Choice of the Cat

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Choice of the Cat Page 33

by E. E. Knight


  Dragging the burden behind him was an exhausting process; he had to stop every ten minutes to rest. He learned to do this under the too-infrequent air tubes the Grogs had poked through to the surface. Rats and field mice had taken up the tunnel as a convenient home; he smelled and heard them all around even if he couldn't see them.

  With his back and shoulder muscles screaming, Valentine inched down the tunnel. It was kind of like rowing a boat, except for the absence of boat, fresh air, and water. He would scoot his buttocks a foot down the tube, which seemed to stretch endlessly through miles of midnight, then drag his improvised blanket-sled along behind with a pull at the nonexistent oar.

  The piggy smell was his holy grail, his stink-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel. As it intensified to the point where he no longer needed his Wolf's nose, he pulled with renewed energy. When he felt his probing hand come away smeared with filth, he knew he was at the end.

  He left the pack where it was. Fighting disgust, he smeared his face and hands with the soiled mud. He would have to remember to carry a can of Duvalier's greasepaint from now on.

  Telling yourself you're going to survive this, eh? It's a one-way crawl, and you know it.

  The tunnel bowed into an upward slope. Above, he saw a length of ten-inch pipe with a funnel at the end—running vertically through the tunnel. He put away his comforting light cube and let his eyes adjust. Hints of light could be seen around the edge of the funnel. He listened with hard ears, but heard only faint animal noises from above.

  Valentine moved the funnel. The wide part covered a hole chipped in a concrete basin, just below dirty grating apparently set on the floor above. The smelly sluice pipe and funnel came out of the ground easily enough. He climbed up through the hole in the bottom of the space just below the grate.

  He paused to listen again and then lifted the grate. He peered into the cement-floored pigpen of the barn. In one warm corner, a heap of porkers lay grunting in a pile. Across a low partition he could see another pigpen and its cluster of sleeping livestock.

  He climbed out of the grating hole. One of the pigs woke up and gave him the once-over, but flopped back on its side when it saw he bore no slop pail. Valentine reconnoitered the lowest level of the unlit barn. It sounded and smelled as if cows were above on the main floor. The pigs shared the basement with a tractor and a horse-trailer on blocks, now filled with chickens.

  He dropped back into the tunnel and began to transfer his equipment. He sensed a Reaper roaming somewhere as an unsettling tickle at the edges of his mind.

  He lifted his arsenal out of the tunnel. The pigs took one look at the flamethrower and decided it looked like some kind new trough-filling device and began to gather around and oink in excitement. Valentine escaped to the garage area, listening for sounds of investigation.

  He hid the satchel charge and flamethrower behind the tractor and climbed up a series of ladders to the hayloft. The smell of alfalfa and hay brought back a rush of memories of Molly and their first tryst. Keeping to the shadows, he surveyed the land as best he could.

  The barn stood behind the apartments of the officers' residences. In the distance he could see a concrete tower at the restored airfield. As far as he knew, the Twisted Cross air force consisted of a single two-seat scout plane, but perhaps the General had plans to increase his fleet in the future. A bunker-flanked hummock of ground marked the entrance to what Khiz-Mem called the Cave, the nuclear-blast-hardened headquarters of the Twisted Cross.

  The biggest aboveground structure on the post was the massive Train Hangar. Valentine could see the front of the building from the three-story-high loft of the barn. Built on the concrete foundations of a hardened airplane hangar, a network of rail lines ran parallel across the wide area in front of it before turning toward the main gate. It reminded Valentine of pictures he had seen of the German submarine pens in the Second World War. According to Khiz-Mem, they were in the process of adding enormous steel doors running down tracks in the concrete columns that held up the reinforced roof. Valentine could see sparks thrown by welders even now, in the dead of night, as work proceeded on the multiacre structure. They lit lines of boxcars inside, and Valentine could make out a few laboring figures within the machine shops and workbenches inside.

  Somewhere deep within the Cave, a natural-gas power plant supplied electricity for the entire base, including for the electrified perimeter fence he knew to be in the works. He moved to the north end of the barn and watched the guards at the main gate. He wondered if the tracks were wired with explosives—if so, it might be feasible to assault the camp by running a train through the gate. More barracks stood behind the low ring of hills that sheltered the base from prying eyes, and two more looked like they were under construction. Valentine did not know if the hills were natural, man-made, or the remnants of crater rims caused by nuclear explosions in '22.

  A Reaper lurked somewhere, near the entrance to the main gate. He sensed another near the Cave and possibly two near the hangar, though those last were at the edge of his range.

  Valentine forced himself to rest in the hayloft for fifteen minutes. He was exhausted from the hike and the cramped crawl through the tunnel, and he needed to think now that he'd seen the hangar. He had a lot still to do this night.

  The rational part of him wanted to get back to Southern Command with what he had learned. Certainly the Twisted Cross needed to be taken very seriously. Left untouched, the General would eventually have enough Reaper-human pairs to consume the Free Territory. Teams of Twisted Cross could destroy the border posts and principal bases as easily as they'd destroyed the Denverites at Fort Rowling. He knew Southern Command had some kind of emergency plan to fall back into the more rugged mountains, but how long could you feed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the hills?

  The Twisted Cross had weaknesses hidden behind their black-and-white flag of terror. This General, whoever he was, seemed still to be in the process of recruiting and building his army, testing it against easy targets as he trained more men. If Southern Command could be convinced, he would guide as many Bear teams as they could afford to send up here, and this General's all-conquering army might be stillborn in the act of creation.

  Valentine's mind kept returning to the Golden Ones, betrayed twice by Kur, and now in full revolt. Perhaps there were other Grogs elsewhere, equally mistreated and exploited, who would follow in their footsteps if just shown the way. Given time and training, the Cats could—

  But the Golden Ones didn't have time. The attack was already being prepared, and Valentine knew that the Twisted Cross Reapers would hit the ghetto in the darkness. They'd go in to kill, not occupy, and leave daylight mopping up of any remaining strongpoints to the support troops. The threat to Southern Command might be years away—the Golden Ones woud die tonight.

  If Valentine could use the demolition charge judiciously, the General might lose a few more of his precious Reapers.

  Just the act of debating his course was an admission of surrender, in a way. If it was the fate of the Golden Ones against duty, duty would lose.

  A few minutes after midnight, Valentine lurked outside the Train Hangar. He had found a blue jumpsuit hung up in the barn, and put it on along with a pair of muddy rubber galoshes. He piled the sword, flamethrower, and satchel charge in a wheelbarrow, threw the blanket over them, and headed for the gate to the officer's compound. He wheeled it slowly and tiredly toward the gate, and the sentry stepped out of the shadows and into the light, shotgun under his arm and collar turned up against the cool air.

  "Sorry, that took way longer than I thought," he called to the sentry. "It turned out she had twin calves, and I just couldn't get the second out. I ended up having to pull it round by getting a piece of twine and drawing its head around," Valentine said, firing off the sum total of his calving knowledge in a single verbal broadside. But it got him ten feet farther toward the guard.

  "Hold it, now—now!"

  Valentine's arms were a blur, and his sword flashed.
The guard fell over with a stunned look on his face, perhaps not believing that a human being could move that fast. Valentine put on the guard's jacket and hat and tossed the shotgun in the wheelbarrow.

  He left his weaponry in a shallow depression in the middle of a field near the mountainous building, covered it with the blanket, and began scouting the Train Hangar. He found a four-wheeled pushcart, piled it with a few items of scrap metal, and began to push it around the pavement, looking busy. He counted twenty-eight boxcars in three rows in the Train Hangar, with guards and dogs protecting the cargo within. None of the workers approached the guards any nearer than they absolutely had to. Valentine looked in the open side door of one and discovered that the ordinary-looking boxcars contained more of the metal coffins, perhaps each with a Twisted Cross soldier floating inside and animating one of their Reapers.

  Valentine let his hard ears roam, listened to the workers in the Train Hanger. The laborers were wondering what happened to the Golden One labor that usually was here to help them. Earlier that day, guards had come through and collected the Golden Ones. They had been placed in a special compound. Some thought they were being searched for weapons; others believed they had been taken as hostages to ensure the reliability of the General's puppet on the throne back in Omaha. There were rumors of a fight in the city. Then orders had come through to strip the base of anyone who could be trusted to use a rifle properly.

  "The General's really lost it," one commented after Valentine had wandered away and he checked over his shoulder. Valentine's Wolf ears still picked up every disgruntled word. "First he tries to bite off more than he can chew out west and loses a big chunk of his best teams, and now it sounds like there's a trouble in Omaha. Instead of letting it cool down, he always demands scorched earth. He can't win a war because he refuses to ever lose a battle. He always talks about how patient he is, but—"

  "Watch it, you. I don't want to be put on a list because I was talkin' treason."

  "It's not treason to say there should be more carrot and less stick. I signed on to this for the carrot, a big stretch of land to call my own and a brass ring like my old man has. It's been four years of step and fetch, and still no ring, no land."

  "I'd be happy if they just got the hair-backs working again. I'm breaking my back here."

  A concrete control tower stood within in the center of the hangar. It sat on a base that Valentine saw housed a spiral staircase, going down as well as up. The tower widened out to a bowl above, and four Twisted Cross soldiers stood atop it. Machine gun muzzles projected out over the edge of the bowl. Valentine pushed his cart past bunkers standing outside the hangar at the corners. The strongpoints didn't worry him. Their firing slits were designed to cover the approaches to the yard, not the interior. He looked across the cavernous interior, trying to figure out where the satchel charge might do the most good and how to deploy it.

  He brought his cart outside again, ostensibly heading for the junk pile. When he returned, the weapons were still hidden in plain sight in the wheelbarrow. He put them on his scrap cart and pulled it toward the center of the Train Hangar.

  As he approached the whitewashed guard tower, a sentry challenged him.

  "Just a sec, buddy—where do you think you're going with that shit? Nothing's allowed to be stored by the cars, even temporarily."

  Valentine kept pulling the cart, and pointed across the yard to a line of workbenches against the far wall. He bumped over the last set of tracks, deeply recessed into the floor of the Train Hangar next to the tower, and an eight-foot-long metal rod rolled off his cart, helped by the tiniest nudge of his leg.

  The guard stepped around in front of him. "You want to get over there, dumbass, you go around. Just because the lieutenant ain't here doesn't mean I can't take your number."

  Valentine picked up the steel rod and moved to put it back on the cart. Suddenly he uncoiled his body, swinging it up and catching the guard under his armpit. Ribs and shoulder bones cracked. The guard's rifle flew away, batted by the steel rod as its owner tumbled to the ground.

  A whistle blew from somewhere near the boxcars. Valentine pulled the cart to the door at the base of the tower and shouldered the flamethrower first, its nozzle clipped to the tanks. He put the satchel charge over the other arm and went up the spiral stairs with the shotgun in one hand and his sword in the other, the dangling nozzle of the flamethrower clanging on the metal.

  A Twisted Cross guard was on the stairs above. Valentine could hear his rapid-fire breathing as if the man were panting in his ear. He put down the sword and heavy weapons.

  He bent and jumped up five full steps, turning in the air as he went. He fired the shotgun in the man's face, sending flesh and bone flying.

  Nearly at the top, he could see the ceiling above. Valentine pulled the pin on one of the concussion grenades, counted two quick heartbeats, and tossed it up into the balcony.

  "Grenade," someone yelled, too late to do any good. Valentine was already running back down the stairs to his other weapons when the explosion hit.

  Even with concrete and two loops of the metal staircase to protect him, Valentine still felt the blast of the grenade. Everything seemed to slow down, and he felt closed off from the world, as though swimming underwater. Off balance, he lifted his gear and climbed up the stairs, bracing himself like a drunk.

  The men in the tower had either jumped or been blown out of the fifteen-foot-diameter circle. Two machine guns still rested in their mounts, and a pair of shoes lay incongruously on the floor.

  A flutter in the air, like bird wings beating against a window—

  —the Reaper almost had him when it jumped into the tower. But this was no Kurian-operated killing machine, owner and avatar seasoned by long years of psychic symbiosis. The man in the unknown tank pulling the wires of his puppet was an apprentice, not a Master, and the Reaper tumbled as it landed.

  Valentine had time to take up his sword as it rose. Before it could point its gun, he slashed downward, catching it at the knee. He jumped out of the way of the rising gun barrel, and the bullets tore through the empty air where he had stood an instant before. Now the Reaper was seriously off balance, and another whirlwind stroke by the Cat caught it across the neck. The head wasn't severed, but the central spinal cord was; the Reaper dropped to the ground, helpless. Its black teeth bit impotently at its own extruded syringe-tongue.

  Valentine ignored it, unhooking one of the strap-ends of the demolition charge. He flipped open the satchel charge and pulled both starter fuses from the top. The heavy bag began to hiss and smoke. Valentine spun like an Olympic hammer-thrower with the single strap held in his hands and sent the bricks of plastic explosive arcing off toward the lined-up boxcars.

  They may have been easier to guard packed together like that, but they made an unmissable target for Valentine's explosives. He heard the thunk of the charge bouncing off a wooden boxcar's roof, and he dropped behind the yard-thick concrete wall of the guard tower. The part of his mind that always drifted around himself in a fight wondered for a moment why the General would use wood for his boxcars, and the answer came as he opened his bag of grenades. Metal would be too hot in the sun—it could cook the men in the tanks inside. But wood had disadvantages, as well.

  He picked up one of the white-phosphorous grenades and covered his ears and nostrils against what was coming.

  The thick walls of the hangar magnified the tower-shaking boom from the explosives. With debris still in the air, Valentine pulled the pin and released the safety handle on the grenade. He pitched the hissing grenade into the destruction in the center of the boxcars. Shots from the hangar's few guards whipped through the air around him, and he dropped back down before they could improve their aim. As he continued to throw as fast as he could pull pins, he saw the first grenades explode. The phosphorous bombs scattered burning white particles into the splintered wood all around it. Fires devoured paint and wood in half a dozen places.

  He heard the sound of footsteps a
t the bottom of the spiral staircase and sent his last grenade bouncing down the metal stairs. It went off somewhere below, eliciting cries that brought a savage satisfaction.

  He turned on the pilot light of the flamethrower and came up over the edge of the parapet with the nozzle pointed at the boxcars.

  Valentine loosed a long stream of fiery rain on the sentries aiming their guns at him among the line of boxcars nearest the tower, painting the roofs with orange and yellow flame. The jellied gasoline roared as it consumed paint and wood, splattering and running down the sides and filling the Train Hangar with black smoke. Fire, the most ancient of terror weapons, was as effective on the Twisted Cross as on the Golden Ones. The boiling flames silenced the shots from the men around the cars.

  The Twisted Cross guards ran for their lives, some dropping their weapons as they escaped flame and smoke.

  Looking down from his concrete nest, Valentine exulted at the havoc wreaked below. No wonder Ali enjoyed lighting fires; the results were spectacular. The flamethrower ceased its napalm ejaculation, empty of everything but harmless compressed air. Valentine dropped it and moved to one of the machine guns. With precise movements, he opened the ammunition box mounted on the side of the gun and slapped home the belt in the receiver. Teem gritted and a snarl on his face, he pulled back the bolt and fired a burst at a group of guards running toward the boxcars. The gun chattered, steady as a rock in its mount, with less recoil than he would feel tapping a pool ball with the cue. Crouching, he concentrated on keeping anyone from fighting the fires now vigorously burning among the boxcars. He could feel the roaring heat almost painfully on his skin from thirty feet away. Nothing mattered but keeping those boxcars alight and the fire growing.

 

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