Conquistador

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Now, this is the way I like to go on an op,” Tully said. “Landed gentry of goddamned Little Rock, that’s me. Natural affinity for horses. Make way, ye peasants!”

“You’re not falling off anymore, at least,” Sandra replied.

When I stop feeling vaguely guilty, I’m really going to enjoy this place, Tom thought as he watched. And when I don’t have the prospect of a long deadly hike through deserts and savage hostile nomads toward a fortress stuffed full of heavily armed Aztec mercenaries. Of course, if I get a chance to get back, all bets are off. He’d made that clear.

He and the object of his thoughts stood watching side by side, each with a foot on the lowest plank of the board fence, leaning on posts with their elbows—his at breastbone level, hers just under her chin. Tully was staying on better; he didn’t have any particular gift for horses, but he did have good balance, excellent coordination and physical training to draw on. And falls didn’t faze him, which had won him a good deal of respect from Sandra, who had evidently been put on her first pony about the time she graduated from diapers.

Tom wasn’t surprised in the least; he’d never yet met anything in the way of physical danger that did faze Roy. He had the scrappy determination of a terrier.

And if we win, and then there’s no way to get out of here… I won’t die of grief, he thought, breathing in the mixed scent of horses, pepper trees, warm dust and greenery.

He’d miss his brother Lars and his sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, but he didn’t see them more than once a year anyway. And he had no other close ties….

“Elbows in, and don’t flap them!” Sandra called to her pupil. “You’re supposed to hold the reins, not try to fly like a crow!”

Tully grinned and obeyed, turning his mount with leg pressure. It broke into a canter—Sandra called again, telling him to keep his knees bent to absorb the harder gait—then into a gallop, and rose over an obstacle of poles and barrels.

“Not bad,” Adrienne said judiciously. “He’s really a very quick learner.”

“Glad you like him,” Tom said, and found that he was. I keep getting these irrational bursts of benevolence, he thought. Must be love.

“Jim Simmons heard from Frontier Scout HQ this morning,” Adrienne said more softly. “He and his tracker will be taking a coastal schooner down to San Diego—he’s been assigned to look into the tribal raiding there.”

“Convenient,” he said, and she grinned back at him.

“And how are we to make our descent on the southland look casual?” he asked.

“By making it casual,” she said. “Hmmm. Can you fly a light airplane?”

“Yah, you betcha,” Tom said. “Roy too. Fish and Game liked its field people to qualify.”

“Then we’ll—”

One of the stable hands came up and cleared her throat. “Miz Rolfe,” she said. “Fella from the paper wants to talk to you.”

Adrienne muttered an impolite word under her breath. “Fetch him, then, Terry.”

The reporter was a photographer too, carrying the latest digital model. To Tom’s eyes it clashed horribly with the suit and snap-brimmed fedora and pencil-thin trimmed mustache; it was like a computer terminal in It Happened One Night. He looked to be about thirty, with reddish-brown short-cut hair and hazel eyes and a sharp, foxy face.

“Miz Rolfe,” the man said, “you may not remember me—”

“How could I forget?” she said with a charming smile, extending a hand. “Charlie Carson, isn’t it? Society news column for City and Domain magazine? I remember the article you did when I got back from Stanford.”

“Yeah,” he said, flushing a little with pleasure. “That was the first under my own byline. Nice of you to recall. I was wondering if you could give me a few words on the Toni Bosco matter? And maybe a picture?”

Well, I don’t think reporters were ever that polite, FirstSide, he thought.

Adrienne pursed her lips, seemed lost in thought for a minute, and then answered: “I think I might, Charlie… provided you do me a favor and keep quiet about my medium-term plans.” She glanced at Tom. “I have… well, an announcement I don’t want leaking. I promise you’ll get it first, when and if, if you’ll humor me.”

“No problem, Miz Rolfe,” he said earnestly. “I appreciate that.”

“Ask away.”

“The Colletta has asked for a judicial session of the committee to investigate the death of his collateral, Anthony Bosco. Do you have any comment?”

“Just that, with respect, the Colletta should remember that Gate Security has plenary authority when operating FirstSide; that no Commonwealth court has jurisdiction over actions done there; and that that applies to the committee sitting in judicial session as well. I killed Anthony Bosco—and I make no bones about it—while on FirstSide, and while he was resisting arrest by an officer of Gate Security, and while himself shooting at Gate Security operatives. And killing one, in fact: Schalk van der Merwe, who left a widow and three small children. Anthony Bosco endangered the Gate secret and put himself outside the law; he fell on his own deeds. Instead of criticizing the Gate Security Force, the Colletta should be taking measures to exercise a tighter discipline on his collaterals.”

“Can I quote you on that, Miz Rolfe?” the reporter said, nearly slavering.

“You may,” she said.

The questions went on for a few more minutes. The reporter finished with, “And what are your immediate plans, Miz Rolfe? The ones you don’t mind people knowing, that is,” he finished hastily.

“You can say that I’m going on an extended holiday,” she said, then smiled. “Just between me and thee, Charlie, and off the record, I’ll be flying down the coast, and then looking for a crew to take Sea-Witch”—she turned to Tom for an instant—“That’s the family sailing yacht—take Sea-Witch on a cruise to Hawaii, with some friends.”

She made it plain who the friend was in the way she looked at Tom. He felt himself grinning back—this was misdirection, but the look itself was quite genuine.

“Thanks a million, Miz Rolfe!” the reporter said.

“Disinformation?” Tom asked, when the reporter had gone and they were out of earshot of anyone else.

“Precisely.” Adrienne grinned and squeezed his arm. “Charlie won’t publish anything he says he won’t, but he’ll stop gossiping when he stops breathing. Giovanni Colletta will find it a lot more believable coming as a rumor than as a magazine story, which he’d assume was planted. With any luck he’ll really believe I’m off to the islands with my new boyfriend in tow and nothing on my mind but making out like a mad mink under the coconut trees on Waikiki. He’s got that Madonna-whore thing, bad. Give you three guesses which category he puts me in.”

Tom gave her a round of applause, grinning. “And you’ll have this yacht leave, too, won’t you? With arrangements that’ll make it look like we’re on board.”

“Hell, yes,” she said. Then she hugged him and sighed. “Do you have any idea how nice it is to find a man who doesn’t feel scared of a woman who can think?”

“Ah…” Advantages of a FirstSide upbringing, he didn’t say. “The brains are up to the standards of the rest of the package,” he said.

By the light in her leaf-green eyes, it was the right thing to say. She pulled his head down beside hers and whispered, “But while we’re here, why don’t we go make out like mad mink?”

“So,” Tully said, rubbing his hands and looking around like a ten-year-old in a candy store, “what does Santa have for the good little boys and girls?”

Tom looked around the armory too; everyone in the prospective scouting party was there, except for the Indian tracker, who preferred to stick with his native tools. Hunting weapons were in one section of the long room; military stuff was in another, and in the center were workbenches, a reloading setup and a remarkably complete set of gunsmith’s tools. Light came from two small barred windows high up on either wall, and overhead fluorescents. There was a comfortingly familiar scent of Break Free oil, propellant, brass and metal.

“I presume everyone’s got their own rifle,” Tom said, and they all nodded. “Now, we’re going to look, not fight, but it’s always nice to have some insurance—you can sing or make love when you feel like it, but you fight when the other guy feels like it.”

“How about this?” Jim Simmons said, taking down a light machine gun from the rack. He looked at the two FirstSiders. “It’s a Bren, rechambered for the thirty-aught-six round.”

Tom had heard of the classic design, but never used one before. It had a bi-pod at the front, pivoted on the takeoff for the gas cylinder, and a top-mounted thirty-round box. There was an alternative C-mag saddle drum holding seventy-five rounds. Tom hefted it; lighter than the 240s he’d used in the army.

“All right; might be nice to have an authoritative backup… I presume you can use it?” Simmons nodded, and so did Botha and Adrienne. “You can give Roy and me—and Sandra—a quick course on it.”

Adrienne pulled out three submachine guns—he recognized the unorthodox shape of a Belgian PN90, its synthetics and molded shapes an odd contrast with the angular wood and metal of the older designs. These had a built-in handgrip near the front, a laser designator and collimating sight, and a fifty-round magazine of transparent plastic that lay along the top of the boxy weapon.

“These might be handy,” she said.

“Good,” he said. Like any workman, he took a proprietary interest in his tools. They had only a few days to make sure everyone was familiar with all the tools at hand. “If it came to a close-quarter firefight, those would be handy. Now…”

He lifted down a wooden crate and took out blocks of a rubbery plastic substance, timers, detonators and wireless control units.

“Who knows how to handle Semtex?” he went on cheerfully.

“That’s her: the No Biscuit.”

“No Biscuit?” Tom asked, walking around the small twin-prop plane and doing a quick check.

“That’s what my flight instructor said whenever I did something stupid. ‘Bad student! Bad! No biscuit!’”

The little amphibian was parked on a municipal airport just south of Napa town—an X of mown grass strips, a couple of timber-framed hangars, a receiving shed and a rudimentary two-story control tower with a wind sock, all drowsing under a clear blue August sky. The air was warm at noon but still carried a hint of morning’s freshness, the green damp smell of the marshes to the south, sun-dried grass and a tang of gasoline, solvents and varnish. The craft had a tricycle undercarriage and a boat-shaped lower body; the wheel struts had sections of shaped board attached, with rubber gaskets to form a tight seal with the rest of the hull when they were retracted. The wing was high-mounted with pontoons at the tips, and there were two modest radial engines in smooth cowlings stained with streaks of black from the exhausts.

Closer inspection confirmed his first impression: The No Biscuit was built with stone-ax simplicity. The hull was a monocoque of laminated spruce with spruce springers and frames; so was the wing, apart from the main spar. The controls weren’t just nondigital—they were plain old cables, not even any hydraulic assist. There were some modern electronics on the control panel, flat-screen displays for radar and such, but they were extras. He looked around and saw several more just like her, and a few others with tubby cylindrical bodies suitable for a land-based aircraft, but the same wings, engines and control surfaces.

“All designed and made here in the Commonwealth,” Adrienne confirmed pridefully. “Except for some engine parts and the cockpit electronics. We could make the engine parts and do without the digital stuff, at need, even if we’re not up to making a C-130 or Black Hawk from scratch.”

Tom looked back at the Hummer parked beside the reception block while Adrienne went through her preflight check. Tom had taken the sensitive and heavy parts of their baggage himself, on the take-no-chances principle, since he was something of a demolitions expert and Roy wasn’t. Tully and Sandy were supposed to be bringing along the rest of the bags. Instead they were horsing around, something that suddenly developed into serious lip-locking. He sighed; on the one hand, he’d seen it developing over the past weeks, and he certainly didn’t begrudge his friend finding someone. On the other hand, when Roy fell he tended to fall hard.

Adrienne looked up from checking the engines. “Glad of that,” she said quietly. “Sandy deserves some happiness, particularly with someone who doesn’t care who her maternal grandmother was.” A slight snort. “We Rolfes had something similar in our early history, certainly!”

“Ah…” Tom hesitated. “Tully’s a great guy, you betcha, but he’s had… problems that way. Two divorces.”

“Third time lucky, maybe,” Adrienne said. “And it’s easier to stay married here. Fewer distractions; people stay put more.”

She gave a piercing whistle and the two broke apart; Sandra looked embarrassed and Tully didn’t, but then… I could count the number of times I’ve seen Roy embarrassed without taking off my socks, Tom thought. I mean, look at that Hawaiian shirt he’s wearing!

They loaded the luggage into a cargo compartment, through gull-wing doors that opened just behind the six-seat passenger cabin. Tom took particular care with several small brass-bound leather trunks. There was no problem with carrying weapons openly here in the Commonwealth; outside the towns and the more settled farming zones everyone went ironed, and even inside them it didn’t raise much of an eyebrow. The explosives and night-sight gear in those, though…

The rest of the gear was exactly what they would have packed for the holiday she’d described to Charlie Carson—the best way to look like you were doing something was to actually do it. Then he opened the door at the rear of the passenger compartment—it swung upward too—and handed everyone up. There was a wheeled stairway around somewhere, but boosting people gave him an excuse to grab Adrienne below the hips and lift her effortlessly high over his head.

“Show-off,” she said, grinning down at him.

“But you like what I show off,” he pointed out.

“Point taken.”

“Show-off,” Tully said as he settled into the seat behind the copilot’s, and Tom edged past him.

“You’re just jealous,” Tom replied. “But I forgive you. It can’t be easy being the world’s only hobbit….”

“I’m not jealous,” Sandra said, and winked. “I’m too fond of breathing un-squashed.”

“Not a problem,” Adrienne said, “when dealing with a gentleman.”

The four of them laughed easily.

Tom stopped after a second, thinking, Forgiveness is an odd thing, as he settled into the copilot’s seat and adjusted it—which required putting it nearly back to Tully’s knees. Leather sighed under him; the aircraft had an unfamiliar smell, less ozone and synthetics than he was used to, more wood and oil and metal. His mind went on working as he watched Adrienne lean out the window to check the control surfaces, her feet moving on the pedals and yoke. The way her neck curved, and the little wisps that escaped the braid she’d made of her bronze-bright hair…

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.”

Well, there’s another pleasant lack of formality.

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.

“Great country for hang gliding!” Tully yelled from the rear, and laughed.

“Fasten seat belts, please,” Adrienne replied. “We thank you for the pleasure of your company on Packed in Like Sardines Air, and we will overbook your next flight with no apologies, because you’re just so much inanimate cargo to us. Your luggage may be found in Tibet. Hope to see you again! Better still, send money and stay home!”

The seaplane banked sharply, sideslipped and dropped, then came in out of the west. The water was fairly calm, rippling like a mirror of green malachite before them; the note of the engines changed as Adrienne throttled back, and there was a moment when Tom felt a little lighter than he should. The hull touched the surface, a skip… skip… skip sensation, the seat slapping him in the butt, with a thrumming underneath it like a powerboat at speed as the plywood vibrated to the touch of the water. Then they were on the surface, tall rooster tails of spray arching up on either side; he pitched forward against the belts, then back as the amphibian slowed and the nose came up. Seawater ran down the windows, clearing to give them a view of the shore. In the first passenger seats Sandra and Tully leaned in toward the center and forward to get a glimpse.

To the east a small U-shaped cove sheltered between two outthrust ridges that fell steeply to the sea. Along its southern edge a sheer drop of vertical rock ran from pine-forested height to the sand, and a stream had cut a V-shaped notch in it—a plume of water dropped fifty feet, falling on a narrow strip of beach to mingle with the waves rolling at its foot. Between the northern and southern cliffs the beach tapered inland to meet a narrow canyon, leaving a sheltered delta of coarse golden-brown sand edged with rock walls on both sides, lowest at the apex where it rose to the mountain slopes.

Tom rolled down the window; a gust of wind caught the bottom of the threaded waterfall, tossing the droplets out to sea in a broken rainbow and revealing a shallow cave behind. Then it died down, and the water veiled the cleft in the rock again. The seaplane pitched as it came landward, then slowed as it maneuvered around a rock reef in the middle of the cove’s entrance, white water creaming off the nearly hidden stone. Adrienne slewed the amphibian back toward the center of the beach and chopped the throttles just before the keel touched bottom. They came to rest with a slow shhhhusssssh sound; the plane tilted a little until one of the pontoons touched the surface, and the propellers spun down and stopped.

“Timed it just right,” she said with satisfaction in the sudden blessed silence. “High tide—the plane’ll be secure overnight once we’ve tied off, but easy to float tomorrow.”

By Jesus, Tom thought as he opened the gull-wing door beside him, the quiet like balm on his abused ears. Talk about peaceful…

Silence flowed in through the opening, and the salt breath of the ocean, the iodine tint of seaweed, and pine from the mountain forest looming above them. It was about as hot as this section of the coast ever got in late summer—in the high seventies—and the wind caressed his face like a damp scented towel.

He shaded his eyes and peered into the inner point of the beach, where sand gave way to upward-sloping rock.

“Ah… on second thought, previous occupant still in the room past the checkout time,” he said mildly. “Ah, Adrienne, is that what it looks like?” That part of the sand was shaded by boulders on either side, and an overhanging oak.

“You betcha,” she said softly, popping open her own section of door; that let Tully and Sandra crowd close and look.

There was a partially eaten game carcass lying there, a purebred European boar by its looks; no feral pig had those massive bristly shoulders, black hide, and long upcurving tusks. Crouched above it was…

“A gen-u-wine tiger,” Tully said softly; he had the binoculars, and then passed them forward to his partner. “Big ’un.”

“But is it a Colletta tiger?” Sandra asked impishly.

The beast crouched above its kill, snarling at the humans a hundred yards away. Tom stood, braced one hand like a clamp on the frame of the No Biscuit’s hull and leveled the binoculars with the other. That brought the big cat to within touching range, the fanged mouth close enough to draw a startled oath. Its thick, slightly shaggy fur was a pale gold color marked with black stripes, fading to cream on the belly and throat; the paws looked broad as dinner plates as they worked and slid their claws in and out. From its looks, he judged the weight to be about the same as a small horse.

“Siberian,” he said. “Got to be—too big and not brightly colored enough for a Bengal.”

“Near enough,” Adrienne said. “Manchurian; we got a bunch from the Selang-Arsi for release in this area. Tropical tigers find the winters here a trial, although God knows it’s warmer than the Amur valley; the Bengal type breed like flies in the southern jungles…. We’d better see him off. Hand me that rifle, Sandy, would you?

“Hey!” she shouted, with the weapon in hand. “You there, yes, you—the member of the Future Pelts, Rugs and Trophies of New Virginia—vamoose! Git!”

She slapped a magazine into the rifle, jacked the slide and squeezed off two rounds, a flat crack-crack! It came echoing back from the stony walls of the cliff, and a double spurt of sand erupted not far from the big cat. The shells tinkled down the windscreen and off into the sea foam below the amphibian’s nose; the tiger snarled, a ripping sound clearly audible over the shushing hiss of the waves falling back down the beach. Then it bent and gripped the boar by the middle of its back. Raising its head to keep the dangling legs free, it turned and leaped up the slope, disappearing into the thick undergrowth.

“Mmm… are you sure this is a good place to camp?” Tom said.

He’d never seen a tiger except in a zoo; few had, in a time when more than half the tigers on the planet were captive-bred in the United States. God, that was beautiful, he thought. And it had been weirdly appropriate for the setting—as much so as the vanished saber-tooths that had perished with the glyptodonts and mastodons not long after the first humans came through this way.

“Oh, they don’t bother people, usually,” Adrienne said. “And they avoid the smell of fire—these forests have a natural burn cycle.”

They climbed out of the plane onto the beach, with the No Biscuit moving slightly as they leaped down; with the tide still high it was just barely aground, and it was comparatively easy to swing it around with the tail pointing at the beach. He stretched, something popping in his back, and looked around. Beneath his feet was sand with an occasional pebble; some of the stones felt greasy and had a deep green sheen. He commented on it as they paid out two heavy ropes and tied the amphibian down to convenient boulders, making it secure from anything but a severe storm. The rock he and Adrienne made fast to was suspiciously polished too, and it had an even more suspiciously convenient groove about halfway down.

“It’s nephrite—jade,” Adrienne said, as they brought the loop of cable around the boulder and secured it. “So’s this big hunk of rock here.”

“Yikes,” he said, looking at it. Nine thousand pounds of jade; call it half a million. Oh, well, a glut of caviar is a glut of caviar. “You know, I’ve been to this spot before—looked at it, FirstSide, never got down on the beach, of course—but I don’t remember the jade boulder.”

“Mom had it moved here from a little south along the coast,” Adrienne said. “One of her better moves; she loved—loves—this spot too. Hell, you can’t quarrel with everything your parents like.”

Making camp was a work of moments; they set up two collapsible bell tents with titanium frames at a discreet distance apart, unrolled their sleeping bags, and dug a slit-trench behind a boulder near the inland edge of the beach. A circle of fire-blackened stones showed where others had made a hearth, and there was plenty of driftwood and deadfall; he shaved the kindling they needed, using dry branches, a hatchet, and a fallen log half-buried in sand as a cutting block.

The gear they’d brought included masks, snorkels and flippers—they were supposed to be on a vacation, without a care in the world, after all.

And, he thought, grinning, why not act like it right now?

Adrienne caught his mood. “Decided to put the Lutheran guilt-and-anxiety thing on hold for a while?”

“It’s your corrupting influence,” he said. “Episcopalians don’t do guilt, I suppose?”

“Of course not. It’s grubby, tacky and thoroughly lower-class,” she said with that irresistible smile. “Let’s swim—and get dinner.”

They changed; he noticed with some amusement that the bikinis the women wore were distinctly conservative by FirstSide standards, and that they both undressed in a tent—the body-modesty taboo had stayed stronger here than it had back in the parent society. As for the swimsuits…

Tully said it for him: “Hey, it’s Beach Blanket Bingo!”

“Oh, you liked that one too?” Sandra said artlessly, clapping her hands. The results were spectacular, even with Adrienne standing beside her, long and sleekly curved.

“God, a woman who likes old movies and looks like that,” Roy replied, eyes bulging. “I’m lost!”

“Well, the FirstSiders stopped making good movies—the new ones are too likely to be just disgusting, or not make any sense—so the Theatre Guild has to reissue the old ones a lot here,” Sandra said, handing them nets and short, heavy prying irons with sharpened, flattened ends. “Except for the Mummy movies, and the Harry Potter and the Rings series—those were fine, but that was years ago now! We should make more of our own.”

“Small population, limited talent pool,” Adrienne said. “We can’t do everything. Let’s go!”

They ran—as much as you could run with flippers on—and threw themselves into the shallow water, stroking out. He exulted in the sudden cold shock of the water, a good twenty degrees lower than the air, and the pull and surge of the ocean like some great beast tugging at him. It was crystal-clear as they sculled out past the little rock reef in the mouth of the cove; the stone was covered in bright-colored coralline algae and sea anemones, and beyond it the sandy bottom held a thick growth of giant kelp. A couple of five-foot giant sea bass flicked by below him, muscular, scaly brutes, then a school of bright orange garibaldi fish, and the bottom held lingcod and kelp bass and others by the dozens. He flipped upright and trod water; not far away a young sea otter floated on its back, wrapped in a strand of giant kelp by its mother to keep it in place while she foraged, staring at him round-eyed with its small paws raised as if in surrender.

It made a sound at him, something between meeep! and keeeek!

“Sorry, kid, it’s not your mother,” he said in reply. “On the other hand, I’m not after your fur, either.”

Just about then its mother did arrive from below, a handsome silvery-brown creature four feet long, with large eyes and a round, blunt-muzzled face framed by long whiskers on either side of a black button nose. She had a foot-long abalone clutched to her chest with one paw, a rock under the other, and looked suspiciously in his direction before she went to check her cub. It greeted her with happy high-pitched squeaks, grunts and coos as it climbed onto her belly and began to nurse, while she juggled rock and shellfish—evidently the problems of working mothers were a transspecies, transdimensional universal.

“Don’t worry, lady, the kid’s OK,” he said, grinning around the mouthpiece of the snorkel.

There were more of the otters scattered through the kelp forest; he could hear the whackety-whack-whack! as one of them held a shellfish between her paws and hammered it against the rock on her chest, going at it like a pneumatic pavement breaker.

“Time to dive,” Sandra said. “This water’s cold.”

It was, particularly without a wet suit; you were courting hypothermia if you stayed in too long. He took a couple of deep breaths and dove; the bottom was about twenty-five feet down, not very far for an experienced swimmer. The abalone was more abundant than any he’d ever seen, despite all the otters topside—and those critters could gobble down a third of their own considerable weights in seafood every day. Plus you couldn’t fault their taste: They’d eat abalone in preference to most other stuff, even sea urchins or crabs. Evidently the absence of millions of humans equally determined to get their hands on the big mollusks was enough to make the difference.

Back FirstSide you had to carry a special measuring stick to make sure none of the ones you took were less than seven inches long, and the meat cost eighty dollars a pound. Here he didn’t see many that weren’t seven inches, and plenty were monsters that would have broken records back FirstSide, a foot long and more.

It wasn’t the first time he’d pried abalone off rocks, either—although most of his efforts had gone into stopping poachers from doing it. He thrust the flattened end of the iron under the muscular “foot” of one and levered sharply; it came free after a long moment of effort, and he stuffed the twelve-inch shell into the net at his waist. His lungs were burning by the time he’d gotten three; they all stroked for the shore when he came up, and waded out with their lips blue and teeth on the verge of chattering, or over it in some cases—being big meant you lost heat more slowly. The kindling was ready in the stone circle, neatly piled in a little tepee; Tom blew on his fingers so that he could work the Zippo and get it going. Flames crackled up through the bone-dry shavings, and then through the larger sticks of driftwood as the four of them stood close around it, each couple pressed together for warmth and wrapped in a blanket.

He could feel Adrienne’s chilled flesh gradually thawing against him, and a big blanket could hide a fair degree of movement. Interesting. Definitely interesting, he thought, and she whispered through a shiver, “I seem to affect you more than the Pacific Ocean itself.”

“I’m not complaining, and neither is he,” he murmured into her ear.

After a while they were warm enough to go wash the salt off under the fringes of the waterfall—like God’s cold shower, as Roy put it—dry off around the fire some more, and dress. He felt relaxed and supple and strong again after fighting the chilly waters, but it wasn’t something you’d choose to do every day—or every week.

“Invigorating, though,” he said.

“I agree,” she said when he voiced the thought, wringing out the thick fall of her hair and running a comb through it with wincing determination before tying it back. “Too bad we’re not really on vacation; the family has a place at La Jolla, just north of San Diego, with a beach that’s nearly as pretty as this—and the water’s a lot warmer.”

Tom nodded; he liked “the Jewel,” even if he found it expensive and a bit pwecious; it was probably something to see, here. Speaking of which…

“Anyone up for a walk?”

They staked out the nets full of abalone in a pool to keep them alive and fresh, along with a couple of bottles of white wine. Tully went up the steep rocky slope at the bottom of the U of the beach with a coil of rope over his shoulder; that was the only spot where it wasn’t nearly vertical. The other three stood with their rifles in the crooks of their arms, keeping a close eye on the climber and his surroundings.

“Nice technique,” Adrienne said, watching Tully.

“Oh, yeah,” Sandra said. “Climbs good, too.”

Tom felt himself blushing a little as they laughed—who’d ever said women were the bashful sex? Roy did know how to go up steep ground, though; Tom fancied he could do it nearly as well, but one-hundred-sixty pounds could go where two-thirty couldn’t. At the crest Tully stopped and rove one end of the rope through a conveniently placed eyebolt sunk into living rock, and let the other end fall down to the sand. All of them could have made it up without, but there was no reason not to take advantage when you could.

Tom went next, walking up the steep slope and hand-over-handing along the rope. He was breathing deeply when he reached the top, and it felt a little strange to be hiking in coastal California with a rifle slung over his back, but…

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my,” Roy said as his partner’s cropped white-blond thatch came over the edge.

“Tigers and bears, at least,” Tom replied. “I understand the lions are mostly south and west of here. But plenty of cougars and leopards.”

They grinned at each other for a moment, and then Adrienne’s bandanna-covered head came over the crestline; Tom extended a hand, closing it around her strong slender wrist, and pulled her up. Sandra followed, puffing slightly.

“I ought to get out on my own feet more often,” she said after a moment. “It uses different muscles than riding.” Then: “Lord, that’s pretty, isn’t it?”

They stood in silence, looking out over infinite blue, along the steep green coastline, down at the white curl of foam along the sand and the arch of the waterfall. Seabirds scattered as a peregrine thunderbolted out of the sky above; it missed its strike, fluttered to a halt just above the shore and then coasted south, gaining height. Then they turned and walked up the line of the creek; it fell in pools and miniature torrents over a rocky bed, under tall cypress and tanbark oak, and then among redwoods—ancient ones, towering above and shading the floor of the forest to a carpet of soft needles, moss and ferns. Tully looked up into the cathedral silence of it, where light seemed to fall like slow honey from gaps above. Then he frowned.

“You know, I’d swear I’d seen exactly the same redwood here on FirstSide—the one with the kink and the big burl.”

“You may have,” Adrienne said quietly. “The older sequoias up in the mountains, and the bristlecone pines, are the same on both sides of the Gate. They’re older than the divergence between this world and FirstSide, and as far as we can tell everything was exactly the same until that day in 323 B.C.”

Tom looked at the redwood. It was big, well over two hundred feet tall, but…

“I wouldn’t think this one was twenty-three hundred years and change old; that’s near the limit for a redwood, and this is the southern margin of their range.”

“Wouldn’t have to be quite that ancient. It was centuries before the changes in the Old World started affecting things here—quite a few centuries. Eventually it did; butterfly-effect stuff there started making it rain on different days here, and so an elk went left instead of right and ate a seedling that he didn’t FirstSide, things like that.”

They stared up at the great reddish-brown columns for a while, then turned back toward their campsite. The fire had died down to a bed of coals red-glowing or white-hot; he looked at his watch and found it was well after seven. His stomach told him the same thing, and that it had been a long time since a sandwich lunch.

Nothing like a hike and a swim in cold water to work up an appetite, either.

“Just one thing missing for a campsite,” he said as they stacked their rifles.

He squatted beside a section of driftwood log and lifted it free of the sand with a long pull and grunting exhalation, then plumped it down beside the fire and brought another across the firepit from the first.

“Well, you pass the brute-strength test, you big, beautiful brute,” Adrienne said, handing him the net bag of abalone. “Let’s see how you do on manual dexterity.”

Shelling and trimming the abalone was a familiar chore. He cut the muscle free of the iridescent interior of the shell with a small sharp blade; once the head and viscera were off and thrown to the attentive gulls he wrapped each one in a towel for a moment, set it on a log and gave it a couple of solid whacks with the flat of a heavy knife.

“Spare the cutting board?” he said.

She passed it over, and he scored the abalone fillets with a series of cuts about half an inch deep and an inch apart and repeated the process on the other side, running the cuts at right angles to the first set and piling the meat on a plate. Adrienne reclaimed the board and sliced a few cloves of garlic as Sandra and Roy unpacked the picnic basket, opened the coolers that held venison sausage and salad whose greens had been picked fresh at Seven Oaks that morning, cut bread, uncorked the wine….

The picnic hamper also held an iron ring on three short stubby legs; he dropped that into the coals and set the frying pan on top. Adrienne dropped in a healthy dollop of butter and waited until it sizzled, then added the garlic. Saliva flooded Tom’s mouth—nothing on earth smelled any better than that, unless you threw some onions into the mix.

“The secret of pan-frying abalone is to do it quick,” he said, and plopped the first into the hot, frothing butter-and-garlic mixture.

A few seconds on each side and it was ready; he did enough for everyone, then came to sit beside Adrienne; they ate sitting side by side on the log, with their plates on their knees.

“God, that’s good.” He sighed. “Particularly considering the fact that it’s essentially a giant seagoing snail.”

“Nothing wrong with snails, done with some garlic and butter,” Adrienne said, mopping her plate with a heel of the crusty bread.

“Big fella doesn’t like ’em,” Tully said. “Maybe he should get a rubber escargot ; he likes the sauce well enough, but—”

“Hey, I’m just a Dakota plowboy,” Tom said a little defensively. “We don’t eat snails.”

“Abalone is a big item in North Dakota, then?” Roy jibed, and laughed. “OK, each to their own. Let’s have some of that chardonnay.”

The white wine was chilled from its immersion in seawater, but the temperature of the air was perfect—low seventies. As the sun sank toward the western horizon the Pacific became a glittering road of eye-hurting brightness. The cliffs turned ruddy with the sunset; he refilled the skillet with sliced potatoes, flipping them a couple of times before sliding out a portion for everyone, then putting one of the sage-and-herb-spiced venison sausages on a stick and propping it up with its butt in the sand and the wood over one of the rocks that ringed the fire.

“It’s a good thing life in the field isn’t usually like this,” Tully said, retrieving his sausage and wrapping a slice of the dense, chewy bread around the sputtering, smoking meat before stripping it off the stick. “War might get too popular…. Pass that mustard, would you?”

“Here,” Adrienne said, and tossed it over. “I suspect we’re all going to suffer enough to satisfy the most exacting conscience before this is over, so let’s store up some memories while we can.”

The sun vanished in a line of red fire and hot gold among the clouds on the western horizon. Stars began to appear above the low crescent moon, and the air grew chillier; he put a pot of coffee on the ring, and Sandra unwrapped some chocolate-walnut brownies.

“Made these myself,” she said. “Seven Oaks walnuts—best in the domain.”

Tom sat on the sand and threw a few more sticks of driftwood onto the fire before leaning back against the log. The flotsam burned with a snap and crackle, flames flickering blue and green with the salts dried into the wood. Adrienne curled into his shoulder, and he put an arm around her; he suspected Tully and Sandra were doing the same, but his eyes were a little dazzled by the fire.

“Just my luck,” he said lightly.

“Kemosabe?”

“I find the girl of my dreams, and she’s a spook from another dimension with a license to kill.”

Adrienne chuckled. “Here, you’re from another dimension. Although I grant you’re not a spook—you’re a game warden from another dimension….”

Tom sighed, taking a sip of the coffee and another deep breath of the cool, sea-scented air. “Just doesn’t get better than this, I suppose.”

Adrienne’s lips touched his ear just as he was taking a sip of the coffee; he might have managed that, but not the tongue that slid in after them. When he’d finished coughing, she thumped him helpfully on the back.

“I’ll have you know that I come second to no meal. Or even a Pacific sunset,” she said, grinning wickedly.

“Ah… I think it’s about time to turn in,” Tom said, ignoring laughter from across the fire. “Long day tomorrow.”