Conquistador (19 page)

“Evidently science and machinery are unlikely accidents,” Rolfe went on. “Fortunately for us!”

“Fortunately indeed!” Chumley said, returning to their business. “Which gives us this wonderful opportunity. But how many of my compatriots I can bring with me, that's another matter. Living here would be . . . well, very different. Not many natives, for one thing; not much labor available.”

“That's true of Western Australia on FirstSide as well,” Rolfe said. “And a number of them are relocating
there.
The Commonwealth will be a lot better than going back to England and the crowds and the drizzle.”

“But more are heading for Rhodesia and South Africa on, ah, FirstSide,” Chumley said.

Rolfe gave a wry smile. “And in anything from five to forty years, we'll be recruiting there,” he said. “Hate to say it, but that's the way I read events; it's not going to stop at the Zambezi. That's one reason I've restricted the import of native labor here; we
could
get any number of workers from the kings and warlords down in Mexico, but we're keeping our
bracero
program strictly limited. Inconvenient in the short run, I grant you—but I don't want my grandchildren to be facing a mass of half-assimilated Aztecs who've been reading Locke and Tom Paine, not to mention Marx. Even without foreign countries to stick their oars in, it would be too likely to end badly. Unless we went right back to ox-plows and handicrafts, and while I'm full of reverence for the good qualities of the past, that's more filial piety than I'm willing to invest.”

“A point, old boy, a most cogent point. I
will
certainly be able to get several hundred new settlers, possibly a thousand. And as you say, Rhodesia may provide more fairly soon, and I have contacts there—relatives and friends. They won't all be farmers and planters, of course. Small businessmen, skilled workmen, civil servants. A few white hunters, too—they'd
kill
for a chance to move here.”

“All useful,” Rolfe said. “Good pioneer stock, like my own English ancestors. And—”

A man in the black uniform of Gate Security came up. He held a sealed message, and his face was pale beyond the degree natural to one with his ash-blond Baltic complexion.

“Thank you, Otto,” Rolfe said, and tore it open, his face an unreadable mask as Lieutenant von Traupitz stood at stiff attention.

That changed to a sigh of relief. Conscious of the glances on him—Salvatore Colletta had noticed something, and so had Louisa Rolfe—he spoke loudly enough that those nearby could hear: “The Russians have backed down. They've accepted Kennedy's terms without qualification. It looks as if there won't be war on FirstSide after all.”

Chumley nodded and ran a hand over his thick white hair as a murmur spread through the crowd, and the laughter of relief from unacknowledged tension.

“That was too close for bloody comfort,” he said. “I've been glad the family was here already.”

“Yes,” Rolfe said. “Although who can tell how the next crisis will go? War now would have destroyed Europe and Russia and hurt America badly. Twenty years from now, with more bombs and missiles to carry them, it could end civilization FirstSide. Or even the human race.”

“That's something that will get you a few more men willing to move,” Chumley said shrewdly. “This is the ultimate in fallout shelters, old chap. Although . . . how well would we do here if the Gate were lost for good?”

“There are contingency plans,” Rolfe said, carefully noting the “we.” “Once the formalities are done, you'll have access to the secret files.”

They'd brought over a vast hoard of technical books and drawings and microfilms, for starters; stockpiles of machine tools and gauges and metals, of crucial parts and materials; and it was all constantly updated. The Commonwealth's own workshops and skilled men could keep civilization going here, after a fashion, at need. Still, a few score thousand people were not enough to keep up the full panoply of twentieth-century industrial technology. They would have to gear down and give up much of the more complex equipment until population built up. Of course, there would be advantages to that, as well. He hadn't founded this nation to have it follow exactly in FirstSide's footsteps.

“Still, I'd prefer it came much later, if ever,” he said. “Much, much later.”

I feel good,
Adrienne thought, as the descent began.
Wired, though. It's been a long time since anyone affected me the way Tom does. God, but he's cute. Sweet, too.

Her skin tingled, and all her senses seemed preternaturally sharp, so that even the flat neutral oil-ozone-metal odor of the helicopter seemed as deep and subtle as fine wine. She felt nimble and quick and clever, as if she could dance between the whirring blades of a harvester unharmed and handle this damned smuggling case with the flick of a finger.

The rolling foothills of the Coast Range were behind them, and the southern San Joaquin Valley spread beneath, turning from the thin green of spring to the dun-colored wasteland of summer drought. At two thousand feet she could see southward to where bare brown mountains and the Tehachapi Pass closed the southern end of the great north-south lowland; a little higher, and she could have looked north to see the San Joaquin join the Sacramento and flow into the delta before emptying into San Francisco Bay. A haze of heat lay over the land beneath her, though it was only an hour past dawn, and most of the game that hadn't moved up into higher country had retreated to the odd stream that drew a line of trees across the plain, or simply lain down to wait for nightfall.

A herd of mustangs drew a plume of dust across the barren land, spooked by the Black Hawk's shadow, and pronghorns scattered like drops of mercury on a block of ice. Ahead was a vivid, livid green, where the tule swamps spread around the great shallow lakes that occupied much of this end of the valley even in summer. Looking east she could see the harsh glitter of sunlight on water through the rippling sea of reeds twice the height of a man. Beyond them lay open blue, and beyond that rose the source of the life-giving flow—the snowpeaks of the Sierras. They floated salt white and ethereally lovely in the distance, turned to an eye-hurting brilliance by the morning sun, a wall between her homeland and the deserts and plains of the far interior.

A smoke flare cast a long streak of orange-red across the yellow-brown steppe not far away from the edge of the marsh. Nearby was the camp she'd come to find, vehicles parked in a square laager, a dozen hobbled horses in a swale that still kept a little green and had a single scraggly valley oak, and a set of tents grouped around campfires. The pilot nodded when she leaned forward into the crew section and pointed, his bulbous helmet and face shield making him insectile as he swung the helicopter sharply in a banking turn and cut toward the flare. It was suitably distant from the tents and the long row of wire cages covered by an awning; it would be just what she needed to send the birds into cataleptic shock. Suddenly the ground was closer; a falling-elevator sensation pressed her into the web seat, and hot dusty air flicked grit into her face as the side doors were opened and swung alongside the fuselage.

Adrienne hopped down with one hand holding the floppy-brimmed canvas hat on her head against the blast of the helicopter's slowing rotors; she could feel sweat starting out under the thin, tough cotton fabric of her bush jacket, and dry instantly in the blade-wash as the turbine howl of the engines died.

Schalk and Piet followed her toward the camp. Closer, she could see eight big Land Rovers, the Aussie SAS six-wheeled model designed FirstSide for long-range desert patrols, plus two Hummers and a Cheetah light armored car with paired machine guns in its little octagonal turret. A heavy-duty field radio sat on a table under a large tent with its sides rolled up; the other tents were rigged as shade-only as well, with bedrolls resting beneath them. Most of the thirty or so men there were in wolf-gray militia uniforms, wearing peaked caps with neck flaps and the von Traupitz double-lightning-bolt-and-eagle Family badge on their shoulders; there were three men in Frontier Scout khaki as well. The Scouts were the Commonwealth's wilderness and frontier experts. As a sideline, they handled relations with Indian remnants who'd survived the plagues.

She recognized both the commanders; the militia platoon was led by Heinrich von Traupitz, scion of a younger-son branch of that Family, and the Frontier Scout was a Settler by the name of Jim Simmons. Both were her contemporaries, in their twenties and of the third generation born in the Commonwealth; she'd met Heinrich socially any number of times since her sixth birthday party, and had worked with Simmons before. The troops were all young men doing their national service except for a grizzled sergeant; probably all from farming and ranching households affiliated with the von Traupitzes, too, and experienced hunters. That Family had their main holding southeast of the Rolfe domain in the Napa watershed, over the Vaca hills and out on the edge of settlement in the Suisun Valley, deeply rural even by her people's standards; they and their Settlers raised a fifth of New Virginia's wheat crop.

“Jim, good to see you,” she said, shaking their hands. “Hi, Heinrich. How's Caitlin, Cuz?”

“Last time we talked, she said, ‘I'm feeling well, though enormous.' ”

Members of the Thirty in the same generation usually called each other Cuz—Cousin—but Caitlin was one in the literal sense, daughter of one of Adrienne's paternal uncles. She'd always been fond of the girl in an elder-sister fashion, and Heinrich was a nice enough sort. For a von Traupitz.

Unlike the older generation,
she thought with slight distaste.

Their founder had been a colonel—in
Das Reich,
a Waffen-SS division with an unsavory reputation, if that wasn't redundant, and a nasty piece of work personally. The third generation were quite human, most of them. Of course, Heinrich's mother had been an O'Brien.

Heinrich smiled back; he was a black-haired man with amber-colored eyes and pale skin that glistened with sunblock.

“I
would
like to be back for the birth; it's our first, you know,” he went on. “I suspect my men wouldn't turn down a cold beer at the Mermaid Café, either.”

He looked over her shoulder. The Black Hawks were Commission property, usually used as air ambulances to bring in patients from outlying settlements. This one had been fitted out in “militarized” mode, with stub wings bearing a six-barreled Gatling minigun on the left side and rocket pods on the right.

“Fancy carriage there, Cuz,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Is there something I should know about, or is this the Old Man's usual overkill?”

“The 'copter is staying to take me back once we've got the cargo,” she replied, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. “It's just what was available.”

The pilot and his assistant were out, doing a maintenance check on the engines and weapons systems, something of which she heartily approved. Her years as a Gate Security agent had taught her that if you didn't take care of equipment, it wouldn't take care of you when you needed it. And while you might not need any particular item often, when you did you'd need it
very
badly.

“Can't be over too soon for me, Adri,” Heinrich said. “If I owned this place and hell, I'd live in hell and rent it out. They say
our
area is hot and flat!” He slapped at a mosquito and cursed as it squashed against his neck in a smear of blood and sweat. “Jim and his boys did all the work. All
we've
done is sit and stare at dust-devils and the occasional pronghorn and listen to our frying skin crackle and pop.”

“You might as well get packed, then. Sorry I don't have time for the social amenities, Heinrich, but this is Gate Security business, and I have to wrap it up fast. Then you can get your men back to civilization and cold beer.”

The soldier nodded, shrugged, slapped another mosquito and walked off toward his troops, calling orders. There was a chorus of cheers, and they began striking camp with commendable enthusiasm.

The Frontier Scout laughed as they walked toward the cages; he was about her height, with sun-streaked brown hair, a close-cropped gingery beard and blue eyes startling in his tanned countenance. His broad-brimmed hat had a leopard-skin band, and old sweat had left rings of salt stain on his jacket, still visible beneath the new ones despite multiple washings; a leather thong around his neck bore grizzly-bear teeth and lion claws.