Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  No, they were more like a veteran married couple, finding reassurance in each other’s bodies, knowing that they’d wake up together or not at all—save that they’d skipped the sex that usually led to such complacency and gone right to physical reassurance.

  The party went on until dawn and beyond.

  The next day he accompanied Lambert across the emptied camp to headquarters. The trampled-down, dead grass where the tents had been set up turned the parkland into something resembling a chessboard.

  They passed through to the CO’s office. Bloom stood there, her files tied up in three big waterproof binders by her adjutant. She walked a little stiffly but kept the cane as more of an affectation than because she needed it for moving about the office.

  They exchanged the necessary salutes.

  “Fort Seng is yours. What’s left of it, anyway,” Bloom said. She turned a bit pensive. “Still wish I knew what they did to me when I got all scared,” Bloom said. “I never once the whole time felt my mind was not my own. I was just dark and depressed about everything. Doubtful. That ever happens to you, tell somebody right away.”

  “How were you to know?” Valentine said. Lambert walked over to the east-facing windows and looked out at the Kentucky woods.

  “Helluva way to fight: Make someone get so beat up about themselves they start thinking about taking their own life. I’d rather be shot at some more.”

  “I understand that,” Valentine said.

  “What ifs—you know. What if I could have been stronger, or figured out something was wrong with me. Does it make you not crazy if you recognize that you’re sick in the head? I remember knowing I felt different. I thought I was just cracking under the strain.”

  “You did better than anyone would have expected.”

  “It was beautiful for a minute, wasn’t it? When we showed up and found the Green Mountain Boys there. Colonel Lambert, you know you did all that. Too bad you couldn’t have seen it. Oh, that was a good day.”

  Lambert turned back to face Bloom. “They fooled me just as much as they fooled you. Wish I’d been a little more careful.”

  Valentine wondered if his repeated requests to Southern Command for assistance to be sent to Ahn-Kha’s coal-country guerrillas figured into Lambert’s calculus when she’d decided on Javelin as Southern Command’s next venture into the Kurian Zone. She knew Valentine, trusted him. Had he let her down? Maybe that’s why she’d been so formal of late.

  “I think the Green Mountain Boys were happy to see Southern Command arrive too,” Lambert added.

  “It’s still the spot Javelin landed, as far as I’m concerned. I think we’ll be back, one day.” Bloom focused on Valentine. “I’m sorry, Val.”

  “Not your doing. I know you’d have stuck.”

  Bloom took a deep breath, brightened. “At least everyone’s rested and refit. We’ll make it the rest of the way . . .”

  “Easy,” Valentine said.

  “I’d settle for hard. One twist away from impossible, even, just so long as I get them home.”

  Valentine stood flanking Lambert, watching the brigade walk out of camp under an iron gray sky. The soldiers moved in step—a rarity for the men of Southern Command, unless they were moving as part of a graduation class or parade review or under a general’s nose.

  Valentine expected the Kurians would let them return across the Mississippi. The Kurians liked to see defeated men live to tell their tales. It was the ones who’d beaten them they went after.

  Men like his father.

  It was hard watching the men he’d come to know on the long advance and the longer retreat file off down the road.

  Of course, the few volunteers stayed on: some technical staff, communications people, and trainers helping transform the Quislings into something that could stand up to the Kurian Order. Even Galloby, the agronomist, had remained, waxing enthusiastic about learning more about legworm husbandry. He had some kind of idea about putting a special bacteria in the legworm’s digestive tract and getting concentrated fertilizer from the other end. But while he put droplets into petri dishes and ran chemical tests, he advised Evansville on how they could do a better job growing their own food without the rest of Indiana to rely on.

  Pencil Boelnitz also stayed, and Valentine wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

  The supply train left, and then some of the artillery Southern Command had brought in and were now towing out, and finally the rear guard departed, pushing burdened bicycles. Red Dog dodged in and out of their wheels to the turn into woods leading to the gate, then plopped down in the sun to pant.

  “You ready for this, Dots?” Valentine asked Lambert, using her old military college nickname in an effort to lighten the mood.

  “No,” she said, looking around as if she were seeing the tree lines of Fort Seng for the first time.

  Valentine chuckled. “Too bad.”

  “You’re helpful.”

  “I’d be a lot more worried if you were more confident. What’s my first order, sir?” Valentine asked.

  Bloom’s command car came roaring back into Fort Seng. Bloom hopped out before it even came to a stop, hauling with her a Kentucky “vol”—short for volunteer: a local who served in the loosest, most disorganized militia imaginable. Their only common element was a dark blue band around their baseball-style caps. Valentine smelled blood on him.

  “The Kurians moved already. They didn’t waste time. We aren’t even out of camp yet,” Bloom said. “I’m sorry I’ve got to leave passing you bad news. Evansville just hauled this guy out of his boat.”

  “Where?” Lambert said.

  The vol spoke up. “It’s lights-out for Evansville and Owensboro. A bunch of flying whatsits have taken over the power plant, and some Reapers and Moondaggers are holding the technical guys hostage.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The banks of the lower Ohio: The Greenwater Infrastructure Support Plant—the former Elmer Smith Power Plant—on the Ohio River dominates the skyline for miles around. Or rather its smokestack does, a weathered, two-color pillar that resembles a Louisville Slugger (once produced a few score miles upriver) from a distance.

  It is a quiet plant, generators thrumming away and a faint wind tunnel sound from the smokestack. The plant is active and confused only on days when thundering mountains of coal are unloaded. Once carried by barge, they’re now brought by Kentucky’s dilapidated railroad on captured trains, and irregularly at that. The Kentuckians break out the old joke that “these colors don’t run anything but short.”

  The river is much changed since 2022. First called by the French-men who explored it “La Belle Rivière,” its banks are now coated with arteriosclerosis of trash and industrial waste. In more prosperous days the river carried a weight of cargo equal to that which passed through the Panama Canal: coal barges, oil, mounds of chemicals white or gray or sulfur-colored, grain, corn, soy, tobacco, and of course steel returning from the coal-fired furnaces of Pittsburgh.

  The Kurian Order still dredges the river, off and on, to its usual main channel depth of nine feet. It maintains the locks that control the river as it descends the five hundred or so feet from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi junction at Cairo—where the few local Grog-traders are careful to correct your pronunciation to “Care-oh.”

  Now, in the warm-water outflow of the plant, tough carp and catfish survive the acidic, polluted river. The bass keep to their willow roots, stumps, and snags in their cleaner stretches of bank.

  At this time of year, with the temperatures sinking lower and lower at night, fog runs along the river most mornings, sending querying fingers into the riverside ravines. The foggy wall represents the new state of affairs along the river. Much of the north bank outside Evansville belongs to the Kurian Order; the south bank to the Kentuckians. When once they exchanged jokes about wool-headed Hoosiers and barefoot Kentucky hillbillies, now the locals steal and shoot.

  But around the power plant, the fog seems to cling extra thick, a shro
ud that suggests the unwary would do well to keep away.

  They took the vol, who was named with a string of three personal names for first, middle, and last—John Robert Nicholas—into the main building, where members of Valentine’s battalion were lugging boxes and setting up duty stations. Lambert escorted Valentine and the vol into her bare office, where a single box sat on her desk waiting to be unpacked.

  “I want you to get them,” Nicholas said, ignoring the bare decor. “You Southern Command people know how to deal with critters like that. We can make the soldiers jump when we have to, but this is beyond anything we can do without tanks and cannon and such-like. Don’t belong on God’s green earth, them things.”

  Nicholas shuddered. He raised his eyes to Valentine. “You’ll kill ’em, right?”

  “Private, Colonel Lambert’s in command here,” Valentine said. “Tell her how you ended up here.”

  Nicholas checked the insignia on their clothing. “That bird outranks that palm tree, right. I forgot. Our big bug is a senior sergeant.”

  “She outranks everyone on the base, Private Nicholas, so you’re speaking to the right woman. Tell us what’s going on.”

  Valentine went to the coffeepot, an expensive-looking plug-in model with silver handles and gold rings at the top and bottom that had probably been found in the house. Lucky it wasn’t sitting in someone’s knapsack. Or maybe it had been, and Bloom rescued it. In any case, she’d left it full of hot, delicious-smelling coffee for her successor.

  The building had a pair of emergency generators, a portable gasoline-powered one and a fixed propane model, but Valentine couldn’t hear either running. The power plant must still be putting out the juice, then.

  “I’m to tell you that ya’ll have a safe conduct pass out of Kentucky and back to the Mississippi for the next forty-eight hours, after which the skies themselves will fall on you. Those were the Tallboy’s exact words, sir.”

  Valentine and Lambert looked at each other. The corner of her mouth turned up and Valentine shrugged.

  “Now that you’ve passed the word,” Valentine said, “tell us what happened at the plant and what exactly attacked you. We need to know as much as you can tell us about what and how many and where they are.”

  Lambert called in a young man she’d selected as her clerk to take notes. When he was seated, she let Nicholas begin:

  “Six I saw. They came in over the fence like—No, I should start at the beginning. I was part of the ten-man security team. We do three days on, then switch and get four days off, then four days on, you know—”

  “Yes,” Lambert said.

  “Just there to keep an eye on the river, you know. We had an OP up the smokestack. We could see the Owensboro bypass bridge on one side—only bypass bridge still up west of Louisville, I suppose you know, sir—and Evansville on the other. Luckily it wasn’t my shift to be up in the wind this morning. At dawn everyone got called out to look up because there were these big things, like birds or bats only bigger than any turkey vulture you could even imagine. They were circling around the top of the stack. I think they drove Berk out. He started climbing down the outside ladder and they just harried him and harried him and he fell before he got to the first perch-rest. He fell and made a mess—spun as he came down and hit headfirst. We all ran inside after that and were looking out the windows to see what they were up to when the Tallboys came over the fence.

  “Now that the plant’s mostly automated, the people who work it just do maintenance on the machines and watch the load—never as much as the plant was designed to make, at least these days. That, and they work the loaders that keep the coal flowing—several people on that full-time. But those big fellers just came in and killed two of us right off the bat, and another jumped on Sergeant White, who was just trying to get away. The others herded us like dogs into the cafeteria and closed all the shutters. We just crowded in the center of the room while they circled. You ever had one of those things nipping at your heels, ma’am?”

  “No,” Lambert said. “All the Reapers I’ve seen have been dead.”

  “Let’s hope that record remains unbroken,” Valentine said.

  “Then for no reason, one just reached in and grabbed a fuel man. At least I think he was—he was covered in coal dust. It fed on him. Got blood everywhere. I’d seen finished-up bodies a couple times, but this was the first time I’d seen one eaten in the flesh. Horrible sight. Most of us turned away. Figure I owed the poor soul that, you know? Someone said his name was Dewey,” Nicholas added, looking at the clerk who was writing down his words.

  “How did you get the message to give us?”

  “After the one ate that poor coker, he grabbed me. That’s where these bloodstains come from, his hands. The big pale bastard held me close, like he was going to dance with me.”

  The last dance, some called it.

  “So the Reaper looked me in the eye and spoke, splattering flecks of blood on my face. I washed it off in the river, of course. Told me that you had time to quit Kentucky, forty-eight hours to leave with the rest of them. Of course, they had a message for the Evansville folks too. Then he carried me out like I was a toddler and chucked me in one of the commute boats the power plant workers use, and I got to Evansville as fast as the motor would take me.”

  “What are their demands to the Evansville people?”

  “An exchange, they call it. Evacuation of Evansville. Anyone who wants to leave will be free to go into Kentucky. Then the south Illinois Kurians move in.”

  “I thought Evansville belonged to the Ordnance Kur,” Lambert said.

  “Must be some kind of deal they worked out,” Valentine said.

  “I don’t know politics,” Nicholas said. “I just wanted out of there.”

  They spent a few more minutes questioning him about numbers, and then they had him sketch out a map of the plant to the best of his ability. With that, they sent him to the small base hospital to be examined.

  Lambert called her first staff meeting in the dining room of the big house. Moytana was there for the Wolves, waiting with the remaining platoon until Southern Command could send a replacement, Gamecock represented the Bears, and Captain Ediyak the rank and file of Valentine’s battalion. Patel had charge of the base in the operations room. There seemed no getting rid of his former sergeant, for which Valentine would be everlastingly grateful. The door opened, and Brother Mark slipped in, looking tired and a little wild-haired. Valentine wondered if he’d been sleeping the previous night’s party off.

  “I was hoping to make this a friendly get-together,” she began, ignoring Brother Mark, who was neither fish nor fowl in Southern Command but knew more about the Kurian Order than even the experts in the Miskatonic. “But the Kurians had other ideas. Word’s probably gotten around the camp that they’ve moved against us already.”

  “Yes, terrible bombing,” Brother Mark said.

  “Bombing?” Valentine asked.

  “The conference in Elizabethtown,” Brother Mark said. “All the legworm clans sent representatives from the big towns to work out which way Kentucky’s going to go. Franklin, Lexington, and Paducah aren’t represented there, except by members of their underground. The town’s been hit twice already, so you might say Kur is being represented after all. We’re not sure if the planes should be part of quorum call or not.”

  “There wouldn’t be a flying rattlesnake on the planes, would there?” Valentine asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “I ran into them in Dallas and again when I was out west. They’re a remarkable organization. They can fly everything they need to a location, set up a small airport, and operate for as long as you can feed them fuel and munitions. They even can build simple bombs and so on if you give them high explosives and scrap for bomb casings.”

  “Brother Mark,” Lambert said, “we’re dealing with a separate event. The Kurians have seized the power plant that supplies Evansville.”

  “Which Kurians?” Brother Mark ask
ed.

  “Illinois, south of Chicago,” Valentine said.

  “Why should that matter?” Gamecock asked.

  “I’m surprised you don’t—,” Brother Mark began.

  “It’s a binary problem with me, suh. Kurians are either dead, and therefore not a problem, or alive, in which case I try to make them dead.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Brother Mark said. “To the Ordnance Kur, their Illinois cousins are practically enemies of the same degree as the people in Kentucky. To their minds, they’re handing the city over to some ‘neutrals.’ The Ordnance wants the traffic on the river flowing free again. The Ordnance doesn’t have much in the way of brown-water craft on the Ohio. They have boats from the Great Lakes, but they couldn’t bring such substantial vessels to the Ohio without cutting them up into sections and reassembling them. And the rivermen in Memphis and Louisiana don’t feel like raking the Ordnance’s nuts out of the fire.”

  “Who’s dumb enough to stick their nuts in a fire, I want to know,” Moytana said.

  Brother Mark harrumphed. “Chestnuts. It’s a phrase going back to—”

  Lambert rapped the table. “Let’s get back to the situation at hand.”

  “Southern Illinois’s no threat,” Moytana said. “What forces they have are busy guarding against Grog raids out of the hills between the Ohio and the Mississippi, and the rest keep an eye on St. Louis. We could do worse. If the Ordnance decides to send that armored column that redhead wildcat claims is assembling and training there into Evansville, we wouldn’t be able to stop them any more than the local leek cutters.”

  “Evansville has a hospital, workshops, manufacturers, horse farms, refineries for both ethanol and coal oil, factories even, never mind the agriculture—we need all that,” Valentine said. “I’m not inclined to give it up.”