Conquistador (59 page)

“Ah . . .” Tom said. “That's interesting.”

Because I feel just like that now, and don't want to admit it,
he thought, and then shrugged hopelessly as he saw her sly grin and knew she'd followed the thought.
Let's face it, for someone of my tastes, this place has a lot of the features I'd pick for Wish Fulfillment Land. Of course, in other ways . . .

The map room at Seven Oaks was an annex off the library; there were big tables and slanted desks, atlases, rack-boxes to hold maps and graphics, and a smell of paper and book dust and leather, mixed with greenery from the open windows giving on a courtyard garden. There was also a big thin-film screen for calling up data, and a printer that could handle large maps at need.

There were seven people in the room: Tom and Adrienne, Tully, Piet Botha and Sandra Margolin, plus a brown-haired young man named Jim Simmons, and a silent Indian called Kolo in a breechclout who crouched in a corner, his black eyes intent. They were Frontier Scouts, evidently something like his job with Fish and Game mixed with the sort of thing he'd done in the army Rangers.

The stock of paper maps included an excellent series for the western part of North America; they were marked in the lower left-hand corner with the words
Commission Cartographic Authority.
He supposed that the basic geography would be the same as FirstSide, minus the draining and damming and clearing of the past three hundred years—there might be differences in the details, the course of rivers and so forth. Evidently the Commission had spent a good deal of effort over the past sixty years to keep theirs current.

The land was familiar, but man's borders were utterly strange. The map showed the outlines of the domains: a thick clump around the Bay Area, an outlier around Puget Sound, and another series down the coast of Southern California culminating in a big blotch in the lowlands between Santa Monica and San Diego. A trail of dots ran from Sacramento to the Mother Lode mines, then up through the Lake Tahoe area and from there into Nevada; they faded off to a last tiny outpost on the site of Denver.

“All right,” he said, moving his hand from Oregon to Baja. “It's unlikely in the extreme that the enemy would be trying to train their clandestine force anywhere close to the coast. Too many people, too many aircraft.”

Though that's an irony,
he thought as the others nodded.
Two hundred thousand all the way from Portland to San Diego! And a couple of hundred planes all up, including little puddle-jumpers.

“At the same time, they have to be close enough to Rolfeston to strike at the Gate. Unfortunately, with a C-130, that means anywhere within two thousand miles—two thousand with a full load, more if you trade off cargo for fuel.”

“Good plane, the Herky Bird,” Tully added. “I spent a lot of time aboard them myself—and they're still making them, which is not bad considering the design was finalized in 1951.”

“We've been using them since 1958,” Adrienne said. “They're our standard heavy transport and passenger aircraft . . .”

“And Colletta Air owns dozens,” Piet Botha said. “Sorry, has owned dozens—every once in a while one is lost or wears out. Or so the reports they file on Nostradamus say.”

“Or they could just divert some at the last moment,” Adrienne said. “Most of the pilots would do whatever Giovanni Colletta tells them unless they had very good reasons not to; they're part of his affiliation, after all. Telling them to go to point X would be simple enough, and once the troops were on board they'd be committed.”

The Indian said nothing.
But I suspect he's following the conversation much better than he lets on,
Tom thought. There was a disturbing, feral quality to the man's gaze, and the way he squatted and held himself was subtly different from anything he'd seen before.
Of course, I've never seen an Indian whose people haven't been in contact with us for a century at least.

“Ten Hercules would be enough to carry a thousand infantry and their equipment, which is more than they'd need,” Tom pointed out. “Cruising at just under four hundred miles an hour. At full range, that means anywhere within
this
radius.”

He picked up a compass, set it to the right distance, and scribed a three-quarter circle with the center on the Gate. “Everything within this line. That's half the continent. Let's start eliminating what we can.”

“They wouldn't want to be farther away than they must,” Simmons said. “To hit fast when they go for it, and to cut down on the number of trips they'd have to make to bring in supplies while they're getting ready.”

“Yeah, the usual logistics problems,” Tully said. “Five hundred men minimum, plus some support personnel . . . who also eat their heads off and need bunks . . . say seven hundred to twelve hundred all up, even with a real high teeth-to-tail ratio, and more if they've got more than five hundred troops. That's a couple of tons of food a day, plus water, housing, uniforms, stores, spare parts, medical supplies, barracks or tents, fuel. . . .”

“Cover,” Adrienne said thoughtfully; she was sitting with a pad of paper in front of her, tapping her chin with a pen. “It would be somewhere remote, but with something going on to cover a lot of transport.
And
somewhere they could produce some of the supplies themselves, to keep the transport needs to a minimum.”

Tom looked at the map again. All the mountainous parts of California and the Pacific Northwest, not to mention the deserts, were marked in green as
Permanent Commission Reserve.
That meant they were national parks, near enough; shades of the color indicated whether they were slated for sustained-yield timbering, hunting preserve attached to one of the Families, or absolute wilderness. The coastal valleys like the Napa or the Salinas or the Santa Ynez were settled, or parts of them were. Sections of the southern basins around the site of LA and San Diego were too; the rest, and the Central Valley, were part reserve, part unallocated land waiting to be handed out as the population grew.

“I don't think there's much doubt as to the where, when you take all that into account,” Adrienne said.

She pulled a thick reference work down from a shelf and began to thumb through it:
Territorial Domains and Possessions of the Thirty Families, 2007 Edition.

“ ‘Chapter Seven: The Colletta Family. Primary domain . . . estates in Hawaii . . .' Aha!” she said, and Tom felt a hunter's grin appear on his face. She went on: “ ‘Owens Valley: Colletta outlying possession, granted in 1962 . . .' right, the Old Man told me about that once—something to do with keeping old Salvo Colletta sweet after taking Hawaii away from him. Hunting lodge and small airstrip until 2005; then the Collettas petitioned the committee and were granted permission to open the Cerro Gordo silver mines; construction work began the following spring. Hmmm. Quote: ‘Doubts were expressed as to the profitability of the venture,' end quote.”

Tom ran one thick finger down the Sierra Nevada until he came to its southeastern edge. It ended in some of highest peaks in the continental United States; Mount Whitney was over fourteen thousand feet. The less lofty Inyo Range paralleled that north-south scarp to the east; between them was a long, flat trough, with a river running down it to a sizable lake—the Owens Valley, and Owens Lake. On FirstSide the river was the source of a lot of LA's water, brought down from the snowmelt of the Sierras' peaks and glaciers and then over the deserts and mountains via aqueduct and siphon and canal. The valley floor was high semidesert; right across the Inyos was Death Valley, much lower and hotter—a desert, plain and simple, with no “semi” about it.

Southward was the Mohave; not as bad as Death Valley, but pretty damned bleak, as he knew by experience.

“Bingo,” he said softly. “Just far enough away to be remote—”

“There isn't anywhere within the zone we control that's
more
remote,” Simmons said. “No overland traffic at all—everything goes in and out by air. It might as well be an island.”

“
Yes!
” Adrienne said, hissing the word. “The Collettas operate the mines there under license from the Commission—nobody would ask any questions, as long as the silver output was consistent with the ore body and the labor they were putting into it.”

Tom peered more closely at the map, then got out a smaller-scale one that covered the southern Sierras. “I've been through there FirstSide,” he said. “The old Cerro Gordo mines are up this side canyon, just east of Owens Lake, or what used to be Owens Lake.”

“This isn't FirstSide, thank God,” Simmons said, leaning forward and then wincing slightly. “Owens Lake is very much there, a hundred and twenty square miles of it. It's officially called Lake Salvatore, of course.”

Tom frowned. “But if the Collettas are supposed to be operating a silver mine here and they aren't really pulling out silver . . .”

“. . . then they could slip the silver in from their share of other mines,” Adrienne said. “The committee checks pretty carefully to see that none of the Families running the smaller mines shorts the Commission. They aren't going to look further if the amount
is
right—it's the same trick we use FirstSide, with the mining properties we own there. If the Collettas want to waste money on a marginal operation, who cares? Most of the production comes from the big digs that the Commission runs directly, anyway.”

He whistled. “Perfect, then. Hmmm . . . an aerial recon run? Visit by an inspector?”

He looked around; Adrienne, Simmons and Botha were all shaking their heads.

The woman explained: “First, there probably wouldn't be much to see from the air; not if they've kept it quiet this long. Second, that would let them know what
we
know, or expect—which might trigger off the coup we're trying to prevent. And yes, they'd know the minute the plane lifted off. There aren't enough airports in the Commonwealth to keep that secret, and you'd have to use military aircraft, either the committee's or requisitioned from one of the Families. Not to mention that if
I
were running this, I'd have radar surveillance running from Mount Whitney, and maybe some light ground-to-air missiles, if I could manage to smuggle 'em in from FirstSide.”

“Hercs would be perfect for this,” Tully said. “They're made to lift from grass and dirt strips. Anything hard and level would do.”

“And the Owens would be a good place to grow supplies, too,” Tom added. “Plenty of water, this side of the Gate. That means we can't judge their maximum numbers by the amount of supplies they ship in.”

They sat and looked at each other, thinking. Sandra went out and came back with a tray of sandwiches and soda; Tom munched at his—excellent thin-cut roast beef with horseradish—and went right on thinking. The soda was a copy of Dr Pepper, the old-fashioned kind.

“The only way I can see to settle this is to go in on the ground,” he said at last. “A small party, overland, could get definite well-documented proof and then get it out again. I take it your grandfather could move once he got that?”

Adrienne nodded. “Not a problem. The committee would suspend the Collettas and the Batyushkovs and any other Family involved—raising private forces beyond their quotas, a no-no, arming natives with modern weapons, a really
serious
no-no, and attempted overthrow of the state, pretty well the ultimate no-no. They'd be far too outnumbered, without surprise, and with all the other Families prepared and united against them.”

“Well, let's get in on the ground, then,” Tom said.

Again, he was conscious of the way the others looked at him—the ones who'd spent a long time here in the Commonwealth, or who'd been born here.

“Easier said than done,” Adrienne said. She stood and traced her own lines on the map. “You could try to get a small party in through the San Joaquin, south to Lake Tulare and then over the Sierras. Trouble is, you'd be like a bug on a plate coming in that way, not to mention everyone seeing you as you went through the Carquinez.”

“Well, you could come straight up from LA and through the eastern Mohave,” Tom said, drawing the pathway. “It's only a couple of hundred . . . ah.”

Botha and Simmons nodded, and began to speak at the same time. They exchanged glances, and the big Afrikaner spoke: “Man, there aren't any roads across the desert, except for the one to the borax mines—I live just south of there, on the sea side of the mountains. You might get a caravan of good four-wheel-drive bakkies through, but then again you might not. You'd have to take all your fuel . . . and you'd be bliddy conspicuous dragging a plume of dust, eh?”

Simmons nodded. “The only way to do it without hanging up a HURRAH, WE'RE HERE! sign would be to go on horseback. Over the Krugersberg—the Santa Monicas—through the San Fernando Valley, over the San Gabriels, then north to the Tehachapi and up the eastern front of the Sierras—”

“
Nie, nie,
” Botha said. “Too bliddy obvious,
kerel.
That's the easiest way across the Mohave. We must swing further east, through the springs at Atolia.”

Simmons winced slightly. “Love punishment, do you, Piet? You'd have to travel mostly by night . . . but you'd do that anyway, in the Mohave.”

Unexpectedly, the Indian spoke, mixing weirdly accented English with his native tongue. Simmons looked at him and replied in the same, then addressed the rest.

“Then there's the Mohave nomads, the”—he spoke something unpronounceable.

The Indian spoke up again: “
Kinun'ya'tuk.
Means ‘mixed-up,' or ‘many tongues.' People from all peoples.”