Torn (Arcadia Book 1), page 17
He finished quickly and passed her a walking stick. “It helps in this loose stuff.”
Setting out, she trudged in his wake. He was right about the loose stuff. The ground was covered in soft, slipping sand and churned-up dirt. After her first stumble, he took hold of her arm, catching her into his side whenever she missed a step.
It would have been nice, if it hadn’t been so impersonal.
Good sex, that’s all you are, and felt pathetic at the rush of pride in the added adjective. Good sex, not just any old sex.
Sex that would not be repeated, not with a man whose agenda she had about as much faith in as she did this land that was the lifeblood of him.
A land they were both pledged to change.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Caleb’s vehicle was covered with a pile of silt. He toggled his com unit, and minutes later, the machine broke out of its prison of dirt. It meant they would be back to proper home comforts much quicker than she’d expected, yet the trick of it irritated Fee. One more clever plains adaptation that proved how little suited she was to this place.
“Very efficient.”
He grinned, and it widened even farther when she stumped over and thumped into the cab without another word.
“Back to camp,” he said once they were on their way.
“After we take a look at this Plan B lake.”
“No need for that. The second dam’s only there as a distraction.
“Maybe, but the Survey sent me here for a reason.” She stared resolutely straight ahead.
He slammed the machine into overdrive, shoving her back into her seat, but did change course. Hopefully to the lake B site, but she was in no mood to ask. Trying to remember the local map didn’t help either, not given the changes in the land. Before, it had been burnt orange and ochre, colours that sang with the dramatic beauty she was learning to see in this land. Now, it was a uniform, muddy yellow and the piled-up masses of sand from the storm hid any recognisable landmark, leaving her thoroughly disoriented.
Caleb Winter was no happier when they pulled up at the new lake, striding across the dirt to the water’s edge. She refused to scurry after him, choosing instead to stop at the top of the bank and slowly scan the basin now filling with water before strolling down to stand beside him.
She eyed the brown wavelets lapping at her feet, still whipped by the tail end of the wind’s fury. Then twisted around to measure the distance to the sharp lip that must be the final high water mark.
“How deep in the middle?”
“Comes up to my knee at the moment.”
She did some quick calculations. “This will still hold a considerable body of water; more than adequate for irrigation and fostering vegetation change in the surrounds.”
He shrugged. “Not enough for a microclimate change.”
“No,” she lifted a hand to shade her eyes, peering across to the far side, “but enough to boost the effectiveness of Lake A if you make a couple of changes. Can you bring up the topography of this area?”
He scowled but pulled up the file on his com unit, waiting till the screen shimmered to life in the air between them. He had set it to holo-display. A three-dimensional chart of the land between this lake and the original Lake A formed on the ground. She walked around it, considering.
Finally, she put her finger on a section of flat land, midway between the two. “Call up the soil types.”
He obeyed but didn’t so much as glance at the graphics forming above the holo-map. “Sand and loam, overlaid with a layer of sediment from ancient floodings.”
“So, could be cropping land?”
He nodded. “From the files the Survey sent through, that’s their third-stage plan for this area.”
She walked around the holo-map once more. Considering options.
“What would a cash crop far sooner mean to the locals? If we joined the two lakes.”
He stared at her fingers, running circles over the river flats of a more fertile past. Eons ago, there had been true topsoil here, but the wind had dealt to that.
Yet with shelter belts planted on the nor’ west side and the natural protection of the surrounding hills on the other sides…
He looked up at her, his foul mood banished. “It might just work.”
Fee pulled her finger through the holo-map, rearranging it as she went. “If we pull up a creek here, and here. Most of the channels will run underground, but not all, and people believe a lot more in water they can see.”
He nodded slowly. Keeping his father out of it would be a problem, but apart from that… “It would bring the locals around, the ones whose children have to leave because there’s nothing for them here except cleaning solar arrays or mechanic’s work.”
It would break his father’s stranglehold. Or was that part of the Survey’s plan all along? And if so, what about this girl; what was her role in it? What had her briefings said before she came here?
“You’ve got a point,” he said gruffly. “We’ll put it to the others back at camp.”
But when he pulled in front of the Admin block, it was to find a man in uniform standing at the top of the steps. A very familiar uniform: the crisp tunic of the Federal Guard.
He slammed to a stop, belatedly apologising to the woman beside him and silently cursing at her wince as her hands grabbed hold of the webbing. “Sorry.”
He doubted she heard him, her eyes fixed on the man, and a look on her face as wary as the clench in his gut. Very wise, when the Survey called in the big guns.
He took his time securing everything. Fee didn’t move either.
“Ready?”
“No,” she said, but her hand moved to the door, forcing him to follow.
Together, they pulled out kit bags and approached the man waiting for them.
It wasn’t until they were on the top step and equal with the visitor that Caleb spoke. “Marshall.”
“Winter, den Coille.”
Fee stepped up beside him. “Ser Marshall. Welcome to the plains. How may we help you?”
The man’s gazed flicked at Caleb but he answered Fee’s more formal tone with the required forms of respect. “You have been summoned to Survey Central. I have a flyer waiting.”
Caleb stepped sideways to pass the man. “Not possible.”
Fee grabbed at his arm. Anyone else he would have shaken off. It had been a long day and right now, he wanted nothing more than to throw this clod off his step, talk to his troops, before heading to his quarters to clean up and get horizontal.
It was Fee who stepped up. “We cannot leave the project at present.”
“My orders are set.”
Caleb recognised that look. The man wasn’t being deliberately obstreperous. His orders really were set, and set solid.
A sudden spurt of anger at Central, which he thrust back. It would achieve nothing. “Let me call Fox.”
But their boss was no help either, and he saw his own frustration mirrored on Fee’s face.
He switched off the unit, strode back to the waiting soldier. “We’ll be ready in an hour.”
He grabbed Fee’s arm and marched her inside to start packing. Her boots beat an angry tattoo on the floor. “We’ll never get these lakes done.”
They made the deadline for the flight, but it was close. So much to be set in motion, work to be delegated, so much to finish off and so little time. He’d already known that he and Fee worked well together, and this day proved it. She had to be as bruised and sore from the storm, as exhausted as he. And as thrown by what had happened between them in that tent.
Forget it, she’d said.
If she thought he would forget making love to her—not going to happen. Except that he still had no idea how what she felt about it. Hoped yes, but knew—no. That they were going to be lovers had been fixed, right from the moment he first saw her. That physically her desire matched his, he had suspected for some time and had it confirmed in that tent.
It was what went with it that had him pitched six ways to never. What she felt; what he felt.
No time to work it out now. The Marshall was waiting on the steps of the flyer, face tight and hand already set on the door rails. Caleb picked up Fee’s bag and loaded their luggage into the hold.
“Ready?”
“Not in this lifetime,” she said, squared her shoulders and stepped on board.
He followed her, taking the seat opposite hers. “Did you have time to do anything about your idea for the new dam?”
“I left the bare sketch of it with Kal. He’s going to work with Adam and Gerard to flesh it out.”
“Have you told Fox?”
She glanced towards the cockpit, where the Marshall was settling in beside the pilot. They were in lift off mode and unlikely to hear anything, though the cabin was sure to be under audio surveillance.
“Not yet. It can wait till we get to Central and find out what this is all about.”
He sent her a tight smile of approval at the bare answer. She was on guard too.
The flyer lifted then levelled off, setting a course north. There were a few hours of flying time to Central. Time to catch up on some badly needed sleep. He would need all his wits about him once they landed. With luck he might even get rid of the pounding in his head. He settled carefully back against the seat rest, turning slightly to avoid the tender swelling hidden by the hair at the back of his head. Fee was strapping in, her face pensive but looking like the fight was coming back to her. For the next few hours, she was safe. No need for him to keep watch.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the woman, the cabin and all the other piled up problems waiting to explode in his face.
Fee wriggled around in her seat, trying to find a comfortable spot, and glared at the man across from her. Asleep—just like that—as if nothing was wrong. She chewed on her lip, tucked her feet underneath her, and cursed her lack of stature. This flyer was designed for giants, or plains folk, and she was small by mountain standards, let alone by the norm found on the plains.
She peered through the window but there was only the odd wisp of cloud and the plains spread out below like a vast brown map. Too distant to seem real. Last night had been real, and what she felt about it threatened to tear apart everything she had always assumed about her life.
Work. That was the answer. Much better than brooding. First: lock down her data securely before they hit Central. Like most field ops, she didn’t fully trust head office. The only data senior staff would get from her were the files she was absolutely forced to surrender, and she’d make damn sure she knew why they wanted them first.
She slumped back against the headrest. It would be nice to have someone on her side for a change, someone not working their own agenda, and yet again thought back to that tent and the man across the aisle.
There had been no hidden agenda; not during that storm. They had made love because both of them wanted to, because death knocked on the door and life was precious.
She squirmed again, disturbed now by her thoughts, not the seat that was too big, too hard. Last night happened because she wanted Caleb Winter too much to refuse him.
“Deal with it,” he’d said to her back on her balcony at home. Deal with whatever this was growing between them. Problem was, she was no nearer to knowing how to do that now than she had been that night.
She pulled up her notes, tried to concentrate, gave up in far too short a time and stared out the window instead.
If only she had the slightest idea what she’d got herself into.
It was a relief when the landscape began to change and the pretence of working could be discarded. She peered out the window, watching the first signs of the massive city of Urbis appear: a cluster of houses, a road, a major power plant thrusting upwards from a tract of estuarine wilderness.
The city was on the northern edge of the continent. Rivers stopped their furious race to oblivion here, stretching out their trunks into a cone of branching twiglets, as if reluctant to disappear into the unifying water of the sea.
Their ancestors had built their first settlement close to the coast and beside the major branch of a river that came from far up in the hinterland. An ideal place to act as a base for the expanding colonisation of a new world. But that was many hundreds of years ago. Arcadia was long settled, Urbis now the capital city of a populous and economically stable world, and it had grown in size to match its importance. Today, the city spread across the estuaries of three mighty river systems.
Not an ideal geo-setting for a megalopolis, yet the pattern was set and the engineers, architects and planners had to make the best of it. A final year project for every trainee eco-engineer was coming up with another adaptive mechanism for the city. An aid for keeping the city viable in the face of floods or the liquefaction that inevitably attended any earth tremor disturbing the shifting gravels and sands on which the city was built, or to protect the precious fertile soils of the river flood pans in the face of burgeoning urban spread.
She remembered the look on her supervisor’s face when she’d said: “Just move the city.”
“Think you’re the first one to come up with that, den Coille? Get thinking.”
She leaned forward to get a better look through the window. There: a tower set on a clawed network of flying buttresses with legs delving right down to the solid bedrock underlying the treacherous upper layers, and above it, spiralling streets of paths, gardens, shops and homes. An artificial tree supporting an entire suburb. That had been her project and she still felt an inordinate surge of pride at the finished product. So few student projects ever came to fruition.
Opposite her, Caleb Winter stretched, yawned, then unbuckled and stood, coming to lean over her to see what she was looking at.
He was too damn close. She refused to show the effect he had on her by moving backwards.
His head tilted toward the suburb. “Yours?”
She nodded. “What about you?”
“A bit harder to see.” A slight smile of amusement touched his face as he called her bluff. Of course Caleb Winter would have been good enough to have a project accepted. But he surprised her. “It’s trees. Windbreak plantings on the incoming branches to stop the more destructive gales.”
She remembered those winds too well. Roaring up from the south, where the mighty central plain sucked all moisture from the air. Days of choking dust and exacerbated tempers.
“Another ten years, and they should be big enough to cut down the velocity of the winds. Seemed the least I could do, given that it’s the changes from settlement of the plains that’s driving up the strength of the big blows.”
His words matched the niggling thought in the back of her head. “We’re a trial. Our regions get to be the fall guys for Central’s new approach, because it helps Urbis. That’s their main objective.”
“To protect the city, yes. Improving the lives of minor provincial regions; not so much.”
A dry smile touched his lips. The man wasn’t stupid. She looked at him through new eyes. Just maybe?
“Why do you think we’re here?” she asked.
One brow cocked up. “Apart from explaining how a relatively simple project has careered from one disaster to another?”
“Yeah, that. There’s more though.”
His mouth straightened, a grim line, and he nodded his agreement. “Yes.” He glanced forward to the pilot’s cabin, as if in warning. No more to be said, not now. But at some stage, she and Caleb Winter were going to have a good long talk.
The landing at Survey Central was routine. Too much so, setting her nerves on edge. They passed through security with a minimum of fuss; no second pauses, no long litanies of clerical interrogation or last minute need for decontamination of field equipment.
They were either particularly high in favour, or in so much trouble that Central wanted them processed and free to be disciplined in the quickest time possible. She had a sinking feeling it was the latter.
Fox was waiting for them in the main briefing room. A small man, unprepossessing in appearance, but she’d long ago learned his looks were no guide to the man.
“Take a seat.”
Her heart sank. She recognised that tone of voice. Caleb slouched into the second chair, legs stretched forward. He’d no intention of letting Fox have it all his own way, obviously.
Not that Fox gave any sign of it. He switched his screens to group display, shimmering into life in front of each of them but doing nothing to impede their view of each other. “The current progress report. It appears less than adequate.”
Ten minutes later, they were in no doubt of the meaning of his words.
“You were caught in a dust storm in the South March. Winter, frequency of such storms?”
Caleb still slouched and his voiced was dead flat. “Increasing by a factor of 3.65.”
“Den Coille, rate of precipitation over the western mountains?”
“Becoming more episodic, Sir. Average rate is increasing at an acceptable rate, but the variation in volume per unit time is widening. More heavy downpours with an increasing risk of catastrophic erosion.”
In plain language, which Fox didn’t need, the total amount of rain wasn’t up by much, but when it fell, it came down in bucket loads that scoured away the soil, despite the tree cover. They needed trees with a wide canopy and deep seeking network of tap roots, trees that sank deep into the soil and stayed there. Not the simple buttresses and shallow roots of the festia trees that dominated her home area now, too readily bowled over by any rough weather.
“In summary, the situation in both your home zones is becoming increasingly unstable?”
She nodded. Caleb grunted.
“Yet this project, this bridgehead project you were charged with, the exact state of this critical project is—what?”
She said nothing, and Caleb crossed his arms. No need to labour the point.
