Free Single Combat by Dean Ing Page A

answer.
    From the sub-basement came another, louder slither of debris. Quantrill eased through the hole again to hear, "—Again, Q. Say again, Q. Say again, Q."
    "Say what again?" The goddam building was completing its collapse in bits and pieces, he decided. And doing it directly above him.
    "Two hundred rounds of ATM's and what else?"
    Ah. Once through that hole he was shielded from Control. Quantrill had been warned that his critic might not function far underground. Of course they hadn't ever hinted that a Faraday cage might be a better shield against RF energy. "I couldn't be sure but there could be some binary nerve gas rounds there," he said, starting to grin as an idea blossomed. "I can't risk blowing the antitank rounds if there's much of that stuff down here. Concur?"
    Pause as Quantrill's grin widened. "Concur, Q. How long do you need?" Another way of asking how long he'd be out of contact, without actually telling him he was beyond range of their signal.
    "Five minutes, but this place is settling around my ears. Can you send a regular down with a doughnut?"
    "Might be quicker if you called up for one, Q."
    "Shout? In this house of cards? You have a lovely sense of humor, Control." But he began retracing his path up the stairwell.
    Minnetta Adams met him at the fallen girder with a bundle the size of a cheap bedroll. "Laker said you needed a doughnut. How'd he know?" She ignored his shrug as she spied the deader sandwiched on the stair. "Any more like that?" Adams was trying to keep it impersonal but any victim beyond her help affected her like a personal reproof.
    Quantrill said nothing, only shook his head and waved her back up the stairwell before descending with his thirty-kilo burden. A doughnut inflated to virtually fill a narrow hallway; a fat sausage three meters long, two in diameter, with a long central passage like its namesake. A stopgap measure, but it had saved more than one life. Doughnuts could be inflated in place to raise timbers, but their primary use lay in keeping that small central passage free of sand, water, silo grain—whatever might otherwise block you off during a rescue attempt.
    Quantrill snapped the webbing seal, rolled the flaccid sausage out, dragged it after him through the hole in the foundation, cursed as he remembered his backpac. It could hang up in the traction ribs of the annulus. He duckwalked back, tugged on the doughnut's D-ring, then worked furiously to get his pack off as he watched the orange ripstop fabric inflate. It would be jammed in the hole in twenty seconds. If any adjusting were to be done he'd have to do it now.
    He oriented the mouth of the doughnut so that it protruded into the basement, thrust his backpac into the annulus, clipped a chemlamp at his wrist, listened to sinister pops and rustles as the doughnut fleshed itself out. Finally, thrusting the pack ahead of him, he hustled through the annulus. It was like crawling through the guts of some great animal.
    He clambered onto packed earth and splintered shoring, then placed his pack near the cache of rockets. There was no sign of nerve gas; never had been. But judging from the stenciled hides of other crates there were enough CBW protection suits to bring half a battalion through a gas attack. The rebels, thought Quantrill, must expect some very nasty treatment from Streamlined America.
    Or maybe the rebs intended to wear those suits while dealing with the Confederacy. It was only a hundred klicks to the Ohio River, the boundary and quarantine line separating Streamlined America from the region that had once been the southeastern United States. Paranthrax had fixed that.
    While Quantrill reflected, he worked. It was one hot sonofabitch in this hole, and damp as well. He eased a plank from the semiconscious youngster, roughly palpated arms and legs probing for major fractures beyond the wrist. Satisfied, he reached under the lad's jawline, pressed hard, held his thumb down. The faint moaning ceased. He did