into higher country damp with recent rain and thick with brush, where a man on a quarterhorse might have met their pace for a short distance. The tall latino was singing of his dark-haired corazdn when Quantrill interrupted, "I thought this one was a blonde."

Laughing: "As you'll see in a couple of hours. I was thinking of the one in Laredo—or is it the one in Corpus?" He yelped in sheer high spirits; sang the refrain from a current western tune: 'Like a Mormon fundamentalist I'm a much-married man."

It was no trick to get Lufo talking about that. Lufo's was the classic form of machismo: potentially every woman was his, and only his. The only time you knew you were a man was when you were atop a woman; not beside, or below. Atop. You liked frequent assurances of manhood and if you had to marry her—well, you married her. Of course any woman who dallied with any other man while married to Lufo would do it at risk of her life, and of the other man's life. It was not a joking matter to Lufo; he might have a dozen women, but they must have no other man.

Lufo explained his one self-imposed restriction: "Plain loco to have two wives near enough that they might learn about each other. That's for men who keep house; have kids. Me, I've had my tubes tied but none of my women know that. They all think a nino would get me to settle down—so they try to get one from me. Ay, it's a good life, compadre!"

Quantrill voiced an agreement he could not feel; told himself that boys would be boys: thanked God he knew no women who might fall under Lufo's spell. Three hours later, after topping off their tanks near Barksdale, they whrummed into view of the soddy.

Quantrill imitated Lufo and shut off his engine in a clearing beyond the ramshackle rows of corn stubble. Lufo's horn was a silly bleat, a long and two shorts. "You won't believe what I think this is all about," Lufo said, turning to his companion, "but she always comes out and—listen."

Quantrill saw a blonde figure skip out of the soddy, admired the strong legs and full figure of the young woman in the short dress. She put fingers to her mouth. A series of piercing blasts floated out across the oak and cedar scrub.

As she turned in another direction to repeat her whistled signal, Lufo said, "She always does this. It's not another man, but she's got someone out there that she won't tell me about—someone her little sister plays with." At this point he stood on his seat and waved until the woman saw him. She waved them in. Settling to the controls Lufo added, "But if you had a hotsy that lived out here alone with boar tracks the size of my hand all around, and she never wore a sidearm and never worried who came to her door, and made you swear you'd never shoot at any pig within an hour of here,—what would you think?" He shook his head, restarted, drove up in the shadow of a tarp-covered woodpile without waiting for an answer.

Quantrill replied through his headset: "I'd think about what happened to Eve Simpson, and I'd think you're fucking loco to think what you're thinking," as he followed Lufo.

With their 'cycles hidden under the plastic tarp, they hefted their traveling gear: mummybag with spare clothing, food, and survival articles packed into the folds. It was then that the warm-eyed blonde ran to meet Lufo. Her arms were already around his nee when she glanced at her second guest. She registered shock, then something like anger, pulling back from Lufo who grinned at the way she stared.

"This is Ted Quantrill, Sandy," said her lover with pride. "He finally made it out this way."

Quantrill intended to extend a hand but saw her hands gripping each other at her breast, her mouth open in a new astonishment. Instead he nodded and smiled, trying to ignore a display he did not yet understand. Even with her jaw down, she was a hell of a looker—and not a woman yet, in years. It was his turn to gape as Lufo continued. "Ted, this is my woman, Sandy Grange."

Quantrill could only repeat her name. She gave him a quick nod, and feeling like an idiot he said it still again. A scab-kneed kid of eleven back in '96 before he joined the Army; yes, if caterpillars became Monarch butterflies, then his gamine girlchild friend Sandy could become this lush creature six years later. He had lost her trace in Sutton County, assumed she'd been devoured—
by the great boar, Ba'al!
He'd even seen their tracks together; had drawn the obvious conclusion. Well, the obvious wasn't always true. Ted Quantrill did not know that he was bubbling with silent laughter; knew only that Lufo was right. It could be a great life.

Sandy glanced quickly at Lufo, whose keen gaze was asking 'what the hell ails this pair,' and then she held out her hand. It was already shaking.

"
I'm
—glad to meet you, Mr. Quantrill." She was all but weeping.

Instead Quantrill burst out laughing, caught her to him, hugged her and whirled her around. "It wouldn't work, Sandy," he said, still laughing as he released her with a gesture at Lufo. "Not for ten seconds! He's not blind and he's not stupid and hell, he isn't even Lufo Albeniz. But whatever he is, he wasn't your playmate back at Sonora—and I was!"

Lufo's swarthy color hid most of his blush, but he quickly moved from anger to suspicion of some vast joke. "Playmate? You two know each other?" It just missed being an accusation.

Breathless from Quantrill's whirl, spots of color reddening her cheeks, Sandy hugged Lufo's sleeve in mock severity. "Now don't be like that, Lufo. If you weren't such a secretive bozo, and a creative speller too, you'd have told me your old friend was Ted—and I wouldn't be gawking at him like this." She linked an arm through Quantrill's, glanced at him again with a 'well-I-never' headshake; urged both men toward the soddy and walked between them.

While Sandy brewed herb tea, she and Quantrill explained their Sonora connection to the disgruntled Lufo. In the process Quantrill realized that the ribbon-chuted canister she'd salvaged from scattered aircraft debris lay hidden in the same cavern where he had once met her dying father.

"I don't think I could find the place without you," Quantrill admitted. "I was only fifteen years old then."

"Wouldn't matter if you did," Sandy murmured, pouring tea. "I stored all my treasures in another entrance—but I can find it. I'm not truly certain that thing is a bomb, you know. The war was over before I saw a holo program showing enemy munitions—but I swear one of their small airdropped nukes was identical to the thing I dragged into my cavern."

Lufo welcomed the chance to focus on the present. He could do nothing about alliances his woman had known in childhood. He asked if Sandy had ever spoken of her salvage item to anyone else. No, she said, not even to Childe; it was something she did not like to think about.

Quantrill recalled Lufo's mention of a little sister. Adopted? Again she demurred; Childe had been born two months before Sandy escaped with her from Wild Country outlaws.

Quantrill: "You wore sandals the day you escaped toting a two-month-old sister." Not a question, but a statement of facts.

Sandy: "Why,—how did you know about the sandals?"

"Tracked you after a team of us ran those outlaws down. I was too late to help your mom. Saw some other prints with yours at a waterhole, and figured you'd made a meal for the biggest predator that ever roamed this country."

Sandy tried to change the subject. Lufo was having none of that. Until now he'd held some hope that her tantalizing hints of a protector in the brush was only a fanciful tissue. Yet Quantrill added earlier, if circumstantial, evidence. Lufo, almost sadly: "Ted, you're talkin' about a big boar hog."

Sandy said nothing, but stared daggers at her lover.

Quantrill, nodding, with a half-smile toward Sandy: "I'm talking about Ba'al. Or maybe there's more than one. Sandy?"

She searched her teacup for a reply, evidently without success. "I don't want to talk about it. I have enough trouble keeping my—human friends from each other's throats."