A herd of mustangs drew a plume of dust across the barren land, spooked by the Black Hawk’s shadow, and pronghorns scattered like drops of mercury on a block of ice. Ahead was a vivid, livid green, where the tule swamps spread around the great shallow lakes that occupied much of this end of the valley even in summer. Looking east she could see the harsh glitter of sunlight on water through the rippling sea of reeds twice the height of a man. Beyond them lay open blue, and beyond that rose the source of the life-giving flow—the snowpeaks of the Sierras. They floated salt white and ethereally lovely in the distance, turned to an eye-hurting brilliance by the morning sun, a wall between her homeland and the deserts and plains of the far interior.
A smoke flare cast a long streak of orange-red across the yellow-brown steppe not far away from the edge of the marsh. Nearby was the camp she’d come to find, vehicles parked in a square laager, a dozen hobbled horses in a swale that still kept a little green and had a single scraggly valley oak, and a set of tents grouped around campfires. The pilot nodded when she leaned forward into the crew section and pointed, his bulbous helmet and face shield making him insectile as he swung the helicopter sharply in a banking turn and cut toward the flare. It was suitably distant from the tents and the long row of wire cages covered by an awning; it would be just what she needed to send the birds into cataleptic shock. Suddenly the ground was closer; a falling-elevator sensation pressed her into the web seat, and hot dusty air flicked grit into her face as the side doors were opened and swung alongside the fuselage.
Adrienne hopped down with one hand holding the floppy-brimmed canvas hat on her head against the blast of the helicopter’s slowing rotors; she could feel sweat starting out under the thin, tough cotton fabric of her bush jacket, and dry instantly in the blade-wash as the turbine howl of the engines died.
Schalk and Piet followed her toward the camp. Closer, she could see eight big Land Rovers, the Aussie SAS six-wheeled model designed FirstSide for long-range desert patrols, plus two Hummers and a Cheetah light armored car with paired machine guns in its little octagonal turret. A heavy-duty field radio sat on a table under a large tent with its sides rolled up; the other tents were rigged as shade-only as well, with bedrolls resting beneath them. Most of the thirty or so men there were in wolf-gray militia uniforms, wearing peaked caps with neck flaps and the von Traupitz double-lightning-bolt-and-eagle Family badge on their shoulders; there were three men in Frontier Scout khaki as well. The Scouts were the Commonwealth’s wilderness and frontier experts. As a sideline, they handled relations with Indian remnants who’d survived the plagues.
She recognized both the commanders; the militia platoon was led by Heinrich von Traupitz, scion of a younger-son branch of that Family, and the Frontier Scout was a Settler by the name of Jim Simmons. Both were her contemporaries, in their twenties and of the third generation born in the Commonwealth; she’d met Heinrich socially any number of times since her sixth birthday party, and had worked with Simmons before. The troops were all young men doing their national service except for a grizzled sergeant; probably all from farming and ranching households affiliated with the von Traupitzes, too, and experienced hunters. That Family had their main holding southeast of the Rolfe domain in the Napa watershed, over the Vaca hills and out on the edge of settlement in the Suisun Valley, deeply rural even by her people’s standards; they and their Settlers raised a fifth of New Virginia’s wheat crop.
“Jim, good to see you,” she said, shaking their hands. “Hi, Heinrich. How’s Caitlin, Cuz?”
“Last time we talked, she said, ‘I’m feeling well, though enormous.’”
Members of the Thirty in the same generation usually called each other Cuz—Cousin—but Caitlin was one in the literal sense, daughter of one of Adrienne’s paternal uncles. She’d always been fond of the girl in an elder-sister fashion, and Heinrich was a nice enough sort. For a von Traupitz.
Unlike the older generation, she thought with slight distaste.
Their founder had been a colonel—in Das Reich, a Waffen-SS division with an unsavory reputation, if that wasn’t redundant, and a nasty piece of work personally. The third generation were quite human, most of them. Of course, Heinrich’s mother had been an O’Brien.
Heinrich smiled back; he was a black-haired man with amber-colored eyes and pale skin that glistened with sunblock.
“I would like to be back for the birth; it’s our first, you know,” he went on. “I suspect my men wouldn’t turn down a cold beer at the Mermaid Café, either.”
He looked over her shoulder. The Black Hawks were Commission property, usually used as air ambulances to bring in patients from outlying settlements. This one had been fitted out in “militarized” mode, with stub wings bearing a six-barreled Gatling minigun on the left side and rocket pods on the right.
“Fancy carriage there, Cuz,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Is there something I should know about, or is this the Old Man’s usual overkill?”
“The ’copter is staying to take me back once we’ve got the cargo,” she replied, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. “It’s just what was available.”
The pilot and his assistant were out, doing a maintenance check on the engines and weapons systems, something of which she heartily approved. Her years as a Gate Security agent had taught her that if you didn’t take care of equipment, it wouldn’t take care of you when you needed it. And while you might not need any particular item often, when you did you’d need it very badly.
“Can’t be over too soon for me, Adri,” Heinrich said. “If I owned this place and hell, I’d live in hell and rent it out. They say our area is hot and flat!” He slapped at a mosquito and cursed as it squashed against his neck in a smear of blood and sweat. “Jim and his boys did all the work. All we’ve done is sit and stare at dust-devils and the occasional pronghorn and listen to our frying skin crackle and pop.”
“You might as well get packed, then. Sorry I don’t have time for the social amenities, Heinrich, but this is Gate Security business, and I have to wrap it up fast. Then you can get your men back to civilization and cold beer.”
The soldier nodded, shrugged, slapped another mosquito and walked off toward his troops, calling orders. There was a chorus of cheers, and they began striking camp with commendable enthusiasm.
The Frontier Scout laughed as they walked toward the cages; he was about her height, with sun-streaked brown hair, a close-cropped gingery beard and blue eyes startling in his tanned countenance. His broad-brimmed hat had a leopard-skin band, and old sweat had left rings of salt stain on his jacket, still visible beneath the new ones despite multiple washings; a leather thong around his neck bore grizzly-bear teeth and lion claws.
“What were they thinking of, sending that bunch of farm boys and clerks’ sons?” Simmons said. “We don’t need soldiers, and I doubt many of them have been twenty miles east of the Coast Range before. My oath! Half of them aren’t old enough to shave. A couple of Frontier Scouts are all that’s necessary for a job like this; the condors don’t have artillery, after all.”
“The Old Man is fond of saying that few operations fail because too much force is used. The troops are just for insurance; and they’re not from Rolfeston, you’ll note.”
“Operation? What operation?” Simmons said, taking off his hat and waving it at the flat, heat-shimmering circle of the horizon while he wiped a sleeve across his forehead. “This isn’t the 1980s, for sweet suffering Jesus’ sake. This valley’s nearly as pacified as the good lieutenant von Traupitz’s ancestral acres back northside of the delta. Most of the natives died off in the first epidemics in the forties and the smallpox got the rest—the nearest wild tribe of any size is up in the Sierras.”