There was one domestic item that drew his eye.
“Well, lookie here,” he said. “Ahem. ‘Hostile Indian remnants skulking in the Tulare marshes have been taught a stinging lesson for their unprovoked attack on a party of Frontier Scouts accompanied by the adventurous granddaughter of our Founder. Lieutenant von Traupitz reports that even though Miss Adrienne Rolfe, daughter of Chairman Charles Rolfe and granddaughter of the Founder, was temporarily in some danger, timely intervention by his force of Commission Militia—’”
Adrienne came back wearing laced hiking boots, loose brown cords and a black polo shirt. She looked over his shoulder; he was acutely conscious of the slight warmth, a scent of laundry-fresh clothes mingled with shampoo and her.
“That’s where those extra condors came from,” she said. “And Karl von Traupitz has an inflated sense of his own place in the world. The whole Family is like that. If they decide to build a new bacon-curing plant they boast about it beforehand, they tell you how world-historically important it is while they’re doing it, and then they write a seven-volume epic complete with footnotes about it afterward. Maybe it’s genetic—although you’d think all the intermarriage would have diluted it by now.”
She had a floppy broad-brimmed canvas jungle hat on her head, with the cord under her chin; she also had two holstered pistols in her hands, and a rifle across her back.
“Here,” she said, sliding the pistols across the table.
Tom caught his automatically; it was his Fish and Game-issue 9mm Glock. “Ah… I presume carrying a gun’s legal here?” he said.
“For Settlers, carrying anything short of mortars and heavy machine guns is legal,” Adrienne said cheerfully. “But be cautious. Dueling is legal here too, with single-shot pistols, usually.”
Both men looked at her in disbelief. A little defensively, she went on: “Well, it’s not common. Maybe once a year. But it is legal—and when a man in town carries a gun openly, he’s saying he’s ready to fight. Sort of like the Code of the West. I’d advise concealed carry, which is also legal here. I wouldn’t put it past the Collettas to set someone on to pick a fight with you two, if my dark suspicions are correct. I’d have canned that story in the Commonwealth Courier and Herald if I could. That would have caused a fuss, though, and they’d probably be fully informed anyway.”
“Do you really need the artillery for a trip into the country?” he said, his eyes sharpening on her rifle.
“No, but it’s sort of customary to have a rifle in the rack beyond city limits,” she said. “We’ll be going through a couple of reserves where big predators are common and big, irritable herbivores are very common.”
“That’s not a Garand, is it?” Tully asked curiously, as she laid the weapon and a rucksack down on the table and turned to a wall-mounted screen.
“No,” she said over her shoulder, as she pressed her hand to the plate beside the screen and looked into the scanner. “It’s an O’Brien-Garand; a modification that Uncle Andy—Andy O’Brien, the first O’Brien Prime—made back in 1949. He was the Old Man’s top sergeant in Baker company, in the Pacific, and he thought the Garand was the perfect battle rifle except for two things.”
A slight sadness touched her face. “He taught me rifles; and he used to play grizzly bears with me when he came visiting, back when I was a little girl, and give me sips out of his wineglass.”
Tom examined the rifle; it was the classic WWII semiauto, but with the gas port moved back four inches from the muzzle and a twenty-round detachable box magazine instead of the awkward eight-round integral clip you loaded from the top in the GI version. The Pentagon, in its infinite multilayered bureaucratic wisdom, had taken until 1959 to make similar changes—Tom’s grandfather had soldiered through Korea with the original model. The only other difference he could see was a slotted flash suppressor-cum-grenade launcher attachment on the end of the muzzle.
He removed the magazine and looked at the cartridges; they were the old full-power .30-06, but these were hollow points, like a game-hunting round, designed to mushroom inside a wound. Pulling back the operating rod, he saw that the chamber and barrel were chrome-lined; the construction was excellent but in an old-fashioned way, everything beautifully machined from solid metal forms, rather than assembled from stampings and synthetics and powder forgings. And the stock was some close-grained hardwood, polished silky-smooth save for the checker work on the grip and forestock.
“I notice your Gate Security Force has assault rifles,” Tom said, laying the weapon down again. “G-thirty-sixes, weren’t they? Good gun.”
“Just a second.” The screen had come alive, and was showing a logo with a central CICN. “This is Adrienne Rolfe,” she went on to the machine.
“Confirmed: voice, retina, palm.”
“Ronald Tully and Thomas Christiansen, ident numbers as follows, to have access to these premises. Transfer one thousand dollars to each account.”
“Confirmed.”
“Wait a minute—” Tom began.
“You wanted to investigate this place. Having money of your own will help.”
He couldn’t say anything to that. Because it’s so self-evidently true, idiot, he thought, and went on aloud: “Thanks. That will help.”
“Good, because I don’t think we have all that much time to get started.” She tossed a house key to each of the men. “I like to have old-fashioned backup locks. Try not to run wild in the fleshpots of Rolfeston with the thousand while we’re gone, Roy.”
Roy frowned, and spoke with grim seriousness: “It’ll be a tough battle, but a twelve-step program will see me through the temptation.”
She went on to Tom: “You’re right about the assault rifles, but the Gate Security Force might have to fight FirstSiders. The militia’s probable opposition uses bows and arrows. And it doesn’t hurt to have the GSF stronger than any equivalent number of Family militia.”
Tom pocketed the key. “Isn’t it a danger to your reputation, giving dubious characters like us door keys?”
“Oh, my reputation can’t be damaged; it got wrecked back in my teens,” she said with a chuckle. “Popular perceptions of my standards of taste, now…”
INTERLUDE
“Good day, Dimitri Ivanovich,” the young scientist said.
He looked uncertain, a slight dark fellow who still blinked as if he had thick glasses on his face, despite the expensive corneal surgery Batyushkov had financed.
“Uncle Dimitri, please, Sergei,” the Prime said, and the two Russians smiled at each other. “Sit, sit—refresh yourself.”
The Batyushkov country seat was only recently completed; it was not far from FirstSide’s town of Aptos, with the sea breaking at its feet and the Santa Cruz Mountains to the north, stretching eastward along the valley of the Pajaro River and south nearly to the site of Castroville. He’d been offered a selection of coastal properties, all the way from Oregon to San Diego—he supposed he could have picked something in Australia, for that matter—but this had been his choice. It was close enough to Rolfeston to be convenient, but not close enough that the Commission was looking over his shoulder every moment of the day; and it was even closer to Colletta Hall, over the hills in the lower Santa Clara. He sensed opportunity there; the Prime of the Collettas was a discontented man.
“It reminds me of the Crimea,” the young scientist said. “Mountains, the sea, fertile land between, and the climate of heaven.”