Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  “All those hospitals and factories and whatnot won’t be much good if they blow up the power plant,” Gamecock said. “You don’t just pick up megawatt generators, you know.”

  “All the more reason to get them back,” Valentine said.

  “How do we do that against dug-in Reapers?” Moytana said.

  “With enough covering fire, we can blow them out,” Gamecock said, looking at the map.

  “No, my guess is, despite wherever the hostages are, most of the Reapers will settle in near the generators or electronics—something we can’t replace easily,” Moytana said. Moytana’s gray hair had turned a little whiter in the year Valentine had known him. “According to your vol, they’re holding all the hostages in the workers’ cafeteria.”

  “Logical.” Gamecock put in. “Easy to feed them. Big enough for everyone to stay in one room, under observation. Warm and cozy.”

  “Packed in like that, a Reaper or two could kill them all in under a minute,” Valentine said, remembering a “sporting event” he’d once attending in Memphis where a single Reaper executed ten men before a basketball shot-clock expired. Without the use of its arms.

  “One problem. All those windows. We could put six Bears in that room in less than a second through those windows.”

  “Wolves can keep the gargoyles and harpies off of our backs. Bears take care of the Reapers. Power plant is back in our hands.”

  “If we can trust the map,” Moytana said. “Someone needs to make a close reconnaissance before we plan anything. For all we know this is an elaborate trap—get all the Bears inside the place and blow it to hell. I think they want us to hit it,” he continued. “They’ve probably got the whole place rigged. A ton of dead technicians, lights out in Evansville and Owensboro, and the resistance takes the fall.”

  “They’re not that clever,” Ediyak said.

  “It doesn’t hurt to act as though they are,” Valentine said. “I’ll ask Smoke about getting over there and taking a look tonight. She’ll need transport.”

  “Better get her over here,” Lambert said. “Where is she?”

  “My quarters,” Valentine said.

  Lambert picked up the phone atop the table and gave instructions.

  Most of those at the table found something interesting in the woodwork.

  “My Wolves will drive her,” Moytana said. “Light-duty truck, something inconspicuous.”

  “Any way we can get a twist on them?” Gamecock asked.

  “Put the Whirlpool plant to work making generators,” Brother Mark said.

  “Something more immediate.”

  “There might be an easier way than assault,” Valentine said.

  “Head back to the Mississippi with the rest of the brigade?” Ediyak asked.

  “No. Who’s running those Reapers? We need to find the Kurian. Take the mastermind out of the equation and the whole thing will fall apart.”

  “He could be anywhere,” Gamecock said. “We know there’s no tower around, so it’s probably hiding. When a Kurian wants to stay hidden, they’re next to impossible to find.”

  “I don’t think so,” Valentine said. “He has to be near enough to the plant so he can control his Reapers day or night. Their range is limited to a dozen or so miles by day, maybe less. Kentucky is thickly wooded and hilly. He needs a high perch for good transmission.”

  “And one well guarded. Let’s not forget what chickenshits they are, suh,” Gamecock said.

  Duvalier knocked and entered the room. She was wrapped up in one of Valentine’s field coats. The table greeted her and she plopped down in a corner.

  “Where on the river on the Ohio side is there a garrison?” Valentine asked the table.

  Duvalier spoke up. “That’s a pretty empty stretch, especially with Evansville in revolt.”

  “I say it’s in a boat,” Moytana said. “All it has to do is go over the side.”

  “In this weather?” Lambert said. “Kurians don’t like cold. I think it would kill ’em. No, it’s holed up. Brother Mark, could it be in the river somewhere? They look aquatic.”

  “That I don’t know,” Brother Mark said.

  Lambert continued. “I was in a sort of a park that re-created their home planet—not Kur, which I think is warmer. It was quite warm, with shallow water.”

  “Boat still seems likely,” Moytana said. “Mobile.”

  “No, it’s high up,” Ediyak said. “If it gets in trouble, it just launches itself into the air. They can glide for miles.”

  “How do you know?” Lambert said.

  “I heard . . . before I defected over,” she replied. “A friend in the underground told me he’d seen one glide away from a fire they’d started in his tower. He sailed off like he was in a glider.”

  Moytana was studying a map on the wall. “The bridge,” Moytana said.

  “Bridge?” Lambert said.

  “New Bridge, the people in Owensboro call it. Just east of the city. Suspension bridge with two high pylons.”

  Lambert shook her head. “Too easy for us to get to.”

  “Not necessarily. Both ends are guarded.”

  “I’ve crossed it, a couple weeks back,” Duvalier said. “North to south. I had a picture of a Moondagger and some letters, claimed I was looking for him. Smugglers bribe their way across all the time. One of the smugglers told me that it’s actually harder to go north to south than the other way. Going north, they just check to make sure you aren’t bringing weapons and ask about your business.”

  Moytana nodded. “The Kurians don’t want their Ohio populace slipping across the river any more than they want Kentuckians visiting Ohio. That Kurian can get high enough so it’s got a clear view of the power plant. The bridge and power plant can’t be more than ten miles apart, I don’t think. Clear line of sight, that is—not by road. Escape by air. Escape by boat. Escape by highway. It’s perfect.”

  “Just guesswork,” Gamecock said. “You know how many old cracking towers and water tanks and cell towers we’ve hit because somebody theorized that a Kurian just had to be there? All we came away with was a lot of rust on our gloves and birds’ nests. I still say we wait for good, strong daylight and take out the Reapers. A Kurian’s just a big bucket of ugly without his walking teeth.”

  “Not guesswork,” Moytana said. “Our scouts have seen some new uniforms on that bridge recently. We’ve been paying attention because of this armored column reputed to be up from Bloomington way and it’s the only intact bridge within sixty miles of Evansville. We keep a close watch on it through a telescope. There are some troops in big woolly overcoats that have showed up. All tall men in winter duty hats. They don’t do anything; they just keep an eye on the Ordnance regulars. They look like high-level security types. Be easy for a Reaper to look like one from a distance, especially at night. He’d just pull his hat down and turn his collar up. We thought they might be there to clamp down on desertions or make sure smugglers aren’t bringing necessities into Kentucky. But maybe not.”

  They worked out the details of Duvalier’s reconnaissance, and Moytana took her out to find a pair of Wolf drivers for her. The nights were coming earlier and earlier, and they wanted to get her to the power plant by nightfall.

  While Duvalier was off scouting the plant, Valentine spent an hour with his rifle and a weighted satchel on his back, training in an old grain elevator in Evansville. It had a similar-loading escalator that Valentine thought similar to the suspension cabling on the bridge, though the bridge’s was larger and more graceful looking. He did a good deal of climbing on the inside of the elevator in the dark, getting used to the feel of hanging and climbing and resting. Then, when his muscles couldn’t take the load anymore, he practiced balance work, using the gun as a balancing pole.

  Duvalier returned the next morning while Valentine was sleeping. She was exhausted and smeared with coal dust and rust streaks. After everyone had gathered again, she gave a somnam- bulistic report, correcting a few details on the vol’s map
and delivering the unwelcome news that a platoon of Moondaggers now occupied the power plant as well.

  “How do we get at the Kurian without it getting away?” Gamecock said. “In the time it takes my Bears to fight their way onto the bridge, it could escape.”

  “We don’t even know it’s there,” Brother Mark said. “And even if it is there, it will in all likelihood be presenting itself as a garbage can or a loose wire hanging from a floodlight.”

  “Not in this weather, I don’t think,” Valentine said. “It’ll be inside where it’s warm.”

  “I might be able to find it,” Brother Mark said. “There’s just one difficulty, however. It would have to be communicating with its Reapers. Or even better, feeding.”

  “Is that all?” Duvalier said. “You let me in to the plant again, and I’ll arrange that.”

  “How?” Valentine asked, unaccountably nervous at the idea.

  “I’ll know that when I get there.”

  “When will we attack the bridge? Strong daylight?” Lambert asked.

  “No,” Valentine said. “We’ll need dark, with no moon. The bridge is too well-guarded for anything else.”

  “I don’t like breaking up my Bears,” Gamecock said. “They’re too used to working together as a team.”

  “You won’t have to,” Valentine said. “That bridge is a job for a whole regiment—which we don’t have—or one man. If he’s there, I’ll get him.”

  Duvalier stiffened. “Val, the last time you went off on your own wildcatting, it took me and a town full of Grogs to go get you back. Let me go.”

  “No, you’re going to be busy at the power plant, getting it back in once piece.”

  They worked out a plan involving Duvalier, the Wolves, and the Bears creating a diversion at the power plant, while Valentine and Brother Mark made a try for the Kurian on the bridge.

  The big basement in the Legion House—as the men were beginning to call it—was something of a treasure trove. Besides a spare generator and the new communications room (inhabiting what had been before then a wine cellar; the precise climate control equipment was kind to the electronics—and the operator), it had an old bar that was now filled with boxes and odds and ends of the previous occupants, arranged like sedimentary layers in an archaeological dig. There were a few holdovers from when it was a nature center: glass cases and displays. Valentine planned to empty them and return them to the “lobby” behind the main doors, where they could post Javelin memorabilia. Above that were the stored clothes from the owner and his family, elegant suits and dresses too delicate for his men to make much use of. Then above that were piles of Moondagger clothing, uniforms and slipperlike footwear and odd Kurian icons, the most artful of which was a wooden frieze of the curve of the Earth’s surface in near-silhouette, as though drawn from a picture taken from orbit, with a great nail like a railroad spike driven through it. The spike had curious etchwork in it. Valentine would have to have Brother Mark take a look at it when things calmed down and see if he could make anything of it.

  Valentine found an interesting, richly woven Moondagger outfit that looked part prayer robe and part dress clothes and part military outfit. It must have belonged to some high-ranking Moondagger, judging from the beautiful knitwork around the collar and seams and cuffs. It had an attractive cummerbund or waist-wrap—he wasn’t sure of the word—of a flexible material like a bandage that had numerous zip pockets. Inside, Valentine even found a little Ordnance currency.

  Valentine had sought find some decent attire from the ex-owner’s wardrobe, an outfit suitably impressive and redolent of status, but the Moondagger robe-uniform might serve even better.

  Luckily it didn’t smell—some of the Moondagger stuff was now rank and musty beyond belief.

  With his clothes selected, Valentine and Brother Mark worked out a rough timetable. It was a cloudy night, as had become usual as November wore on.

  He and Brother Mark put together a small truck and a canoe, tying it in the bed and on the roof and looking for all the world like they were departing for a fishing trip.

  Then it was a bumpy drive with Valentine, Brother Mark, and a Wolf corporal at the wheel. He knew the roads, trails, and railroad cuts for miles around and promised to get them to the other side of Owensboro—a town that was still more or less neutral. Wolf scouts had gone into town, overcoats thrown over their uniforms but weapons carried openly, and eaten at a diner with Ordnance soldiers at another table. They both paid their bills with Ordnance currency. Kentucky might be semi-free, but it was still integrated with the Kurian Order economically.

  Discussion about the quality of the apple pie available in Owensboro or the amazing coffee at the Hitch had to be curtailed when they parked above the river. Valentine and the Wolf scouted and decided they were near enough to the bridge to make it a quick trip but far enough to avoid observation from the guards. Valentine and their driver set about untying the canoe while Brother Mark set out food and thermoses. They were all in for a long, cold night.

  “Cold night,” Brother Mark said. His breath steamed on the riverbank in the shadow of the bridge on the northeast side. They had left the Wolf back with the truck. “So much for our In—long-lingering summer.”

  “Indian summer, you mean,” Valentine said. “Indian summer’s a good thing, especially up among the lakes in Minnesota.”

  The Quisling guards didn’t have any dogs on this side; Valentine was thankful for that. He’d heard barking up on the bridge at the guard change and briefly worried about patrols.

  The bridge itself was elegant, a delicate-looking road bridge. Two tall pylons, one at the north end, one at the south, supported the bridge with a series of cables. They looked rather like a pair of matching spiderwebs, Valentine thought. The cables weren’t tied to bigger main cables such as in more famous suspension bridges such as the Golden Gate. Instead they all linked to one of the two supporting pylons.

  “You near enough?” Valentine asked.

  “There’s a Kurian on that bridge. That’s all I may determine.”

  “What does it feel like?” Valentine asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The mental impression they give. Is it a voice, or thoughts?”

  “It’s like a chill. An open window on a still winter day in an otherwise warm room. Like the heat is leaving my body and flowing toward—it.”

  Valentine thought it odd that Brother Mark might be describing the cold tingle that sometimes came over him when he passed close to a Reaper.

  “I just need to know where to go.”

  “Somewhere high, is my guess. They can sense longer distances that way without the clutter of animal and vegetable life.”

  Valentine looked at the riverbank. The Ohio was lined with refuse, mostly bits of plastic: bags, cracked bottles with blocky lettering advertising energy and stamina, cartons that looked like they were meant to hold eggs, chunks of foam clinging together like the chunks of ice Eliza hopped across to escape slavery.

  There’d been a saying among the workers at Xanadu in Ohio—he’d learned it while digging ditches: Flush it in Ohio, and it washes up in Indiana. Valentine had taken it to mean that the less competent of the Northwest Ordnance were given duties in Indiana, but it appeared the phrase had a literal truth to it as well.

  Owensboro, across the river, slumbered. There were burned-out ruins on the north side near the older of the town’s two bridges. The closer of the two had long since collapsed—or been destroyed to simplify the border between Kentucky and the Indiana portions of the Ordnance. The “new” bridge was a little over a mile to the west, linking a bypass road that ran around the edge of what had been the suburban part of the old river town.

  The Wolf had told him that Owensboro was a lively little town, popular with shady traders who brought Kurian Order products into Kentucky and returned with legworm hides, crafts, tobacco, bourbon, and marijuana. The big conference center practically in the shadow of the old bridge was still intact, the
site of a bustling flea market on “Market Saturdays” every other week.

  Valentine searched the bridge. He found what he was looking for even without Brother Mark—a little cocoonlike structure high on the north pylon of the bridge.

  “There,” Valentine said, pointing.

  Brother Mark squinted. “I am afraid my vision is not what it once was.”

  Valentine handed him some binoculars. There must have been enough light for him to see, for he followed the delicate cabling of the bridge up to the north pylon.

  “Temporary,” Brother Mark said. “That, my daring Valentine, is the Kurian equivalent of a hammock-tent. Or the Kurian is very small and very young, a new bud off an old sire. Where else would he get multiple Reapers?”

  Brother Mark muttered something else about budding in secret or an authorized increase.

  “Is he there?” Valentine asked.

  “I’m—I think so. There’s some activity. As I said, it may be young. But it’s able to control multiple Reapers at once. It must be a prodigy.”

  “All the more reason to kill it when it’s young.”

  Brother Mark lowered the binoculars. “Savage.”

  “It’s the truth, savage or no.”

  Brother Mark reached into his pocket and extracted a bandless watch. “Better get on with it, then.”

  Valentine changed into the black Moondagger robes and thick wool socks. He didn’t have a beard, but if he tousled his hair right, it gave him a mad, Rasputin-like air that went with the Moondagger apparel. He didn’t have the little curved knife many of them carried either; they were prized trophies for Southern Command’s soldiers.

  The robes had plenty of room in the sleeves to hide his Cat claws on their breakaway twine.

  “Go back to the boat,” Valentine told Brother Mark. “If you see a lot of shooting without the flare going off, just head back for the other side. If they loose the dogs in the woods, head back to the other side. If I’m still alive, I’ll figure some way back, hopefully through Evansville. I’d rather not swim in this water if I don’t have to. We’ll have a frost by morning, judging from this wind, and I don’t want to die of hypothermia thanks to wet clothes.”