Winter Duty (24 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Crucible Legion, as it was now being styled, had its first field operation providing security on the streets of Owensboro. Valentine had a standing order to put anyone who called it “Valentine’s Legion” to work filling potholes, and it didn’t take many days of punishment with wheelbarrow and shovel before the name disappeared.

Both the informal name and the formal request to go to Owensboro had come through Brother Mark, who’d decamped without a moment’s rest to the Assembly at Elizabethtown and engineered its move to Owensboro.

Valentine and Lambert allocated two companies to the security detail, one to provide a presence on the streets in town and a second in reserve just to the west, ready to move to the west bridge or travel on the Owensboro bypass as needed. Valentine gave the street detail’s command to Ediyak, and Patel’s company had the reserve duty. Ediyak had an intelligent charm about her that would mix well with civilians, and Patel could be relied upon to get his men from A to B in a hurry if it became necessary.

Valentine had little to do but get to know the town and keep his men from talking too much in the bars or being too high profile on the streets. The soldiers of the legion had the unusual orders to keep out of the establishments of the downtown they were guarding.

He felt odd patrolling a town not in Southern Command control, but as the Owensboro Emergency Council explained it, the delegates didn’t trust some of the hotheads in the more vociferous clans not to try to storm the convention center and force the vote their way at gunpoint.

While the forces of Southern Command couldn’t be called “neutrals” in Kentucky politics, they were famous for letting the civilians carry out votes without anything more than a soldier’s fatalistic interest in the events of elected officials.

All Valentine’s soldiers could do was provide an illusion of security. They stood in pairs and trios on the street corners and walked through the old town square and along the rusted, broken river walk. But if a file of Northwest Ordnance gunboats came chugging down the Ohio, all they could do was point the delegates to their designated bombproofs.

Of course, an illusion could be a powerful thing, as Valentine had learned at substantial pain in the Kurian Zone.

Owensboro had a police force, of sorts, who appeared to have one law for the town’s residents and another for strangers and transients. Valentine had to keep in the good graces of the local police captain, his deputies, and his “detectives”—who, as far as Valentine could tell, were in charge of extorting money from the shadier local establishments.

The Kentucky Assembly met at the waterfront conference center that played host to Owensboro’s famous flea markets. Instead of socks and shoelaces and genuine Japanese electric razors, they traded votes during the day and drinks at night.

Valentine set up his command post in the old town welcome center right on the main street, with a good view of his observation post on the old severed bridge over the Ohio that ran into the center of town. The welcome center had become a sort of lounge for restaurant and accommodation touts and cabdrivers. The touts and drivers were so busy with the Kentucky Assembly in town, they had no need of a place to sit out of the weather and swap lies about their clients, and Valentine had moved in without any protest.

Brother Mark came in on a coal train with a few other delegates, including Tikka, now dressed in an impressive mix of cotton, legworm leather, and riding boots that made Valentine think of a dashing flying ace of the First World War. She looked Valentine levelly in the eye and shook his hand before excusing herself.

“That bright young woman’s building an army for Kentucky. Or an Army of Kentucky, though they haven’t settled on a name,” Brother Mark said in admiration.

“I hope word doesn’t get out.”

“Kentucky is turning into the proverbial tar baby for the Kurian Order,” Brother Mark bubbled. Valentine wondered if he was drunk. Perhaps it was the stimulation of so much social intercourse, running from faction to faction, picking up on the queer electrical currents that run through political assemblies. “They’re like Br’er Fox, getting stuck in the tar.”

“I think the version I heard had Br’er Rabbit getting stuck. Br’er Fox wins one for a change,” Valentine said.

“Well, either way the analogy is sound. Every time the Kurians try to attack Kentucky, they only get themselves stuck in worse trouble. They sent the Moondaggers in after us, and they perpetrated outrages against a people that tend to pick up their guns and let the lead fly until the point of honor is settled. Just when matters were beginning to calm down, they tried their gambit at the power plant. Now all of Kentucky is talking about that over their back fences and cracker barrels.”

“I’ve yet to see a cracker barrel my whole time in Kentucky,” Valentine said. Brother Mark had a city man’s habit of cornpone clichés to make his points about the rural folks.

“Yes, yes, well, you know what I mean. But they’re stuck in worse now. The bombing of Elizabethtown is another example. It united the delegates just as it chased them out of the city. Half were ready to break off and go home until the bombs started falling.”

“And delivered them right into our lap,” Valentine said.

“You’re a victim of your own success, my daring Valentine,” Brother Mark said. “All Elizabethtown spoke of the way you handled the power plant difficulty, and that smothered the idea of moving to Bowling Green or Danville. When planes hit the conference center unexpectedly again in a night raid, they decided to relocate in secret to Owensboro. We picked up two more legworm clans and several of the towns in the south. The only major hold-outs are the towns in the Cincinnati-Louisville-Lexington triangle, but you can hardly blame them, practically in the shadow of all those Kurian towers.”

There was still a pretense of an assembly going on in Elizabethtown, complete with press notices. A radio broadcaster calling himself Dr. Samuel Johnson—Valentine had no idea if that was his real name or not, but he felt as though he should know the name—continued to report jumbled details and play recorded interviews allegedly obtained in Elizabethtown over what was probably Free Kentucky’s only computer-telephone line hookup. Of course Kurian agents were hunting all around Elizabethtown for the site of the assembly, probably so it could be targeted for bombing again, but for now the decampment to Owensboro and the new swearing in of delegates at the high school basketball court had remained a secret.

They kept an “underground special” radio in Valentine’s city headquarters for listening to Dr. Johnson’s daily report. Valentine, who was right in Owensboro with the Assembly meeting only around the corner from him, knew more about how the debate was progressing from a transmitter in Elizabethtown than he did from local reports.

Odd world. But he’d noted that before.

There didn’t seem to be much for his security team to do. In the end, his one great contribution was to take Pencil Boelnitz off the hands of the Assembly security team. He snuck into the Assembly once, was warned off, and was escorted out. When he got in again the very same day, the Assembly sergeant at arms demanded that he never see Boelnitz’s classic profile again.

Valentine had the journalist put under guard and walked back to Fort Seng.

Even Brother Mark wouldn’t update Valentine on the real progress of the debate. Valentine plied him with food and had Ediyak cut and style his hair—strange duty for someone with captain’s bars, but she was as curious as Valentine about the progress of the debate and was willing to play sort of a Mata Hari with comb and straight razor.

“Sworn to secrecy, I’m afraid,” Brother Mark said, wincing at the amount of gray exposed at his temples. “Everyone’s afraid of an opinion getting back to the Kurians. There’s a rule, until the actual Assembly vote, that none of the voting on motions and so on is to be recorded or reported.”

“But Dr. Johnson’s sources keep giving him a ‘sense of the Assembly, ’ ” Ediyak said, applying a little Macassar oil (Owensboro style—probably cooking oil with a little dye).

“Dr. Johnson is not necessarily accurate in his reports,” Brother Mark said. “Remember, he’s also reporting that they’re meeting in an ‘undisclosed location outside Elizabethtown.’ ”

“Well, that’s true after a fashion,” Valentine said. “About eighty miles outside Elizabethtown.”

“Why didn’t they do this last summer?” Ediyak asked.

“Karas was operating on his own hook with his own allied clans,” Brother Mark said. “But some of Kentucky supported him and started putting together a democratic assembly, on paper at least. The Assembly is almost feudal, going back to the traditions of the Magna Carta. This is a collection of powerful and influential men and women. Kentucky’s nobility, you might say.”

“You wouldn’t know it by how they’re spending in town,” Ediyak said.

“They’re afraid to show their faces. If you see a man hurrying down the street with his collar turned up and his hat pulled down, I guarantee that’s an Assembly member.”

Brother Mark was willing to brief them on general parameters of the debate. There were three broad factions in the Assembly, the Old Deal Caucus, the Militant Independents, and the All-Ins. According to Brother Mark, the future of Kentucky would be determined by which way the Militant Independents voted.

“Hard to say what’ll tip the balance,” Brother Mark said. “The Kurians seem to have finally figured out that threatening Kentucky is causing more problems than it’s solved.”

The debate was raging among the people as well. Dr. Johnson, when he had no news to report, read letters and notes from a few phone calls and even news reports from overseas. Of course there was no knowing just how much the good doctor was editorializ ing, but the vast majority of the messages he read were in favor of Kentucky declaring itself against the Kurians, though there were mixed feelings about whether they should join the United Free Republics or no.