by EE Knight
“Do the engines circle over the tower?”
Duvalier switched from the alleged sausages to more reliable—and digestible—toast. “No, they went off and came back.”
“Could be they’re getting ready for a raid of their own. I think we’d better see if Gamecock can send half his Bears to back up the Wolves,” Valentine said. He had better report this to Lambert right after breakfast.
When the women finished their food and left, Valentine told Ahn-Kha about his people.
Lambert held an officer’s call over dinner that night. She passed the word that she wanted to talk about the threat from the Georgia Control.
They use the old formal dining room of the mansion. The woodwork here was left untouched by Southern Command whittlers, probably because all the ornate decor reminded them of a funeral parlor.
Ahn-Kha came along and brought an appetite, but couldn’t fit his legs under the table, so he sat on a window bench and looked out over the east lawn of the mansion. A headquarters rooster led his hens in an exploration of the terraced landscape.
The lamb and spring potatoes with rosemary were good. For dessert, they had hand-cranked ice cream. Valentine avoided the wine and had a stainless tumbler full of milk.
“I find,” Lambert said, when the dessert and small talk over coffee began to drag, “that it’s easier to solve a problem if you can define it. Anyone want to take a shot at defining the problem?”
By tradition, heads turned toward the junior officer, who was usually allowed to speak first. Valentine suspected that the tradition predated Southern Command. It prevented the lower ranks from keeping silent during a meeting and just agreeing with the superiors.
Glass, now the Sergeant Major for the entire battalion, attended the officer’s call for reasons of courtesy and efficiency.
“Atlanta’s moving in on Kentucky,” Ediyak said, speaking as the junior.
“Anyone heard otherwise?” Lambert asked.
The staff sat silent.
“Okay, the buildup isn’t a feint so they can take over Nashville and Memphis. But why do they think they can move on us?” Lambert asked.
“The Army of Kentucky’s still putting itself back together after that ravies outbreak,” Captain Patel said. “The legworm ranchers are tough enough when they have to be, but they’ve got communities and families to think about. They can only play guerilla part of the year.”
Valentine remained silent. He had an oddly defined role at the fort—on Southern Command’s paperwork he was a corporal of the militia, but in practice he was the executive officer for operations. Everyone called him “Major” and kept up the appearances, despite the fact that his career had been permanently broken by a court-martial verdict years ago. He had some ideas of where Lambert and Ediyak were taking this meeting—they’d quietly consulted his opinion—but while he had an idea of the strategy, the tactics to be employed were still a mystery to him.
Still, he had a role to play. They hadn’t exactly fed him his line, but it was time to put in his discussional ante.
“What keeps the Kurians from doing the same thing in Arkansas or Texas?” Valentine asked.
“Southern Command,” Patel said.
“More than that,” Valentine said. “The populace living there. Every village has some sort of militia. They’re armed and the guards have special dedicated support units to show up with the mortars and machine guns. It keeps the Kurians from doing anything beyond small terror raids. In the Kurian Zone, the poor bastards are subject peoples, as likely to help enemies as inform on them. In the Republic, the locals will break out the machine guns and dynamite if they think there’s a Reaper in the neighborhood.”
Which can be bad enough. Valentine’s first blood in the Free Territories had been in such an incident, in the little town of Weening.
“Why hasn’t the Ordnance moved against Evansville? Because there are ten thousand adults there being organized to fight if they have to. The Ordnance lost the Moondaggers to us, some good assault troops to that ravies outbreak, and their garrisons don’t dare concentrate too much or they might lose land to a rival Kurian. They can’t arm their people in the same ratio that we can, or they’ll risk a revolt. The Grogs are sick of dying for them, except for the ones that can be trained like dogs and a few elite units under close supervision.”
“What we need is an instant population,” Lambert said.
Valentine thought of an old Warner Bros. cartoon he’d seen at the theater in Pine Bluff. A little alien had run around sprinkling seeds with water, growing big bird creatures. He once thought that the Kurians probably had a similar system for growing Reapers, but he’d learned in his search for Gail Post that they used human females who possessed some kind of special genetic marker.
“Ex-soldiers from Southern Command would be my choice,” Patel said, after swallowing his usual after-dinner tablets of aspirin. He had bad knees, and popped the white caplets morning, noon, and night. “Some guard vet, has his twenty years and five hundred acres—or better yet an ex-Wolf. I could put the word out.”
“There aren’t enough ex-Wolves in all of the Free Republics, even if they all moved,” Lambert said.
“What would it take to occupy the lands between here and the Tennessee?” Ediyak asked. “Maybe Southern Command can offer some kind of bonus for settlers. I know the people in the refugee camp they put me in would jump at the chance to get their own land.”
“We need something like ten thousand,” Lambert said. “At best, there are a thousand Kentuckians from the Gunslinger Clan there now, and that’s counting all the kids and grandparents.”
Glass snorted.
“You have something to add, Sergeant Major?” Lambert asked.
“No, sir,” Glass said.
“I expect he nasalized what we were all thinking,” Valentine said. “Getting ten thousand people to leave the relative safety of the Free Republics and move into Kentucky.”
“The papers haven’t had much good to say about our performance here,” Lambert said. “Kentucky—chaotic, dirty, disease-ridden, nothing but legworm meat to eat. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding back and forth across the state with some obnoxious cousins following behind.”
“Maybe we should give it back,” Patel said, eliciting a few chuckles.
“May I offer a suggestion?” Ahn-Kha said. They’d spent long hours the previous night, looking at each other in the blue darkness talking about his suggestion.
“Of course,” Lambert said. “Err—Valentine, does he have a rank with Southern Command?”
“When I last appeared on the lists, I was a Colonel of Auxiliaries, sir,” Ahn-Kha said. “So even a Southern Command corporal outranks me in combat zones. But I fear my commission is defunct since the unpleasantness following Major Valentine’s legal trouble.”
“You still have your old gift for understatement,” Valentine said. “Just call him Uncle.”
“Your suggestion, Uncle?” Lambert said.
“Two generations ago in my people’s history, we were promised green lands and good stone by the Kurians, once you difficult humans were under control. The Kurians gave us a ruined city poisoned by sun weapons and dry prairie. I’ve seen the limestone all around here and the richness of the land speaks for itself. If you would have my people here, they would gladly come.”
“The Golden Ones,” Lambert said. “I don’t remember how many you had in Omaha.”
“It was some thousands when I left,” Ahn-Kha said. “Fifteen or so.”
“Moving them would be tough,” Patel said. “That’s six hundred miles or thereabouts, most of it covered in Grogs. We don’t have any friends in Missouri or Southern Illinois.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Glass said. “I was involved in the offensive that was supposed to relieve them Groggies. Never got off the ground what with the setbacks in Kansas. They said there were upwards of twenty thousand in the city alone, something like another two thousand outside it.”
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��I’ve been told the Iowans finally took Omaha back,” Valentine said.
“I’ll look into it,” Lambert said. “They’re an awful long way from here, and there’s no direct route across friendly country.”
“What about the Kentuckians?” Patel asked. “How would they feel about nonhuman neighbors setting up? Nothing against you personally, of course, you’re a rare Grog. Most of ’em are unneighborly. Having a colony just around the bend of the river could cause bad blood, between the head-hunting and cattle raids.”
Ahn-Kha’s ears flattened. “Golden Ones don’t rise by being thieves or trophyteers, Mr. Patel. I would not judge you by the behavior of a silverback gorilla.”
“Brother Mark and Major Valentine have the best connections with the Army of Kentucky,” Lambert said, smothering the incipient argument. “What’s your assessment?”
All eyes turned to Valentine. “Hard to say,” he finally said. “I think they’d welcome any allies. They’re a flexible bunch. I think they’d adapt. Out of all of North America, as far as I know, they’re the only ones who made use of legworms. Built a whole culture around them over the years. The Golden Ones are smart, tough, and reasonable—sorry to distill your people into a few words, old horse, but there it is—I think the Kantuck would want ’em.”
“I doubt the Missouri Grogs or the Iowans would appreciate us marching a host of Uncle’s relations through their lands,” Glass said.
“If you could hurry me back to my people, I could sound them out on the matter,” Ahn-Kha said. “I would be eager to be among my own kind again. It’s been many years, and if they are in distress, I should be with them.”
“Let’s at least explore the idea. Major Valentine, you and Ahn-Kha and Ediyak come up with a plan, based on moving twenty thousand civilians. Make it twenty-five—Grogs eat a lot.”
“That’s a college stadium,” Patel said. “Lots of food and water. We’re talking divisional support.”
“We’re wasting our time talking about it, sir,” Glass said to Lambert, though whether he objected to exploring the idea or further chatter was hard to say. Glass was notoriously asocial for such a popular NCO. “Not a whole population. No way we can take that many cross country without killing half of them.”
“I agree. There’s simply no way to move that many civilians,” Patel said. “Not through hostile country.”
“Be easy to do on the river, if we controlled those waters,” Valentine said. “The river takes care of water and sanitation. You could fit a lot of Golden Ones in a barge, for a few days anyway.”
“You might as well have suggested an airlift, sir,” Patel said. “We don’t own any part of the Mississippi, at least not on a permanent basis. The skeeter fleet is strictly hit-and-run. That’s why our supplies and mail, what little we get of it, has to come overland.”
“We need a brown-water navy,” Lambert said.
“Then the question for us is—lease or buy?” Valentine said.
CHAPTER SIX
The Logistics Commandos: What the Ozark Free Republics can’t make, they take. Southern Command has turned scavenging, black market trade, and outright theft into a science. Oftentimes, their toughest veterans retire into the freewheeling Logistics Commandos rather than retire to their allotted acreage and meager pension. Former Wolves and Cats often make the best LCs—they know the Nomansland terrain and the surrounding Kurian Zones and usually have a network of contacts.
In the field, the Logistics Commandos are wild cards, the last reserve of every commander. They’ll follow behind a successful attack, grabbing everything from prisoners and intelligence and truck batteries to dropped weapons, always sorting, always prioritizing. On a retreat, they decide what can be saved and what must be sacrificed. Because nearly all of them are long-service veterans with combat experience, they can fill almost any role in a fight from artillery to signals.
Of course they can be difficult. They have an old soldier’s nose for food and comfort, and the other forces of Southern Command often complain—with justification—that the Logistics Commandos grab all the best beds and let only their scraps of their ample tables and secondrate luxuries reach the rawer hands and newer heels at the front.
“These are the boats?” Lambert said.
“Everything that floats,” Valentine said. He and Ediyak were taking the colonel on a tour of Evansville’s waterfront with the commander of Evansville’s River Guard, an ex-river patroller named Jackson.
Jackson was a very what you see is what you get fellow. He had no office, only a fast, heavy boat with twin machine guns set up on a mount that probably was supposed to be used for sportfishing. He took them on a waterborne tour of the three miles or so of Ohio River that unequivocally belonged to Evansville. The locals had many less-lethal boats, mostly used for ferrying people across the river or east-west travel between a southward loop known as the “west hill” and the heart of the old city to the east. Like many old river towns, its biggest vessel was a derelict casino barge, hollowed of all but the ceiling glitz, now used for sheltering livestock—mostly chickens and pigs—traded to the river traffic.
They had a few barges, coal and corn vessels for the most part, still held together as a city storage reserve. One was even rigged to hold freshwater. A single decrepit tugboat was still in service for pushing them around, if necessary, but by the look of the engine and the part-time crew, it wasn’t up to the job of even getting a single barge to the Mississippi, let alone up it. There was also a smaller tug designed for firefighting. It could, Valentine supposed, be pressed into duty as a barge pusher, but it would need some modifications for tying itself on to a barge train.
There were plenty of men in Evansville with riverboat experience, according to Jackson. Most had fled the Kurian Zone once Evansville became known as a haven, so getting them back on the river and in hostile territory might call for an old-fashioned press-gang. Valentine didn’t like the idea, but it might be their only option.
Jackson gunned his engines and weaved around a sunken wreck of a tug, sending his passengers lurching into each other. The wreck was rather picturesque, if you liked rotting wood and rusty metal. Waterfowl nests covered the wheelhouse roof. In the slack water next to it, the Evansville River Guard’s other battle-ready boat sat, holding on to the wrecked tug with a boat hook, ready to dash out downriver.
A tiny brown-water navy was being put together by the city, mostly to help defend the booms and check approaching barges for enemies. Evansville’s leaders decided their best chance for survival was to allow river traffic up and down the Ohio, provided it wasn’t military supplies or fodder for the Reapers. Corn and coal and dry goods could pass after being checked.
The Kurians were putting extra troops on the “peace marked” barges to discourage deserters.
Valentine wasn’t a fan of “hostile neutrality” or whatever the Evansville town fathers were calling their attitude about river traffic these days, but Southern Command had no business telling civilians how to run their affairs unless bullets were flying.
“Men aren’t the problem,” Jackson said, when they asked him what his capability was to get to the Mississippi junction. For now, grander plans weren’t being discussed, even with someone in the Evansville armed service. “Machinery is. You get me the boats, I could fill them with hands.”
“Can you build them?” Lambert asked.
“Marine motors are the real problem, okay. They have to be tough and reliable. What we have is cannibalized, fifty-year-old gear for the most part. We have plenty of people in Evansville who can steer a boat, read the river, fix an engine. The weapons and combat stuff, on the other hand—”
“Well, we have a lot of men who can do that,” Valentine said.
“River fighting is a little different than on land,” Jackson said. “It starts and finishes very quick. You need men who can put a lot of shit on target—begging your pardon ladies—fast and I mean fast, or you lose boats and the next thing you know you’re swimming i
n an oil slick.”
Lambert sat with them on an airy, upper-floor balcony of the mansion, resting in the quiet after their day on the river. Her bedroom connected with it. It had a nice view to the north.
Duvalier and Frat had joined them for the very informal meeting, as they were talking about the Kurian River Patrol on the Tennessee, who had the nearest brown-water combat craft.
Lambert started off: “Okay, to sum up, crews will be difficult but doable. It’s motors and hulls that are the problem. We can’t build boats, at least not in time, and we can’t buy them and Southern Command, when I asked, said that all forces were allocated.”
“Then we’ll have to steal them,” Valentine said.
Duvalier and Frat’s Wolves knew the ground along the Tennessee best. Ediyak had already assembled their observations into a concise report.
“There’s a cute little rest stop on the river right off the Cadiz inlet,” Duvalier said.
“I think it used to be a training base, before they moved it upriver to Tennessee,” Ediyak said. “According to this week-old Wolf report, there’s a couple of dry-dock ships, a machine tool workshop, a little dispensary still in operation. Respite Point, they call it now. There’s a couple of bars and a brothel in the old base. Very popular with the River Patrol. Not big enough for a Kurian and plenty of fun for the crew while their boats are out of the water being refitted.”
“Hulls, engines, weaponry, that sort of thing?” Valentine asked.
“You bet,” Frat said.
“Garrison?”
“Platoon strength, not even,” Frat said. “Plus whatever of the River Patrol is in camp. The locals are very friendly to the River Patrol and would give warning of a large force.”
“But a small team could make it.”
“Maybe, sir. Doubt if they could hold it for long, though. Respite Point is well guarded,” Frat said. “Upriver, near the Tennessee border, there’s a big River Patrol base. Even if we were able to surprise them and hit it, I doubt we’d get many boats, as they’d scream off into the water as soon as the attack got rolling. Then, even nearer downriver, there’s a big gun fort supporting Cadiz on the other side. Lots of mean ordnance sighted on the river, and three booms you have to weave around. The cables to pull them out of the way lead right into the fort.”