Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (14 page)

The Canadians announced that they were going to the terminal for lunch, and offered to make purchases for the delayed travellers. She decided to try to bury the hatchet with Pistols and buy him a largish Canadian beer to make amends, and a hot pretzel to go with it. She handed over what she had left of Alexander’s distributed currency meant for “food, drink, and necessities” to get them through the night. When they returned, she gave the beer and pretzel to Pistols and sat down with Valentine and Ahn-Kha to eat her own stew.

The meat was tough and a little gamey and seasoned with something that was trying to be oregano. She wondered if she was eating moose or caribou or some other denizen of the Northwoods.

“I thought you didn’t like Postle,” Valentine said, seeing Pistols lift his bottle to her from across the hangar with a friendly smile.

“I like Postle just fine,” she said. “It’s his penis I can’t seem to get along with. It does too much of his thinking.”

With Pistols tamed and everyone else occupied and the office warm, she stretched out on the floor and napped until Valentine woke her (she didn’t know it, but after Pistols told of his impromptu blood-draw, everyone was careful not to startle her).

The pilot waved to them from the door. He looked freshly shaven and had a new chart under his arm.

“Last leg. In the air, anyway,” Valentine said.

She spent much of the flight looking at Postle, who was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. She honestly hoped the claw pricks weren’t
becoming infected. She’d probably gone a little overboard in proving her point, but she’d managed to get back on board without so much as a glance from him. Maybe he’d have an entertaining story for the Swedish girls, or the girls wherever they were heading in the Baltic.

She was growing used to the rattling old plane now that their trip in it was just about over. She wished it were flying them all the way overseas; it seemed capable of a transatlantic hop if it could refuel in, say, Iceland, but it seemed there were stealthier arrangements for the other legs of the journey. Well, she wasn’t organizing it.

For some reason or other, Valentine liked the man. Probably because he was about as emotional as a reptile. Valentine had a hard time dealing with the messiness that went with any kind of emotional display. Besides, he and Sime had a past, mostly bad. They were like two drunks who’d beaten the snot out of each other in a bar fight and ended up drinking buddies. The combination of their air of cool appraisal and the inability to read their expressions put her on edge. She could never relax around such men.

Pistols, on the other hand, was more her type. Deadly—well, she hoped, for their sake—and direct. Now that his grabby habits were straightened out, that is.

H
alifax,
April: Part fishing village, part seaport, part land’s-end outpost, the city is as tough and crusty as a barnacle. For much the same reason. The cold North Atlantic besieges the port, seemingly trying to force a retreat toward more hospitable ground. But this outer corner of Nova Scotia isn’t ready to surrender yet. Centuries of tradition have inured the residents to the weather, and they are rightfully proud of their important role in the struggle against the Kurians. Their port is the main seagoing gateway across the Atlantic that is free of Kurian control—or even occasional disruption. For once, the long, cold winters worked in the city’s favor. The Kurians, while they have the technology to survive in any climate, prefer warm ones for safety’s sake. They never know when they might be forced from their holes and have to dive into the nearest waterway or drift in high winds to a new refuge. They generally leave the administration of cold climates to their allies.

From Halifax, shipping and passengers break up into smaller contingents that can be transported by lighter smuggling craft into the Great Lakes or down the eastern seaboard of the United States. Some trade, mostly furs and precious metals or rare earths scraped from the tundra
and cold shores of northern Canada, heads east to Europe as well, mostly in the hands of experienced smugglers.

There’s still the fish, as well. The cod fleets are busy, save for the wild winter months, when even their tough boats and legendary seamanship are not equal to the challenge. Some larger ships, mini oceangoing factories, process the cod into frozen strips that serve as cheap, nutritious protein brought by rail and the seasonal roads to the eastern half of Free Canada that runs from the midway point between Toronto and Montreal all the way northeast to the ocean.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the isolation would make for a lifeless city where the residents scuttle from breakfast table to work, work to washing basin at home, and washing basin to curtained bed before beginning the cycle again. Nothing could be further from the truth. The little town is filled with everything from theaters to taverns to, remarkably, a pair of fine-dining restaurants, one complete with potted palms and a black-and-white checkerboard marble floor polished to a brilliant sheen and white-jacketed waiters. The people of Halifax, most of the year trapped beneath iron-gray skies, have found in this wind-and-spray whipped point of the New World cultural resources that a twentieth-century resident wouldn’t have imagined.

The cold was dreadful. The wet gave it a penetrative staying power; even after you stepped inside, it took a few minutes to warm up. She hoped the whole trip wouldn’t be like this.

They had arrived with six days until their transatlantic ship departed for the Baltic, and had already spent three of them working out the kinks from the long, segment-by-segment flight.

“Easy from here on out,” Sime announced upon their bouncy landing into the wind at the Halifax airstrip, with a smile that for once didn’t look practiced and professional. Sime was probably sick of riding in a walk-in cooler that was being tossed around like the last tablet in a pillbox on a courier’s galloping horse.

Valentine was fond of Sime, and being Valentine, wanted her to like him, too. He was always defending Sime as being “good at his job.” She could put up with him for the trip to the conference, but it didn’t mean she had to like him. He always evoked memories of the Kansas “quality” of her youth. Their faces and hair were always as polished as their vehicles’ dashboards, and to her, just as plasticine. They were all good at their jobs, too.

They were met at the airport by a bearded man in a furry hat that made Duvalier think of Russians. She had no idea what kind of hats Russians wore, honestly, but this one was tallish, with flaps at the sides, and neatly trimmed in gray fur. She’d seen something like it somewhere or other, maybe on a vodka bottle. It looked warm. Indeed, it must have been, because he wore only a goose-down vest over a wool shirt as protection against the North Atlantic wind.

“Welcome to Nova Scotia,” he said, with an even thicker accent than they’d heard in Ontario. “Name’s Preffer. I’m with the Refugee Network. I’m arranging your departure for Europe. I have a car waiting to take you to your hotel. We weren’t sure about your arrival, so you have a couple days in balmy Halifax before starting your crossing.” He cracked his knuckles before shaking their hands.

He bundled them into a delivery van that smelled like kerosene.
There were little fold-down seats in the back. It made Duvalier think of the collection vans from the Kurian Zones, save that this one wasn’t armored. And there were handles on all the cargo-area doors.

“Sorry about the no-windows thing,” Preffer said. “We use this when we need to discreetly shuttle refugees around. Not that you’re refugees—no offense.”

The town was full of “refugees.” Halifax, as it turned out, had families who’d escaped from the Congo delta to the Gulf of Murmansk.

Valentine had talked on the flight about Hong Kong, how it was a poor province of China until some revolution or other. A lot of people fled to Hong Kong because it still had British law, and within a few decades a poor collection of muddy hillside villages became some of the most valuable real estate in the world.

Before she grew bored and more or less quit listening, she had heard Val go on to say that something similar was under way in Halifax. People with the means to escape the European Kurians tended to flee to Southern Argentina or Canada, and Halifax had become what Ellis Island was to an earlier generation of immigrants: a gateway to a New World. Despite the cold North Atlantic climate and the damp chill through most of the year, they stayed and prospered, bringing with them all sorts of intriguing abilities. There were restaurateurs and clothiers, makers of precision instruments and doctors, furriers and perfume manufacturers—Halifax still did a little whaling to help feed its population—making it a more cosmopolitan city than it had ever been, even during the World War booms it had known.

The immigrants had mostly settled in an area of the city known
as the Beehive. It covered the old North End of the Halifax peninsula, centered around the old Hydrostone and the memorial to the Halifax explosion in 1917 when an ammunition ship in the harbor exploded, leveling most of the city. The colors, sights, and sounds of the Beehive ran almost around the clock. The locals had covered stretches of the narrow old streets with a sort of plasticized canvas to keep out the rain.

Preffer set them up in four rooms above a twenty-four-hour café. The kitchen had been stripped and turned into a dormitory with sinks for washing and laundry. Everything was double-layered. Double layers of glass to keep out the cold, double layers of door with steel bars over the regular door for security, blinds and curtains on the windows. At least there were no bugs. Duvalier was an expert on critters in cheap lodgings.

“When do we depart for Europe?” Sime asked.

“Your boat is here. She came in a couple days late, sorry to say, and the crew needs a few days of rest. Soon as the captain gives me the okay, we can ship you out.”

“A ship?” Stamp asked, making a face as Pistols removed his boots and socks to air out his toes.

Preffer cracked his knuckles. “Well, not really a ship. But you’ll be comfortable enough.”

“Must we be isolated until then?” Stamp asked, aiming the question at Sime rather than Preffer.

Sime glanced at Preffer.

“The town is safe enough. Nobody’s going to get shanghaied for their aura,” he said. “There are a lot of touts soliciting people for labor of one kind or another, long hours at low pay. Pickpockets might
get something, but we don’t have a lot of violent crime. Don’t be loud and drunk; that’s a guaranteed night in the cells and while we have good relations with the black-and-blues, they don’t have to do us any favors. So please, stay out of trouble.”

He extracted a small phone from his pocket and plugged it into the wall. There were two numbers written on it in indelible pen. “Call if you’re at a loss about anything. The bigger number is mine. The smaller is the Refugee Network. Only a few people know about your trip, so if you can’t reach me and you have to go through them, just tell them you’re new arrivals and you’re above the Ballyhoo Diner. Someone will get here in minutes.”

They could order up food from the café through a dumbwaiter, of all things; Preffer had made some sort of arrangements. There were people going in and out of both front and back at all hours with no small amount of noise.

Valentine and Pistols fell asleep within minutes of deciding on sleeping locations, Sime and his secretary were comparing notes about the journey, and Ahn-Kha was pushing two single mattresses together to make a bed able to accommodate most of him.

The next morning, they ate breakfast over the smell of drying socks.

“I’ve been cooped up too long,” Stamp said as Ahn-Kha loaded the breakfast dishes back into the dumbwaiter. “Alessa, feel like exploring?”

She shrugged. The cold wasn’t what she’d call pleasant, but compared to a Wyoming winter it was within an elbow poke of balmy. “It’s what I do.”

Sime had produced a small radio and everyone was listening to
the news from the Baltic English-language station. She buttoned up her duster, picked up the sword-stick, and followed Stamp, who was dressed in her nice camel-colored long coat, out the door.

They explored the Beehive. It was already humming with human, vehicular, muscle-powered, and horse-drawn traffic.

Duvalier noticed there were little decorative bees everywhere. On signposts, in store windows, on the door handles of a few of the more expensive shops. She commented on it and Stamp just shrugged and said, “Let’s ask.”

In every store where they engaged in casual conversation, they asked about the bees. They received a slightly different answer every time.

No one knew where the bee symbol came from. Some said it was Newfoundland honey, a “free” three-ounce jar of which was given away to every immigrant, thanks to the resources of the Newfoundland Relocation Resource, the entity that helped refugees find a useful life on the island or elsewhere in Canada. Others said it was a manufacturer symbol, that of a large cutlery concern that had set itself up in Halifax, reputedly owned by some French. Others claimed it was the Mormons, whose missions also did a great deal of fine work with the most destitute of the refugees. Or it might have been the Canadian currency, which featured a bee on its hundred-dollar bill. It could be that bees were also relative newcomers to Newfoundland, and had prospered under the altered weather patterns of the Kurian Order.

In any case, bees were a theme of the Beehive. They were pictured in shop windows, decorated lampposts, and glowed golden brown when painted on lampshades. The town certainly buzzed;
despite the cold, everyone seemed to be outdoors: talking, standing around with steaming mugs or glasses in their fists, enjoying the night and the camaraderie. There were string quartets playing and accordions, with rival musicians playing spirited dance numbers—Duvalier recognized the “Pennsylvania Polka”—or sadder, wistful songs. She noted that the livelier players had larger audiences and more money thrown into the proffered hat.