Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  “I have some support staff looking for passage too. And mail, of course,” he said, patting his oversized shoulder bag.

  “That bag’s a heavy responsibility,” she said. “If the captain doesn’t mind cramming a few more in, I won’t object.”

  They asked Mantilla, who shrugged. “Fuck it. Cook will be busier, is all. I’m fine with it, ma’am,” Mantilla said. “Your people do their own laundry and use their own bedding. I’m not running a cruise ship.”

  Valentine joined the chorus of “thank you, Captain’s” from his charges.

  “All you headed up to Evansville?” the sleepy mate asked.

  “Looks that way,” Valentine said.

  “Tough run. Not many friends on the Ohio.”

  “Maybe I’ll make some new ones,” Mantilla said.

  Last-minute stores of fresh vegetables came on board, and with no more ceremony than it took to undo mooring lines, the tug pushed the barge downriver into the narrow, dredged channel.

  Valentine now knew why Mantilla’s crew were somnambulists when they tied up. They worked like furies when the boat was in motion: throwing sacks of mail and unloading crates to shore boats along the run practically without stopping, nursing the engines, hosing windblown fall leaves off the decks, cooking and snatching food, and, most important, checking depth with a pole on the doubtful river. Mantilla’s barge and tug was big for the Arkansas. Most of the river traffic was in long, narrow flatboats with farting little motors that sounded like fishing trollers compared to the tug’s hearty diesels.

  Valentine, feeling guilty for just watching everyone work, eating of their galley but toiling not for his bread, checked the matériel Southern Command had scraped up for his operation in Kentucky.

  As usual, the promises on paper didn’t live up to what waited in the barge.

  There was plenty of material for uniforms: soft gray felt in massive, industrial rolls.

  “I know what this is,” Lambert said. “We took a big textiles plant outside of Houston.”

  “We’ll have to sew it ourselves.”

  “It’s light, and it keeps you warm even when you’re wet. They use it for blankets and liners.”

  “What’s it made out of?”

  “Polyester or something like it. Everyone’s talking about the winter blankets that Martinez is passing out made out of this material. But they’re not talking about how he acquired them.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “Stuff comes from a fairly high-tech operation—a factory with up-to-date equipment and facilities. We captured it intact outside Houston. The ownership and workers were only too happy to start cranking out material for Southern Command as their new client. General Martinez wouldn’t have any of it, though. He had them work triple-shifts cranking out fabric, and then when they’d burned through their raw materials, he stamped the whole product ‘Property of Southern Command’ and shipped it north. Factory never got paid and owner had no money to buy more raw materials, so it’s sitting empty now instead of making clothes for Texans and selling uniform liners to Southern Command. But Martinez got close to a million square yards of fabric for nothing.”

  The weapons were painfully familiar to him: the old single-shot lever action rifles he’d trained on long ago in the Labor Regiment. They were heavy, clunky, and didn’t stand up to repeated firing well. The action tended to heat up and melt the brass casings, jamming the breech. But it was better than nothing, and it threw a big .45 rifle bullet a long way. They’d be handy for deer hunting, if nothing else.

  The guns kept turning up like bad pennies in his life.

  “Don’t look so downcast, Valentine. Check the ammunition.”

  Valentine opened a padlocked crate.

  “Voodoo Works?” Valentine asked, seeing the manufacturer.

  “Pick one up.”

  Valentine knew something was different as soon as he lifted up a box of bullets. He raised an eyebrow at Lambert.

  “Yes, it’s Quickwood. Testing found that the .45 shell was less likely to tumble and fragment. Only a couple of thousand rounds, but if you distribute the Reaper rifles to your good shots . . .”

  She didn’t have anything to say about the explosives Valentine uncovered next. They’d loaded him up with what was colloquially known as Angel Food, a vanilla-colored utility explosive that was notoriously tricky to use. The combat engineers used to say working with it kept the angels busy, thus the name. You could handle or burn it without danger, but it was quick to blow when exposed to spark. Even static electricity was dangerous.

  For preserved food there was a lot of WHAM. Probably captured supplies taken off of Quisling military formations and now being repatriated to its native land. The WHAM had probably logged more time in service than many of his soldiers.

  As to the training materials, they were mostly workbooks on reading, writing, and arithmetic: useful to many of the lower-level workers who escaped the Kurian Order functionally illiterate but not particularly useful to his troops.

  For entertainment they had cases and cases of playing cards with the classic depiction of a bicyclist.

  Valentine lifted one of the boxes and opened it. Inside, the cards were wrapped up like a pack of cigarettes.

  “Strip poker?” he asked Lambert.

  “Stakes aren’t worth it, not with your face looking like that.”

  They laughed.

  Valentine would have found it hard to put into words to say how relieved he was Lambert was joining them in Kentucky. She was the sort of person who did a good deal without drawing attention to herself. He’d come across an old quote from one of the Prussians, von Moltke something or other, that perfectly described her: accomplish much, remain in the background, be more than you appear.

  But had she ever stood under shellfire before? History was full of leaders who were fine organizers but couldn’t face what Abra ham Lincoln called the “terrible arithmetic” of sacrificing some men now to save many in the future.

  To be honest with himself, Valentine had a little trouble with his sums as well.

  Later that night, as he fell asleep, he felt a slight, ominous tickle in his throat.

  Valentine, thick-headed and sneezing on the flatboat trip downriver with his new charges, observed that you could mark the deterioration of civilized standards the closer you drew to the Mississippi by the signs along the Arkansas’ riverbank.

  He liked leaning on the rail, watching the riverbank go by. Mantilla had put them all in oil-stained overalls even dirtier than his crew’s and beat-up old canvas slippers with strips of rubber sewn in for traction.

  “Only because it’s not barefoot weather, unless it’s a sunny day,” one of Mantilla’s crew explained.

  Back in the better-served counties with functioning law enforcement, there were polite notices not to tie up or trespass, bought at some hardware store.

  Farther down the river, you had hand-painted boards up.

  KEEP OUT! THIS MEANS YOU!

  or

  I’M TOO CHEAP FOR WARNING SHOTS

  Then closer still to the Mississippi, the ownership left off with writing entirely and sometimes just nailed up a skull and a pair of crossed femurs at their jetty.

  They left the last of the gun position and observation posts guarding the mouth of the Arkansas River at night and turned up the wide Mississippi with all hands alert and on watch.

  Mantilla’s men were experts with paint and brush and stencil and flag, and within a few minutes they had transformed the old barge with Kurian running colors.

  Valentine stood on the bridge, drinking the captain’s excellent coffee with Mantilla. They had a shallow draft, so the captain kept close to the Kurian east side as part of his masquerade. There were monsters on the river six times as long as Mantilla’s little craft.

  “You should have a little honey for that cold. Honey’s the best thing. Colds are a real suka.”

  Valentine accepted some tea and honey. As usual, he was in for anothe
r surprise. The tea was rich and flavorful; it made much of the produce in Southern Command taste like herb-and-spice dust.

  “That’s Assam, all the way from Sri Lanka,” Mantilla said.

  Valentine wasn’t even sure where Sri Lanka was. To change the subject, he inquired about the dangers they might face on the river, motoring right up through the border of two warring states.

  “It’s a sort of truce at midchannel,” Mantilla said, pacing from one side of the bridge to the other on the little tug. “Nobody likes to make a fuss, sinking each other’s river traffic. The sons-of-whores military vessels will chase and shoot right and left, but the coal and grain barges pass without too much trouble. Of course, the Kurian captains are smart enough to do a little trade with our little luggers; a few tons of coal or steel given up here and there for a quiet run between the Kurian Zone and the UFR is a small price to pay. The bastards would rather pay up than fall in the schiesse with our side.”

  “Chummy.”

  “We stay on our side; they stay on theirs. Most of the time. Your little venture into Kentucky broke the rules. Our Kurian friends can’t allow that to stand, you know. They’ll strike back.”

  “It had better be with something better than what they’ve used so far,” Valentine said as the Mississippi unrolled like a blue-green carpet in front of the little barge. “The Moondaggers were vicious, but they weren’t much in a stand-up fight against people who could shoot back.”

  “They were supposed to take you quietly into custody. After a few culls, the rest would be exchanged back to the UFR in return for some captured Texas Quislings or some other property the Kurians wished not to lose. Your little rebellion in the Ozarks is getting too big for its britches.”

  “Our little rebellion. You’re on our side.”

  “Very much so. If I speak strangely, it’s only because I know of other rebels in other places and times.”

  The “and times” comment put Valentine on his guard. How much did he really know about Mantilla? What did the captain’s name mean in Spanish again? Was it a cloak or covering of some kind?

  Valentine wondered how Mantilla, a river captain, knew so much about the fighting. You’d think he’d spend his time studying depth charts and dealing with customs clerks and patrol boat captains.

  With the usual methodical lucidity he had during illness, he thought the matter over in the glorified closet that served as his cabin. He didn’t like being played, but unless Mantilla was an unusually cruel gamester, he didn’t think he was being toyed with. Instead, the barge captain seemed to be trying to let him in on a secret without saying so directly.

  He went to bed wondering just who, or what, their captain was. If he was, say, a Lifeweaver, why would he be doing something as exposed and dangerous as traveling up and down the rivers of the former United States—and perhaps into the Caribbean and beyond as well?

  The other possibility was that he was a Kurian who had gone over to the side of his estranged relatives, the Lifeweavers, to help the humans, but that made even less sense.

  There was a third option. Valentine had heard rumors, long ago in his days as a Wolf, from his old tent mate that there was supposed to be another kind of Hunter, another caste beyond the Wolves, Cats, and Bears. Of course, it hadn’t been much more than rumor. His old tent mate had claimed that it was something the Lifeweavers tried to effect in humans but that didn’t work out; they all went mad and were locked up in secrecy.

  Then again, Valentine had met an old resistance leader in Jamaica who’d been modified in some way by the Lifeweavers. She’d seemed sane enough, even if most of the rumors about her were insane. She’d offered some insight into his future.

  She’d turned out to be at least partially right.

  Valentine didn’t know how there could be such a thing as precognition. There were so many variables to life. He’d seen too many lives lost by someone being a step too late or a step too early.

  He quit thinking about Mantilla. As long as he got them safely to Evansville. Or to the mouth of the Tennessee in Kentucky, even. Past Paducah.

  He woke up to gunfire.

  It alarmed him for an instant. The familiar crack put him atop Big Rock Hill and running through the kettles of south-central Wisconsin and in the dust of the dry Caribbean coast of Santo Do mingo and with the punishment brigade on the edge of the mine-fields around Seattle, not sure of which and remembering each all at once in dizzy, sick shock. Then he remembered Lambert had told him that Mantilla had said she could practice with her rifle up by Missouri bootheel territory.

  He put on his boots, grabbed a piece of toast, and went up on deck to watch.

  Lambert, dressed in some washed-out, sun-bleached fatigues, was firing her rifle from the seated position, looking down the scope through a scratched and hot-glued pair of safety goggles. Valentine had seen the rifle’s cheap cloth case when he came aboard and wondered what she had in there. He recognized the weapon: It was one of the Atlanta Gunworks Type Threes he’d become familiar with when Consul Solon had issued them to his ad hoc group posing as Quislings on the banks of the Arkansas. They were sought-after guns in Southern Command, basically an updated version of the old United States M14.

  Lambert looked like she had one rigged out for Special Operations. It had a slightly longer barrel with a flash suppressor and a fine-looking optical scope, as well as a bipod that could fold down into a front handgrip. The plastic stock had a nice little compartment for maintenance tools and a bayonet/wire cutter.

  The bayonet was a handy device. It had a claw on the handle that was useful for extracting nails and the blade was useful for opening cans or creating an emergency tap in a keg.

  But he knew the weight and length of the weapon all too well. Lambert, for all her determination, found it an awkwardly big weapon to handle.

  She was using it to pepper pieces of driftwood, old channel markers, and washed-up debris lining the riverbank. She clanged a bullet off of what looked like an old water heater.

  “You’re a good shot,” Valentine said.

  “It’s hard to be a bad one with this thing,” she replied, putting her eye back to the sight and searching for a target. “I wish it wasn’t so goddamn heavy, is all.”

  “Try mine,” Valentine said, offering her his submachine gun. It was a lethal little buzz saw, with an interesting sloped design that fought barrel-rise on full-automatic fire. Perfect for someone Lambert’s size. He’d carried it across Kentucky and back.

  Valentine looked at the serial number on Lambert’s gun. Something about the stock struck him as familiar. An extra layer of leather had been wrapped around the stock for a better fit on a big man. He’d last seen this gun outside Dallas—

  “This belonged to Moira Styachowski,” Valentine said.

  “Yes,” Lambert said flatly.

  “She gave you her old Number Three?”

  “No. Colonel Post gave it to me. I wanted his advice on a good field rifle. He said something about Kentuckians knowing a good long rifle for three hundred years and counting, and that if I got desperate I could probably trade it for a working truck, optics being precious in the borderlands. I am thinking about trading it, though. It’s a great heavy thing.”

  Post knew his guns. Odd of him to give Lambert too much gun. He’d made a present to Valentine of his first .45 automatic. Valentine had lost it, of course, but had replaced it with a similar version at the first opportunity.

  Lambert fired off a few bursts with the entry gun, ripping up a blackened old post for a dock missing its planking.

  “That’s more my size,” she said.

  Valentine considered a lewd comment about a small size having its advantages in ease of handling, but decided against it. Lambert wasn’t a flirt and had been his superior too long for it to feel right, even as a joke.

  They each fired off a pair of magazines. The Number Three wasn’t quite as handy as the Steyr Scout Valentine had gone west with, but the optics were better and it had anot
her hundred meters on the carbine. It was a weapon that could serve equally well as a sniper rifle and a battle rifle. Valentine wouldn’t care to use it for house-to-house street fighting, but for the woods and hills of Kentucky it was ideal.

  “Want to switch permanently?” Valentine asked. “I’d love to get my hands on an old Number Three.”

  “Will said to sleep with it, or you’d steal it,” Lambert said.

  “Unless it has sentimental—”

  “I’m teasing, Valentine. Will said I should trade it if I found something better. I like your gun more. But are you willing to—”

  “Only if I’m not breaking up a love triangle between you two and the rifle.” Valentine instantly regretted the words. Stupid thing to say.

  “I think he’d be pleased as anything if you carried it,” Lambert said. “He thinks you hang the moon, you know.”

  “Only by standing on his shoulders. While he bled,” Valentine said.

  The cheery intimacy evaporated.

  “Let’s shoot,” Lambert said.

  “Ever fired a gun in battle?” Valentine asked.

  “During Archangel,” Lambert said. “But I don’t know if it counts. Our column came under fire at night. I bailed out and started blasting away at the gun flashes with everyone else. Turned out we were shooting at our own men. No one was killed, but two of our men ended up in the hospital.”

  “It happens,” Valentine said.

  “Post said when you were young, you lost someone close by accident like that.”

  “True,” Valentine said.

  “I’m sorry; was he not supposed to talk about it? He only told me to make me feel better about that night.”

  “I didn’t know you two were that close.”

  “Oh, I might as well tell you. I facilitated his adoption of Moira’s daughter after her plane went down. ‘Facilitated’ isn’t quite the word. Stole, maybe. She was supposed to go to that special school where they’re bringing up trans-human children.”