Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (2 page)

The koan also had the practical effect of relaxing her, so if she had to she could go into action loose, with sure and steady hands.

A Reaper meant a Kurian. With these woods and hills, it had to be nearby. Probably in the hotel—nothing else in the area matched its level of security.

If a Kurian were here overseeing his generals, it was just possible that there would be other Kurians in attendance. Was the alliance already settled, and this conference was just to hammer out the details? Or were they still determining who would do what in joint action against Kentucky in the future? If it were the latter, there might be a party of Kurians keeping an eye, or whatever sensory
node the Kurians used to keep from getting consumed by their cousins, on their generals. They’d also want to make sure rival rulers weren’t offering deals to the Quislings that might put them at a disadvantage.

That was their weakness. Time would tell if it was fatal. If the Kurians had shown any ability to work together, they would have subjugated humanity as easily as humans controlled life and death in a chicken coop.

That might explain all the security. Even air had some difficulty getting in, judging from the guards on the roof near the rust-streaked, multi-ton HVAC units.

Security might keep her out, or if it didn’t keep her out, find her once she made it inside the hotel.

She thought about calling in the cavalry. A single Reaper was a factoid. Intriguing, and further confirmation that something major was in the works here, but she wanted evidence before making a case that the disheveled elegance of the French Lick resort was worth the fight. Maybe they were only deciding on a new communications network or, given the problems with the electricity, establishing a new national grid for the Eastern Kurian Zones. Shooting it up would bring a world of hurt down on the assault force. They’d be lucky to make it back across the Ohio even if they scattered into small parties.

No, she couldn’t ask men to die on a hunch.

Full dark came on and the insects filled the night with their signaling. Eating and sex. She knew the Kurians ate. How did they reproduce? Maybe the meeting was just a big insemination (or whatever they did) party to produce a new generation. It would be funny to tell the Bears they had to shoot up an orgy.

The “doughnut” part of the hotel glowed like hot embers.

“Lit up like Christmas,” she said, taking a handful of Indiana mud and generously coating her face. They must have no shortage of diesel oil for the generator. The inner ring of security would have their night vision compromised by the hotel’s lighting. Dogs wouldn’t be fooled, but dogs were at their most useful when they knew what they were looking for. She’d had dogs practically step over her only to whine and lunge at night-feeding rabbits.

She worked her way around to the west entrance, cradling her old, seemingly gnarled sword-stick. The two men at the door looked solemnly alert. A broad patio almost encircled the round part of the hotel. Soldiers were standing and smoking. Perhaps she could try there.

Sliding from patch of growth to pile of broken tile to heap of cleared growth—they had spruced up the hotel for the conference, it seemed—she drew close enough to distinguish the facial hair on the guards.

Fading back into the hillside, step by careful step she headed for the lower lands south of the hotel. The wide road running up to the parking entrance divided the hotel from a rather overgrown garden and some kind of outbuildings that had trees growing out the broken windows. The garden smelled like sweet rot, and she instantly identified the smell of death.

She crossed the road with an easy stride, hoping that she would be seen only at a distance and mistaken for someone with business at the hotel, then quickly took shelter beneath a picturesque bench ringing an oak. None of the men on the porch gave any indication that they’d seen her; their eyes were light-blinded.

A crunching step approached. Heavy boots with the measured
tread of a cop walking his beat. Her back burned with the fear of a Reaper, but she glanced up and saw a mustachioed face. A Reaper could no more grow a beard than achieve an erection. Probably a southerner, then. Ordnance soldiers were almost all clean-shaven.

He glanced at the men on the balcony, unzipped, and urinated on a tree root extending from beneath the bench. He whistled a non-tune as he did so, sounding more like he was trying to entertain a bird than form music. She kept her face buried in the soil, feeling the warm splatter strike her hair.

She heard a sharp intake of breath. She looked up and saw the surprise and embarrassment in his eyes.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Warmest I’ve been all night.”

Rolling and lashing up, she caught him with the handle of her sword-stick in the solar plexus. His breath came out with a whoosh as muscles involuntarily contracted. So much for a scream for help.

Not wanting blood, she rose and struck again, this time across the back of his neck. That put him on the ground, giving her a moment to unloop the nylon cord around her wrist, slide its falsely decorative beads out of the way, and finish him quietly by strangulation.

Sorry, sport,
she thought.
Shit luck for both of us
.

She heard laughter from the balcony.

Some of her clan relished swapping stories of Kurian atrocities. They tried to convince one another that their victims deserved their fate, that justice was being done. She held to no such illusions. The moment he saw her it was her life or his, and she intended to keep on living—at least through the death of another Kurian or two.

If she just left the body there, it would be a fine starting point for trackers.

With an effort, she lifted him into a fireman’s carry and tottered across the road, as far outside the paired decorative streetlamps as she could manage. She staggered to the hedges surrounding the outbuilding.

She followed her nose to the death smell. It was strong… and she was approaching it from upwind.

She burst through a hedge and almost fell into a long trench. The bottom was lined with bled-out bodies, mostly older specimens. She saw a half-closed stomach scar on one younger specimen—the victim of a botched operation, it seemed. All the bodies near her except the one with the cut above the appendix bore the distinctive tongue marks of a Reaper at the base of the neck or in the upper rib cage.

“Holy mother—,” she began, then clamped her hand over her mouth and nose.

She set the body down as quietly as she could.

A growl sounded from the hedge line behind her. She froze, searched out of the corner of her eye.

A dog and a handler stood thirty feet away, peering into the darkness. The dog was alert to her, but the handler couldn’t see her in the night shadow.

She flowed down into the body pit at the speed of molasses running on a hot day. The dog whined and pulled.

The bodies were soft and rotting.

The handler raised a flashlight and cast the beam of light carefully into the darkness where she’d been squatting a moment before. She pulled her sword-stick tight into the crook of her arm and covered it with the withered leg of an old man. He had bristly hair.

The beam of light passed over her, resting on her breast for just a moment. In the glare, her own healthy flesh wouldn’t be markedly different from the flesh of the bodies.

The dog padded forward, leading the man holding its leash. It sniffed about and snorted in disgust.

The body of the guard she’d dropped drew the handler, following the beam of his flashlight, which had caught the Ordnance insignia, a sort of elongated pentagon—a stylized capital “O.”

Slithering with sword-stick cradled, she approached across the bodies. The corpses made noises like sponges.

The handler drew something shiny from his pocket, attached to a short lanyard. A whistle. Its sound could carry a mile or more.

She sprang upward, drawing her blade from the stick. “Help me!”

Arms out and open as though pleading, or rushing to embrace him, she ran forward.

He was having none of it. He put the whistle to his lips—

But no air would enter it. She’d opened his throat at the center of his Adam’s apple, the blade slicing as neatly through the nylon cord of the whistle’s lanyard as it did the cartilage and tissue of his neck.

He toppled, a confused look frozen on his face.

“Hssssss!” she hissed at the dog. It ran toward the outbuildings, dragging its leash.

Even better,
she thought grimly as she hid the bodies under layers of Reaper waste.
One dead or missing man would inspire a careful search. Two would be enough of a mystery that the search would concentrate on the missing men rather than a wiry, scuffed-up redhead
.

She retrieved her pack from her cache on the hillside and put
as much timber and earth as she could between herself and the Kurians.

She dug a shallow pit with her folding camp shovel and surrounded it with the flattest rocks she could take from a watercourse. She set her sole tin pot atop it and started boiling the beans she’d been soaking. It wasn’t an ideal stove, but just as practical as a campfire, and you could see the flicker of flame only by standing over it.

With a little wild mushroom, her beans, honey, and a piece of bacon for flavor it made a decent stew.

A familiar soft step crept up on her campsite.

“You didn’t see the fire, did you?” she asked.

“Smelled your stew,” said Clay, the Wolf who’d crossed the Hoosier forest with her two days ago. “Why aren’t you camping at our rendezvous?”

“I did check it—through my optics. You must have been away. I didn’t remain. Left you a note in the drop that I’d check back for you or another note. If a Reaper grabbed you and started removing digits, there might be a little welcoming party at the spot.”

“The idea doesn’t seem to bother you that much,” Clay said. Poor kid. He’d been a little squirrely ever since they woke snuggled up to each other against the night’s spring chill. He’d brushed her breast, pretending it was an accident. When she didn’t respond, he didn’t press the matter, thank heaven.

Silly. She didn’t do recreational sex, not on a job, not with a comrade. She’d fucked and sucked her way into a few headquarters and pass-only Quisling “Green Zones,” but that was business, not distraction.

The Wolf was just a kid. But then, most of them looked like kids to her these days. God, she wasn’t even that old, just into her thirties.

She liked Wolves. They used their eyes, ears, and noses, and fought only when they had no choice, or a strong advantage. They could run all day on a few mouthfuls of porridge.

Wolves listened to reason. Bears did whatever the fuck would lead to the most blood.

She let the kid finish and light his pipe. He looked like a boy playing with his father’s tobacco stand. The pipe had a long plastic stem and the bowl was a rather elegantly carved animal face that she supposed was meant to be a fox; the snout was way too narrow and the ears too wide to be a wolf. The tobacco was rather noxious cheap Kurian Zone ration compared to the rich, aromatic Carolina import that Colonel Lambert, the leader of Southern Command forces in the Kentucky Theater, smoked.

They chatted about what the weather promised over the next few days, and then she broke the news.

“You’ll have to run again, I’m afraid, and find Brigade HQ. The hotel is worth hitting with everything we can put onto it.”

His eyes flared. Eagerness? The Wolf’s buckskin leathers meant he had nothing to prove, at least not to anyone who’d seen his breed cover thirty miles in a day, running and shooting all the way. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Clay said.

“If you’re going to be running all night, I thought it best that you do it on a full stomach.”

“I didn’t have to kill an hour smoking… .”

“Maybe you didn’t, but your digestion did. Take it from me, kid.
I’ve struggled with a sour gut for years. Never eat a big meal unless you can rest for a bit after.”

“I could have made the run on an empty stomach,” Clay said.

“You never know when you’ll need that strength, and you’ll be all the faster for it. Get out of here,” she said.

“And tell the major to hurry,” she called at the retreating back.