Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  Lehman opened a notebook on his desk and jotted down a few words. “I’ll see what I can do. I know some huge rolls of blanketing or bedding has shown up recently. Guns will be tougher.”

  “What about my offer to the Quislings, sir? Can you give me something in writing to back it up?”

  “I’d be proud to. But honestly, Valentine, I don’t think any of ’em will be around to collect. They’ll either quit on you or be killed.”

  “Do you know something I don’t, General?”

  “It’s been my experience that the top-level Quisling officers are excellent. Well trained, intelligent, motivated, cooperative. Their soldiers are brave enough. They’ll stick where our guys will pull out a lot of the time. But you know as well as I that it’s the quality of the NCOs and junior officers that define an army. I’ve not seen the Quisling formation yet that has outstanding sergeants. They’re usually the best bullies and thieves in uniform.”

  Valentine swung through intelligence next. He had to place a call and be signed in by the security officer at the duty desk in the hall.

  A corporal escorted him to Post’s office. The corporal didn’t even try to make small talk.

  Valentine walked through a bullpen of people at desks and occupying cubicles, passing maps filled with pins and ribbons and whiteboards covered with cryptic scrawls on the walls, and arrived at an office beyond. Post these days rated his own adjutant, and Post’s office was just beyond his adjutant’s. There was no door between Post’s office and his adjutant’s, just a wide entryway.

  Valentine knocked on the empty doorframe. Post beamed as he entered. There was a little more salt to his salt-and-pepper hair and a good deal more starch in his uniform, but then headquarters standards had to be maintained.

  The last time Valentine had seen Will Post, his friend was lying in his hospital bed after the long party celebrating the victory in Dallas and the retirement of the old Razors.

  Post sported a lieutenant colonel’s bird these days. Even better, he looked fleshed-out and healthy. Valentine was used to seeing him thin and haggard, tired-eyed at the Chinese water torture of minutiae involved in running the old battalion, especially the ad hoc group of odds and sods that had been the Razors.

  When Valentine had first met him in the Kurian Coastal Marines, his uniform bore more permanent sweat stains than buttons. Now he looked like he’d wheeled out of an award-banquet picture.

  “Hello, Will,” Valentine said, saluting. Post, as a lieutenant colonel, now outranked a mere major—especially one who usually walked around Southern Command in a militia corporal’s uniform. Valentine felt embarrassed, trying not to look at the wheelchair. He’d seen it in pictures, of course.

  “Good to see you. What happened to your ear?”

  Valentine had left a hunk of lobe in Kentucky. If he could find the right man with a clipper, he should really even them up, even if it would make him look a bit like a Doberman.

  “A near miss that wasn’t much of a miss.”

  “Sit down, Val,” Post said. “I was just about to order sandwiches from the canteen. They have a cold-cut combo that’s really good; I think there’s a new supplier. Cranberries are plentiful now too, if you’re in the mood for a cranberry and apple salad. Our old friend Martinez has made some commissary changes already.” He reached for his phone.

  “I’ll have both. I’ve an appetite today.”

  Post, in his efficient manner, had seen Valentine’s discomfiture and acted to correct the situation.

  While the Enemy Assessments Director-East called down to the canteen, Valentine glanced around the room. Post’s office had two chairs and an odd sort of feminine settee that in another time and place would have been called a fainting couch.

  “How’s Gail?”

  “Good. She does volunteer work over at United Hospital. She’s good with me, with the wounded. She says she only does it to forget about what she went through, but she could just as easily do that by sitting in a corner slamming tequila. Which is how I met her, way back. Except she was reading.”

  Post’s desk had too many file folders, reachers to help him access shelves, coding guides and a battered laptop to have much room for pictures. He had citations and unit photos—Valentine recognized the old picture of himself and Ahn-Kha on the road to Dallas.

  Ahn-Kha. Probably his closest friend in the world other than Duvalier, and the big golden Grog wasn’t even human. He was leading a guerrilla band in the Appalachians, doing so much damage that both sides were mistaking his little partisan band for a large army.

  He’d seen that same shot on his visit to Molly and her son, ages ago. Ever since he’d brought her out of Chicago as a Wolf lieutenant, they’d been family to one another, with a family’s mix of joys and heartbreak.

  Odd that Post and Molly should both like that photo. Of course, the only other published picture of Valentine that he could remember was an old photo taken when he became a lieutenant in his Wolf days.

  What Valentine guessed to be a map or recessed bookcase stood behind heavy wood cabinet doors complete with a lock. Nearest Post’s desk was his set of “traveling wheels.”

  Valentine looked at the biggest picture on his desk: a family photo of his wife, Gail, and a pigtailed toddler. “I didn’t know you had a child.”

  Post brushed the picture’s glass with a finger, as though rearranging Gail’s short, tousled hair. “We tried. It didn’t work. The docs said they found some odd cell tissue on Gail’s, er, cervix. Something the Kurians did to her in that Reaper mill, they think. We more or less adopted.”

  “Good for you.”

  “There’s more. It’s Moira Styachowski’s daughter.”

  Valentine felt a pang. “I didn’t know she had one.”

  “She’s a pistol. Only sixteen months but we call her the Wild Thing. Jenny’s all Moira. We were godparents, you see. And when that plane went down . . .”

  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 li
ttle 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 K
urian 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?”