Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (23 page)

The staff exchanged a couple of words and she recognized “Lifeweavers” repeated.

The woman who’d made her ID smiled sympathetically. “No one can say. They always attend, though they take little part. Since the disaster in the South Atlantic only one or two are expected. They are here already; I am sure. I know the White Ravens are here.”

“White Ravens?”

She bit her lip in thought. “Do you call it something else? Those humans who communicate with them for us and guard them. They are connected in some manner, you know? Do you have such people in America?”

“Oh, I see. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about that,” she said.

She’d heard rumors about humans who joined up with the Lifeweavers to serve them, like priests attending to a living god. She’d be tempted to take an offer like that. She felt a strange sort of comfort in their alien presence. They were so wise and remote. It would be fascinating to see the cosmos through their eyes, even secondhand.

She attached the little alligator clip and took a walk around the concourse on both levels. It was nearly empty, with just a few attendees like her vacantly wandering, or little groups of Baltic League organizers hurrying about with carts filled with plastic storage bins. She had a few curious looks from the sleek attendees.

Well, she’d have an opportunity to talk with one sooner or later. A Lifeweaver or two would make all the difference in Kentucky.

As she walked away, she heard more Finnish behind her, and a stifled giggle. Sometimes she cursed her enhanced hearing. Sometimes you didn’t want to hear everything that transpired behind your back.

She wondered what the joke was, but felt certain it was about her. There was just something about Europeans that made her feel awkward. Back home, everyone was ragged.

To be honest with herself, she felt a bit of a ragamuffin. It was one thing to shrug and say “screw that noise; I’m just here for the food” and another to be among them—these people were clearly
taking the conference very seriously and putting on their best. And here she was, your basic Midwestern farmyard scarecrow. Her pants were thin at the knees and the collar of her shirt was frayed and wrinkled. And these were her presentable clothes.

No wonder the late Thérèse Stamp had nudged her about buying new clothes.

Curiosity satisfied, she wandered around the grounds of the conference center. At the sunken fountain plaza there were garbage bins and several sand-filled basins for tobacco. There were some extinguished matches and butts in the sand, but not many. As for the ground and the fountain itself, both were immaculate. Wait—there were a few silvery coins in the fountain, thank God. These Finns were starting to turn into civic-minded robots in her imagination. That, or there were a lot of make-work jobs cleaning public spaces for the refugees who’d come up the Gulf of Bothnia.

She went into town and looked in shop windows. Finally, she found a store crowded with racks of women’s clothing, with more stacked in disorganized bins. All used or patched stuff, by the look of it. It smelled of industrial-strength detergent and critter killer. Hopefully it would be cheap.

The shop had only a few staff, and all those seemed to chat with one another in a polyglot tongue that was discernible to her only through a couple of brief English phrases (“okay,” she’d learned, was virtually universal).

A nice pencil skirt, some tights, and a new blouse and jacket later, she felt like a new woman. The clean, simple lines of the women’s fashions popular up here suited her thin frame. She could almost admire herself in the mirror in the neat, severe lines. Almost.

As it turned out, her purchases were very cheap. The clothing became less expensive the more you had to buy. Rough work clothes and boots, along with winter layers, were the pricier, sought-after items up here. People had fewer occasions to dress in formal business attire, and it would hardly stand up to field use to be worth the purchase price.

They didn’t even offer bags, but they showed her how to roll up the jacket and skirt and then bundle everything into the shirt for transport. She left the store ready for the conference, or whatever other social occasions the stay in Kokkola might bring.

She wasn’t the only one who’d polished up a little, with the start of the conference looming.

Ahn-Kha had found a barber to trim his silky arm and leg hair and whiskers. His facial hair all ended on a neat plane now, slightly longer at the point of his jaw, going up in a nice edge getting shorter and shorter as it approached his jawline. He looked almost dashing. She would have liked to see that scene, giving instructions to a local barber who probably couldn’t speak more than a few words of the various Scandinavian languages.

Pistols had gone “Euro.” He’d changed his hair completely, right down to the color. It was now white, with perhaps the tiniest bit of ice blue tint. He’d also acquired a black leather jacket, cut like a classic old navy peacoat. It hid his pistols admirably and looked good on his stocky frame. The nautical attire made his face seem more the product of wind and weather than childhood disease.

Valentine had gotten a haircut, but otherwise hadn’t changed
much. His eyebrows had been trimmed, too, and someone had put a clean edge on his nails. He’d had all his clothes cleaned and pressed, but he hadn’t made any purchases. Valentine being Valentine, he’d probably bought some pathetic-looking family a hearty meal and new clothes.

Sime, of course, didn’t need any buffing. He was always as polished as a jade statue. He had a slightly different smell to him, though; perhaps he’d been trying French soaps again.

T
he
Pan-Freehold Conference of 2078: Each Pan-Freehold Conference has made history, in its way. The first, in 2048, was memorable just because it occurred. It meant the Resistance had enough of a structure that they could coordinate their efforts to meet somewhere in safety. It took place outside of Helsinki, which at that point was under disputable Kurian control, moving each day and meeting each night. The practice spawned the phrase “Helsinki White Night Shuffle,” still in use to describe a fly-by-night organization. Only five freeholds, four from the northern parts of Eurasia and Canada representing all of North America, attended, with others participating via shortwave. The only major achievement of the conference was setting up a system for communicating between freeholds, a system that remained one of the Resistance’s most deeply held secrets for generations.

Another meeting wasn’t held for six years. The Pan-Freehold Conference of 2054 took place in the Australian Outback, starting the tradition of switching between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. While it was better attended than the first, it was considered something of a failure because the freeholds failed to come to a decision about the objectives for the next few years. It was also the first conference that had Lifeweaver
observers attending—in this case five who were aiding the Australian/New Zealand/New Guinea/Indonesian freeholds.

Four years later, the conference was held in Canada. It was successful but not memorable, except perhaps for the quality and quantity of the beer. The Black Year of 2062 was a disastrous affair held off the coast of Argentina. The Kurian Order managed to attack it with low-level precision bombers, creating chaos, and then seeded the entire island with air-dropped “wild” and very hungry Reapers. The 2066 meeting never really got off the ground because of security concerns; it took place mostly over phone lines and shortwave radios as they looked for security solutions for the next one. Security was a major concern of the next conference, held in 2070. The conference was dispersed among many safe houses in a remote district in the Akita prefecture of Japan, an area in the Dewa mountain chain where the people live quietly and strangers are marked. While the communications gear worked, and there were no raids, the camaraderie of previous conferences was missing—just as much was worked out during the nightlife, it seemed, as at the daytime meetings. The 2074 meeting, hosted by the South Africans deep in the bush, marked more than twenty-five years since the first Pan-Freehold Conference, and news from around the world was largely positive. Gains had been made nearly everywhere, and even formerly quiet Kurian Zones had seen an uptick of Resistance activity. For the first time, the Kurian Order seemed vulnerable. But again, the conference broke down over disputes about where the next blow should fall heaviest. The Chinese, North Americans, and Andean multifreehold associations each thought a good part of a continent could be reclaimed if supported properly by the others, and the conference ended in acrimony.

By 2078 no one was expecting much. The past two meetings had
been tumultuous and everyone was expecting a quiet, businesslike affair among the quiet, businesslike Scandinavians. Perhaps returning it to Finland would evoke old, romantic memories of revolutionaries scuttling from basement to basement, living on boiled potatoes, coffee, and rounds of head-blasting vodka mixed with aquavit and gin.

Indeed, very little was agreed upon at the conference beyond the quality of the cuisine. The delegations all asserted what became known as the “after you, Alphonse” protocol for major cooperative efforts against the Kurians. There were the usual lower-level exchanges of technology and information, selection of books that could be used for coding messages, arrangements for liaisons to return home with different delegations—the inaction that Sime had promised had apparently become a reality.

Duvalier had very little to do at the conference. On the rare occasions that required a vote by the delegates, Ahn-Kha was the only one of their party who was at all involved, though they showed the votes and delegates on large view screens. Ninety percent of these were ceremonial, according to Ahn-Kha, mostly devoted to voting posthumous thanks to some hero of the Resistance. Supposedly there were also secret votes, but Ahn-Kha said they probably wouldn’t be happening until the end of the conference, once the issues had been wrangled out.

The United Free Republics and the Kentucky Alliance had arranged, through Sime, for a small per diem, which provided them with just enough Finnish currency to get a decent meal and toiletries. It turned out that Ahn-Kha and Valentine had also had the sense to bring a few bottles of real Kentucky bourbon as trade goods, and they
commanded a very handsome profit for the pair at the nicest of the local bar/restaurants, as well as their hotel lounge. They shared their profits with her (“I used a little of your baggage allowance anyway, since you always travel so light,” Val explained), so between that and saving on her per diem by eating at the conference’s buffets, she had pocket money for indulgences. After a splurge on chocolate, she saved the rest for items that would last longer or perhaps a nice souvenir.

She watched Ahn-Kha vote a couple times out of interest. He had an identification card that carried a magnetic strip, and when it came time for a vote, he stood in a short line in front of one of the electronic vote recorders placed on conveniently located podiums at the edges of the aisles of the plenary conference room. Ahn-Kha inserted his card, and a screen brought up his designated language (English) giving him Yes, No, or Abstain options. Each voting delegate’s choice was displayed on a movie-theater screen. A few of the very large, multinational freeholds, such as Canada, Mongolia, and the Andes Chain and the Indo-Pacific Territories (which included Queensland and the Australian Outback), had more than one vote.

For those needing translation, they’d either brought their own translators or they could access a network with instantaneous translation given in a dozen languages over a local network. Most of the seats had plug-ins for headphones—you just pushed buttons on a “dial” to go to the channel for the language you wanted.

Then there were smaller meetings in other rooms. The meetings had subjects such as “Refuting and Using Kurian Propaganda” and “The Home Farm: Four Ways to Improve Production” and “An Examination of the Debriefings of Six High-Level Defectors.”

The conference had a daily “newspaper” that mostly covered corrections and changes to the schedule, though there was, oddly, a humorous, dialogue-free cartoon at the bottom of the back page every morning. Just the thing to put a smile on your face before the “How Many Lives per Year to Support a Kurian?: Latest Analysis” session at nine a.m.

As for the food and drink, it was very good. Every delegate received plastic tokens: red for food, white for entertainment and personal necessities, and black for alcohol, tobacco, or indulgence foods such as chocolates and quail egg–type delicacies. The only problem was that the tokens were useless in town; they could be used only at the hotel and conference center. Vodka, schnapps, and a Danish liquor called aquavit were the cheapest liquors (beer, oddly enough, could be bought with any colored token, thanks to local sources and a patriotic gesture by a Polish brewery that had managed to get a large supply of beer across the Baltic to aid in the fight for freedom), and wine tended to be the most expensive source of alcohol.

There were exhibits on the concourse, mostly by weapons and communication-gear manufacturers. “Micromanufacturing” and “anysourcing” seemed to be popular buzzwords, according to the flyers she picked up. There were live fire demonstrations of guns that allegedly had only three moving parts and could be manufactured with the simplest of metal-stamping technology, ways to create explosives that looked like attic insulation, cinder blocks, bricks, or conduit, and to Ahn-Kha’s delight there was a special heartroot booth that showed all the different ways to grow the Golden One staple and turn it into dishes for human consumption or animal feed. They had heartroot with honey, thick heartroot stews, even heartroot
smoothies mixed with dried fruits that claimed to supply a full day’s protein and carbs in a single shake.

There were also a few weirdos, or “Moonrakers,” as Valentine called them. There were people in the alleys of town who set up displays selling crystals that allegedly interfered with a Reaper’s sense of your lifesign, lucky charms handed down through families that supposedly kept children safe, even brass rings “guaranteed to fool anyone and pass all detection tests.”

Duvalier looked in on a room devoted to “War Games.” For games, they were carried out in deadly seriousness, with military staff officers from the various freeholds testing operational alliances and theoretical attacks on various Kurian Zones. From what she could gather, your freehold had “resource points” of population, raw materials, and technology that closely matched real-world numbers, and you could allocate your resource points to building up your economy, or military, or some combination of the two, the classic “guns or butter” choice, in other words. You could also spend resource points in Kurian Zones to slow them down or cause distractions.

Duvalier, who’d served her whole life more or less as one of those resources raising havoc in the KZs, knew it wasn’t quite so simple as that. Why the population of Kentucky would fight the Kurians tooth and nail when the population of Kansas wouldn’t was a more complex question than could be quantified in the war games tables and charts. She was just a fraction of a “resource point” in game terms, but if she got lucky she could kill a Kurian or take out an entire Quisling brigade headquarters. You couldn’t just spend a certain amount of money to shift the allegiance of a population; if you could,
the Kurians probably would have bought out Southern Command decades ago.

Or perhaps they had. Unsettling thought. She sometimes wondered if there was something rotten high up. Since that wild summer after Solon’s collapse, when Southern Command seemed to be on a roll, toppling Kurian Zones almost as fast as they reached the borders, the advance had ground to a permanent halt at the Rio Grande and the Mississippi. Guys like Val suddenly brought up on dubious charges… with smooth talkers like Sime running the show now. “Show” wasn’t even the right word; it was more like one long intermission.

While waiting in line at the bakery, she ran into the sergeant with the nearly unintelligible English who’d questioned her outside the garrison. After exchanging a few forced comments about the weather and how she was liking seeing the sun set at eleven thirty in the evening, he made a rather ham-fisted attempt to arrange a dinner date. “Food, huh? Eat? Both?” he said, waggling his forefingers at her and then at himself.

She couldn’t imagine the conversation and she didn’t want to have sex with him, so she shook her head no and said “boyfriend” a few times.

They chatted some more as the line moved forward. He had a holstered pistol she admired. He extracted it for her. It was a Glock 17, looked like, with an extra-thick handgrip—the sergeant had large hands. She admired it.