Single Combat

berm, away from countless cubic meters of the near-explosive hydrogen. It really was fairly safe, Riker told himself. Nothing like the safety of helium, but lots cheaper and with roughly ten per cent more buoyancy. That was IEE for you.

Riker checked the pallet anchors, his smile fading as he mentally replayed his hours with Chabrier. It seemed almost as if the bulky chemist — if that was really his job — wasn't interested in speeding up the shipments. If anything, as if he craved a delay. And friendship. But why would a highly trained scientist crave camaraderie with a delta crewman? As the vast craft slid upward into the last of the sunlight, Riker pondered the question and studied the particle-beam perimeter weapons that stretched away across the trackless desert.

One hell of a waste, he thought, to set up such a P-beam security rig as that. All corporations were a little paranoid about their measly secret processes. What could be so important that anyone would bother to sneak in? But that was IEE for you…

CHAPTER 24

For all its gleam and pillared portico, White House Deseret was chiefly a ballroom with a few staff offices, guest rooms and kitchen. And with one particular elevator to whisk senior staff and certain invited guests, far down below the 'bench'—a natural terrace at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. From the bottom of the shaft, Boren Mills took a ten-minute ride in a magnetic sling tube. Mills was not supposed to know — but knew, nonetheless — that the real hardball business of Streamlined America was transacted directly beneath the repository of Mormon genealogical files in Cotton-wood Canyon. If you weren't safe under the Granite Mountain genealogical vault, you couldn't get safe.

Mills passed through more security, then forced a pleasant smile despite an urge to gape. The raven-haired young amazon who escorted him to the Presidential apartment was nearly two meters tall in her spike heels, and while the hooded white satin gown fell to her ankles, it was also slit to reveal a lot of luscious apricot-tinted thigh. This was a far lusty howl away from the conservative male staff who had escorted him in previous visits. It unsettled him; told him to expect changes in a man he had studied carefully.

That man was also just a tad drunk. 'Go and ponder your sins,' Blanton Young told the improbable vision, and waited until she had gone.

'Future sins, I hope.' Mills could not resist it.

'How'd you guess?' Young took the small Mills paw in his big one, held the Mills forearm with his other hand. The ritual communicated great physical vitality, which Young could squander. 'I tell you, Mills, there's no end of wisdom in that scripture.'

Mills let his gaze follow Young's open-handed gesture. On one wall of the lavish ultramodern room was a tablet of black onyx, and inset in flowing script of richest polished gold was the legend: '… And it is by the wicked that the wicked shall be punished.'

'Interesting,' said Mills, not knowing what else to say.

'Interpretation of the Book of Mormon is just a matter of Divine guidance,' said Young, as if that guidance was self-evident, leading his guest to the wet bar. 'For instance, in '97 it told me I should shunt that bunch of Army assassins into S & R as soon as my,' he paused to savor some personal joke, 'sainted predecessor shuffled off this mortal coil.' With that, he performed a shuffling two-step, then took a sip from his goblet.

To say that Mills was aghast was to claim a delta dirigible was a penny balloon. Mills did not care what caprice a man chose, so long as he chose it predictably. This was not the Blanton Young he had seen previously — or was this, at last, the private Young emerging? Mills managed to say, 'Got it: wicked hit men punish wicked Indys.'

Rumbling: 'Rebels, son; an Indy is a rebel only when I interpret him as one. But it took me awhile to realize that you can make a sinner punish himself-herself,' he winked, with a wave of the big head toward the door, 'by a penance consh — consisting of more wickedness. You take a girl brought up strict, caught lifting a smoked ham to feed a few useless mouths; and if she's not too keen, after a week or reconditioning you can argue her into, ah, any position.'

Reminds me of an old joke,' Mills essayed.

'Bet I've heard it.'

'About druggies. Their idea of a round-table religious debate is to see who can commit the most original sin on your lazy susan.'

Young guffawed after a two-beat pause. Mills would never know whether he really got it. 'Well, I owe you one for that,' said the pixillated Prez. Staring into his sour mash as if it were a crystal globe, Young went on in softer tones: 'So I'll pay off now. A certain industrial concern whose initials are LockLever is pressuring a Texas rancher to sell his whole spread, which LockLever will turn into the wildest, wooliest, modernest dude ranch in the world.'

Mills was astute enough to break his chuckle off. ' Hanh-I'don't-get-i t.'

'It's not a one-liner, Mills. The pressure comes by way of LockLever's control of the aquifer North of Texas Wild Country. There isn't a drop of running water on the Schreiner ranch; they water the stock and imported game animals from wells — always did.

'As it happens, LockLever could pollute or divert the whole underground supply from their experimental rigs nearby. The Schreiner spread used to be a hundred square miles back in the 'eighties. It's grown since. I don't know if they'll sell — they've always been a tough bunch of Texas pecans, I hear — but if they do, LockLever will need cheap power to run the kind of Wild-Country Disneyland they have in mind.

And there isn't any good place to put a line-of-sight tower on the whole, million-acre ranch.'

Now Mills got a glimmer. 'Where's the nearest mountain?'

'Ten klicks North of the ranch boundary. And there is enough federal enforcement to that prominence — couldn't call it a mountain but an LOS tower could narrowcast cheap power to the ranch; and that little old prominence is now federal land.'

Jesus, God and Moroni, thought Mills; to think he'd swapped an old gag for a chance to screw LockLever! 'I should think LockLever would've made a handsome bid for such a natural LOS site,' he murmured.

'They did. Some hitches developed. Old lawsuits, title irregularities; you know. You can always find something if you look hard enough.'

'I've always wanted to own a small mountain in Texas,' Mills said with a straight face.

'Oh, I don't think your government could show that kind of favoritism to an individual,' Young tutted.

'But of course, some survey crew might find signs of oil, or something else that Streamlined America badly needs. That's an argument LockLever hasn't used. Yet.'

Mills: 'And what might a geological study turn up?'

Young: 'Surprise me. But the discovery would have to come from a reliable company with a good track record.'

'IEE owns Latter-day Shale — if memory serves,' Mills said.

'A good reliable company,' Young nodded sagely. 'Excellent track record — in which I may have some stock if, as you say, memory serves.'

'Sonofabitch,' Mills exulted.

'You're another,' said the President of Streamlined America, and drank as if validating his reply.

CHAPTER 25

Over his next glass of sippin' whiskey, Mills learned why the President chose IEE as leverage to balance the proposed LockLever project. LockLever claimed that such an entertainment center would bring wealth to the area and would be welcomed by the locals; but Young had learned something more. The giant consortium had further hedged its bets by paying off some people who had clout in Wild Country.

In a word: rebels. Federalists suspected that much of the payoff wound up in the hands of the Indy leader,