by E. E. Knight
No! The devil wouldn’t get her. She would run, back toward the singing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Return: While the repercussions of mankind’s defiantly violent answer to the Kurian offer rippled across the globe, in Finland itself, and across the Baltic League, the average freeholder nodded in quiet satisfaction at the news that the Kurian diplomat had been torn to shreds by his own bodyguard. “Serves ’em right” in various Nordic idioms probably sums up the most popular reaction.
Sensationalists got hold of the story first, and turned it into a tale of Kurian treachery unmasked by the unconquerable human spirit.
Only later were more serious researchers able to piece together the Kurian plot to force a vote in their favor, a vote that would be broadcast worldwide by the Baltic radio network. There is the philosophical idea that once a matter is introduced into words, it becomes something that can be imagined and eventually accepted. If the news went around the world that the conference had voted to accept the Kurian “peace” offer, the word “peace” would have been on everyone’s lips. As it was, the Kurians proved too clever for their own good. Had they just made their offer and left it to the delegates to decide, with the Lifeweavers advocating that they accept this last, best chance, who is to say whether the Butter faction would not have gathered enough Guns to carry the vote?
She woke to the familiar rocking of the sea and the steady growl of an engine. She sensed that they were on a larger ship than any they’d used to this point. She was in some kind of dormitory with two bunks and just enough space for a little table that held a washbasin and tap.
She sensed a presence nearby. Valentine sat in a canvas chair, a book on his lap and another open on the arm of the chair. He looked tired.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“Ferry to Sweden. Or I should say, up the Swedish coast. We’ll take a train across, then back to Halifax and home. Your only worry at this point is eating.”
“Christ, I can’t even die right,” she muttered.
Valentine tut-tutted. The man had ears like a bat. Arrogant ass.
“When did you get back?” she asked.
“The night you had your bath. You’ve been unconscious or sedated. One of the Canadians with us is sort of a nurse-midwife-doctor, so you’ve had medical attention since we took you out of the Kokkola hospital. They gave you blood and plasma there, but they wouldn’t release you without running a few tests. They don’t know how stingy you’ve been with your nine lives.”
“That’s debatable.”
“You’re going to live, Ali. The war’s over for you for a while.”
“Is that an order, Major?”
“I think we had this discussion before we left. You outrank me. I can’t give you orders.”
She felt too tired to talk, so she didn’t respond.
“You went a little mad and did a dumb thing,” Valentine said. “I don’t know exactly what it was, but I hope—”
“Nothing to do with you and your glorious cock, Val.”
“I’m sorry I missed the mess at the conference.”
“Hope you at least had fun in Helsinki,” she managed.
“I learned a lot about art. Or rather, the value of art, or how our skipper friend decides what art she wants to buy. It’s not that different from a used-car lot, as it turns out. She acquires what she thinks will be worth something if the world ever sorts itself out again. Quite a vision.”
“She was a vision,” Duvalier murmured.
“It wasn’t an affair, Smoke. I just wanted a little glimpse of that world. It was that or fishing, and I’ve fished plenty of northern lakes in my time. Still, glad that you were there to take care of things. Why were you cutting yourself, when every Finn sergeant should have been buying you a Koskenkorva?”
She’d been running risks all her life. If, deep down, she wanted to die, wouldn’t she have been less cautious, at least a few times? It is so easy to screw up in the Kurian Zone. Of course, being driven in a collection van to the Last Dance wasn’t her idea of an easy death.
Funny, when you looked at his face, you mostly came away with the memory of the scar running vertically near his eyes. But he had a few other cuts and divots marring his beautiful skin. She knew plenty of women who would have spent fortunes for that skin. They were like two collections of scars talking to each other, the scars masking what lay beneath.
She wasn’t sure she could even form an honest answer into words, so she put him off. “I’m not ready to talk about it yet. Give me some time.”
Valentine’s upper lip twitched as he patted her hand. “Sorry. I thought this trip would give both of us a rest. Let’s talk more when you’re up to it.”
“Don’t go,” she said. How many times had she wanted to say those words to him? But to do so would make her sound vulnerable. Needy. “Nice to have you here. Don’t mean to be a burden. Do you have somewhere you need to be?”
He sat. “Need? My need’s in this room. I don’t think you know how much I need you. How much the Cause needs you. Every time you’ve been at my side, we’ve had success. All my screwups seem to happen when you’re not around to kick me in the butt and set me straight. Damn it, woman, you’re my oldest and best friend.”
“What about Ahn-Kha?”
“He’s like a brother to me. We’re bound up in this together, in some way I can’t explain. Maybe he can, with his philosophies. He’s family. You’re the person I want to have around. You’re the person whose absence leaves me, well, lonely. I can’t ever pay back what you’ve given for me.
“You pulled me out of darkness once. I’d like to return the favor. If I have to, I’ll attach tow chains to Ahn-Kha and have him haul you up back into the sun.”
She had no doubt he cared for her. They were family; they’d been through too much together. She spent the rest of the day quietly in her cabin eating, mostly easy-to-digest soups. Potatoes and ham and summer vegetables. It wasn’t great, but it was better than most travel food she’d eaten.
That night, she asked Valentine to bring her something to read.
She ambushed him right away so his defenses would be down.
“I want a real night with you. In my bed, in the biblical sense. It won’t change anything between us,” she said, and she hoped it would be true. She’d been able to turn off her emotions for sex in the past, out of necessity.
“Aren’t we a little beyond that sort of thing?”
“I just want to feel good for one night. You know I don’t get many guys. I don’t like most of ’em, and the ones I do like get scared. You’re not scared.”
“I used to be, a little.”
She’d thought so. This conversation was more interesting than anything that had happened since everything went to crap in Kokkola. “Well, it’s been years since I scared you.”
“True.”
“Be mine, just for a few nights on this trip. I need to clear away the cobwebs.”
“I don’t think it’s been that long for you. What about—”
“The cobwebs in my head, buster.”
They’d come close a couple of times. When he first knew her, he made a few halfhearted, half-joking attempts to get into her pants. When they were posing as husband and wife on the Gulf Coast, at night he’d hang up his Quisling Coastal Marine uniform and give her a friendly kiss on the cheek.
She grew to like those kisses, look forward to them. She was actually a little sorry when he was posted to command the Coastal Marines on the gunboat Thunderbolt and the time came for the real operation to commence.
One hot night, bored and unable to sleep, rather than crawl out onto the roof of the neighbor’s apartment and sleep, they’d stayed in on their sweat-soaked bed and rather groggily groped each other. It had started out as a few good-natured elbows thrown, and then matters escalated. They’d both satisfied each ot
her enough to fall asleep, exhausted, but you couldn’t say they’d been lovers—more like kids messing around.
Still, the night stayed with her for months after. She could still feel his youthful, hard cock in her imagination. It featured in a few of her fantasies.
He sat, staring at her.
“I know you’re not afraid,” she said. “I’m curious, and I can’t believe you aren’t.”
“Once an old tent mate of mine tried to argue me into trying sex with him,” Valentine said. “Strangely, this feels a little like that conversation. Not sure it would feel natural to me.”
“I’ve always found unnatural a lot more exciting,” she said. She leaned over and grabbed him, pulled him to her by the front of his shirt.
They found themselves kissing. Impossible to say who started it. As for the disrobing, he took the initiative, with increasing excitement as she explored him for the second time in their lives.
He shivered every time she touched him, twitching about like an overexcited horse. Perhaps he hadn’t been fucking that Pole in Helsinki. He jerked like a teen with a girl’s hand on his prick for the first time.
He proved an impatient and overeager lover. He spent himself rather sooner than she would have liked, though he was tenderer than most men afterward. If he had the impulse to slink out of her bed like a restless dog, he suppressed it admirably.
Giggling, she admitted to herself that he really wasn’t that good. Maybe it was nervousness, or he was just uncomfortable with physical intimacy with her. Or maybe she really was “one of the guys” to him, and he’d just dipped his toe into emotional bisexuality.
Or perhaps it was the tiny bunk. There wasn’t really room for two people on either the top or the bottom bunk. She couldn’t even really open herself the way she wanted to. The ship’s side got in her way on one side, and the high rails for the bunks made it difficult to get comfortable on the other. Only afterward did it occur to her that they could have just piled a couple of plastic-covered sea mattresses and all their bedding on the floor.
The journey home was more easily accomplished than the outbound leg.
They traveled with Sime and the Canadian and Greenland/Iceland representatives. Duvalier wasn’t even aware that there were people in Greenland, but the post-2022 climate had created a thin strip of habitable earth on the southern coast of the huge, icy island, and the Scandinavians had returned with their fishing boats.
Valentine joked that now that the Resistance had committed to continuing the struggle, it did not matter so much if the delegates all were lost in the chill northern latitudes or not.
They were back by late August, sped on by rumors of action heating up in Texas and Kentucky and all along the Appalachians. Valentine spoke often of August and September being a forbidding time of year, historically.
They were met by a small delegation welcoming them back to the Kentucky Alliance. Ahn-Kha’s name was cheered. His ears stuck out horizontally true, a sure sign of embarrassment. The summer heat and humidity of Southern Indiana felt dreadful after the Baltic cool.
Colonel Lambert was part of the official delegation, of course, along with Captain Patel.
“You arrived just in time,” Patel said, speaking mostly to Valentine. “All hell’s breaking loose to the south. The Georgia Control is attacking on a wide front. They’ve got troops stretching from Nashville to the Daniel Boone National Forest.”
“When did it start?”
“Day before yesterday.”
They’d been travelling for ten days. Did it have anything to do with events in Kokkola? Were the ripples already spreading?
At least Valentine had made no more mention of getting her out of the fight.
“I guess we’re alone in the fight. If there is going to be fighting.”
“Southern Command will get back in it, if I have anything to do with it,” Sime said. “I didn’t realize until this neutrality proposal how weak they must be. Nobody makes an offer like that if they think they have a chance at winning. It’s a bluff, and I intend that we should call it.”
They said farewell to Sime at the Evansville airport. A little two-engine scout reconnaissance plane was waiting for him to speed him back to Texarkana. Ahn-Kha shook his hand, his hairy face grave.
“We might have done better to negotiate,” Sime said. “Without the Lifeweavers—”
“Without the Lifeweavers we have a few more years of Bears, Cats, and Wolves,” Valentine said. “They’ll dwindle and die.”
“We’ve attempted to breed them,” Sime said. “That generation is at least a decade away from beginning to be useful.”
“Ordinary people are going to win this,” Valentine said. “Ordinary people in the Kurian Zone. Watch for it.”
“I hope you’re right, Valentine,” Sime said. “Well, good luck.”
He shook Duvalier’s hand—she still thought his touch a trifle reptilian, and he still reminded her of a Kansas Quisling, through and through. He boarded his plane.
“Well, the dice are thrown,” Colonel Lambert said.
They had a minute while the plane taxied and everyone moved out of the way.
Alessa Duvalier chuckled. “Valentine, you used to play chess. I sort of remember you got into it in Omaha with some bigwig there. What was it called when you move a few pieces at the opening to tempt your opponent into doing something stupid?”
“A gambit,” Valentine said. “You sacrifice a pawn or two in order to get your opponent to open up his defenses.”
“But whose gambit was it?” Ahn-Kha asked. “Ours or theirs?”
“Maybe we only took a pawn in Kokkola,” Duvalier said. “And now we’re alone in the fight. We have to live with that.”
“See that you do,” Valentine said. “But it always was our fight.”
GLOSSARY
BEARS—The toughest of the Hunter classes, Bears are famously ferocious and the shock troops of Southern Command, working themselves up into a berserk rage that allows them to take on even the Reapers at night. Also famous for surviving dreadful wounds that would kill an ordinary man, though how completely they heal varies slightly according to injury and individual.
CATS—The spies and saboteurs of the Hunter group, Cats are stealthy individuals with keen eyesight and superb reflexes. Women tend to predominate in this class, though whether this is due to their bodies’ adapting better to the Lifeweaver changes, or to the fact that Cat activities require the ability to blend in and choose a time for acting rather than more aggressive action is a matter of opinion.
GOLDEN ONES—A species of humanoid Grog related to the Gray Ones. Golden Ones are tall bipeds (though they will still sometimes go down on all fours in a sprint) mostly covered with short, butternut-colored fur that grows longer about the head-mane. Expressive batlike ears, a strong snout, and wide-set, calm eyes give them a somewhat ursine appearance, though the mouth is broader. They are considered by most to have a higher culture than their Gray relations. Their civilization is organized along more recognizable groups, with a loose caste system rather than the strictly tribal organizations of the Gray Ones.
GRAY ONES—A species of humanoid Grog related to the Golden Ones. Their hair is shorter than that of their relatives, save for longer tufts that grow to warm the forearms and calves/ankles. Their bodies are covered in thick gray hide, which grows into armorlike slabs on some males. They are bipeds in the fashion of gorillas, with much heavier and more powerful forearms than their formidable Golden One relations, wide where their cousins are tall. Unless organized by humans otherwise, they tend to group into tribes of extended families, though in a few places (like St. Louis) there are multitribe paramountcies controlling other tribes in a feudal manner.
GROGS—An unspecific word for any kind of life-form imported or created by the Kurians, unknown to Earth pre-2022. Some say it’s a version of “grok,” since s
o many of the strange, and sometimes horrific, life-forms cooperate; others maintain that the term arises from the “graaaaawg!” cry of the Gray Ones when wounded or calling for assistance in a fight. In most cases among the military of Southern Command, when the word “Grog” is used it is commonly understood to be a Gray One, as they will use other terms for different life-forms.
HEARTROOT—A Golden One staple, it is a fungoid like a very thick mushroom. Rich in proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, it is ground into animal feed. It is difficult to eat raw, but baked and coated in honey, it is reasonably tasty. It may also be braised or roasted and added to stews to provide more protein content when meat is short.
HUNTERS—A common term for those humans modified by the Lifeweavers for enhanced abilities of one sort or another. Up until 2070, the Hunters worked closely under the direction of the Lifeweavers in Southern Command, but after so many of them fled or were killed during Consul Solon’s incursion, the Hunter castes were directly managed by Southern Command.
KURIANS—A faction of the Lifeweavers from the planet Kur who learned how to extend their life span through the harvesting of vital aura. They invaded Earth once before in our prehistory and formed the basis for many legends of vampires. Although physically weak compared to their Reaper avatars, Kurians are masters of disguise, subterfuge, and manipulation. They tend to dwell in high, well-defended towers so as to better maintain mental links with their Reaper avatars. Face-to-face contact with one is rare except for their most trusted Quislings. Some have compared the Kurian need for vital aura with an addict’s need for a drug, especially since the consumption of vital aura sometimes leaves the Kurian in a state of reduced sensibility. Most Kurians live life on simple terms—concerned with whether they are safe, do they have enough sources of vital aura, and how can they gather a large supply and keep it against their hungry and rapacious relatives.