David Weber - Hell's Gate

For the first time since their departure from the swamp portal, Gadrial Kelbryan was truly afraid.

Jathmar felt wondrously alive as he sent his mind questing across the surrounding folds and dips of land.

Mapping was as close to flying as he ever expected to come. Oh, he'd gone ballooning, of course. That was part of every licensed survey crewman's mandatory training. But ballooning was a slow-motion, ponderous activity, and the balloon was merely pushed hither and thither by whatever capricious winds happened to be blowing. He'd heard rumors about balloons fitted with one of the newfangled "internal combustion" engines some of the more wild-eyed lunatics were tinkering with back on Sharona. He didn't expect much to come of it, though. And even if it did, the earsplitting racket and stink wasn't going to be very conducive to enjoying the experience.

But Mapping, now. Mapping felt more like what Jathmar imagined birds must feel, soaring silently across the sky as forests and fields flashed beneath one's wings. Jathmar had always envied birds, even drab and commonplace little sparrows.

But, then again, sparrows can't Map.

Jathmar grinned at the thought, but Mapping was a Talent only humanity possessed, and only a tiny fraction of the ten billion or so human souls in existence could lay claim to that specific Talent. Of course, that was still a pretty damned large absolute numbers. Nearly a fifth of the population had been blessed with some kind of psionic Talent. Given the best current estimate, that worked out to around two billion Talented people, of whom only two percent had inherited the ability to Map. That meant there were?theoretically, at least?something like forty million Mappers, but there were several subtypes within the Talent, and they were clearly concentrated in specific bloodlines. Not to mention the fact that at least half of those technically Talented with the ability had Talents too weak to bother training for professional use. Both of Jathmar's parents had been Mappers, however, and so had three of his grandparents, which explained why his own Talent was so strong.

Unlike Shaylar, Jathmar's mother and grandmother hadn't been able to join survey crews. But they'd found ways to make use of their Talents on the home front, working for the Park Service: mapping virgin woodland without impinging on it, doing geological survey work, planning new highway routes, doing the occasional Search and Rescue work for lost hikers. Even taking on odd jobs like inspecting dams and culverts for structural soundness.

Mapping was a Talent which was always in high demand in the commercial sectors. Considerably higher demand than his wife's usually was, actually. Voices were always valuable, but they were also among the most numerous of all the psionic Talents, the true telepaths of Sharonian society, with nearly as much variety in potential employment as there were individual variations between Voices. Shaylar was a very special case, however. Very few Voices could match her sheer strength and range, which would have been more than enough to make her extremely valuable to someone like the Chalgyn Consortium. But when the sheer strength of her Talent was combined with the precision with which she was able to use it and her marriage bond with Jathmar, it produced a team which could have written its own ticket with just about any survey concern.

Jathmar's professional assessment of his own Talent was tempered by a realistic view of his shortcomings, as well as his strengths. He knew he was a good Mapper?very good?and that Shaylar was a first-class Voice. But it was the combination of their Talents, they way they interlocked and complemented one another, which made them such a truly formidable team, especially in virgin wilderness.

The reasons for that were simple enough. Jathmar could See not only the topography of the ridgeline that lay two miles due south of him, and the abrupt turn this creek took a mile northeast, frothing through a white-water staircase of rapids, but he could also See what lay under the ground. Only a small percentage of Mappers had that degree of Talent, and that was what made Jathmar so valuable to a survey crew.

And Shaylar's ability to share that Sight with him was one of the reasons Halidar Kinshe, her government sponsor, had fought so hard to put them into the field together as team.

Now, as he stretched his awareness to its furthest limits, Jathmar caught a glimpse of something vast and dense beneath the soil. It was large enough to cause a wavering, almost like heat-shimmer, in the faint but discernible?to a Mapper?magnetic field.

That magnetic field lay across his Sight of the world like a precisely cast fishnet of crosshatched lines. But the line just ahead of him was bent slightly out of true. That caught his immediate, full attention, for he'd come to know exactly what spawned that dark, massive magnetic anomaly. There was a major iron deposit in this region, big enough to warrant immediate investigation. If the deposit were large enough?and if the clues they'd gathered so far added up to what he suspected, it would be enormous?it would shortly be a magnet (Jathmar grinned at his own word choice) for development by the Chalgyn Consortium's Division of Mining and Mineral Extraction.

If DOMME developed the deposit into a profitable mining venture, every ton of ore extracted, smelted, and turned into tools would put finder's royalties into this survey crew's bank accounts. And if he really had stumbled across the same iron deposit as Sharona's fabulously valuable Darjiline Mines, the Consortium certainly would develop it.

It was one of the conundrums of trans-temporal exploration that in a society with access to multiple, duplicate worlds, with all the vast treasure troves of mineral resources, rich untouched farmland, and incalculable numbers of wild birds and animals that implied, there were actually a limited number of key resources and all too many companies in competition to grab them. With no fewer than fifteen major corporations and consortiums?not to mention nearly a hundred smaller independent outfits which operated survey crews on a shoestring budget?contending for the riches on the far side of any new portal, prizes like the Darjiline Mines were actually scarce.

Which was the whole reason survey crews worked so hard to figure out where they were when they crossed the eerie boundary of a new portal. News that the Portal Authority had sent troops to construct a new portal fort would race outward through the web of development companies literally at the speed of thought, despite all that a company's Voices could do to encrypt their transmitted reports.

No telepath was ever permitted to invade another's mind without permission. Prison sentences went with that kind of abuse, not to mention massive fines and the ever-present threat of closing down any company which knowingly used or tolerated such practices. But industrial espionage tiptoed around that particular law with increasingly sophisticated ways of deducing the truth. Once the Portal Authority had taken the step of sending out a troop detachment to build the fort, rival teams would start sweeping into the area, looking for the fastest way to reach the most valuable tracts of land before anyone else.

Shipyards went up first, in many cases, built with surprising speed, since the only practical way of reaching many of those valuable tracts would be to sail there. The company that owned the forests and iron mines necessary to build those ships would make a ton of money selling them to rival outfits. Once they'd grabbed the best land for themselves first, of course.

It was usually a free-for-all along any portal border, which was why the Portal Authority insisted on building its forts. Portal Authority troops weren't there to fight a war, since there was nobody in any of the worlds they'd ever explored. They were there to prevent claim jumping and timber piracy and all the other uncivilized behaviors which went with the territory when multiple groups jockeyed for position along a vast, steadily expanding frontier. And, of course, to collect the Authority's portal transit fees.