by EE Knight
“What’s Bee saying? Or is it just a protective display?”
“Her dialect is a little difficult to follow, my David, but in general, she’s saying that you put the moon in the sky. This is the first I’ve heard of you rescuing her from a circus.”
“I didn’t know warrior Grogs listened to females.”
“They do. Bee’s at a respectable age, where she becomes—the human word would be ‘Auntie.’ That is an important title.”
“Auntie Bee?” Valentine said. His head was swimming. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“You don’t speak much of your family. I am not sure. My David, did you intend for Gray Ones to come to Kentucky as well?”
“No, only your people.”
“Well, I don’t think Bee fully understands your plans. She is talking up the place in the manner of a—what is that title?—real estate salesman.”
Yips and hoots broke out among the Grogs.
“What excites them?”
“She’s talking about how many legworms there are, and that the humans are friendly and welcoming to Grogs.”
Valentine looked at the Gray Ones. They were spellbound. Or perhaps still under the influence of the Kurian aphrodisiacs. Bee had them riveted as she spoke to the ring, turning every moment or two on one vast forearm to face a different part of the audience.
The hundreds of Grogs broke out of their circle, forming groups, calling, pushing, pulling, and cajoling. Others loped off in a four-legged run to acquire friends and relatives for the scrum.
“I think a new Grog tribe is being formed, my David.”
“Would your people mind having them along, or does it mean interspecies warfare?”
“We look on the Gray Ones as rustics. Some we find charming and congenial, others—not so. As long as they are not high-handed. Some of the habits of the Gray Baron’s army will have to be changed.”
The camp was in chaos. Gray Ones were chasing the few available females. “Chuckles” was missing. Valentine hoped for her sake she’d made it out unmolested. But Gray Ones had been known to make do with human females and other livestock, when desperate ...
They’d patched up Valentine as best they could without a surgeon. He’d heal, if he could just eat and drink enough. He still felt light-headed, but he had to help bring order to the camp. The Golden Ones were freed, by Valentine’s word as new Stronghold Chieftain, and he’d promised Danger Close that once everyone who wanted to leave did, the headquarters would be his.
But first, he wanted to give the Baron the same chance he’d been given. Now it was his turn to feel the weight of shackles and uncertainty about the future.
“Okay, what happened?” the Baron asked. “How did you turn my army into a Spring Break party?”
Bee had told him that the threat to Snake Arms had also motivated them. She was strong juju, in charge of the spirits who’d died in the Baron’s service.
“The Root Beer,” Valentine said. “We dumped a case of Kurian aphrodisiacs in it. We weren’t sure of the pharmacological effects. By the books, by my beliefs, you’re my enemy. I don’t feel it in my guts, however. My gut tells me you’re a friend.”
“A friend?” the Gray Baron said. “Give me a knife, and I’ll spill your guts and have a look, see what the problem is.”
“I’ve taken a bullet from you. I wouldn’t want to return the experience.”
“One thing I know about the Kurians. They’re not a forgive-and-forget race. They’ll suck the life out of their own mother as soon as she reverts back to being a father, if the parent’s dumb enough to let them. I’ve sent as many of your forces in the field as I can get in touch with off to the west. It’s full spring now, and the Grogs in the Missouri Valley will be feeling their oats. How soon before they head north to make a warrior’s name for themselves?”
“The way I see it, you have three options. First, I can leave you behind to explain things as best as you can to the Iowans. Second, I can take you prisoner and drop you off with Southern Command. I’ll assume they have nothing on you, other than you being a high-ranking Quisling, which will probably mean you’ll get a few more appeals before they shoot you. Third, you can come with me.”
“Ha!”
“You told me once you liked the taste of real freedom. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word. I’m part of a sort of experimental formation that gives Quislings a second chance, if they want it. You choose a new name, swear under it, and serve six years. You can serve more if you want a chance at a pension or a land grant, later. You’re a good leader. You’d probably even still be in command of some of your same Grogs. We sure could use a man like you.”
“I’m no turncoat. So there’s honor involved. You talk about land allotments? Like some patch of Texas scrub can compare with what the Kurians give?”
“What do they give, really?”
“Eternal life. Not some mystical Jesus hoo-ha, either. Life you can see and touch. The churchmen said that if I can pacify Missouri, they’ll get me a brass ring and the power to extend my life as long as I like.”
“Feeding on your fellow men?”
“There are other ways. No shortage of pigs and dogs. Pigs are more emotionally developed than we think. I met one of their archons, Japanese and Korean guy; he was born in the 1920s and he lives off pigs.”
“You think that offer is still open? Suppose I order a couple companies of your Grogs to go burn some towns in Iowa.”
“Their officers know better. They’d march right back here to see what was wrong.”
“Well, either way, you’re coming with us. When we get back to the bootheel country, I’ll let you make up your mind—a Southern Command military prison or freedom in Kentucky.”
“Bootheel country’s a long way off. That’s a tough march with all these Grogs.”
“We’ll manage.”
“Now you’re the one jerking off, Valentine. You think everyone’s just going to settle down, happy? A couple of lambs will go missing, and there’ll be bloodshed, and somebody’s going to get their head chopped off. Then it’s all-out tribal warfare. Just wait and see. You want to build something that’ll last, I’d suggest a permanent hierarchy. Humans on top, then the Golden, then the Gray. That’s what I was working toward.”
“You left out the Kurians.”
“I said working toward, Valentine. Till you screwed everything up.”
Valentine left the Baron in an evil mood matching his own.
“I have a message for you, sir,” the Wolf said. “Repeat from Colonel Lambert at Field HQ.”
Valentine read the block pencil letters. The coms tech had lined out the code phrases beginning and ending the message that acted as filler to make decryption more difficult.
GENERAL HEADQUARTERS TO SENG/ LAMBERT THROUGH EASTERN OPERATIONS. PERMISSION FOR GG TRANSPORT AND SUPPLY DENIED. PRESENCE OF NONHUMAN FORCES CONSIDERED DANGEROUS AND PROBLEMATIC FOR CIVILIAN MORALE. RIVERINE ELEMENTS WILL PROVIDE LIMITED SUPPORT FOR TRANSFER TO KENTUCKY. CONGRATULATIONS ON ACTION IN N. MISSOURI—SIGNED MARTINEZ
Valentine wondered if the scrambler chatter at the end was a simple mistake or the headquarters code clerk sending his own secret message.
Anger throbbed, tightening his chest. The general had done it to him again. That bastard. Maybe he knows I’m involved, somehow.
“Well, my David?” Ahn-Kha asked.
“We can’t land in the Ozark Free Territory,” Valentine said.
“Odd that they’d be so nervous about it. Chances of more than a few civilians seeing them are slim, there’s not much civilian presence near the river in the bootheel country.”
“We must still go ahead. My people’s dice are cast. They are trapped between enemies.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Grog Express: The Gray Baron’s rail line describes the chord of his defensive arc running from the Mississippi River to the Missouri south of Omaha.
It is an unusual railroad, in that it connects no cities, Kuri
an Zones, or resources. Much of it did not exist before 2022; it’s purely an invention of military necessity. The Gray Baron wanted a fast way to link his vast operational area and defend it with a comparatively small force. The answer was mobility.
The Iowa Guard believed it couldn’t be done—a rail line largely built and worked by Grogs. The Gray Baron, with a few hired engineering guns and a lot of backbreaking labor, proved them wrong. With it, legworms even pull loads, drawing laden flatbeds in the manner of horses hauling barges on a nineteenth-century canal.
The Grog Express runs two kinds of trains. Fast diesel locomotives pull the battle trains, designed to shift artillery from one point to the next with his best-trained Grog and human elites. Slower-moving supply trains shift his companies of fighting Grogs, legworms, and the wounded and injured and supplies for other formations.
The Grog Express is fed through two supporting lines. One runs up into Iowa, the other to the Mississippi River, where it ends near the riverside wharf of a little town called—nowadays—Grog Point.
David Valentine watched the progress in the rail yard with something like satisfaction.
The day promised another thunderstorm. High white mushrooms above, a griddle of blue steel flat as the prairie beneath.
The Baron’s Stronghold had a small but functional yard, communicating with his personal line and running back up to Iowa. The first order of business was to send Chieftain and a few Golden Ones a dozen miles up the line and tear up track, to prevent a surprise attack.
Unlike their Gray cousins, who had a Byzantine tribal network, Golden One families organized themselves generationally, making organization of the flight somewhat easier. Postpubescent males and females each formed a “circle” as Ahn-Kha translated it, then newly mateds, then females with the unborn, then families with young unable to survive without their parents help, then families with older offspring, then those who had lost one or the other mate, then senior males and females, and finally the truly elderly who needed the care of a younger generation. Each such “circle” had leaders and adjudicators who found help and settled disputes and spoke for their circle, more or less. The circles called on other circles for help, ancient “links”—such as widows and widowers naturally supervising the unmated youths, pregnant females seeking help from the senior females, unmated youth looking after the elderly ...
Little of it was codified; it seemed to be a tradition with the Golden Ones.
“What happens if a newly pubescent male doesn’t feel like making sure one of the toothless elderly’s food is properly mashed?” Valentine asked.
Ahn-Kha’s ears went back. “Very little, as long as there isn’t thievery or brutality of any sort. Just talk. But if such a link breaker should ever need assistance themselves, they may have difficulty finding it outside blood relations.”
Graf Stockard had made himself useful as a sort of sergeant major in the confusion. He assembled the Baron’s men under guard of a couple of armored cars and Valentine made the usual offers to take volunteers. The others would be locked up, packed into the old forced-labor holds and secure warehouses to be turned over to whichever of the Baron’s forces or Iowa Guard reclaimed the camp. Valentine had more than enough to do without a few hundred extra prisoners to take care of. It wasn’t quite lawful, but it would have to do.
Somehow, the difficulties of organizing the move sorted themselves out among the Golden One circles. Valentine and his team stayed furiously busy answering questions, often in mime for not one in ten Golden Ones even knew a few words of English. They wanted to know about weapons, about the trains, about canned heat and water purification, about tentage and cordage ...
The scattering of humans and masses of Golden Ones were slowly coming together as a team. Nothing like breaking a good sweat together in the outdoors to start an alliance.
They were such gentle giants, too. They reminded Valentine of horses, very careful of how they placed their feet and shy to the touch. As he explained coupling and uncoupling railcars and the attendant safety chains, a pair of juveniles, easily the size of a smallish man, held a plate of mashed heartroot and a pitcher of instant lemonade, ready to give arificially-flavored-and-sweeetened refreshment.
Whatever last doubts Valentine had buried in the recesses of his mind about the Grogs’ ability to adapt to Kentucky were dispelled. The Kentuckians like those in the Gunslinger Clan would welcome such neighbors. Well, probably.
It occurred to Valentine that it would have been a good deal easier to simply relocate the Kentucky Legion to Northern Missouri than move the Golden One population to the more hospitable Kentucky soil. But the idea of abandoning Evansville and the Army of Kentucky ...
He wondered if the same doubts had plagued his father at the birth of the Ozark Free Territory.
They were able to organize two trains, plus a small third flatbed worked by powerful Grog muscles like a giant handcart. The first was full of warriors and had the fastest engine. Valentine and Ahn-Kha briefly considered attaching the armored battle cars and filling them with warriors, but the weight would slow the train. They elected to have it look more like a fast-moving troop train, with the warriors crammed into boxcars and a single armored caboose bristling with machine guns. A twin 40mm cannon on a crated-and-sandbagged flatbed was pushed by the engine.
Only one of the Baron’s patrols came in during the process, and they were taken prisoner by armed Golden Ones before they comprehended the changes to the fortress. Thanks to the Warmoon Festival, there had been only a few patrols out. Every Gray One wanted to take his part in the rites to enhance his chances in the coming season.
Ahn-Kha thought it best if the experienced Golden One fighters stayed with their people and the “Express” was stuffed with Gray One warriors. The Golden Ones would be at ease with their families and the familiar command structure of their elders around.
The Golden Ones’ commander-in-chief was a meaty, shrapnelscarred veteran named Wu-Dkho—no human could say his name on the first try. Valentine thought of him as “Napoleon.” He was a little shorter than most of the Golden Ones, and he wore a heavy, pocket-lined coat with his chin tucked into his chest in a manner that made Valentine think of a painting he’d seen of Napoleon retreating from Moscow. Ahn-Kha explained that his stance was a little intimidating to most Golden Ones—to them that body language was more Gray One than Golden, indicating an angry bull-Grog ready to head-butt.
Valentine made contact with Cottonmouth and told them Buffalo would be on the move. He hoped to cover the forty air miles with his advanced elements overnight, and have the rest of the Golden Ones to Muddy Landing in three days.
“Muddy Landing,” Captain Coalfield’s voice crackled back. Valentine couldn’t tell if there was relief in his voice. “Seventy-two hours.”
“From dusk tonight,” Valentine said.
They held a final meeting in the command caboose of the fast train. A chalkboard with a tracing of the eastern spur of the Grog Express was filled with the latest information about the expected schedule and the distribution of the population and soldiers between the trains.
On a sideboard, the Gray Baron’s expensive array of ports and whiskeys had been cleared away and replaced with heartroot, nuts, and strawberries, plus the inevitable instant lemonade common to every Kurian Order organization Valentine had ever visited.
Old sweat clung inside his uniform. He wanted a shower, badly, but a sponge and a basin would have to do, and even that could wait until the Express was moving.
Duvalier stood in front of the chalkboard, looking like a small mannequin displaying the wrong-sized coat, examining the time-tables with her arms crossed.
“Forty miles in three days with this bunch is pushing it,” she said. “We’ll be crawling at foot pace.”
Frat was there, along with a human engineer who wanted out at Saint Louis, Ahn-Kha and a messenger Golden One, Duvalier, Stockard, and Pellwell, the last because she and her ratbits were already designated to ride in the
command car.
“Who cares if we’re slower than shit,” Frat said. “With those big bastards properly armed, nobody’s going to mess with us, at least nobody who can concentrate in time.”
“We’ll move in shifts,” Valentine said. “Apart from those riding full-time, we’ll stop every three hours to let a few hundred rest.”
“A drop in the bucket when you’re talking about ten thousand—,” Duvalier said.
“Nine thousand two hundred and seven, though we might see a birth very soon,” Ahn-Kha corrected. “With enough water it can be done. Water is the key.”
Which led to a technical discussion about the conversion of a pair of ten-thousand-gallon diesel tank cars to carry water.
Pregnant females, mothers of infants would ride in some comfort in the barracks cars.
“One problem remains,” Valentine said. “Already, there are probably phones ringing in various Iowa headquarters about the silence from Gray Stronghold. If we could keep up some radio chatter, the usual business traffic between here and Iowa ... I wouldn’t want to be in the coms bunker when the next Grog patrol comes in, under the Baron’s officers.”
“I’ll do it, sir,” Stockard said. “I’ve been trained on coms procedure.”
“Thought you wanted to come with us, Captain? Get back to your son?”
“Yes. Very much. But having someone staying back, manning the radio will increase your chances that much more. They know my voice in Iowa. I’ve pulled my share of shifts in the com bunker.”
“As long as you don’t flip back to the Iowa side,” Duvalier said. “A guy could win a brass ring, letting them know what happened and where we’re headed. Once a Quisling—”
“Enough of that,” Valentine said.
“You’re too quick to judge,” Frat said, glaring.
“I’ve been my own judge, jury, and executioner out there often enough,” Duvalier said. “I don’t trust. That’s why I’m still around.”