by E. E. Knight
"Didn't know you were back."
"After all this time, you still haven't figured it out, have you? I don't like my comings and goings to be noticed." Valentine noticed her slurring her words a little. He'd never known Duvalier to have more than a single glass of anything out of politeness—and even that was usually left unfinished.
"I thought you hated parties," Valentine said.
"I do, but I like to go anyway, and hate them with someone."
"You dressed up."
Duvalier wore tight shorts, a sleeveless shirt, and what looked to be thigh-high stockings in a decorative brocade. Her battered hiking boots just made the rest of her look better. "Wishing I hadn't. Some of your horntoads thought I was here professionally."
"Serves you right for getting cleaned up. Any bloodshed?"
"All the ears and noses in your command are accounted for, Major. Colonel Meadows asked me to find you."
"Speaking of finding people, I've yet to find anyone who saw you during our fight at the airfield."
She wrinkled her freckled nose. "I should hope not. Everyone but me was busy being a hero. As soon as the bombs started dropping I hid deep and dark next to a storm sewer leading off-field. You can't outsmart a rocket."
"If they gave out medals for survival you'd have a chestful. Speaking of which, is that the legendary red bra I see peeping out?" He reached for her cutoff shirt—
"Dream on, Valentine." She grabbed his hand and gave his wrist a painful twist, then pulled him toward the barbecue pit, her hand warm in his.
Colonel Meadows was carving pork, heaping it onto plates, and handing them out, at which point Narcisse would slather the meat with barbecue sauce and hand the plates out to the lined-up soldiers. Judging by their sticky lips, most were back for seconds.
"Daveed!" Narcisse said, spinning on her stool. "This recipe I learned on Jamaica—they call it 'jerked.' Have some!"
"In a second, Sissy," Meadows said. "We're getting a drink first. Spell me, Cossack."
A soldier prodding the coals stood up and took the carving knife out of Meadows' hand. Meadows tossed him the apron.
They filled pewter mugs from a barrel at the beer tent—it was poor stuff, as Southern Command had better things to do with its soil than grow hops—and found a quiet spot away from the band. Duvalier followed with a plate at a respectful distance. She had good hearing, if not quite Valentine's Wolf ears, and positioned herself downwind, back to the men but undoubtedly able to hear every word said.
Some fool fired off a blue signal flare to add to the festive atmosphere. It turned the beer black inside the mugs and added deep shadows to Meadows' eyesockets.
"Great party, sir," Valentine said, and meant it.
"We deserve it." Meadows was a we kind of officer. He held out his mug and Valentine touched his to it, the faint klink sounding a slightly sour note thanks to the pewter.
"An interesting letter in the courier pouch hit my desk the other day. This is as good a moment as any to tell you: They're offering you a Hunter Staff position."
Valentine felt his knees give out for a moment, and he covered with a swig of beer. "Staff?"
"Easy now, Val. It's a helluva honor."
Duvalier brushed past him on the way to the beer tent, and gave his hip a gentle nudge with hers.
"Not that you'll have a lot of time to show off your swagger stick. I hear they work you to death."
Valentine understood that well enough. Southern Command operated on a general staff system that selected and then trained a small group of officers in all the subsidiary branches of service: artillery, logistics, intelligence, and so on. The highly trained cadre then served as staff inspectors or temporary replacements or taught until promoted to higher command or, in the event of a crisis, they took command of reserve units.
The Hunters—the Wolves, Cats, and Bears of Southern Command that operated as special forces outside the borders of the Free Territory—had their own identical staff system that trained with the others and then performed similar functions with the smaller Hunter units. A couple of hitches in Wolf and Bear formations was enough for most; the veteran soldiers usually transferred to support units—or the Logistics Commandos if they still had a taste for operating in the Kurian Zone. But most still served Southern Command by belonging to ghost regiments that might be called up.
Captain Moira Styachowski, one of the most capable officers he'd ever met, had been on the Hunter Staff.
Valentine might end up in command of one of those formations. The role was wryly appropriate; he'd been nicknamed "the Ghost" when serving in the Zulus, his first Wolf company.
Meadows broke in on his thoughts. "Valentine, it's official enough so I thought I'd tell you. You're better than two years overdue for a leave. It'll take them a while to get your training schedule worked out. When we're done here you'll be cleared to take a three-months' leave. I'll miss you. It's been a pleasure."
And Valentine would miss the Razors. They seemed "his" in a way none of the other organizations he'd served with or commanded ever had. Seeing them broken up was like losing a child. "Thank you, sir."
He didn't feel like thanking anyone, but it had to be said.
He wandered back among the Razors, accepted a few congratulations with a smile, but all he wanted was quiet and a chance to think. Meadows had tried to add a sparkle to a bittersweet party, but all he'd done was ruin Valentine's enjoyment of the festivities.
Stow that, you dumb son of a grog. You're ruining your enjoyment, not Meadows.
Back in his days visiting the opulent old theater in Pine Bluff, they'd show movies now and then. He remembered sitting through part of one when arriving early for the evening's movie; the smell of popcorn and sweat on the seats all around him, unable to shut out even the blood from a tiny shaving cut on the man next to him with his inexperienced Wolfs nose.
The early show for the families was a kids' cartoon, full of bright primary colors even on the shabby little projector rigged to an electronic video-memory device. He recalled a bunch of kids' toys in a machine, and a mechanical claw that came down and selected one of the dozens of identical toys now and then. The toys responded to the mystical selection of the claw as though at a religious ceremony.
Life in the creaky, stop-and-start mechanism of Southern Command had never been so elegantly summed up for him. "The claw chooses!" Orders came down and snatched you away from one world and put you in another.
Duvalier proffered a fresh, cool mug filled with colder beer. "Guess that's it for Cat duty, far as you're concerned," she said. Her eyes weren't as bright and lively as usual; either her digestive troubles were back or she'd continued drinking. Valentine sniffed her breath and decided the latter.
The swirl of congratulatory faces wandered off after he took the mug, offered a small celebratory lift of the brew to the north, south, east, and west, and took a sip.
"Did you run down that Lifeweaver?" On second taste, the beer wasn't quite so sharp.
"No. There was a rumor one'd been killed by some kind of agent the Kurians planted last year. Guess Kurs' got their versions of Cats too."
Valentine had heard all sorts of rumors about specially trained humans in Kurian employ. That they could read minds, or turn water into wine, or redirect a thunderstorm's lightning. Everything from mud slides to misaddressed mail was blamed on Kurian agents.
Valentine shrugged.
"They'll get word to us. They always do, one way or another. Right?" Duvalier asked.
The last sounded a bit too much like a plea. Duvalier thought of the Lifeweavers as something akin to God's angels on Earth; the way the Kurians' estranged cousins presented themselves added to the effect. This cool and deadly woman had the eyes of a child left waiting on a street corner for a vanished parent.
"Mystery's their business," Valentine said.
She emptied her mug. "Want to blow this bash?"
The beer worked fast. Valentine already felt like listening to music a
nd discussing the nurses' legs with Post. But he couldn't leave Duvalier tipsy and doubtful.
"Yes," he lied.
Her shoulders went a little further back, and more of the red bra appeared beneath her vest. "Lead on, McGruff," she said.
Valentine was pretty sure it was MacDuff—Father Max made his classes perform two Shakespeare plays a year—but couldn't prick her newly improved mood with something as trivial as, well, trivia.
The men were setting up some sort of chariot race involving wheelchairs, Narcisse, and a Razor with his leg in a cast from ankle to midthigh. By the looks of the clothesline traces and wobbly wheels on the chairs, the soldier's other leg would be in a cast by morning, but Valentine and Duvalier hollered out their hurrahs and stayed to watch. Narcisse's wheelchair overturned at the third turn—she didn't have enough weight to throw leftward to keep both wheels of the chair down in the turn—but she gamely hung on and was dragged through the freshly trimmed parking lot meadow to victory, garlanded by a dandelion leaf in her rag turban.
Duvalier pressed herself up against him as they jumped and cheered her on. As they wandered away from the race, she was on his arm.
"Seems like a staff appointment deserves a special celebration," she slurred as they left the crowd and passed under the Accolade's bunting.
"Careful, now," Valentine said as they made a right turn toward his quarters. "You're evil, teasing me like that."
She looked around and saw that the hall was empty. Then she kissed him, with the same fierce intensity that he remembered from the bloody murder in the Nebraska caboose.
"Let's. Now. Right now." She extracted a half-empty flask from within her vest and took a swig.
Valentine had desired her for years, and they'd come close to making love out of sheer boredom once or twice while serving together in the KZ. But the half joking, half flirting they'd done in the past had always been passed back and forth around a shield of professionalism, like two prisoners swapping notes around a cell wall.
"I wanna see what that little Husker cowgirl thought was so special," she said with a facial spasm that might have been a flirtatious eyebrow lift that suddenly decided to become a wink.
Dumb shit, why did you ever tell her that?
He pulled her into his room and shut the door behind them.
"Not drunk and not with us about to—" he began, fighting off her fingers as they sought his belt.
"Now who's the tease, huh?" she asked, falling back onto the bed as though he'd kicked her there. "You're a lot of talk and fancy words. Ahn-Kha's got bigger balls than you—"
That struck Valentine as a curious—and stipulatable—argument. They'd both seen Ahn-Kha any number of times, and the Golden One had a testicular sack the size of a ripe cantaloupe.
"Ali, I—"
"It's always I with you, Val. Ever notice that? I don't even want us to be a we, I just want one fuck, one goddamn, sweaty fuck with a guy I halfway care about. I spent eight months on my back for those grunting Quislings. Wasn't like blowing some eighteen-year-old sentry to get through a checkpoint 'cause I had a story about how I gotta get medicine to my sick aunt—I had to eat breakfast with those greasy shits and talk about how great they were and just once I'd like—"
And with that it was like all the air had left her lungs. She leaned over with her mouth open for a moment, a surprised look on her face—then she fled to the bathroom.
Valentine pulled his lengthening hair back from his eyes, listened to the mixture of sobs and retching sounds echoing off the tiles in the washroom, and let out a long breath. At the moment he couldn't be sure that he wouldn't rather face another air pirate raid than go into that room.
But he did so.
The mess was about what he expected. A horrible beery-liquor smell wove itself above and around the sharper odor of her bile, and she was crying into the crook of a vomit-smeared arm at the edge of the toilet.
He picked her up. After a quick struggle he set her in bed and took off her shoes and socks, and gave each rough foot one gentle squeeze.
"No, not now," she said. I wasn’t.
"I got puke on my good bra."
"I'll rinse it out and hang it up."
"Thanks."
Her freckles looked like wildflowers in a field of golden wheat.
By the time he'd used a washcloth on her face and arm, rinsed out her clothes—and her socks for good measure—she was murmuring at some level of sleep. He put a thin blanket over her and cleaned up the toilet area, using a bowl as a wash bucket.
When that was done she was truly asleep, rolled into the blanket like a softly snoring sausage.
* * * *
That night Valentine sat in his musty room with its vomit-disinfectant-and-tobacco smell and quieted his mind by laying out the three pieces of paper bearing Gail Foster's name. Black Lightning was still pounding away, the amplified music much reduced by the bulk of the intervening hotel.
He took a yellowed blank sheet of paper from his order book and drew a cross in the center, dividing the paper into four squares. He labeled the top left "Goal" and the top right "Known Known." The bottom left became "Known Unknown." Another scrape or two from his pencil and the bottom right box had the label "Unknown Unknown."
While it seemed like gibberish, the formula had been taught to him in his youth by the old Jesuit, Father Max, the teacher who'd raised him after the murder of his family. Father Max had told him (a couple of times—when Father Max was in his cups he sometimes forgot what he said) that the analytic tool came from a woman who used to work at the old United States Department of Defense intelligence agency.
It divided one's knowledge of a subject into facts you knew, facts you knew you didn't know, and the possibility of important pieces of knowledge out there that you weren't aware of until they rose up and bit you. But by diligent pursuit of the questions in the other two squares you slowly accomplished the goal, and sometimes found out about the third in time to act.
And when an Unknown Unknown showed up you had to be mentally prepared to erase even your Known Knowns.
Valentine had lived in the Kurian Zone, had even spoken to one directly, and all his experiences had left him with was the unsettling conviction that humanity's place in the universe wasn't much different than that of a Canis familiaris—the common dog. There were wild dogs and savage dogs and tamed dogs and trained dogs, and dogs knew all about other dogs, or could learn soon enough, but their guesses about the wider world (cars and phones and other phenomena) and a dog's place in it was limited by the dog's tendency to put everything in dog terms.
If he tried to put himself in the place of the practically immortal Kurians, an endless series of doubts and fears popped up. The Kurians had laid waste to Earth once with a series of natural catastrophes and disease, so what was to stop them from unleashing an apocalyptic horseman or two if mankind became too troublesome? He'd seen on the Ranch in Texas that the Kurians were toying with different forms of life in an effort to find a more pliable source of vital aura than man, in the form of the ratbits. How much time did man have before the Kurians decided to clear off the ranchland that was Earth and raise a different kind of stock? Wouldn't a goatherd who got sick of bites from the billys switch to sheep?
Depressing speculation didn't help find Post's wife. He remembered his promise and picked up the pencil again. Under "Goal" he wrote: "Learn what happened to Gail Foster." He did some mental math as he transcribed Kurian dates (the years started in 2022, and after a brief attempt at calendar reform had reverted back to old-style months and days).
Known Knowns
Gail Foster lived in the Free Territory (Pine Bluff?).
— Was tested at station 9-P
— No other woman on the list had an X under "result."
— Was shipped somewhere by the Kurians five days later.
Known Unknowns
— Shipped to where?
— Did test indicate a negative or a positive?
; — Purpose of test?
He checked the list of names on the Miskatonic paper again and wrote:
Why only females tested? (Fertility? Privacy? Expediency?) The last was guesswork, for all he knew they tested all women, whether of childbearing age or not. There was the chance that they gave men the same test too, and for reasons of their own performed the tests separately—though the Kurians were not known for breaking up families and couples, it made groups of humans easier to handle.
Statistically, being one out of fifty in the Kurian Zone meant bad news for Gail Foster—formerly Gail Post. In his time undercover in the Kurian Zone Valentine had seen dozens—strike that, hundreds—of instances where the Kurians had culled humans into a large group and a small group.
The small groups never lasted long.
Were they checking for a disease or infirmity that meant she only had a short time to live? The Kurians used humans the way banks exchanged currency; perhaps a human only counted as a human if it could be expected to survive more than one year.
Valentine looked at himself in the shard of mirror on the wall. The single bare bulb in the wall cut shadows under his eyes and jawline. You're a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy, Valentine.
Maybe she scored supergenius on a test and was being shipped off to learn some kind of Kurian technology. Maybe she had a special skill that would keep her comfortably employed in the Kurian Order to a ripe old age.
Or maybe she showed up on some list as a refugee, and was shipped back to her original owners faster than you could say Dred Scott.
The other thing he'd learned from Father Max was that the first step in discovering a few Unknown Unknowns was to answer the Known Unknowns.
So much to do. He'd have Ahn-Kha take Hank to a boarding school. He didn't want the boy to become just another camp extra until he enlisted at fifteen. He'd have to arrange for transport for both of them, and for himself to Pine Bluff and the Miskatonic.
He had one promise to keep before starting this new page. Even if it was a page he didn't know that he was up to turning. Just as well Post had given him this. At least he had something to do with his leave other than fret.