Wild Country

Chapter Six

First, Sandy Grange located the plastic cup she had hurled into the night. Then she shooed Childe into bed, arranging the woven comforter with its plaited strips of rabbit fur so that it would be close at hand. Next she tidied up, imagined that Childe's snores were genuine, and sat down at the table with her lockbox.

The contents of that box would not have gladdened the heart of a petty thief, unless he knew what he was looking at. A ruled composition tablet of polypaper and ballpoint pens; a curled Polaroid photo, a candid shot of Ted Quantrill in the early days of the war while he still carried a certain innocence in those green eyes; the tarnished engagement ring with its tawdry rutile gem which Lufo Albeniz had once given her (she had never worn it); and finally a stainless-steel amulet of peculiar workmanship. Its central bezel was empty because Sandy had pried the great jewel from it.

Sandy did not know that this unique off-planet jewel, dubbed the Ember of Venus, now adorned the throat of the mistress of a top official of Pemex Oil. She only knew that she had entrusted the thing to her ex-lover, Lufo, hoping that he might sell it for a reasonable fraction of its true value. This, Lufo had done.

Sandy had received sixty thousand pesos, roughly six thousand dollars at the current exchange rate, from Lufo. Lufo had held back a "small" commission. Sandy could not know that commission amounted to four hundred and forty thousand pesos for himself — and for his various wives in Texas and Mexico. So much for trust.

If Sandy entertained doubts about Lufo's honesty, she knew better than to voice them to Ted Quantrill. Once Ted realized that the fortunes of war and Wild Country had delivered the legendary Ember into Sandy's hands, he would know she also owned the steel bezel with its curious black diamond studs, its tiny yield chamber, and the alphanumeric readout on the back. If the jewel was worth half a million pesos, that handmade amulet was worth immensely more. Crafted in desperation by an imprisoned scientist, it was the world's only working miniature of a matter synthesizer.

Rumors of its existence had nearly died through the years. It no longer functioned because the computer terminal to which it had been linked was now fused into slag, a casualty of the rebellion in 2002. Quantrill had once argued that if the tiny thing really existed, it could topple governments; would change the face of economies across the globe and on New Israel's orbiting colonies. Sandy had known, even then, that she could set those changes in motion.

For better or worse, she had chosen to hide the thing away. Quantrill, she knew, would have delivered it to the only politician he trusted, Attorney General James Street. Knowing this, she would not share her secret until certain it was the right thing to do. In her youth and optimism, she felt that one day she would be certain, one way or the other. In the meantime, she felt that life was not bad, merely hard. If Ted Quantrill ever learned that she had kept this stunning technical toy a secret, her life might contain a Quantrill-sized void. Therefore, Sandy Grange spent half of her sixty thousand pesos on creature comforts and hoped she could invest the rest wisely.

Of course, once a technical breakthrough is achieved it cannot be hidden away forever. It had never occurred to Sandy that at least two governments were well on the way to rediscovering the secrets of the original Chinese matter synthesizer. Even if Sandy was more cautious than Pandora, others clamored to open the box.