“Your luggage is being picked up and will be waiting for you in your quarters at the corporate housing center,” he said in impeccable American English, opening the car’s rear door for the two women.
As she and Amanda got into the back seat, Pancho saw there was a driver sitting behind the wheel. The young man slid in beside him.
She grinned. “What, no limo?”
The young man half-turned in his seat and said quite seriously, “Mr. Randolph doesn’t believe in unnecessary frills. This is comfortable enough, isn’t it?”
“Quite,” said Amanda.
By the time they got to the test site Amanda had set up a dinner date for herself with their handsome young escort.
The test site was on the shoulder of a green hillside that sloped down into the warm Caribbean. Late afternoon sunshine slanted down from between massive cumulus clouds that were visibly growing, boiling up into towering thunderheads, getting darker and more menacing by the minute. Pancho smelled the salt tang in the air, heard the surf rolling in gently below, felt the warm steady breeze on her face. A tropical paradise, she thought.
Or it would be, if it weren’t for all that danged hardware squatting in the middle of the field.
Following their Latino escort, they walked from the car to the small knot of people standing around what looked like a set of man-tall dewar flasks crusted with frost, a small crane, lots of plumbing and tubing, a medium-sized truck carrying what looked like a pair of major-league fuel cells on its bed, a smaller truck loaded with a bank of capacitors, and a corrugated-metal shed off to one side. Several automobiles and semivans were parked on the other side of the shed.
As they got closer, Pancho saw that the people were gathered around a small swept-winged aircraft that was resting on a pair of skids. It was an ancient cruise missile; she saw, an unmanned jet airplane. She knew they’d been outlawed by the disarmament treaties. Only the Peacekeepers had such weapons, and this one looked too old to be a Peacekeeper missile. The markings on it were faded, the serial number stenciled on its tail barely legible.
Before she could ask a question, a trim-looking man with silver hair and a rugged fighter’s face stepped out of the crowd around the missile. He wore a light tan wind breaker zippered to the throat despite the warm sunshine, a baseball cap perched jauntily on his head, well-faded jeans, and cowboy boots. Their escort stiffened almost like a soldier coming to attention.
“Senor Randolph,” he said, “may I introduce—”
“You must be Amanda Cunningham,” said Dan Randolph, with a crooked smile. He put his hand out and Amanda took it briefly. “I’m Dan Randolph.”
Then he turned to Pancho. “And you’ve got to be Priscilla Lane.”
“Pancho,” she corrected, taking his extended hand. His grip was firm, friendly. “Priscilla’s too fussy, and anybody calls me Pru or Prissy, I’ll belt him.”
“Pancho,” Randolph said, his smile widening. “I’ll remember that.”
“What’s this all about?” Pancho asked. “Why’ve you brought us here?”
Randolph’s eyes showed momentary surprise at her bluntness, but then he shrugged and said, “You’re going to see some history being made… if this double-damned jury-rigged kludge works right.”
He introduced Amanda and Pancho to Lyall Duncan and the others gathered around the missile. Almost all of them were male, engineers or technicians. One of the women was a tall blonde; competition for Amanda, Pancho thought. Duncan looked like a fierce little gnome, or maybe a troll, even when he smiled.
Puzzled, intrigued, Pancho allowed Randolph to usher her and Amanda to the shed. It was packed with instruments and consoles and one rickety-looking desk with a lopsided chair in front of it.
“You just stay here and watch,” he said, with a curious grin. “If it works, you’ll be witnesses. If it blows up, this ought to be far enough away to keep you from getting hurt.”
The dark-haired troll called Duncan chuckled. “Experimental physics, you know. Always the chance of an explosion.”
The crane was on its own caterpillar tractor. A pair of technicians used it to hoist the missile off the ground and trundle it out almost half a kilometer. They put the missile gently onto the grassy ground, pointing into the wind blowing steadily in from the sea.