“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.”