June 18,'
c/o Texas A & M
Research Station Sonora TX
My Dear Ted:
By now you probably know we've stalemated paranthrax. It was a team effort and for a time, you were part of that team. I thought it might give you a lift to know you've been a giver of life and not a taker.
You really should have said goodbye; it didn't take a Sherlock to trace you to the San Marcos induction center, and God knows you could pass for sixteen. I kept your note — as an object lesson in male inconsistency, I suppose. Surely you've had enough of uniforms by now! How many stripes on yours? Let me suppose it's one or two, and on that supposition I congratulate you. Better yet, write and tell me. I'm not naive enough to think you're still in San Marcos but optimist that I am, I dare hope this will reach you — wherever.
I'm not in Sonora now, either. I can't tell you where. Let's just say I volunteered elsewhere. Incidentally, there's reason to hope that Louise and Sandra Grange are alive and well. Aggie Station resounded with rumors about some of the survivor groups, though they weren't the most law-abiding sects I might mention. But I digress… My current work is with something by the jawbreaking monicker of Staphylococcus rosacea, alias Keratophagic Staph, and we can thank God it's still confined to Asia. I'm assuming you've heard about it; it's in the news here. On the other hand: if you're anywhere in its vicinity, burn used hankies, keep your resistance up and your hands away from your eyes. It wouldn't hurt to use goggles. Need I insist that you take any antibiotics you're issued religiously! If I have a religion left, perhaps that's it. As long as all religions have their side effects, I may as well pray to Novobiocin as to anything else. Meanwhile, we of the priesthood are busily crafting new gods — the better to counter dat ol' debbil Staph. Wish us Godspeed — or should I say antibioticspeed? I saw a holo interview last night between the Sec. of Defense and Everyman's hotsy, Eve Simpson. Sorry to say she's getting downright chubby; no doubt you mourn that too, too-solid flesh more than I do. As I was saying, the gov't now admits that our transient camps in the San Joaquin Valley weren't just for agribiz. We expected the little invasion that wasn't there. Why tell you about it? Well, for all I know you're in some engineering battalion out there. So is my daughter, Cathy Palma, Jr., and it's just possible that you may run into each other. If so, tell her Mama says you don't have to salute!
Must get some sleep. I have to keep my resistance up, too. Think of me now and then as I do of you and, if the spirit strikes, write. When all this is over, don't hesitate to use me for a reference, Ted. By then it may be all I'm good for.
As ever
Catherine Palma
Quantrill read the letter with an aching sadness that became anger on second reading. Damn Palma! Her letter needed ten days to reach him and ten seconds to breach his defenses. The last thing a gunsel needed was a reminder that there were still kind and loving people out there, taking terrible chances without rage or vengeance to prod them.
He scanned the passage on survivor groups a third time, dredging up wry amusement to counter his ire. For damned sure they weren't law-abiding sects; according to Seth Howell they were the chief reason why West Texas and much of New Mexico were justifying the label of Wild Country.
Neither Howell nor Reardon had said so, but Quantrill felt sure his next assignment would be into wild country. Two of the new gunsels, Desmond Quinn and Maxim Pelletier, were sitting in on his cram sessions — but so was Sanger. Maybe Howell was right: to stop a bunch of crazies you'd have to ice them all or pinpoint the leaders first. Isolating leaders meant infiltration, and to minimax the operation it would be best to let gunsels, for once, do the prelim work usually reserved for the FBI or other agencies.
Of course that meant T Section's charter was thereby broadened. The Collier administration seemed reluctant to delegate death contracts to agencies which were themselves becoming Mormon in sympathy. T Section had no Mormons and no sympathies. It had one recent casualty whose Chicano background should have been good cover for an infiltrator in wild country. That cover had bought him a shallow grave on the banks of the Pecos River. Quantrill could not yet fully believe that some religious nut had bagged Rafael Sabado but, taking it at face value, he could endorse the notion of sending gunsels into the region in teams.
He glanced at the Palma letter again, acutely aware that Control would have read it first. 'Palma, you soft- hearted loser,' he snarled, and tossed the letter into the carrel shredder. It wouldn't hurt, he thought, to let his mastoid critic transmit a scorn he did not feel.
He checked the time: a half-hour before dark. Maybe Sanger would feel like a 'little jog', their own code phrase for twenty minutes of cross-country run and ten minutes of clean, piping-hot undiluted lust somewhere on the hillside below the big house. With Marbrye Sanger, he felt, you knew where you stood; knew that her needs were on honest display; could depend on a quid pro quo without emotional aftershocks.
On one level Quantrill admitted his use of sexuality to salve a psychic wound. On another he assumed that Sanger was all surface, uncomplicated, beyond the need for friendship.
His was an assumption that Control endorsed. Had Control found any evidence that Marbrye Sanger ached for dearer sharing with Quantrill, the pairing would have been dissolved by 'coincidence', and permanently. But Sanger was subtle, and regularly chose partners other than Quantrill — and was more vocal in her enjoyment of them. Control, for all its vigilance, did not ask whether Marbrye Sanger invested all her external encounters with the same inner valence.
Sanger rejoiced at Quantrill's syncopated knock. She was not fool enough to show it; if anything, Sanger overestimated Control and her critic; preserved the cool grace that characterized her. She agreed to the little jog, careful to avoid primping, mindful of the video unit that might squat behind her mirror.
Each time she was alone with Quantrill, Sanger sought new insights behind those troubled green eyes; touchstones into the character of a youth she must never claim as friend. She could provoke him into stories of his past, titillate him, ravish him, goad him to take her in the same way. But she knew that she must never befriend him.
Sanger told herself that what she had was enough.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Liang Chen had taken more than enough. Accustomed from infancy to the security of his social unit, he *d been quite willing to leave his lakeside village unit in Hunan to join the biggest military unit on earth: The Chinese People's Army. Unit within unit, the huge CPA bureaucracy churned its human molecules into motorized infantry, armored, engineering, quartermaster units with all deliberate speed — i.e., slowly. Liang was quick to learn, stalwart under pressure, good with math; the right recipe for an antitank fire controller.
Even when the RUS brought in the fast-scudding armored ACV's to change the rules on him, young Liang reacted quickly, bagged an even dozen. His new conversion tables accommodated the quick lateral capability of an ACV, permitted his battalion to survive the RUS onslaught where others failed, added a deferential note to his unit's phrase 'Xiao Liang'—young Liang. Now, for the first time, he wondered if he would live to be called 'Lao Liang', old Liang. Liang counted the remaining HEAT warheads, wondering when he would see more.
It wasn't just the ferocity of the previous winter, though frostbite had scalloped Liang's ears. Nor the long desperate footsore march to meet the American Fifth Army which had been hurled against the southern face of the Kazakhstan front in the spring. Even the dwindling of supplies and the rumors of a hellish disease to the rear had not, in themselves, sapped the patriotic juices that once surged through Liang Chen. What drained him most was unitary breakdown.
Liang was feeling the surface of a tumor in the military corpus of China. When the supply of antitank missiles was exhausted, Liang's unit melded with a mortar company. When the food ran out, the forty per cent of his company who could still fight managed to attach themselves to a retreating regimental supply group near Birlik, fighting off American air sorties with small arms fire and a few shoulder-fired SAM's.
And when the first of the infected front-line officers began to don dark glasses to hide the signs of that infection, Liang shrugged it off. The CPA would take care of its own, he thought. But units could not prosper when
