Free natural predator and captive synthesized predator studied each other a long while, until a familiar voice spoke in his helmet commset. He replied: "You again, Grenier?" The foxes, startled, vanished into scrub.
"CenCom said we could haul you in. Sorry." Grenier's apology sounded real. "Got an MP South of you; fishing, probably turned an ankle. Mind giving us some help?"
"It'll take me a little time to deflate my sack," Quantrill lied. He hadn't taken the gas-insulated mummybag from stowage.
"Give us a rough fix from our original DZ. I'll be there in about, ah, fourteen minutes."
"I'm about a klick, true heading three-forty degrees or so, from the DZ and I'll have my beacon on, bearing one-sixty to the DZ. If you can miss me, Grenier, you gotta be trying."
The strength of Grenier's signal was already gaining. "OK if I set her down? I'd rather not use floodlights; we'll need our night vision in a half-hour."
"Quicker if you just hover and snatch me by cable. Ground winds aren't bad enough to bounce me off the hatch, and I won't have to eat as much dust if you stand off twenty meters."
"It's your hide." Cable retrieval was tricky in darkness, even with image intensifiers. Quantrill had suggested a quick pickup that made him slightly more vulnerable. His motive was the training exercise, but Grenier misread it as a friendly gesture. "You're good folks, Quantrill," he murmured.
"Ram it." Quantrill's reaction was instant, un-heated. It brushed away the hand of friendship in pure reflex action. It made his life bearable by constraining his worries within his own skin.
Too many of Quantrill's friends had died. The Sanger connection was — well, a potential problem.
Though their shared embraces never extended to spoken pledges, too often their bodies spoke tenderly.
He told himself that Marbrye Sanger would be repelled by spoken tenderness. Besides, Sanger claimed other partners on occasion — and Quantrill pretended to. Sanger was a rover, and a damned good one.
She could take care of herself.
In thinking Sanger direct and uncomplicated, he underestimated her. He chose not to consider that she might long for an open outpouring of his love, even while knowing it might destroy them both.
Presently, striding through fragrant grasses on his promised heading, Quantrill heard a familiar soft drone in his helmet sensors and, almost at the same moment, "Gotcha," from Grenier in his commset. Moments later he was snapping carabiners, exhaling slowly through his nose to keep swirling grass chaff out of his personal pipes. A sneezing fit was a common hazard when you ran beneath a sprint chopper. The snatch was clean; Grenier did not accelerate until Quantrill had been winched entirely within the fuselage and the belly hatch indicator winked out.
The rover found a litter awaiting him; all three couches were occupied by a team of regulars, all lighthearted, all disgustingly fresh for the night's work. Quantrill snapped on his harness and tried for a few minutes of sleep. Sanger was not among the crew, but he had not really expected that pleasure.
CHAPTER 6
Ralph Gilson's disappearance might best be blamed on midlife crisis, that recurrent panic provoked by bald spots, occasional impotence with a wife who is munching celery in bed, and the fear that one's mistress can honestly ask, 'Ralph who?' two weeks after he dies.
In Gilson's case there was no mistress and no bald spot — though his wife chewed gum at the damnedest times. In 1997, Ralph Gilson had been S/Sgt. Robin Gilbert, one of a hundred thousand troops who had survived the Bering Shoot and refused to stop retreating in Alaska.
For the first time in his life Gilbert had rebelled; had put Army training to its ultimate test, making his way back through Canada to California by shank's mare and cadged rides. But he found Mexican citizens occupying most of the California coast, and rumors that they carried Chinese plague. Gilbert did not want to be a citizen of Alta Mexico; he did not even care much to be Robin Gilbert, deserter.
So he became Ralph Gilson, modestly successful jobber of holovision equipment in Ft. Collins, Colorado. With so many records destroyed during the nuke strikes and the shrinkage of national boundaries, it was an easy matter to generate a new identity so long as you stuck to it. After three years came the onset of internal crisis; and for the second time — it would be his last — Gilbert/Gilson rebelled.
Gilson was a twice-a-year Methodist who believed the holo warnings about the threat New Israel would become, when the Israeli Ellfive orbital colonies were complete. He was not too sanguine about Catholics, either; it was Mexican Catholics who occupied the ruins ringing the dead sites of L. A. and San Francisco. But above all, he began to mistrust a government that made it gradually more difficult for jews and Catholics to share meetings or media exposure.
First came the tax on holo unscramblers, which 'coincidentally' were needed now for all but the major media networks. Gilson owned a little stock and knew how, for example, the Federal Broadcasting Network skipped to the tune of IEE, which pirouetted for Blanton Young's Federalist party and the LDS church. Gilson was not too surprised when the second turn of the screw prohibited unscramblers.
Montana stations were now — temporarily, both governments maintained — Canadian. Tucson stations hewed to regulations of Alta Mexico. In the Wild Country of South Texas and most of New Mexico, stations did as they pleased since neither Streamlined America nor distended Mexico had much success ruling those sun-crazed gunslingers in Wild Country. In this time of reconstruction, the new Southwest was becoming much like the old West of an earlier reconstruction. President Young sought to save the American people from radio and holocasts that might interfere with his peculiar vision of a new, and uniformly Mormon, Zion. Since most LDS and gentile voters might not understand how necessary those measures were, the President elected to mask them in committee recommendations. Of course, a few seditious sons of perdition smuggled unscramblers in from Wild Country. More serious measures would have to be taken; more summary justice.
Gilson could hardly miss the rumors shared by his illegal contacts. In Idaho Falls, now near the Canadian border, 'justice' had caught up with a thirty-third-degree Mason whose lodge formed a nucleus of dissent. In the deep-water port of Eureka not far from Alta Mexico, a bloated body had washed ashore, its dentition matching that of a good Mormon who had felt a calling to reorganize a longshoreman's union.
The bishop of the New Denver Diocese had perished, with other prominent Catholics, in the cellar collapse of a Colorado monastery — and rumor insisted that the collapse was preceded by an explosion.
Ralph Gilson had nothing against Mormons — well, nothing much, anyway — in general. A hell of a lot of them had bought his unscramblers, and a few were willing to joke about the unsaintliness of the 'Lion of Zion', Blanton Young, whom one liberal Mormon had dubbed the Lyin' of Zion. But support for Young at the polls was the final punchline, and his reconstruction policies were steadily clotting the individual have-nots into groups of rebels.
Ralph Gilson's rebellion had put self-esteem into his step, and cash into his pocket. And eventually, an S & R rover on his ass. Gilson was the fifth smuggler to receive Quantrill's attention. He was the only one, however, to have unloaded over a quarter of a million illegal unscramblers by making the price attractively low.