Conquistador (64 page)

Back right after we got shanghaied through the Gate, I could've sworn I'd hate her guts forever. Either I'm a very weak person, or love conquers all, or maybe it was just a snit. Or maybe I'm starting to like this place a lot and resent being brought here a lot less. I don't like all the methods, but the results certainly aren't bad. I like the way you don't have to wade through layers of bureaucrats to get something done, for example. But is that because of the way John Rolfe built this place, or just the scale? With the population of one medium-small city,
could
you have as much paperwork?

The checklist went quickly. They put on their headsets; she handed ear protectors, the kind you wore on a firing range, to Tully and Sandra before she flipped the ignition switches. It had been a while since he'd flown in anything this small, and he'd forgotten how loud piston engines were, radials particularly, and particularly with the side windows open. The port engine lit with a bang and a burst of black smoke from the exhausts and then settled down into a steady
rumm-rumm-rumm
as the twin-bladed prop spun into a silver disk; then the starboard followed suit. The buzzing roar made speaking futile, although the muffling earphones helped; Adrienne's finger pointed out the essential gauges—oil, manifold pressure, temperature, RPM.

“Ready for takeoff, tower,” she said.

“Cleared,
No Biscuit,
” a man's voice returned casually. “San Diego's expecting you sometime late tomorrow. Check in a couple of times, would you?”

“Roger, wilco,” she said. “Over and out, Napa control.”

Adrienne worked the throttles and turned the
No Biscuit
into the wind from the south. Tom felt a small flutter of excitement as the nose came up and the wheels came off the concrete; he always did at the beginning of a trip. With it was a bit of the acid apprehension he'd felt getting into transport planes, with a hostile reception waiting at the other end. It wasn't as bad; they weren't going to be seeing any action soon, but it was there. This wasn't a vacation, after all: It was an op, even if the strangest one in his life.

“Do the landing gear, would you?” Adrienne shouted in his ear. At his questioning look, she pointed to a lever between the seats.

“Well, we are back to basics,” he muttered unheard, gripped it, flipped off the restraining strap, and began pumping it up and down. The two wheels under the wings and the nosewheel in front of them came up with a rattle and clank of gears, closing with a sigh of rubber gaskets.

They climbed steadily to five thousand feet; it got chilly enough that he zipped up his jacket. There were patches of fog over the bay, and a dense bank of it veiling the site of San Francisco . . .
or New Brooklyn,
he thought. Most of the rest of the Bay Area was clear; he could see Mount Diablo to their left, and Mount Tamalpais over to the right in Marin, rising out of fog like a peak in a dream, densely green with virgin woodland almost to the peak. He grunted a little then, as if hit in the belly.

At his companion's inquiring look, he shouted: “It keeps hitting me—what
isn't
there.”

She nodded. “Same thing in reverse! Only it's worse, FirstSide. Like seeing someone you love horribly disfigured.”

The plane kept out over the water, a thick fringe of marsh and tide flat ringing the larger bay, a deep indigo blue broken here and there by the whitecaps or the larger V of a ship's wake. Once they lurched aside to dodge a flock of birds rising from the edges of the bay; dark shapes hurtled past, but nothing crashed into their wings or the props.

“You should see what it's like from September on, when the waterfowl arrive!” Adrienne said. “Have to veer inland then, or out to sea!”

They veered east then, to the inner edge of the Santa Clara valley; even through the engine roar, he could hear Tully's long whistle. Somehow seeing Silicon Valley gone, nothing but tawny ranchland interspersed with checkerboard of fields and a few hamlets, drove things home.

I keep feeling I've adjusted to the
reality
of this,
he thought.
And then something new hits me.

“I'm avoiding the Colletta domain,” Adrienne said. “Not that I think they'd try anything as raw as shooting us down—especially when they think I'm taking myself out of the game. No need to take unnecessary chances. Why don't you try her for a while? Get a feel for how she handles.”

She leaned back, taking her hands from the yoke as he took over the copilot's set of controls, glad of a distraction from the momentary sense of being adrift from everything solid and real. The
No Biscuit
rocked a little as his feet settled on the rudders; a simple design didn't necessarily mean one that was simple to fly. Turbulence buffeted the yoke in his hands and vibrated up his feet; he kept one eye on the horizon, and the other on the airspeed and altitude indicators and the compass. The
No Biscuit
was doing a steady 110 mph, on a heading that would take them straight southwest to Monterey.

Nice and level . . . so, not too bad,
he decided, trying a gentle climb, an equally cautious dive, and a bank right and left.
No particular vices, but I wouldn't want to try acrobatics in it.

Soon they were over Monterey Bay. He looked down and grinned; nothing there where the city had been but a small fishing village; there was a line of cultivation along the Pajaro River, reaching inland along the south flank of the hills, and a scattering of farms around the lower Salinas. Away from those the land rolled wild: forested uplands, tawny grass studded with oak trees on the fringes of the rivers, dense marsh and slough where water ran down to the sea, long curves of beach. He took the plane down, leveling off again at about a thousand feet.

“That's the Batyushkov domain, up under the edge of the Santa Cruz,” Adrienne said. “Then the Morrisons—from Pennsylvania, originally—around Salinas town, and the Sanderses, farther up the river, and the Bauers in the Carmel Valley.”

“I always loved this part of the country,” he said. “And the Big Sur, especially.”

“Here, you look. I'll fly,” Adrienne said indulgently.

He unshipped the binoculars clipped above the windscreen and opened the side window again, peering out—the slipstream wasn't too bad. A pod of humpbacks was moving south along the coast perhaps half a mile out, several score—possibly hundreds, from the way one surfaced and spouted every ten seconds or so, a bit early for the usual migration. They were breaching, too: throwing themselves up out of the water, doing a little twist and dropping back with a huge fountain of spray, probably from sheer exuberance. One of their kind had met some sort of misfortune and lay dead on the beach, swarming with gulls and . . . yes, half a dozen condors! Plus at least three grizzlies, feeding at widely spaced spots along the fifty-foot carcass.

“Where's this spot you wanted to stop overnight?” he said.

“A little farther down the coast,” she replied. “About an hour's flight. This—all the uplands south of here, the Big Sur country and the Santa Lucia range—is a Commission reserve. Wildlife and hunting preserve—no settlement at all. But there's a place I'm very fond of, and it would be good tradecraft to stop there.” A grin. “And fun, too.”

He took the controls again for a while, then switched off with Tully; just watching the surf-washed shore passing by below was endless pleasure. Still, he wasn't unhappy when Adrienne took charge once more and began to circle. For one thing, he'd gotten spoiled in the two months he'd been here, used to quiet all the time.

“Bloody good to be back on the edge,” Jim Simmons said, stretching out in the chair and taking a sip of cold beer, savoring the hundred-degree heat and the empty plains and bare rock hills that lay northward.

The Frontier Scout station in Antelope Valley had been founded in the late 1970s, tucked into the northern slope of the San Gabriel Mountains and near a good pass; it served to protect the growing settlements along the coasts and in the basins north of San Diego. The station had grown a little itself in the years since. The original adobe blockhouse and wall now stood among a cluster of cottages, a barn and stable, fenced paddocks, two battered six-wheel Land Rovers, a few eucalyptus and pepper trees, a small grove of pomegranates and pears. A windmill clanked away beside the storage tank, drawing water for houses and garden plots from a deep well, and pumping some to a solar heater. A thousand yards away the small chapel and grange of a Franciscan missionary settlement stood amid more greenery and the tattered, ratty wickiups of its two dozen converts, many of them mixed-bloods; New Virginia's Catholics included a sprinkling of zealots displeased with the changes in the Church after Vatican II.

A small band of nomads who had come in to barter or see the missionary doctors had camped under the rim of a cliff not far away with their leather tents and horses and light carts.

For the rest the arid wilderness about was much as he remembered it: creosote and sage and the odd Joshua tree, sun baking down out of a sky bleached a faded blue, spicy-sulfury scents of desert herbs. Few New Virginians came this way except eccentrics and hunters and the odd trader interested in the turquoise and aquamarines the natives brought out of the wastelands. The Antelope Valley was fertile enough when you had deep wells and power-driven pumps, but it was ferociously hot in summer, often chilly in winter, and there was still plenty of land lying unclaimed closer to the coast. Even the San Fernando Valley had only a handful of full-time Settler residents; it would be a long time before that tide flowed over the San Gabriels in strength.

Simmons had been to Antelope Station before, posted here once or twice, and for two years as a child while his father was operating in the region. He still wasn't a specialist in the area or its peoples, and Dirk Brodie was.

“I'm just trying to get a feel for conditions here,” Simmons said soothingly. “The committee's sort of worried.”

Brodie thumped his hand down on the arm of his chair—not the first time a beer bottle had made that trip enclosed in his fist, from the look of the wood.

“Now they get worried,” he growled.

He was a lean, tall man, with rusty black hair cropped short and a leathery face. There were deep wrinkles beside his eyes, despite his being a year short of thirty.

“I've been reporting that the tribes are restless for better than two years now,” Brodie said.

“What've you heard?”

“For starters, trade has dropped off. And the deep-desert nomads, they've gotten hold of a lot of muskets. Not too bad in itself—”

Simmons nodded; the official thinking was that an Indian with a flintlock smoothbore was no more dangerous than one with a bow, and once they were used to muskets they'd be dependent on the Commonwealth for ammunition and repairs.

“—but it's damned odd. They're getting other trade goods too, from somewhere—are you people up in the Central Valley letting more through than the records show?” He sighed as Simmons shook his head. “Well, somebody is,” he said. “And they've been raiding more than usual, too—I've been thinking of calling for a punitive expedition, and I don't like doing that.”

“Which clans?” Simmons asked.

“Akaka, Othi-I and Kapata, mostly,” he said. “The Ravens, the Salts, and the Turtles—but there's word of a new war leader, Swift Lance, and that he's been Dreaming. And the clans have been Singing his Dreams.”

The
No Biscuit
sank until it was flying parallel to a series of high east-west ridges and well before their crests. Their feet rose out of the surf to make a series of U-shaped pockets; some of them had small patches of beach between them, and in some water seethed white over rock. Deep forest ran up the canyons, thick with Douglas fir and twisted Monterey pine and redwood. The plane shook, shuddered, buffeted by the updrafts along the steep slopes.