"I am the Church!" Mills realized with a start that he'd seen the same look on Eve's face when he asked for her amulet. "The Council of Apostates," said Young, relishing his heresy, "is a test. I see that now. And I have passed that test."
Through his consternation, Mills saw that he was privy to a development so new that it had not yet become surrounded by rumor. With utterly no idea of what to say, he fell back on the hoary goad of interviewers and shrinks: "I see."
"I wonder if you do. I have passed through a purifying fire of the spirit, and I can depend on insp'ration. When I'm inspired I can't be wrong.
It's a tr'mendous sense of respons'bility but," the President unleashed a beatified smile, "somehow it makes me feel free."
No doubt, thought Mills. That same sense of guidance and inspiration must have given the same freedom to Alexander; to Rasputin; to der fuehrer. But to ride the coattails of Young was to ride a barmy tiger. Should he dismount now? But how the hell could he? And how long before this loony generated an open break with what was, unofficially, a state religion?
Suddenly Boren Mills knew why LockLever was paying cash homage to the rebels. They knew of Young's instability; were straddling the ideological fence. Yet the CEO of LockLever hadn't helped organize Young's S & R hit team as he, Mills, had done. Mills and IEE could expect no quarter from Jim Street. Unless-unless Mills made himself absolutely vital to the survival of Streamlined America no matter who won the political battles. Choosing his words with utmost caution: "Mr. President, how did the Council of Apostles respond to your revelation?"
Young lurched up from his chair, circled the wet bar as if analyzing an opponent, chose a glass of seltzer before answering. "I'm not an idiot. Mills. I won't feed a man things he can't swallow. What I can do, is replace Council members with my own people. A matter of seein' that some of my folks are standin' in the right places. Pity you're not LDS yourself."
"I can do more as a fellow traveler," Mills said quickly. "How long before, um, normal attrition in the Council," he said, knowing that some members would die by means that were not normal, "gives you the power you need?"
Innocence personified: "How would I know? Could take a year or so."
"If I might suggest it, Sir, you might take care not to let your new lifestyle show in the meantime."
"Council isn't as down on plural marriage as you might think," Young chuckled, "but I get your drift, son. It has been revealed to me that even the head of the Church must make haste slowly." Horsewink.
Mills exhaled with undisguised relief. Whether mad as Parisian hatters or merely posturing in his cups, Young still understood caution. Mills: "Depend on IEE to move with you. But I'll have to know what you need."
"You can start by talking with those Israelis about a media countermeasure. Streamlined America must break free from foreign pressures." A rolling rippling belch paced the President's train of thought. "And not just media gadgetry. Mex oil, Canadian platinum, African cobalt-stuff this country must have."
At that moment, inspiration struck Mills. Some crucial raw materials were present, in minute quantities, in sea water. "We're already doing our part with shale, but IEE hasn't been idle in the rare metals field either," he said slyly.
"I'm talking metric tons."
A hundred kilos a day of lighter elements from a synthesizer, perhaps ten a day-he'd have to check with Chabrier-of heavy rare metals like cobalt. It would mean a different production schedule of synthesizers, but a few could be on-line in less than a year. A hundred synthesizers could yield a ton of heavy elements every day.
"So am I," said Mills. "Pure stuff. It's, uh, an extraction process we've kept pretty secret. In a few months IEE can be shipping a ton of cobalt a day from Eureka."
"Not enough for the New Denver and Cleveland mills by a long shot. We use seven thousand tons of Zaire cobalt a year."
"In two years we can match that," Mills promised. He hadn't said the process was ocean extraction, but the implication was clear enough.
"Domestic?"
Time to enrich the implied lie: "Domestic as sea water."
"At compet'ive price?"
"No. Sir." Pause for effect. "Cheaper."
The President sat down slowly, then raised his goblet in salute. "The Lord has provided," he murmured. "I knew I was right about you; inspiration," he said smugly and then added, "but you better come through."
Mills tallied new necessities in his head. He'd have to maintain utmost security on shipments of elemental metals from the Utah desert to the Port of Eureka. And set up some kind of barge facility off the coast as a blind. But once those shipments became mainstays of reconstruction in Streamlined America, Mills could write his own ticket with any administration.
"To Zion," said Mills, and raised his own goblet.
Ten meters away on the other side of the wall, the raven-haired hotsy felt her lip curl.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
As the pudgy, chain-smoking Sean Lasser began Sanger's briefing, she surmised that old age was creeping up on him. He'd never shown this much courtesy to any rover. ". Had to be one of the undercover rebels that we disappeared two weeks ago, you see."
Sanger, quickly: "You mean because it had to be a rover who helped him escape? If the man told the Canadians all you say, I suppose so." Finger-snap: "Unless some rebel posed as one of us and-"
Lasser's headshake, slow and commiserating, stopped her. "No one but a rover could've faked that mission," he said gently. "All we needed was the escapee's name, and our man in Calgary couldn't get that. He did manage three minutes alone in the room where the man had been debriefed, and tape-lifted prints off the chair arms. We identified one this morning. Ever hear of a Dandridge Laird?"
Negative shrug. Marbrye Sanger had no doubt she'd learn plenty about him from the file that lay at Lasser's elbow. She'd never had to go into Canada to disappear a man before, but the prospect disturbed her no more than any other killing might. "Will I be on a team or singleton?"
"Team. We have to pick that team with more than usual care. Howell and Cross are busy setting the mission up; that's why Seth isn't briefing you himself." A finger tapping against his teeth, as though the ritual and not his thought processes generated the pause. "How well do you get along with Ted Quantrill?"
Under the little man's deceptive mild gaze, Sanger had to force her eye contact. "As well as with any rover. We've teamed on several missions-but you know that." Taking a risk: "We get along; he doesn't talk my arm off. He's a surly little bastard but he doesn't have many weaknesses."
"Not even in bed?"
"I've had that pleasure," she said evenly. "Also with Ethridge, Graeme Duff, once even with Howell, which I won't bore you with. I might have it with you, if the occasion ever arises." The spots of color on her cheeks did not suggest that it was very likely.
"Why thank you, Sanger; though I ah," with a dusty cough of self-deprecation, "wouldn't want to bore you with that." Pause. "I'm asking as politely as I can: do you think any of your liaisons-with Quantrill, for example-left emotional bonds?"
She made her laugh loud enough so that it wouldn't come out shaky. "Basic T Section stuff, Lasser! Going soft on another member of a hit team is a deadly mistake." Her grin was as feral as she could make it: "I don't have many weaknesses either." Sanger, however, knew that her responses to stress were not as controlled as Quantrill's. At the moment she hadn't the strength to kick a sick whore off a bidet and she knew it.
Lasser, studying her, at last said, "Good," and picked up the thick file. "Howell will give you details but I can tell you now that this will be touchy work. You have to take your man out without killing him, if at all possible. We have a lot of questions we need to ask him."
"Soporific slugs? Hypospray?"
"Hypospray might not be fast enough, but you'll get a canister just in case. You'll probably have to use your chiller. Just don't hit a vital spot; they don't care if he loses an arm. He won't be needing it again."
Not worried
, but perplexed: "So how do we get a bleeder back here alive?" She was thinking of Calgary.
"Sprint chopper. He doesn't know we're onto him but when he does, you can expect some good moves."
She took the file from Lasser, glanced at the first page, and then realized why that file was so thick, why Howell and Cross were setting up the mission. Seth Howell and Marty Cross had more single combat experience between them than any half-dozen rovers, and they would be her team members. No wonder Lasser had been so gentle, so careful.
The file she held was Ted Quantrills.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
So this was the way her world ended, thought Sanger. Inside, she was whimpering. She'd spent far too much time trying to figure a way to warn Quantrill, and not enough time steeling herself for her decoy duties. Quantrill was pulling sprint chopper maintenance at Dugway, on the Utah side of the Nevada border. How simple it might be to ask Control, through her critic, to patch her into Quantrill's head. And how fruitless; for Control would not let her say a dozen words of warning, and she'd be cancelled forever. What would she say anyway? Run for it? They'd only zap him with his critic detonator. Whatever I must do now, I love you beyond all reason? He probably knew it anyway, and it wouldn't keep either of them alive.
Sanger stared out the polymer port of the sprint chopper, ignoring the wiry half-Cheyenne, Cross, in harness near her. Howell was not as good a pilot as he was a killer-but there was no great hurry as he guided them past the Oquirrh Mountains.
Quantrill had not seen fit to tell her (oh God, why not? Hadn't he known he could trust her?) he'd funked a mission, turned rebel beneath her nose. But neither had she told him the real story about his friend Raima. How Sanger had left a printed warning for Dr. Cathy Palma two hours before she was expected to disappear the woman in Abilene, Texas. God damn that man, refusing to ask her help! Now she could not give it and hope to live. Marbrye Sanger did not want to die, and didn't intend to. The best thing for her was to expunge Ted Quantrill from her memory; to bleed her soul of him. He'd made his single bed and now he could die in it.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Quantrill only half-noticed the approach of Howell's craft as he lay supine on the mechanic's creeper. Three similar craft squatted outside the maintenance hangar five hundred meters away, and Quantrill lay above hot concrete beneath the nose of the fourth, which Miles Grenier had flown to the alignment pad. Old-timers still called these secluded spots 'compass roses'. Grenier sat in the cockpit, checking out the avionics and calling out the results of Quantrill's simple remove-and-replace operations with numbered modules. It had never occurred to Quantrill that rovers might be kept deficient in electronic theory.
Perhaps it was the continuing buzz of the distant sprint chopper that first suggested a break in routine. Usually the pilot set his bird down quickly to avoid spreading dust across the flight line. This one hovered, half concealed by the hangar.
He heard Grenier's audio buzzer. From sheer curiosity he pushed the stowed nose flotation bag aside; listened through the thin inner bulkheads. Grenier spoke normally at first. After a pause he spoke more quizzically but Quantrill could not hear what he said. The rover wiped late morning perspiration from his brow with the sleeve of his odorous work coverall. He had time to damn the heat of the turbines whistling in the fuselage; they weren't loud but while checking the bird out you wanted them idling.
A vagrant breeze wafted warm exhaust back to Quantrill, pungent with expensive fuel. Quantrill decided Grenier was going to take all day on his comm set, cursed, rolled back on his creeper and slapped the nose hatch shut before sitting upright. The hovering sprint chopper in the distance, he noticed, backed from sight without landing.
Quantrill was only a little surprised to hear the turbine whine rising, but very much so to see the wingtip shrouds swivel into takeoff position. If that goddam Grenier was heading back for an early lunch he wasn't going to leave Quantrill to leg it alone back to the hangar.
He lay back on the creeper, grasped handholds and shot himself backward to the belly hatch, punching the skin detent as he passed it. The hatch opened and Quantrill snagged internal handholds, legs driving him vertically as the craft began to lift and turn.
"What is this, Grenier; trick or treat?" Quantrill lay on the narrow walkway and stared angrily forward at the pilot.
Grenier did not hear him over the turbine scream, but evidently heard something in his headset. He chopped back the power too quickly, flicked off all systems while struggling up from his seat. And the glance he flicked at Quantrill was rich with fear and suspicion.
"Abandon ship," Grenier shouted, waving Quantrill out the still-gaping belly hatch, and following him with almost a rover's speed. Grenier backed away, not looking at the aircraft but at the rover. "Quantrill, get away," shouted the pilot. "We've got a problem with the bird!"
Quantrill trotted after the taller man, saw past him to the flight line. Five minutes before, there'd been several people currying their birds. Now the place was deserted. At the periphery of his vision was a charcoal-black mass, skating ten meters over the deck, and now Miles Grenier was running like a deer. The hurtling mass was a sprint chopper, arcing in between the two men. Isolate your hit, said a well-remembered voice in his memory. The voice had been that of Jose Marti Cross, the same man that Quantrill now saw peering from a side port in the approaching aircraft.
Quantrill dropped to one knee, slapped at his armpit for a chiller that wasn't there. The face of Marty Cross vanished from the port and with that simple reflexive act, Cross said it all: combat stations.
Give the pilot credit, thought Quantrill; he horsed his craft around while masking Grenier from a man who, if armed, might well shoot him or take him hostage. But Quantrill was sprinting too, now, and a precious few seconds are required to stop and then accelerate six thousand kilos of Loring sprint chopper.
In those seconds Quantrill crossed fifty meters of level concrete toward the craft he had so recently abandoned. Then Howell surged forward, coming out of the sun, high enough to clear his quarry's head, low enough so that his shrouded propwash would knock a horse sprawling.
Any watcher would know by now that Quantrill was unarmed. But Cross sat with feet braced against the padding of the open belly hatch, both hands steadying his chiller between his thighs, waiting for Quantrill to come into view. He was almost too close to miss-but also too low to see Quantrill until a second before the Loring passed over him. It should have been enough, with a chiller.
Because the sun was high, Quantrill saw the big shadow almost too late. He saw a tuft of grass that might serve as a shoving-off point, kicked away against it in an abrupt change of direction, rolled. He saw three puffs, hairbreadth misses by Cross, of dust as he came up squatting in a welter of pebbles at the concrete's verge. The Loring continued, levitated over its abandoned twin, prop shrouds gimbaling as Howell turned, virtually hidden from Quantrill as if seeking cover. Which he was, for a vital five seconds.
Then Howell leapfrogged the abandoned Loring again, this time slowly dropping to a meter off the deck. Now between Quantrill and his goal, Howell stopped the Loring. Quantrill feinted, started to run, then slowed as he saw the legs of Cross swing from the belly hatch. Quantrill dropped his pumping arms then, a gesture full of defeat.
And of misdirection. He could see Howell in the cockpit, grinning, knowing he could slam a six-ton hammer into his victim. He saw Cross hit and roll. And he saw that he was no more than twelve meters from the nearest wingtip shroud. His high overhand toss seemed a ridiculous empty gesture until Howell, with a spurt of pure horror, saw the glitter of small objects in the sun.
The handful of broken concrete half-fell, was half sucked into the circular shroud as Quantrill raced toward that wingtip, ignoring Cross who was up in a crouch below the fuselage, steadying his aim for a kneecapper.
Quantrill could not possibly sprint quickly enough to reach the shroud before its fiberquartz prop blades ingested those jagged chunks of concret
e. He counted on that fact. With a shrill series of reports like small-arms fire, the concrete hunks shrieked through polyskin, some whining as ricochets into the distance, some shrapneling the fuselage behind Howell's bubble. Neither Howell nor Cross was hit but before either could make a patterned response, the Loring-as Quantrill had known it must-responded on its own.
The balance of a twin coleopter craft depends greatly on the shape of those prop blades, and their proximity to the airfoil surface in the shroud. Hammer a few dents into a shroud, especially near those prop tips, and its efficiency will plummet. Blow a dozen jagged holes in it while the props eat hardware, and you will see a coleopter go bonkers.
Quantrill had that pleasure.
The upward-slanting shroud was only a meter from concrete at its trailing edge when Quantrill committed his act of classic sabotage. It faltered, fell, scraped concrete, and became a sliding pivot as the other wingtip lifted as if to cartwheel the entire vehicle. Howell reacted almost quickly enough. A thorough pro, Cross sidestepped to get a shot at Quantrill who in turn kept himself masked by the nearer shroud. Cross took Howell's expertise for granted, and had no warning when the fuselage sideswiped him across his back and shoulders.
Dean Ing - Quantrill 2 Page 13
