Dean Ing - Quantrill 1

by Systemic Shock(lit)

  Ranjit Khan knew he had made a mistake, loitering in on the enormous shovel-shaped mass of airship in an effort to get a certain kill; but he had not realized it could bumble away so quickly. Ranjit had seen sparkles of bright polymer and wispy structure splash from the delta's hull and knew that he had drawn blood. Ranjit was an educated man; knew that dirigibles had considerable space between their great gossamer buoyancy bags. But Indian dirigibles were filled with hydrogen, and Ranjit had expected to fly over a fireball. He throttled back, realizing that the airship pilot would require him to maneuver at great waste of his remaining fuel if the damned thing could squat in the shallow canyon to the south.

  Ranjit was no fool. This time he would make a head-on pass, slowing to the snail's pace of an STOL as he forced the gasbag to turn or die. In the canyon it could not maneuver. So thought Ranjit Khan.

  "We're losing pressure in Cell Five," Rogers said. "Can't tell how big the leak, but big enough."

  Calm, quick: "Deploy two series of patches." Rogers flipped the protective cover from buttons, keyed an instruction.

  The helium cell material was a ripstop fabric thinner than a wastrel's excuse, but it could be punctured rather easily. For in-flight repair, a delta boasted tiny subsystems on the floor of each cell; gadgets that actually blew bubbles. The skin of a bubble was a white polymer that turned from slick to sticky, then chitinous, as it encountered oxygen. Yet, for such a bubble to maintain neutral buoyancy in helium, it could have only one substance inflating it: hydrogen.

  The bubbles migrated toward a leak so that they deployed to a puncture, popped, stuck and hardened in the hole, and usually plugged the leak, a white spot on the cell's black surface, easy to find and fix. But two dozen lemon-sized bubbles could not patch the rents in Cell Five. Chartrand found the Norway settling stern-first, and ordered more patches while he adjusted the elevens further. Then he called for more helium. "If I can get some sky under this bitch, gentlemen, abandon ship. Consider it an order," he said, still calm, watching his orientation display as the Norway slid over the lip of the canyon barely meters above the scrub. Even if he could maintain altitude, it would not be enough to let a chute open.

  "We've got those twenty-two's, cap'n," Bernie Grey said.

  "If you get a shot, take it," said Chartrand. Texas A & M had given them no heavy machine guns, but ROTC classes used weapons scaled down from twin-fifties for use against target drones. The twins fired twenty-two caliber slugs, four hundred rounds a minute. They would have been useful at

  Oak Ridge, but against an Indian STOL?

  Ranjit was having problems. He had felt one surge of fuel pumps, knew that his fuel plenums were nearly empty. He could make another pass and then horse the aircraft up and southward, ejecting a thousand meters or so before the craft began to drop. He might still walk to Mexico. He throttled back still more, practically gliding at a speed of three hundred klicks. The yellow delta had touched, tail-first, onto rocky alkali flats and even if it tried to turn, he could rake the gossamer brute with cannon. This time he could not miss.

  Nor could Chartrand. He saw the line of alkali puffs stutter toward him from the approaching bird of prey. As the Norway's struts swung down to absorb the airship's inertia, Chartrand made ready to trip their pneumatics. She would be tail-heavy, her prop shrouds were aimed ju-u-ust right, and she had something more potent than a pair of twenty-two's slung against her belly.

  Ranjit saw his cannon rounds march up the arroyo to his target. There was no question of missing now.

  The Norway flopped slowly, then rebounded with her pneumatics, actually rose fifty meters like a broaching whale, nose proud. The aft end of the gondola spurted long tongues of fire.

  Ranjit saw the enemy's maneuver and started to smile. Turning upward rather man sideways was a surprise, but his cannon were boring through the great ship, end-to-end. As he began the smile, he also commanded his hand to put the STOL into a steep bank, the better to reach an optimum cruise altitude. But neither the smile nor the bank ever really occurred. Tiny spots before Ranjit's eyes grew from gnats to fencepoles in a second, and of the twelve little missiles Chartrand had fired shotgun-fashion dead ahead, eleven shrieked past.

  The twelfth passed into Ranjit's portside air intake, detonating against the duct wall adjacent to his remaining fuel.

  David Chartrand saw the deadly fireflower blossom, become hunks of wing and impeller and ejection pod, and then it was a shower of metal and plastic, almost as big as the Norway as they engulfed one another thirty meters above Devil's River Canyon. Sandys jurnal Aug. 24 Sat,

  Holo says sinowinds envaded Florida, one sure envaded Texas. I heard the boooom in the hole, mom and me went to see. It was up the drywash, well realy it was clean acrost it. Mom woudnt let me go close to the delta stuff. Those poor men, poor soles, mom said. I found a napsack, a finger, some title bullets and a dress of ribbons tied to a heavy iron can. Well Igess its a dress. I rolled it all into a gully. Coudnt lift the can. It must be forein, the words arent ours. My dady doesnt talk much wont let me see his hands. He jokes its a secret. Hes still wore out from letting the animals go last week. I wish my dady didnt smell bad.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  A grain elevator, Quantrill found, could be almost as deep below ground level as it was high. So insulated were the tunnel occupants that they knew nothing of the Norway's fate until many hours later. No one at Aggie Station noticed the smoke to the south. The youth in the yellow flight suit was recognized from a week-old holocast; seemed willing enough to move cargoes around Aggie Station while he waited for the delta to return. Still confident that he would scramble aboard his airship after a day or so, and exhausted after relocating thousands of terrified hamsters, Quantrill fell instantly asleep in the staff quarters.

  Dr. Catherine Palma damned her comm link with College Station that night as the three-note signal interrupted her work a hundred meters from Quantrill. It wasn't tough enough setting up a four-level paranthrax barrier with a few lay people before competent lab personnel arrived. No, she also had to second-guess the radiation counters, trial contusions, and play administrator. Palma stored her console display, queried the comm link, and swore again; the Red Cross had finally come through for the green-eyed kid.

  Cathy Palma pushed herself away from the desk feeling all of her fifty-one years; trudged to the staff dorm. She found Quantrill naked, his covers kicked away in sleep, the dull gleam of synthoderm over a wound in one leg. She stood beside him for a long time, thinking that those muscular youthful limbs had taken their last indolent tan; wondering if she would ever see her own daughter again. Cathy Junior would have liked this boy, but of course he was much too young.

  He stirred then, and Palma silently made her way back to her office. Though she had not entertained sexual thoughts about the boy, she felt a twinge of the voyeur's guilt. Time enough to talk with him the next day. Thank God, she thought, for objectivity.

  When she returned to her office she was met by one of the Sonora field men with news of the Norway disaster. Palma spent the next two hours at her comm link trying to bridge the supply gap which the delta's loss represented. She did not think of the youth again until the next morning.

  Sunday morning was like any other morning for Palma. A hectic scramble to rejuggle tasks; a radioed promise to use two valuable hours finding and treating one of the field men who, from the sound of it, had taken a massive radiation dose and could not be moved; and ah, yes, the Quantrill boy.

  She checked her pocket, then took her coffee across the half-deserted little cafeteria. He was alone, studying her face as she neared him.

  "It's about my parents," he said. No barely-submerged hysteria there, but no hope either. And no wasted amenities.

  She slid into a chair, willing him to play the man. "I 'm Dr. Catherine Palma, Mr. Quantrill. I've heard about you. Yes," she went on levelly, "I've just had word from-whoever finds out such things. You can't always believe what you hear." Step One: give the poor devil a
hint by manner and innuendo.

  He looked away, as though to find some new exit from the room. "That news about the Norway: we have to believe that, don't we?"

  Toying with her cup: "Yes, we sent a team out last night as soon as I heard. Apparently an enemy jet and our delta collided. No survivors. I'm sorry, Mr. Quantrill, I knew some of those men too."

  "I was starting to think of the Norway as home. Even left my scout uniform and backpack in her. Now-look, could I find some other clothes besides these?" He looked down at the bright yellow uniform, his eyes dry, distant.

  "There must be some Aggie coveralls-"

  "No," he said quickly. "Just-just plain old clothes." Her gaze was interrogative. He shrugged into her silence, added, "I'll work for you, Dr. Palma. But I don't want to join anything I like. That hasn't worked out very well."

  After a long thoughtful pause, Palma said, "I suppose it does sharpen one's sense of loss. But you have to make alliances with something, Quant-may I call you Ted?"

  A nod. "I don't have to make 'em with things I love, Doc. And I might like it here. I'm not making that sound very smart, am I?"

  "Look, Ted, sometimes a long sleep and then some hard work can do wonders." She pulled the vial from her pocket, set it before him. "Why don't you wash those down with water and hit the sack? It's not much, but it's all I can do." She had almost added that if he were older, they might have gotten drunk together. But her responsibility, not his age, was the barrier.

  "Maybe I will. Thanks." He put the vial into his pocket.

  Almost angrily she said, "Don't you want to know what I found out?"

  "About my folks? You've already told me. They're dead, aren't they? One, or both?"

  It was curiously difficult for her to say it: "Both. Your father was-in action." She couldn't say 'killed'. "Your mother was admitted to a clinic in Durham, North Carolina, and I'm afraid paranthrax swept the place." More softly: "Do you know what we're doing here?"

  "An antidote for it. Chartrand said that "d make this place a target if word got out."

  "We don't call it an antidote, but you have the idea. Does it make you feel better to know you're helping destroy the thing that destroyed your home?"

  "You want the truth, Doc?"

  She sighed and stood up. "No thanks. There's too much of that going around." His response was a smile, peer to peer, and that was somehow unsettling from a fifteen-year-old. "Not that you asked me, Quantrill, but don't cut yourself off from humanity. We all need somebody, now and then."

  "To dump on?"

  "If you have to put it that way; yes."

  "Who do you have, Doc?"

  "I have the little fellows like the ones I gave you. Mostly so I can get enough sleep to keep going. And why am I telling you that," she laughed. Palma had good teeth.

  "You needed somebody to dump on." His humor was so mordant, so subdued she nearly missed it. This youngster already played the man too well; perhaps that was the trouble.

  "Fair enough," she said. "We take what we can get. See me when you feel better; right now I have to make a house call," she ended with a private cynicism and walked away quickly, dismayed at her prevision of a future full of children grown old too soon.

  Sandys jurnal Aug 25 Sun.

  We got a dr. here, she looked like she could use one herself. She stuck things in my dady. They made me go outside but I heard some and worked it out my ownself. I dont see how a plate could be so small you coud have them in your blood. Mistery!! But thats why my dady is sick but now its just a matter of time, my dady doesnt have many platelets left. I prayed God to take away the rest of the bad platelets to make my dady well again.

  The delta Santos-Dumont, hastily rescheduled to Sonora, brought vital personnel as well as supplies. Cathy Palma, sworn in as a Captain in the Preventive Medicine Division of the Army Medical Department, assumed her lessened duties with undisguised relief. Palma was on good terms with the civilian staff. Since the Army needed a smooth interface with the locals, the graying Palma found herself functioning as a one-woman clinical service. The crisis relocation center in the big Caverns of Sonora had its own clinic; the town itself was almost deserted.

  On Thursday she sought out young Quantrill and handed him a small polypaper bag. "I thought you might need this to keep your nose clean-or whatever," she said, grinning.

  He dutifully opened the bag, shook out the freshly-laundered square of bright cloth, and rewarded Palma with an open smile. "I give up, Doc; where'd you find it?" He was holding his scout neckerchief, with familiar snags now neatly mended.

  She told him of the local people who could not be persuaded to leave their own small underground lairs; of a man who had retreated to a cave like some wounded animal, and was unquestionably dying there; of the little blonde girl who had presented the doctor with a new treasure she had found near the Norway's crash site.

  Palma had instantly realized that a scout neckerchief from the Norway could only belong to one person. "You have to realize that the Grange family isn't the kind that takes charity, Ted. Little Sandy paid me for easing her father's pain in the only coin she had."

  "She had more," Quantrill guessed. "This was in my pack; I bet the little bugger found the whole thing. It's okay, Doc, she's welcome to it."

  This was Quantrill's first sign of interest in anything since their first meeting. Others could move cargo-and this youngster seemed determined to retreat into himself. He hadn't even approached the Santos-Dumont during her brief moorage. "Quantrill, I need a strong back and a driver, and with that gimpy leg you're the one we can spare the most," she spoke the half-lie gruffly. "I'm requisitioning you."

  "I don't drive worth a damn."

  "You will," she promised. That was the day Quantrill first left Aggie Station with Palma. At her insistence he wore a white lab coat; quickly mastered the four-wheel-drive van, more slowly became an asset in Palma's mercy rounds. There were advantages, she decided, in a strong youth who seemed unmoved by the sight of suffering.

  For the first few days Palma used her new assistant sparingly, leaving him in the depot area at times. Soon she was sending him alone on errands to towns like Eldorado, Junction, and Ozona in the filter-conditioned van. She noted without comment that he was picking up the local dialect. Perhaps it would soon be time to introduce him to people whose troubles were more immediate than his own. Sandys jurnal Sep. 2 Mon.

  Mom got new kemlamp. I got musquitefrom the drywash, we bill afire sinse my dady is always cold. He dont want us to touch him even to take him out in the sun. I bet I coud do it myself he doesnt way hardly any more than I do. When I kissed him tonite I thout why if my dady is so good does he smell so bad. His breth smells like his arms do, they have this watery stuff in the sores. His hair is coming out. He made me get a mirrer and he took a look.and said if he had a dog with a face like that hed shave its a-s and make it walk backwards ha ha. He says more d-ms and h-lls than I ever heard. Its alrite God, at least hes awake again. The emergency call from Salida Ranch came at one of the few times when Palma was near enough to make such a remote house call. Salida, a sheep ranch near the Llano River, was Quantrill's first experience at taking a four-wheeler over such rough terrain. By now he was nearly as adept as Palma at following the map display and found the faded clapboard house with its sheds, pens, and drunkenly-leaning barn a half-hour from the highway. Palma walked through old ruts to the house, Quantrill carrying her medical bag. A gaunt woman, her skin sun-creased like cured sharkskin, welcomed them with a gap-toothed smile. When Quantrill saw her husband, he wondered what she had to smile about; the man's lower leg was a gory mess.

  "You're lucky, Mr. Willard," Palma said as she cleaned the worst wound, a gash in the wiry leg that might have been made by a cleaver. "These tendons will repair themselves if you'll give them a chance. Where were you standing when the boar came at you?"

  "Standin' hell, I was ten feet up a mesquite," Willard said, his voice husky with exhaustion. "I knowed that devil was takin' my lambs
, I seen his tracks for a week now. But when I throwed down on him with the thirty-thirty he was in heavy brush. Gawd but he was big!"

  "I didn't know they ate sheep," Quantrill said.

  "I didn't know they clumb trees," said Willard, "but you can tell them peabrains at Aggie Station they've crossed a Russian boar with a sure-'nough squirrel." It had not been a sow, he insisted. " A boar with the devil's own corkscrew."

  Palma: "Did you get him?"

  Willard: "Well, I hit him. Then he rushed me. If he hadn't'a been so heavy that branch would'a held him, and I wouldn't'a been here now. Hon, show the doc what he done to my brush gun."

  Mrs. Willard produced an old lever-action carbine, holding it by the tip of its short barrel. Its stock was splintered and gouged, with bright scars in the blued metal of the receiver. And the rank odor suggested that the boar had anointed the gun.