Perhaps it was the continuing buzz of the distant sprint chopper that first suggested a break in routine. Usually the pilot set his bird down quickly to avoid spreading dust across the flight line. This one hovered, half concealed by the hangar.
He heard Grenier's audio buzzer. From sheer curiosity he pushed the stowed nose flotation bag aside; listened through the thin inner bulkheads. Grenier spoke normally at first. After a pause he spoke more quizzically but Quantrill could not hear what he said. The rover wiped late morning perspiration from his brow with the sleeve of his odorous work coverall. He had time to damn the heat of the turbines whistling in the fuselage; they weren't loud but while checking the bird out you wanted them idling.
A vagrant breeze wafted warm exhaust back to Quantrill, pungent with expensive fuel. Quantrill decided Grenier was going to take all day on his comm set, cursed, rolled back on his creeper and slapped the nose hatch shut before sitting upright. The hovering sprint chopper in the distance, he noticed, backed from sight without landing.
Quantrill was only a little surprised to hear the turbine whine rising, but very much so to see the wingtip shrouds swivel into takeoff position. If that goddam Grenier was heading back for an early lunch he wasn't going to leave Quantrill to leg it alone back to the hangar.
He lay back on the creeper, grasped handholds and shot himself backward to the belly hatch, punching the skin detent as he passed it. The hatch opened and Quantrill snagged internal handholds, legs driving him vertically as the craft began to lift and turn.
"What is this, Grenier; trick or treat?" Quantrill lay on the narrow walkway and stared angrily forward at the pilot.
Grenier did not hear him over the turbine scream, but evidently heard something in his headset. He chopped back the power too quickly, flicked off all systems while struggling up from his seat. And the glance he flicked at Quantrill was rich with fear and suspicion.
"Abandon ship," Grenier shouted, waving Quantrill out the still-gaping belly hatch, and following him with almost a rover's speed. Grenier backed away, not looking at the aircraft but at the rover. "Quantrill, get away," shouted the pilot. "We've got a problem with the bird!"
Quantrill trotted after the taller man, saw past him to the flight line. Five minutes before, there'd been several people currying their birds. Now the place was deserted. At the periphery of his vision was a charcoal-black mass, skating ten meters over the deck, and now Miles Grenier was running like a deer. The hurtling mass was a sprint chopper, arcing in between the two men.
Isolate your hit
, said a well-remembered voice in his memory. The voice had been that of Jose Marti Cross, the same man that Quantrill now saw peering from a side port in the approaching aircraft.
Quantrill dropped to one knee, slapped at his armpit for a chiller that wasn't there. The face of Marty Cross vanished from the port and with that simple reflexive act, Cross said it all: combat stations.
Give the pilot credit, thought Quantrill; he horsed his craft around while masking Grenier from a man who, if armed, might well shoot him or take him hostage. But Quantrill was sprinting too, now, and a precious few seconds are required to stop and then accelerate six thousand kilos of Loring sprint chopper.
In those seconds Quantrill crossed fifty meters of level concrete toward the craft he had so recently abandoned. Then Howell surged forward, coming out of the sun, high enough to clear his quarry's head, low enough so that his shrouded propwash would knock a horse sprawling.
Any watcher would know by now that Quantrill was unarmed. But Cross sat with feet braced against the padding of the open belly hatch, both hands steadying his chiller between his thighs, waiting for Quantrill to come into view. He was almost too close to miss—but also too low to see Quantrill until a second before the Loring passed over him. It should have been enough, with a chiller.
Because the sun was high, Quantrill saw the big shadow almost too late. He saw a tuft of grass that might serve as a shoving-off point, kicked away against it in an abrupt change of direction, rolled. He saw three puffs, hairbreadth misses by Cross, of dust as he came up squatting in a welter of pebbles at the concrete's verge. The Loring continued, levitated over its abandoned twin, prop shrouds gimbaling as Howell turned, virtually hidden from Quantrill as if seeking cover. Which he was, for a vital five seconds.
Then Howell leapfrogged the abandoned Loring again, this time slowly dropping to a meter off the deck. Now between Quantrill and his goal, Howell stopped the Loring. Quantrill feinted, started to run, then slowed as he saw the legs of Cross swing from the belly hatch. Quantrill dropped his pumping arms then, a gesture full of defeat.
And of misdirection. He could see Howell in the cockpit, grinning, knowing he could slam a six-ton hammer into his victim. He saw Cross hit and roll. And he saw that he was no more than twelve meters from the nearest wingtip shroud. His high overhand toss seemed a ridiculous empty gesture until Howell, with a spurt of pure horror, saw the glitter of small objects in the sun.
The handful of broken concrete half-fell, was half sucked into the circular shroud as Quantrill raced toward that wingtip, ignoring Cross who was up in a crouch below the fuselage, steadying his aim for a kneecapper.
Quantrill could not possibly sprint quickly enough to reach the shroud before its fiberquartz prop blades ingested those jagged chunks of concrete. He counted on that fact. With a shrill series of reports like small-arms fire, the concrete hunks shrieked through polyskin, some whining as ricochets into the distance, some shrapneling the fuselage behind Howell's bubble. Neither Howell nor Cross was hit but before either could make a patterned response, the Loring—as Quantrill had known it must—responded on its own.
The balance of a twin coleopter craft depends greatly on the shape of those prop blades, and their proximity to the airfoil surface in the shroud. Hammer a few dents into a shroud, especially near those prop tips, and its efficiency will plummet. Blow a dozen jagged holes in it while the props eat hardware, and you will see a coleopter go bonkers.
Quantrill had that pleasure.
The upward-slanting shroud was only a meter from concrete at its trailing edge when Quantrill committed his act of classic sabotage. It faltered, fell, scraped concrete, and became a sliding pivot as the other wingtip lifted as if to cartwheel the entire vehicle. Howell reacted almost quickly enough. A thorough pro, Cross sidestepped to get a shot at Quantrill who in turn kept himself masked by the nearer shroud. Cross took Howell's expertise for granted, and had no warning when the fuselage sideswiped him across his back and shoulders.
The craft was settling. Quantrill, flinging his other handful of gravel into the face of the falling Cross, cleared the halfbreed's fire pattern in a running leap. Still, he was lucky; one round blew a hunk from the heel of his work boot and spoiled his landing, so that his kick took Cross in the right shoulder instead of his face.
Both of Quantrill's hands closed on the chiller, pressing on Cross's fingers to squander the rest of the magazine in one sputtering burst. He'd learned that ploy before they ever put the critic in his head.
When Control spoke to him, it was obvious that someone—Howell?—was describing the action. Except that Howell was still up forward in the cockpit while the sprint chopper wailed down to quiescence, a bird with only one good wing. "Q, you're over-reacting." said the quasifeminine voice in his mastoid. "It's still not too late to save yourself. We need to talk to you, Q. Why don't you just—"
"Control, why don't
you
just go fuck a duck?" He had longed to say that for years. "I've got my signet ring garrote wire snugged under Cross's adam's apple. Maybe I won't jerk and cut his head off when you pull my plug. But can you risk it?"
It was a lie but Quantrill was making it true, first passing his arms under Cross's to deploy his wire. Cross, the master of stealth, was no master of defense against the impacts that had stunned him at temple, scapula and groin. Quantrill's standard-issue signet ring was the only weapon he'd worn that day—even though he wasn't supposed to wear it while doing mechanic's chores. The filament-thin wire was hardly more than a meter long but with the signet in one hand and the ring on his other, he soon had the loop pressed around the throat of his old instructor, his new hostage.
Barely conscious, smaller than Quantrill, Cross grunted as raw bone edges grated in his right shoulder. The renegade rover lifted Cross bodily under the arms, both hands at shoulder height, bright sun glinting from the loop of wire. Howell popped his canopy and swung down to concrete, his own chiller drawn as he watched Quantrill move backward with his burden, facing Howell.
Seth Howell's bandy long legs could have carried him around Quantrill to balk progress toward the intact sprint chopper which Grenier had abandoned, but Howell had made other plans. The big man had no mastoid critic but with his headset still in place his every word could still be monitored by Control. "You're no pilot, Quantrill," he said, pacing his quarry, holding eye contact. "You'll sit in that Loring 'til you broil. Cut your losses, man."
Quantrill, still backing, let his fists move apart. "Stop right there, Howell, or I'll bleed your bunkie a little." Howell stopped. Quantrill was now virtually in the shadow of the Loring's wing, ignoring the calm pleas of Control that continued in his ear. Howell stepped first to one side, then the other, compelling his attention. The big man had trouble keeping his gaze on the rover's; his temptation was to study the progress of Marbrye Sanger, coming up from under the fuselage behind Quantrill.
The first thing Sanger did after dropping from Howell's craft was to stand motionless, hidden by the second Loring while Howell passed over it again. Then she moved to the fuselage, put one foot into a maintenance toehold, and grasped an air intake duct so that she could peer over the craft, to study Quantrill's desperate ploy with only two handfuls of broken concrete.
Sanger grinned as she exchanged the chiller's explosive rounds for a magazine of ball ammo. They wanted the man alive and, with a target as quick as Quantrill, you couldn't depend on the exact placement of a round. That was
one
rationale, anyway…
"Howell's lost control," she murmured through her critic. "Subject is going mano-a-mano with Cross." Pause. "But Howell told me to stay behind this chopper and wait for an opening. You countermanding?" Another pause. "I concur with Howell. Why not patch me into his headset? I can't tell what the hell is going on." She nodded to herself as she heard Howell's voice in her head.
After a few moments she could report Quantrill's stolid progress as he moved backward toward her with Howell in careful pursuit. "For God's sake don't risk hitting me, Howell," she muttered, and dropped silently to the concrete. On all-fours she could see Quantrill half-dragging Cross, whose struggles were weak, and she moved as if unaware that she was lining up with quarry and stalker. She refused to think about the likelihood that Howell might shoot anyway.
Crabwise, Sanger passed under the fuselage, then stood directly behind the panting Quantrill. She waited until he stopped, hardly more than arm's length away. She could have hacked at the juncture of his neck and shoulder with the barrel of her chiller, but Howell muttered into his headset, "He's got to let go of that fucking garrote wire."
She waited.
"Don't get your hopes up," Quantrill called. "The loop is still in place." With that, he let his right hand drop the signet, still holding the wounded Cross as a shield, and reached back to feel for the starboard hatch release. Instead he felt a chiller's muzzle in his right armpit, an arm against his left elbow. Her position violated Sanger's training but under the circumstances she had no choice.
"I can't miss, Quantrill," she said as he froze. "Think very carefully before you jerk that wire." Then, as he slowly swiveled his head, she pressed the chiller flat against his ribcage, loosening her grip, her unseen fingers splayed apart so that he could feel them. "
Very
carefully," she said again.
"I have him, Control." Thirty meters away, Seth Howell stood in an approved crouch, both hands steadying his weapon.
Quantrill thought about it until Howell took that first step nearer. Then his backward-extended right arm swept down an infinitesimal instant before his knees flexed to drive him backward against Sanger. He dipped, still holding onto Cross, rammed his free elbow lightly into Sanger's midriff, her sidearm clattering to the concrete. She rebounded from the Loring's fuselage, clutching her belly, and fell to her knees.
Howell resolved his dilemma when he saw the chiller drop; began to lope intending to pistol-whip Quantrill. The doughty Howell had not believed it possible that a garrote wire could slice lightly, be unlooped, then re-employed around a second hostage in the time it took for him to run twenty paces. In that brief instant, Howell became a believer.
Quantrill squatted beneath the Loring and behind Sanger, his garrote loop against her elegant throat. Marty Cross sat before them, right arm useless, and stared at the blood that dripped from his clutching left hand to pool between his legs.
"We can all stand here 'till he bleeds out," Quantrill called, "or you can try me again and lose this bitch, too. Or you can drop the chiller and go back to your parking problem."
Howell glanced at his sidearm. "No way." But he began walking backward, pausing to shout, "Marty! Can you breathe? Can you hold?"
Even while holding the edges of his throat together, Jose Marti Cross refused to shame his Cheyenne mother. But when he nodded his head, his entire upper torso nodded too.
"Yes, the motherfucker has
Sanger
now," Howell raged into his headset as he loped away, reseating his chiller. "All right, we
all
underestimated him! Who is this? Salter? Get a meat wagon out here on the triple for Cross. What? She didn't have a chance, you gotta see this sonofawhore to believe him. He's hauling her into that chopper and he can't fly it—I don't think. Control, do you have any kind of video on us? I'm getting tired of being your eyes…"