by E. E. Knight
"Major Valentine," Young said. "I heard about you on my break today. The fight on that hill by the river in Little Rock. It's . . . ummm ... a privilege."
Valentine felt his eyes go a little wet. "Thank you, Corporal. Thanks for that."
A sticklike insect with waving antennae was exploring his sink. Valentine relocated it to the great outdoors by cupping it between his palms.
He gave the insect its freedom. He used to be responsible for the lives of better than a thousand men. Now he commanded an arthropod. As for the general staff training . . .
"What the hell?" he said to himself. "What the hell?"
* * * *
He met with his military counsel the next day right after breakfast—some sort of patty that seemed to be made of old toast and gristle, and a sweet corn mush. The officer, a taciturn captain from the JAG office named Luecke who looked as though she existed on cigarettes and coffee, laid out the charges and the evidence against him. Valentine wondered at the same military institution both prosecuting and defending him, and, incidentally, acting as judge. Most of the evidence was from two witnesses, a captured Quisling who'd been in the prison camp and a Southern Command nurse lieutenant named Koblenz who'd been horrified at the bloody vengeance wreaked by the outraged women.
Valentine remembered the latter, working tirelessly in the overwhelmed basement hospital atop Big Rock Mountain during the siege following the rising in Little Rock. He'd countersigned the surgeon's report recommending a promotion for her.
He'd sign it again, given the opportunity.
"They've got a good case. Good. Not insurmountable," Luecke said.
"And my options are?" Valentine asked.
"Plead guilty and—see what we can get. Plead 'no contest'—get a little less. Plead innocent and fight it out in front of a tribunal." She turned the cap on her pen with her fingers but kept her eyes locked on his as though trying to get a read.
"When you say 'not insurmountable' you mean?"
"Good. I like a fighter. For a start you're a Cat. We're hip-deep in precedent on Cats not getting prosecuted for collateral casualties. We can blame the women for getting out of hand—"
"I'm not hiding behind the women. Try again."
The pen cap stopped twirling for a moment. "If it were just the Quisling we could toss a lot of dust around. Lieutenant Koblenz will be tough; her statement is pretty damning." The cap resumed its Copernican course.
"She must have presented some case of charges for them to hunt me down so fast."
"She didn't file them. They talked to every woman who survived that camp and the battle. All the others couldn't remember a thing."
"Then who's behind this?" Valentine asked.
"Your former commander, General Martinez. I should say General Commanding, Interior, I suppose. He got promoted."
Valentine's head swam for a moment. When he could see the tired brown eyes of his counsel again he spoke. "He's got a grudge against me. I gave evidence at a trial—not sure if it can even be called that."
"Interesting. Tell me more."
Valentine tried to sum the story up as concisely as he could. He had come out of Texas with his vital column of Quickwood and was ambushed by "redhands"—Quisling soldiers who wore captured uniforms from Southern Command stockpiles. He had a pair of Grog scouts—they were smarter than dogs, horses, or dolphins and were far more capable fighters. The Grogs survived with a handful of others, and with a single wagonload of Quickwood made it to General Martinez, more by accident than design, at his refuge in the Ouachitas. Martinez had two of his Grogs shot at once, and it was only by putting a pistol to the general's head and arresting him for murder that Ahn-Kha survived.
The trial ended in a debacle and Martinez's camp was divided; many of the best soldiers decided to quit the place with Valentine. Ultimately they made it to Little Rock where the rising took place.
Captain Luecke remained poker-faced throughout the story, and only moved to set her pen down. "I don't know much about General Martinez, or what happened during the Kurian occupation," she said. "I spent it aspirating mosquitoes in a bayou. I'm going to ask for a delay in your trial date so I can prepare a defense, if you agree. Fair warning: It'll mean a lot more time for you in here."
She was a cold fish, but she was a very smart cold fish. As she packed up Valentine was already missing the smell of tobacco and coffee.
"Captain?" Valentine said.
"Yes, Major?"
"I'm not sure I want to fight this. I let prisoners get tortured and murdered right under my nose."
She sat back down. "I see. Guilty, then?"
"I . . ." The words wouldn't come. Coward. You're quick to condemn others.
"You don't have to decide this second. Can you do something for my satisfaction?" Yes.
"Give me the names of some of those women. And no, we're not going to point fingers and say 'they did it.' I just want to hear from all sides about what happened that night."
Valentine thought back to the too-familiar faces of the siege, especially those stilled in death. And not always faces: Petra Yao was only identified by the jewelry on the arm they found; Yolanda, who had to wear diapers thanks to the mutilation; Gwenn Cobb who walked around with her collar turned up and her shirt tightly buttoned afterward—rumor had it they'd written something on her chest with a knifepoint; the Weir sisters, who never talked about it except for their resulting pregnancies; Marta Ruiz, who hung her head and grew her hair out so it covered her eyes. . . .
Christ, those cocksuckers should have gotten worse.
Valentine felt the old, awful hurts and the heat of that night come back. The thing, the shadow, the demon that sometimes wore the body of "the Ghost" flooded into his bloodstream like vodka until his face went red and his knuckles white.
There were things a decent man did, whatever the regulations said, and let any man who hadn't been there be damned.
"Still want to plead guilty?" she asked.
Valentine tried lowering his lifesign. That mental ritual always helped, even when there weren't Reapers prowling. "Prepare your case."
* * * *
The men in the exercise yard kicked up little rooster tails of fine Arkansas dust—Valentine hadn't seen its like even in Texas; soft as baby powder and able to work its way through the most tightly laced boot—as they walked or threw a pie-tin Frisbee back and forth.
He got to know his three fellow "shooters" there. They took their sourdough bread and soup out as far from the prison as possible and sat next to the six-inch-high warning wire that kept them ten feet from the double roll of fence.
Colonel Alan Thrush was the highest-ranking, not distinguished-looking or brimming with the dash one expects from a cavalry leader. He had short legs and the deft, gentle hands of a fruit seller. "Caught a company of Quislings doing scorched earth—with the families inside—on a little village called McMichael." McMichael had risen against the Kurians in response to the governor's famous "smash them" broadcast shortly after Valentine's move on Little Rock. "Left them for the crows in a ditch."
Unfortunately, his men left the customary set of spurs on the forehead of the Quisling officer in charge, and the commander of a column of infantry following made the mistake of pointing out his handiwork to a pink-cheeked reporter who neglected to mention the charred corpses in McMichael.
Colonel Thrush intended to fight out his court-martial. He said so, slurping a little beet soup from his pannikin.
Valentine was the only major.
Captain Eoin Farland was a clean-faced, attractive man whose wire-rimmed glasses somehow made him even better-looking. A reserve officer who'd been put in charge of a fast-moving infantry company in Archangel, he'd been far out on the right flank on the drive to Hot Springs. His men recaptured a town, stayed just long enough to arm the locals, and when he asked the local mayor what to do with six captured Quislings who had gunned down a farmer hiding his meager supply of chickens and rice, the mayor said, "Shoot them.
"
"So I did. I'd seen it done before in the drive, especially to Quisling officers."
"But he put it in his day report. Can you believe that?" Thrush laughed. "Shoot, bury, and shut up."
"Says the man who left bodies in a ditch," Farland said.
"Not better, that's for sure," the thin man with the long, honey-colored locks said. Valentine had learned that his last name was Roderick, that he held the rank of lieutenant though he looked on the weary side of forty, and nothing about the charges against him. Every time anyone asked, he shrugged and smiled.
"Are you asking for court-martial?" Valentine asked Farland.
"No. I'm pleading guilty. They've got my paper trail. Something's holding up the show, though, and my trial date keeps getting postponed."
"As does mine," Thrush said.
"What's gonna happen is gonna happen," Roderick said. "I'm asking for lobster and real clarified butter for my last meal. How about that? Better get it."
"Shut up," Thrush said.
"You start planning yours too, Colonel."
Valentine only got one piece of mail his first week in the Nut. It came in an unaddressed envelope, posted from Little Rock, and bore a single line of typescript:
HOW DO YOU LIKE IT?
* * * *
"You've got a visitor, Major," Young said after the sun called lights out the next day. Valentine wondered if the guard ever got a day off. He'd seen him every day for a week.
Something felt wrong about moving across the prison floor in the dim light. Sounds traveled from far away in the prison: water running, a door slamming, Young's massive ring of keys sounding like sleigh bells in the empty hallway.
Valentine expected to be taken to some kind of booth with a glass panel and tiny mesh holes to speak through, but instead they brought him to a big, gloomy cafeteria on the second floor of the asterisk. Light splashed in from the security floods outside.
Young made a move to handcuff him to a table leg across from a brown-faced man in a civilian suit. Valentine was jealous of the man's clean smell, faintly evocative of sandalwood—in the Nut one got a new smock once a week and clean underwear twice.
Valentine wondered at the smooth sheen of his visitor's jacket. The civilian's gray suit probably cost more than everything Valentine owned—wherever they were storing it now.
"Don't bother, please," the man said, and Young put the handcuffs away. "It's an unofficial meeting. Won't you—"
Valentine sat down. He noticed his visitor nibbled his fingernails; their edges were irregular. Somehow it made him like the man a little better.
"Major Valentine, my name's Sime."
He said the name as though it should provoke instant recognition. Valentine couldn't remember ever having heard it.
Neither man made an offer to shake.
Sime tipped his head back and spoke, eventually. "I'm a special executive of our struggling new republic. Missouri by birth. Kansas City."
"How did you get out?" Valentine asked. Jesus, that used to be the first question he'd ask those fleeing the Kurian Zone in his days as a Wolf. Old habits died hard.
"My mom ran. I was fourteen."
"What's a 'special executive'?" Valentine asked.
"I'm attached to the cabinet."
"That superglue is tricky stuff."
"Quick but dusty, Major."
"You are going to come to the point of this?"
"Tobacco? Maybe a little bourbon?" Sime made no move to produce either, and Valentine wondered if some assistant would emerge from the shadows of the big, dark room.
"No, thanks."
"Trying to make things more pleasant for you."
"You could get me a bar of that soap you used before meeting me."
"How—oh, of course. Ex-Wolf. I'm very sorry about all this, you know."
Valentine said nothing.
Sime leaned forward, placing his forearms on the table with interlaced, quick-bitten fingers forming a wedge pointed at Valentine. "Are you a patriot, Major?"
"A patriot?"
"Do you believe in the Cause?"
Had the man never read his service file? "Of course."
"Body and soul?"
This catechism was becoming ridiculous. "Get to the point."
Sime's eyes shone in the window light. "How would you like to do more to advance the Cause than you've ever done before? Do something that would make the rest of your service—impressive though it is—look like nothing in comparison?"
"Let me guess. It involves the charges against me disappearing. All I have to do is go back into the Kurian Zone and—"
"Quite the contrary, Major. It involves you pleading guilty."
A moment of stunned silence passed. Valentine heard Young shift his feet.
Valentine almost felt the edge of the sword of Damocles hanging above. "That helps the Cause how?"
"Major Valentine. I'm personally involved in—in charge of, in a way, some very delicate negotiations. A consortium of high-level officials in the Kurian Zone—"
"Quislings?"
Sime wrinkled his nose and opened and shut his mouth, like a cat disgusted by a serving of cooked carrots.
"Quislings, if you will," Sime continued. "Quislings who run a substantial part of the gulag in Oklahoma and Kansas. They're offering to throw in with us."
"I see why you use good soap."
"Stop it, Major."
Valentine turned toward Young.
"Listen!" Sime said, lowering his voice but somehow putting more energy into his words. "We're talking about the freedom of a hundred thousand people. Maybe more. An almost unbroken corridor to the Denver Protective Zone. Wheat, corn, oil, livestock—"
"I see the strategic benefits."
Sime relaxed a little. Valentine felt nervous, his dinner of doubtful meatloaf revisiting the back of his throat. "Still don't see how my pleading guilty helps."
"These Quislings are afraid of reprisals. Maybe not to them, but to some of the forces they command. The Provisional Government organizing the new Free Republic wants to show them that we're not going to permit atrocities."
"Show? As in show trial?"
Sime turned his head a little, as though the words were a slap. He looked at Valentine out of one baleful eye.
"You have me. You also have this: plead guilty, and it comes with an offer. You'll get a harsh sentence, most likely life, but the government will reduce it and you'll serve somewhere pleasant, doing useful work. Five years from now, after we've won a significant victory somewhere, your sentence will quietly be commuted to celebrate. You could return to service or we could arrange a quiet little sinecure at a generous salary. When was your last breakfast in bed? I recommend it."
"I have the word of a 'special executive' on that? I've never heard that title before:"
"Consider it as coming from your old governor's lips. He knows what you did in Little Rock. I'm speaking for him and for the other members of the Provisional Government."
Valentine took a deep breath.
"Do this, Major, and it'll be the best kind of victory. No bloodshed."
"That's the carrot; where's the stick?"
"You haven't given me an answer yet."
"Let's say I fight it out."
"Don't."
"Let's say I do anyway," Valentine said.
Sime looked doubtful for the first time. "The Garage." The air got ten degrees warmer in the dark of the cafeteria.
"Will you accept a counteroffer?"
"I'm a negotiator. Of course."
"Do you know Captain Moira Styachowski?"
"I know the name from your reports. She served with you on Big Rock."
"Get her in here. I hear that same offer from her, and I'll take it."
"Ah, it has to come from someone you trust. I feel a little hurt, Major. Usually my title—"
"I've had a gutful of titles in the Kurian Zone. You can keep them."
"I'll see what I can do. If she's on active ser
vice I might not be able to get her."
"She's the only—no. If you can't get her, get Colonel Chalmers. I've dealt with her before."
Sime extracted a leather-bound notepad and wrote the name down. "She's with?"
"A judge with the JAG."
"Very well. Thank you for your time, Major."
"I have nothing but time."
"Don't be so sure. Take my deal." Sime looked up and waved to Young.
* * * *
The next day rain tamped down the dust on the exercise yard. The shooters and the looters stayed on opposite sides of the pie slice between the frowning brown wings D and E, trying to keep their pannikins full of lukewarm lentils out of the rain as they sat on long, baseball-dugout-style benches.
"Anyone got an offer from a civilian named Sime?" Valentine asked.
Farland and Thrush exchanged looks and shrugged. Roderick sucked soup out of his tin.
"We're getting pushed back again," Farland said. "God, it's like getting a shot when the doctor keeps picking up and putting down the big-bore needle."
Roderick stopped eating and stared. "I had rabies shots. Harpy bite."
"He said all this is more or less of a show. To convince some gulag Quislings that Southern Command won't just shoot them dead if they join us."
"News to me," Thrush said. He returned his pannikin to the slop bin and returned, twitching up his trousers with his deft little hands before he sat. It took Valentine a moment to remember when he'd last seen that gesture—Malia Carrasca's grandfather in Jamaica would go through that same motion when he sat. "You know, they might be firing smoke to get you to plead out."
"They've tried murderers before," Farland said. "My uncle served with Keek's raiders before they hung Dave Keck. But he killed women and children."
"And Lieutenant Luella Parsons," Roderick said. "When was that, fifty-nine?"
"She shot the mayor of Russelville," Farland put in. He wiped raindrops from his glasses and resettled them.
"Yeah, but she claimed he was working for them. Said she saw him talking to a Reaper."
"I heard they tried General Martinez himself for shooting a couple of Grogs," Roderick said.
"That makes sense," Thrush said. "If you ask me, it's a crime not to shoot 'em."
"Actually it was," Valentine said. "I was there. The two Grogs he shot were on our side."
