Wine of the Gods 4: Explorers

by Pam Uphoff

Question was in a pants suit, all in brown shades. Where Never stood out, Question was nearly camouflaged. Pregnant belly and all.

  "Looks very businesslike to me." Julianne wondered a bit about the cost of silk, and whether the little fab they had with them could produce artificial silk.

  "That was the idea. But since I'm a Laaady, I'm apparently supposed to look useless. I'm afraid Karista society and I don't mix. You should come and meet Lady Florence."

  Anne was especially delighted to meet an established noblewoman, in this case a widow assisting in the running of the joint household of the King's half brother and the King's eldest son. Apparently two confirmed bachelors. Never was a relative of the younger man, and she and Question were both staying there. Lady Florence cringed at the Earthers' garb, and made a very large number of recommendations, including what to wear to a Cove Islands garden party.

  Then a shopping trip to buy fabric in large quantities. Both Never and Question were familiar with fabbers from their spying on Earth, and made suggestions on textures and colors of the additional fabrics it could produce. They left the Earthers with heaps of material, and wondering where to find a seamstress.

  "I just have to survive one more dinner full of hints about marrying and then I can go home." Never grinned at their heaps of fabric. "Have fun!"

  "I thought you were Dydit's wife? Two kids?"

  Never snorted. "I was trying to avoid complicating your understanding of our society as a whole. But I am a member of a smaller culture. Witches do not marry. Dydit and I have a long term relationship, but there are no legal bindings."

  Anne watched them go, and huffed in irritation. "Those two do not fit this society psychologically, either. They are open minded and egalitarian, flexible. Both Dydit and Lefty show occasional reactions typical of the nobles, in Dydit's case, and the middle class, in Lefty's. I'll bet Lefty's parents were merchants. I'm surprised Dydit doesn't have a title."

  Julianne nodded. "He does have a bit of that 'Rules are for others, I don't actually notice them myself' sort of attitude, doesn't he? And don't forget that they may not be from here. A small, long term Oner presence might be about like that, you know?" She booted her comp and started looking through dress collections, comparing them to Lady Florence's sketches. A frantic three days of sewing got the women ready for the party. The men wore their suits.

  Pretty much to no avail. The Ambassador curled a sarcastic lip as Jerry tried to explain the size and strength of the Earth, and why they should be delighted to be in contact with them, and especially why they didn't want the Earth to get angry.

  "Does he really think we are so stupid?" An Auralian Army officer she'd met a week ago loomed over her shoulder. "Let me refresh your drink." He topped her glass off from his hip flask.

  It improved the mildly alcoholic fruity drink enormously. It wasn't until she had suffered through the hangover the next day and a half that it occurred to Roxy that she should have remembered the part about not compromising her reputation. Repeatedly.

  It was almost a relief, when the King decided they should all go away. He sent a formal letter of greetings to the President of the World, and a letter to the Dallas Board of Directors informing them that he was interested in trade, mining rights for a percent of profit and a list of electronics, appended. The list was a well thought out combination of sun panels, electric motors, and computer equipment. Roxy sighed, and hoped the other side of the negotiation would be as sensible. Lon would no doubt give the Board his best sales pitch.

  Chapter Sixteen

  21 May 3477

  Various Worlds

  The gate was brief, a single gyp whipped through. He and Ray were traveling with the returning fuel and supply trucks, and he saw the flying toss of a box off the gyp as it turned and followed them back through before the gate closed. The hotshot driver honked cheerfully and passed them before they got to the first corner.

  At the Dallas offices, apprehensive staff scurried to get him a computer.

  "It's Twelve -seventeen." Bec looked somewhere between horrified and delighted. "Did you hear? Jefferson almost marooned the whole cadre and all the temporary drivers."

  Ray choked faintly, behind him. Never, ever, get on the wrong side of the Driver's Union.

  "Gerald McCamey wanted you to call as soon as you got here." The other flunkey was nervous. Why? It wasn't his fault, he just kept the warehouse in order. Surely the Company isn't at risk of folding over this?

  "Show me." Lon sat down at the computer desk, and started opening reports.

  Not to his surprise, Jackson Jefferson had found the mountainous location of the gate anchor unacceptable. His mistake in bringing in all the equipment, boxes and personnel had been quickly compounded by attempting to move the anchor with the equipment on hand. As Lon had already heard, it was now at the bottom of a deep gully. Very deep.

  "He put it on a box transporter? It must have hung over the end. And without professional packing?" Lon shook his head in disbelief.

  "It slid all the way down that hill, and still works?" Ray sounded impressed.

  "The tow driver kept his head and let it pull him down too. He had enough control to slow it and the cable stabilized it, so it didn't roll." Bec murmured.

  "He must have been having visions of being marooned there." Lon snorted. "At least he didn't roll down on top of it."

  The flunkey squirmed. "They dug out as much of a runway as they could, and red Xed it. The rescue crew's report is there."

  "They've moved all personnel home, in case of loss of contact. Well, this should be fun." Ray looked over the specs. "We can get an eight ton in there, but can we move it anywhere afterwards?"

  "How about just a cat with a dozer blade and back hoe. We'll just start digging. When we've got a road for the anchor to travel on, we'll come back and get whatever we need at that point." Lon was typing up a list as he spoke. Chainsaws, fuel and oil. Log chain. Survey markers. Mobile shelter. Food. Winch, size extra large. "Getting this all through is going to be a bitch. I wonder how far it is to the boxes and food he took across? And if they ate it all. That would help us. I'll write it up pretty for the Board. And I'll call McCamey now."

  "God, Lon, we've got the Gate Authority doing a review of our safety programs, the CDW union has filed a lawsuit, our partners are screaming . . . "

  "I didn't hear that anyone was injured." Lon interrupted.

  "It was the possibility of marooning the whole cadre that's firing up the Unions. The Driver's Union alone . . . Anyway, we need you to fix it. What can you do?"

  "The law suits are your problem. Ray and I will take a cat with bulldozer and backhoe across and get a road built, move the anchor to someplace safe, and set up a safe camp around it. I see that you've got a coring rig there already, and boxes. Jefferson should have seen that he'd need a road, and moved the anchor properly before moving all that in. What happened to the original plan? I thought he was just going to do a bit of coring, and my cadre would take over?"

  "Ah. Well. He talked the Board into letting him run a whole exploration program. He said you'd be busy enough with prospects Fifty-three and Forty. And he had a cadre put together for Carolina, and equipment and . . . created this mess."

  "As far as I know, he's always been the exec, not the manager, always in large companies with lots of back up and he's only run regional explorations after initial contact. Does he have any experience at all at being first in? Well, it's a bit late to research him, and Meese said Carolina New Ventures insisted on having him in charge. All we can do is clean up after him. Now. I see that you've got a gate scheduled for Seventeen in four days, so I'm going to scramble up what I'll need. Twelve fifty-three is in as good a shape as I could leave it. I'm pulling everyone not necessary out of there until we work out the odd One World rumors and get a treaty with the local government. The DONA people, the contract linguists and sociologists, the biologist and my designated representative are off to visit the closest city. They should be back in six or se
ven weeks. I'll schedule gates so I can check on them while ordering the next run of equipment for Seventeen."

  "Oh, good. Good. You wouldn't believe what the stock prices have done. It's only been a week!"

  ***

  "Just hope the gate anchor isn't damaged just enough to work one more time."

  Lon sent Ray a repressive look. The problem with losing an anchor—apart from the exorbitant cost—was that the gate took time (money) to locate a specific but unmarked membrane of the multiverse. Some times it was impossible. But even when they were fairly sure they'd found the right world, and shoved a new anchor through, the actual location of the new anchor could be thousands of kilometers away from the original anchor and the marooned personnel.

  In the end, Lon had three helpers with him. Mark Lotto and Ferdinand d'Acosta were hot to gain experience for future employment with exploration cadres. They were about to get it. At least Ray's semi-serious teasing wasn't visibly bothering them. The gate fogged up then cleared to show the brief ramp and the very large red X on the steep slope a few meters away. The trees on the other side all seemed to be leaning at a forty-five degree angle. Lon grabbed a convenient roll bar as Ray gunned the cat through. They arrived on a slope that flattened out to level as they bumped the dirt bank marked with the emergency X.

  Lon looked at his companions' stunned expressions, and smiled dryly.

  The cat was built to go places without roads, but Twelve-seventeen was way past a mere lack of roads. And that was before the anchor had slid down the hill.

  He glanced back to see that the gate was already closed. Now they were on their own. The steep slope behind the anchor was a mess of broken trees. Small ones. "Must have been a forest fire about three years ago, the trees slowed the anchor without damaging it."

  A tractor and trailer combo was wrapped around a pair of larger trees three quarters of the way down and a bit forward of the old fire score.

  Ray nodded his approval. "Damn good thinking. The driver gunned his rig into the trees that would hold it, so he didn't keep sliding and hit the anchor."

  Fred scowled. "Maybe, I wouldn't have tried to drive with something crucial hanging over my trailer like that."

  Mark sniffed. "That only works if no one else will do it instead. And worse than you could of."

  Lon took a good long look around. "Let's take a walk."

  The cat was loaded to the limit, the max amount of stuff that would fit through the gate and on to the limited arrival space. Lon loaded everyone with survey equipment and started walking not quite along the contour of the southern side of the steep cleft the gate anchor was trapped in. A mile downstream the steep mountain turned into a hundred foot cliff.

  "Well, we can at least get a good look around." Lon leaned out over thin air. To the northeast the mountains fell away to plains. As good a place to aim for as any. Then he tried to look along the cliff.

  "East." Ray was doing the same. "We'll have to go down the nose of that ridge there."

  "Right. So we'll side track to there for starters." He looked around at the younger men. "See how the cliff face is buried in the ridge there? Looks like the closest place to get down from here. So we'll start a bit of road building. It won't be pretty, but it only has to hold long enough to get the anchor and the rest of the equipment out of here.

  "Mark, why don't you start unloading everything and moving it back behind the anchor. Ray, start marking trees. We need to at least have a decent runway. Fred, you and I are going to go surveying, chainsaws in hand."

  "I remember thinking the Authority team was having fun with camera angles when they ran their scan." Ray walked out and looked around. "Right. To doze out enough room for a convoy to enter and turn without backing up the line into the gate I'll have to run along the slope that way . . . "

  "Don't worry about a long convoy. I suspect the first thing we'll do is move the anchor. You just need to think in terms of a transporter truck, and the equipment to load the anchor."

  Ray skidded downhill a meter as he tried to walk on the pine needles and loose litter covering the ground. "You do know how long a transporter truck is, don't you?"

  "Yep. Maximum length they can fit through. How about if you back cut the hill behind the anchor and we use the rig to lift the anchor and move it down and back? Get it level, so the transporter doesn't wrench its frame coming through. I told them to make the next calibration good to fifty feet."

  Ray whistled. "Fifty feet? God knows I need it, but I don't want to hear what the board is going to say about your expenses."

  Lon grinned. "Well, that's why we don't have another gate time for six weeks. I can't afford too many of them."

  Ray walked around behind the anchor and eyed the mountain slope. "If I could winch that trailer down the hill and stand it in the streambed, we can build on top of it without damming the water flow. Then we can raise the low end of the anchor and swivel it, so the road runs along the slope . . . " He grabbed two of Lon's stakes and planted them. "Run along contour from here, for starters."

  "Will do." Lon handed Fred a chain saw, and hefted the survey stakes. Mark was muttering something about knowing he should have brought a slave along as he cautiously attacked the crates and nets hung and piled on the Cat. Lon swatted a hungry mosquito and headed for his first tall victim. They were going to have to cut a lot of trees in the next few weeks.

  They marked a level path around the nose of the hill, quartered the slope down to the next stream, and staked out a path, found a small canyon, felled two trees across the narrowest part of the canyon they could find. The transporter wouldn't be able to turn, it would have to pull ahead and back over the bridge and along the slope, then forward for the next leg up slope . . . Another stream, but there was an approach that a transporter could make a turn into. Once across, they could drop down along the mountain's sideslope, over a hump, down a river bed, climbing out before the falls and side sloping a bit more . . .

  The first night was a nightmare of whining hungry mosquitoes. They wound up packed together in the cab of the bulldozer, reeking of insect repellants.

  "I hope to hell it gets better once we get down out the mountains." Ray groused. "If we're going north we must be headed for desert."

  The next day they built the road the other direction, to the abandoned convoy, and brought down the kitchen box. Sleeping in the kitchen was a vast improvement.

  Ray filled the trailer bed with gravel, stuffed holes with boulders then covered it all with dirt as he backcut the slope. He dug the anchor a new, flat, base and used the coring rig's arm to lift the anchor on one side to swivel it carefully into position. After that the crude road building went quickly, with only a couple of spots having to be blasted. The flats, far from the desert they'd expected, were vast swampy grasslands with even more biting insects, not all airborne.

  With two weeks until their scheduled gate time, Lon took the coring rig down their makeshift road and drilled four test holes before they had to head back up the mountains.

  The first core crossed a quartz vein. Lon held up the core turning it carefully. He managed to keep a lecturing tone of voice. "Note the visible thread of gold." Then he grinned manically and suggested the others walk out a rough grid and collect soil samples. Once the coring was done he took samples from every stream and pond as they traveled.

  They left the drilling rig on a nice flat topped hill above the gold core site and the cat groaned and labored its way back up the mountains. They were heartily tired of each other after six days of sleeping in the close quarters of the cat's cab. They had to winch the cat back up several of the slopes, impossible to drive even with the bulldozed trail. The people moving the anchor were not going to appreciate that particular part of the route. They got back to the mountainous arrival site on schedule, then waited two days for the gate to open. Lon huffed a breath of relief as the gate formed without incident. They roared back into civilization with two of the original cadre's gyps.

  There was qu
ite a crowd waiting for them. Two different union with picket signs. Company people, grinning broadly, as they saw the long bulldozed path on the far side of the gate. Gate Authority people, looking relieved. Marooned parties were bad for business. Media, disappointed by the lack of blood.

  "Not a word about the drill cores, understand?" Lon looked at the two youngsters, who nodded enthusiastically. "You two did a good job. Ray, you want to show them how to set up a startup? I'll talk to the transporter people, then send a recall to the cadre. I'll pop in on Twelve fifty-three and check there, if I can get back soon enough to make the gate."

  In the privacy of the Dallas Warehouse he produced the quartz core and handed it to Meese. "I think we should let Fifty-three cool off. I'll leave a token presence to hold the lease, and bring everyone to check this out."

  Meese grunted. "You got a road in and had time to drill cores? I'm black and blue from kicking myself for letting Carolina New Ventures foist Jefferson off on us." He turned the core under the bright lights and his hands went momentarily still. "But I may not have kicked hard enough."

  "He has an entirely different sort of expertise, sir."

  "Humph. How tactful. Should I send him to Fifty-three?" Meese pursed his lips as he held the core up to the light.

  "You haven't fired him? Never mind, Union, right?"

  "Right."

  "Keep him completely away from Fifty-three. He's pure poison with natives. Try Forty. Make sure he takes lots of hunters and guards. Maybe one of them will accidentally shoot him."

  Meese had a bit of a coughing fit. "I think I'll find a reason to keep him home, or tell Carolina to keep him away from anything we own a part of. We are not impressed with his field abilities. What are your plans?"

  "I need to check Twelve fifty-three, the party visiting the nearest king should be returning about now. Hopefully that went well. I'll decide when I talk to them how many and which people I'll leave there. I authorized Ms. Seabaugh to offer a hospital in exchange for mining rights for the region of the crater. If their king is interested, if the DONA people will also be reasonable, we may manage a sweet deal there."