“There are still some renegades and hostiles in the lakes and swamps,” Adrienne pointed out. “At least a hundred, worst case a thousand—there are lots of little islands in there, and plenty of fish and game. A few of them have stolen guns, too. They’d like to get their hands on our weapons and gear. Very, very much. Plus they’re not really fond of New Virginians, which is understandable from their point of view.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to camp out alone around here, or set up house, or try to graze stock,” Simmons agreed. “But they’ve learned better than to come out in the daytime, or in any numbers. I doubt they’re going to attack a party of mounted Scouts, either.”
“They’re even less likely to attack a platoon and an armored car,” Adrienne said. “Trust the Old Man’s judgment. He knew you’re someone who could be trusted to produce twenty closely related condors on short notice without shooting them, for example.”
“Wasn’t hard,” Jim said. “The Valley isn’t half as challenging as things were when we were back in Kenya during the Mau Mau.”
The remark was made with malice aforethought; the British-African immigrants were popularly and unflatteringly known as when-wes. He dropped into a semi-British clipped accent as he spoke. Normally apart from an occasional turn of phrase his voice had the same slight New Virginian drawl as hers or Heinrich’s, the legacy of many languages and generations of linguistic drift in relative isolation.
Adrienne snorted. “Jim, you were born in the Commonwealth and you’ve never been back. Your father was born in New Virginia and never went FirstSide in his life either. Your grandparents came from Kenya in ’sixty-three.”
“That skipped my mind,” he teased, grinning.
The other two Frontier Scouts waited by the cages; they were cut from much the same cloth as Simmons—in fact, one was his younger brother and one his maternal aunt’s son; New Virginia ran on nepotism, and not only in the Thirty Families. The wire containers were in a double row, eighteen of them, with an awning rigged above. Inside the cages huge vulturelike birds perched and stank and brooded, their naked yellow heads twisting on the ends of long scabby necks to cast a baleful eye on the movements of their captors. With their wings folded, the distinguishing white patches underneath were invisible, and they looked like huge ill-tempered bundles of feathers with claws. A condor high above was a sight of heart-catching grace and beauty, but close quarters were something else again. Occasionally one would utter a disconsolate, croaking squawk or engage in a feather-ruffling, beak-stabbing dispute with its neighbors.
“Well, there the bloody things are,” Simmons replied. “Bugger-all explanation I got; just a message from your father to go get them, countersigned by the Old Man no less, at which I genuflected, salaamed, saluted and got on my way… and I was due to go up to Fort Tahoe Station, which I will remind you has a much better climate than this. What’s going on—is there a barbecue planned at Rolfe Manor?”
Adrienne grinned at his plaintive expression. “Well, they do weigh in about the same as a turkey, and I suppose with some chipotle rub and a sage-and-herb stuffing, maybe a little garlic…”
The birds all looked healthy, and they all had a dish of water and a gobbet of fly-swarming meat that stank even worse than they did, a gourmet meal for what the biologists called an obligate scavenger, which meant carrion eater in plain English. She nodded in satisfaction, and sipped from a tin cup of strong camp coffee someone put in her hand.
“Good work, though, and quick,” she said. There were thousands of condors in the Commonwealth, but that didn’t mean you could walk around scooping them up with a butterfly net, particularly when they had to be unharmed. “I’m impressed; I’ll tell my father and the Old Man so, too.”
Simmons swept off his hat and gave her a mock-courtly bow. “That glad-dens the cockles of my heart.” His expression was sly. “Is the lady impressed enough to sweep me off my feet, take me away from this piece of refried hell, make an honest man of me and elevate my lowly but roguishly charming Settler self to the demiparadise of collateral Family status among the august Rolfes?”
Adrienne punched his shoulder; it felt like striking a board. “You’d go toes-up in a month, living in Rolfeston, or even on an estate in Napa,” she said. “And working a regular job inside the frontier would drive you to suicide. You’re a wilderness man through and through.”
“True… true… how about a brief, meaningless affair, then?”
“You’re incorrigible!”
“No, the name’s Simmons…. Right then; how about charming you into telling me what this is about?”
“Sorry. Gate Security business.”
His eyebrows went up. “Gate Security requires twenty condors? Half of which have to be fed one lead shotgun pellet, and the rest a package of mysterious powders flown out at vast expense?”
“Yes,” she said, and laughed with good-natured schadenfreude at his frustration.
“Adrienne, do you have any idea of what it’s like making a condor eat something? They have projectile vomiting down to a science. I deserve to know!”
“Really, I can’t tell you; not only that, you’re supposed to keep quiet about it too. Any prospect of getting the last two soon?”
“We shot bait all along a front north and south of here,” Simmons said. “Mostly wild cattle, some antelope, and a few feral camels. The cars would spook the birds, so we ride out when—Ah, here he is.”
A lone figure came trotting out of the northeast, where the marsh made a green line on the horizon, which meant a considerable distance hereabouts. There was an old joke that when your dog ran away in this part of the Commonwealth, you could stand on a chair and watch it going for three days. Adrienne wore a monocular in a case on her belt; she snapped it open and put it to her right eye. A man was approaching, barefoot and clad only in a deer-hide breechclout. His long black hair hung to his shoulders beneath a headband, and his body seemed to be comprised exclusively of bone, gristle, jerky and sinew sheathed in dark brown hide. He moved at an effortless smooth trot through the calf-high plain of yellow-white dried grass, the short bow in his left hand pumping as he ran. A quiver was slung across his back; his belt bore a steel knife, hatchet, militia-issue canteen, and a bag that probably contained most of his other possessions. His broad high-cheeked face was flatly impassive, and he was hardly even sweating in the vicious heat.
“Ah, that’s one of your tame Yokut trackers, right?” Adrienne said.
“Kolomusnim, or Kolo for short. He’s not particularly tame, but he’s a bloody good tracker. Good man, when he can keep away from the booze.”
“Most can’t, judging by the specimens I’ve seen around your Frontier Scout stations,” Adrienne said.
“I’d be tempted to drown my sorrows myself, in their position,” Simmons said, surprising her. “Let’s to business, then.”
Kolomusnim came up at the same swinging trot, stopping and sinking to his heels in front of the Frontier Scout, who squatted likewise to watch as the Indian drew in the white dust and spoke in a mixture of his native tongue and garbled English; after a moment she could follow the latter, at least.