by E. E. Knight
* * * *
Valentine walked past a sandbagged observation point camouflaged to look like another water tank. A pair of solders had set up twin-lensed range finder, just poking above the rim of the tank like the antennae of a lead ant checking the exit from the nest. Wires dangled from the phony tank, running to the underground PVC tube leading to the mortar pits.
The command building was two units of prefabricated housing, easily ported by trailer and then joined, its outline concealed under a mesh of netting and some young trees. A dugout stood just opposite, its door open and beckoning thanks to the alert.
He signed in with Colonel Pizzaro's admin and chitchatted over coffee until Pizzaro waved him in from the door. He had lined, leathery skin but very bright eyes that reminded Valentine of the comical little goggle-eyed walnuts the church youth groups sold as fund-raisers. A squawk box crackled in the corner. A flak jacket, combat harness, and carbine like Valentine's rested on a foldout extender on his desk.
"Let's take a walk," Pizzaro said, buckling his harness and picking up the carbine.
He led Valentine out to the two layers of perimeter wire. Most officers had a bit of military business that either irritated or obsessed them. Pizzaro's was base security. He didn't like the idea of anything leaving or coming into his station without his knowing about it. He liked to walk the wire as he talked rather than stay cooped up in his office. According to his staff, he'd been in an interrogation camp during Solon's occupation of the Ozarks, which was enough being boxed up for a lifetime.
"You want the good news or the bad?" Pizzaro asked. The shade of his slouch hat and the hard daylight dimmed his eyes somewhat.
"The good first. Otherwise it's like drinking bourbon out of a shaving mug."
Pizzaaro licked his lips. "All I ever see you drink is milk or coffee. When we go off alert, stop by."
"Is that the good news? Alert called off?"
"You're messing up your ordering," Pizzaro said, checking some frayed wiring on a quartz lamp. Valentine looked at the manufacturing stamp. It had originated in Mexico City. "Let's stick to the good news. I got a courier packet. Highbeam is on—I have this from Lambert herself. I've got to punch your ticket and give you escort to the staging briefing. Even my staff doesn't know this yet, and I want to keep it that way, but this post will be Point Zero. You'll set off from here. If it wasn't for the alert, we'd already be laying plumbing for a new camp."
"Was that the good news or the bad?" Valentine asked.
"Thought you'd be pleased to hear that all that scouting you've been doing in Kentucky is about to pay off."
"I never found what I was looking for."
"Anne . . ."
"Ahn-Kha," Valentine supplied.
"Sorry, not much with Grog talk. Sounds like dogs snarling at each other to me."
"So what's the bad news?"
"I'm sealing the base. First recon reports are in: It's a strong Grog column out of Cairo area. It's those gangly, hunched-over ones with the pig-ugly faces. They're avoiding contact and mostly hunting and scavenging. There aren't many settlements up that way but I'm getting reports of thievery—stealing livestock and chickens and whatnot. Anything they can sneak off when no one's looking. Some folks have disappeared, but we're not sure if they've run or the Grogs got 'em."
"Doublebloods, they call themselves," Valentine said. "Odd of them to come across the river like that. They keep to themselves."
"You spent some time in Illinois. Anything else you can tell me?"
"The Illinois Guard has a lot of stations around Mount Vernon, keeping watch on the Doublebloods. I had someone in the Illinois Guard I wanted to meet."
Sergeant Heath Hopkins. He died badly.
"So they're neutrals."
Pizzaro had enough troubles with the big gray Grogs inhabiting the riverbanks on his side of the Mississippi, the lonely Kurian tower watching river traffic from Cairo, and the Kurians on the other side of the twisting river in Kentucky and Tennessee. Valentine wasn't that surprised he didn't know much about the Doublebloods. There were pissworthy fires closer to the colonel's feet.
Valentine dredged up his very limited experience. "More like they hate everybody. Kurians tried to make a half Grog half human and it didn't work out. They're ill-tempered, even for Grogs, so the Kurians planted them on the borders of Southern Command, hoping they'd be trouble for us. Problem is, they all remember which direction the trucks that brought them came from, and it wasn't southwest."
"Can you savvy their lingo?"
"No more than a few phrases they use to communicate with the other Grogs. But I'd rather not walk on into the camp. This could be a man raid."
"A what?"
"They're amazons. Something amiss with their reproductive system. Not many male embryos live to be birthed. The ratio is four or six to one or thereabouts, if the Illinois Guard has the numbers right. There're problems up and down the Doubleblood genetic line, and the only way they're surer of a live birth is with a human donor and a Doubleblood female. Inbreeding worsens the defect. They're smart enough to grab new males now and then."
"Good God."
"It's not so bad. I hear they stick two layers of bagging over your head. Insurance," Valentine said.
The colonel tapped down some wire pegging with his foot and made a note in a pocket-sized sheet of paper. Valentine wondered if it was about the Doublebloods or the wire.
"What kind of weaponry?"
"Just small arms for fighting. They hunt with bows or crossbows and slingshots. They'll carry explosives to blow open locked doors. Tell your patrols to keep their distance."
"I'd just as soon discourage raids. What kind of casualties do we have to inflict to turn them around?"
"It's not that simple. Like I said, they're ornery. If they spill blood down here, a feud will start, and a good feud can go on for years."
"They're invading us. What do they expect to happen?"
"Logic and tribal custom. Ne'er the twain shall meet."
Valentine sensed Pizzaro was wavering, so he spoke again: "Right now you're just other. Start skirmishing and you'll be enemy. Your other option is to kill every last one of them. Then they'll think the gods punished them for arrogance. But you know how hard it is to run down Grogs who've gone bush."
Pizzaro thought it over, flicking his thumb over a rusty barb in the wire. "I'd better get to the communication center, then. Anyway, this is your chance to get out, if you like. Nobody'll say anything if you show up for the Highbeam—or whatever the crap they're gonna call it—conference a week or so early. Otherwise it'll be Rally Base cooking for you for a few days until whatever business the Doublebloods want to start finishes."
Valentine couldn't see riding away from some of the kids he'd helped train in a crisis. Or could he? "Can you shelter the Shrivastava clan?"
"Shrivastava? Of course. But it'll take more than a bag over his head to get him hot to abandon his store and stock."
* * * *
Trader Shrivasta may have been a civilian, but there was something of Valentine's old captain, LeHavre, in him. He had a gentle manner masking a pirate avarice but it didn't make him any less outraged at the idea of hiding behind locked gates while the Doublebloods stole from his pens and coops.
Valentine spoke to him in front of the arms room, the one part of the store back in the family quarters. Racks of rifles and pistols lined the walls, and reloading tools filled a long workbench. There was only one other exit from the room, and it led down to a tunnel to a separate basement, the family "Reaper proof in an old underground gas tank.
"The fort? This building is tougher than it looks, young man. Both basement and attic have firing slits to cover my property."
His nine-year-old son sat behind, loading bullets from boxes into fresh new magazines. The whole family knew the story of Grandfather Durtee, who held two Reapers off with a shotgun while the rest of the clan fled to the vaultlike underground shelter. The grandfather had been the only loss tha
t night.
"If you draw blood, they'll be back to avenge it."
"Then I will draw more blood, young man. Yes! Let them return! I welcome all at my store, provided they pay for what they take. These creatures will pay for my stock, one way or another."
Valentine wondered if it was too late to catch that transport to the conference.
Ray, the trading post's butcher, appeared, an old army flak jacked draped over a beefy arm. He accepted an old Ml6 from his employer. "You take the wall covering the back door, young man," Shrivastava said, and Ray nodded. The boy passed him a bag of magazines.
Shrivastava turned back to Valentine. "You taking a gun, young man, or will you stay in the Reaper-proof with the mothers and children?"
Maybe the Doublebloods would let him guide them to a bottom that contained a sizable herd of wild pigs. They could get all the side meat they wanted and carry off the young. "I'm going to go talk to the Doublebloods."
"No! Youn—David, do not waste yourself in that manner. My great uncle went to set up a post with the Whitefangs up beyond the ridge. They ate him. I do not call you a coward. The children will be comforted—"
Whatever else Shrivastava said was lost in the rush of an idea. Was there enough daylight left to get over the ridge?
Maybe. With a fast enough pair of wheels.
* * * *
Within an hour he'd convinced Pizzaro to loan him a driver and transport. Plus a big bag of supplies.
Scaring off coyotes with wolves? Pizzaro had said, liking the idea.
He arranged for a motorcycle, his best two-wheel man, fuel, survival gear, even priceless com gear. "We'll worry about the authorizations and paperwork later."
Valentine wanted to kiss him, remembering his days in the Wolves. If Southern Command had a Pizzaro at every forward post, the Wolves would spend more time raising hell on Kurian Zone back-roads and less cadging for supplies.
"You're not bad back there, sir," Callaslough, his driver, said from the front of the big Harley. Harley-Davidson still produced up in Milwaukee, and this specimen had found its way into Southern Command's motor pool. Fat tired, with a high clearance and rugged brush breaks and plenty of horsepower and hookups for attachments. It was meant to hold a sidecar, maybe even one of the dark-canopied blisters for a Reaper, or to pull a one-body medical sled.
The motorcycle jumped and blatted along the old road, now not much more than a potholed deer trail, quickly enough under Callaslough's urging.
Valentine had tied two small staffs of pig iron to the rear backrest/ gear bar. A white flag fluttered at one, a netted bag of Texas oranges on the other. Though each man had a carbine, they'd slung them facing down and backward, further proof of peaceful intent.
Not that it wouldn't stop an ambitious young Whitefang from trying to knock them both off the bike with a single .50 caliber bullet, a thought much on Valentine's mind as they bumped up Badblood Ridge.
Valentine's active imagination felt the notched foresight of a rifle resting on his eye, wondered if some poor, horny, unmated Grog would ignore the signals for parley. The noise the bike made must be drawing Whitefang scouts like the musical ice cream wagons of the KZ lured children to the New Universal Church ice cream that had proselyetizing cartoons and homilies on the wrappers.
Callaslough spotted them first as they came off Badblood, bouncing down a gravelly wash under the gaunt, nest-and-vine-draped skeletons of power pylons. A wind chime of bleached skulls alternating with femurs and tibias hung from one long arm, threaded on old wire.
A bent, loose-skinned old Whitefang stood atop a fallen hickory, his long rifle gripped in the exact center but held stiff-armed toward them. Some females watched from the other side of the log. One, younger or more daring, climbed even higher than her male guardian to get a better look. She bore a bulging harvesting bag.
Callaslough slowed the big motorcycle.
"Pull up," Valentine said. Their seating arrangement made it easy to communicate quietly, at the cost of having to smell each other's sunbaked sweat. "Point the bike so it's parallel to his rifle, not pointed into Whitefang land."
Callaslough executed a neat stop, swinging the bike's rear tire so it sent a spray of pebbles toward Whitefang territory.
"Leathery old hangball," Callaslough commented. The old Grog's testicular sack was well below his loincloth line in the heat.
"That's good for us. Foragers mean one of the tribe's bigger camps are around."
Valentine stepped off the bike. He held up with his right hand some signaling mirrors given as trade goods, tough squares of chrome on lanyards. In his left he held a selection of Texas coast oranges in a net bag. He had several boxes of matches in reserve; he'd yet to meet a Grog that didn't love to strike a match, just from the pure dazzle and power of instant fire-creation.
"Foot pass! Parley!" Valentine called, in the lingua franca of St. Louis.
The females issued chirping noises, seeing what he had to offer. The male scratched an itch under his loincloth in thought, but his eyes didn't leave the oranges.
"I think we're good," Valentine said.
The nimble female plucked at his ears, urging.
The Grog planted his gunstock, hooted, and gave an unmistakable "get over here!" sweep of his arm. He licked his lips as he did so.
"Shit. I'd almost rather be shot at," Callaslough said.
* * * *
They arrived about an hour before sunset.
The humans walked the bike in with the help of one of the females. They wore soup cans around their necks, indicating that they'd come in peace and offered up tokens and gifts to be allowed on White-fang lands—the "foot pass" of Grog commerce and diplomacy.
The Whitefang encampment stood in an old field with an irrigation trench on three sides and thick woods on the fourth. Water flowed in the trench. Clay pots stood upstream for drinking water, and laundry lines hung downstream. Old books hung on the bushes shielding the toilet area where the ditch drained off.
The Whitefang villagers lived in tents made of pulled-up carpeting and quilts of plastics, weatherproofed with beeswax or musky smelling oil.
Human captives hewed wood, made charcoal, and carried water. They looked at the newcomers with pleading eyes.
Valentine avoided their gaze. Nothing you can do about it at the moment.
At first the tribe wanted nothing to do with Valentine and Callaslough. They young males, unblooded and untattooed, their long hair a testament to lack of wives, glared or hopped up and down in excitement, letting out little war cries. The younger females taunted by slapping their own backsides or spitting in the embassy's direction.
"Lots of unmated Groggies," Callaslough said as they walked the bike into the village. Pizzaro had sent along a man who knew something of the Grogs, but Valentine would have preferred a little less experience. Callaslough was just finding things to be nervous about, and the Grogs read body language better than words.
The chief lived in an old farmhouse, apparently. On the lower level, the walls had been mostly pulled away to admit air, but the upper rooms remained intact. Valentine wondered how many wives were crammed into the aluminum-siding seraglio.
Stripped old farm equipment stood in the center of the village, a playland-junkyard for the little Grogs. They swung and climbed and chased each other and an assorment of village dogs in and out of old harvesting tubing, control cabs, and engine housings. At the edge of the playland, a scrubbed and polished claw-foot bathtub served as a central drinking trough.
Their escort Grog pointed to a place for them to sit and went up the stone stairs to the skeleton of the house's first floor.
The chief remained huddled with his subchiefs and elders. Valentine extracted a two-pound bag from his trade goods, went to the big drinking cistern, and ripped open the packet.
An elderly female tried to stop him, hooting and slapping at his hands. Valentine ignored her and emptied the packet, full of granules that looked like sand, into the trough.
That got the attention of the elders and the chief.
Valentine mixed the water with a clay carrying pot, upending and dumping the water as it began to froth.
"What the hell's that?" Callaslough asked.
"Root beer mix."
Valentine took his canteen cup and drank. Then he refilled it and offered it to the grandmother. She sniffed suspiciously and turned her head away.
"Damn," Valentine said. He filled another cup and drank again. It wasn't very good—the mixture really needed to sit and chill to be truly tasty—but it was sweet.
The younger Grogs weren't so shy. They slurped and squealed, and their elders ran forward to pull them away. A squirmy youngster managed to break away from his mother and go back to the tub, drinking with both hands.
The chief came out on his steps to watch, eyes shaded under a heavy brow. He had huge, woolly thighs that looked like a pair of sheep standing close together in a field. One of the youngsters brought him a cup of the mixture, babbling.
The chief, sniffed. He laughed and upended the mixture down his throat. He wiped his lips and laughed again.
"Good-humored guy," Callaslough ventured.
"I'm sure he'd laugh just as hard if his warriors were playing soccer with our heads."
"I am Whitefang," he barked at Valentine in the Grog trade tongue. He stamped on the old steps, hard, and Valentine heard a commotion from the upstairs.
"O Whitefang, this foot-passed stranger begs the powers of your ears and eyes and tongue."
Whitefang waved them over with a two-handed gesture that made it look like he was taking an appreciative whiff of his own flatulence.
"He didn't just cut one, did he?" Callaslough said.
"Try and look agreeable, no matter what," Valentine said as he stepped forward.
The chief bobbed and one of his subchiefs put a pillow-topped milking stool under his hindquarters, but he didn't sit until Valentine and Callaslough were both off their feet.
