Single Combat tq-2 Read online

  Young's Mormons would kill him with nutrition — and moved toward Salter as if by Brownian motion.

  Salter was saying to the craggy one, " — And she knows what rovers do, for better or worse; but all the same I'll feel better if you choose a rover who doesn't like to ham it up. Don't give the assignment to Ethridge, for example."

  "Ethridge isn't a ham," said the smaller one. "Grandstander, maybe; ham, no."

  "But you get the idea. The more laconic, the better — ah, Mr. Mills; salud," Salter finished, raising his glass with a manful attempt at good cheer.

  "Health it is," Mills agreed, eyeing his own glass as though undecided whether good health were worth such sacrifice. The men laughed, taking their cue from Salter.

  "Boren Mills, let me introduce two of my right arms; Seth Howell," he indicated the long-legged topheavy man with unruly brows, "and Jose Marti Cross," he went on, nodding at a man of Mills's own slight build.

  "Marty, Seth: Mr. Mills of IEE."

  Mills had intended more polite conversation, but found this Mutt and Jeff team intriguing. Both were training supervisors — chiefly, Salter explained, of the rovers. To Mills it was obvious that the President hadn't told Salter just how much Mills knew about the S & R operations. Obvious: but true? In some ways, Salter was an opposite number to Mills; they both performed crucial operations for the Lyin' of Zion. They even did favors for each other — but at Young's direction.

  Mills turned his attention to the supervisors. Most men preened for Mills, hoping to be remembered.

  These two seemed to care so little, they might have been members of some other species; Howell a middle-aging grizzly, Cross a graying weasel. To tempt them, Mills tossed out a small bait: "I'm always looking for good security men."

  Howell, his wispy tenor suggesting an old larynx injury, his hard eyes amused: "Folks're always mistaking us for the fallen-arch brigade," he said easily.

  Mills missed the connection for one beat, equated fallen arches with flat feet, and smiled. Seth Howell might look and sound like a brawler, thought Mills, but like a gosh-and-grits politician he could sandbag you. Or maybe break you like twigs in those huge paws.

  Cross, his faint sibilants and high cheekbones tagging him as part Amerind: "Our kids are more like anthro field men — and women, Mr. Mills. Remember those hobo jungle fires two years back? Our rovers saved S & R lots of grief by a little field work."

  Mills nodded. He knew rovers would have cover stories and wondered how much scrutiny they could stand. "Tell me about it."

  "Army-issue canned heat," Howell husked. "Poor buggers thought it was gel alcohol and tried to process it to drink. But GI stuff makes good incendiary bombs these days." His eyes refocused on someone just behind Mills. "Yes, Quantrill?"

  "When you have a minute," said a very young man with a faint southern accent.

  Mills turned, smiled, and held that smile while a vague memory of violent death thudded at his diaphragm.

  He'd seen this youth somewhere before in dangerous circumstances, but couldn't place him.

  Ted Quantrill's green gaze flickered in recognition, then returned to Howell's {ace. "Reporting for extra duty," he said, using their term for disciplinary action.

  Cross grinned, big wide-spaced teeth shining in his small dark face. "Let me guess, Quantrill: you spiked your fruit juice."

  Quantrill did not smile, but his tone was sadly whimsical. "Talking in ranks during inspection," he said.

  "I'd sooner believe it of the Sphinx," Howell joked, then pursed his mouth in thought. "Marty, seems to me that Quantrill has just volunteered for Salter's little tete-a-tete."

  "If he's all through talking," Cross said with a grunting laugh.

  Mills felt the conversation sifting around him, knew he was not supposed to understand it — and besides, the sturdy Quantrill made him uneasy. "If you gentlemen will excuse me," Mills said, lifted his glass again, and moved off to mull it over.

  From a distance, Mills studied the muscular young rover. Somewhere he had met Quantrill face to face.

  And the kid knew it. Eventually, watching Quantrill's stoic acceptance of some duty as Cross explained it. Mills shrugged away the problem and slid into the vortex around Blanton Young.

  Quantrill took it impassively. He was damned if he would tell Marty Cross and Seth Howell just how much he loathed interviews. It would only give them another key to the small punishments they could use against him. Then he excused himself and made a point of stopping several times, swapping greetings with regulars, on his way to Marbrye Sanger.

  She leaned against a partition of decorative 'dobe, which told Quantrill she'd laced her fruit juice with some local lightning. You drew penalties for slouching in dress blacks. "I've already seen the old village,"

  she was saying to one of the new regulars who hadn't yet given up on her.

  "No harm in offering," he said equably, nodding as Quantrill moved near. "If you don't mind my saying so, you could use the fresh air. What's in that drink, anyway," he went on. It was half curiosity, half rebuke.

  "Manna from hell," she grinned, smacking her lips.

  "Most regulars don't believe in hell," Quantrill said.

  "Show me a rover who doesn't," Sanger challenged, slurring it a bit as she turned toward Quantrill.

  "Hello, compadre."

  In the private lexicon of Quantrill and Sanger, compadre served for chum, lover, alter ego. Quantrill had kept the word as tribute to a friend in the business, Rafael Sabado; long since gone, long since avenged.

  Quantrill glanced at her drink, shrugged to the other man as if to say, 'what can you do? She's a rover.'

  "He's right about the fresh air," he said to Sanger. "Let's get about five minutes' worth of it."

  "Five minutes? Don't do me any big favors," she said, nodding to the disappointed regular as she strolled with Quantrill toward an exit. "And where the hell have you been?"

  "Drawing extra duty," he grumped. "That's why I've got only a few minutes. Gotta catch a monorail to the Alameda in town so I can give a goddamned interview." They passed outside, negotiating steps toward a scatter of trees near the parking area. Sanger stumbled once, caught his arm for support, spilled some of her drink. "You ought to dump that, compadre," he said gently.

  She cast it onto the ground. "Sure. My source has more." Her hands mimed a sign: Ethridge.

  "I thought so. I wish he'd drawn my duty tonight."

  "Maybe he will," she said, dripping saccharine sexuality.

  "Unfuck you," Quantrill parried. "I was thinking about the docudrama that was made when they were forming S & R. One of our people met Eve Simpson then; said she was fat as a pig, no matter how she looked on holo." It had been the ex-Iowa State gymnast, Kent Ethridge, who'd made that discovery.

  Ethridge was still a rover but had suffered too many disillusionments. Now he spent most of his leaves spaced out on pills and booze.

  "Rumor says Simpson's a washed-out druggie; that they use a double for her interviews," Sanger mused, then jerked around. "Is that who's going to, quote, interview you tonight? Doesn't sound like extra duty to me, compadre. Sounds like fun and games."

  "Reciting cover stories for a cooing sow? Some fun. Some games," he muttered, and drew a polymer poncho form his medikit. "Here; let's just sit and cool off for a minute."

  In the pale glow from distant fluorescents, Sanger's honey-tinted skin took on a deathly greenish cast. It reminded him that life was brief, and that they had little of it to call their own. And Control could always be listening. Their shoulders touching, he rested his forearms on his knees, stared out across the dark line of hills under a billion stars.

  He felt her hand slide into his lap, provocative, familiar; but shook his head. "What's the point," he said. "I don't have the time."

  "Or the urge," she said.

  He took her hand, placed his fingers in her palm, began a slow laborious manual conversation learned through moonless nights to deny Control their communion. "I could jus
t forget the interview."

  She signed back: "And find yourself packing chutes or overhauling choppers for a month at Dugway?"

  "Done it before," he replied. "Can almost fly damn' things myself, been on so many test hops."

  "You'd hate me every minute of it."

  "Not hate," his fingers insisted.

  She willed him to say more; not to say more; avoided this booby-trapped psychic territory by-signing, "If only Quinn had made it."

  "We don't know he didn't; only what Pelletier said," he signed.

  "We know you have to go," she said aloud, rising, offering her strong hands to pull him up. They took little risk in allowing Control to suspect momentary sexual alliances, but there were some things as verboten as genuine love affairs. One of those things was talk about Desmond Quinn, who'd refused to accept the Army's word that a mastoid critic could not be removed. Quinn had disappeared at the war's end rather than continue his assassin's work in the new guise as S & R rover.

  Max Pelletier, Quinn's closest ally, had backtracked Quinn months later. Apparently Quinn had found a Mexican surgeon willing to try removing the critic; a surgeon who had lost two fingers when the critic detonated during the operation, with poor determined Des Quinn the only fatality. Or so Pelletier had said.

  "See you when I see you," said Quantrill as they parted near the monorail terminal. "Take it easy. I mean easy," he repeated, miming a sip from a nonexistent glass.

  "Don't chide your elders, sonny," she said in false gaity, giving him a fanny-pat toward the approaching transit module. "And take a good deep breath before you submerge in all that blubber."

  Quantrill squeezed his eyes shut, wrinkled his nose at this deliberate gross-out from Sanger's lovely lips.

  Taking the steps to the platform three at a time, he called, "You've turned words into a martial art; you know that?"

  "Don't let it put you on the mat," she called back, made cheerful by their brief moment together, hands on hips, her head thrown back to let the chestnut hair fall free.

  He fought down a nearly overwhelming impulse to return to her side, but imagined that Sanger would have considered it weakness.

  CHAPTER 12

  Eve Simpson, alone in her suite, cancelled her outgoing video before answering the phone. What she saw incoming pleased her immensely. "Ted Quantrill, ma'am; Search & Rescue." You couldn't tell a lot from a room video but he looked like a hunky morsel. Unconsciously she moistened her lips with her tongue.

  "Of course," she said; cordial, not too cordial. "Come right up. I'll leave the door unlocked, Mr. Quantrill, I'm — doing a few things," she ended vaguely, and punched off.

  Chiefly she was doing one thing: sloshing lobotol in the bottoms of the crystal goblets she had brought, except for the one she would use herself. Faceted crystal didn't reveal trace coatings as a clear glass might.

  When the young rover arrived with a diffident tap on the door, Eve was carefully arranged on a couch amid pillows and a satin coverlet. She saw his bemused glance at her camouflage and did not give a damn. She was used to it. "I'm a little dizzy after all that rich food, Mr. Quantrill," she temporized.

  "Forgive me for taking my ease this way."

  "Oh. You were at the awards banquet?"

  "I was there," she agreed, her eyes approving their scan of this splendidly uniformed creature, then abruptly shifting ground. She waved a languid hand toward the inert holocam rig nearby. "I hope these things don't make you nervous."

  His headshake was too quick. "We get used to 'em.",

  "Confidentially, I never do," she lied. "That's why I bring fortifications with me." She raised her goblet and grinned wickedly. Sipped. "There's fruit juice at the bar — and more of this naughty champagne if you'd care to join me. Please," she said it prettily.

  Quantrill chose apple juice, a goblet, and the chair near her couch. His choice of liquids didn't matter, she thought; her gratification lay in the lobotol.

  And she was half right, though it was disappointment and not gratification she had assured with the drug.

  One of the regular additives to the diet of S & R members was anaquery, a substance that migrated to the brain without obvious effects — unless certain physicochemical changes occurred in that brain.

  Whether by hypnotic concentration or drugs, minute chemical changes accompanied the blocking of volition and judgment. It was those changes that triggered anaquery, with results that appalled Eve in due time. Anaquery prevented any agency, including S & R, from digging into a rover's mind. It was a small sacrifice, in Salter's judgment, for the added security. After all, you didn't have to care about the guillotine's internal stresses so long as it sliced unerringly.

  "I get the feeling I've seen you on holo before," she said to prompt him. Lobotol did its erosive work slowly.

  "Maybe in a group," he said, eyeing the holocam.

  "No. By yourself — a long time ago. Um — talking with Juliet Bixby?" Eve managed to hide her loathing of Bixby, her svelte opponent on another network.

  "Quite a memory, Ms. Simpson; I'd almost forgotten. I was on the delta airship Norway early in the war.

  We got waylaid by a renegade bunch but — we got away," he finished lamely.

  Her eyes grew round. "You started a fire or something, I remember now. You saved the Norway and were wounded. You were wearing a thigh crutch, weren't you?"

  "Took a round in the leg." He did not add that he had seen his first lover shot dead by renegade sentries and had made his first kills that night. It had all been a long time ago. Long enough, almost, to forget.

  "Care to show us the scar?"

  "Not particularly." Again a glance at the holocam. The lobotol was taking its own sweet time.

  "The camera's not on," Eve murmured. "We're just getting acquainted, you and I. May I call you 'Ted'?

  And by all means, my name is Eve. Tell me, Ted; do you have any special lady? Or maybe a hotsy 'in every port'."

  "I'm a rover, not a sailor, Ms. — Eve. But no; no one special."

  "Surely a young man in his prime," she smirked, "enjoys a woman now and then. Do you like a strong full-bodied woman, Ted?"

  Those piercing green eyes were slightly unfocused now as he took another sip of apple juice. "Sure I like'em," he smiled uncertainly.

  "Take another little sippie, Ted." She watched him do it, his motions less assured, his breathing now shallower. Got him! Softly, cooingly, with sexuality dripping from each word: "You know, primitive societies didn't care much for the slender-assed fragile little hotsies you see on the holo, Ted. We know, because they made effigies of their sex goddesses. Nice luscious great tits, round soft lovely ass, lots of woman to screw and screw and screw." She undulated slowly under the satin. "You look primitive to me, Ted Quantrill."

  He just sat there, blinking, his respiration rapid and shallow as he watched her peel the satin away.

  Beneath it he saw her enormous breasts resting comfortably against a billowing ledge of fat. "May I show you what a sex goddess really looks like," she teased, pausing in her routine. Her legs, below the coverlet, were separate mounds spread for coming attractions.

  He blinked. Swallowed. "I need to find the bathroom, Eve."

  "To relieve your tummy or your tensions, lover? Maybe Eve can help. How would you like—

  She never got to describe it. Quantrill lurched up from the chair, but Eve caught at his trouserleg. He fell against her, shaking like a malaria victim, and vomited once, twice, squarely between her breasts, before she could get her great girth underway.

  With a squall of revulsion Eve rolled aside, squirmed to her knees while trying to avoid the line of fire from Quantrill's much-used barbecue. She saw the finely corded muscles of his throat grow taut, another spasm building in his belly and working its way up his torso, and then she was reeling toward the bath.

  The rover fell on his face as she slammed the door. She could hear him retching, gasping, as she turned the needle-shower on full force. If the little bastard
suffocated in his own gorp it would be good enough for him.

  Eve soaped herself furiously as she cursed and lathered, lathered and cursed. Eve was convinced that she had simply moved faster than the laggard lobotol; that the sight of her naked body had prompted this ultimate rejection from a man. Eve was not often embarrassed, and all her half-acre of skin blushed under the needlespray.

  Reject her, would he? The scrumptious little hick would be sorry for this. She felt like rushing back into the boudoir to stamp out his life, and in mounting frustration Eve flung open the door.

  Quantrill lay in his filth, repeatedly pushing himself up on trembling arms only to fall again, his limbs twitching in a way to make Eve suspect a seizure. To someone or no one he was grunting 'mayday', over and over.

  She could not go near him, could not even stand his smell. She slammed the door; found that she liked the fury of it; slammed it again, and again, bellowing her rage and vindictiveness. She was still screaming when the hotel staff arrived.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sean Lasser had grown too old for active training operations, but he knew far too much about S & R to be turned out to pasture. It was Lasser, alone among rover instructors, who drew the gentle chores.

  "No question about it," Lasser muttered as he studied the printout of Quantrill's vital signs; "you took a fair-sized dose of some narcohypnotic, to judge from your condition when they brought you here last night. Anything from PZ to lobotol could have done it. We're assuming it wasn't an injection." Lasser tapped his front teeth with a thumbnail, usually a sign that he was brainstorming. "Did you sit down to watch the holo? God knows you're not a likely subject, but some people can be put under by the right holo presentation. Had you been drinking anything alcoholic?"