Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  As Valentine walked toward his new formation’s billet, he saw his hatchet men inspecting the vehicles in the motor pool. Of the long column of vehicles that had started out with Javelin, only one battered old army truck had survived the entire journey out of the large vehicles. The rest had been cannibalized to keep others going or lost to wear, Moondagger rockets, artillery, and mines, or accident. A few civilian pickups, Hummers, and motorcycles remained, looking like candidates for a demolition derby thanks to the knocks and cracks.

  “Master Sergeant Brage,” Valentine said, pronouncing his name as Braggy.

  “It’s BRAY-zhe, Major,” Brage said, as irritated as Valentine hoped he’d be.

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” Valentine said. “Why the interest in the motor pool?”

  “Orders, sir,” Brage said, tapping his chest pocket. “We’re to determine what’s worth taking and what’ll be left behind. My staff and I have final word. Our decisions are final and unalterable.”

  “I’ve seen my share of alterations to unalterable. May I see the orders, please?”

  He handed them over with the air of a poker player laying down a straight flush.

  Valentine read the first paragraph and then went to the next pages and checked the signatures, seals, and dates. He recognized the hand at the bottom.

  “My old friend General Martinez. You’re on his staff?”

  “I have that honor, sir.” With a wave, the rest of his hatchet men returned to work.

  “Martinez has been honoring me for years now. I hardly feel it anymore,” Valentine said.

  “I’m sure you mean General Martinez, sir. Of course, whether I make the GHQ staff depends on my success with this assignment. I intend to leave no stone unturned.”

  “I wouldn’t advise you to turn over too many stones in Martinez’s staff garden. Not a pretty sight.”

  “I have to get back to work, Major. I’d advise you not to hinder me.”

  “Or what, Sergeant Bragg?”

  “BRAY-zhe, sir. Anyone caught red-handed in the act of taking or keeping Southern Command property from its proper allocation, right down to sidearms, may be dealt with summarily,” Brage said, sounding as though he were reciting. “That only applies in combat areas, of course.”

  “Of course. And if you want to see a combat area, Sergeant Bragg, I suggest you try to take a weapon from one of my men.”

  Javelin stood on parade, a great U of men. It reminded Valentine of his farewell to the Razorbacks in Texarkana, when they retired the tattered old flag that had waved over Big Rock Hill and been bomb-blasted at Love Field in Dallas.

  Valentine read out the list of commendations and promotions. The men stepped forward to receive their medals and new patches and collar tabs from Bloom.

  A delegation of civilians and officers of the new city militia from Evansville sat in chairs, watching. Valentine hoped they were impressed. All they’d seen of Southern Command’s forces up to now had been files of tired, dirty, unshaven men lining up to receive donations of food, toiletries, and bedding from Evansville’s factories, workshops, and small farmers.

  Valentine had juggled with the schedule a little to get as many excused from duties as possible, but it was worth it.

  He stepped forward to the microphone when she was done. “Colonel, with your permission I’d like to add one more name. If you’ll indulge me, sir.”

  Bloom beamed. Her teeth might not have been as bright as Ladyfair’s, but her smile was better. “With the greatest of pleasure.”

  Valentine spoke into the microphone, which put his voice out over the field amplifier, a device that turned your words into power-assisted speech that sounded a little like aluminum being worked. “Javelin Brigade, I have one more promotion. At this time I would like to recognize one of my oldest friends in the Cause.

  “Top Sergeant Patel, would you step forward, please?”

  Patel hesitated for a moment and then handed his cane to his corporal and marched out into the center of the U of formed ranks. Valentine couldn’t tell if he was wincing or not. He marched without any sign of weakness in his old, worn-down knees.

  “This man has been looking out for me since I was a shavetail lieutenant with his shoes tied like a civilian’s. He helped me select and train my company, the shit detail.”

  The term was a badge of honor now, ever since their action at the railroad cut in Kentucky.

  “Top Sergeant Patel performed above and beyond, crossing Kentucky and back on a pair of legs that are hardly fit for a trip to the latrine.

  “I recommended, and Southern Command granted, a commission for Nilay Patel, elevating him to the rank of captain, with its attendant honors and benefits. He’s been breveted over lieutenant so that our Captain Patel will never have to salute a sniveling little lieutenant with his laces half-undone ever again.”

  “You could have given me fair warning, sir,” Patel said quietly. “Would have paid for a shave and haircut across the highway.”

  “Surprise,” Valentine said out of the corner of his mouth. The amplified speaker popped out the p but nothing else. He spoke up again. “So be sure to save a seat for him on the barge home. He’ll ride home in a comfortable deck chair, as befits a captain.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Patel said. “I’m not leaving before you and the company.”

  “We’ll argue about it later, Captain.” Valentine reached into his pocket. “These are some old insignia of mine. No branch on the reverse. They don’t do that for Cats, or they put in a false one.” He handed them to Patel, feeling paternal, even though his old sergeant major had almost twenty years on him. “Wear them in good health.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Patel said, leaning over to speak into the microphone. Then, for Valentine’s ears only, he continued: “It’s good to feel useful again. Even if it comes with a little pain.”

  The fall weather turned colder and rainier. Through it all Southern Command’s forces improved Fort Seng, rigging lighting and plumbing and communications throughout the fort. A double perimeter was laid out, though they didn’t have the mines, lights, or listening posts to cover the entire length.

  Valentine saw Boelnitz mostly around headquarters. He had a knack for finding something interesting going on and observing in the company of whoever was doing it, asking questions but keeping out of the way. The men felt flattered to be interviewed, as did some of the women—Valentine saw one long-service veteran giggling like a coquettish schoolgirl as they chatted. A couple of others looked at him with naked hunger, the way she-wolves might eye a dead buck strung up for dressing.

  In the meantime, Valentine reintroduced himself to Bee, one of the three Grogs in camp. He’d rescued her and two others from the circus of D.C. Marvels before Javelin entered Kentucky, and he’d also known her years ago when she’d traveled as a bodyguard to a bounty hunter and trader named Hoffman Price. Big as a bull, she had arms long enough to go around him twice when she sniffed and touched and remembered who he was.

  She’d apparently forgotten his existence but was equally delighted to reacquaint herself with him, and she soon fell into her old habit of trailing along somewhere in his wake with a shotgun and an assault rifle, both cut down to pistol grips, in holsters on her wide thighs, with plates of bulletproof vest serving as loincloth, vest, and mantle.

  Each morning, Valentine visited the headquarters bungalow for his Quisling battalion. He had to split his time between his Quisling recruits and the main headquarters building, where Lambert needed him as she oriented herself to western Kentucky and Evansville.

  His ex-Quislings were losing their baby fat, or their paunches, under Patel’s double-time training. During the day, the mixture of tenting and barrack that housed his ex-Quislings—the men were building their own accommodations as part of the shake-down training—lay empty in the field behind the bungalow.

  He’d chosen the bungalow not for its size or plumbing or available furniture—he liked it because it had a huge social room, a sort of li
ving room-dining room-kitchen combined. He lined the walls of the big room with couches and stuffed comfortable chairs. Judging from the remaining books, the house had belonged to a gardener or a gamekeeper who’d worked for the estate’s owner.

  Valentine liked to hold meetings comfortably, with everyone seated and relaxed, usually in the evening.

  This particular morning he found it in the hands of Ediyak—once a lieutenant but now a captain thanks to Rand’s death. When he’d returned to Fort Seng she’d been across the river attempting to wrangle more supplies out of the Evansville leadership. She was a delicate-looking young woman, doe-eyed and usually buzzing with energy, who’d defected from the Kurian Order. The defection had been harder for her than most; she’d been involved in communications and intelligence, so she’d lived on an access-restricted section of her former base. She’d played a Mata Hari trick and arranged to date a general, slipping away from a resort hotel as her aged paramour slept. I defected thanks to two bottles of wine and beef Wellington, she was fond of saying.

  Valentine liked his former company clerk, who’d first come to his notice when she came up with the gray denim utility-worker uniforms that allowed his company to roam Tennessee and Kentucky without attracting notice. Some of his command he respected, some he dealt with as best as he could, but he liked her as a person and found her company rewarding beyond the necessities. She was a little weak on assertiveness—she’d risen from private to corporal to sergeant to lieutenant and now captain thanks to assorted emergencies in the trek across Kentucky, and handled the detail work of each station with ease, but she seemed in a permanent state of finding her feet thanks to the constant promotions. She needed decent NCOs under her or the men would get away with murder, but she was bright and—well, “creative” was the word, he supposed. She sensed what he wanted with very few words of explanation from him.

  “How’s the organization going?” he asked her.

  There was something theatrical about Ediyak. Maybe it was the big eyes in the thin face or her size. She made up for her small physical presence by moving constantly and gesturing. “After cutting out the unfit and the idiots, we’re down to a hair over three hundred fifty,” Ediyak said, swiveling on her chair and taking the roster off the wall for Valentine to examine. “The brigade’s artillery stole some of the best and brightest, by the way. The culls are in a labor pool.”

  She rose and pointed to the large-scale local map. “Right now they’re working on getting a better ferry in place between Henderson and Evansville. As you directed, I broke up our old company and made them NCOs over the new formations, five men to a platoon. So if you add them in, you have the makings of a decent battalion.”

  “Now tell me what’s happened in the interwhiles,” Valentine said.

  “For a start, we’re broke,” she said, making a gesture that gave Valentine a pang for his mother: the cassé of French culture, a little motion like breaking a stick. “Evansville is a rat pile, and everyone’s hoarding: food, fuel, everything from sewing thread to razor blades. Bloom asked, in her darling vigorous way, for the men to sacrifice ‘valuables’ or they’d have to do a thorough search of the camp to gather non-Basic Order Inventory that might be traded or sold. Of course the implied threat was that if they didn’t contribute some gold and whatnot that they’d picked up on the marches, she’d search thoroughly for all of it.

  “We had a few of our recruits go over to Evansville in search of a good time. Vole and a couple of his cronies. They never came back. I don’t know if they deserted or the Evansville people quietly strung them up in some basement. I think the latter’s more likely.”

  “Any good news?”

  She slipped back to the desk. “Not much. Supplies are running short—food and dispensables anyway. The leg shavers among the women are sharing one razor between us.”

  “Opposition?”

  “The Moondaggers are long gone. Kentucky doesn’t have a Reaper east of Lexington, from what the Wolves tell us. Memphis sent up a couple of armored trains from the city, evacuated what’s left of the Moondaggers and prominent Quislings in eastern Kentucky. The rest are holed up in the bluegrass region with what’s left of the Coonskins. But anything that rides legworms is settling in for winter quarters, with the nights getting colder and their worms egging and piling up.

  “Can I ask, sir, what’s going to happen with us?”

  “You’re going home.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Just between you and me, Southern Command has written off Kentucky. They’re sending some NCOs and transport to decide what’s worth salvaging and what isn’t.”

  “Lovely. There go our guns, sir.”

  “We’ll see about that. By the way, Ediyak, where’d you pick up the tschk gesture?” Valentine asked, making the cassé breaking motion with his hands.

  Ediyak’s eyes widened. “The . . . oh, that.”

  “You grew up in Alabama, right?”

  “Yes, sir. I grew up poor as dirt in a little patch of kudzu called Hopper where a girl was expected to be married at fifteen and nursing her way through sweet sixteen,” she said, her accent suddenly redolent of boll weevils and barbecue.

  “So you picked that up after you got out?”

  “Yes, sir. Why so interested?”

  “How did you get out?”

  “Church testing. They had this extraordinary idea of putting me on the public broadcasts,” she explained, her hand fluttering about her breast like a dove looking for a perch. “A sagging old Archon with my picture said I had the perfected look. If by ‘perfected’ they meant half-starved and iron-deficient, I’m guessing they were right. I went to school for two years learning about lapel microphones and makeup and phonetic pronunciation, a dusty duckling among graceful swans, learning to dress and talk and give the appearance of being cultured even if I was to the outhouse born. Then they decided I didn’t look right next to the other news broadcasters because I was too small. I tried out for Noonside Passions, rehearsed with a few of the principals, but didn’t get a continuing role. I did six episodes before they had me die in childbirth, giving my poor daughter to sweet little Billy, who’d only just learned to shave himself. They told me she’d grow up in no time and fall in love with him. They do get a little ripe on that show, don’t they? But I’m getting away from the story of my brush with fame. I left the show and let myself be recruited into military communications.”

  “Is that where you saw the gesture? On the show?”

  “I believe it was from a friend, a very good friend I made on Noonside Passions: one of the writers, a Frenchman. He’d gone to an école something-or-other and was in New York picking up some tips for the French version of the show.”

  Relief washed down Valentine’s spine like cool water. Ediyak didn’t seem like the Kurian-agent type, but then Kurian agents that penetrated Southern Command spent years working at not being the Kurian agent type.

  She had seemed discomfited about the mention of the show, though. Or the gesture.

  At their first evening meeting after Patel’s promotion that had leaped him all the way over lieutenant in a single, overdue bound, they held an informal party. Congratulations flowed along with some bottles of bourbon of mysterious provenance.

  Alessa Duvalier appeared in the middle of the chatter and pours.

  She didn’t look agitated, just tired and with that pained look she wore when her stomach was bothering her. Valentine took her long coat anyway, noting the mud smears and the river smell on her. The waters of the Ohio didn’t need a Wolf-nose to detect.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Bloomington,” she said.

  “All that way. By yourself?”

  “I hitched a ride with a good old boy who trains fighting dogs. He was on the way to a match in Indianapolis. His truck got me there and back.”

  “You went to a dogfight?” Valentine asked.

  “No, I skipped it. So did the dogs. But they weren’t in fighting
shape anyway. They’d just eaten about two hundred sixty pounds of asshole after I took the wheel.”

  “Why Bloomington?”

  “We received an underground report that the Northwest Ordnance moved into a new headquarters, and I went to check it out.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Maybe nothing; maybe not. Headquarters was for the Grand Guard Corps’ Spearhead Brigade from Striker Division. From what my old Ohio boyfriend told me, that’s the best of their best, unless you count their marine raiders on the Great Lakes. Armored stuff that usually is deployed at the Turnpike Gap in Pennsylvania against the East Coast Kurians. They may just be training, from what I could pick up in the bars. It may just be exercises to impress the Illinois Kurians and the Grogs.”

  “Where did you get the idea to go up there?”

  “Brother Mark,” she said, referring to the ex-New Universal churchman who was the UFR’s main diplomat, more or less, east of the Mississippi. “The underground got word to him, Kur knows how.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Oh, back at Elizabethtown. The wintering clans are all sending delegates to this big conference to decide what to do next. There’s talk that they might declare against the Kurians; others say they’re listening to a peace delegation.”

  Valentine retrieved his mailbag and passed out a few precious gifts he’d picked up in the UFR for his officers and senior NCOs. He couldn’t bring much, considering all the personal mail he’d had to carry for Javelin’s survivors, but he had a new lipstick for Ediyak, aspirin for Patel, a clever chessboard with folding cardboard pieces for one of his corporals who was a chess enthusiast, and matching Grog scar-pins for Glass and his two gunners, Ford and Chevy. And, of course, the tin of talcum powder for Duvalier and her boot-sore feet.

  “Where’d you pick up the diaper bag?” Duvalier asked.

  “This?” Valentine asked, looking down at the bag as though he’d never seen it before. “They said it was a mail pouch.”

  “It is, but even Southern Command doesn’t take nine months to deliver,” Patel said.