Valentine's Exile (2 page)

David Valentine breathed in a last snootful of clean air and descended into the muskrat-den reek. He stepped down carefully, holding an uprooted young dandelion in his gun-free hand. The stairwell to the old terminal's sublevel was mostly gone. The entryway had been enlarged, replaced by churned-over earth paved with plywood strips dropping eight feet to the hole in the cinderblock side of the foundation where the basement door used to be.

The entrance to the Razorbacks' headquarters resembled an oversized anthole, if anything. It fooled the eyes that sometimes drifted high above the besiegers' positions.

He rested his gun in a cleaning becket and stood on a carpet remnant in the entryway to let his eyes adjust to the dim light within. Deaf old Pooter, one of the regiment's guinea pigs, rolled up onto his hind legs and whistled a welcome from his chicken-wire cage perched on a shelf next to the door. Valentine tossed him the dandelion.

“They didn't hit us after all,” he told Pooter.

Pooter chuckled as a length of milky dandelion stem disappeared into his fast-working jaws.

If the Kurians dusted again, Pooter would expire in a noisy hacking fit, giving the men inside time to ring the alarm, lower the plastic curtains, and put on their gas masks and gloves.

Valentine was tired. He'd spent the last eight hours moving across the forward posts, keyed up for a battle that never came. Probably more than he would have been had there been action, the weird I'm-alive-and-I-can-do-anything exhilaration of surviving combat would have floated him back to the Razors' HQ.

On the other side of the door from Pooter was a sandbagged cubbyhole filled with salvaged armchairs resting among thousands of loosely bound pages from perhaps a hundred different pre-22 magazines and novels. A team of Nail's Bears, Razorback HQ's emergency reserve, lounged within, smoking captured tobacco and reading books or magazine fragments.

Except for one. The Bear Valentine knew as Lost & Found stood just outside the cubbyhole in the deepest shadow of the entrance, an assault rifle resting in his arms like a cradled child, a bucket filled with white powder at his feet.

Valentine took in the HQ air, perhaps ten degrees warmer than the morning chill of the Texas spring outside. The Bear, tobacco, a faint fecal smell, brewing coffee, old sweat, drying laundry, gun oil, and a hint of cabbage stewing in salty broth rolled around in his nostrils.

“Morning, sir,” Lost & Found said, looking out the door beyond Valentine. He prodded the bucket at his foot.

Valentine dutifully stripped off his combat harness and tossed it in the decontamination barrel. The rest of his clothes followed until he stood naked on the carpet remnant.

He took a handful of the boric acid from the bucket and gave himself a rubdown, concentrating on his shoulder-length black hair, armpits, and crotch. Rednits liked the warmth and tender apertures around hair follicles, and the battalion wasn't losing any more men to nit-fever. Colonel Meadows had enough on his hands with twenty percent of the Razorbacks filling field hospital beds or recovery wards, eating leek-and-liver soup twice daily, getting their blood back up to strength.

Valentine went over to a bank of lockers featuring names written on duct tape plastered on new paint slathered over old rust, and extracted a uniform. Hank had put a fresh one in overnight, while Valentine was forward. Regular soldiers had to make do with the rumpled contents of the slop bins, but the Razorback officers each had a locker for their inside uniforms. When he was properly dressed in the mixed-gray-and-deep-green fatigues of the Razorbacks (Southern Command Mixed Infantry Division, for use of—some said the color scheme was reminiscent of a raccoon's backside) he put on leather-soled moccasins and followed the smell of coffee with his Wolf's nose.

He walked past the headset-wearing HQ radio/field-phone operator, whose gear was swathed in cheesecloth that smelled of kerosene, surrounded by six different NO SMOKING signs in English, Spanish, and French. The kerosene kept the electicks out. The little bastards ate electrical insulation and grew into three-inch sticklike bugs whose metallic chitin inevitably shorted out electrical equipment.

The boy with the headset, seventeen but scrawny enough to pass for fourteen, studied the flickering needles of the radio set as though divining runes. Valentine raised an eyebrow to the kid, got a head shake in return, and looked at the clipboard with the most recent com-flimsies. There'd been some chatter out of Dallas the previous day that made GHQ-Dallas Corridor suspect a counterattack in the Razorbacks' area, but nothing had manifested last night.

Valentine decided to give the boric acid a few more minutes to work and headed for the galley.

In the five weeks they'd occupied the airfield, Narcisse and her staff had set up sinks, stoves, and even had a pizza oven going. Companies rotating to or from the forward positions always had a pizza party before creeping out to the strongpoints covering the approaches to Dallas. Narcisse wore no uniform, held no rank, and wandered between the battalion's kitchens and infirmary as the mood struck her, dispensing equal helpings of cheer and food, escorted in her wheelchair by a steadfast rottweilerish mutt who'd wandered into camp on the Razorbacks' trip south from the Ouachitas. The men and women whose job it was to aid and comfort the frontline soldiers obeyed the old, legless Haitian as though she were a visiting field marshall.

Valentine said good morning to the potato peelers working under faded paint that once demarked a maintenance workshop, rinsed his hands, and poured himself a mug of water from the hot pot. He plopped in one of Narcisse's herbal tea bags from a woven basket on a high shelf, then covered his brew up with a plastic lid masquerading as a saucer, and took the stairs down to the subbasement and the hooches.

He smelled the steeping tea on the way down the stairs. It tasted faintly of oranges—God only knew how Narcisse came up with orange peel—and seemed to go to whatever part of the body most needed a fix. If you were constipated it loosened you, if you were squirting it plugged you. It took away headache and woke you up in the morning and calmed the jitters that came during a long spell of shellfire.

Valentine had a room to himself down among the original plumbing fixtures and electrical junction boxes. In the distance a generator clattered, steadily supplying juice but sounding as though it were unhappy with the routine. Just along the hall Colonel Meadows occupied an old security office, but Valentine didn't see light creeping out from under the door so he turned and moved aside the bedsheet curtaining off his quarters.

His nose told him someone lay in his room even before his eyes picked out the L-shaped hummock in his wire-frame bed. A pale, boric acid-dusted leg ending in a calloused, hammertoed foot emerged from the wooly army blanket, and a knife-cut shock of short red hair could just be distinguished at the other end.

Alessa Duvalier was back from the heart of Dallas.

Valentine examined the foot. Some people showed the experience of a hard life through their eyes, others in their rough hands. A few, like Narcisse, were bodily crippled. While the rest of Duvalier was rather severely pretty, occasionally exquisite when mood or necessity struck, Duvalier's feet manifested everything bad the Cat had been through. Dark with filth between the toes, hard-heeled, toes twisted and dirt-crusted nails chipped, scabbed at the ankle, calloused and scarred from endless miles on worn-through socks—her feet told a gruesome tale.

A pair of utility sinks held her gear, reeking of the camphor smell of its spell in the decontamination barrel, her sword-concealing walking stick lying atop more mundane boots and socks.

“Val, that you?” she said sleepily from under the blanket, voice muffled by a fistful of wool over her mouth and nose to keep out the basement chill. She shifted and he caught a flash of upper thigh. She'd fallen into his bed wearing only a slop shirt. They'd never been lovers, but were as comfortable around each other as a married couple.

“Yeah.”

“Room for two.”

“Shower first. Then I want to hear—”

“One more hour. I got in at oh-four.”

“I was out at the forward posts. Pickets didn't report you—”

She snorted. Valentine heard Hank's quick step on the stairs he'd just come down.

He looked at his self-winding watch, a gift from Meadows when the colonel assumed command of the Razorbacks. The engraved inscription on the back proclaimed forty-eight-year-old eternal love between a set of initials both ending in
C
. "One more hour, then. Breakfast?”

"Anything.”

Valentine took a reviving spout-shower that kept Hank busy bearing hot water down from the kitchen. Valentine had been seeing to the boy's education at odd hours, trying to remember the lessons Father Max had issued at thirteen, and had put him in the battalion's books to make it easier to feed and clothe the boy. They shared more than just a working relationship. Both had ugly red-and-white burn scars; Valentine's on his back, Hank's on his semi-functional right hand.

“What's the definition of an isosceles triangle?” Valentine asked as he worked a soapy rag up and down his legs.

“All—no—two sides of equal length,” Hank said.

“When all three are the same?”

“Equilateral,” Hank said.

Hank also got the questions on degrees of the corners of an equilateral right. Tomorrow Valentine would get him using triangles for navigational purposes . . . it always helped to add practical applicability right away. In a week or so the boy would be able to determine latitude using the sun and a sextant, provided he could remember the definition of a plumb line.

“Haven't seen Ahn-Kha this morning, have you?”

“No, sir,” Hank said, reverting to military expression with the ease of long practice.

Valentine hadn't smelled the Grog's presence at headquarters, but Ahn-Kha kept to himself in a partially blocked stairwell when he was at the headquarters. Ahn-Kha was evaluating and drilling some of the newer Razorbacks, mostly Texan volunteers who'd been funneled to them through Southern Command's haphazard field personnel depot north of the city. Southern Command tended to get recruits the all-Texan units didn't want, and Ahn-Kha knew how to turn lemons into lemonade. The first thing Valentine wanted recruits to learn was to respect Grogs, whether they were friends or enemies.

Way too many lives had been lost in the past thanks to mistakes.

Valentine asked Hank to go fill a tray, saw that the light was on in Meadows' office, and poked his head in to see if his superior had anything new on the rumored attack.