Skylock (15 page)

To the side, a lighting control panel was spread open, various repair tools laying about it. Disturbed by the prospect of an unwanted audience, Warrington took a quick glance about. Thankfully, no after-hours repairmen were in the vicinity. Maybe just off on their break—it didn't matter. This wouldn't take long.

Their privacy assured, he strode forward to confront Royce. But it was the director who spoke first, glancing innocently behind the president.

"Alone, Eugene?" he asked. "I expected at least guards and leg irons."

"You can damn well bet they'll be on their way," snarled Warrington, "if you don't do some quick and satisfactory explaining—starting with the truth about that nuclear airplane!"

Corealis raised his brows, mildly surprised. "Well, you've done some speedy homework. I am impressed."

His scornful tone bounced off the president.

"The truth!" he demanded.

Corealis repeated, glancing toward a distant clock, "The truth? Fine. I sent the plane out almost immediately after we talked last night. By now, it should have picked up whatever people may have survived their emergency—if there ever really was one. Agents onboard will have gathered up all the research work and files, leaving behind a small fusion device to erase any evidence of the base ever existing."

"When will the people be returned?"

Corealis reached over to consider a plant leaf and spoke bluntly.

"They won't. You see, a slight modification to the plane's intelligence system will have turned off its cabin pressure by now. All present will have gone into oxygen deprivation, nodding off gently to their eternal rest.

"As we speak, they and their research data are now onboard a fully automatic plane which will have climbed to a specific high altitude orbit over a predetermined locale of low EM penetration in the northwest territories. It will leave that orbit and come down for retrieval only when and where I have designated."

Warrington stared, incredulous.

"You have the gall to stand there and openly admit the consigning of innocent people to extermination like some litter of unwanted kittens?"

The director shrugged, unaffected.

"Thank yourself, Eugene. Your ultimatum forced the issue. Just yesterday, you said I was a bulldozer so badly needed to get difficult jobs done. And so I am. I was privileged enough to learn of a discovery like the world has never seen. You bet I'll guard it with my life—or anyone else's."

Corealis approached the president. His voice was sharp and hard.

"Are you too dense to grasp what the full regulatory power of an entire population means? Let me tell you. Religious declarations on birth control, individual decisions, and the complete magnitude thereof are forever under a practical governmental regulation.

"Economics is war, Eugene. Bloodless for the most part. But every bit as ruthless in direction and impact. And for a few soldiers to die in the name of the many who are not only spared, but reap its immense benefit, has all through history been a very acceptable loss ratio."

"Would," challenged Warrington, "you be willing to include yourself in that select fraternity of draftees?"

"To insure the program's success? In a blink," he pledged. "And I would not hesitate to ask the same of anyone else who might be required: co-workers, friends, family . . . even the president of these United States."

Warrington grimaced. "You monster."

The director pondered the comment.

"Really. Extending resources for unborn generations. Forever eliminating overcrowding. And doing it all with no real discomfort to those future-selected pawns?

"No one would get hurt. Everyone would have full bellies and those drafted into service would simply go through life with one biological function painlessly altered. If that wish makes me a monster, than I do stand guilty as charged."

Warrington shook his head with slow astonishment.

"This very day you have killed people over the matter and can yet speak so flippantly? Such abuse of entrusted power is unpardonable!"

The director's eyes narrowed critically.

"If I've abused mine, Eugene, then you surely have neglected the proper issuance of your own. Be honest with yourself, my friend. You've lost your objectivity. You've crossed a line of professional restraint, which no leader can ever afford to. Admit it. Admit it and do the smart thing.

"Step down, Eugene. Let me convene the regional board of governors and find a proper replacement to wear your mantle of responsibility. Someone clinical enough to help get this country reunited and back on its feet once Skylock breaks. If you like, I'll disqualify myself from voting or even having any participation in its mechanics at all."

Corealis' face softened in Warrington's new silence. His voice turned personal and imploring.

"There'd be no shame, Eugene. Probably true admiration for a wise man's recognition of his own limits. Make the whole thing easier. Do it. Please. Or let me alone to finish handling this matter my way."

Warrington's eyes rekindled.

"No!" he bellowed. "No! Your Nazism is through. Do you hear me? I swear I'll see you convicted of every felony against humanity I can find!"

The director nodded remorsefully. Shuffling forward in his heavy gum boots, he stopped face to face with the president.

"Yes, Eugene. I hear you."

Corealis inhaled and raised melancholy eyes to the distant banks of grow lights. Unexpectedly, he drove the man back with a furious shove.

"You pragmatic oaf!" he screamed in Warrington's face. "You simple-minded fraud! Your kind and their ivory tower fantasies make me sick! You go through life with your heads in the sand or up your ass, dreaming your two-bit grand notions and distancing yourselves from the dirty work that constantly needs to be done, but always ready to accept the practical windfalls gained by the few of us willing to get bloody in the back alleys."

Corealis shook his head mournfully. "With enough time for proper grooming, you'd've done the same here, too."

"No!" Warrington defended. "I would never—"

His words were severed by another backward shove.

"I piecemealed that research station together brick by unallocated brick!" snapped Royce. "Sweated out three years' diversion of funds, equipment, and personnel. For my country. For
our
country, damn you! And now, a sudden fit of rookie utopianism is going to take it all away?"

Corealis stopped his pursuit of Warrington at the muddy vestibule entrance. Searching the man's face, his anger was suddenly replaced by frustrated resignation. He dropped his gaze, speaking to the thick mud between them.

"Your kind make for impoverished politicians, Eugene . . . and worse leaders. You're indecisive, weak-kneed in matters that count, and entirely too predictable.

"Before you ever arrived here I knew exactly what you'd say and that you'd come nobly alone to say it. Looking at you now I understand fully that your breed has only one redeeming fact at all, Mister President. And that is the sorry, ironic truth that you always do make such damn fine martyrs."

Warrington's mortified glow flashed to surprise as Corealis launched him with a harder, final shove. Muddy water splashed high on the man's pressed pants as he vainly tried to regain his balance. But there was no stopping his backward tumble into the live circuitry of the open electrical panel.

The lights in the agri-plot blinked only once. The 49
^th
President of the United States went rigid, then crumpled away as the high voltage circuitry reset itself. In a few minutes Corealis stepped over the dead man and sloshed to the nearest phone. Clearing his throat, he dialed 911.

Trennt and Baker yanked open the passpod's escape hatch and kicked it away. Churning flood waters rushed directly below, thrashing, deadly waves of cocoa brown, bobbed heavy with silt and lethal refuse. Menacing whitecaps pulsed stop-action-like in stark throbs of the pod's belly strobes.

Stunned, Baker rocked to his haunches.

"The hell?"

"Probably a flash flood from up country," reasoned Trennt.

"Whatever," replied the shooter glancing about. "I don't reckon this here is no lifeboat."

Trennt gazed further out the hatch. Some distance off, a broad dune of loose gravel swung into view as their sole alternative to a watery landing.

Descending gently, the passpod rocked in broad weighty swings between lethal rushing waves and hostile indifferent land. Undecided on which medium it should settle, the cabin swayed teasingly. One moment hard left to deep and treacherous seas; the next, toward the steep, uninviting hillside.

Trennt sided with Baker's logic.

"If this crate has life preservers, we'd better be finding them."

A quick search of the wind-trashed cabin produced inflatable optic-orange vests. Strapping them on and, in turn, about their catatonic remaining passenger, the two agents slung their guns crosswise over their backs and, with the woman sandwiched between, hovered in the doorway.

The vacillating landing zone rose up to meet them. Land, then water. Land. Then water.

Three hundred feet; land.

Two hundred; water.

Seventy-five; land.

Fifty; water.

Twenty; land.

"Jump!"

The trio exited the pod, crashing painfully in the loose, shin-deep stones of the steep hill. Short seconds later the pod mashed into the graveled shallows behind.

Safe.

They clutched the harsh incline, sucking raw, thankful breaths. But soon after, Trennt shoved himself erect. Stretching over the limp woman between, he called weakly to his partner.

"Were you able to save anything off the plane?"

Baker pulled at a corner of his ordnance sack then patted a coarse yellow notebook and limp clutch of random papers crushed inside his shirt.

"You?"

Trennt shook his head miserably. "All the juice stayed aboard."

Baker slumped back to the heaped gravel. "Damn."

Behind, filthy waves broke violently against the crashed passpod and into its open hatch. Stormy chocolate water swirled angrily about it in rough, tugging eddies, trying to dislodge and swamp the arrogant nuisance.

Trennt raised his face to the sky. High up, a friendly perimeter of calm blue was briskly shifting west. A gray arc of returning storm clouds was eagerly filling the horizon.

But between earth and sky was a more immediate concern—the still settling chute pack. Its garish orange and white striped blooms kited down like circus tents in the still, thick air. Shortly they'd splash out in the main current. Submerged, their brilliance would become a huge sea anchor, dragging the pod away from shore—and with it anything in the way of survival gear.

Without a word, Trennt was off, scrambling crablike over the slick, cascading gravel, back for the pod. Behind him Baker thundered in warning.

"No, Jimbo! Don't! There's no time! Let it be!"

But a second later the shooter himself was chasing after.

Trennt splashed through the already filling compartment, snatching up anything useable. In his wake, Baker did likewise. Between them a first aid kit, collapsible shovel, and ration water pack were salvaged. Self-heating coffees and loose courtesy snacks were being plucked up as the first chute touched down and was immediately sucked downstream.

Its shroud lines tightened briskly, telegraphing a hard jolt to the pod. Seconds later the next chute landed. A secondary jolt rattled in, sending the men sprawling in the frigid brown slush and their harvested goods flying about. The pod began a crunching backslide, sluicing ever deeper with the filthy, cold water. Only moments remained before the final chute landed.

Baker righted himself and stabbed quick, pecking hands at the precious flotsam.

"Jimbo, we'd better get a move on, pronto!"

Trennt underhanded him the folded shovel and drinking water pack.

"Go on!" he ordered, still grabbing up loose articles. "I'm right behind you."

A jerk of the last parachute was powerful enough to break the pod free of its anchorage. Slogging through the fast-rising slush, Trennt was pitched free of its sinking hatch. He scrambled away as a final moan of complaining metal vibrated behind.

The pod began a quick retreat from shore. Bobbing lower and lower in the main current, the brilliant roof strobes flashed dimmer with each new pulse. In seconds they were smothered entirely beneath the foaming, dingy waves.

There was no time for the survivors to mourn their loss. A sudden warning chill was in the air. The first tiny bits of light sleet drifted lazily downward, heralding a return of real punishing hail.

Trennt scrambled uphill. Trembling uncontrollably in his drenched clothes, he motioned to Baker.

"Take the shovel. Get her and you dug in as best you can. Use the survival blankets for cover!"

"What about you?"

Trennt spied a leeward undercut some yards off.

"There!"

He charged ahead, fell to his knees at the hollow pocket and began clawing away clumped gravel with bare, freezing hands. His fingers were quickly skinned and bleeding. But he dug harder, managing a tiny den that he barely fit into. Trennt stretched his own survival blanket across its downwind opening and braced the flimsy barrier with forearms and knees.

In minutes a thundering gray colossus broke over the landscape. Fueled with billions of frenzied horsepower, gale winds carved a deadly path across the open plain. Boulders were flung about like dried peas, gravel launched skyward as a trillion hunks of supersonic buckshot.

Scalding rain and shrapnel hail drilled the earth. Roiling sheets of lightning convulsed through the amalgam in searing flames of phosphorescent green and pink.

A deluge of boiling kettle water burst from the pregnant clouds. It clashed with the poisoned sleet and birthed tons of hard, black ice that slithered across the open desert floor, filling in hollows and pockets like quick-set cement.

His strength failing and wracked with chills, Trennt shuddered wretchedly in his den. Straining to hold up the thin fabric barrier, his muscles flamed, then went icy and numb. Somewhere in the struggle he heard himself scream.