Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  Had LeHavre ever said anything like that about his own eager young lieutenant out of the wilds of northern Minnesota? Of course, LeHavre had brought Valentine along differently, keeping him back rather than sending him forward until he found his feet among the men and in the responsibilities of his platoon.

  Bee slept outside, snoring softly, her head pillowed on her shotgun. She’d arranged her mane—Valentine could never decide whether Grog hair should be called “mane” or “fur”—into a star to show off the wound she’d received when the Coonskins turned on the Kentucky Alliance.

  She was proud of her wound, issued at his side like a stamp of bravery. Valentine wondered just when whatever debt Bee decided she owed him for freeing her would be paid off. She was mysterious about her loyalty, and Valentine’s rough-and-ready Grog gutturals weren’t up to discussions of intangibles.

  But Frat could hold up his end of any conversation. The boy, who’d once possessed a wary, quiet intelligence, had turned into a well-spoken man.

  Valentine waved Frat in, heard his report, and then had him sit on one of the tiny camp stools. His long legs made him look a little like a frog ready to give a good loud croak.

  “What’s with the big bag, son?”

  “Saw yours and sort of admired it, sir. All these maps are a hassle.”

  “I used to carry them rolled up in a tube.”

  They chatted for a while. Valentine asked about his officers’ training, and they shared memories of Pine Bluff. Frat accidentally mentioned a brothel that was either new or had escaped Valentine’s notice in his days as a shy, studious lieutenant.

  They laughed at their mutual awkwardness. Frat, for admitting that he took a trip upstairs as a rite of passage (always on the house for a Hunter on his first visit, it seemed), and Valentine for living so sheltered a student life that he was unaware of its existence.

  Sometimes, their conversations turned serious.

  “You ever heard the theory that the Kurians keep the Freeholds in business? That they have allies at the top of our military and government?” Valentine said.

  “Well, sir,” Frat said. “I think this might be a conversation that wouldn’t stand an Honor Code examination.”

  “The ‘sir’ stuff only counts when we’re standing up. I want your opinion. Disparaging and doubting our superiors is a fine old American tradition.”

  Frat thought for a moment. “It’s something men like to shout after a defeat. They cry, ‘Betrayed,’ and run. Makes them feel better about running way, or keeping out of it to begin with. If the game’s fixed, there’s no sense putting any skin into it.”

  “You’ve put some thought into this already,” Valentine said.

  “There was the exact same argument when we got back from Kansas all bloodied, kind of. What’s that saying? Never attribute to malevolence what can be explained by stupidity. Something like that.”

  “I heard it as malice. Interesting that we agree on that. Of course Kur has a few agents in the Free Republics; they’d be fools not to, and we’re not fighting fools. Where’d you get that cry, ‘Betrayed!’?”

  “Those Shelby Foote books you gave me about the Civil War when I signed up.”

  “Ah, I’d forgotten about that.” Valentine had thought the volumes would teach Frat some useful lessons about leadership in adversity.

  “If you ask me, Kansas wasn’t malice or stupidity. They just got lucky. The whole Moondagger army was training for a run at those Grogs in Omaha. But you know that.”

  Valentine had a lot of former friends there. Last he heard, after a big battle the Grogs had retreated up the Missouri River Valley and were now finding friends among the Nebraska ranchers he’d met when looking for the Twisted Cross with Duvalier.

  “Actually I don’t. I was out of the country at the time.”

  “Kansas was bad. One of the places I was reported killed, as I recall. My platoon was ambushed and I made it away with only two men. I think the others were captured. We tried to follow and see if we could help them escape, but—they were the Moondaggers, you see. Someone told me that Moondagger priests can channel aura to a Kurian just like a Reaper, and in return they get special powers, just like Wolves do, kind of. That’s one of the reasons I volunteered to come out here, to get another crack at them.”

  “What’s left of the ones that operated in eastern Kentucky are back in the Bluegrass region, licking their wounds, last I heard, under the protection of a clan called the Coonskins, who betrayed the Kentucky Alliance. The ones who chased us across western Kentucky have been scattered. Not many survived the massacre on the road to Bowling Green. I would have liked a few officers as prisoners, personally, but the legworm clans had women and children to avenge.”

  “We’re heading near there, right?”

  “Yes. Corporal O’Coombe was dropped off in the Rolling Fork Valley southwest of Louisville. But we don’t want to tangle with them or the Coonskins. Not with two motorcycles and four transport vehicles.”

  “Isn’t the size of the dog in the fight—,” Frat began.

  “Why aren’t you a captain, Frat?” Valentine asked.

  “Most of the fights I’ve been in since Archangel have been losing ones. In Kansas I lost a platoon. Rio Grande was a disaster, or turned into one a long time after I left. Maybe third time’s the charm. Seems to me if I’m in charge of a permanent group of Wolves operating in Kentucky, I oughta be a captain at that.”

  “You’re at the damp and sticky part of the bottom of the barrel in Kentucky, you know, Frat. Southern Command has written us off.”

  Frat listened to the wind for a moment and poked the center of the fire. “They wrote your boys off on top of Big Rock Hill too. They asked me to contribute to a memorial service for you and those Razorbacks when we lost communication when that big gun started blasting you. We got a big speech about how you bought us time and we had to make it count.”

  Valentine remembered the earth quaking with each fall of Crocodile’s monster shells. The poor, maddened dog who had to be shot; the numbed, desperate man who wandered out into the churned earth to seek disintegration in one of the blasts.

  “Let’s forget that for now,” Valentine said, taking his map out of his diaper bag. “Here’s where I’d like you to scout tomorrow. . . .”

  With that, they lost themselves in operational details until it was time for Valentine to check the sentries before turning in.

  A clear, cold night on the banks of the Rolling Fork with the temperature dropping enough for men to sleep curled up with a fire-warmed rock . . .

  The Valentingle came hard, so hard that Valentine thought he was ill until he recognized the familiar prickling on his scalp, the feeling that every molecule in his body was lining up to be counted. Valentine was almost nauseous with the alarm.

  What the hell is approaching camp? What from hell, make it . . .

  Valentine fumbled at his pocket, found the chain, and put whistle to mouth. “Alarm! Take your posts,” Valentine yelled.

  Something wicked this way comes.

  Valentine heard the engine on the Bushwhacker come to life. Clicks and clatters of magazines being sent home sounded all around like crickets.

  Valentine found his Type Three and put in a red-striped Quickwood magazine.

  “Frat has a visitor. He’s coming in with a parley,” one of the Wolves said, shining a flashlight on himself as he approached through the brush. “It’s a freak-Reaper—with a flag of truce.”

  Valentine recognized what he saw prodded along by Frat, a forage bag over its head. It was taller, more spindly than most Reapers, and its tightly wound apparel had tufts of fur at the edges. Great wings were folded at its side so they stuck out behind like a pair of curved swords, and it paced with torso bobbing and head bobbing, knees reversed like a bird.

  He’d seen something like this before, perched on a limb, watching him load his column back onto boats after their gun raid into Kentucky.

  A big scallop-shaped pouch hun
g from its waist, loose and empty, but apart from that it bore no weapons or other obvious gear.

  “Ranks only, please,” Valentine said to the gaping men. He glanced up at the clear sky, looking for other fliers, and then addressed the newcomer. “I will keep you blindfolded. No reason for you to look around.”

  “It is in your nature to quiver in fear.” The creature had a high, faintly squawking voice, as though a goose were talking, rather than an ordinary Reaper’s breathy whisper. Though softly spoken, the high-pitched words carried through the night like the notes of a flute.

  “He knows how to get things off on the right foot,” Chieftain said, his twin, gracefully curved forged-steel tomahawks at the ready.

  “Those wings give me the loosies,” Ma said. “I hate a bird you can’t eat.”

  Bee brought up her big Grog gun and used a tree branch to rest it on with the sights lined up on the Reaper.

  Valentine guessed that her gun wouldn’t kill it, but it’d tear off an almighty big piece on the way through. The Reaper looked fragile. He wondered if the Kurians had built it to be proof against Quickwood, and was tempted to test it. Give Boelnitz something colorful at last: gunning down an emissary under its flag of truce.

  Valentine looked at Mrs. O’Coombe, who had drawn herself up to her full height, hand resting on a pistol belt she’d strapped on. She nodded to Valentine.

  “What do you have to say?” he asked.

  “We are—how would you understand it?—an important branch of a larger tree concerning itself with affairs in North America. We of like mind are fond of you humans—such a mix of greatness and folly, with your charming notions of assistance to those outside your name. They call us the Jack in the Box. We’ve done our best to research the source and are somewhat confused, for we have nothing to do with hamburgers and French fries or a winding musical toy.”

  Its speech had an uncanny sound to it, as though the words were being forced through a vocalization apparatus ill-suited to English, yet it was easy to comprehend the words. Valentine wondered of the bird thing was making noises of the appropriate length, and the Kurian was speaking directly to their brains.

  “Let’s hear him whistle ‘Pop Goes the Weasel,’ ” Silvertip said quietly to Chieftain.

  “Still, there,” Valentine called over his shoulder. “Lieutenant, wrap a handkerchief over that bag. I get the feeling he’s looking right through it.”

  Frat threw his rain poncho over the Reaper’s head.

  “That’s better.”

  “Indeed. We can’t smell you anymore, just this musty fabric. What do you use for waterproofing, apart from grotty, bacteria-gathering mammal oils?”

  “Reaper blood,” Chieftain said.

  “What is your real name, Jack in the Box?” Valentine asked.

  “Silence, renegade. Return the brass ring you so ill-advisedly carry or we will say no more.”

  They all stood in silence for five full minutes—Valentine timed it with his watch.

  “Perhaps we should start breakfast,” Valentine said.

  “Return the ring!”

  “I earned it fairly. If you want it, try to take it.”

  “This is one of your flags of truce!” Jack in the Box’s avatar said.

  “Then speak your piece,” Valentine said. “Do you want to surrender to us?”

  “I come to offer a bargain. I like the people of this land: their independent streak, their enjoyment of hearty meals and entertainments, their work ethic—but most of all their adaptability. From a few escaped legworms running wild they have built an entire civilization, using them alternately as a food source and transportation and warcraft. They even use the skins of the eggs. No Grog dared penetrate a legworm nest with fresh spawn wriggling about, yet they send teenagers in to snatch the material from under living scythes.”

  “So you admire the state,” Longshot said. “So do I. But I’m not making demands of people who never did me or my kind any harm.”

  “It is for the superior to arrange the affairs of the inferior. I only choose favorites to improve.”

  “Leave if all you want to do is argue and waste my beauty sleep,” Duvalier said. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “Quit arguing with the thing; it gets us nowhere,” Valentine said. “Let’s hear it, then.”

  “That Kentucky be placed under our protection. We will not take one life from your Alliance lands. Not one. No tribute, no flesh of worm or cow or goat—all we will ask is that it remain strictly neutral in the contest between civilization and progress on one side, and atavism and greed on the other.”

  “Civilization and progress—” Frat began.

  “Oh, you only lack the experience of years, boy.”

  “You lack the experience of who you should be calling boy,” Frat said, reaching for his parang.

  “Are we done here?” Valentine asked. “You’re giving your offer to the wrong people.”

  “Mankind has always been a herd. Well, two herds. The larger of the two are the dullards, the grotty masses with their simple pursuits of sex and drink and sport. They are easy to keep and thrive with a minimum of animal husbandry. But among you there is an elite, who appreciate art and culture. It’s only the passions of youth that seek the physical gratification rather than the mental that has kept your race from progressing out of its current stage. A little more selective breeding and you would have made the leap to thought-energy manipulation on your own. We will fulfill that potential. But we have the time to see it through. Give us a few more generations.”

  “Baloney,” Valentine said.

  “You’ve been among our better vanguards of the new Homo sapiens lux, David Valentine. Have you not seen it with your own eyes?”

  Valentine thought of Fran Paoli—no, that made him too uncomfortable. What about the officers Solon collected? Even at the time Valentine admired them. Intelligent, energetic, committed, organized. Cooperative as ants, brilliant as artists—they came so close to establishing their order in rebellious territory captured only a few months before. . . .

  Yes, Valentine had admired them.

  How had Valentine’s memory latched onto Consul Solon’s team so quickly? He’d spent years in the Kurian Zone, and his more recent time with, say, Pyp’s Flying Circus was more pleasant to consider. Did the Kurian know what mental cards he was holding? Captain Mantilla had said that one’s opponents were almost too eager to give the game away, seek the most comfortable mental path.

  Was the Kurian putting a few illuminated markers on that path?

  “We would almost take it to be universal,” Jack in the Box continued. “On the Grog’s world they became two distinct races, the golden and the gray, in their terms.”

  “Eloi and Morlocks,” Chieftain said. “Only you feed on both.”

  “Does the same apply to your Dau’wa?” Valentine asked, using the old Lifeweaver name for the renegades who practiced vampirism.

  “On Kur, the weak and the stupid were consumed long ago,” Jack in the Box answered. “The most resourceful of us survived. Then they went after each other. But it provided the necessary lessons. We are all sprigs of a few hardy family trees, tested and tested again.”

  “Tested or twisted?” Valentine asked.

  Who are you, Jack? Some Kurian who came off worse in a contest, looking for a safe place to hide? Valentine played music in his mind as he listened, mental chaff against the Kurian exploring his mind. Childhood nursery rhymes worked well, like the one employed by the Bears in the northeast to calm themselves down. The itsy-bitsy spider . . .

  “Where would you put your tower?” Duvalier asked.

  “We had in mind the Lincoln birthplace. The architecture is pleasing, the location central yet out of the way. It would suit us.”

  “How many ‘us’ would that be?”

  “We are the only one. For now. But if the time comes, I may have others of my kind take refuge with me. The deal would remain the same. All we ask is to be left alone and f
or this land to remain neutral.”

  “Is there an ‘or else’ attached?”

  “There always is. We have intimations of what our brethren are planning. Only my intervention can stop the whirlwind that is about to sweep across this land.”

  “This isn’t for us to decide,” Valentine said. “You need to speak to the Kentuckians.”

  “Events are not altogether in my control, either. I came to you in the hope that you would have that apostate who goes by the name Brother Mark persuade them into wisdom rather than folly. Our brethren are disappointed in the foolish gesture your cousins made in Owensboro. Tell your Brother Mark that Gall has been specified for Kentucky.”

  The creature reached inside its robes, and Valentine saw fingers shift all around from trigger guard to trigger—save for Duvalier, who’s sword appeared with a snick. It produced a white, capped cylinder about the size of a dinner candle high for all to see, and then dropped it at its feet.

  “You men like to have matters set down on paper. I give you paper.”

  “Thanks anyway. We’ve rolls of it,” Duvalier said.

  “Perhaps that’s for the Kentuckians to say,” Mrs. O’Coombe said. “It’s their land.”

  “So entertaining a discussion,” Jack in the Box said. “We almost forgot to offer a compliment. Brilliant gambit in Owensboro. You are worthy of your name after all.”

  “Gambit?” Valentine asked.

  “Yes. The bomb. Blowing up some of your own. You won your goal, but the herd you stampeded is heading for a cliff. Keep your workmanship in mind in the coming days as the bodies pile up and this beautiful, rich land becomes a waste.”

  “We’ll take you along to meet the Assembly,” Valentine decided.

  “No, I know that trick as well. You think you’ll use our avatar to locate us.”

  “Maybe we won’t give your avatar a choice.”

  “All I have to do is have it hold its breath. These flying forms are frail. Their hearts explode if deprived of oxygen for long. But that would be a shame. You will have no way to give an answer.”