Dean Ing - Single Combat

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PART 1: SEARCH & RESCUE
CHAPTER 1
The reverend Ora McCarty faced the wall in the most sacrosanct office of International Entertainment
and Electronics and watched a holo image of himself sing an old inspirational: 'Rocky Mountain High'. It
had aired—or so McCarty believed—during his Sunday morning program. From the corner of his eye
McCarty could see the expression on the face of IEE Chairman Boren Mills. It was, in Ora McCarty's
jargon, nervous-makin'.
The holovised McCarty strummed a last chord on a sequined guitar, held the last note, then winked from
existence as Mills keyed his hand-terminal. "Hey, you cut off my finish," McCarty said affably.
"Call me a music-lover," Boren Mills replied in soft derision. "But don't tell me you didn't know that song
is on the prohibited list."
McCarty turned to face the smaller Mills. "Aw, that's for Mormons! That song don't tempt people to
take drugs, no matter what they think in Salt Lake—"
"Do I have to remind you who subsidizes your gentile services?" Boren Mills snapped, his bright dark
eyes flashing under heavy brows. "If the church is liberal enough to support a mildly heretical preacher,
the least you can do is exercise judgment with your material."
"Censor myself, you mean," McCarty grumbled. "Seems to me, you LDS folks—"
"Correction! I'm a Congregationalist, Ora. Never, ever, link me with the Latter-Day Saints."
"Well…" McCarty's half-smile suggested that he was buying a polite fiction, "… those LDS folks are
happy with my mission just so long as it's mainly country-western entertainment that don't take issue with
anything they want said."
"Entertainment is my middle name," said Mills with deliberate symbolism. IEE's middle name was
'entertainment', and whatever board members twice his age might prefer, thirtyish Boren Mills was IEE.
"Entertainment's what I gave my holo audience," McCarty nodded.
"Not with 'Rocky Mountain High," Mills rejoined, the receding vee of his widow's peak moving
side-to-side in negation. "Your monitor has his orders. Since my last name is 'Electronics', what your holo
audience got was 'In The Fourth Year of Zion'."
"The hell they did."
"The hell they didn't," Mills replied easily.
"I don't even know that piece," McCarty insisted, then formed a silent 'oh' of sudden enlightenment. Ora
McCarty was still essentially a twentieth-century man in 2002 AD, coping with the technology of
war-ravaged, Streamlined America. At times that coping was slow, and sullen. "You faked me."
"Regenerated you," Mills shrugged the implied correction. "Don't worry; thanks to us you never looked
better or sounded half so good. Want to see what you really sang?" The Mills hand, small and exquisitely
manicured, held the wireless terminal, thumb poised.
McCarty shook his head quickly, both hands up in dismay. "Now that's an abomination, Mr. Mills. And
what's worse it makes me break a sweat to see a me that isn't me." To stress his rejection, McCarty
turned his back on the holo wall and faced rooftops of Ogden, Utah outside the smoke-tinted glass
panel. The giddy height of the IEE tower yielded a unique view; no other commercial structure in Ogden
was permitted such an imposing skyward reach. McCarty supposed it had something to do with the
microwave translators built into the temple-like spire. Even in architecture, IEE suggested its sympathy
with the reigning Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Now that a Mormon administration
directed the rebuilding of an America whittled down by ravages of the Sinolnd War, McCarty could
condone such corporate cozening as good conservative business practice. He let his eyes roam past the
city to salt flats shimmering in late spring heat, to the tepid Great Salt Lake beyond, so impossibly blue in
the sun as to seem artificial.
As artificial, for instance, as his rendition of a song he'd never sung, or as his effectiveness as a man of
God, when image-generating modules could replace him right down to the wrinkles in his shirt. Squinting
against a glint of sunlight from the too-blue lake: "I wonder when they'll start fakin' the news," McCarty
said.
"Oh,—I suppose someone will try it sooner or later," said Mills, but McCarty did not notice the subtle
twitch that passed for a smile. "You can't imagine how much it cost FBN to regenerate your little ditty." It
was, of course, very cheap. "If it happens again, you'll pay the tab. Try to curb your paranoid fantasies,
Ora; as long as we maintain control of FBN Holovision, we won't often squander big money regenerating
events."
Not once did Mills lie outright; as usual, his lies were chiefly implicit.
Reluctantly, McCarty faced Mills. "I guess the world isn't as simple as I'd like," he sighed, fashioning a
shrug that ingratiated him to audiences; awkward, gangling, suggestive of a reticent mind in the big
rawboned body. "I appreciate your takin' your own time on this, Mr. Mills. A lot of men wouldn't
bother."
"A lot of men don't succeed," Mills replied evenly, with a light touch at McCarty's elbow, steering him to
the door. Boren Mills was one of those compact models that did not seem diminished when standing
among taller men. With a forefinger he indicated the needlepoint legend framed behind his rosewood
desk: SURPRISE IS A DIRTY WORD. "See that your programming people check your scripts from
now on. We can do without any more surprises on the Ora McCarty Devotional Hour."
"That goes without saying," McCarty murmured.
"Nothing goes without saying," Mills replied. "That's the essence of written contracts. Read the prohibited
list, Ora."
Damn the man, thought McCarty, and tried to respond lightly as he stood in the doorway: "You've
made me a believer, Mr. Mills. If I lost network support by stickin' a burr under the LDS's saddle
blanket, I'd wind up so far out in the sticks you couldn't find me with a Search & Rescue team."
"Nicely put," Mills grinned, and terminated the interview. Mills was still chuckling to himself as he
returned to his desk, knowing that McCarty could not fully appreciate his own jest. If the
federally-funded Search & Rescue ever did seek the reverend Ora McCarty, McCarty would not
survive that search.
CHAPTER 2
Ted Quantrill was not yet twenty-one, Marbrye Sanger was twenty-four; and their entwined communion
was as old as humankind. Their Search & Rescue uniforms lay near, boot-tips aligned with unconscious
military precision. Had the lovers stood erect there would not have been a centimeter's difference in their
heights, for the long taper of her questing fingers was repeated in the span of her arms, the extraordinary
length of her legs. Yet many men would have been reluctant, viewing her naked splendor, to seek her
embrace. Those long limbs revealed the muscles of an athlete, the physical equal of the youth who shared
her delight. Only in the upper body could his sinew overmatch hers.
Presently she smiled for him, her eyes heavy-lidded through an errant lock of chestnut hair, and arched
against him as she felt his thrusts quicken. At his faint moan she pressed a forefinger against his open
mouth, now grinning, teasing him, then reaching down with her other hand to milk his masculinity. At the
same moment she made her eyes wide, her mouth a tiny V of innocence, brows elevated as if to ask,
'who, me'?
Gritting his teeth, laughing softly through the pulses of his own climax, he nodded back a silent, 'yes you'.
You, you and I, we together. They lay, mouths open to silence their breathing, her roan-flecked eyes
interlocked with the startling green of his own.
Then he rolled slightly to one side, brought his right hand up, said in sign-talk: "I died. You?"
She would not lie to him about the little things. Signing in the bastard dialect they had learned while still in
Army Intelligence: No. Doesn't matter. Love to watch you."
It was the only use either of them dared make of the heart-touch gesture, love. Each of
them—mistakenly—assumed the other would recoil from overt words of tenderness.
"I'm only a sex object," he signed in mock dejection.
"A killing object. You died, remember?" Then she thought of something else; bit her lower lip.
"Problem," he signed. Not a question, but his eyes probed.
She nodded. Carefully, she placed a strong hand against his breast, rolled to one side, breathed in the
conifer-spiced evening air of northern Wyoming highlands. Signing: "My last hit. They always promised
we'd never get a mission against someone we know."
"So?"
"I knew her—second-hand."
There was really nothing he could do about it but: "Sorry," he signed.
Momentarily then she wanted him to feel the full impact, and spelled it out for him. "Dr. Catherine
Palma."
Quantrill froze. He had known the woman well, a stolid, fiftyish medic who'd risked lingering death in the
fight against Chinese plague during the war. Palma, a mother-figure for him before his enlistment at age
fifteen. He'd mentioned Palma to Sanger on many occasions, always silently by necessity. The late
Palma? In a soundless agony he balled his fists, rolled onto his back, eyes closed.
Sanger placed her hand on his breast as if to smooth away the tendons that stood out, fanning inward and
up from pectorals to throat. Then she coughed, a demand for attention.
When he opened his eyes again she was smiling, almost in apology. "/ suspect she was on guard," said
the lithe fingers. "Rebel medic now; couldn't find her." About the big things, she had to lie.
"Bitch. Could've told me an easier way."
"Sorry; honestly," she signed in shame.
Suddenly suspicious, he squinted as his hands said, "Really couldn't find her? Or wouldn't?"
"Think I want to die? Tried my best," she lied again.
His exhalation lasted at least five seconds. "I believe you."
Now she was up on one elbow, frantic with the notion that he might not believe her. They were both
professionals; it was his duty to report suspicions, even such a one as this. Perhaps she could phrase it in
a way to compel belief. "Listen hotsy; better believe me. If you ever deliberately funk a mission,
make sure you tell me first."
"Why?"
"Because I want you to get it from friendly fire," said graceful hands that could kill him as easily as
caress him.
CHAPTER 3
Search & Rescue was both highly publicized and saturated in secrecy. Boren Mills was one of a dozen
outside S & R ranks who knew its double purpose. At war's end in 1998 America's great Mormon
president, Yale Collier, had envisioned a regular cadre of young civilians who would operate directly
under executive orders, and who would be superbly trained to rescue citizens in mortal trouble. Freeway
overpasses, weakened years before by nuclear blasts, still occasionally collapsed without warning—as
did buildings, dams, and underground structures. Along the eastern border of Streamlined America,
hotspots of paranthrax sometimes appeared, usually borne by some illegal immigrant from the
Confederation East of the Mississippi River. Along the vaguely-defined southern border region called
Wild Country, ranchers from Texas to the San Joaquin valley appealed for help against a variety of
deadly problems.
To the North, Canada now controlled what had once been most of the northern U. S. until the
keratophagic staph plague scare during the great war; and along that border, the problems were less
obvious.
Collier had become infused with a dream that Streamlined America, under the Mormon stewardship of
his administration and those groomed to follow, would be rebuilt into the true Zion. But
Yale Collier had been infused with cancer, too. He lived long enough to see his Search & Rescue teams
become a symbol of young American altruism and audacity, and he entrusted the development of S & R
to his successor, Blanton Young. Collier was spared any suspicion that Young might have his own ideas
about the uses to which a small cadre of daredevils might be put.
Shortly after the death of Yale Collier in 1999, President Young exercised some executive options.
Search & Rescue's three hundred regulars already had Loring Aircraft's sleekest new close-support
sprint choppers, with the shrouded fans swiveling on stubby wingtips to provide both helicopter modes
and level flight in excess of six hundred kph—and the hell with fuel consumption.
They already got the best training: paramedic skills, alpine and desert survival courses, flood and mine
disaster seminars. Their equipment was already the latest, including dress and mission uniforms familiar to
millions who saw holovised rescues to the greater glory of Blanton Young and his Federalist party.
What S & R did not initially have,—what the sainted Collier had not wanted it to have, as an arm
reporting only to the Chief Executive—was a covert military charter. Blanton Young wasted no time in
swelling the S & R ranks with another select group which had been attached to Army Intelligence during
the war. The group had been known to its members as T Section; T, as in 'terminate'.
Survivors of T Section were almost all wary youthful specimens to whom the quick covert kill was
paramount, and these few became S & R's rovers. Regulars gave each other nicknames. Rovers did not
answer to nicknames, scorning even the small luxury of feeling damned together. Quantrill was only
Quantrill; Sanger only Sanger.
Blanton Young did not regard himself as a heretic. He took great pains to show that one could remain on
the church's Council of Apostles while serving as the nation's chief executive. America was recovering;
and as always during a reconstruction period, the government relaxed its restrictions on business and
industry. And individual freedoms? That was something else again.
An industrial spy, a union organizer, or an anti-Mormon activist was more likely to disappear than to face
public trial. The President viewed his S & R cadre as a nicely-balanced tool. Regular missions, eighty per
cent of the total, searched out the vulnerable and rescued individuals. The rover missions searched out
dissidents and rescued the status quo. So far, Young's hit team was barely a rumor even among
grumbling Catholics and members of masonic orders. Certainly the regular S & R members would not
broach the secret because they did not share it. Just as certainly the assassins would not divulge it; each
of them still carried small mastoid-implant transceivers, 'critics', with self-destruct charges that could drive
a gram of debris into the brain with the same results as an explosive bullet.
The critic had been a wartime innovation and, working with Naval Intelligence, Boren Mills was as quick
as Young to see the potential peacetime uses of this tiny, deadly audio monitor buried behind the ears of
agents thoroughly trained in single combat. If government and business found common cause, they could
also share common remedies. When both could fly the banners of a popular religious movement, a
certain amount of excess could be made palatable to the public.
This was not to say that most Mormons, guided by their Council of Apostles, sought a repressive society.
In a genuine ecumenical spirit, LDS tithes helped defray the costs of some protestant sects and promoted
open forums for debate. The church had even donated campaign contributions to some fence-straddling
legislators of the Independent party, though Indys were similar to Democrats of the prewar era, many of
them openly critical of this growing connection between the state and the church of the LDS.
It was not the fault of devout Mormons if open debate helped pinpoint certain rabble-rousers who might,
if they proved both troublesome and refractory, simply disappear while crossing the path of an S & R
rover.
CHAPTER 4
Quantrill felt the sprint chopper lurch in treacherous downdrafts behind Cloud Peak, wrestled his
backpac into place without disconnecting his seat harness. "Sorry 'bout that," said the voice of Miles
Grenier in his headset. "These ugly birds are too sensitive with a light load."
Like all regular S & R pilots, Grenier disparaged the beauty of his sprint chopper and his expertise in
flying it, as a good Mormon curb against excessive pride. Grenier did not ask why he'd been ordered to
leave the alpine survival exercises near Sheridan, Wyoming to drop this lone S & R/over into broken
country to the South.
For an S & R regular, the primary virtues were skill, unquestioning obedience, a good nature, and good
looks—in that order. Rovers were a phylum apart. The rovers trained first with one team, then another.
They seldom talked about their ‘surveillance' sorties and were clearly not LDS in outlook. For a rover,
good looks were secondary and good nature just about nonexistent. Rovers had been known to rage
against a mission, to swill illegal hard liquor, even to grow combative. The one thing a rover almost never
did was to encourage close friendship with regulars or, so far as Grenier knew, anybody else.
Of course some rovers seemed to relax among themselves, thought Grenier. Quantrill, the youngest rover
of them all, definitely seemed to unwind in the company of that gorgeous creature, Marbrye Sanger,
during paradrop practice into rotting snow in the Bighorn National Forest.
Sanger, one of the half-dozen female rovers, could have had all the friends she wanted merely by a toss
of those chestnut curls or a flirt of the long strong legs. Instead, she spent much of her time as companion
to the silent, muscular Quantrill. Grenier thought them an unlikely pair: Sanger in her mid-twenties, elegant
even in her mottled coverall, vivacious on a team problem but otherwise aloof. Ted Quantrill, and
scarcely out of his teens, a sturdy churl of Sanger's height with chilled creme de menthe eyes and a talent
for doing nothing until the last possible second. When Quantrill moved, you knew he'd been thinking
about the problem; the little son of perdition might make a botch of it the first time, but it was the fastest
botch anybody could ask for. The second time—with a rappel, recovery winch, whatever—he was
usually perfect. And quicker still. Grenier decided that Quantrill had already had his second time with
Sanger, and
SPRINT CHOPPER SUMMARY SHEETS
cheerfully damned him for getting there first. But then, Sanger was a rover, too…
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.
CHILLER SUMMARY SHEETS
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.
Quantrill 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 wilderness-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.
摘要：

ScannedbyHighrollerandproofedmoreorlessbyHighroller.PART1:SEARCH&RESCUECHAPTER1ThereverendOraMcCartyfacedthewallinthemostsacrosanctofficeofInternationalEntertainmentandElectronicsandwatchedaholoimageofhimselfsinganoldinspirational:'RockyMountainHigh'.Ithadaired—orsoMcCartybelieved—duringhisSundaymor...

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