by E. E. Knight
"There are kids all over the place."
"Nits make lice, Val," Duvalier said.
"Is that who you really are?" Valentine asked.
"Whose side are you on, Ghost?" she called after him. "I know the answer: your ego's."
Valentine hurried up to the barn, the new leather pants creaking as he trotted. His ankle hurt, but seconds might count.
"Yes, you look fine in your leathers, Bulletproof," a woman called from the door of the barn. The party was still in full cry, and Zak and Tikka were stomping the concrete with bootheel and toe in syncopation, another quarrel forgotten. Valentine ignored his greeter and went straight for the Dispatcher.
The crowd parted, alarmed at the U-gun. Valentine carefully carried it pointed down, his hand well away from the trigger area. Zak stepped in at his rifle arm. "Dave, there's no need—"
"Watch that weapon, David," the Dispatcher said. "What's going on? Pants too tight and you're looking for the tailor?"
A few laughed.
"Dispatcher," Valentine said. "Our Grogs were down looking at the contest field. They went off to some bushes to—you know—"
"And?" the Dispatcher asked.
"They saw the Wildcats. Some of them on their worms, armed, others gathering."
"Coming this way?" the Dispatcher asked.
"The Grogs just ran back. Armed riders is all I know."
The Dispatcher upended his glass of bourbon onto the concrete. "Carpenter, get to the herd riders, have them try to lead the wild worms west. Mother Shaw, take the children out to the cover-field. Everyone else who can shoulder a gun, get to the rein-worms. Lead riders Mandvi, French, Cherniawsky and McGee, with me. David, you and your people with Zak; Zak, get them clear."
"You might see some fancy riding after all," Tikka said.
The crowd dissolved, and the musicians cased their instruments, if not sober at least sobered.
Zak brought Valentine to his legworm at the road trough. Other riders were climbing on board, bawling orders to the teenage boys watching the mounts—
—when a rocket cut across the sky, leaving a sparking trail. It exploded overhead with a BOOM that rattled Valentine's bones.
The legworm reared but Zak settled it.
Zak extended a hand, but Valentine found that with the hooks and spikes in his costume, climbing the side of the legworm was possible without assistance, as long as another shell didn't fire.
"What the hell was that?" Valentine asked, the boom still echoing in his ears.
"A big firework, sorta. Scares the worms. They're trying to make the mounts bolt."
Valentine saw one worm humping as it headed down the road, a rider raising dust as he was dragged. The others had their mounts under control, more or less, and turned them toward the barn.
Another rocket exploded, but it only served to hurry the leg-worms in the direction they were already going. Zak reached their campsite.
"Get on!" Valentine called. "We've got to ride out of here. Where's Price?"
"I don't know," Ahn-Kha said. "Still off with his mule." Valentine helped the others up.
Bee looked alarmed, and refused to mount. She let out a shriek into the night. Ahn-Kha barked something at her and reached out, but she slapped his hand away and ran off toward the road.
"I'll drop you off with the kids in the cover-field," Zak said. "You'll be safe there."
"Take us to the fight," Valentine said.
"The Dispatcher—"
"The Dispatcher's going to need every gun," Valentine said. "We've got three. Right?" He looked over his shoulder at Duvalier and Ahn-Kha.
Anh-Kha nodded. He had his cannon and Price's Kalashnikov. Duvalier patted her shotgun. "I'm happy to plant a few bobcats."
"Wildcats," Zak said.
"Then let's get online."
Valentine looked down at his U-gun. The only ammunition he had for it was Everready's 5.56mm. He wished he had a real sniper load. He looked at Duvalier's shotgun. The Mossberg would be useless in anything but a close-quarters fight. "Ali, take Price's rifle."
"Be sparing," Ahn-Kha said. "There is only one magazine."
"Where's the rest?"
"In boxes." Ahn-Kha rummaged around in the battle satchel that contained spare bullets and gear for his gun, and handed him the box.
Cookie and Gibson joined them and the legworm slid quickly down the hill to where the other riders were gathering. Cookie had his ear to a headset, coming from a handcrank-charged portable radio.
Another rocket exploded over the massive barn. Yellow-white sparks ran down the tin roof.
"They're good with the fuses over there. Probably been cutting them all day. So you're a brother rider now," Gibson added to Valentine.
"Seems like," Valentine said. Zak lined up his legworm behind another. Just behind them, in the center of the column of legworms, the Dispatcher waved a flashlight. The column turned and the leg-worms went single-file up toward the barn.
"If we go to battle line you, the girl, and the Grog can cling to the cargo netting," Zak said. "Keep your heads down."
Valentine learned what battle line was as soon as they crested the hill and turned their line north. Another sky-cracking explosion over the barn sent a legworm humping over from the other side of the hill, its riders hanging on for their lives. The line of battle-ready legworms twitched, but stayed in station front to back.
"They're coming. Flank facing offside," Cookie called, listening to his headset.
Zak and his team slid off the top of their worm, as did riders all along the battle line, digging their hooks, goads, and spikes into the thick patches of dead flesh. Women and teenage boys with rifles, hooks looped around their chests and attached to their ankles, joined the fighting line, adding their guns.
The column moved in the direction the fleeing legworm had just abandoned. Valentine readied himself for what would be on the reverse slope of the hill when they topped it.
Cookie slapped his thigh, headset to his ear. "Zak, we got 'em. They're in the field, not halfway across, in open order."
Cheers and foxhunting hallos broke out all across the Dispatcher's line of legworms as the news spread.
Zak's mount crested the hill and came down the other side, turning slightly as it followed the worm directly ahead.
Twenty or more legworms crept—or so it looked in the distance— in three columns across the contest field toward the Bulletproof camp.
Valentine took comfort in the thick length of legworm between him and the Wildcats. It was like shooting from a moveable wall. He thought of stories he'd read of fighting warships, their lines of cannons presented to each other. In naval terminology, the Bulletproofs were "crossing the T" against the oncoming Wildcats.
The Dispatcher's legworm followed theirs, and the one behind his let loose with a whooshing sound.
"The pipe organ's firing!" Gibson yelled. "Yeeeah!"
Streams of sparks cut down the hillside and exploded in the earth among the columns. The Wildcat legworms began to turn and get into line to present their own bank of rifles to the Bullet-proofs, but the mounts kept trying to get away from the explosions.
Machine guns from the front Wildcat legworms probed their line, red tracers reaching for the riders. Another Wildcat firework burst above and Valentine felt the legworm jump, but it had overshot.
The Bulletproof column accelerated. Zak employed his sharpened hook to urge the legworm along and close the gap that opened between his mount and the one ahead. Zak still had his rifle slung; his job was to keep his beast in line, not fight.
Now the two masses of legworms, the Bulletproofs tightly in line and moving quickly, the Wildcats' in an arrowhead-shaped mob, converged.
Ahn-Kha sighted and fired. "Damn," he said, loading another shell. He shot again. "Got him."
A legworm in the Wildcats turned and others writhed to follow or to avoid its new course. Ahn-Kha picked off another driver.
"That's some kind of shooting," Cookie said. A
hn-Kha ignored him, fired again, swore.
The front end of the Bulletproof column began to fire. It had run ahead of the Wildcats; the marksmen got an angle on the exposed riders clinging to the right sides of their mounts.
The Wildcat column dissolved into chaos. Each legworm turned and hurried back toward their camp as fast as the hundreds and hundreds of legs could carry their riders.
Cheers broke out all across the Bulletproof line.
"That's how you win a scrap!" Gibson said. "Tight riding. Damn if Mandvi can't point a column."
"It's because we were ready for them," Zak said, nodding to Valentine.
"Cease fire," Cookie shouted, radio headset still to his ear— though no one but Ahn-Kha was shooting. The Wildcats retreated in disorder.
Valentine hadn't used a single bullet.
* * * *
More rounds of Bulletproof were being issued as riders danced jigs. Other legworms, still with armed riders, circled the barn at a distance, though the scouts had claimed that the Wildcats were decamping and heading for higher ground to the east.
"Zak, I take it you're willing to give our friends a ride north, now," the Dispatcher said. "And if you aren't, I'll make it an order."
"Of course I'm willing. I'm willing to dig a hole to hell if that's where they want me to drive my worm."
"Your sister can go watch your string," the Dispatcher said.
"Wormcast." Tikka kicked a stone.
Duvalier hung on Valentine's arm, but it was play; she felt stiff as a mannequin. "Better luck next time."
"What's your destination over the Ohio?"
"We're trying to find an old relative," Valentine said. "She's come up in the world, and we're going to see if she'll set us up."
"Take Three-Finger Charlie, Zak," the Dispatcher said. "He's got connections with the smugglers. Tell him to trade egg hides if he has to, I want these folks set up so they can pass through the Ohio Ordnance in style."
Hoffman Price led his mule into the circle of revelers. "I was scavenging for mule shoes. He found a mess of wild carrots, and they were fat and sweet so I pulled up a bushel."
"You missed—" Zak began.
"I know. I saw it from a couple miles away. You Bulletproofs throw one hell of a party. Fireworks and everything."
Price looked at the bourbon-sloppy smiles all around. "What? Don't y'all like carrots?"
Chapter
Ten
The Ohio River Valley, September: North of the bluegrass in the upper reaches of the Ohio River lies a stream-crossed country of woods and limestone hills. Rust-belt ruins, dotted with an occasional manufacturing plant, line the river. North of the river is the Great Lakes Ordnance, a network of Kurian principalities in a federation of unequal mini-states huddled around the middle Great Lakes. South of the Ohio are coal mines and mill towns, under wary Kurians who have staked out claims bordering on the lands of the legworm ranchers.
No one much likes, or trusts, anyone else. But this is the industrial heartland of the eastern half of North America, such as it is, producing engines, garments, footwear, tires, even a bush-hopping aircraft or two, along with the more mundane implements of a nineteenth-century technology. Their deals are made in New York their "deposits" are exchanged in Memphis, and their human workers are secured by mercenary bands of Grogs hired from and directed by the great generals of Washington, DC. As long as they produce, even slowly and inefficiently, the material the rest of the Kurian Order needs, and keep the Baltimore and Ohio lifelines open, their position is secure.
It was here that David Valentine lost his forlorn hope of a trail.
* * * *
Valentine, Price, Bee, Ahn-Kha, and Duvalier stood at the Laurel-ton Station a week later in a blustery rain.
Zak and the other Bulletproofs departed after depositing them in the care of a man named McNulty, a River Rat trader and "labor agent" friendly to the tribe on the south bank of the Ohio.
They'd ridden into a shantytown right in the shadow of a grain-silo Kurian Tower—only the most desperate would resort to such real estate in broad daylight—with Price's mule happily munching hay in a flatbed cart being towed by the powerful legworm. After introductions at the River Rat's anchored barge-house and one last round of Bulletproof bourbon in farewell, Zak turned over six full legworm egg hides, cured and bound in twine. Valentine only parted with them after McNulty gave them Ohio ID cards, ration books, and an up-to-date map of the area. The map was annotated with riverbank areas that were hiring and cheap lodgings—all with the password "BMN."
McNulty probably took a cut of any business he referred.
With a week's familiarity, Valentine could see why the legworm-egg leather was so valuable. It breathed well, and though it became heavy in the rain the wet didn't permeate to the inside.
They followed the riverside train tracks to the turn-in for Lau-relton. Price told them what he could about the north side of the river. He had returned fugitives to the Ohio authorities once or twice, but had never been much beyond the river. Bee stuck close to him here under the somber sky—autumn had arrived.
The residents kept to their towns. Patrolmen on bicycles, most armed with nothing more than a sap, rode the towns and highways. The officers looked at Price's Kalashnikov as they passed—the rest of their longarms were wrapped in blankets on the mule—but made no move to question them. Valentine saw only one vehicle, a garbage truck full of coal.
The ground reminded Valentine of some of the hills near the Iron Range in Minnesota, low and jumbled and full of timber. But where the forests in the Northwoods had stood since before the Sioux hunted, the forests in Ohio had sprung up since 2022, breaking up and overrunning the little plots carved out by man.
So when they cautiously turned the bends nearing Laurelton, only to find more windowless houses and piles of weed-bearing brick, he couldn't help feeling deflated.
There was a station, if a single siding counted as a station. The track continued north, but the height of the weeds, trees, and bracken suggested that a train hadn't passed that way in years. Valentine even checked the rust on the rails to be sure. In his days as a Wolf he'd seen supply caves hidden by saplings and bushes specifically pulled up and replanted to discourage investigation.
Deep oxidation. He could scrape it off with a thumbnail.
"Fool's hope," Valentine said. "Rooster either lied or didn't have correct information from the Kurians. Maybe they divert the trains to keep the final destination secret."
Price unloaded his mule to give the animal a breather. "The debt is settled. I feel for you, David. Long way to come to find nothing. It's happened to me."
Post would know he'd tried his best. How many vanished a year in the Kurian Zone? A hundred thousand? A half million? But how do you laugh in a legless man's face and tell him the last rope he's clinging to isn't tied to anything but a wish?
The narrow road bordering the track was in pretty poor condition. It certainly wasn't frequently traveled.
Why here?
Price filled the mule's nosebag and Bee rooted inside one of the abandoned houses for firewood. Duvalier stretched herself out next to a ditch and took off her boots.
The hills around Laurelton were close. A hundred men, properly posted, could make sure that whatever transpired here couldn't be seen by anything but aircraft or satellites.
Ahn-Kha poked around the road, examining potholes. "Strange sort of road, my David," Ahn-Kha said.
Valentine joined him. Like the tracks, it ended in weeds to the north. The south part—
—had been patched.
Valentine trotted a few hundred yards south.
There was a filled gap in the road at a washout, recent enough for the asphalt to still be black-blueish, rather than gray-green. The Kurians weren't much on infrastructure maintenance even in their best-run principalities; they didn't like anything that traveled faster than a Reaper could run. . . .
Valentine examined the weeds and bracken bordering the st
ation. Sure enough, there were three gaps, definite paths leading from the tracks to the road. Quick-growing grasses had sprung up, but no brambles or saplings, though they were thick on the west side of the tracks.
"A farewell feast," Price said, revealing a sausage wrapped in wax paper and a loaf of bread. "Unless you want to come back with us."
Valentine handed him Everready's Reaper teeth. "More than earned. If I had another set I'd give them to you, with my initials written on them."
"If you see the old squatter again, let him know I appreciate being able to repay the debt. What are you going to do next?"
Valentine rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. "You said you'd brought in men to the Ordnance?"
Price consulted a scuffed leather notebook and extracted a card from a pocket. "Yup. I'm 31458 here in Ohio." He passed it to Valentine.
The card had the number, and some kind of seal featuring a man in a toga holding one hand over his heart and the other outstretched, over a pyramid with an eye at the top. "Meaning what?"
Price shrugged. "Dunno. They always recorded my number when I brought a man in, though."
"How hard is it to get one of those?"
"I didn't even know I had to have one. They gave it to me when I brought my first man in. I was going to stop at one of the cop stations and look at what kind of warrants are out. Long as I'm up this way, maybe someone's hiding out in Kentucky I can bring in. Make the trip profitable in more than a spiritual sense."
"Mind if I tag along?"
"Not at all."
"Let's walk along the road on the way back to the river."
After lunch they walked single file down the side of the road. Valentine stayed in the center of the road, crisscrossing it, checking blown debris, the patchwork repairs, anything for some kind of sign. He found a few old ruts that he suspected were made by heavy trucks, but they were so weathered that he could only guess at the type of vehicle.
"So we did all this for nothing?" Duvalier asked when they took a rest halt. "We're just going back?"
There was a welcome tenderness to her voice; she'd been cold since Valentine had turned the mutual slaughter she'd tried to start into a victory for the Bulletproof.
