by EE Knight
“Yes, Pellwell?”
“It’s the guys,” she said, referring to her intelligent menagerie. “They say something bad’s coming. They can hear it.”
Valentine switched to his “hard” ears, concentrating on the night air. All he heard were the sounds of musical instruments and dishes being washed up and stacked. Someone was making love rather frantically in the woods above the artillery lot above them.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“You wouldn’t. They can hear outside our range.”
Valentine didn’t wait for her to elaborate. He dashed for the door to headquarters.
“This is Valentine,” he shouted, loud and clear at the com center. “Full alert. No drill.”
The dispirited corporal stood up so fast his plate of congealing beef and french fries hit the ground.
“Kill the lights,” Valentine ran to Operations, the siren sounding.
“Kill the lights,” he repeated, but the men in the operations room had anticipated him. The lights died in the headquarters, dim red battery-operated hand LEDs flickering on at the hallway outlets. Cheap Kurian Zone junk used in their cities during the routine power brownouts, but they worked admirably for a couple of hours.
Now he heard them too. Engines, in the sky. There was a deeper thumping sound, lower and farther to the south. Helicopters.
Air raid.
Valentine had seen this horror before.
The electricity might have died, but the fires were still burning bright out at the barbecue.
Explosions ripped up the barbecue pits as rockets struck. Valentine heard engines roar overhead, caught a quick glimpse of flashing red and green at the wing tips of the propeller craft.
Following the rocket attack, a pair of biplanes, probably converted crop dusters, came in low. They lifted their noses and slowed as they pancaked through the air. Two figures dropped from each plane, off the wings, where they’d been riding like stunting barnstormers.
They hit the ground and rolled, then came up on long legs.
Reapers!
Valentine sidestepped to his woodpile behind headquarters, grabbed the axe he used to split wholes into halves and halves into quarters. The familiar feel of the polished hickory calmed him. With death running loose on the lawn, a piece of sharpened avativism comforted.
He remembered the night on Big Rock Hill when Reapers fell from the sky. They’d been wild ones, deadly to whoever was nearest to where they landed, but vulnerable to skilled hunters once they’d fed on their victim.
But these Reapers moved with purpose. Before, they mindlessly fell on the nearest beating heart. These struck with hands and feet, breaking and ripping without stopping to feed.
The former Quisling troops, who’d had fear of the Reapers put into them along with their mother’s milk, fell into absolute panic. Valentine ran forward.
“Get guns, knives, anything!” he called, keeping some fleeing men off the steps up to headquarters with the handle of the axe. “Swarm ’em! Douse them with gasoline! Anything!”
Valentine had flashbacks to the night the Twisted Cross came for the Eagle Brand in Nebraska. But these avatars didn’t fight like professional soldiers were operating them. They put weapons to their shoulders, strange contraptions that reminded Valentine of small I-beams with a handle and shoulder pad welded to the bottom. Atop the back of the device was a V-shaped rack filled with tubes the size of a household conduit pipe.
One turned his in the direction of Valentine, still trying to reach the action and turn the panicked men back into soldiers.
Even the Reaper with the weapon, pound-for-pound one of the strongest creatures on earth, braced itself as it aimed at the vehicle shop.
“Rockets! Down, down!” Valentine shouted, flinging himself forward.
F-whoooosh f-whoooosh f-whooosh spat the rocket rifle.
The vehicle shop erupted into orange flame, the roof rising and spinning into the air like a Harryhausen flying saucer.
A Bear exploded out of the darkness, driving a shattered tent pole through one of the Reapers as it aimed. It was Chieftain, the most experienced of Gamecock’s Bears. He hoisted the convulsing creature as though raising a tar-dripping flag. Another Reaper, suddenly and unaccountably headless, took a few wayward steps before crashing on its side. Alessa Duvalier rose and ran a few steps and dropped again, her oversized coat looking like a forgotten rag blown from a laundry line as it covered her, lying in the culvert next to one of the macadamized camp utility roads.
Ahn-Kha stormed up from the stables, one arm full of shotguns, the other wrapped in bandoliers. He handed out weapons and ammunition to any hands willing to take them.
The grass-pounding beat of a helicopter sounded, suddenly overwhelming the gunfire with its air-cutting anger.
Three helicopters, a fat one in the center flanked by two smaller maintaining a jostling, zigzagging formation like a queen bee in the air with two suitors, thundered up from the south.
Ahn-Kha picked up a smooth landscaping stone the size of a softball. Running forward, he made a swooping overhand throw.
A picture flashed in Valentine’s mind—probably one of the old volumes in Father Max’s library where he whiled away the long Minnesota winters after his parents died—of a cricket bowler. Ahn-Kha echoed the motion.
The stone, hurled with such force it described an almost straight-line trajectory, struck the windscreen of the big central helicopter. Valentine saw it strike sparks as it passed through and impacted the pilot and his instrumentation.
The helicopter went nose-down, and the big rotors threw up high-flying divots of earth as the craft nose-tipped in.
The other two craft, unsure of what had brought down the big one, pulled high, both banking right and just missing each other’s blades.
Three monstrous forms—at first Valentine thought they were an exotic creature like a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros—jumped out, apparently unhurt by the crash.
They were hulking, a third again as big as a typically oversized Grog. Ahn-Kha, drawn up to his full height, would come up to the shoulder line of the beasts, leaning out over their pier-sized forelimbs like gorillas.
Valentine had never seen anything like them. Pale-skinned, like the Reapers.
He rushed forward with his axe, Ahn-Kha falling in behind.
One of the men Ahn-Kha had armed with a shotgun fired right into one of the giant Grog’s faces. It turned away, threw out an arm and punched the man into red-topped mush.
Another was crushed beneath a stomping foot the size of a wheelbarrow.
Ford and Chevy, the core of Valentine’s old heavy-weapons group, each carried a vehicular machine gun in a harness. They held their guns high so as not to hit any of their allied, and scattered bursts at the monsters. Valentine saw bullets strike, tearing out chunks of hide, but the beasts showed no more sign of feeling it than the armored car Valentine had shot some weeks before.
Valentine froze. The giant Grogs had yellow eyes with slit pupils.
One opened a cavernous mouth as though to bellow in his face. Instead, a stabbing, barbed tongue the size of a harpoon shot toward Valentine’s chest.
He ducked under both tongue and chin, swung the axe with every iota of strength he could summon. The blade buried itself deep in the beast’s neck. It let out a startled cry and reared, dragging the axe handle out of Valentine’s hands.
Its tongue was limp and flopping. Valentine must have severed some nerve, or the trunk of the tongue itself.
Weaponless, Valentine froze. The creature stepped forward and put a wide foot on its own tongue. It crashed down, threatening to bury Valentine, but a powerful arm hauled him back.
Ahn-Kha blasted another of the beasts in the eye with his shotgun, wielding it with the quick ease of an experienced gunfighter with a pistol.
“We must run, my David. Explosives are needed!” Ahn-Kha said.
The creature Valentine had struck in the neck fell dead at last.
One of the Grog-reapers had picked up a tent pole and swung it this way and that, knocking soldiers about like a man killing rats with a club.
It was Bee who finally turned them back. She rushed forward with a white tank resembling a field soup pot in one hand and a burning rag on a stick in the other.
She hurled the tank, tearing the valve free with her toe. Valentine heard it hissing as it flew. She followed it with the brand, then threw herself on her face.
“Good thinking, Bee,” Valentine said.
She said something in return. Valentine recognized the Grog word for “fire.”
“She heard you say that they needed to be killed with fire,” Ahn-Kha said. “A propane tank makes the most fire she’s ever seen.”
“Well, they sure blew the hell out of that barbecue, suh,” Gamecock said, surveying the smoldering ruin of cookout, helicopter, and giant Reaper the next morning.
The salvage teams crawled over the corpses of the helicopters, uniformed ants on mechanical carcasses wielding wrenches, tin snips, and screwdrivers.
Pellwell, meanwhile, had forgotten her ratbits for a moment. Or if not forgotten, was at least ignoring them in her haste to examine the beastly mega-Reapers. She’d scared up a camera from somewhere and was taking pictures and writing notes with each frame.
“Hey, they did us a favor. Maybe we can fill the craters with wood and roast a couple pigs.”
“Dangers of a night attack. There might be confusion.”
Valentine shook his head, wondering. “I’ll give this to Atlanta. They learned who hit them. They struck back, and meant it. Both had some bad luck tonight. They attacked a barbecue rather than our main buildings. We lost months’ worth of work.”
“Let’s hear from observation points. North, south, east and west. All of them, and send out patrols. The air raid might have been a setup for the finish.”
“If they want us out of Fort Seng,” Valentine said. “I wonder if it might be best to accommodate them.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Trails: North America is once again a land of trails. With so much wartime destruction and neglect to land corridors, outside of an individual Kurian Zone or the free territories, getting from here to there proceeds mostly in fits and starts. One makes a fast, exhausting dash of long days of travel to the next safe area, where packs can be refilled, animals rested and exchanged, fuel and munitions purchased—if they’re available, that is. Complex does not even begin to describe it.
It’s possible to carve out a new trail, of course. One just needs the manpower to establish waypoint bases for rest and resupply. There’s already a well-established trail between Southern Command and Fort Seng; the only thing that changes are the river crossing points on the Mississippi and the Tennessee. Escapees from the Kurian Zone flow one way, a trickle of replacements and supplies travels the other.
What Valentine and company propose to do has not been tried before on this scale. Their plan involves establishing a one-shot “river trail” from the Mississippi bank north of Saint Louis to Evansville. There are no substantial Kurian forts on the river between the two points, as the area largely belongs to the Grogs. While the land route would be much shorter in miles, the river will allow speed, which could prove vital for transferring a stadium full of Golden Ones without it turning into a late twenty-first-century trail of tears.
“You know, David,” Brother Mark said, “there’s a fine old saying ripened by the distinction of years. Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is one definition of insanity. Which is how establishing a new freehold in the mid-South is beginning to look to these weary eyes.”
The old renegade churchman smelled like mothballs and spiced aftershave to Valentine. It was an oddly comforting mixture, suggesting generations of familial secrets. He was bone tired from putting the fort back together after the air raid, seeing the worst of the wounded into the Evansville hospital, and finishing the plan with Ediyak. “I think ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ is even older.”
The battalion officers sat in the big entrance hall to headquarters, overstuffed chairs pulled into a circle and sentries posted at the doors and windows. Lambert had finished presenting the plan she, Ediyak, and Valentine had worked out for moving whatever Golden Ones wanted to come to Kentucky.
“It might be wiser to pull back down the Ohio to the other side of the Mississippi,” Brother Mark said.
Ediyak gulped and grew wide-eyed. She’d spent much of her life in the Kurian Zone, and when a churchman spoke, you listened and complied.
“The new freehold was your idea,” Lambert said. “We military types, once we get hold of something, crack our heads against it until one gives way.”
“Can’t stop now. The Kentuckians have thrown in with us,” Valentine said.
“Nobly spoken,” Brother Mark said. “But we’ve brought with us all four horsemen, and they’ve had a run of the land. The Western Coal fields and much of the Pennyroyal is empty, thanks to the ravies virus.”
“Depends on how you define empty,” Devlin said, attending to represent their nearest allies, the Gunslinger Clan. “There are still a lot of legworm herds. We had a good spring for legworm leather. Maybe the cold kept parasites and rats out of the eggs, I dunno, but there’s a record number of young legworms crawling. Those Wolves of yours make good hands for herding once they learn which end is which and how to move ’em along.”
“They should be patrolling,” Lambert grumbled. “I’ll talk to Carlson about it.”
“We’re letting them keep some of the legworm leather from the eggs for their help. It’s good for trade with just about anyone.”
“We’re getting away from the point. Ahn-Kha, how quickly can your people get set up here?”
“Two generations ago the Kurians promised us a rich, green land with good rock for building. I’ve never seen such limestone as is in the hills here. Rich deposits of silver sand, err, what is your word—”
“Mica,” Lambert said. “Used for some glasses, drywall, electrical insulation, and so on,” Lambert said. “Evansville’s still doing a little of that on a shoestring.”
“Mica. Thank you, my colonel,” Ahn-Kha said. “This is good land. Very good. Certainly a milder climate than shivering Omaha. One season of growing, another of building, and we will have the beginnings of roots.”
“The whole history of Kentucky is nothing but immigrants,” Devlin said. “We’re flexible, as long as you let us be. We adapted to using the legworms pretty darn quick. We’d rather have big fellas like Uncle here than the Kurians.”
“Still, I’d better touch base with the provisional government and the Army of Kentucky,” Lambert said. “Brother Mark, are you up for the trip?”
“My spirit never objects to seeing old friends again. My hips and shoulders, however ...”
“The hard part will be getting them to Saint Louis,” Valentine said. “From there, we can use the Mississippi.”
Over the next three days they finalized the plan. Valentine found himself in awe, yet again, at Lambert’s command of detail. And the sheer amount of work she and her two assistants—camp scuttlebutt said she worked one until he keeled over, by which time the other had usually revived from his own marathon session. The three of them plus a secretary clerk for typing orders, produced a working plan.
Still, more had been left to chance than Lambert liked. Valentine had learned to trust luck backed up by tactical flexibility to see himself through difficulties, which would come one way or another.
Control of the river would make so many of these issues simply vanish. The Kurians had held the great rivers of the North American middle—what Lambert had compared to the central arteries of the circulatory system—for so long, both sides had grown accustomed to taking that as a given, like weather or seasons or growing cycles. Certainly, a talented smuggler like Captain Mantilla could get through with his anonymous and ever-reconfigured and repainted boat, but the barges of supplie
s that would make operating in Kentucky or Missouri or into the rusted-out cities along the Ohio would never pass without notice.
When was the last time anyone tried? Valentine wondered.
Any way they looked at it, use of the rivers would simplify matters. The tonnage requirements of moving such a population was nothing to a string of barges.
Still, their alternative was workable. Not without risk, but workable.
He and Lambert planned to divide the camp in two very unequal forces, minus those unfit or unable to make the trip, who would remain at Fort Seng.
Lambert would be in charge of “Force Heavy.” Driving every young legworm they could gather, they’d cut across Western Kentucky two waypoints, one on the Ohio of the proposed riverine route, another overland. East of the Tennessee, Kentucky was dangerous ground filled with bounty hunters, legworm ranchers who hadn’t joined, and patrols and troops from Memphis. They could buy stores of food from the locals with packaged and processed legworm flesh, hides, and some captured Moondagger weaponry and whatever footwear and metal cooking pots they could scrape together from Evansville’s market.
A threat to sell derelicts to the Amazons might even improve march discipline. Certainly there wouldn’t be any stragglers.
Captain Patel had put in two years as a corporal running reconnaissance in that region, and Valentine had been across it off and on ever since Operation Javelin was in the planning stages. Between Lambert’s sensible orders and her subordinate’s experience they should be able to cross in peace. If not, they had the guns to fight the underequipped natives. The Amazons considered Southern Command’s forces minor enemies, territory for an occasional raid, compared to the major enemies in the northern part of Illinois or the gray Grogs across the river in Missouri. Attempted genocide tended to leave an impression on the genocidees.
But all that would take time. Lambert expected the hundred-fifty-mile march from New Harmony to take two weeks without fighting, and double or triple that if the Amazons proved hostile.