“Feeling better?” Adrienne asked, bending to thump the ribs of one of the big dogs that hung around her. The white-bibbed cat looked down disapprovingly from the top of a big globe mounted in a wheeled frame of oak and polished brass.
“Somewhat,” Tom replied.
In fact he was feeling excellent, better than he’d felt since his last long hiking trip, up in Glacier National Park. The aches had gone; he was in fundamentally good condition, after all. He also felt loose-limbed and strong and quick, as if a spring in muscle and bone that had been fading for the last few years without his being quite conscious of it had come back sometime in the past week.
“I always get the sensation my body’s flushing out poisons after a spell FirstSide,” Adrienne went on. “Whether or not it’s true.”
“Ah…” Tom said. “That’s interesting.”
Because I feel just like that now, and don’t want to admit it, he thought, and then shrugged hopelessly as he saw her sly grin and knew she’d followed the thought. Let’s face it, for someone of my tastes, this place has a lot of the features I’d pick for Wish Fulfillment Land. Of course, in other ways…
The map room at Seven Oaks was an annex off the library; there were big tables and slanted desks, atlases, rack-boxes to hold maps and graphics, and a smell of paper and book dust and leather, mixed with greenery from the open windows giving on a courtyard garden. There was also a big thin-film screen for calling up data, and a printer that could handle large maps at need.
There were seven people in the room: Tom and Adrienne, Tully, Piet Botha and Sandra Margolin, plus a brown-haired young man named Jim Simmons, and a silent Indian called Kolo in a breechclout who crouched in a corner, his black eyes intent. They were Frontier Scouts, evidently something like his job with Fish and Game mixed with the sort of thing he’d done in the army Rangers.
The stock of paper maps included an excellent series for the western part of North America; they were marked in the lower left-hand corner with the words Commission Cartographic Authority. He supposed that the basic geography would be the same as FirstSide, minus the draining and damming and clearing of the past three hundred years—there might be differences in the details, the course of rivers and so forth. Evidently the Commission had spent a good deal of effort over the past sixty years to keep theirs current.
The land was familiar, but man’s borders were utterly strange. The map showed the outlines of the domains: a thick clump around the Bay Area, an outlier around Puget Sound, and another series down the coast of Southern California culminating in a big blotch in the lowlands between Santa Monica and San Diego. A trail of dots ran from Sacramento to the Mother Lode mines, then up through the Lake Tahoe area and from there into Nevada; they faded off to a last tiny outpost on the site of Denver.
“All right,” he said, moving his hand from Oregon to Baja. “It’s unlikely in the extreme that the enemy would be trying to train their clandestine force anywhere close to the coast. Too many people, too many aircraft.”
Though that’s an irony, he thought as the others nodded. Two hundred thousand all the way from Portland to San Diego! And a couple of hundred planes all up, including little puddle-jumpers.
“At the same time, they have to be close enough to Rolfeston to strike at the Gate. Unfortunately, with a C-130, that means anywhere within two thousand miles—two thousand with a full load, more if you trade off cargo for fuel.”
“Good plane, the Herky Bird,” Tully added. “I spent a lot of time aboard them myself—and they’re still making them, which is not bad considering the design was finalized in 1951.”
“We’ve been using them since 1958,” Adrienne said. “They’re our standard heavy transport and passenger aircraft…”
“And Colletta Air owns dozens,” Piet Botha said. “Sorry, has owned dozens—every once in a while one is lost or wears out. Or so the reports they file on Nostradamus say.”
“Or they could just divert some at the last moment,” Adrienne said. “Most of the pilots would do whatever Giovanni Colletta tells them unless they had very good reasons not to; they’re part of his affiliation, after all. Telling them to go to point X would be simple enough, and once the troops were on board they’d be committed.”
The Indian said nothing. But I suspect he’s following the conversation much better than he lets on, Tom thought. There was a disturbing, feral quality to the man’s gaze, and the way he squatted and held himself was subtly different from anything he’d seen before. Of course, I’ve never seen an Indian whose people haven’t been in contact with us for a century at least.
“Ten Hercules would be enough to carry a thousand infantry and their equipment, which is more than they’d need,” Tom pointed out. “Cruising at just under four hundred miles an hour. At full range, that means anywhere within this radius.”
He picked up a compass, set it to the right distance, and scribed a three-quarter circle with the center on the Gate. “Everything within this line. That’s half the continent. Let’s start eliminating what we can.”
“They wouldn’t want to be farther away than they must,” Simmons said. “To hit fast when they go for it, and to cut down on the number of trips they’d have to make to bring in supplies while they’re getting ready.”
“Yeah, the usual logistics problems,” Tully said. “Five hundred men minimum, plus some support personnel… who also eat their heads off and need bunks… say seven hundred to twelve hundred all up, even with a real high teeth-to-tail ratio, and more if they’ve got more than five hundred troops. That’s a couple of tons of food a day, plus water, housing, uniforms, stores, spare parts, medical supplies, barracks or tents, fuel….”
“Cover,” Adrienne said thoughtfully; she was sitting with a pad of paper in front of her, tapping her chin with a pen. “It would be somewhere remote, but with something going on to cover a lot of transport. And somewhere they could produce some of the supplies themselves, to keep the transport needs to a minimum.”
Tom looked at the map again. All the mountainous parts of California and the Pacific Northwest, not to mention the deserts, were marked in green as Permanent Commission Reserve. That meant they were national parks, near enough; shades of the color indicated whether they were slated for sustained-yield timbering, hunting preserve attached to one of the Families, or absolute wilderness. The coastal valleys like the Napa or the Salinas or the Santa Ynez were settled, or parts of them were. Sections of the southern basins around the site of LA and San Diego were too; the rest, and the Central Valley, were part reserve, part unallocated land waiting to be handed out as the population grew.
“I don’t think there’s much doubt as to the where, when you take all that into account,” Adrienne said.
She pulled a thick reference work down from a shelf and began to thumb through it: Territorial Domains and Possessions of the Thirty Families, 2007 Edition.
“‘Chapter Seven: The Colletta Family. Primary domain… estates in Hawaii…’ Aha!” she said, and Tom felt a hunter’s grin appear on his face. She went on: “‘Owens Valley: Colletta outlying possession, granted in 1962…’ right, the Old Man told me about that once—something to do with keeping old Salvo Colletta sweet after taking Hawaii away from him. Hunting lodge and small airstrip until 2005; then the Collettas petitioned the committee and were granted permission to open the Cerro Gordo silver mines; construction work began the following spring. Hmmm. Quote: ‘Doubts were expressed as to the profitability of the venture,’ end quote.”