Single Combat tq-2 Read online

  Another lurch. Grenier let the autoleveller have its head, watching the coleopter shrouds at the wingtips jitter as they sought to obey the gyros. "Still with me, Quantrill?"

  "If you really crave my lunch, bub, I'll come forward and flop it over your shoulder," was the reply, with a Carolina drawl in it.

  "We're nearly out of it," Grenier promised. "That's Powder River Pass just below. I'll swing past Hazelton Peak and throttle back at the DZ. If it'd been up to me, we'd have come over the top." It was as near as Miles Grenier would come to complaining about a flight plot.

  "You pays your money and you takes Hobson's choice," Quantrill said. "Maybe CenCom knows what he's doing; quien sabe?" in the S & R chain of command, the synthesized male voice of the central computer surrogated the President himself; could countermand an S & R instructor or even the Executive Administrator, Lon Salter. S & R regulars did not even joke about CenCom's omniscience, and felt discomfort when a rover did it.

  Miles Grenier could not know that rovers obeyed a second, vaguely female, voice they called Control.

  To Control, rovers showed a more rock-bound obedience than a regular ever could; a surly obedience residing in a bit of chemical explosive that Control alone could detonate within the rover's skull. If Control was listening, whatthehell: she knew how complete was the rover's subordination.

  CHAPTER 5

  The sprint chopper, its dull radar-absorbent black surface set off with distinctive yellow S & R sunflower emblems, throttled back behind a grassy knoll and maintained a three-hundred meter altitude as a bulky object fell from its belly hatch. Quantrill, his descent controlled by a handheld frictioner on the thin cable, grimaced as the harness connectors pulled against the epaulets of his mission coverall. Now he was no longer falling, but hurtling over uneven ground twenty meters above high grass with God knew what footing beneath. "Once around the park, Grenier," he said into his helmet.

  The 'once' was a joke; it took several tight circles for Quantrill's mass, pulling a tight curve into the cable, to stabilize over a precise point on the ground. Many years earlier the trick had been discovered by a missionary whose small aircraft, with a bucket winched on a rope, could maintain a circular bank with the bucket nearly motionless at the center. The missionary had supplied friends in a South American jungle clearing too small for a landing. A sprint chopper could land and take off vertically, of course; but any casual eye could see that landing and might draw sensible conclusions.

  Quantrill's drop from the hatch to treetop height had taken only seconds. Several tight spirals by Grenier brought them near enough to a stale position that Quantrill could ease off the cable tensioner and hit the quick-release when his feet neared the rank grass that invaded from nearby prairies. A landing would have taken a little more time. From experience, S & R instructors knew that most casual witnesses at a drop zone only recalled seeing a sprint chopper banking in tight circles for a few moments before it accelerated away from the DZ with the droning whirr peculiar to shrouded props.

  Quantrill was not concerned with casual witnesses. He dropped into knee-high grass, rolled, lay prone.

  "I'm down and green, Grenier," he muttered into his helmet mike in their 'green for go, red for no-go' jargon. "Hit it."

  Grenier hit it. The cable's whine dopplered away behind the little craft which spurted off at full boost; and nothing but a rocket accelerated faster than a light polymer aircraft pulled by big props.

  Quantrill lay quietly for a time, using his helmet sensors to test for the sounds of other humans. But the afternoon sun was hot, and the dry up-country breeze did not venture below the grass tops, and he heard nothing of interest. Quantrill quickly doffed his helmet, pressed its detent, let the visor and occipital segment slide into their nested positions. He stowed it, a greatly diminished volume no greater than a medium slice of watermelon rind, in the curve of his backpac that cupped near his left armpit. His right armpit was already occupied by a seven mm. chiller carrying explosive slugs in its magazine.

  The nice things about a chiller were numerous. While it had only a small suppressor instead of a bulky silencer, it did not say BLAM! It said cough* cough*cough, and would say it twenty-four times, as quickly and delicately as a tubercular butterfly. Its gas deflectors kept recoil almost at a null category, so that you could aim it and keep it aimed. It was small enough, with few enough projections, for a breakaway holster. And thanks to the cold-gas plenum in each cartridge, there was exactly enough endothermic blowdown to match the ferocious heat release of the powder charge that consumed the cartridge case.

  It was the so-called caseless cartridge, with no telltale spent rounds nor even a muzzle flash from the dual-propellant system, that made this side-arm practical. The exhaust gases were not literally chill; the chiller's name sprang from its lethal efficiency. A chiller's only limitation, went a rover joke, was that it couldn't hide the body.

  Somewhere upwind was a reef of sage; below the twice-broken bridge of his nose, nostrils flared briefly in welcome. The sky was hard and laser-bright, with fluffball clouds herding obedient shadows beneath them — what the old hands called 'solly sombry' in bastardized Spanish. It would have been a good day for lazing, and Quantrill always felt a dangerous rush of kinship when he saw someone pause to savor the gifts old Earth lavished.

  But it was a good day for killing, too. Now out of Grenier's sight, he dialed his coverall chameleon stud, watched incuriously as the mottled fabric became grassy green, the sunflower patch fading quickly.

  Outwardly now, Quantrill was anonymous. He checked his microwave compass, tuned by an orbiting SARSAT, and shuffled into a dogtrot toward high ground a klick southward. From there, he might spot the North Fork of the Powder, where his quarry had camped for some of the languid hatchery trout stocked there. As he always did, Quantrill found some hook of justification on which to hang his deadly purpose; any man who preyed on tame hatchery trout, he told himself, needed a bit of killing.

  Side hammer in thumbrest contains print recognition plate. Muffled, not truly silenced. Antirecoil practical because exhaust is cool. The chiller's effectiveness comes from the round w/consumable case that adds to propellant; so gas plenum takes up more than half of case length. No ejector needed. Long rounds angled in clip.

  If print recog. program set, trigger-pull by anyone unrecognized punctures only cold-gas plenum which forces trigger forward to lock finger with enough force to break it & hold it. Round doesn't fire since hollow needle punctures plenum & drains gas into trigger piston. S & R people have been known to test strangers by making Chiller 'available'.

  Quantrill did not care that Ralph Gilson, paunchy and fortyish, had waxed fatter smuggling unscrambler modules through his holovision dealership; was selling them for the express purpose of bringing Mexican — hence sometimes Catholic — holocasts to Americans. For that matter, Quantrill would not have cared if Gilson's crime had been spitting on a sidewalk or bagging a President.

  A rover's day-to-day survival required strict compartmenting of one's concerns. Empathy, altruism, patriotism; all were casualties of the job. Quantrill's secret fear — shared by other rovers, though none admitted it — lay in those moments when pity or tenderness threatened to soften the tempered cutting edge of his killing skills.

  So Ted Quantrill did not think about his previous night with Marbrye Sanger while he rested, scanning the North Fork that sparkled below his vantage point. He could not allow vagrant memories of his parents and sister, long dead; of little Sandy Grange, tracked and presumably eaten by an enormous feral Russian boar in the Texas Wild Country; of smiling Bernie Grey, cargomaster of the delta dirigible Norway, blown to fragments by a Sinolnd fighter-bomber. It was safe to remember the dead, but not to mourn them. Memories of the dead could hone his appetite for revenge. He'd even returned to Wild Country early in 1998 to destroy the legendary boar, Ba'al, but hadn't cut its trail in a month of dogged search near Sonora, Texas. Ralph Gilson's trail was a simpler matter.

  Q
uantrill spotted the wisp of smoke from smoldering campfire two klicks upstream. Gilson had a guide who might be with his client or lounging in camp, and Quantrill wanted Gilson alone. The young rover kept well above the stream, moving slowly, studying streambanks for sight of his quarry while he worked his way toward the campsite.

  Once he spooked a brace of pronghorn; cursed as they bounded on sinew catapults to safer open country, because a pronghorn could give you away by keeping you in sight. When a pronghorn moves warily off, the predator is generally within three hundred meters. Quantrill gave them extra room, moved in sight of the camp, lay prone and studied the setup.

  The two-man tent, twenty meters from the water, was too opaque to show movement within, but the place seemed deserted. A stainless coffeepot steamed among coals, leaning slightly, and this gave Quantrill an idea. The distance was a hundred meters; he took the chiller from its nest, removed the magazine of explosive rounds, replaced it with a spare magazine loaded with high-penetration jacketed ball ammo. It would sing faintly, but could be mistaken for a deerfly.

  Quantrill jacked a round in, steadied the chiller with both hands while prone, elevated the ramp-sight. He had no need to steady his nerves; his rare mastery of adrenal response had been one of the Army's reasons for handing him a hunter's role in the first place.

  The chiller grunted once. A hundred meters away, a puff of ash moved lazily from the firepit; otherwise, nothing. Quantrill waited a moment, considering the movement of the ash, and tried a hand's span of windage. Another round: charred wood jumped under the coffeepot, which toppled over, hidden momentarily in its huffing cloud of steam and ash.

  "Ahh, shit," emerged from the tent, followed by a lean bronze-faced man wearing skullcap and jeans, naked to the waist. Quantrill changed magazines by rote, watching the guide snatch at the coffeepot.

  The man said nothing more, did not gesture to the tent, but stolidly inspected the pot before beginning to clean and refill it. The man betrayed no irritation, no sign that might subtly suggest the presence of another person. Quantrill reseated his sidearm. He had decided that his quarry must have fished downstream, a tenderfoot ploy since it was easier to return downstream than upstream after a tiring afternoon in the sun.

  Finally the guide squatted to replenish his fire, his back to Quantrill who began to slither backward, still intent on watching the campsite, until he passed behind a lichen-spotted boulder that jutted from the grass.

  "Fella," a gruff voice said from behind him, "you better have a good explan—", as Quantrill whirled onto his back.

  Among a million humans, the gene pool may provide a few specimens with responses so blindingly fast they do not even dip near the norm. Ted Quantrill's synaptic speed and the output of his adrenal medulla made him one in a hundred million. Army Intelligence medics had tested Quantrill from hell to breakfast in 1996, found him one of those rarities posited by the early stress researcher, Lazarus. The admixture of adrenaline and noradrenaline that coursed through Quantrill's body during stressful moments did not provoke tremors, confusion, or panic; and so his response could be both fast and unerring.

  Ted Quantrill's systemic response was as smooth and purposeful as a rattler's strike — and according to psychomotor tests, slightly faster. A recruiter, one Rafael Sabado, had recognized Quantrill's natural gifts while training the young recruit in unarmed combat; had then passed him on to T Section for the training in single combat which, eventually, coerced Quantrill into S & R. In the Twentieth cent, such men had been racing drivers, circus aer ialists, stuntmen. In the Nineteenth, they had been gunslingers. Now in the Twenty-first cent, it was gunsel time again.

  Quantrill recognized the stubble-faced angler and flicked the chiller from his armpit. Gilson's challenge had taken almost three seconds. In less than that time, Quantrill judged that they were hidden from the campsite, made positive recognition, and squeezed the chiller's buttplate to jack a round into place.

  The chiller coughed its apology, the HE slug's tiny azide charge muffled inside Gilson's ribcage. The man was holding three trout in his left hand, a wrist-thick hunk of brushwood threateningly in his right. He grimaced, shoved backward by the impact, mouth open as if to shout. Then he fell forward, still gripping weapon and fish.

  Quantrill did not linger to study the effects of his shot; an HE's muffled 'pop' at ten-meter range was a lethal statement. He rolled to the boulder's edge instead, peering through grass toward the camp. The guide had turned; stood up slowly, scanned downstream, then swept his gaze past Quantrill's boulder and on upstream.

  Quantrill pursed his mouth in irritation. Only once had he found it necessary to bag a guilty bystander, rover parlance for anyone who knew he had witnessed homicide by an S & R rover. Beyond the punishment meted out by Control for that gaffe, Quantrill's own brutalized, manipulated sense of fair play had punished him more. He willed the damn' guide to decide- he'd heard nothing of importance, to squat again at the firepit — and finally, with a single shake of his head, the man did so.

  Quantrill reseated his chiller, wriggled backward several paces, then began the feverish process of enclosing a fattish adult male in a polymer bodybag.

  The bag was dull green outside, dull tan inside, and he chose the green face outward as camouflage.

  From a half-klick, he might be spotted as a man toting something heavy — perhaps a butchered-out antelope. He zipped the bag shut, perspiring now, risking a quick scan that rewarded him with the sight of the guide who was heading downstream in search of his missing client.

  For a two-hundred-meter span downstream, Quantrill judged, the guide's path would bring him in sight of the bodybag — if he knew where to look. Quantrill hauled the bag toward the boulder, cursing his heelmarks. He felt justified in his caution when, before disappearing downstream, the guide stood atop a treetrunk which the annual spring runoff had abandoned.

  The man seemed to stare directly at Quantrill for a moment, but even in the high clean air of Wyoming it is impossible to distinguish a squinting green eye and a patch of medium-blond hair from three hundred meters. Unless they moved.

  The rover knew better than that. If his own incompetence led to a second death then and only then, in Quantrill's beleaguered value system, was the rover guilty of manslaughter. He had argued it out with Sanger, twice upon times, using their old T-Section short-hand sign talk. This manual conversation avoided any monitoring by Control through their mastoid critics. Control, and their cadre of hard-bitten instructors, came down hard on rovers who were disposed to argue ethics. The survival ethic, they said, had been proven paramount in a billion years of evolution — and S & R wanted acceptance, not argument.

  Waiting for the guide to disappear, Quantrill looked about him for Gilson's flyrod, presumably dropped in the grass. Then he gave it up. If he couldn't find the thing, neither would a search party. He burrowed under the bag, came to one knee, then lurched off with ninety kilos of dead weight in a fireman's carry.

  He did not slow his pace until, sweat-sodden and breathless in the thin air, he had lugged his quarry nearly a kilometer from the stream.

  Quantrill could have told Control of his progress then and there, via his critic and the relay stations at Mayoworth or Hazelton Peak. Some rovers seemed pathetically eager to keep Control advised of every step, like anxious children placating a stern, unknowable parent. Quantrill had found Control too free with pointless instructions and rarely initiated contact until his mission was complete. If he had any faith in the corporate state he served, it was faith that he would not be expended so long as his usefulness exceeded the rover average. His faith was not misplaced.

  For all his physical gifts, Quantrill was not particularly quick in adjusting to the thin air of northern Wyoming. Control's human and electronic modules had juggled many variables; decided that S & R's youngest rover boasted a better success rate in rough country than anyone but the S & R instructors, Seth Howell and Marty Cross; and arranged for Quantrill to spend five days in a wildernes
s-area seminar before this’ surveillance' mission. The S & R regulars, almost all of staunch Mormon stock, were an altruistic friendly lot; but they'd been taught to let rovers rove without asking for details. Quantrill had left the seminar, and with luck might return to it, without a ripple in their routines.

  At length, the rover felt rested enough to resume his carry and chose the route with the most cover, avoiding the few animal paths he struck. The main thing was to get well beyond the radius of any reasonable search by Gilson's guide, as quickly as possible. The guide probably would not succeed in bringing in a search party until after midnight — an S & R team of regulars, like as not — and no one knew better how to avoid a search pattern than a trained searcher. Long before that, the bodybag and its contents would be under a meter of earth, the bag's pheromones repellent to carrion-eaters. Quantrill put another klick behind him before awaiting dusk under a ledge, and learned then what had been poking into his shoulder. Gilson had been a meticulous man: his flyrod, in five short sections, lay ranked in tubular pockets along his trouser leg.

  "One day," Quantrill said to the bodybag, "I'll be able to afford a packrod like this." He was not even remotely tempted to steal the rod while studying Gilson's wallet with gloved fingers. Expensive equipment was often marked with tiny dipoles, and getting caught with a missing man's toys was an error too stupid for serious consideration. Gilson had lived and died in a political clime that favored the already-favored, and equated price with value. Gilson's property was better protected than his life.