by Dean Ing
Canadian Homingbirds, fitted with carbon shields over their sensors. With its internal vanes, a Homingbird could jitter in flight in a preprogram that could defeat most beam weapons — unless the beam struck precisely, the first time. Its range was under a kilometer, but if fired in volleys the little rockets simply overwhelmed a laser, maser, or P-beam weapon's ability to readjust its aim.
Best of all, the dilating rocket nozzle permitted the little rounds to loiter in flight for several seconds, tempting enemy fire. When that fire came, the surviving Homingbirds went swarming in on full boost with shaped charges. Canada still lacked the solid-state technology of Streamlined America, but she knew how to make weapons dumb enough to sacrifice and smart enough to win.
"I am cutting the lights," Chabrier warned, and Quantrill saw tears coursing down the man's blue-whiskered cheeks.
Not one but two sides of the cargo elevator slid back; Quantrill ducked low, blinking in a darkness that brightened as his eyes adjusted. The moon helped a little. The breeze was summer-soft, and from their prominence atop the lab berm they spied moving lights two klicks distant and moving away. "The patrol,"
Chabrier sniffled, and cleared his throat. "They could return in less than an hour."
"Oh, I think we can count on that," Quantrill chuckled, revving up the fans. "Get on behind my seat, man, what the hell are you waiting for?"
Chabrier's hands squeezed and grappled at one another. "Go to a safe distance and wait for me," he pleaded. "Please, I beg you; I am not a murderer! I cannot just let my fellows die like vermin." He waited for an answer; got none. "I shall not tell them that you exist; only that Boren Mills has arranged our deaths as we all knew he would." Voice rising to a tortured baying: "At least give them a chance! They are prisoners, you dirty boche! Slaves! All they can do is run!"
"Tell 'em to scatter in different directions, not to travel in daylight, and especially not to be found by black search aircraft," Quantrill said in anger and resignation. "Truth is, Chabrier, they have about ten minutes." He thought it might really be nearer twenty.
He listened to Chabrier chatter into his control module, the Frenchman standing on one foot and then the other as if the elevator floor were hot lava. Slow-moving, emotional, untrained with the weapons of single combat: Chabrier was all of these, but his courage in behalf of alien slaves filled Quantrill with a bitter envy. The good Samaritan, it seemed, had his counterpart among the minions of Boren Mills.
The elevator's panel speaker erupted in jabbers that Quantrill did not understand. He understood one thing: the staff was staging their own Chinese fire-drill somewhere below. Chabrier spoke their tongue in staccato bursts, repeated one phrase, then leaped from the platform as the doors began to close. He ran the few steps to the hovercycle, scrambled aboard; cried, "Avance; vorwarts; GO, for God's sake!"
Quantrill went.
As the vehicle gained headway, Chabrier leaned forward and called over the whoosh of fans, "The perimeter fence is high and very near. If we cannot go over it, how will you get through?"
"Now you tell me," Quantrill snarled, throttling back, letting go of one handlebar to rummage blindly in the toolbox near his feet. Chabrier pointed to a dim moonlit tracery of rectangular mesh ahead, fully five meters high with steel pipe bracing at intervals. He shut off the machine, let it settle, swung his chemlamp to study the barrier.
"Be assured that if we cut it, we will alert the guards," said Chabrier quickly.
Quantrill saw that they were still too near the lab for safety. "Where are the nearest guards and how soon can they get here?"
"Halfway to the North gate. The patrol is probably halfway there now and they may need ten minutes to return from there."
"In other words, if we wait five minutes we'll have the longest head start."
"Do we dare?"
"Relax; we dare. I promise, the detonators won't pop for another ten minutes. At least that's what I was promised. Who the fuck knows?"
Quantrill unrolled a coil of tubing the thickness of a finger and ten meters long; gave another to Chabrier, demonstrating how to string the tubing in a great 'U' against the steel fence. As always, Quantrill readied two escape holes in case one, for whatever reason, failed. Pressure-sensitive tape crossing the tube gave it the appearance of barbed wire, but was only an aid in holding the tubing against tree trunk, fence, or door facing.
To Chabrier's query the younger man said, "Plastiquord — an improvement you French made on Primacord. When you pull the pin at the end you get ten seconds before it blows, and it'll sever two-centimeter steel bars. Just make sure it's snug against the fencewire, and let me pull the pin."
"That honor is all yours," Chabrier muttered, peering at his handiwork, readjusting a corner curl of the tube as if neatness counted. Quantrill checked the work; saw nothing to criticize. Near the midpoint at the crossbar of each 'U' he tied a monofilament cord to the fence and let it trail back on the ground.
The hovercycle was running again when a muffled thump from above the earthen berm made them glance back to the lab. The cargo elevator again stood in the open, a square of blackness against the night sky.
"Uh-oh," said Quantrill, who leaped to pull the delay pins; proved that he could duck trot as he dodged behind the 'cycle. "… Eight, nine, ten, elev—" he said as the first report ripped the calm. The second blast came a second later.
Quantrill burst from his cover to grapple with the monofilament cord, hauling backward with all his strength. Chabrier knew the fence was not electrified enough to deliver a shock — but the little saboteur hadn't asked him. Chabrier helped fold the severed mesh back by sheer force. Tied back by the cord, the mesh yawned open and, seeing several dim figures hurtling down the berm toward them, Quantrill vaulted onto his seat.
"Those guys are on their own now," he called, floating his vehicle through the hole. "Get aboard, Chabrier, before they swamp us!"
Moments later the two men hummed away without lights, building up to a speed so great that Chabrier was sure they could not avoid an obstacle if one did loom ahead. Quantrill squinted at a small box riveted on his instrument panel; twisted a vernier knob until an orange light glowed; readjusted so that the light barely flickered. With Chabrier's extra weight, the 'cycle's engine worked harder to keep its distance from the hardpan, and their speed seldom exceeded highway norms across the desert expanse. They were not yet ten klicks from the lab when a flash at their backs lit the terrain. Quantrill glanced back, thrust a fist aloft in triumph; far behind them, in splendid silence, a massive roil of crimson and yellow arose from the desert floor in a fireball that darkened as they watched.
Quantrill, over the engine noise: "Looked like an oil storage dump. Ammonium nitrate doesn't go up like that."
"Monomers and diesel fuel tanks buried outside in the berm, mon ami; it would appear that you are damnably thorough."
Turning again to the west, Quantrill laughed outright. "You should be cheering, frenchy; weren't you a prisoner too?"
"All that work, all that experimental data — one hates to see it lost."
"Mills's enemies don't hate to see it lost — and that means most of Streamlined America."
"They would, if they knew what you destroyed."
Dull thunder finally overtook them, half a minute after the glare. As it faded Quantrill said, "I was supposed to blow away a Chinese gadget that synthesized rare materials."
Chabrier stiffened, then accepted the fact that Mills could not keep his secrets as well as he imagined.
Speaking into Quantrill's ear: "You are well-informed. Every unit in existence was operating in that lower basement, and the porcelain parts were even more delicate than the cermets. I might possibly rebuild one from — from a small model and my memory, but without great good fortune M'sieur Mills will find nothing of much use back there."
"That makes you a valuable man to — wups," Quantrill ended as the field sensor light winked, then glowed brightly.
A sharp turn on a hovercycle r
equires the driver to bank steeply without scraping the fan skirts. Quantrill nearly lost his passenger as he urged the vehicle up and around in an abrupt turn. The field sensor light was a steady glare. Quantrill slowed until they were hovering; steered to make the 'cycle pivot; made its nose wag slowly as he watched a meter on the sensor box.
Finally, his outstretched arm pale in moonlight, Quantrill pointed left of center, ahead. "P-beam tower. I'm told they're about fifteen hundred meters apart. That true?"
"Closer, I think, over uneven ground. I saw them only once. Boren Mills amused himself by flushing rabbits and driving them forward by gunfire. When the beams struck the poor little beasts exploded as though struck by lightning. Of course the vultures came later — and met the same fate. Mills merely wanted to frighten me. He succeeded."
"Let's see if we're close enough. Move your legs up and shut your eyes; I'm going to fire one of the little birds near your feet."
Chabrier obeyed as if goaded by needles. Quantrill set a dial; pressed a stud. With a near-explosive whistling rush, the little homingbird sizzled away, backblast shifting from boost to loiter, and Quantrill watched with one eye covered to maintain half of his night vision.
For perhaps five seconds the exhaust cometed off, dwindling to a hard point on the horizon. Then a thread of light stretched across the desert for one retina-jarring instant, and a blue-white firebloom marked the intercept point where rocket and P-beam met twenty meters above the hardpan.
Quantrill urged the 'cycle forward another three hundred meters while Chabrier's grip tightened on his coverall; then he warned his passenger again. This time the Homingbird's rush carried it only a few hundred meters before a sharp line of glowing air molecules traced the P-beam's passage to the sacrifice decoy. Both men heard the spaaat of the beam in air and the chuffing boom of its target. "Near enough.
This'll be a loud one; three, two, one." Hands over his ears, Chabrier still heard the sharp whistles. First one, then four more boosters howled away. Quantrill protected his ear nearest to the munitions rack; watched with one eye as the brief battle unfolded.
The sacrifice round preceded the others by a half-second, moving in the arc of its brief patrol. The hard actinic line again stretched from obelisk to target, and suddenly four exhaust glows became long zigzag booster trails like an aerial firework gone berserk.
A second P-beam fired, and one rocket cartwheeled into the distance. There was no third P-beam because the sawtooth trails of two Homing-birds converged on the obelisk at such a pace that Quantrill could barely follow the sequence. Two shattering blasts, the ear-pounding signatures of small shaped charges, echoed from nearby gullies and weirdly from inside the hollow shaft of the obelisk like a belch from a pipe organ. The upper fourth of the shaft split open, one piece spinning into the air.
Blue sparks showered up from the obelisk in a display that could have been seen from Mexican Hat, a hundred and sixty klicks to the south. More sparks erupted horizontally from a hole at the tower's base.
"Solar accumulators are shorting," cried Chabrier. "Thanks to God! This will be a beacon to my friends."
Quantrill did not advance until the base of the obelisk, thick as a man's waist, began to melt. Only then did he gun the 'cycle forward, passing the tower as its energy accumulators consumed gobbets of metal that fell inward. Not until Quantrill was half a kilometer beyond did the itch subside between his shoulders. He throttled back, settled himself for the long ride, and veered South.
"We can hide in the mountains if we continue to the West." Chabrier called.
"We've got enough fuel to make New Vegas, and I have a contact there," Quantrill said over his shoulder. "By dawn we'll be skirting the Grand Canyon. But anytime you'd rather walk, you just sing out."
Chabrier laughed and fell silent. He knew that he could negotiate with reasonable men; sell his talents as Von Braun and others had; but he wondered whether he would meet any reasonable men. No longer could he hope to live in the ballooning shadow of Eve Simpson — and in a way he would miss the great cow. If he was to reconstruct a synthesizer — of any size — he would have to recover her amulet. In its cermets and solid-states resided technical details that no one, not even Chabrier, could memorize. He had long since committed his records of those secrets to a temporary memory storage in his apartment; a memory bank which would automatically self-destruct without daily receding by him and him alone.
Somehow, he must get his hands on that bezel again. He entertained a hope that this young saboteur's friends could make contact with Eve Simpson.
CHAPTER 54
No one found it remarkable that Eve would be so drained of energy that she might miss breakfast. The tale of her courage on the previous evening hung in the dining hall, rich and pervasive as the perfume of chorizo omelet. But on the second pass on her morning rounds, the maid still heard no reply to her knock on the door to Eve's cabin.
She knocked again; called; fitted her key to the door and insinuated it open. "Maid service, Senora," she sang as required, and then wrinkled her nose against the stench of urine — and of something else.
It smelled, she thought, of butchering in the barrios; not a truly bad smell if it brought memories of feasting in a poor TexMex family, but a smell very much out of place among rich gringos.
The girl thrust the door open further. The first thing that caught her eyes was the gaping hole where the sliding glass door should be, with sunlight streaming through it. Then she saw the corpulent dark-smeared nude torso sprawled grotesquely near the broken bedframe, its skin gray-white, the flies already idling in through the breach in the wall; and when she glanced near her own feet and recognized that the melon-shaped object near the door had a face that stared unblinkingly toward her, she began to run…
CHAPTER 55
"Don't make me go over your head, damn you," Boren Mills raged into his office holoscreen, "or I'll trot out the holotape I showed you and run it for Young myself!" Mills's automatic devices could not record Chabrier's control module, but duly recorded the views of the lab monitor until the moment it went blank.
Lon Salter knew that he could delay the inevitable, but anyone with eyes could recognize Quantrill's profile and the way he moved. "We already have three S & R teams probing the site, Mills; and two rover flights tracking the fugitives. They all went out the same hole afoot and then split, but they can't go far. What good will it do to take you out there?"
"I can't tell you that, Salter — well, maybe I'll have to. I don't care what you do with Quantrill after I question him but I want my lab staff on ice and unhurt at all costs! I want a voder — belay that; I want a live interpreter who speaks technical Chinese, and I want to be on the site in three hours with him. I can make you a very," he paused, thinking of Salter's own recorders, " — a very happy man if we can recover certain things from that wreckage — or a very unhappy one if you balk me."
Salter's usual lugubrious expression grew deeper. "I'll have to pull every string I can with the Air Force, but maybe I can get you to the hole before noon." He frowned at Mills's image: "Maybe I should meet you there. I won't carry any bugs if you won't."
Recording devices were easily detected anyway. "Agreed," Mills rapped. "One more thing: we both know why we can trust rovers to keep quiet. I want no one but rovers to collect anything from the site.
No outside experts, no regulars! There are some things so sensitive that it could be necessary to disappear some of your own people."
"You'll go on record with that?"
"I'm sure I already am."
A pause to confer with his roster display. Salter registered something akin to pleasure as he said, "Mills, to do that I'd have to pull every rover in S & R from other duties all over Streamlined America. A national red-alert emergency: are you ready to justify that to cool down a fire in IEE?"
"What do you think Streamlined America is all about? Who backs the Lion of Zion? Where would he be without you and me, Salter? Now stop acting naive and get those ro
vers to my lab site! I'll see you there as soon as possible. Make it possible very, very soon."
Mills slapped the holo off, stood up, started pacing his office. Oh, he had a lot of the prints and specs for the synthesizer; everything Chabrier filed into permanent memory. But the subassembly prints for the cermet parts, and the ones for the toroidal yield chamber, were top-assembly prints without breakdowns.
Chabrier had held out on him, and now the goddam Frenchman was either Quantrill's hostage or, worse, his companion!
And what if he couldn't get Chabrier back? Well, there was always that tiny unit the sex-crazed frog had made for Eve. Other men might upscale a standard model synthesizer from that. Suddenly the Ember of Venus and its tiny integrated synthesizer took on an importance it had never owned before.
Mills detested drugs, but with his back to the wall he would shoot Eve's fat arse full of alkaloids. He would have her mainlining popcorn, hulls and all, if that was what it took to recover that sole remaining model of a working synthesizer.
He was striding toward his holo, phrasing his recall demand so that Eve would suspect nothing unusual, when the intercom spoke.
Mills's secretary had been hired not for her thirty years of experience so much as for her seventeen-year-old voice. Vibrant and girlish as ever, now it was also troubled. "It's some manager of a ranch in Wild Country, Mr. Mills, on line one. He says he can't speak with anyone else — and he seems to be crying."
CHAPTER 56
The hardest part about getting from New Vegas to Eureka was persuading Chabrier to shave. The man flatly refused to let anyone but a female registered nurse scrape the fur from his back, buttocks, and thighs, and finding a woman they could trust took Quantrill's contacts nearly a full day.
Quantrill was shipped in a container labeled 'Radioactive Waste'. No one had expected Marengo Chabrier — for that matter, they hadn't really expected Quantrill — so the scientist underwent six hours of cosmetic work. Chabrier was wheeled into a Greyhound omnibus as a sallow drooling fossil by the same slender nurse who had shaved him. Before they reached Eureka, Chabrier and the woman passed narrow scrutiny several times, and knew the stirrings of a beautiful relationship.
