Winter Duty (6 page)

They looked at each other in silence.

“Sunshine and rain, Val.”

“I didn’t know you two were that close.”

“After you were hurt at the tower in Little Rock, we sort of hit it off. She found time for me while I adapted to rolling through life.”

“You are rolling. A lieutenant colonel.”

“I get a lot done. I’m more or less desk-bound.”

Valentine wondered how much Post was leaving unsaid.

“Something to drink?” Post asked, opening a minifridge. “I have water, lemonade—er, wait, limeade this week—good old Southern Command root beer, and that awful cocoa—remember? I can order coffee. I don’t keep liquor in the office. Best way not to give in to temptation is to make it physically difficult.”

“Any milk?”

The bushy, salt-and-pepper eyebrows went up. “Milk? Sure.”

The food arrived on a tray, under shining covers, reminding Valentine of the amenities of the Outlook resort he’d visited, and partially destroyed, in the Cascades.

“Major David Valentine, drinking milk,” Post said, passing a carton. “You getting an ulcer?”

“I’m surprised I don’t have one. No, I acquired a taste for it out west, oddly enough. It’s . . . comforting. Ulcer or no.”

“You acquire one here. Anyway, East is more my area. Speaking of which, you owe me a serious Kentucky debriefing. Between you and the Green Mountain Boys, it sounds like you cracked the Moondaggers. What’s left of them are back in Michigan, licking their wounds and singing laments.”

“I’m not so sure it was us. They tried the ‘submission to Kur’s will’ routine on the wrong set of locals. In Kentucky you can’t just wheel into a legworm clan and drag off the sixteen-year-old girls. Those guys know how to make every shot count, and while you’re driving around the hills, they’re humping over them on their worms.”

“Well, we’re celebrating here. Those bastards painted a lot of Kansas soil red. We call the area west of Olathe the Bone Plain now.”

Valentine remembered all the little towns he’d seen, crossing that area with Duvalier. Strange that the Kurians would shed so much blood. Living heartbeats were wealth to them.

They talked and ate. Post impressed Valentine all over again with his knowledge of Kentucky. And Valentine was grateful to forget about the wheelchair.

“Did Lehman give you the bad news?” Post asked.

“What’s that?”

“Javelin plus the operation against the Rio Grande Valley. Southern Command is probably going to pull in its horns for a while. No more offensives. It’s all about ‘consolidation’ and ‘de fensible resolution’ these days.
We’ve won our ramparts back, let’s be sure they never fall again,
and all that. We’re going back on the defensive.”

“That doesn’t do much good for those poor souls outside the walls,” Valentine said.

“We tried our damnedest. You should see all the workshops. There are more tires and artificial limbs than shoe soles. You remember Tancredi, from the Hill? He’s there. He’s got it worse than me—he’s wearing a colostomy bag. Our generation’s used up. I think younger, stronger bodies will have to see the rest through. We need a rest. You need a rest.”

Valentine admitted that. He was so very tired. He didn’t mind the stress of fights like that one against Blitty Easy’s Crew. You aimed and shot, lived or died. It was being responsible for the lives and deaths of the men under you that wore your nerves raw.

Valentine was begining to think he wasn’t cut out for that kind of responsibility. But then, if he didn’t do it, you never knew who might take the controls. If you were lucky, someone like Colonel Seng or Captain LeHavre. But men like General Martinez rose farther and faster.

He covered the noisy silence with a sip of milk.

Post waggled a pen between his fingers. Optical illusion gave it a rubbery flexibility. The pen stopped. He gave the old turning-key signal Valentine remembered from their days conspiring together on the
Thunderbolt
. Valentine rose and closed the office door.

“I’m probably breaking enough rules to merit a court-martial here, Val. They’ve got you on the books as militia, sure, but that’s about the same as civilian under our regs.”

Valentine shrugged. He’d let go of the career long ago. He enjoyed the freedom of being outside the normal chain of command.

“A friend brought in your report, and I made a temporary copy and read it first thing. All these proposals of yours about aid to those ex-Quislings out of Evansville and eastern Kentucky? It’s not going to fly. I doubt it’ll even hatch, to tell you the truth. We’re about to undergo a ‘reallocation of priorities.’ As far as Southern Command is concerned, Javelin was a disaster, and the less said and done about what’s going on on the other side of the Mississippi, the better.”

Lehman had given him the same impression, if not so directly worded.

Valentine shrugged. “We’ve friends in the legworm clans. We can operate as guerrillas. I’m only looking for a gesture of support. Some gear, boots, and a few boonies to train the men.”

Southern Command’s trainers of insurgent or counterinsurgent forces no longer wore the old US Army green berets. They’d taken to simple boonie hats, usually dressed up with a brown duck feather for NCOs, a larger eagle quill for officers.

“Not my area. I’d say take it to your friend in special ops, Colonel Lambert, but she’s under a cloud right now. Investigation pending court-martial. Gross neglect of duty—Martinez is making her the scapegoat for Javelin. That giant staff of his has quite a few Jaggers.”

Jaggers were Southern Command’s military lawyers.

“Any more good news?”

Post spun, tossed his sandwich wrapper in the regular garbage pail. Security refuse went into a locked box with a slot at the top. “Lots. Well, not so much good as puzzling. We’re getting odd reports from the underground, both in the Northwest Ordnance up in Ohio and the Georgia Control—they’re very influential in Tennessee.”

“I don’t know much about the Georgia Control, other than that it’s based in Atlanta. They make some great guns. Our guys will carry Atlanta Gunworks rifles if they get a chance to pick one up. Remember those Type Threes?”

Post nodded. “Good guns. ‘A state run along corporate lines’ is the best way to describe Georgia Control. Every human a Kurian owns is a share. Get enough shares and you get on the board of directors. Here’s the odd feature: They let people buy shares too. By people, I mean brass ring holders, so I use the term loosely.”

Valentine had to fight the urge to touch the spot on his sternum where his own brass ring hung from its simple chain. “I picked one up a couple years back. It comes in handy.”

Post chewed on his lower lip. “Oh, yeah. Well, you know what I mean. Anyone who’s served in the Coastal Marines is half alligator anyway.

“But back to the chatter our ears are picking up. Here’s a helluva tidbit for you: Our old friend Consul Solon’s on the Georgia Control board of directors. Would you believe it? Five years ago he’s running for his life with Southern Command howling at his heels and half the Kurian Order wanting to see him dead for fucking up the conquest of the Trans-Mississippi, and damned if he doesn’t wash up on a feather bed. The guy’s half mercury and half Ralvan Fontainbleu.”

Valentine chuckled. Fontainbleu was a nefarious importer/exporter on
Noonside Passions
, the Kurian Zone’s popular soap opera. Valentine never did get the soap part, but operatic it was. Fontainbleu ruined marriages and businesses and sent more than one good man or woman to the Reapers. Oddly enough the drama was fairly open and aboveboard about the nature of the Kurian Order, though it towed the Church line about
trimming the sick branch and plucking the bad seed
. Fontainbleu was the particular nemesis of Brother Fairmind, the boxing New Universal Church collar who wasn’t above busting a few heads to keep his flock on the straight and narrow. Valentine hadn’t seen an episode since he returned from the Cascades—odd how he could still remember characters and their plots, relationships, and alliances. The desire to check up on the story plucked at him like a bad habit.

Back to Post.

“I had a feeling we hadn’t heard the last of former consul Solon. What are the underground reports?”

“Scattered stuff. You’d think with Kentucky in turmoil the Kur would be grabbing pieces off of Ohio and Tennessee, guarding bridges and invasion routes, putting extra troops into the rail arteries north through Lexington and Louisville. But it’s just not happening. To the north, the Ordnance has called up some reserves and shifted troops to support Louisville or maybe move west to hit your group at Evansville. But as for the usual apparatus of the Kurian Order, we’re getting word of churchmen leaving, railroad support people pulling out. . . . If anything, they’ve pulled back from the clans, like they’re a red-hot stove or something.”

“Their troops in Evansville revolted. Maybe they’re afraid the infection will spread.”

“I’d like your opinion on that. What’s Kentucky like now? Every legworm rider who can shoulder a gun shooting at the Kurian Order?”

“Nothing like that. The Moondaggers came through and just tore up Kentucky and hauled off any girl they could grab between fifteen and thirty. Really stirred the locals up. The place is in flux now; hard to say which way it’ll go. They might just revert to their old semi-independence, as long as the Kurians don’t aggravate the situation.”

Post knitted his fingers. “We were hoping the Control was pulling back to more defensible positions and assuming there’s a new Freehold being born.”

“I don’t think much will happen until spring,” Valentine said. “That’s the rhythm of the legworm clans. They settle in close to their worms for the winter until the eggs hatch.”

Post nodded. “I wish I had more. You know the underground. They have to be very, very careful. What they get me is good; there’s just so little of it. Kurian agents are—”

“Dangerous,” Valentine said, rubbing his uneven jaw. The fracture hadn’t healed right. A reminder of his encounter with a Kurian agent working for the Northwest Ordnance when he’d found Post’s wife in a Reaper factory called Xanadu.

“Yeah,” Post agreed. “I wonder how many we have in this headquarters. We tend to win the stand-up fights. Yet more often than not, they figure out a way to make it seem like a loss. Walk down the street in Little Rock—”

“And one out of two people will agree that Texas and Oklahoma were defeats,” Valentine said. He’d heard about the famous
Clarion
war poll just after the Kansas operation, repeated endlessly in articles and opinion columns since. That had been the last operation he and Post had shared—a blazing offensive that tripled the size of the old Ozark Free Territory. But it just gave the
Clarion
more cities to report bad news from. “So what do you think I should do?”

“Get as many as you can back across the Mississippi,” Post said. “We can use them here.”

“And leave the legworm clans hanging? They threw in with us in Javelin.”

“They might be all right. The Kurian Order needs that legworm meat for protein powder and cans of WHAM.”

They exchanged grimaces. They’d both eaten their shares of WHAM rolls in the Coastal Marines. WHAM was a canned “meat product” produced in Alabama, filled out with bean paste, and sweetened with an uninspiring barbecue sauce to hide the tasteless, chewy nature of legworm flesh.
Three tastes in one!,
the cans proclaimed. The joke with WHAM is you got three chews before the flavor dissipated and you were left with a mouthful of something about as succulent and appealing as week-worn long johns. It went through the digestive system like a twenty-mule-team sled.
Three chomps and run,
the cook on the old
Thunderbolt
used to recommend.

It was a staple of Kurian work camps and military columns operating far from their usual supply hubs.

“There has to be some good news,” Valentine said.

“Full list and details, or just bullet points?”

Valentine poured some more milk. “I need cheering up. Give me the full list,” Valentine said.

“I won sixty bucks this week at poker,” Post said. “It’s a short list.”

Valentine tossed back the rest of the glass of milk. “I think you’re right about that ulcer.”

Post’s advice was absolutely correct. Javelin hadn’t worked. It hadn’t died; in a way it had won, dealing a deathblow to the vicious Moondaggers. But it hadn’t worked out as planned. Give it up and move on, the way you folded when you drew into a promising poker hand and came up with nothing.

Except the pieces were scattered across Kentucky along with his bit of ear, and they included a big, hairy Golden One named Ahn-Kha; Tikka, brave and lusty and vital; and the former Quislings who’d put their lives and the lives of their families into jeopardy by switching sides. Southern Command had run up a big bar tab in blood.

The next day Valentine sat through a second series of debriefings with Southern Command personnel and civilians whose professional interests included the function and capabilities of the Kurian Order. He was questioned about political conditions of the legworm tribes and the organization and equipment of the Moondaggers. He even had to give a rough estimate of the population of Kentucky and the Appalachian towns and villages he’d seen.