Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (10 page)

Higher-ups meant there would be an all-officer scramble to make sure the brigade was presentable. With all the Grog, Wolf, and Bear teams at Fort Seng, things were bound to look a little shaggy, especially to someone with a reputation for tunic-button counting like General Martinez.

Duvalier decided to bury herself in the kitchens for the visit. She could lay out rat traps or make sure scrap food got to the camp pigpen or clean the coolers and refrigeration equipment and avoid the inevitable inspection-and-dinner that she could already hear coming like a distant thunderstorm. She checked the assignment list—one clipboard at headquarters was mandatory, the other volunteer; Lambert and her exec must have been up all night typing it out. She noticed that she just had one simple mandatory assignment—a water filtration equipment check. Easy enough. She’d just have to take a few test tubes of Fort Seng water to the camp’s medical office and see that the results were properly recorded and filed and then make sure that the water-purification tablets were stocked up in all the field cases. She noticed that Valentine had volunteered to lead a Wolf team on the farthest-out reconnaissance patrol during the visit.

She knew there was some kind of bad blood there, dating back to the brief Kurian occupation of what was then the Ozark Free Territory. She’d been busy herself, performing in a Little Rock club frequented by the Quisling officers to pick up information and be in a position to kill a few colonels if and when the need arose, and so she didn’t know all the circumstances, but the short version was that Valentine suspected Martinez of keeping his forces mostly out of the fight until they tired of hanging out in the mountain brush and were willing to undergo an orderly surrender.

She volunteered for the pens and coops. Animal waste didn’t bother her—actually very little bothered her, except being grabbed, poked, or touched. She sometimes wondered at her dislike of contact. After making a to-do list for obvious fixes with the livestock, she looked over some of the maintenance logs and found that there’d
been no lead test of the supply—ever, apparently. She set about getting a water-testing kit from the company stores when she saw Lambert passing through headquarters with an unknown woman in Southern Command Guard rig with a captain’s bars.

“He’d like to make a short speech to the men, of course,” she told Lambert. “Where would you suggest that take place?”

Duvalier made a show of adjusting the strap on the testing kit so she could pause and listen.

Lambert said the athletic field would serve. There was a wooden platform at the center that would allow him to address the whole camp with minimal amplification.

“The major general likes a little more theatricality. I have a banner for the new year’s motto: Purpose to Everything.” The visitor paused after she repeated the phrase, as though expecting a squeal of excitement from Colonel Lambert. When no such oohing and ahhing arose, she cleared her throat and continued. “They’ll be expected to repeat it after the major general. Loudly.”

Kurian Zone crap,
Duvalier thought.
Keep everyone up to date on the latest pap from on high
.

The water checks gave her an excuse to go get some fresh air. She’d read a short book once, George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, that she’d found in an overgrown house where she’d waited out a storm. Someone had stuck a whole bunch of college books in a plastic tub, and the other literature was too long to begin and too heavy to carry around, and she didn’t see what good a calculus and a physics book would do her apart from helping her fall asleep. At the end, the mistreated animals that’d revolted against their farmer found themselves led by a group of pigs that were even worse than the old, lazy farmer
had been. The pigs grew so used to dealing with men that it was tough for the other animals to tell the difference. She’d felt that a few times during her stint in Southern Command, but attributed it to efficiently run military organizations being much alike, thanks to command-and-control necessity.

Southern Command was in a fight for survival against beings that wanted to harvest humans as food, and the priority of the man in charge of that fight was to make sure everyone knew this year’s slogan? Someone’s water wasn’t hot enough to cook the crayfish, as her uncle used to say.

It irritated her enough that she wanted to talk about it with someone. Narcisse would just laugh it off as meaningless tripe and not worth the emoting. Ahn-Kha was stoic about everything.

She found Valentine with Captain Patel, picking out Wolves and a couple of aspirants for his patrol. The tents and barracks of Wolf country, as it was called at Fort Seng these days, put her a little on edge. The shaggy, rail-thin Wolves always eyed her hungrily. She felt a little like a chicken invited to dinner at the fox den.

Valentine finished his business with Patel and escorted her out. A bag full of variegated human hair stood outside one of the tents, and she heard scissors snipping.

“Colonel Lambert wants hair and beards regulation,” Valentine said.

“Even the Bears?” she asked.

“Patel and a couple of his big timber boys are going to find something for the rowdies to do,” Valentine said. “Gamecock has the rest finding their A uniforms. Which means no cut-off sleeves, from what I understand. We’ll put the Bears in the back.”

“The whole camp should find something else to do during the speech. Rah-rah speechifying like that reminds me too much of the KZ. You know he actually has a slogan for the year? ‘Purpose to Everything.’ I already heard Corporal Manfried in the mess call it ‘Porpoise on Biscuit Ring.’”

“Banner?” Valentine said. His face went poker-hand blank, which usually meant he was brewing something up. “Hey, Smoke, old road friend, you wouldn’t be interested in volunteering for the stage decor?”

“I might. What do you have in mind?”

“I’ve heard a lot of speeches from Martinez. I don’t want to inflict them on our poor fighting men without an opportunity for real entertainment… .”

Maybe it was the slogan-of-the-month. Something sent her back to her childhood once she fell asleep. The Great Machine. She dreamt of it again.

She’d first had the dream as a little girl, growing up in the gentle rolling hills of Eastern Kansas near the edge of the great flat plain of the rest of the state. Even in her little town it was still a vista of vast horizons, fifteen-mile views if you could just get up on a roof or high in a tree—always her favorite spots, in almost any weather. She liked being up out of the view of searching eyes, which always seemed to be attached to gossiping tongues.

At the age of seven or eight (she couldn’t be sure which), she began to have dreams of the machine. Maybe they were connected to the visits of Quislings to her mother. They’d started before then, she
suspected, but only once she’d been moved into her neat green-and-white-painted little school with the other Quisling kids did she hear about what her mother was undoubtedly using for payment for her access to the best education available, in one of the unofficial schools where she could be taught by someone other than the New Universal Church and its youth organizations.

The dreams were horribly vivid. She was in her home, occupied with some chore, when a rumbling, growing as it approached like an avalanche, drew her to the window. Mechanical spikes like clock towers mixed with talons erupted out of the earth in showers of dirt, puffing out dark gas like a steam engine as they unfolded and expanded, always sending out more points, barbs, hooks, irregular rows and rows of them like the broken saw teeth or the shark jaws she’d seen in New Orleans. Mad lights blinked and searchlights opened and shut, sending patterns of light and dark and color over the landscape.

The house would rock on its foundation and she sought escape to the roof, calling for her mother. Mother tried to follow, but a piece of the machine, like a mechanical tree root with the grasping ability of a hand, reached in the door and yanked her out of her shoes. There was nothing to do but clutch at the empty shoes and try to escape.

Once she was on the roof she could see, like a mountain, a centerpiece of the Great Machine, with an eye atop the pyramidal mechanism like the seal on the old one-dollar bill. All the individual spines were connected to it deep underground. The pieces all hooted and chattered like a conglomeration of television sets, radios, and alarm klaxons. The noise was such that it was a weapon itself; you wanted
to squat and put your hands over your ears. She wished some attack aircraft of the Old World would zoom in, shooting nuclear-tipped missiles into that eye, putting out the eye and silencing the cacophony, but the Great Machine couldn’t be destroyed. It didn’t have a weakness like a dragon’s missing scale or a space station exhaust port. No one weapon would wreck it.

In fact, it did a good deal of destruction to itself. In her dreams the Great Machine was a shambles. Spines would collide with other spines, breaking both and sending rusty bits showering to the ground below. She could reach out and tear off pieces of it, the way she removed old aluminum siding from rotting homes in metal drives organized by the Youth Vanguard.

Even as a tweenager she realized that her dreams about the Great Machine were really about the Kurian Order.

In waking life, she knew the Great Machine was a fantasy. It had long ago lost its power to scare her when she was awake the way thinking of it had frightened her as a child. Reason slumbered with the rest of her body, however, so it still had the power to terrify her in her dreams. Sometimes her mother was not pulled into the machine, but embraced it, let pieces of it enter her in an obscene fashion—the Great Machine dream had matured sexually just as she had.

Sometimes the dream ended when it destroyed her house. When it went on, she ran through the streets while clockwork talons waved around and above, bending down to stab at the people on the ground like a heron taking a minnow or a lizard. Some of the people were running away with her, some seemed oblivious to the machine, and others, having been engulfed by it, were having their hands turn into gears, their eyes into lights, and their mouths into speakers.

One thing was certain: the machine would never take her. In the twilight time between wakefulness and sleep, when the world was half dream and half dawn, she thought of how she would always keep a grenade at the ready, just in case a piece of the machine grabbed her. She would blow apart her own components, and hopefully a few of the machine’s, to prevent her mouth from adding to the noise or her fingers from becoming the gears bending a new spine toward the ground to impale another victim.

The wonder of it was that the machine had reached for her so many times and missed. She wasn’t that good. Either she hadn’t yet struck a blow that really hurt the machine—in that case she’d have to redouble her efforts—or the machine itself was something of a lemon.

It was probably some mixture of both. The Kurian Order was like a huge, overweight boxer. It could pummel a heavy bag easily enough; the heavy bag didn’t move, and the layers of fat and muscle, combined with its height, made it hard to really hurt it. But if you watched your step and didn’t get cornered, avoiding its clumsy, muscle-bound blows was fairly easy.

She’d never told anyone about the dream. Transitory lovers, like that boy from Ohio, had sometimes questioned her about her nightmares, asking if she wanted to be woken up from them. She said no, they were brief, would pass, and she luxuriated in her sleep. Even David, who at times was some combination of partner, husband, and brother, didn’t know about the Great Machine. The meaning was so obvious it wasn’t worth discussing, especially with a man who now and then woke up sweating and calling to his dead mother, killed by some kind of Kurian Order hit team.

She descended from her aerie early, feeling achy and anxious from the dream. Her muscles had never relaxed properly last night.

They had an old tack room that had been converted to an extra walk-in cooler for the camp by the simple expedient of adding a heavy-duty window air conditioner and extra insulation. She went in and poured some of the camp goat’s milk, then shuffled off to the first-floor communal kitchen to find some baking soda to brush her teeth.

Narcisse had just drained a couple of chickens for Blake and was in the process of plucking them. The feathers lay all about her feet. “You had a bad night, girl.”

“Bad dreams,” she said. “You need help?”

“Oh, I think you have things to do. General Martinez arrives today.”

How did she know about that?

She wondered about Narcisse, the old woman Valentine had picked up in the Caribbean on his mission to find Quickwood—a rare hardwood that might have served as the basis for legends about vampires being killed by stakes—and brought north. Physically, the old woman seemed more dead than alive these days. She’d seen a few people in hospitals kept alive by machines, and Narcisse reminded her of them. The same dead-looking skin, withered hands, sunken cheeks. Yet for all the decrepitude of the body, she managed to keep going somehow, some inner animating spirit occasionally showed in her eyes, especially when she was interacting with Blake. And mentally, she was still more insightful about the people in camp than even Brother Mark was.