Conquistador

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Piet Botha reined in his horse. He rode in Boer fashion, slumped with his legs nearly straight and slanted forward. His son rode beside him, using the bent-knee New Virginian style. They were alike otherwise, given the twenty-five-year gap in their ages. Schalk Botha was a little lighter in his coloring and had eyes of an unusual tawny shade; besides that he was an inch shorter than his father’s six-three, and without any of the older man’s extra flesh. He was also grinning with excitement.

“Hell, yes, Pa,” he said. “Sounds like fun!”

“You’re not too old for me to clout across the ear,” Piet growled. “This is serious business, boy. We may have to fight some of our relatives, not just the bliddy Indians.”

Schalk shrugged his wide shoulders. “Only if they’re fools enough to get mixed up in treason.”

“Treason is what you do when you lose,” Piet said. “I’d be on the other side myself, if I thought it would work. But it wouldn’t.”

He stopped and leaned down from the saddle to fasten the gate. His cow-beasts were all inside the paddock now, and he looked up the long slope of the land to where his farmhouse glittered white and red among its trees and orange groves, and the mountains reared blue behind it. It was a hot day, but tempered by a breeze from the sea; the air was full of the smell of horse sweat and cattle dung and crushed herbs. Behind them was a dirt road, and beyond that a waste of tall dry grass, dead reeds that had grown in seasonal sloughs earlier in the year, an occasional thicket of oak or sycamore or willow, and patches of the tall stalks of wild mustard.

It’s home to young Schalk, he thought. His homeland. He came here young enough; I’ll be an exile all my life.

He shrugged at the thought; he’d be an exile in the land of his birth, too, even if he could live there unmolested by the new government’s police—something unlikely in the extreme. The country that had borne him didn’t exist anymore, not really. Instead he spoke of practical things. “We’ll be getting the horses. Good ones—no show beasts, mind—ones that’ll stay alive over the mountains. And the mules.”

Adrienne Rolfe smiled to herself as they climbed out of the amphibian and onto the floating dock, blinking lazily in the bright San Diegan sunshine. I’m feeling disgustingly sleek and satisfied, she thought, as the crewmen took the ropes. I like Tom. I like him a lot.

She grew aware of exactly how sleek and satisfied her smile was, and shrugged ruefully at Tom’s expression; Tully’s was carefully neutral, but the little man was alarmingly perceptive.

San Diego was the third-largest city in the Commonwealth, nearly twenty thousand people and growing fast. She rather liked it, in small doses—except when the Santa Ana was blowing, of course. The town was a decade younger than the ones around the bay, and it had a tarry practicality, a big-shouldered quality that gave piquancy to the sun-washed, mountain-backed setting. It was also a Commission territory, not dominated by any Family the way Napa or New Brooklyn were. It wasn’t centered around the Families collectively either, the way the capital was. Settler merchants and manufacturers set the tone here.

The floatplane docks were near the yacht basin, and just over from the main harbor, all facing south toward Coronado Island and within the sheltering hook of land that cut off the harbor from the Pacific. The land airport was on the shore to the west; a Hercules was coming in as she watched, with the winged Thompson gun of the Collettas on its tailfin; her mouth quirked at the irony.

The main harbor was busy too, amid a white storm of gulls: ten big windjammers , a couple of flat-decked wooden tankers and dozens of smaller craft, from tugs down to fishing craft and rowboats, all moving about the dredged channels to the redwood piers. New nahua workers filed over the gangplanks of a three-master up from the southern ports; cranes swung ashore its other cargo: baled raw cotton, rare tropical woods, cacao in the bean, leather, featherwork cloaks, chilies and caged macaws. Another fair-sized sailing ship was being towed in; the absence of a diesel auxiliary and some subtle elements in her lines showed she was foreign—Dahaean out of Hagamantash, probably, from what FirstSiders would call Shanghai—laden with silk and cotton fabrics, tea, pepper and cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg and inlaid furniture, jade statues and thousand-knot rugs. A Tahitian schooner looked more exotic, with its twin prows and flamboyantly colorful tiki-mask figurehead.

Most craft were from the Commonwealth, swapping northern timber and manufactures and FirstSide goods for refined petroleum, chocolate, cement, brick, tile, borax….

And there she is, Adrienne thought.

A tall young woman with yellow hair came swinging down the docks; she was dressed in a white linen dress with a thin black belt and a wide-brimmed white hat; a little discreet jewelry, and the Families’ gold-and-platinum ring on her left thumb. She took off her sunglasses and waved with a bright artificial smile, and walked more quickly.

“Tom Christiansen, my cousin Heather Fitzmorton,” Adrienne said formally. The bitch, she did not add aloud, as they exchanged a formal kiss on the cheek.

Heather was Adrienne’s age to a year. Her eyes flicked across Tully, lingered on Sandra for an instant, then took Tom in from feet to head.

“Well, Cuz,” she drawled, “I see your taste has improved—and gotten a lot more conventional.”

“Ha,” Adrienne said flatly. “Ha. You always were such a kidder, Cuz.” Heather’s handshake was lingering when she took Tom’s hand. “And here are the keys. I presume Irene is around?”

“At the town house,” Heather said. “It wouldn’t do to have her standing next to you where people could see; it might give them ideas.”

“Thanks for helping out.”

“All a mispocha-mitzvah, as the saying goes,” Heather said, taking the keys and dropping them into her handbag. “And it’s a guilt-free chance to get away from my kids for a while.” She wiggled her fingers at the rest of the party. “Ta,” she finished, and walked away.

Tom blinked. “I got the impression she doesn’t like you?” he said, taking in Sandra’s black scowl at the retreating back of the woman of the Families.

“I’m not exactly popular, and Heather’s a model of respectability,” Adrienne said. “I warned you about that, remember… but Heather has a perfectly adequate sense of responsibility, fortunately, so I could ask her for a favor.”

“Mmmm… mispocha-mitzvah… something ‘good deeds’?” Tully said. “If that was Yiddish.”

“More or less,” Adrienne said. “‘Clan duty’ might be closer to the actual colloquial meaning.”

“I didn’t think mispocha meant family.”

“It doesn’t, FirstSide. It sort of came to here; old Sol Pearlmutter used to mutter, ‘What a mispocha!’ about the Families, so… Heather’s my aunt Jennifer’s daughter—her father’s a Fitzmorton, of course, a collateral, and they have a place just across the Mayacamas in the Fitzmorton domain—Sonoma Valley, you’d say.”

“And Irene?”

“Another cousin; and she looks a lot more like me than dear Heather. Blame it on the way the Fitzmortons and Rolfes kept interbreeding back on Firstside. In the meantime, let’s get to the hotel.”

The San Diego Arms knew they were coming in, and sent transport—a brand-new European fuel-cell van; it was open in back, and Adrienne enjoyed pointing out the sights as they moved inland, through the bustle of the harbor district and into the town proper: the paved highway and pipeline stretching north toward Long Beach, the new movie theater…

“And who the hell are they?” Tom blurted, pointing to two men.

“Those?” Adrienne said. Got to remember what looks weird to a FirstSider, she chided herself.

Those were two big brown-skinned men, with middle-aged fat overlying impressive muscles, swirling tattoos over much of their faces and bodies, wearing what looked like crested Grecian helmets made of orange and green feathers, multicolored cloaks and sarongs. They strode along the sidewalk under the pepper trees, occasionally stopping to look in a shop window. Nobody but a few fascinated small boys noticed them.

“Those are Hawaiian ali’i—nobles—from Tahiti.”

“Ah…” Tully scratched his head. “If they’re Hawaiian, how come they’re from Tahiti?”

“Long story… well, about the time we sent our first ships across the Pacific, the Hawaiian islands got hit with a really bad series of plagues—smallpox from the Selang-Arsi country and chicken pox and measles from who knows where. We bought the islands from the survivors—paid them with vaccination and, umm, a few other things.”

“And they moved to Tahiti?” Tom asked, his fair brows knotted in thought. “Because they’re closely related cultures, I suppose?”

“Well, it was more on the order of Tahiti being part of the ‘few other things’ we paid them with. Their ancestors had come from there, and they remembered.”

“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “What did the Tahitians say to all this?”

“The ‘few other things’ also included ships, a couple of thousand trade muskets, some muzzle-loading brass cannon, and a lot of gunpowder.”

“Oh,” he said. “Then they conquered Tahiti?”

Adrienne felt like patting him on the cheek. Tom’s so gentle and sweet! she thought. Aloud, she went on: “Sort of. Actually, they ate a lot of the Tahitians, as I understand it: You could consider it a conquest, or a really big hunt for long pig. And sacrificed a lot of them to Kuka’ilimoku—the war god.”

Tom and his friend winced. Adrienne went on: “Just because someone gets the dirty end of the stick doesn’t mean they’re very nice,” she pointed out.

Tom would have enjoyed the Sea-Witch more if he’d been able to relax, if they were really headed west to the islands for nothing more serious than scuba diving and surfing and climbs among the mountain forests.

As it was… I’m enjoying myself anyway, he thought. Just not as much.

He’d done a little boating—canoeing in the North Woods of Minnesota, and a little sailing in California; he’d have done a lot more, but it took money he didn’t have.

Right now he was standing at the forepeak, clinging to the foresail shroud where the long bowsprit lanced out from the hull, and looking back at the taut curve of the sails. The two-masted schooner was sailing reach before a following wind, slicing its way northwest and throwing bursts of spray twice the height of his head as it rose to the swells. Land had dropped below the eastern horizon hours ago. The sea was indigo under an azure bowl of sky, cloudless save for a little high haze in the east; the wind was not quite stiff enough to show whitecaps, and the waves were long and smooth. Foam peeled back from the yacht’s sharp cutwater, and the bow-wave curled deep along the hull, showing the copper sheathing that protected the wood from teredo-worms. A school of bottlenose dolphins rode the wave, lancing out of the water in smooth curves and spearing back with hardly a splash, dancing with the sea and the ship.

Let me sail, let me sail, let the Orinoco flow,

Let me reach, let me beach, on the shores of Tripoli.

The tune ran through his head as he watched, like a lilt of infinite possibilities beyond the horizon.

Adrienne waved from the rear of the yacht near the wheel and aft of the deckhouse, a hundred and forty feet back. That was only a little more than the height of the mainmast—the foremast was a bit shorter—and she carried ten thousand square feet of canvas in her fore-and-aft sails. That was a number; the dazzling mass piled overhead was reality, like clouds brought to earth and imprisoned in a suave geometry of curves and lines. He levered himself up and walked backward—sternward, he reminded himself—along the deck; it was relatively narrow, nowhere more than thirty feet across, and uncluttered save for the low shapes of the geared winches that controlled the sails.

The crew nodded as he passed, not pausing in their work, and Tom returned the gesture. There were twelve men aboard, and three women. Captain McKay was a taciturn man whose hair had been lion-colored before it went mostly badger gray, with blue eyes and a kink in his nose that looked as if it had been put there with something sharp, and scar tissue half an inch thick over his knuckles. His accent was an improbable mixture of Scots and Aussie, when he did speak; his wife was purser-cook, his daughter her assistant, and his son first mate. Evidently McKay had been running the Sea-Witch since she was built in the Pearlmutter yards in New Brooklyn thirty-five years before. What he’d done before that, FirstSide, was not mentioned. The rest of the crew were New Virginian-born, except for one Dahaean picked up recently in San Diego, a dark Eurasian-looking man with the front of his scalp shaved and the black hair at the rear worked up into braids and looped over his ears.

Tom nodded to him, too: The man was dressed in a pair of tar-stained breeches that ended at the knee, showing a remarkable assortment of scars on his whipcord-lean torso. God alone knew how he’d ended up here.

And according to Adrienne, his language is a creolized form of North Iranian with a heavy Sinic influence. Whatever the hell that means.

Captain MacKay was seated at the table on the fantail, under an awning, along with the rest of their party. A steward was just laying out luncheon: salad, skewers of grilled shrimp the size of Tom’s thumb in curry sauce, cold meats, bread, cheese and fruit. The skipper of the Sea-Witch had his white peaked cap on the table and was filling a foul old briar pipe; luckily the stiff breeze would snatch away everything but a hint of its reek.

“Aye, we’ll cruise a bit off Santa Barbara,” he said to Adrienne, giving Tom a courteous nod. “Those are well-traveled waters, s’truth. We’ll be seen by ships and aircraft both; then we’ll turn and head”—he waved to the southwest. “Off the wind on that heading lie the Marquesas, and we’ll be nicely making way. Cruise there, up to the islands, and it’ll be a while before it’s realized you’re no aboard, miss, but the Sea-Witch herself, she’ll be seen and spoken of at once—on the radio, too, no fear.”

Tom seated himself. “I’m a bit noticeable myself,” he pointed out.

McKay grinned, a snaggletoothed expression in his bushy beard and mustache, and pointed silently to his son.

The young man was in his twenties, and only a finger under Tom’s six-three and a bit, but he was gangly rather than broad-shouldered and deep-chested, and until today his freckled face had been topped by a thatch of stiff gingery curls. Tom’s eyebrow went up as he saw that the unruly mop had been cut close in a good imitation of the Ranger crop he wore, and dyed silver-blond as well.

“From a distance…” he said.

“Aye,” McKay said with satisfaction. He cocked an eye skyward. “This wind’ll no hold. I may need the auxiliary if we’re to make the coast again by sunset.”

Tom had the impression that McKay regarded using the diesel engine as a confession of failure of some sort. Purist, he thought.

Adrienne’s eyes met his; she was wearing a sarong, a halter, and red hibiscus flowers in her hair; she winked slightly, and he knew she’d read his thoughts.

Now, this is more like being on an op, Tom thought. The No Biscuit had made its rendezvous with the yacht neatly enough. One to pilot, one to come aboard the Sea-Witch and impersonate Adrienne… complicated!

The Sea-Witch pitched slightly as it lay with its nose into the wind blowing from the shore; the sunset was fading sternward, a smudge of red along a horizon fading from green to deep night blue. He could see the outline of the San Pedro hills to the southwest and the mountains behind Malibu—the place where Malibu was FirstSide—to the north. There was enough light from the stars, a frosted multitude that faded only around the one-quarter moon—more stars than he was used to seeing FirstSide except in the most remote desert wilderness.

The No Biscuit floated half a hundred yards away, and the inflatable boat shuttled between them. Adrienne’s cousin Irene came over the rail with a grin that was more than a little like hers, ready to take her place in the masquerade.

“This is like the story about the wolf, the sheep and the cabbage,” the younger woman said. “Good luck, Cuz.”

“Enjoy the islands, Cuz,” Adrienne replied. “Try to act like me.”

“I don’t know if I’m up to that, but I’ll do my best—it ought to be fun trying!”

Their gear went over the side in a net, hung from a cable on the long boom; crewmen held the rubber boat close to the yacht with boathooks. Tom followed, pulling his night-sight goggles down; the rope was harsh against his palms as they went over the side. A low, muted throb came from the schooner’s diesel, enough to cover the muted hum of the outboard; Tom took charge of that, since he’d had a fair bit of boat training, and the vibration surged up his hand and forearm as he opened the throttle wider and twisted the tiller to bring the inflatable around and away, settling on an eastward course toward the black outline of the land. The Sea-Witch turned westward as soon as they’d cast free, her bow coming about to the northwest and her sails rising with a rattle of winches and a flapping of sheets that turned taut as they caught the wind. The schooner heeled over and began to pick up speed; the seaplane remained quiet, pitching gently on the waves—it would stay there until the Sea-Witch was well away.

“This heading,” Adrienne said, settling in beside him on the rearmost bench and holding out a digital compass with a faintly glowing display.

The flat bottom of the inflatable struck the water, slapping it as they picked up speed. Their destination was a little north of where the Los Angeles River ran into the sea; here and now the stream reached salt water well to the north of the Palos Verdes hills, along the course of what he’d known as Bellona Creek. And “course” was a misnomer, since the river wandered through a broad ill-defined zone of wetlands and swamps all the way to the ocean; on the coast everything between Santa Monica-that-wasn’t and Palos Verdes was seaside swamp, saltwater or brackish marsh, miles of it. More stretched between those hills and the site of Long Beach. Even in high summer the scent from the land was damp, smelling of those vast wetlands.

“And on FirstSide it’s a dry concrete ditch,” Tom murmured, and heard Adrienne chuckle beside him.

Spray struck his face, cool and tasting of iodine and salt; he wiped his night-vision goggles with his sleeve and peered ahead. An endlessness of reeds rustled to the southward; now that the mudflats were covered by the high tide, but this shallow-draft boat could go almost anywhere. Tully called to him a moment before he saw it himself; a blinking light, so faint that it would have been invisible to unaided vision. White sand gleamed nearby, where higher land rose northward.

Tom’s teeth showed in a fighting grin. The pretense was over, and the mission was about to begin.

Tom brought the inflatable in quickly, running the bow up as far as he could on the wet sand. Then he jumped over the side of the rubber boat and held it as the waves thumped it against the ground and small tumbling ripples of foam hissed around his feet. The others followed, and the four of them grabbed the rope loops along its sides and ran it higher, up onto the sloping surface of the beach. He looked around; as best as he could tell, they’d landed right on target—around the southern part of Palisades Beach, near where the Santa Monica Pier was FirstSide, at the westward end of Colorado Avenue. A sandstone cliff stood inland a couple of hundred yards, low here but rising to the north; off that way he could just glimpse a few lights burning in the night, a large sprawling house or small village.

He felt a moment of disorientation; the geography was the same, but he was used to seeing this spot in a blaze of lights—some of the most expensive housing in the United States was within a mile or two, and a few miles north were the condos of Malibu, not to mention the meganecropolis that stretched from here to San Diego and inland to the edges of the Mohave. The smell was entirely different, sea salt and iodine, beach wrack crunching underfoot, the silty mud of the huge marshes to the south.

The feeling of weird dislocation wasn’t as bad this time. I’m getting used to it, he thought grimly.

“We’re right on the place they filmed Baywatch,” Tully said reverently, and Sandra giggled. “And thereabouts is the carousel they used in The Sting….”

“Roy,” Tom said, with warning in his voice. It was scarcely the time to indulge one’s old-movie fixation.

The other man chuckled quietly and subsided, shrugging. They all went down to one knee beside the inflatable, unslinging the rifles they wore across their backs and scanning the darkness through their night-sight goggles. They gave good vision, but it wasn’t quite like normal sight—there was a bright, slight flatness to their surroundings that made it harder to judge distances. Adrienne pushed hers up and used a pair of powerful binoculars instead for a moment. He recognized the instrument from the square, molded look and the digital controls on the top; it was a cutting-edge FirstSide military model, with automatic light compensation and a built-in range finder. The GPS system wouldn’t work here, of course.

“Right on target,” she said quietly. “That’s the Versfelds’ home place—Hendricksdorp, their equivalent of Rolfe Manor or Colletta Hall.” She pointed to the lights, shining from around the curve of the bay and a little inland, just beneath the deeper darkness of the mountains.

“Nobody but Versfeld’s people will be wandering around here—and Piet can talk his way past them. Better to keep out of their way, of course.”

“Speaking of the devil,” Tom said.

The cliff sloped down to ground level nearby. A horse whickered quietly from that direction, and several men came toward them—two tall men, and a slighter one of average height; he could hear the crunch of their boots in the sand. A little closer, and he could recognize the gorilloid shape of Piet Botha. The younger man beside him resembled him enough to be his son, and almost certainly was. And Henry Villers. The black man was standing a bit aside from the Afrikaners, and there was something in their body language that spoke of strained politeness all around.

My sympathy is underwhelming, Piet, Tom thought. I’ll work with you, but I don’t have to like you.

Like the four from the sea, the three men waiting for them were dressed in Commonwealth militia uniform—stone-gray bush jacket and trousers of tough cotton drill with plenty of accordion-pleat pockets and leather patches on elbows and knees, and a floppy-brimmed jungle hat; the outfit faded into the background well. They also wore the webbing harness, which seemed to be based on the Israeli design, one he’d always envied: broad belt with adjustable lacing and many carrying attachments, padded straps over the shoulders, and load-bearing pouches in the small of the back. Tom was willing to bet that the designer had suffered through a couple of campaigns in the sort of stuff rear-echelon types thought up for field men to wear.

“Miss Rolfe,” Botha said; she nodded acknowledgment.

Adrienne and Sandra kept watch with rifles ready; the men slung their weapons, bent in unison and lifted the boat, with Botha and Tom opposite each other at the rear, where the boxes were stacked. It wasn’t all that heavy itself, but the crates of weapons and gear weighed more than twice what any of them did, even Tom or the still more massively built Piet. The soft sand made for bad footing, and it churned under their feet as they panted upslope; he leaned away from the weight, teeth fixed in a grimace of effort and sweat stinging his eyes. The going went easier as they came to rock and dirt held by coarse dry grass; they were all sweating, but the night was pleasant, no more than sixty degrees and with a fresh breeze off the water that made it seem cooler.

“Here,” Botha said, indicating a deep pit about the size of a grave; a pick and shovel leaned against a boulder near it.

Thank you, O taciturn man of the veld, Tom thought sardonically.

They lifted the cargo free and stacked it, then deflated the boat with a hiss and smell of synthetic-tinged air. He and Tully rolled it into a compact bundle, stuffed it into the predug hole, slid the silenced outboard engine into a tough canvas sack and dropped that in as well. A few minutes’ work buried the whole under sand and tumbled rock; he stopped and carefully memorized the lay of the land, turning in a complete circle and taking a bearing on conspicuous landmarks as best he could in the dark. He noticed that the others did likewise, in their different ways—it was appallingly easy to lose something completely, in trackless country, even if you knew the general location.

I’m glad everyone seems to know their business, Tom thought, as they carried the boxes up a narrow pathway to the crest of the higher ground inland; he slung two on his shoulders and trotted easily under the hundred and eighty pounds of weight.

This wasn’t like an op in the Rangers, where he was working with people he’d spent years beside and whose strengths and weaknesses he knew inside out. He and Roy had been together long enough in the SOU to develop an instinctive rapport too. Depending on so many relative strangers made him a little nervous, but there was nothing he could do about it except hope they’d shake down quickly.

The younger Afrikaner went up the slope and returned with a string of mules. Sandra came forward and the two of them oversaw the loading; Adrienne and Botha cut stalks of brush and went back down the beach, sweeping over their footprints. A normal night’s breeze would obliterate most traces that didn’t remove, and a few days would take care of the rest. While they were about it Tom went a little into the thick brush and crouched on guard with his back to a small sycamore tree; what he could see of the landscape was a lot more densely grown than he’d expected, the vegetation dry and dusty enough in high summer, but plenty of it, ranging from knee level to more than his six-three of height.

“And it’s noisy,” he murmured to himself, relaxing into a hunter’s absolute stillness that let all sounds in, only his eyes moving, and his chest as he breathed.

He could hear the beat and hiss of the waves as the tide went out, like the heartbeat of the world when you were near the shore. There were plenty of insects, too; not many mosquitoes, thank God, since there wasn’t a freshwater swamp close by. But a fair swarm of other types, chirping and rustling and buzzing and shrilling and hopping and flying through the darkness. He moved his head occasionally in a slow arc, because the goggles cut off peripheral vision, and more than once he saw a bat twisting through the air in pursuit of some bug or other. There were birds in plenty—nightjars, and he saw a great horned owl whip by at only twice head-height, swerving and jinking like a fighter plane and intent on something inland; then he heard the harsh scream-click-hiss of a barn owl not too far away. A couple of black-tailed jackrabbits passed him, hopping and then landing and coming erect with their tall ears swiveling like radar dishes; one landed near enough for him to reach out and touch it if he’d wanted to. It gave a bulge-eyed double take and a squeal as it realized there was a human at arm’s length, and thumped the earth in alarm before it tore off.

Can’t be easy to be small and tasty, he thought.

Something larger went through the brush a hundred feet to his north; he couldn’t tell exactly what and didn’t care to guess, not in the crazy mixed-up ecology John Rolfe’s importations had produced, but whatever it was it snorted as it caught their scent and crashed off. A coyote went yip-yip-yip and howled occasionally, answered by others across the huge stretch of wilderness—but then, song-dogs had survived here even when it was all built solid; they were as adaptable as humans, and nearly as clever.

Farther away something gave a grunting moan in the night, an ooorrrrghhh… ooorrrrghhh… ooorrrrghhh… that built up to a throaty roar. He recognized it then, more from the MGM logo at the beginning of movies than anything else—the territorial roar of a lion, announcing its claims to the world and any other male thinking of horning in on its pride of females.

Face it, he thought, grinning silently, and breathing deeply to take in the scents of sea air, dry satchet-smelling herbs and dusty earth, this is as close to paradise as a man like me is going to get. Lots of space, lots of animals, just enough civilization to visit when you want a book or a good dinner or a movie or a cold beer.

The thought of going back permanently FirstSide, back to crowding and itchy madness and a world so empty of life, was getting increasingly repellent.

Plus I think I’m in love, and that it’s mutual. If only John Rolfe weren’t such a ruthless son of a bitch… well, for now he’s my son of a bitch. Got to admit he’s one gutsy and smart son of a bitch, too. I don’t like everything he’s done by a long shot, but it’s impressive that he’s been able to do it. He took that one wild chance and ran with it.

Something crackled behind him and to the right, very faintly. Tom spun before the sound was finished, the weapon in his arms coming up to his shoulder in a perfect three-point aiming position even as he threw himself prone. The leveled rifle probed the darkness as his finger took up the slack on the trigger.

More than one man had died because they assumed someone Tom’s size had to be slow. Assumptions were nearly as deadly as bullets, and much more popular.

“You fast, not just big, Tall Man,” a thickly accented voice said. “Listen good, too.”

“Hello,” Tom said dryly as a wiry brown form rose from the brush; the dark skin was about as good at melting into the background as his fatigues.

Kolo nodded wordlessly and slipped the polished shaft of his tomahawk back into a loop at his belt, then turned and trotted away through the darkness—making a lot more noise this time; you could move silently through this wilderness of dried stalks and crunchable vegetation, or quickly, but even someone like the Indian tracker couldn’t do both. Behind the spot he’d occupied another figure rose—Jim Simmons, with a scope-sighted rifle cradled in his arms.

“Sorry,” the Scout said; they shook hands. “We just got here, and Kolo likes a joke. Also he’s annoyed that this trip means he can’t get back to visit his wife and family.”

Tom looked at the sycamore he’d been squatting under. “Yah, you betcha, life is hard—and he was going to put the tomahawk into that tree just over my head, wasn’t he?”

He pushed the night-sight goggles up on his forehead; it was a strain if you wore them too long. Simmons shrugged ruefully, his teeth white in the darkness.

“You know the really funny thing?”

“No, what?” Tom said.

He’d been around Roy Tully long enough to know an appeal for a straight line when he heard it. He didn’t mind; Simmons was the most likable of the men on this trip, after Roy. Just about the only one besides Henry Villers who was simpatico at all, in fact—possibly it was because they were in the same line of work and were both men of the wilderness by choice. The smaller man went on:

“The local Indians didn’t use tomahawks before we got here. Some Families idiot back in the early days evidently gave them the idea, probably because he’d read Last of the Mohicans too many times and thought that Injuns just weren’t proper Injuns unless they chucked hatchets about with bad intent, and took scalps. Incidentally, the local tribes didn’t do that either—not this side of the Sierras—until it was suggested to them.”

Tom winced. “Jim, did you ever get the feeling that John Rolfe and his friends turned this place into a theme park of perverted romanticism run amok?”

The Scout grinned. “All the time. I like it that way. It may be a playpen, but it’s our playpen, by God.”

They went back to the mules, and Botha and his son Schalk—the name gave Tom a bad feeling, but hell, the two men had been partners for a long time before Schalk van der Merwe went rogue—led them to the rest of the caravan.

If I ever have a son, I’ll probably name him Roy, after all.

It was surprising how much space ten mules and fourteen-odd horses took up; quadrupeds were bulky. Sandra introduced him to his horses, two big cobby roans; he fed them lumps of sugar and pieces of dried fruit, and did the appropriate horse-language blowing in the nostrils in greeting. The women and the smaller men were on mounts that looked like they had a good bit of Arab in their bloodlines, which was just what you wanted for a desert expedition… except that breed tended to be small, and asking one to carry two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle, bone and gristle was a bit unfair.

To his relief, he wasn’t expected to pull the spare horse along on a leading rein, or help with the mules. Those had been trained to follow each other on a long looped arrangement, and Sandra would be chivvying the horse herd along cowboy-style; he noticed the two Boers and Simmons keeping an eye on her as they moved out in a loose column of twos on what was probably more a game trail than a track made by men. It couldn’t be easy, even though the horses wanted to stay close to each other and to their human protectors in the predator-smelling darkness. He also noticed the men relax—a little—as it became apparent that she was good at what she did.

Adrienne rode knee to knee with him. He leaned over close enough to murmur, “Lot of boars wandering around here—male chauvinist variety,” he said dryly.

“Tell me about it,” Adrienne said; he thought he detected a trace of bitterness under the mordant humor. “Do you have any idea of how irritating it is when the best you can get is to be treated like an honorary man? And if you think Jim’s bad, you should see what the older generation is like. Fast cars and feminism are the only good points about FirstSide.”

The Bothas led, father and son; this land was part of the Versfeld domain, only ten miles or so from their farm, and they’d both hunted through it for years. The party went east for a good long while, then began trending a little south, keeping the mountains parallel to their course on their left; the Dipper blazed above them, and the Pole Star was plain enough. The land was pretty well flat, with an occasional hill rearing out of the plain; for a while the vegetation died down to sagebrush and dry grass with an occasional scrubby tree. He was a little startled when one of the trees raised its head and looked at them….

A dry rustling sound stopped; he hadn’t noticed it until then. That had been something huge cropping at the top of an oak, and ripping the leaves loose with a long prehensile tongue. It reared up to its full eighteen feet of height as they approached, its two knobby horns and long camel-like head clear against the stars, then turned and paced away, both long gangly legs on either side moving in unison. It looked slow even after it had broken into a clumsy gallop, but he estimated that it was moving at nearly thirty miles an hour.

Adrienne gave a low gurgling chuckle. “There’s something intrinsically funny about a giraffe,” she said. “Unless it kicks you. In a way, it’s a pity this land isn’t slated as Commission reserve.”

“I admit, it looks a lot better than FirstSide LA,” Tom said. “Smells better, too. It would be a shame to see it go the same way.”

“Oh, we’re never going to let it get like that,” she said. “Just farms and ranches and small towns, with a couple of medium-sized cities. No long-distance aqueducts, and strict limits on wells—one thing the domain system was designed to do was make it impossible for cities to reach out and suck other regions dry. But it’ll be a lot tamer than it is now.”

It couldn’t be much wilder, Tom thought. Christ, what a mix-up—Wild West and wild Serengeti!

They came to a dirt road a couple of miles inland, rutted clay scattered with gravel on a low embankment, flanked by ditches and tall posts carrying wires.

Adrienne pointed southward along the dirt road. “That’s Highway One,” she said. “It’s paved from San Diego to the oil wells and refinery at Long Beach; then it heads north, inland for a way, up to San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles. In theory you could drive all the way from San Diego to the geyser country north of Napa—but a lot of it’s rough, not easily motorable like this.”

“It’s all what you’re used to,” Tom said gravely. And I’ve seen better roads than this in Afghanistan, for God’s sake.

After that the vegetation grew thicker again; for a couple of miles they traveled single-file through stands of castor-bean plant mixed with wild black mustard in a tangle that that ranged from six feet in height to ten; small yellow flowers were still blooming at the end of the mustard’s short branches. After the first few hundred yards it was like riding through neck-deep water that occasionally closed over his head—although water wouldn’t make you sneeze, which the pollen from the mustard did—or between rustling walls along a laneway barely wide enough for a horse and rider.

“Careful, big Tom,” Simmons said on his way back to check on the mules.

“Here be tigers?” he replied.

Adrienne answered for him: “The place is lousy with them. Also grizzly bears and lions. Cape buffalo and American bison, and the odd rhino too; and up ahead”—she pointed southeast—“is the Winkpar.”

“Which means?”

“The Indian word was pwinukipar, or something like that. It means ‘many waters’ or ‘big swamp.’ Hippos. Elephants. Crocs.”

“Right where Las Cienegas was, right?”

Before that became a main Los Angeles highway, it had been what its Spanish name meant—“swamps.”

“Right. But it’s not just one big block—there are little sloughs and seepage springs all over the country between the river and the Santa Monicas. Excuse me, between the river and the Krugersberg.”

“Well, that adds a certain charm to a ride in the night,” Tom said, and they smiled at each other in the rustling dimness.

And oddly enough, it’s true, he thought, feeling himself warmed. Although if I’m going to be charged by a rhino, better while riding a Hummer than a horse.

They moved on through the night, stopping every hour or so for ten minutes’ rest and switching horses every two. He used the intervals to stretch, grunting a little as he forced head to knee. Mosquitoes grew more common as they skirted the huge swamp to their south; it made him glad he’d had the malaria cellular vaccine just before he left the army. The marshes covered scores of square miles, even toward the end of the summer drought—and so did groves of trees on their edges, sycamores and big cottonwoods and willows mostly, with oaks and California walnut; the shade grew dense enough that everyone put their night-sight goggles back on. They were riding through an open gallery forest most of the time; the problem was that there were patches and outliers of the marsh, where streams ran downhill from the Santa Monicas or underground rock ledges forced the already-high water table to the surface. Those produced jungle, an impenetrable lacework of creepers and California rose. Sometimes you couldn’t go around.

He dismounted at a hand gesture and unlimbered the machete from his saddle. “Now this takes me back,” he said, as he took his turn.

The blade was a slightly flared rectangle of good steel, heavy and sharp; he waded in, reminding himself that they needed a path wide enough for horses, not just men. Brushwood and branches and thorny vines fell with a ssss-chunk! as he struck with blows that might have been timed by metronome, flicking or kicking the cut stems aside when he had to. The ground turned muddy under his feet, but they didn’t come to an actual river, just a laneway of lower growth that carried the overflow of the winter storms down from the mountains. Sweat ran down his face and flanks and back as he breathed deeply with the exertion, an agreeable enough sensation—which wasn’t something he’d ever thought he’d say about breathing in the LA basin! Back FirstSide, he’d be choking on the air….

Henry Villers came up to spell him. “Nice job,” he said. “I thought you did your fighting in dry places, Warden Tom.”

“Mostly—Euphrates to Hindu Kush, with excursions north. But my battalion got sent to the Philippines for a while during the war—Abu Sayyef tried a revival. Jungle work.”

“What happened?”

Tom grimaced. “Some of us died. All of them died… not a happy time. At least it isn’t raining here, and there aren’t many civilians to get caught in the cross fire.”

“I was a dry-area fighter myself,” the black man said; he took over, competently enough, if without the machine accuracy and strength of the ex-Ranger.

“Kuwait?”

“Gulf War One, right,” Villers said. “Marines—we did the ‘hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle’ part while you army pukes played at being Rommel’s Desert Rats.”

“Ah… I think Rommel was the Desert Fox and fought the Desert Rats,” he said, hesitating until Villers turned and grinned at him over his shoulder.

“Man, you fell for that one! I hung out with some Brits during the buildup; they still have that dumb-ass rodent painted on their tanks.”

Tom nodded acknowledgment at the hit. “What was your MOS, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Hey, every marine’s a rifleman—even the women. Seriously, it was infantry—I carried the squad’s Minimi,” Villers said; that meant he’d been a machine gunner. “Anyway, it wasn’t much of a war. Never saw anyone so anxious to surrender as those Homers. Taking care of them slowed us down worse than fighting would have.”

“Best kind of war,” Tom said sincerely. “Even better if you’re piloting a Predator through a satellite uplink from Florida.”

“Right on, brother,” Villers said, panting, dropping back to let Schalk Botha replace him at the front. “Christ, I’m thirty-eight and I feel every year of it. Should have spent more time in the hills hunting deer this spring.”

All the men took turns at the clearing, until they were up and through the slough and into more of the cottonwood forest.

“We’ll camp here,” Botha said. “We’ll need firewood—”

“And I’ll help put up the tents,” Henry Villers said smoothly, with a toothy smile.

Tom filled in the unspoken codicil and smiled to himself: Draw your own water, Mr. Boer, and hew your own wood.