March in Country (7 page)
Authors: EE Knight
Champers had an engineer’s mind. He adjusted to new factors quickly and settled on an efficient course of action. He’d argue for a new location for the tower’s foundation. If they listened and switched, it would mean a week’s delay or more. If they overrode him, he could arrange for an accident that would prove his original objection.
Meanwhile, Valentine would organize a breakout for the misfit construction camp.
With the woman named Carrie, he didn’t seem so much the tanned accountant, more the attentive boyfriend. She needed it. Perhaps it was the strain of being assaulted in the shower and tied up showing, but she seemed terrified by the idea.
At the very least, Valentine decided, the works might be delayed until they could return with more forces. Then, if the Control put enough troops around Center City to meet an unknown threat, they’d have to weaken elsewhere. His companies or the Army of Kentucky could hit a weak spot then and really pour some fat into the fire.
Carrie had a hundred questions, but Valentine wasn’t willing to answer any of them.
“He’s trusting us on our end. We’ll have to trust him on his,” Champers said.
They worked out a dead letter drop, using a coffeepot in the garbage dump, shook hands, and wished each other luck.
“Honestly, how far can you set them back?” Valentine asked as he put his hand on the door.
The accountant look came back into his eyes. “Six weeks. Eight if they’re careless with inspecting the heavy equipment after we’ve run.”
Valentine wondered how much his battalion and the Army of Kentucky could accomplish in that time.
Well, he was but a major. The higher-ups would have to decide what to do about the Georgia Control.
He hurried away into the overcast night, around the garbage pit and under the wire fence, recovered rifle cradled in his arms. Just in case.
The light went on in the trailer’s bedroom again. Maybe they were releasing nervous tension together.
“More power to you, hard hat,” Valentine said, safe beyond the wire.
Of course, safe, anywhere near the Kurian Zone, was a relative term. Valentine’s hair rose—a sure sign of a nearby Reaper.
He didn’t know where he got the gift of sensing them. Perhaps he’d been born with it. Some of the other things he could do came from the Lifeweavers, humanity’s extraterrestrial allies against their Kurian cousins. His night vision, sense of smell, reflexes, healing—there were others who had been enhanced better than he. But he’d never met another Wolf, or Cat, or Bear who could tell by a cold feeling at the back of the head that a Reaper was nearby.
It was up on the hill. Near where he was supposed to meet Duvalier.
He risked a run, hoping the guards in the towers weren’t looking his way with night vision.
Panting and dragging his bad leg, he made it to the crest of the hill. The brush was lighter up here.
Duvalier approached, hands shoved in the pockets of her big duster, smiling. Her sword staff was tucked under her arm like a swagger stick.
He held up a clenched fist—danger!
Was she drunk? Crazy? She ignored him, still shuffling forward as though trying to make as much noise in the soggy leaves as possible.
A black figure exploded out of the trees, running for her.
Too late, Duvalier turned.
She screamed. Not her battle cry, half wildcat screech and half foxhunt yelp, this was a shriek of pure terror.
The Reaper put long pale fingers around Duvalier’s arms. It lifted her. She kicked futilely at its kneecaps and crotch.
“Hey!” Valentine broke cover, waving his arms, anything to get it off Duvalier. “You! Over here!”
It opened its mouth. Duvalier managed to get a hand up to ward off the coming tongue—
The Reaper jerked back as though kicked in the head by a Grog. It fell with her, one arm still gripping skin so deeply blood welled up like a pitchfork thrust into rain-soaked soil.
Adrenals on fire in the small of his back he ran up, parang and .45 out, noise of the shots be damned, in time to see Duvalier sawing at the dead Reaper’s forearm tendons with her own camp utility knife. Released from the death grip, she stood up and turned to meet him.
“You have your talk?” she panted, smiling.
Seeing red and needing a fight, he resisted an impulse to slap her. “What was that, letting a Reaper grab you?”
“Val, that was a hyperalert Reaper. I saw him come out of camp. He was feeling fine and ready for a night in the bush. His master must be somewhere nearby to have such a good connection. Hope he felt it wherever those squids keep their appetite. Just a sec—”
She vomited up watery bile. “That’s better.”
Duvalier had suffered for years from what she called a “delicate stomach.” A combination of bad water and worse food while wandering the Great Plains meant that anything stronger than rice and stewed chicken gave her indigestion.
Valentine scanned the horizon three hundred sixty degrees, looking for something that might serve as a Kurian tower. “How did you kill it?”
She stuck the blade of her camp knife into its jaws, pried them open a little wider. The Reaper’s stabbing tongue flopped sideways, like a broke-back snake smashed by a rock. With the jaws held open, Duvalier reached in and pulled out a blade about the size of a largish pen. It had a triangular base and narrowed to a fine point.
“Nasty little pigsticker Chieftain rigged for me.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed the spring-loaded holder for a stiletto. “You have to hit a button. I’m glad he grabbed me by the upper arms instead of the wrists.”
“I should think so,” Valentine said, good and mad.
“Spit, the stick up your ass must like it there, I can hear it getting longer. I had it under control, Val. I’ve been hunting these dickless assholes longer than you. Stinkbait here thought I was easy pickins.”
Valentine massaged his sore leg. “Thanks for the heart attack.”
“Your heart! Ha. You’re a little soft between the ears, and I can’t speak for what’s between your legs, never having been with you in the Biblical sense, but I think that heart of yours is unharmed and untouched as ever. You’re all cold blood and hot steel, like those killer robots in the old whatchacallit we saw at the movie palace in New Orleans.”
Valentine was examining the Reaper’s dress. It wore a tight-fitting jumpsuit that reminded him of the padding a baseball umpire wore over his chest. It was almost stylized. The monk’s robe look wasn’t popular in Atlanta, it seemed.
“What’s next, Val?” Duvalier asked.
“We strip your kill here. The material and the fangs will be worth something to the smugglers or the Kentuckians. Then we head back for Fort Seng and deliver the bad news. Georgia is on the march.”
CHAPTER THREE
Odds and Sods: As it ages, any large institution develops quiet filtering areas where less useful or odd-fitting pieces wash up, to be either sluiced out of the prospector’s pan or picked out for some more useful activity. In a well-run organization, these pools are managed so that those in them perform activity that’s at least marginally useful.
In a more sclerotic bureaucracy, those who find themselves in such filter pockets may moulder away quietly until retirement, in happy or unhappy obscurity depending on temperament, devoting most of their time and talent to making a more comfortable barnacle shell for themselves.
Sometimes, out of a mixture of talent and boredom, an individual will energize the sluice.
Fort Seng, just south of Evansville, Indiana, in the early days of what soon would be the Kentucky Free Alliance, was that sort of place. Fort Seng was remarkable in its organizational gravity. It served as a swamp not for one such organization, but for three.
By designation, it was under control of Southern Command, the military arm of a welded-together federation of states resisting the Kurian Order called the United Free Republics. The UFR encompasses a region from Southern Missouri to Texas north of Houston, somewhat protected by the vastness and emptiness of the plains to the west and the Mississippi River to the east. Southern Command’s operations in Kentucky have received all the attention a butt-cheek boil would on a patient in the midst of coronary surgery.
A fresh face and set of strategic outlooks in the form of LieutenantGeneral Martinez has a large staff evaluating all of Southern Command’s operations with an eye toward improving conditions, training, and chains of command. Martinez assumed overall command with a mandate from the newly elected president to prevent another in a series of expensive disasters that have dogged Southern Command since the mad dash through Texas at the birth of the UFR. Martinez has put Southern Command into a “defensive stance,” devoting his energies to consolidating what has already been won and giving his forces muchneeded time to refit and rest.
Commander-in-Chief Martinez has a few career graveyards for those who don’t toe the new line. Fort Seng is one of them. It’s too far away to be within his new, more defensible map of “chords and arcs.” Withdrawal is not in the political cards, as the previous year’s trek across Kentucky in an attempt to establish a new freehold in the Appalachians was a partial success, ending with a victory outside Evansville that inspired much of Kentucky’s populace to rebel against the Kurians. With bodies of both Southern Command’s soldiers and their legworm-riding allies scattered across last-year’s battlefields, the United Free Republics aren’t yet ready to forget about the smouldering embers of Operation Javelin that had lit a flame of revolt across Kentucky.
For the city of Evansville, a modest industrial town lately pried from the Kentucky Northwest Ordnance, Fort Seng is another sort of destination. The city has survived a dreadful shakeout. Kurian loyalists have fled elsewhere, and the factories and workshops fed by Ohio River traffic are short raw materials and components for their new duties in equipping Kentucky’s forces in the field. Half the population has been reduced to survivalist farming in little garden and parkland plots, fish hatcheries in polluted water diverted from the Ohio, or keeping chickens and pigs in abandoned housing and the rest are underemployed and growing poorer and more ragged by the day. Some have “called quits” and crossed the river seeking work around Fort Seng, where even that trickle of funds and supplies General Martinez allows his Kentucky garrison is enough to attract the desperate.
Oddly enough, Southern Command scrip, the military currency disparaged throughout the United Free Republics and only accepted by most merchants at a highly disadvantageous exchange rate for macro-and microeconomic reasons that would make too lengthy a digression for our purposes, but which boil down to “can’t buy jack in the here and now” is the common currency.
One might even say this stretch of Kentucky is a last chance for a few in the Kurian Zone as well. There are those who find escaping to Kentucky’s Jackson Purchase easier than the long trek to the United Free Republics or the dangerous run across the Great Lakes for the deep north woods outside the Kurian Windsor-Toronto-Montreal Belt. They’re valuable citizens, if they make it. Escaping across the Northwest Ordnance or through the military concentrations of the Nashville and Atlanta Kurians ensures that only the most careful, healthy, and intelligent make it. Once installed, they work hard to overcome the usual shortcomings of a Kurian Zone upbringing: near illiteracy, habits of blending in so as not to attract attention, and instinctive avoidance of authority figures.
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