She turned and pressed the keys on her computer console, watching as the illuminated map on the far wall changed. Colored dots vanished and shifted, until all that remained were a number of silver lights.
Some of them were speculative. Some of them were much more certain.
She was wearing her own version of the Hunters’ uniform. Flagg had originally designed it and chosen the logo of the golden arrow piercing a silver sun.
Her tight-fitting pants were tucked into highly polished black boots. A thin red stripe ran down each leg. There was a similar stripe down each arm of the black jacket. Beneath that was a white silk blouse, high at the throat.
She licked her full lips, considering the map, knowing that the conglomerate of politicians and industrialists and senior officers from the old armed forces were all desperate to try to locate Zelig and his secret base. Life after the eco-holocaust was polarizing. Left and right. Good and bad.
Dark and light.
Margaret Tabor had not the least doubt in her sharp, ferretlike mind that the Hunters of the Sun were the only force for the light.
Silver dots, gleaming like shards of diamond, spilled onto a velvet cloth.
“Power,” she whispered.
If only she had access to more power. Staggering amounts of irreplaceable gasoline were being expended to keep the base functioning. There were already one or two small, improvised plants working out in the desert at refining gas from crude. But it was a complex procedure and devoured much more power to get it running. Zelig had already attracted several of the leading scientists who’d managed to survive beyond Earthblood. The Hunters were far less successful in that area, though they had plenty of weapons men and survivalists.
And lawyers.
But Margaret had personally taken charge of a murderous purge of some of the spineless and useless hangers-on at the base. Mouths were food.
Food was power.
Just to put one of their only two choppers into the air for an hour was a desperate decision.
If only the right-thinking men and women who were the core of the Hunters had been able to read the future and taken precautions as soon as the first red tendrils of the plant cancer had appeared. Then they could have taken over huge stocks of gas.
Zelig would have been long dead, his scrawny throat crushed beneath the heel of her boot if that had happened.
But it hadn’t.
With more power, they would have tracked down the base in the Northwest weeks ago.
“Aurora, indeed,” she said aloud to vent her anger.
Gradually their patrols were closing in, narrowing it down to a radius of a hundred and fifty miles from the ruined city of Seattle. As soon as the circle tightened further, it would be possible to mount a major operation with all their forces.
The silver dots seemed to mock her.
The landing of the space vessel Aquila, down at Stevenson Base, had been a total shambles for the Hunters of the Sun. Prime targets for enlistment had been allowed to escape.
Now where were they all?
Some dead.
She knew that, but she also knew that some of them were still very much alive. The dots showed the survivors clustering together on the West Coast.
There was a faint knock on the door of her office.
“Enter.”
Margaret Tabor knew from the hesitancy and volume of the knock who was standing there. She also knew that he would knock again to be sure.
“Come in, Owen,” she called, preempting him.
Owen John was the latest in a surprisingly long line of older male assistants. Patience and tolerance weren’t her strong points, and the lives of his predecessors had tended to be short and not at all merry.
But he hadn’t been a volunteer. None of them had been volunteers.
Margaret’s policy was to keep her eyes open around the compound for any men who reminded her of her own father. Then she would order them to become personal assistants to her. It wasn’t an offer that you could possibly refuse, because refusal meant instant, painful death.
Acceptance also tended, in the long or short time, to lead to termination.