Choice of the Cat

by E. E. Knight

  "Thank you."

  "And there's a wonderful laundry just catty-corner. Tucks, it's called, and they will make those buckskins look like they've just been sewn. They can get the bloodstains out. Along with the ... ahem ... natural masculine odors."

  The museum filled out about one quarter of the first floor of the building Donna had described. Valentine had bummed a pair of jeans and a clean shirt off one of the convalescing Wolves—Gupti had a head wound and Salvador a knee brace; Salvador's advice was to borrow from Gupti because there was every chance of him not remembering he'd ever lent out his clothes. Valentine borrowed clothes from Salvador and reported to the fort to let them know where he was staying; then went into town.

  The museum was on his map.

  He spent a few minutes chatting with the curator, a one-legged veteran with a solid build and a pistol in a quick-release holster—a former Bear. A single key dangled from a breakaway chain around his neck; Valentine suspected it was for a case of captured assault rifles.

  He took a polite look at the exhibits, tracing everything from the last newsmagazines, stained and dog-eared, covering the earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanoes of 2022 before Big R hit. The next cabinet covered the Ravies plague—photographs of wild mobs caught in action, cities aflame, stacked corpses riddled with bite marks and bullet holes. Then the hopeful headlines from the few remaining newspapers about the Kurians, visitors from another world who had come to restore order to a shattered civilization. Alongside these were pamphlets, amateurish and smeared and filled with horrific sketches about how the Kurians were the cause of it all. There were drawings of the robed Crisis Governors with captions asserting that the "Reapers" were nothing but death-collectors, vampire like creatures who fed on humans for their masters.

  Then came a few fuzzy shots on bad stock of the Lost War. Drawings of the Grogs, a polyglot of beings brought by the Kurians from other worlds. Blasted tanks. Crashed planes. Mushroom clouds. Ruins. Flags being hauled down as bases went up in smoke to save them from capture.

  A room, shielded from the rest of the museum by a black curtain, was devoted to the Kurian Order as practiced across the planet save for a few remote Freeholds. Valentine decided not to look in mere. He'd seen enough of the KZ with his own eyes.

  Valentine stated his business. The custodian picked up a phone and dialed, and he told Valentine one of the "upstairs men" would be with him in a minute.

  * * *

  Bone Lombard was about Valentine's age and had thick glasses. He introduced himself as a CID "filter."

  "What's that?" Valentine asked.

  "I'll show you."

  He took Valentine back to the loading dock. Like a big garage, the dock had a series of metal doors on rails, a wide-open interior devoid of anything but structural supports. Painted lines crisscrossed the floor. The lines organized a sea of wire crates and metal trays filled with documents, binders, folders, and books.

  "We get a lot of captured paperwork," Lombard said. "We meaning a big we—Southern Command. Anything that isn't obviously useful, like the details of a column, where and when it'll be, ends up being carted here. We get everything from Quisling cookbooks to personal letters, complete with perfume and snips of hair. I don't want to bore you with all the procedures, but the filters read through it." He waved at another young man and a woman. The other filters sat on wheeled chairs with a built-in desk, pencils handy under a droplight hanging from a hook attached to the back of the chair, going through loose paper. "It can sometimes give us a picture of what's really going on outside our borders. Where there are shortages, weak spots."

  "You divine trends from paperwork?"

  "Once, based on requisitions that the logistics commandos found in a hospital, we saw that huge amounts of bandages and surgical supplies were going to Shawnee Oklahoma. Turned out that the Fassler Revolt was in full swing."

  Valentine remembered hearing something about it while he was studying for his lieutenant's bars at Pine Bluff. "It ended badly."

  "Fassler and all his men got hanged, yes."

  "I heard crucified," Valentine said.

  "Maybe. Couldn't get them enough guns in time. The Oklahomans really locked down the counties in revolt. But again, if it weren't for some paperwork, we might not even know the name Fassler."

  "I've got a name for you. What do you know about the Twisted Cross?"

  Lombard shrugged. "I don't know. Let's index it."

  One of Lombard's associates kicked out sideways and sent his chair-desk rolling down an alley between the boxes. A white cat jumped out of the way.

  The "index" turned out to be an old library card catalog in a separate room, thickly insulated behind a safelike door. There were several of the huge wooden cabinets filled with index-card-size drawers. Valentine opened a drawer; under typed headings there were handwritten notations in a mix of letters and numbers.

  Gannet, Pony A. (Capt. "Chanute Leadership Corps")

  MIL-KAN ACT206928 11NOV61

  Append CAP -6 INT -15( m, v) EX 61-415

  "Don't even try," Lombard said. He took the card. "Seems this Pony—strange first name—Gannet was a captain from a Quisling body called the 'Chanute Leadership Corps.' Action Report 206-928 describes the fight. You see the date. Looks like he was taken, and there was something interesting about the capture—it appears as a separate appendix. His interrogation is also appended, and copies went to Division V, which deals with atrocities, and M, which deals with people missing in action. They must have caught him more-or-less red-handed at something. He was executed in '61 sometime between eleventh November and the end of the year. That's pretty fast nowadays. If you go to a card for the 'Chanute Leadership Corps,' you'll see—"

  "I'm impressed. But the Twisted Cross?"

  "Quisling unit, I bet," Lombard said.

  "Yes."

  Lombard went to a file drawer. "They have any other names?"

  "I don't know. I wrote out my report. You want to read it?"

  "Sure, in a sec. Okay ... Twisted Cross. They're designated a Quisling unit. Looks like they get around by train. That's odd. They're cross-referenced to Eastern Division."

  "Why's it odd?"

  "They provide railroad security, maybe?"

  "Why is it odd?" Valentine asked again.

  "Usually Quisling units stay in one area, under a lord or a group of lords. You wouldn't find the late Captain Gannet's Chanute Leadership Corps operating in, say, Illinois. Unless that particular Kurian family was invading Illinois, I suppose."

  Valentine gave him the copy of his supplemental report that he'd attached to his description of the battle at Little Timber. Lombard looked through the three pages at the rate of ten seconds a page.

  "Aren't you going to read it?"

  "I did. Shall I quote the key passage? Ha-hem ... 'The destruction of Lieutenant Caltagirone's platoon and Smoke's report of heavily armed Reapers employed in groups as a cohesive fighting force demand investigation. Any information on the General—'"

  "Sorry. I wrote a report on these guys once before. I might as well have tossed it in a swamp."

  "Fear not. I'm sure it lives forever in an index just like this one, so it can be located in a climate-controlled warehouse. Wish we filters got the same treatment—you should smell this place in August. Let's go talk to Doug; he's our Quisling expert for everything west of the Mississippi."

  As he followed Lombard to the stairway, Valentine congratulated himself for passing through the filter.

  Lombard took him to an office this time. Doug Metzel had a nameplate on his door, which opened only partway thanks to the volume of binders in his office. They lined shelves, filled corners, and cut off the light from the room's big, arch-topped window. A cat napped in the sun atop one labeled bridge security. But the man himself wasn't in.

  "Two weeks' leave. His mother—cancer, I guess," his assistant reported. She was a slight woman, perhaps in her late thirties, and wore a Guards uniform. Her nameplate read sgt. lake.<
br />
  "Shows you how often I make it to the third floor," Lombard said.

  "What is it, Bone?"

  "I've got a Wolf just in from ... ah ..."

  "Lake of the Cherokees," Valentine supplied.

  "Memory's great short-term." Lombard shrugged. "Five minutes later, it's mush. Comes from doing sort after sort after sort."

  Lombard made further introductions. Metzel's Southern Command associate shook hands with Valentine. "I'm honored," she said gravely. Valentine hadn't heard that expression very often from either a civilian or a Southern Command Guard. He wasn't quite sure how to respond.

  "It's a pleasure," he said.

  "I'm Doug's liaison, and I'm filling in while he's gone. What do you have, Lieutenant? Sit down and give me the highlights."

  Valentine sat across from her and began with his first encounter with the Twisted Cross swastika logo when he'd seen it on a canoe belonging to some Reapers hunting a Cat named Eveready in the Yazoo Delta. The Illinois Quislings who feared an organization with that insignia called the Twisted Cross. The Twisted Cross man he'd met in Chicago who spoke of a comrade who "fed" and suffered a bad leg wound. The man's own feeding, somehow inspired by the others. Then more recently, Smoke's description of Reapers with guns.

  She listened attentively and brought down a binder. Inside it were pages of snipped insignia from uniforms. She consulted the legend in the front and then opened it before Valentine. "Like this?"

  The card within had a black piece of fabric attached. On the fabric was a white piece of metalwork, a reversed swastika.

  "That's their insignia. I saw one just like it in the Zoo in Wisconsin. The owner... he fed like a Reaper." Valentine's voice cracked, embarrassing him.

  The liaison and Lombard grimaced. "Maybe just a sicko? Monkey see, monkey do?"

  "I only saw him for a few minutes. He was definitely Twisted Cross."

  She made a note on a pad of paper. "We don't know much about them. We think it's railroad security. They've been spotted in a couple different places." She looked in another folder. "Looks like the current theory is they run what we call 'Q-trains.' Trains filled up with soldiers that look just like normal cargo trains. You Wolves or whatever hit the train, thinking you're going to score some tires and penicillin, and out jumps a regiment of men. But there are no action reports having to do with the Twisted Cross attacking Southern Command, so we can only theorize about methods or numbers."

  "It's got to be more than that," Valentine said. "There were border trash in Illinois that were scared—"

  She turned the book around and looked at it again. "I don't doubt it. Lots of Quislings use Nazi insignia. Trying to be tough or scary." She waved at the binders. "I can name half a dozen groups that use that crap. There's a gigantic biker gang in California's Silicone Alley that has SS death's-heads and the twin lightning bolts plastered everywhere. Up in Idaho, there are brownshirts with those goofy cavalry pants and boots. The Quislings open a history book, find something that looks intimidating, and copy it. Hell, even our own guys—Colonel Sark's Flying Circus in the Cascades uses the Iron Cross as a decoration for valor. I'm sure there are others in the East; the West is my field."

  "Will you read my report?" Valentine asked.

  "It's informative," Lombard added.

  "Of course."

  Valentine passed it to her. "While I'm here."

  She smiled at him. "You always been a Wolf, Valentine? Seems like you don't trust our department."

  "Always been a Wolf, unless you count my year in the Labor."

  "The millstones of Southern Command grind slow but exceedingly fine," she said. She rotated a pencil in her mouth as she read, looked up, and extracted it. "Sorry. Old habit."

  Lake finished it, put a star in the upper right hand corner. "That means 'interesting,'" she explained. "I'm kicking it higher in the food chain."

  "What would two stars mean?"

  "Immediate threat," Lombard said.

  "I don't see anything like that here. Southern Command has other fires nearer its foot to piss on. But thank you for bringing it to our attention. I'll see if I can find that Cat's report; I'll send them on together. Thanks for bringing him up, Bone."

  Valentine had done all he could. Perhaps he'd given his story enough inertia to keep the Twisted Cross moving through Lake's millstones. He thanked her for her time, and Lombard escorted him to the door. A calico cat rubbed itself against his boot as Lombard fumbled with his key.

  "What's with the cats, Bone?"

  "Mice. They love to eat paper. We've got a lot of it here."

  "Do you think what I came in with is important?"

  Lombard took off his glasses and cleaned them with his shirttail. He didn't bother tucking it back in. "Yeah. Anything that can surround and kill a platoon of Wolves is dangerous. But your Cat's story—it's hearsay, kinda. Operating out in the KZ for months on your own, it's enough to queer anyone's judgment. I've read a few Cat reports.... Some sound like the products of a disordered mind."

  "Will you make sure the paper trail stays in view?"

  "I'm just a filter, like I said. I'll do what I can."

  They shook on it at the museum door.

  The weather turned sunny, almost hot. Valentine sweated on his walk back to the boarding house.

  "You missed a courier, Valentine," Donna Walbrook said when he returned to the Den.

  She handed him a sealed envelope. "Bad news when it comes special delivery." .

  He read the sender's imprint. It was from the colonel's office, Second Wolf Regiment. Maybe they'd cut his survivor's leave short so he could take command of a reborn Foxtrot Company. Foxtrot deserved to live after the fight they'd put up at Little Timber. He broke the seal.

  Mrs. Walbrook watched him, saw his face, patted him as he read. "Sorry, son. Someone you know die?"

  "I've got orders to report to Montgomery next week." The rest of the words were hard to say; he had to force them out of a thick throat. "Under escort. There's a court of inquiry being formed to investigate my actions. I'm subject to court-martial."

  Chapter Four

  Southern Missouri, April: Even the rebuilt islands of humanity surrounded by the bloody sea of the Kurian Order no longer resemble the quiet past. The settlements and towns are in the tradition of medieval villages, with stout buildings huddled together like a threatened elephant herd, presenting horns and hide to the world as the mothers and young shelter within. People take care to be indoors by nightfall, and trust only the faces known to them. A few radios and even fewer printing presses distribute the news. A telephone call is a rarity. Trusted elders and community assist the smallholders with everything from education to sanitation.

  On the north "wall" of the little town of Montgomery, folded into the foothills of the picturesque Ozarks of south-em Missouri, Jackson Elementary School stands stolidly as one of the hamlet's oldest buildings. Architecturally uninspiring but thickly bricked, it protects the north side of one of the newer towns of the Ozark Free Territory. A series of classrooms, with windows bricked up except for a few rifle loopholes with sandbags ready on nearby shelves, look out on a playground cleared of swings and trees. The roof of the school is covered with a slanted shield of fireproofed railroad ties, which, along with a thirty-foot watchtower are the only additions to the school in the last half-century of its existence.

  * * *

  Inside the building, in the old half-underground library on the lowest level of the school, three long scarred wooden tables have been rearranged into a U. At the center of the table, a sober-faced woman in a heavy uniform coat sits with three small piles of paper in front of her, sorting through the handwritten and typed pages with the aid of a younger officer. To her left, another gray-haired officer waits in self-important isolation, his fingers laced primly in front of him, tired-looking eyes gazing across the empty space in the hollow of the U at another figure.

  The object of his gaze is David Valentine, wearing the closest thing to a un
iform the Wolf officer posesses: creased blue trousers, boots, and a pressed white shirt. He has bound his shining black hair close to his scalp out of respect for the occasion. Valentine has none of Foxtrot's complement in Montgomery, but were any of them to look at him, they would know fie was angry. His chin is down, jaw set, and he wears the fixed expression of a wounded bull about to try a final charge at the matador. A brother Guard officer leans toward him, speaking calmly and softly into his ear.

  Col. Elizabeth Chalmers, who rumor said had written the book on Southern Command's military jurisprudence, cleared her throat. After the days' proceedings, Valentine learned that the sound was her version of a judge bringing the court to order with his gavel.

  "This investigation is drawing to a close. Captain Wilton," she said, addressing the older man who sat facing Valentine, "you've had the unhappy duty of attempting to substantiate the charges brought by Captain Beck against Lieutenant Valentine. Namely that on the date in question Lieutenant Valentine willfully and without cause disobeyed orders and withdrew from Little Timber Hill, turning Foxtrot Company's hard-won victory into a defeat."

  Two weeks ago, when Valentine first heard that Beck, from his hospital bed, had ordered charges brought against him, he had been shocked. During the course of investigation to determine if a court-martial should be convened, Valentine came to the slow realization that Beck was using the investigation of his subordinate as a smoke screen to obscure the debacle at Little Timber Hill. Foxtrot Company, so laboriously built up and trained over the last year, was again well below half-strength and rendered useless to Southern Command for the rest of the year at least. Judicial proceedings against a disobedient subordinate would befuddle the issue.

  Who knows, Valentine thought, a touch of gallows humor appearing, Beck might even get another promotion out of it.

  Captain McKendrick of the Advocate General's office, the tiny legal team that handled most of the military and civilian justice in the Free Territory, had been assigned to Valentine as his official "friend and spokesman." His counsel consisted of, "Keep your mouth shut," and "Colonel Chalmers prefers to be addressed as sir, not ma'am."