Baltic Gambit

by E. E. Knight

  She watched Ahn-Kha vote a couple times out of interest. He had an identification card that carried a magnetic strip, and when it came time for a vote, he stood in a short line in front of one of the electronic vote recorders placed on conveniently located podiums at the edges of the aisles of the plenary conference room. Ahn-Kha inserted his card, and a screen brought up his designated language (English) giving him Yes, No, or Abstain options. Each voting delegate’s choice was displayed on a movie-theater screen. A few of the very large, multinational freeholds, such as Canada, Mongolia, and the Andes Chain and the Indo-Pacific Territories (which included Queensland and the Australian Outback), had more than one vote.

  For those needing translation, they’d either brought their own translators or they could access a network with instantaneous translation given in a dozen languages over a local network. Most of the seats had plug-ins for headphones—you just pushed buttons on a “dial” to go to the channel for the language you wanted.

  Then there were smaller meetings in other rooms. The meetings had subjects such as “Refuting and Using Kurian Propaganda” and “The Home Farm: Four Ways to Improve Production” and “An Examination of the Debriefings of Six High-Level Defectors.”

  The conference had a daily “newspaper” that mostly covered corrections and changes to the schedule, though there was, oddly, a humorous, dialogue-free cartoon at the bottom of the back page every morning. Just the thing to put a smile on your face before the “How Many Lives per Year to Support a Kurian?: Latest Analysis” session at nine a.m.

  As for the food and drink, it was very good. Every delegate received plastic tokens: red for food, white for entertainment and personal necessities, and black for alcohol, tobacco, or indulgence foods such as chocolates and quail egg–type delicacies. The only problem was that the tokens were useless in town; they could be used only at the hotel and conference center. Vodka, schnapps, and a Danish liquor called aquavit were the cheapest liquors (beer, oddly enough, could be bought with any colored token, thanks to local sources and a patriotic gesture by a Polish brewery that had managed to get a large supply of beer across the Baltic to aid in the fight for freedom), and wine tended to be the most expensive source of alcohol.

  There were exhibits on the concourse, mostly by weapons and communication-gear manufacturers. “Micromanufacturing” and “anysourcing” seemed to be popular buzzwords, according to the flyers she picked up. There were live fire demonstrations of guns that allegedly had only three moving parts and could be manufactured with the simplest of metal-stamping technology, ways to create explosives that looked like attic insulation, cinder blocks, bricks, or conduit, and to Ahn-Kha’s delight there was a special heartroot booth that showed all the different ways to grow the Golden One staple and turn it into dishes for human consumption or animal feed. They had heartroot with honey, thick heartroot stews, even heartroot smoothies mixed with dried fruits that claimed to supply a full day’s protein and carbs in a single shake.

  There were also a few weirdos, or “Moonrakers,” as Valentine called them. There were people in the alleys of town who set up displays selling crystals that allegedly interfered with a Reaper’s sense of your lifesign, lucky charms handed down through families that supposedly kept children safe, even brass rings “guaranteed to fool anyone and pass all detection tests.”

  Duvalier looked in on a room devoted to “War Games.” For games, they were carried out in deadly seriousness, with military staff officers from the various freeholds testing operational alliances and theoretical attacks on various Kurian Zones. From what she could gather, your freehold had “resource points” of population, raw materials, and technology that closely matched real-world numbers, and you could allocate your resource points to building up your economy, or military, or some combination of the two, the classic “guns or butter” choice, in other words. You could also spend resource points in Kurian Zones to slow them down or cause distractions.

  Duvalier, who’d served her whole life more or less as one of those resources raising havoc in the KZs, knew it wasn’t quite so simple as that. Why the population of Kentucky would fight the Kurians tooth and nail when the population of Kansas wouldn’t was a more complex question than could be quantified in the war games tables and charts. She was just a fraction of a “resource point” in game terms, but if she got lucky she could kill a Kurian or take out an entire Quisling brigade headquarters. You couldn’t just spend a certain amount of money to shift the allegiance of a population; if you could, the Kurians probably would have bought out Southern Command decades ago.

  Or perhaps they had. Unsettling thought. She sometimes wondered if there was something rotten high up. Since that wild summer after Solon’s collapse, when Southern Command seemed to be on a roll, toppling Kurian Zones almost as fast as they reached the borders, the advance had ground to a permanent halt at the Rio Grande and the Mississippi. Guys like Val suddenly brought up on dubious charges… with smooth talkers like Sime running the show now. “Show” wasn’t even the right word; it was more like one long intermission.

  While waiting in line at the bakery, she ran into the sergeant with the nearly unintelligible English who’d questioned her outside the garrison. After exchanging a few forced comments about the weather and how she was liking seeing the sun set at eleven thirty in the evening, he made a rather ham-fisted attempt to arrange a dinner date. “Food, huh? Eat? Both?” he said, waggling his forefingers at her and then at himself.

  She couldn’t imagine the conversation and she didn’t want to have sex with him, so she shook her head no and said “boyfriend” a few times.

  They chatted some more as the line moved forward. He had a holstered pistol she admired. He extracted it for her. It was a Glock 17, looked like, with an extra-thick handgrip—the sergeant had large hands. She admired it.

  “You get one, gun basement,” he said. “’Stand?”

  She didn’t ’stand, so she shrugged.

  “I take you. I take you.”

  He did take her, all the way to the center of town. Down a little alley off the main plaza in front of the sulfur-colored town hall and civic center, he showed her a gun shop. She spent an hour perusing the stock while he chatted with the owner and leisurely ate a breakfast quiche he’d purchased at the bakery.

  She selected a Glock 17 similar to his save for the factory grip. Through the sergeant, she negotiated a deal with the owner. He arranged to swap out its current handle for a rubberized diamondback grip. The owner also put new luminous dots into the sights of the pistol—free of charge.

  He let her onto the garrison gun range and she put fifty rounds through the gun, familiarizing herself with it. Her sergeant—Ruddi was his name, apparently—must have sensed something about her, since he quit trying to get her out on a date and instead wanted to hear Duvalier talk about ways to kill a Reaper, or a Big Mouth (they were a serious problem in the Baltic and in the waters of the Danish straits).

  They cleaned their weapons together. She learned two Finnish expressions. Varo! meant “watch out” and anteeksi was a common way to say “excuse me.”

  One of the garrison soldiers brought them a tray of freshish—meaning dried and salted—fish, potatoes, and vegetables of the summer harvest. They had beer out of a cask as well, with a label burned into the side of the cask with a branding iron. Some popular local brew, a very decent lager, she thought.

  “See. We dinner, after it all,” Ruddi said.

  She laughed and agreed.

  The gun had set her back the majority of her expense money. She’d have to live very cheaply on the free stuff for the delegates and their associates, perhaps step up her attempts to get invitations to the nicer dinners and receptions.

  The town had an old-fashioned public bathhouse and sauna. There were also numerous private ones that were “welcome to the delegates” so everyone could enjoy the Finnish tradition of sauna, even though it wasn’t midwinter and they’d miss the full effect of running into the snow to
cool off.

  The Baltic League had come to some arrangement with the owners, and attendees of the conference were free to use the bath part, though you still needed a little money to tip the staff. Massages, pumicing, and individual lathering with a sponge was extra, of course.

  She visited the larger baths out of some mixture of curiosity and boredom.

  There were one or two curious delegates like her there for the experience. Most of the attendees seemed to be older locals, who bought monthly passes at reduced rates. From what she could see, it was as much social ritual as personal hygiene. The Finns came to the baths to chat over tea, exchange canned or preserved items from their gardens, read, even play chess.

  The bath part was fascinating. After soaping and rinsing in a little stall with a wood slat chair to sit on, you stepped on through to the men’s or women’s (or mixed, for the daring, and she wasn’t that daring, more because she was embarrassed by her dreadful feet than modesty) soaking pool. In a true nod to the Old World, the water was heated by hot rocks dropped into a little cistern at the bottom of the pool. A grate was put over the rock bed to add a measure of safety. The heated water circulated through the natural tendency of the hot water to rise, as far as she could tell. The cooled rocks were extracted regularly and returned to the fireplace by cheerful attendants who joked with the old men in Finnish.

  She loved it. Except for the part where the old ladies beat each other all over the skin with leafy birch branches. Supposedly it kept the skin young and supple (according to an English information sheet they handed her). She’d engaged in conversation with the Finns mostly through pantomime, though the oldest ones knew a few polite words of English that had been taught in the schools of their youth.

  On her third time she brought Valentine, and a little pair of canvas slippers so they could go to the common room together. They both wrapped thin towels around their waists, like most of the Finns. The women were unconcerned with exposing their breasts in a bathhouse, or at least those who were concerned about it stuck to the women-only side. When she emerged from the bath to move to the sauna—still enjoyable in the cool, bright summer of the north—she felt deliciously sexy with the wet wrap clinging about her waist and buttocks. That was an unusual feeling for her. Valentine’s maleness brought it out, she supposed, though everything above her waist counted him just as an old friend. Well, the reproductive organs did have their own separate consciousness. Between odd moments of arousal and her monthly cycle, it sometimes felt as though her ovaries were running the show.

  Val’s wet towel didn’t leave much to the imagination, either. Most of the other attendees were staring at his scars, the big exit wound in his leg and the burn marks on his back in particular. One, who’d heard them speaking English, asked, “You have in wreck?”

  “Boiler room accident,” Valentine said. He’d told Duvalier about being scalded by steam while pursuing a Kurian through the bowels of a Kurian tower in Little Rock.

  “Ooch,” the Finn said sympathetically. He pulled at his bottom lip, as if trying to extract English vocabulary. “You are… lucky… for being alive.”

  Valentine smiled and shrugged.

  He’d endured more physical pain than she had fighting the Kurians. She liked to disappear when the bullets started flying; Cats just weren’t of much use in mass slaughter. He’d suffered emotionally, too. She’d been brought up in a Kurian Zone. She sometimes thought most of her emotional responses were like burned circuitry from that. The wiring was there; it just had no power. Most of the time.

  “Been meaning to tell you, this weekend I’m going away,” Valentine said. “Three days at most—trip to Helsinki.”

  “With Eva Stepanek?” Duvalier asked. The pleasant sexiness boiled up and disappeared like water on one of the rocks fresh from the fireplace.

  “Yes. I’m curious about her art collection. She’s really proud of it. It’s all in storage, but when she’s no longer sailing, she plans to open a little gallery or museum. She hasn’t decided which. She wanted to show me some of the finds. I’m no expert, of course. Maybe when we met years ago I was too skeptical of her plans—I honestly can’t remember. She seems to want to prove something to me.”

  That she can suck a cock with the best of them, I imagine, Duvalier thought.

  “Helsinki is the biggest city in Finland, right?”

  “Yes, it’s ten times the size of this, easy. Bigger than New Orleans, I think.”

  “You think that’s wise?” Duvalier asked. “You’re supposed to be at this conference.”

  “The conference is interesting in its way. I think if the Kurians were going to try something, they would have done so already. In any case, it’s a weekend. Half the delegates will be at the coast and the rest will be preparing for their next week’s presentations.”

  “If the Kurians only found out the location after the conference started, they might still be staging a force strong enough to make it into the harbor,” Duvalier said.

  “The Lifeweavers haven’t shown up yet. Unless they’re disguised. If I were the Kurians, I’d wait until I thought I could bag them. Sime told me they weren’t expected until the end of the month.”

  “You’d think they’d have arrived while the location was still secret. Maybe the Kurians are out hunting for them.”

  Valentine pulled at his chin. “If so, that’s something for the Finns to worry about. I don’t see how we can make a difference. If I could point to some tangible dangers, I’d just alert the Finns anyway and be ready to help. But you’re right—it is odd that they aren’t here from the start. Maybe the Baltic League doesn’t trust the Lifeweavers any more than the other delegates do. There’s always talk that the Lifeweavers are just Kurians pretending to aid us. Fighting both sides of the same war, as it were.”

  Duvalier had heard that theory proposed from barstools by veteran soldiers and scraggly-bearded kids more than once over the years. It was the sort of idea you’d come up with after an evening’s drinking and bullshitting.

  “The New Universal Church came up with that one,” she said with a laugh she hoped didn’t sound too forced.

  Valentine let it drop. He knew she felt closer to the Lifeweavers than most.

  “Could be,” Valentine said. “Still, there’s not much scheduled for the weekend. Some demonstrations in the field. Oh, Ahn-Kha will like the heartroot part. The Finns have a lot of mossy bogs around all these lakes. It’s doing very well there. It just freezes up in the winter—you can chip it out if you get real hungry and defrost it—then it goes right back to growing in the spring. I had a heartroot omelet for breakfast, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t bad, especially since they used a good cheese. It’s a little tasteless without support.”

  “Heartroot? Great. Unless he gets it just like Mom used to cook, it gives him terrible cabbage farts,” Duvalier said.

  Valentine smiled. “Still another reason to be in Helsinki this weekend.”

  “Have you actually done anything at the conference?”

  “Once we passed on the warning, I’ve just been doing what suits my fancy. There was a discussion about Xeno products. I was in the audience, but they had me talk a little about the legworm ranchers. They didn’t even know where to find the meat on a legworm or that the leather came from egg casings. I was able to straighten them out on a few things. Some delegates from Russia claimed there were a lot of legworms in the tagia up near the permafrost line. In the winter they go into the usual hibernation nest-pile, get snowed over, and sometimes people get curious about the heap, climb it, fall in, and are never heard from again. They’re terrified of the damn things, to tell the truth. They can believe the Kentuckians have built what amounts to a society handling them. What about you?”

  She shrugged. To tell the truth, she was a little bored with it all. She never followed the grand strategy of the fronts beyond information about where the enemy was operating. Her vague feelings of unease probably came out of the boredom. She was so used to being rea
dy to deal with death jumping out of the trees that she couldn’t relax—even with the aid of a sauna. “I sat in on a few talks. You have the headphones on and it’s like watching a foreign film, only there’s no film. As to finding a Kurian infiltrator, the security people are making sure there’s nobody wandering around recording stuff. The thing is, note taking isn’t against the rules; everyone’s jotting down notes all the time. If there is a spy—or spies—he’s got to be bored.”

  “The voting delegates get special meetings. Ahn-Kha has said there might be something in the works for India. There’s been a lot of talk about it. To hear them talk, the Kurians there are worse than the ones back home; they fight with each other more than with the Resistance. They’re trying to get Australia and Russia to commit to getting enough arms to Mumbai for a rising. Those guys with the turbans, the Sikhs, that’s what they’re here for, to get more weapons out of the other freeholds.”

  “If only Southern Command could have knocked over Georgia. We could arm the whole world.”

  “The Atlanta Gunworks, you mean?” Valentine asked. “They make good stuff, better than we do. If we took it over—”

  “Suddenly they’d be making crap guns like most of the stuff Southern Command stamps out.”

  “I wasn’t going to put it quite like that, but yes. Funny how everyone hangs on to vintage firearms if they can get them.”

  “Maybe she’s just after your bourbon.”

  “It’s true. I have one bottle left. Thing is, she’s not really a drinker. Odd, because all of the other Poles here toss it down like iced tea. This is the hardest-drinking meeting I’ve ever been to.”

  “You’re just used to Southern Command.” While Southern Command made her crazy at regular intervals, she did admire it. You’re not supposed to drink in uniform, and they didn’t think too much of you if you drank much out of uniform, either.

  They split up and returned to the areas for their respective genders to dress. Her skin felt lovely thanks to all the steam, even without a thrashing by birch branches. She was in the mood for some really good food and maybe a little wine, and she didn’t have the money for a weekend at the expensive joints with the menus translated into French.