by E. E. Knight
She carefully worked her way toward him.
His getaway seemed well planned, but his fingers kept failing him with the various latches and nets on the motorcycle for military gear. She felt almost sorry for him, struggling to tie off an elastic cord that had its usual hook missing. She reversed her throwing dagger and sent it sailing at his head, hilt first.
It struck him on the back of the head with a satisfying rap! but did not lay him out senseless. Nor did his appearance blur, so he wasn’t a Kurian in an unusually imaginative disguise.
Instinctively, he turned around to see who’d thrown the rock or whatever had hit him, and he locked eyes with Duvalier.
“Oh shit,” he said. His face went white. He looked like he was about to faint.
She really should kill him. He was a colonel, and by the look of the fabric and cut of the uniform, someone well cared for by the Kurian Order.
But there was something about his rotund shape and pop eyes that made him a figure more to be laughed at than hated. She was picturing him lying on a lily pad with legs comfortably crossed and fingers clasped. Where did that image come from? Maybe that was how he survived in the snake pit of Quisling rivalries, by making those who might be enemies discount him on appearances. If he’d only make a move to a weapon…
Let this cog in the Great Machine live, Kansas girl, she thought. She drew her sword. “You’re not on the Control’s list. You have five seconds to disappear.”
He hesitated for half a second, a full ten percent of his allotted time.
Valentine had once moved an ornery mule by doing a spastic dance. She lifted her sword above her head and stamped forward, raising a thin ripple of stable-yard chaff with her boot. He took the hint and ran off in his light-stepping manner, leaving the map case and the briefcase half connected to the motorbike.
Good thing, too, or she would have had to run him down and probably kill him. Perhaps her spycraft on this operation wouldn’t be a complete waste. She was rather proud of herself for working in the mention of the Georgia Control, the biggest and best-organized Kurian Zone in the eastern half of the old United States. A little extra confusion about who did all the killing wouldn’t hurt.
She carefully looked his luggage over for hidden triggers or other gadgets that might destroy the contents—and her—and decided they were safe to touch. Still, it took a conscious effort of will to pick them up and tuck them under her arm. They were heavy enough, loaded with paper. She hoped she wouldn’t have to lug this crap back across the Ohio on foot. That would be just her luck.
Of course, the solution was munching alfalfa all around her. Now that she had time to think about it, a horse was the best way to make her getaway—especially if she took off in a direction a fleeing Quisling might take. If she headed north, she’d be in very tall timber in no time.
While a vehicle missing from the motor pool would attract attention to her escape, there was always the possibility of a horse not being noticed, or disappearing from its paddock out of fright over the noises echoing around the hill from the hotel. She might make a clean getaway, with no one looking for horse tracks until all the survivors had been interviewed.
A few minutes in the stables led her to choose a hardy-looking small thoroughbred gelding. She had a good deal of distance-riding experience and he seemed suitable. Though no one would call her a born horsewoman, she’d found that smaller horses often had more endurance in them than the big, impressive ones. He seemed like he had a nice temperament, too. He gave her a friendly rub as she hooked a lead line to him.
It occurred to her that she hadn’t heard anything from the hotel in a while. Half the Ordnance in Indiana would be converging on the hotel now—and, not incidentally, giving up on the pursuit of the Fort Seng column retreating toward the Ohio.
As she saddled the horse and tied on some bags of grain, she heard a few explosions—possibly booby traps left behind by the Bears to strike the unwary.
She carefully bagged the captured papers and maps from the colonel’s motorcycle and hurriedly set them on the back of the horse. She threw the colonel’s overcoat over her duster and put a rag in his hat to make it fit her head. In one of the overcoat pockets she found a very nice pair of sunglasses with real glass lenses. They were a little large for her head but she could bend the bows a little. From a distance, she might be mistaken for an Ordnance scout or courier.
She found a patch of springtime mud and made a generous application of it to her face. Between that and the colonel’s sunglasses, and with the overcoat buttoned high, she was barely recognizable as a woman.
Satisfied, she walked the horse out of the stables. She probably should have ridden him a little before loading him; it would be a tedious process to saddle another one if he turned out to have a bad hoof, but he seemed fit enough. She turned due north and pointed his nose at the heart of the Hoosier forest.
There was one highway to cross and she’d be safely out of the French Lick area. She paused the horse on the edge of the highway to listen, then kicked him across.
He wanted to trot alongside the road; she could tell. It was probably what he did out riding with the convalescents. She found a walking trail and turned his nose up in.
A muddy, cloaked figure appeared in front of her. Dead gray leaf fragments clung to it like camouflage. Reaper! How did they do it?
Her hand reached for her sword-stick.
The Reaper held up an arm. She noted there was nothing but a tarred stump where its foot had been. Her friend from the hilltop.
“colonel?” it asked. “why are you not on a motorcycle?”
Duvalier never minded a case of mistaken identity. The more confusion, the better for her, usually. “Change of plan. What are your orders?”
“i am told to help a colonel escaping on a motorcycle.” It must not be in direct contact with its Kurian at the moment. Conversing with a Reaper as if it came naturally was no easy matter. She gulped down her fear. “You don’t look like you can run.”
That was a puzzler for the thing. The answer required it to think about its own physical condition. “it is difficult. i fall frequently.” The mud, leaves, and burrs in its cloak attested to the truth of the statement.
How would that colonel talk? Would he be ingratiating? Haughty? “I might be pursued. They might even be in Ordnance uniforms. Scare them off, and if they don’t scare, take one prisoner. We need prisoners.”
“prisoners,” it repeated.
“Were you told who I was?” She didn’t like the idea of leaving a Reaper who had seen her alive, but then it clearly wasn’t in contact with its Kurian. How much would its memory retain when it reestablished contact? Well, the briefer she made this encounter, the better. She went into a fake coughing fit that would let her use a raspy voice less likely to be remembered.
“chief of staff, force integration,” the Reaper said.
“Then you know why it’s vital that I get back to Columbus,” she rasped back. The last was a guess—Columbus was the general headquarters of the Ordnance. She departed swiftly. No sense in lingering to possibly make a mistake.
Half a mile later she realized she was ravenously hungry. The lifestyle of a Cat in the KZ did not lead to frequent chances to sit down to eat. Ration-type foods were hard on her always troublesome stomach.
She took the easy way out. She walked the horse for an hour to rest it, extracted a big bandage from her first-aid kit, and took out her sharp skinning knife.
At a pause to let the horse drink, she nicked open a cut inside its leg. The horse cried out and jumped sideways and it took her a moment to calm it. She let the blood run from the cut into her ration cup until she had about a pint, then put a dressing on it.
The warm blood made a satisfying, easily digested meal. Its saltiness soothed her muscles, full of old aches from the past few days’ exertions and new ones from the riding.
> Though Alessa Duvalier would never make the claim, anyone who knew her record would consider her the best Cat between the Appalachians and the Rockies. She was certainly one of the oldest still active. It was the most natural thing in the world for a predatory Cat to enjoy the taste of blood now and then.
CHAPTER TWO
The Southern Command Headquarters at Fort Seng: The former great house of the Audubon National Forest quietly chatters with activity. A command is often a reflection of its commander, and quiet, ceaseless professionalism characterizes both the colonel and her headquarters.
Fort Seng still sits near the banks of the Ohio—in fact there are guns commanding the Evansville riverfront—but its administrative area has grown. Fort Seng and the independent brigade there—heavily reinforced by hundreds of Wolves and Bears who’d grown sick of the defensive crouch the rest of Southern Command had adopted—are now the military nerve center of multiple substations, each increasingly capable and independent as the months progress. Perhaps a third of the soldiers of Fort Seng are dispersed to these stations, conducting training to better integrate the whole.
Other communities have grown up around the fort, as it is increasingly called in Western Kentucky and Southeastern Indiana. Some are opportunists, if not outright parasites, like the bars, cleaners, entertainment dens, and eateries rising just outside the base entrance off of old Federal Highway 41 the way mollusks show up around a bayside canning plant sluice.
To the southwest, the Xeno “Gray One” Grogs are scattered according to their tribal system between the banks of the Ohio with the old Shawnee National Forest and its wilder Grogs. The Baron—as he is still known—is holding his military alliance together and his beloved Grogs seem just as happy to fight under Southern Command and Kentucky’s flags as under the Kurian Order, and perhaps more content when at home in their charcoal-dusted huts, thanks to the milder weather. To the east, the Golden Ones brought out of Iowa the previous year are setting up communities in the arc between the Ohio and old Interstate 69 leading to Owensboro. They are making themselves useful at the huge electrical plant feeding the region and in the coal-rich mines, as well as building their preferred sod-roofed homes out of the plentiful limestone.
The fort itself is much expanded, with “Wolf Country” to the south and the “Bear Dens” running up toward the Ohio River. Fort Seng has won itself a reputation as a daring, fighting command, attracting men and women who want to be where the action is, where the war against the Kurians is still on the march.
With power up and running, Evansville has dozens of small manufacturing concerns, all using the new Kentucky Free Zone coal-backed “Black Dollars.” Rumor has it that a substantial amount of gold that was once housed at Fort Knox but hidden during the Overthrow after the defeat in Indianapolis is in the hands of the Kentucky government, some say hidden at Lincoln’s boyhood home, or Mammoth Cave, or sitting quietly beneath bourbon at a distillery, or buried under the finish line at a Lexington racecourse. Speculation about legendary gold aside, there is a confidence that Kentucky is increasingly established as a permanent freehold. Young people with a desire for a change of occupation or society leave the legworm clans for peaceful Evansville or the more contentious Lexington to start their lives. There are opportunities for both, and even the sleepy riverside city of Owensboro is now a trading hotbed for Grog crafts and constructs. Some of the more high-minded have established a human-Grog school in Owensboro where adults learn about one another and the young play and sing one another’s songs.
Eastern Kentucky is even attracting the interest of a few writers and academics interested in the structure of a post-Kurian world, should such a dream ever come to be. Besides the newsworthiness of a new freehold east of the Mississippi, there has never been a military organization or political state quite like this one, built on the legworm clans who depend on a Xeno species for their life and mobility, and the cooperation between humans and two sentient Grog species.
So after a violent birth and a period of uncertain flux, the Kentucky Free Zone is ready to take its place among the nations of the earth. Interestingly, it was almost left out of the great Baltic Conference, added as an afterthought when a Baltic League radio broadcast mentioned the hodgepodge of Grog tribes and humans cooperating in the fight against the Kurians. One of the organizers contacted Southern Command and suggested that they bring a delegation from the new freehold, and the rest would shortly become history.
Duvalier’s exhaustion after the long escape from the Hoosier National Forest required an epic session in the headquarters tub.
The slate-tiled bathroom, a lavish holdover from the days when the headquarters at Fort Seng was a powerful Quisling family’s mansion, was bigger than her meager lodging in the stable. Formerly a spa-retreat for the lady of the house, now it was women-only, just adjacent to Colonel Lambert’s sleeping quarters and private office, in her little aerie at one end of the headquarters upstairs. Another officer might have kept the sanctuary with its tub jets private, but Lambert opened it to any female on base and installed a reservation roster allowing up to an hour of private bathing. As there were just a few short of thirty wearing the Southern Command uniform, plus a couple of auxiliaries such as herself, most opted to use it as an occasional treat. Lambert herself used it once a week, very early Sunday morning before her usual appearance at the interfaith services.
Duvalier, just before departing for the Hoosier Forest, had requested a slot for three nights of the week she judged likeliest for her return from Indiana and had wound up with the third.
Southern Command’s male soldiers weren’t up to the standards of gallantry of previous centuries, but they accepted the idea that the women on base deserved a lavish bathing retreat and set about putting the former luxuries back in order. They’d installed stained glass on the windows and returned a cedar-lined mini-sauna to functionality. They’d also recovered a huge wardrobe from somewhere and filled it with the thickest towels and robes to be found in the Evansville area.
Not for the last time, Duvalier was grateful that she operated with southerners.
In Duvalier’s experience, most COs and their senior staff bring a certain flavor to their commands, like a chef influences the food in a restaurant. With Valentine signing off on the design and facilities at Fort Seng, you could be sure hygiene would rank high on the priority list. It wasn’t just this tub room. They’d sunk fresh wells into the limestone-filtered water table, run fresh pipe to all corners of the camp, and put in heaters so anyone could have a hot shower or do laundry whenever time permitted. The camp had a laundry worthy of a base three times its size—either Valentine was planning for the future or he really liked clean sheets—and a couple of barbers and a family of cobblers were allowed to build and live on base. They were also piping waste out these days, to the fort’s own sun-drenched rock bed, where it was circulated through an old irrigation sprinkler over three layers of gravel before draining into some swampy ground, and eventually, she supposed, into the Ohio. You could trust that the drinking water wouldn’t be tainted with sewage when Valentine had a say about the plumbing.
So after selecting a robe and towel, she relaxed in the deep, old-fashioned soaking tub. It had jets and a little dial for the control of the flow, but the tinkerers hadn’t found the needed parts to get them working again. She’d lathered herself with a bar of “French-milled” (whatever that meant) soap she’d swiped from Valentine and given her dreadfully gnarled (at least to her eye) feet a good scrub.
Valentine was no sybarite, but he was fastidious about his hygiene. He had a connection who had a connection in the Quisling luxuries trade and always had a few concealed bars of buttery soap that instantly worked up into a lavender-scented foamy lather. Funny aroma for a guy as no-nonsense masculine as David, but she’d shared space with enough men to know they all had some habit that indulged their feminine side whether they admitted it or not.
Lambert inter
rupted her as she was dressing, after inquiring whether it was okay for her to enter. She’d even given a regulation-sounding knock, neither too soft nor too demanding. Duvalier always suspected that if you unscrewed Lambert’s skull under her symmetrical bob you’d see circuits and gears whirling away, waiting for the latest instructions from Southern Command. She threw on the clean, long, men’s garrison shirt she’d brought to wear after the bath and checked to make sure she’d left everything in reasonable shape for the next user.
Whoops. She’d forgotten to hang up the foot-scrubbing brush after rinsing. She rectified that and tightened the closure on her robe.
“All yours,” she said, exiting.
Colonel Lambert looked her usual razor-cut self, polished and not a hair out of place.
“Stop by my office later, if you aren’t exhausted. I’ll be up for a couple hours yet. Not official. Not an order, therefore. More social than anything.”
Social? There were rumors about Lambert, but they mostly circulated around the more feminine, pinup-candidate camp females. Duvalier discounted them; she couldn’t believe Lambert had any needs that couldn’t be met by a well-arranged, color-coded three-ring binder. Once she’d even thought the colonel and Valentine had been a couple, at some time over their long history, which dated back to the officer training school he’d attended on his way to his lieutenant’s commission, but now that she’d seen more of Lambert since her brief tenure running Southern Command’s Special Operations, she doubted it.
Funny, though, that two promising officers of Southern Command both ended up serving in the same Kentucky backwater. Together they’d turned it into a whole new front of the war.
In the old rough-and-ready days when she was informally serving with Valentine’s Razorbacks in Texas, Duvalier plopped down in his bed when he wasn’t using it. Even in those days, when she was a good deal younger and of fresher skin, the men didn’t call her “Valentine’s woman” or anything like that. She was more like a mascot to the regiment, and like a brigade hound—or cat—she was expected to sleep in the CO’s quarters.