Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (24 page)

“You get one, gun basement,” he said. “’Stand?”

She didn’t ’stand, so she shrugged.

“I take you. I take you.”

He did take her, all the way to the center of town. Down a little alley off the main plaza in front of the sulfur-colored town hall and civic center, he showed her a gun shop. She spent an hour perusing the stock while he chatted with the owner and leisurely ate a breakfast quiche he’d purchased at the bakery.

She selected a Glock 17 similar to his save for the factory grip. Through the sergeant, she negotiated a deal with the owner. He arranged to swap out its current handle for a rubberized diamondback grip. The owner also put new luminous dots into the sights of the pistol—free of charge.

He let her onto the garrison gun range and she put fifty rounds through the gun, familiarizing herself with it. Her sergeant—Ruddi was his name, apparently—must have sensed something about her, since he quit trying to get her out on a date and instead wanted to hear Duvalier talk about ways to kill a Reaper, or a Big Mouth (they were a serious problem in the Baltic and in the waters of the Danish straits).

They cleaned their weapons together. She learned two Finnish expressions.
Varo!
meant “watch out” and
anteeksi
was a common way to say “excuse me.”

One of the garrison soldiers brought them a tray of fresh
ish
—meaning dried and salted—fish, potatoes, and vegetables of the summer harvest. They had beer out of a cask as well, with a label burned into the side of the cask with a branding iron. Some popular local brew, a very decent lager, she thought.

“See. We dinner, after it all,” Ruddi said.

She laughed and agreed.

The gun had set her back the majority of her expense money. She’d have to live very cheaply on the free stuff for the delegates and their associates, perhaps step up her attempts to get invitations to the nicer dinners and receptions.

The town had an old-fashioned public bathhouse and sauna. There were also numerous private ones that were “welcome to the delegates” so everyone could enjoy the Finnish tradition of sauna, even though it wasn’t midwinter and they’d miss the full effect of running into the snow to cool off.

The Baltic League had come to some arrangement with the owners, and attendees of the conference were free to use the bath part, though you still needed a little money to tip the staff. Massages, pumicing, and individual lathering with a sponge was extra, of course.

She visited the larger baths out of some mixture of curiosity and boredom.

There were one or two curious delegates like her there for the experience. Most of the attendees seemed to be older locals, who bought monthly passes at reduced rates. From what she could see, it was as much social ritual as personal hygiene. The Finns came to the baths to chat over tea, exchange canned or preserved items from their gardens, read, even play chess.

The bath part was fascinating. After soaping and rinsing in a little stall with a wood slat chair to sit on, you stepped on through to the men’s or women’s (or mixed, for the daring, and she wasn’t that daring, more because she was embarrassed by her dreadful feet than
modesty) soaking pool. In a true nod to the Old World, the water was heated by hot rocks dropped into a little cistern at the bottom of the pool. A grate was put over the rock bed to add a measure of safety. The heated water circulated through the natural tendency of the hot water to rise, as far as she could tell. The cooled rocks were extracted regularly and returned to the fireplace by cheerful attendants who joked with the old men in Finnish.

She loved it. Except for the part where the old ladies beat each other all over the skin with leafy birch branches. Supposedly it kept the skin young and supple (according to an English information sheet they handed her). She’d engaged in conversation with the Finns mostly through pantomime, though the oldest ones knew a few polite words of English that had been taught in the schools of their youth.

On her third time she brought Valentine, and a little pair of canvas slippers so they could go to the common room together. They both wrapped thin towels around their waists, like most of the Finns. The women were unconcerned with exposing their breasts in a bathhouse, or at least those who were concerned about it stuck to the women-only side. When she emerged from the bath to move to the sauna—still enjoyable in the cool, bright summer of the north—she felt deliciously sexy with the wet wrap clinging about her waist and buttocks. That was an unusual feeling for her. Valentine’s maleness brought it out, she supposed, though everything above her waist counted him just as an old friend. Well, the reproductive organs did have their own separate consciousness. Between odd moments of arousal and her monthly cycle, it sometimes felt as though her ovaries were running the show.

Val’s wet towel didn’t leave much to the imagination, either. Most of the other attendees were staring at his scars, the big exit wound in his leg and the burn marks on his back in particular. One, who’d heard them speaking English, asked, “You have in wreck?”

“Boiler room accident,” Valentine said. He’d told Duvalier about being scalded by steam while pursuing a Kurian through the bowels of a Kurian tower in Little Rock.

“Ooch,” the Finn said sympathetically. He pulled at his bottom lip, as if trying to extract English vocabulary. “You are… lucky… for being alive.”

Valentine smiled and shrugged.

He’d endured more physical pain than she had fighting the Kurians. She liked to disappear when the bullets started flying; Cats just weren’t of much use in mass slaughter. He’d suffered emotionally, too. She’d been brought up in a Kurian Zone. She sometimes thought most of her emotional responses were like burned circuitry from that. The wiring was there; it just had no power. Most of the time.

“Been meaning to tell you, this weekend I’m going away,” Valentine said. “Three days at most—trip to Helsinki.”

“With Eva Stepanek?” Duvalier asked. The pleasant sexiness boiled up and disappeared like water on one of the rocks fresh from the fireplace.

“Yes. I’m curious about her art collection. She’s really proud of it. It’s all in storage, but when she’s no longer sailing, she plans to open a little gallery or museum. She hasn’t decided which. She wanted to show me some of the finds. I’m no expert, of course. Maybe when we met years ago I was too skeptical of her plans—I honestly can’t remember. She seems to want to prove something to me.”

That she can suck a cock with the best of them, I imagine,
Duvalier thought.

“Helsinki is the biggest city in Finland, right?”

“Yes, it’s ten times the size of this, easy. Bigger than New Orleans, I think.”

“You think that’s wise?” Duvalier asked. “You’re supposed to be at this conference.”

“The conference is interesting in its way. I think if the Kurians were going to try something, they would have done so already. In any case, it’s a weekend. Half the delegates will be at the coast and the rest will be preparing for their next week’s presentations.”

“If the Kurians only found out the location after the conference started, they might still be staging a force strong enough to make it into the harbor,” Duvalier said.

“The Lifeweavers haven’t shown up yet. Unless they’re disguised. If I were the Kurians, I’d wait until I thought I could bag them. Sime told me they weren’t expected until the end of the month.”

“You’d think they’d have arrived while the location was still secret. Maybe the Kurians are out hunting for them.”

Valentine pulled at his chin. “If so, that’s something for the Finns to worry about. I don’t see how we can make a difference. If I could point to some tangible dangers, I’d just alert the Finns anyway and be ready to help. But you’re right—it is odd that they aren’t here from the start. Maybe the Baltic League doesn’t trust the Lifeweavers any more than the other delegates do. There’s always talk that the Lifeweavers are just Kurians pretending to aid us. Fighting both sides of the same war, as it were.”

Duvalier had heard that theory proposed from barstools by
veteran soldiers and scraggly-bearded kids more than once over the years. It was the sort of idea you’d come up with after an evening’s drinking and bullshitting.

“The New Universal Church came up with that one,” she said with a laugh she hoped didn’t sound too forced.

Valentine let it drop. He knew she felt closer to the Lifeweavers than most.

“Could be,” Valentine said. “Still, there’s not much scheduled for the weekend. Some demonstrations in the field. Oh, Ahn-Kha will like the heartroot part. The Finns have a lot of mossy bogs around all these lakes. It’s doing very well there. It just freezes up in the winter—you can chip it out if you get real hungry and defrost it—then it goes right back to growing in the spring. I had a heartroot omelet for breakfast, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t bad, especially since they used a good cheese. It’s a little tasteless without support.”

“Heartroot? Great. Unless he gets it just like Mom used to cook, it gives him terrible cabbage farts,” Duvalier said.

Valentine smiled. “Still another reason to be in Helsinki this weekend.”

“Have you actually done anything at the conference?”

“Once we passed on the warning, I’ve just been doing what suits my fancy. There was a discussion about Xeno products. I was in the audience, but they had me talk a little about the legworm ranchers. They didn’t even know where to find the meat on a legworm or that the leather came from egg casings. I was able to straighten them out on a few things. Some delegates from Russia claimed there were a lot of legworms in the tagia up near the permafrost line. In the winter they go into the usual hibernation nest-pile, get snowed over, and
sometimes people get curious about the heap, climb it, fall in, and are never heard from again. They’re terrified of the damn things, to tell the truth. They can believe the Kentuckians have built what amounts to a society handling them. What about you?”

She shrugged. To tell the truth, she was a little bored with it all. She never followed the grand strategy of the fronts beyond information about where the enemy was operating. Her vague feelings of unease probably came out of the boredom. She was so used to being ready to deal with death jumping out of the trees that she couldn’t relax—even with the aid of a sauna. “I sat in on a few talks. You have the headphones on and it’s like watching a foreign film, only there’s no film. As to finding a Kurian infiltrator, the security people are making sure there’s nobody wandering around recording stuff. The thing is, note taking isn’t against the rules; everyone’s jotting down notes all the time. If there is a spy—or spies—he’s got to be bored.”

“The voting delegates get special meetings. Ahn-Kha has said there might be something in the works for India. There’s been a lot of talk about it. To hear them talk, the Kurians there are worse than the ones back home; they fight with each other more than with the Resistance. They’re trying to get Australia and Russia to commit to getting enough arms to Mumbai for a rising. Those guys with the turbans, the Sikhs, that’s what they’re here for, to get more weapons out of the other freeholds.”

“If only Southern Command could have knocked over Georgia. We could arm the whole world.”

“The Atlanta Gunworks, you mean?” Valentine asked. “They make good stuff, better than we do. If we took it over—”

“Suddenly they’d be making crap guns like most of the stuff Southern Command stamps out.”

“I wasn’t going to put it quite like that, but yes. Funny how everyone hangs on to vintage firearms if they can get them.”

“Maybe she’s just after your bourbon.”

“It’s true. I have one bottle left. Thing is, she’s not really a drinker. Odd, because all of the other Poles here toss it down like iced tea. This is the hardest-drinking meeting I’ve ever been to.”

“You’re just used to Southern Command.” While Southern Command made her crazy at regular intervals, she did admire it. You’re not supposed to drink in uniform, and they didn’t think too much of you if you drank much out of uniform, either.

They split up and returned to the areas for their respective genders to dress. Her skin felt lovely thanks to all the steam, even without a thrashing by birch branches. She was in the mood for some really good food and maybe a little wine, and she didn’t have the money for a weekend at the expensive joints with the menus translated into French.

Ahn-Kha would be eating heartroot all weekend, which would give him gas, which would make the hotel untenable.

She decided to send a message to Von Krebs.

T
he
Bothnian Coast, July:
Long stretches of the heavily forested Finnish coast are almost uninhabited. Few have the resources to live in a remote home through the long, dark winter, so most of the vacation and year-round homes of the pre-Kurian era are empty of everything but bears, red foxes, and other wildlife.

Still, there are a few fine homes left on the coast, mostly near towns of year-round activity such as Kokkola, as well as smaller, more humble dwellings around villages devoted to fishing and sealing on the coast. The Gulf of Bothnia has its charms for some, including the fact that the low-salinity water freezes over for several months out of the year, making it one of the largest expanses of ice outside of the Arctic and Antarctic regions—an ice fisherman’s paradise, if you have the ability to cross the sometimes treacherous sheets and drill your way through to water. In the summer, the small, isolated beaches see a rush of campers and fishermen taking advantage of the mild weather and long sunlit dawns and dusks. Through the other seasons one might consider it an ideal climate for a philosopher or writer, with opportunities to spend weeks on end quietly and warmly indoors, if you have the resources, though the market for writing and philosophy is much lessened in the dark days of the Kurian Order.

She dropped a message for Von Krebs at the conference center first thing the next morning, before she lost her resolve to do so.

Wandering briefly through the conference center, overhearing conversations she couldn’t understand, she wished in vain to be on her way home. Even Pistols seemed to be enjoying the conference. He called the atmosphere “stimulating,” a word she doubted he had used often before their trip.

Not that the trip wasn’t good for her. She’d put on weight. The Finns used a lot of sour cream in their soups and dressings, and after an initial bout of indigestion, she was thriving on regular meals with plenty of fresh veggies. There wasn’t much of what she considered fruit at these latitudes, but the berries made up for it.

She wasn’t mentally stimulated, either. To be honest, she was bored.

It wasn’t for the lack of characters attending. There were a few big, burly, savage-looking Scandinavian guerillas who were either Bears or such beasts personally that they could have given the Bears a tougher time than they’d seen outside of a Reaper conclave.

One in particular caught her eye. He was a blond giant, like some hero out of an epic who was just waiting for a Valkyrie to carry him off from the field of the slain. He’d been partially—well, there was no other word for it but “scalped” in some encounter or other, and it left him with a huge pink patch where his hair should have been on the left side. As if to compensate, he’d let the right side grow into a long fall, giving his head an asymmetrical but strangely appealing look. He wore a thick fur jacket and what looked like
wolfskin boots; he’d left the wolf faces atop the shoes, as a matter of fact. She quietly inquired about him at the security desk.

“Rolf, that one is. A Norwegian. The last survivor of an entire company of Bears. You know Bears?”

“I know Bears.”

“All died but him at Trondheim. A terrible fight, but Trondheim now, no more Kurians. Oslo and Bergen and the south coast of Norway is all they have.”

“And they’re welcome to it,” the security woman at the desk said. “Damn stupid Norwegians.”

The activity woke her appetite. She went back the hotel, wondering what she’d do with herself until the afternoon. She expected Von Krebs to get the message by noon. It was in her nature and her training to observe people’s routines. She’d seen Von Krebs most days around lunchtime in the hotel, having drinks with friends. He usually hit the convention center first.

She decided to use the hotel buffet.

Meals came in two varieties—free buffets for the attendees, and personally funded meals that could be delivered to your home or eaten at an elegant table near a romantic fire.

The only head-scratcher for her was the monitors. The hotel lobby set up six big, brilliant electronic screens that produced pictures and video so sharp that they were hard to distinguish from real life. One of the hotel workers said they were Finnish-made; there was a substantial electronics remanufacturing industry closer to Helsinki and Turku.

So, with all that amazing technology, what did they do? Ran conference updates about schedule and speaker changes in between reruns
of
Noonside Passions
, the ubiquitous Kurian Zone daytime drama. Duvalier couldn’t stand it, but Valentine would sit quite happily, drink coffee or tea, and soak up plot points about infertile women and black market scoundrels, leavened with plenty of New Universal Church sermonizing.

It was popular around the world, so they could get broadcasts of the day’s show in several languages. Moreover, since it was propaganda masquerading as entertainment, it was broadcast everywhere. Valentine liked to pick the story lines apart sometimes, trying to pick up hints about what the Kurian Order was worried about this particular month. They would do a series about energy rationing and conservation, or add a subplot about why it’s important to keep your teeth clean, or to report privately owned transmitters.

Still, every day there were little groups of men and women watching one of the several broadcasts and rebroadcasts. Some worked on notes held in their laps, others grabbed a hasty meal and watched, and still more talked and chuckled as the show proceeded.

As Duvalier idled and wondered whether she should go to the pharmacy in town for more stomach powder (her cranky gut was improving with the ample dairy and fiber), she sipped some watery fruit punch and watched the watchers. One German woman grew so excited at a
Passions
plot point that she hopped up and ran to one of the lobby phones to call over to the conference center. All Duvalier could get of the conversation was a character’s Germanicized name mentioned a couple of times.

People get worked up about strange things. She’d known Bears who would read Jane Austen novels to one another, crying openly at the little heartbreaks of the books’ heroines.

She’d rather spend her time sleeping. Dreams were better than
anything a television writer could create. Now that she’d been eating well for a few weeks, her dreams had quit being about banquets and switched over to sunny fields, music, and sex.

Then she’d get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet, pass through the front room of their suite on the way to the toilet, holding her breath against the funk swirling around Valentine and Pistols (did they secretly hold farting competitions?), and return to her bed to drop into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Von Krebs broke his usual routine. She didn’t see him around the hotel for lunch, and when she checked back in with the message center, she found that he hadn’t come in for his notes yet.

With nothing better to do, she saw Valentine off at the train station. There was a Finnish holiday of some sort on Friday and a few of the conference attendees were taking advantage of the light schedule to see Helsinki. The Helsinki train, on turnaround, was having a twenty-minute break and crew change. The sailor rather pointedly looked at a map and timetable in a display window.

Down the straight-shooting line, the tracks vanished into the pine forest. Duvalier thought Finland could supply much of the world’s population with wood if it had to; everywhere she looked in this country there were beautifully tall pines, as straight as if they were designed with an architect’s T square.

“I’m getting out for a long weekend, too,” she said. “I’m taking Von Krebs up on his offer to see the coast from his friend’s house.”

Valentine had just a small canvas bag, the one he used for his pistol, ammunition, holster, knives, and the cleaning kit for his
weapon. He made a show of adjusting the strap. “Glad to hear it. Get a little sea air and sun.”

“What’s with the gun? You’re not really taking a train across the country for art,” Duvalier said.

“My gun’s in there, yes. The rest is shaving kit and a change of underwear.”

“A Southern Command packet of weekend-leave condoms, too, I hope,” she said. “Remember the daughter you left on Jamaica.”

“I do. Too bad she doesn’t remember me. Why do you bring that up?”

“Thought I’d remind you to keep your weapon on safety this weekend,” she said, but there was a laugh in her voice as she did so.

“Not that it’s really your business, but I really am going there to see her art collection,” Valentine insisted. “It’s a day there, two days around Helsinki, and a day back. I can’t get in that much trouble. I’m not interested in her beyond the paintings. I don’t know that she has a physical interest in me. You have sensitive antennae—would you say she’s into women?”

“I left my lesbian-detection kit in the stable at Seng. Sorry.”

“She knows her art.”

“I’ve seen better ‘art’ beckoning from a New Orleans balcony,” Duvalier said.

Valentine ignored the jibe. “Just think. People used to spend their whole lives involved with… art. You’d study it at school, tour museums, get to know artists and gallery owners. Write books about it. Isn’t it incredible?”

“If you go in for that sort of thing, yeah. A frog in a frying pan
doesn’t give a squirt about who owns how many Renoirs, and we’re frogs in frying pans. That’s easy to forget up here.”

Valentine looked down the tracks. The train had arrived and the conductors were helping people find their cars. “Wonder if we’ll ever get to a world again where people can build a life out of art.”

“When did you get this art bug? Usually you’re going on about some book or other that’s interesting you.”

“We’ll have to cut this short, Ali. Train’s boarding. You have fun, too. I’m a little surprised. Von Krebs doesn’t seem—”

“He’s not. I just want to be on the ocean.”

“It’s a gulf of a sea, technically.”

“Well, whatever. Saltwater shoreline. Never had much of a chance for it since our trip to the gulf waters. Be careful, Val.”

“You, too.”

He gave her a nudge with his elbow as he picked up his bag and joined his fellow passengers in going up onto the train. Duvalier saw Eva Stepanek waiting for him by one of the cars.