No Contest

“Yes, General Elsey?”

“You will follow your orders as specified.”

“But, General Elsey, I won’t have any equipment left,” Simonec whined.

“Follow your orders,” General Elsey repeated firmly. Simonec hung up and grumbled. “Follow orders. Follow orders. Cut your own neck, Simonec. Might as well cut my own nuts off, too. I’ll be sitting here with nothing.”

He returned to the operations room, where the small overnight rotation was waiting expectantly.

“We gotta give them the Big Ear,” Simonec complained.

His operations team groaned. “We’ll be defunct. We’ll be sitting here with our thumbs up our butts.”

“You think I don’t know that? I’m gonna take the heat for it, too, so you grunts are getting off easy. Now give them the Big Ear. Maybe this time it will actually come back to us.”

Colonel Simonec bristled at the laughter from his underlings. Maybe he’d take up disciplinary actions to fill the long hours ahead of him.

The new DOHS hangar at Yuma operated-behind a privacy-fence almost twenty feet high, which was a joke. You had to be deaf and blind not to see the airships that launched from there night after night.

Tonight, the black blob that floated gracefully from the hangar was the biggest black blob of them all. It moved faster than the others. It was absolutely silent. Nobody on the night watch failed to witness the black stain blot out the sky. Officially, of course, nobody saw anything.

Dawn in Arizona was breathtaking. The Sun On Jo reservation, a hundred miles south of everywhere, was surrounded by desert that a white man would have called desolate. Sunny Joe Roam was not a white man, and when he looked at the land awakening to the sun he saw nothing but beauty.

Until he saw the wreckage.

It was larger than the other wrecks, and spread widely in an almost perfect circle.

“Winner. Boy.”

Sunny Joe’s grandson was helping to rebuild a hogan wall that had collapsed. They just didn’t build hogans like they used to, Sunny Joe thought. Then he recalled that he helped build that wall the first time, when he was around about fifteen.

“Coming,” Winner said, but Winner didn’t come for some ten minutes. That’s how long it took for them to settle the next log into place. Sunny Joe didn’t grow impatient. Reservation time didn’t pass the way white- man time passed, and the reservation was a better place because of it. But Sunny Joe was wondering why Winner didn’t have his own reasons for hurrying himself up there. After all, he had to know what Sunny Joe wanted him for. Didn’t he?

“Son of a bitch,” Winner said when he came to Sunny Joe’s side and spotted the distant wreckage.

“I thought you brought it down, boy. I was going to chew you a new one.” Sunny Joe knew Winner well enough. Winner wasn’t a liar. He acted however he pleased to act and always took responsibility for it.

“This is bad news, Sunny Joe,” Winner said. “Smith’s ignoring Remo’s warning.”

“He must think we got something important up our sleeves, but what in the world could it be?” Sunny Joe asked as they strolled swiftly to the crash site.

“Whatever it is, it’s important enough to waste bigger and better spy drones on. I didn’t hear this one. Didn’t even hear it hit the ground.”

They stood in the circle of destruction. The curved, blackened plate that rested on the earth at the center of the circle looked intact, but every other component was in fragments.

“That’s why,” Winner said. “It didn’t crash hard. No crater. It touched down then burned itself to pieces. I guess the Sun On Jo engineers will never figure out its military secrets now.”

“Guess not,” Sunny Joe agreed seriously, “So why did it come down? Was it one of them throwaways?”

“No. Just the opposite, I think,” Winner said as he picked through the slivers of chips and circuit boards.

Sunny Joe Roam didn’t touch the stuff. It wouldn’t tell him anything. What he knew about technology was limited to stunt-man devices used during his years as a Hollywood daredevil. What he would have liked to know right about now was why the thing crashed, if Winner didn’t crash it. Of course, he thought with a wry grimace, who else could have crashed it besides Winner and himself?

Something gold glinted in the morning sun. The two men waited for Freya to reach them, and only Winner shifted his stance impatiently.

“My ears were burning,” Freya announced.

“We were just about to start talking about you,” Sunny Joe confirmed. “What’d you do here, little daughter?”

She pulled a long folded strip of leather from the back pocket of her jeans and allowed it to fall open. It was a sling.

“I hit it with a rock,” she explained.

“Freya, I asked you to stay away from those things,” Winner said. “You don’t know what this man is capable of. He’s a murderer. He’ll order your execution with a phone call, just like he orders these things sent out to spy on us.”

“I can protect myself.”

“Not against this man. If he thinks you’re a threat, who knows what he’ll do?”