by E. E. Knight
"Never had the opportunity. Unless you count some classes at a shoestring war college. They didn't give out souvenirs."
Her sons helped her sit down on a bench. The assembly took their seats on chairs ringing the main room of the tiny house. Except for Ahn-Kha. The bench he tried let out such a groan that he shifted his buttocks forward to a comfortable squat with the bench as a backrest.
Obay looked down at her ring. "I was doing an internship in Boston when the Ravies hit. I ended up on a cleanup crew behind a guard unit. Loading bodies. Even martial law was breaking down-it didn't look like there'd be bar exams for a while. I saw the ring on a body-he had a suit worth a good three thousand dollars-and thought, what the hell."
"Boston's a long way from Jamaica."
"My father. Pulled every string with every man he'd ever known."
"Did he make it out with you?"
"He didn't even try. The airport was a nightmare. Gun battles between Boston Police and Massachusetts State Troopers and the National Guard. Nobody had orders. People crying, begging. I saw a man shoot himself right in front of his family."
She related her story without the shocked, vacant look that Valentine had seen on so many survivors of those days.
"I got flown down here with a bunch of children in a jet with enough fuel for a one-way trip. I guess there was a rumor that Jamaica was Ravies-free. A lot of the kids were sitting two and three to a seat. Babies crying. It was a frightening ride. The bombs were going off by then, and planes were dropping from the electromagnetic pulse. There was an army captain on board. Talked me and the kids through it. We ended up married just before I had my first boy."
She looked at the man in the vestments. Now that Valentine knew her face, he saw a hint of Obay around the son's eyes.
"Your visions are pretty accurate. A law firm could have used that, predicting a judge's decisions."
"Oh, that came later. Wasn't something I was born with. Given to me. I suspect you know a few Lifeweavers, too."
Valentine said nothing.
"One came to Jamaica. He had a small group of men-I suppose they were some kind of Special Forces. A mixture of Americans and British and Cuban soldiers, I think, going by the flags on the uniforms. The visit was brief; he was being chased."
The light broke through Valentine's doubts.
"I didn't understand much of what he had to say. I never even learned his name. Everyone called him 'the Brother.' It made him sound like a Mormon or an Amish or whoever that was that called each other that. Then I found out he was more like The Brother from Another Planet. He said I was going to be part of a new communications network. A biological one. They had me drink some kind of goop out of a tequila bottle, and I passed out for a few hours. When I came around, the Brother character was speaking in my head. Soon as he saw I was alive and getting his words without him using his mouth, he started glowing and told the rest 'Obey her.' Pointing at me, you see. Then he and the soldiers left. It made an impression on the kids. Everyone kept looking at me and repeating 'Obey.' Duane, my captain, had us go into a town in the mountains.
"Whatever he did to me, it didn't quite take, at least in the way you'd think telepathy should work. I get strange images now and then. Visions, pictures-sounds sometimes. Just had an audio last week with a lot of gunfire and explosions. The vision about you, it was a gray ship that seemed to be made of thunderclouds, and I saw your face, clear as I see it now. Your friend, Mr. Ahn-Kha, he was part of the clouds, too, with lightning in his eyes and fingertips."
"What do you see for the future?"
"Nothing from the Brother. But the men my sons lead will take care of their end, if your ships can help us with the garrison in Kingston."
"Dey come. Dey come tomorrow, Obay," Utari said.
"And then what?" Valentine asked.
Obay looked at the ceiling. The island's panoply absorbed her for a moment; then she returned her eyes to Valentine. "A new Jamaica. For all the factions, I hope and pray. With the Specter gone, even the Cockpit Country might see reason."
"And you?"
Obay played with her ring, twirling it on the shrunken digit between the enlarged knuckles. "Might end up using the old law studies before I die after all. What kind of constitution do you folks operate under there in the Ozarks?"
"They're landing now."
Valentine looked down from his perch on a rooftop water tower at Kingston in turmoil. Two days after the death of the Specter, the Thunderbolt and a pair of three-mast clippers sailed into the harbor as though in a naval show. All three ships were filled to overflowing with every willing man of the commodore's who could shoulder a rifle.
Faint booms came up from the docks. The Thunderbolt's gun systematically blasted the harbor defenses. The posts were manned by the few troops still obeying orders under the Horsed Police officer. According to the Kernels, a Horsed Police officer named Colonel Hsei had tried to take control of the Specter's organization.
Valentine and Ahn-Kha, through their Kingston contacts, probably knew more about Hsei's struggle to assume the reins than the warlord himself. Formerly in charge of the city's garrison, the colonel managed to keep many of his troops together, even as the Public Police vanished into the countryside. Valentine had to admire Hsei's execution, if not his methods. A storeroom beside the regimental stables held the bodies of rivals and subordinates who failed to agree with his plan for Jamaica's future.
The same grapevine passed word to the inhabitants of Kingston that with the arrival of the ships, the north side of the island would finish the liberation of the south. The sons of Obay guided Valentine and Ahn-Kha to the city, and the Jamaicans filled rooms and streets with men and women eager to meet "the Crying Man" who had delivered them from the Specter. As they moved from village to city, time after time Valentine felt the touch of eager hands, as if physical contact with him somehow guaranteed their freedom.
Now buildings burned, and the clatter of hooves and echoing shots told the tale of the rising city. Ever since Valentine's arrival, machete and club had been matched against horse and gun, but without the Specter's organization and Reapers, Hsei's command had begun to crack. The booming arrival of the Thunderbolt and the commodore's flotilla turned confusion into collapse.
Valentine, Ahn-Kha, and a group of armed Jamaicans had occupied what in the late world had been a professional building of some kind. It was three stories of whitewashed brick, with broad balconies servicing the network of rooms inside. Until the Specter's death, it had been a barracks of the Public Police. Valentine chose it for its view of the city and of the main road north out of town. Equally useful for holding up reinforcements or Colonel Hsei's troops, its strategic location demanded occupation with what forces he could organize. The enthusiastic Jamaicans, led by men and women who had sprung seemingly from nowhere, had barricaded the highway before the building and lined the railings of the balconies with mattresses and furniture. Anyone trying to pass along the highway would hit the choke point and come under gunfire at a range that made skill superfluous.
Ahn-Kha looked out across the rooftops from beneath a straw hat and canvas parasol. Despite his fawn-colored fur and thick hide, he suffered from Jamaica's sun more than his bronze-skinned friend. They stood together on a tiny platform running around the edges of a rooftop watertower supplying the barracks.
"And the police, my David? How are they reacting?"
Valentine watched the Thunderbolt spit fire from her Oerlikon into a rusted crane, one of the harbor's few strong-points still fighting. A body, ant-size at the distance, plummeted from the tower.
"They're running. Looks like they have a dock secured. Polaris and Vega are being tied up to the docks-they didn't even have to send in boats. It's almost over."
"But not for us."
The Cat turned his gaze to the captain's compound. "It looks like Hsei has seen enough. Two trucks are being loaded up at headquarters. Horses too. Hell, they're firing into the mob again. Wait-yes, they are coming
this way. The informants were right-he's going to run north toward the mountain stations. Better get your Grogs to the windows."
The Golden One picked up his long gun and moved to the roof-access ladder. Valentine watched the column for another minute, just to make certain of its direction. Hsei's men had perhaps been unnerved. The group leaving the barracks was as much of a mob as the Jamaicans hurling rocks from the alleys.
He swung down from the water tower and jumped to the gravel-covered roof, careful to land on his good leg. The work ahead would be bloody; he hoped it would be brief. Allowing Colonel Hsei to escape into the countryside with even a nucleus of armed men might mean trouble for the commodore and the Jamaicans in the days ahead; it would take weeks to organize an occupation of the various stations, forts, and barracks strung out across the Specter's lands. In the meantime, others might rally around the colonel.
Picking up his old Russian-made gun with its drum clip, he hurried down to the first floor. Grinning Jamaicans all around brandished their weapons and called out to him in their local patois. He understood only a phrase or two.
"D' dundus comin', mon?"
"We cut dey bakra asses now!"
Valentine nodded to their officer and went out to the front of the building. He and Ahn-Kha walked the balconies, cutting a serpentine trail down to the first floor, nodding and clapping the Jamaicans on the shoulder. "Keep down and wait for the horn!" he said, over and over again until it became as much of a singsong as their greetings.
He looked out at the barricade from the first floor, where Ahn-Kha's Grogs waited, covering the street from the windows and doors of the front of the building. What had been a parking lot sloped down to the highway. Carts and wreckage had been arranged to force any traffic moving up the road to negotiate a hairpin turn. Valentine wanted the obstacle to look to be the result of accident rather than design, so Hsei would stick his neck well into the trap before it snapped shut.
Valentine knelt behind the walkway barricade and searched southward with his hard ears. He picked up the sound of diesels and hooves. He nodded to Ahn-Kha, who had been walking back and forth in front of his Grogs, grunting out orders as he moved along the sidewalk fronting the shuttered windows. Ahn-Kha picked up a tarnished circular horn, an ancient foxhunting relic from Jamaica's colonial past. It had been gathering cobwebs on the wall of the barracks until one of the Grogs decided it would make an interesting headband.
The first horses reached the barricade, galloping pell-mell up the potholed road. Some fools fired from one of the upper levels, but neither the riders nor the horses took hit or heed. A horse vaulted over the frame of a broken sofa, unseating its rider. Valentine let the others pass and chambered a round in the PPD.
The first of the mass of riders trotted into view, coming up over a rise in the road like ships appearing over the horizon. Behind the clattering riders came the grinding gears of the two trucks and the higher pitched farting of a motorbike. Ahn-Kha barked something to his Grogs.
"Wait for the signal," Valentine said, loudly enough so it would carry to the balcony above him.
"Wait," he repeated.
The riders approached.
"Wait."
The Horsed Police slowed their horses to a walk as they saw the obstacles.
"Wait."
Now he could see the trucks: beds crammed with equipment, furnishings, and loot. Women and children, probably families of some of the Horsed Police, rode atop and among the cargo. Corrugated aluminum welded over the doors and windows protected the driver and passenger. A motorcycle with a sidecar puttered before the big diesels, but the sidecar held only a mound of possessions rather than a passenger ready to fire the machine gun mounted there. More soldiers jogged amongst the mob, already panting and casting aside their weapons in an effort to keep up with engines and horses. Strained, anxious faces in a dozen different skin tones looked warily at the partially blocked road and to the buildings at either side.
The vanguard of horsemen did not like what they saw and called to their fellows, drawing rifles and shotguns from saddle sheaths.
Valentine nodded at Ahn-Kha, who blew into the circular horn. Its wavering wail filled the air.
Wide-shouldered Grogs filled the windows and doors of the first floor of the barracks. Valentine heard shots crack from above. Horses screamed and plunged as their riders turned tail, fell out of the saddle, or dismounted by flinging themselves to the ground.
Valentine dropped two uniformed Jamaicans shouting orders. The PPD chattered out its harsh coda as he aimed short bursts into the crowd. Ahn-Kha methodically fired his rifle into the aluminum-covered cabins of the vehicles. The .50-caliber rounds blasted thumb-size holes in the plating and slumped the drivers within.
Cartridges fell like brassy hail from the balconies above as the Jamaicans emptied their weapons into the mob.
The motorcycle roared to life. Its uniformed rider gunned it, expertly swerved around dying horses and between the barricades. The cyclist threw his hips off the saddle to counterweight the tight slalom. The colorful insignia on the rider's uniform tipped Valentine to his identity: Hsei. He fired a burst but missed the racing figure.
"Ahn-Kha! The motorcycle!" he shouted.
Ahn-Kha stood and took a round from his mouth. In battle, the Grog kept cartridges in his lips, tucked into his flexible ears, and between his knuckles. He closed the breech of his gun, sighted, and fired. The bullet's impact threw the rider bodily into the motorcycle's handlebars. The bike spun sideways and crashed.
One truck, its driver dead, went nose-first into the ditch at the side of the highway. Riders and cargo tumbled forward and out. The truck behind halted, dead horses blocking its path.
Jamaicans flooded the street, wielding improvised weapons. Some grabbed the unwounded horses and ran off, leading their prizes. Others leapt into the trucks, looking for booty. But most of the mob concentrated their energies on the hated Horsed Police.
"Cease fire!" Valentine yelled, fearing any more firing would do more harm than good. At a word from Ahn-Kha, the Grogs put up their smoking guns.
Years of death and brutal treatment resulted in ugly scenes in the street. Whole and wounded Horsed Police, their hands raised in surrender, fell victim to the mob. A few Jamaicans flung themselves over the wounded and protected them from the clubs and knives with their own flesh, but the mob merely sought other targets. Valentine heard women's screams and saw some of the Horsed Police's children caught up in the mob's fury. A child fell under a club, skull opened and yellow-gray brains spilling to the pavement.
He shouldered his way into the crowd, stepping over bodies of the dead and dying, and jumped on the cab of the second truck. He fired his gun in the air.
"Enough!" he yelled, putting every decibel his body could produce into the bellow.
Ahn-Kha grabbed a horse, threw off its saddle, and mounted. He led his Grogs into the fray. The spectacle of the strange, apelike creatures distracted the mob enough for Valentine to get their attention. Eyes turned to Valentine and the Grogs.
"Enough!" he shouted, forcing a grin to his face. "The time of death is over!"
The mob turned from rage to celebration. Jamaicans joined Valentine atop the truck, waving their arms and calling out to their fellows.
"Free!" "Death is dead!" "Death is over!" came the cries.
Something gave way inside the exhausted Cat. He stood in the celebrating throng, shaking with exhaustion and emotion. He realized his head hurt; the sun struck his eyes like knives. He summoned a few Jamaicans and began to carry the surviving wounded into the shelter of the barracks. As his hands grew sticky with sweat and blood, he thought of the clean sea.
Chapter Six
Hispaniola, April: The largest island of the Caribbean has a record of woe. The rugged land remembers only moments of peace in its long history of strife and sorrow. Rule by colonial aristocrats, despots, corporations, or military dictatorships made no difference to the impoverished inhabitants. The new bos
s, as the twentieth-century song said, was much the same as the old one. The passage of the Kurians across their green island made the rest of their unhappy past a mere warm-up for the horrors to come.
The island's role as one of the first gateways of the Kur's invasion shrank the populace from the millions to the thousands. When the Kurians arrived, their Reapers hunted down the Hispaniolans in even the most remote villages on their way north, south, and west. The few slaughter-shocked inhabitants of the island remember these years in oral tradition as "La Fiesta de Diablos."
The beauty of the island stands in contrast to the ugliness of its history. Royal palms tower over empty towns, vanishing under a carpet of leafy vines. Nature left to itself covered the eroded scars left by charcoal gatherers in a dozen years. Cackling colonies of birds flit from enormous palm to enormous palm over an ocean of lesser trees and creepers. Gulls and sandpipers congregate on empty beaches, nesting in washed-up fishing boats. Further inland, wild dogs and pigs hunt and root through new and thriving forests.
What civilization there is exists on the east side of the island, where the Kurian families rule a retinue of Quislings from the gray ziggurat of the Columbus lighthouse. A few coastal communities dot the perimeter of the island, sending tribute to the Dark Lords in the east. Their combined Reapers hunt farther inland, or land here and there along the coast in search of auras. Perhaps something of the spirit of Columbus has entered the Santo Domingo Kurians, for they are some of the few who venture into the sea in ships in their predatory wanderings along Hispaniola 's long coastline. The appearance of the Kurian "Drakkar" sends whole towns fleeing into the mountains.
It was not a bad storm; the Caribbean sees far worse during hurricane season. The spring storm lashing the channel in between Hispaniola and Cuba made up in bluster for what it lacked in size.
Valentine watched Captain Carrasca on the Thunderbolt's bridge. A knotted rope and a stick, in a curious mix of hairstyle and seamanship, restricted her thick hair to the back of her head. She stood next to the wheel, bending first one knee and then the other as she rolled with the ship's motion like a slow metronome, owlish eyes watching the storm.