by E. E. Knight
“Élan, right down to the company level, is important to me. Especially in my light infantry. You’ll move fast and fight hard, grabbing ground and holding it until supports arrive. As a sign of your special bravery you’ll carry a symbol, your bolo knife.”
He looked over his shoulder. The diesel ground forward and stopped before Valentine. Hamm hopped up into the bed. “Help me, will you, Colonel? I like to hand these out personally.”
There were long green crates within, like footlockers. Valentine lifted the hinged lid on one. Rows of sheathed machetes rested within. General Hamm picked one out and handed it to him. “Yours, Colonel. A handy little tool. Got the idea from those blades some of the ‘Wolf’ guerillas carry. You’ll find I’ve improved the design.”
“All the troops carry these, General?”
“No, just you lights. The heavy infantry get flak jackets and masked helmets. Consider yourselves saved a heart attack. That armor’s Pennsylvania-built; it’s hotter than hell down here.”
Valentine unsheathed a blade. It was long and rectangular, a blade on one edge and saw teeth on the other. It widened slightly near the handle, which had a wire cutter built into the guard just above the blade. The metal was coated with a dark finish for night use.
Solon had retired to his SUV. Valentine, with the help of a corporal, handed up knife after knife to the general, who passed them out, each with a little word of commendation to the files of men brought forward to receive them. They returned to their company positions. The general took up a blade as well.
“You’ve got your blades. Your bolos. It was an old war cry, and soon you’ll be shouting it again, when we go up into the mountains and get the poor bastards unlucky enough to be facing you. Let’s try it out, shall we?
“Bolo!” he shouted, then lifted his hands to the men.
“Bolo,” they shouted back.
“Not good enough!” Hamm said. “Booolo!”
“Bolo!” the men screamed back. “Booolooo!”
“Louder!” the general bellowed. He unsheathed the blade, brandishing it in the air. “BOLO!”
“BOLO!” it came back to him, a wall of noise. Valentine joined in, the scream so long repressed escaping. With it went some of his pain. He looked out at the thicket of waving, blackened steel. The general was right. He wouldn’t care to be up against them either.
The next item on Solon’s itinerary was a train ride. They took the ferry across to the north side of the river. Above them workmen and prisoners fixed I-beams to the pilings of the old bridge. Xray-Tango was rebuilding the railroad bridge first; the road bridge would come later. They stepped out of the ferry and took the short walk to the old rail yard.
The officers, a mélange of three generals, eleven colonels—including Valentine—and an assortment of accessory captains and lieutenants, ate a buffet served on the platform before boarding the flag-festooned train for its inaugural ride. The beginnings of the line to run, once again, west from the Little Rock area to Fort Scott had only been cleared a few miles northwest, but in those few miles it went to a station near Solon’s prospective Residence, even now being constructed on a hill thick with trees, where once a golf course, lakes and the houses of the well-to-do stood. The nukes had flattened and burned house and bole alike, but a grander estate would rise from the ashes.
Valentine tried to keep his hand off his holster as he exchanged pleasantries with the braided Quislings. Solon was a gracious host, and introduced him to a few others as “Colonel Le Sain, a protégé of Xray-Tango.” Xray-Tango introduced him to others as an officer nominated to command by Consul Solon himself. As the new officer in the coterie, Valentine received a sort of reserved attention. The generals nodded to him, the colonels seemed suspicious of him, and the lesser officers watched him. One lieutenant in particular pursued him, popping up at his elbow and clinging to him like a wart.
“Your Colonelcy would care for some more wine?” the unctuous lieutenant, a man named Dalton, asked.
“I’m fine, Lieutenant.”
The man looked at the turned backs all around them, and lowered his voice. “A man in your position deserves a few comforts to forget the hardships of command. Ask anyone; I’m the sort that can make good things happen. I can make bad things disappear. Pfssssht.” He punctuated his conversation with sound effects. “You’d find me good company, and I’m looking for a good billet.”
Valentine had already brushed off one captain angling for a staff position; he didn’t want a Quisling with aspirations toward pimphood hanging around his camp. He asked Xray-Tango about it when they got a moment together on the train.
“Solon’s at fault for it, really,” Xray-Tango said. “He hands out promotions like a parade marshal throwing candy. They join his military advisor’s staff until he can fob them off on someone. A lot of them are sons of important men in Dallas, or Tulsa, or Memphis. Anyone who helped him. Some of the officers had trouble fitting in back home, but they’ve done good service to the Higher Ups, so here they are. We’ve got generals who are illiterate, colonels who are pederasts; you get the picture.”
“They should have gone down to New Orleans, then. They’d’ve fit right in.” Valentine looked out the window as the train crawled west, blowing its whistle every minute on the crawling, festive trip. The official one. Another train with construction supplies had gone out on a test run a few days before.
“The bad ones have an unerring instinct for not getting themselves killed, have you ever noticed it? Colonel Forester took a bullet in the ear on the banks of the Black. General Cruz was sharing a foxhole with three men when a 120mm mortar round paid them a visit. Three privates got a helluva funeral, we had to bury them together because we couldn’t tell who was who. Hamm’s predecessor, General Patrick O’Connel, our best division commander last summer, had a birthday party and someone decided signal flares would really set off the cake. Six officers died when the house burned down.”
“Idiots. But six? Fumes get them?”
“The fire spread fast. There were a lot of papers in there; they tried to fight it to save them. The general traveled with his own supply of gasoline. They locked it up good. Too good—no ventilation. Whoof.”
“The fire took a house full of people?”
“One or two made it. The general had an eye for the ladies. They traveled with him. He had this redhead. A real saddlebred—a little on the bony side, but pretty. She got passed on to Hamm like it was in the will.”
“Privileges of rank,” Valentine said, trying to sound as nonchalant. Ali? A fire would be just like her. But the rest didn’t fit. Pillow recon, as Alessa Duvalier used to call it, wasn’t her style.
The train swung and jerked as it crawled along the points. The track needed some work.
“What’s Hamm like?”
“Third Division is a hell of an outfit, though they’ve really caught it since O’Connel died. They’re scattered on the north side of the river now, refitting for the big push.”
Valentine looked out the window. Ali would understand, if he could just talk to her. She’d been a Cat almost since puberty, had seen and done things that would turn a tough man’s hair gray. He had been planning to put Gabriella Cho’s bullet between General Hamm’s eyes, right after removing Solon’s head with Caroline Smalls’, but now he was having second thoughts. After turning them over in his mind, he discarded his hopes. It was wishful thinking, to expect Alessa Duvalier to be wandering almost the same camp he was, even if she was a Cat.
The train finished its short run at a notch in the hills above what had been North Little Rock. Solon’s party disembarked, more trucks—this time, hosed-down pickups—met them to take everyone up the steep grade to the estate grounds. Judging from the roadside placement of the posts marking where the fence would be, Solon had great plans for the grounds, if sheer acreage was any indication. A marble block the size of a crypt already bore the words STATION ONE—CONSULAR RESIDENCE in meter-high letters.
The hill fla
ttened out as they rode to the top, and Valentine got his first view of the foundations of Solon’s Residence. The vigorous young scrub forest that had been claiming the hillside lay in windrows up the gentle hill and at the top. A cluster of Quonset huts next to a pond housed the builders. The construction site, situated for a perfect view of the river valley to the west and the distant Ouachitas beyond, dominated a chunky, freshly cleared vista. As they drove closer Valentine got a better view of the future center of Trans-Mississippi power. There were basements, foundations and churned-up earth all around something that looked like it once was a college, or perhaps just a sturdy building that had survived the ’22 devastation. A new roof had been put on it, surmounted by a cupola. The “college” formed the base of a great U of future buildings, some of which had the floors of the second story built along with the beginnings of walls. Georgian-style arched windows, minus the glass, were in place on the lower levels. It was reminiscent of the old Federal White House, expanded into a palace-sized villa.
The surroundings were just as impressive. The tallest hump of Big Rock Mountain, still forested, dominated the villa’s “backyard.”
Solon gathered his entourage at what would be the turnaround of his drive, in front of the new arched doors. Valentine angled his way through the press of officers to see Solon pointing out highlights. “There’ll be a Grecian temple on top of the hill, one day. But that’s the sort of finishing touch I’m saving until the masons are done with the important work down here. It’ll be the finest view in the Trans-Mississippi, one day. Right now I call it the Lookout. I’ll hike up there later, if anyone wants to join me.”
He ushered the officers into the central hall. The interior had been gutted and turned into a grand entrance hall, branching off to the right and left to the rest of the villa. The entire back wall was missing, save for a balcony framework and supports for glass.
“This is going to open up on the inner patio. There’ll be a pool and a greenhouse but, as you can see, it’s just a big hole at the moment. At first I was going to get rid of this building. Old army construction, though the bricks were attractive. They’d turned the basement into some kind of hospital or dormitory. Come down, and see what I’ve done with it.”
He led the party past a worker, who made haste to clear the way for the officers. “This is the Situation Room. There’ll be a conference center and offices, and below, in the subbasement, a communications room and security bunker. The fixtures are in, but it’s still missing some equipment.” Solon led them into the conference center, separated by glass walls—complete with drapes for security—but as yet unfurnished.
“Now a brief meeting,” Solon said, as his aides brought up a pair of easels.
Because of the lack of chairs, only the generals and colonels were allowed to sit for the meeting, and after it was over Valentine was grateful for the chance to walk again. After three hours of maps, orders, questions and arguments, he needed a break. Solon stopped for a meal, with a promise to answer question individually afterward. Access to the flush toilet was by rank, so Valentine grabbed a paper plate full of sandwiches and went up into the clean air and used the workers’ outhouse.
He found an empty sawhorse and leaned against it, watching a bulldozer move earth. The sunshine made him feel even more enervated. He’d keyed himself up for nothing, as it turned out.
Two or three times during the meeting he’d rested his hand on his pistol. It would have been easy to draw it and kill five or six of the assembled senior officers. But as he came to the critical moment, the murder-suicide he’d been thinking about seemed more and more like an empty gesture as the emotionally frozen gears of his mind began turning again. A few deaths would not matter. The Kurians would have a hard time replacing someone as manifestly gifted as Solon, but the rest of the officers were easily switched cogs in the military machine. Or perhaps, when it came down to the sticking point, he lacked the courage to go open-eyed to his death.
Through the series of disasters—like falling dominoes he’d raced to stay ahead of—he’d been caught up in, he found himself in a unique situation. All the mistakes and misfortune had placed him in the enemy headquarters, handing him priceless information on the Quisling plans to finish off Southern Command. And his role in the operation couldn’t have been better if he’d written the orders himself. His light infantry was assigned to probe the passes into the western Boston Mountains, looking for a lightly guarded route that he could seize so the rest of Hamm’s division could put itself into the heart of what was left of the Free Territory’s forces in their mountain redoubts. He could get what Quickwood he had where it was needed most, courtesy of the trucks of the TMCC.
The most tantalizing piece of information wasn’t stated explicitly; Valentine had to put it together based on the questions from Quisling commanders from Tennessee, Okalahoma, Kansas and, especially, Texas. Solon was a strange cross between a venture capitalist and a military genius: he’d gotten command of large numbers of Quisling troops from all around the Ozarks, but the terms of the agreements were expiring. He’d made another set of deals, like a debtor trying to extend the due date of a loan for a few more months by promising interest greater than had been paid for the previous two years. He had until the end of summer to put paid to the loan, to conquer the Free Territory, before he lost eighty percent of his men. If he could clean up Southern Command’s holdouts this spring and summer, he’d have enough to garrison his Trans-Mississippi with the help of the leaders of his Kurian substates, and send captives and prisoners off to the hungry neighboring Kurians, their bodies paying off his debts.
Valentine even found himself admiring his fellow officers. They asked intelligent questions, wrote notes in their order journals with smooth, elegant hands, and offered imaginative suggestions. There was efficiency, yes, but a certain amount of coldness, too, like greyhounds eager for the release of the rabbit, all eyes on the prize and not a thought for the men in uniform around them. A similar group of Southern Command officers would be more informal; there would be jokes and jibes and a good deal of smoke blowing.
“He’s seeing everyone individually next,” Xray-Tango said, breaking into his thoughts. The general gave a pine door-post an experimental rap. Valentine looked at the twitching eye and knew that Xray-Tango had received orders he hadn’t liked.
“Did he give you what for about the bridge, General? Or getting the locks rebuilt?”
“No, nothing like that. That’d be sensible. He wants his house finished, so he can transfer his governement out of Fort Scott. The Twenty-three Representatives will be here soon.”
“Twenty-three more Reapers? That won’t be pleasant.”
“These aren’t so bad. I’ve seen them, all sitting around the conference table. They’re more like zombies than anything; they just sit in their chairs until they need to see, hear and speak for the Higher Up at the other end. He feeds them pig blood, not people. Something about the distance, I dunno, they can’t be animated right from so far away, and the ones closer have too much else to do.”
“Then what’s the matter, sir? You seem upset.”
“I asked to retire after the big push. I’m feeling my age, Le Sain. Getting sick of making decisions for idiots who had the exact same decision put to them the day before. Then there’s the . . . the stuff like the other night. It wears a man down.”
“He turned you down?”
“He said he needed five more years to get the groundwork for New Columbia built. Promised me I could leave then. Bridges, highways, roads, factories, housing; he’s even talking about an airport. The Kurians don’t like anything bigger than bush planes in the air, but he’s got this idea for a Trans-Mississippi air force burning in his brain. I’m just worried that after five more years, they’ll want another five before I get my estate, and I’ve got my reasons for thinking that. You see, Le Sain, he promised me that when Southern Command was finished off, I’d be able to retire. I don’t like a man who plays me like a fish. Can’
t stand people who are more convincing at making promises than keeping them.”
“I’ll go get my talking-to,” Valentine said.
“You coming for the party later?”
“What party is that, sir?”
“You’ve been keeping to yourself lately. We’re having a little celebration in the Blue Dome. You been in there yet?”
“No, there was the flood, sir. Since then I’ve been too busy fitting out.”
“You owe it to yourself to live a little, Le Sain. Young man like you. Come along and have some fun.”
“Odd you should say that, sir. I’ve told myself that just today. I thought there’d be some fun with this trip.” He hooked a thumb in his gunbelt. “The day’s not over yet.”
There was only one miserable-looking captain still waiting when an aide shook Valentine awake. Valentine had pretended to snooze as he idled while Solon met with each officer; exhaustion turned his pretense into reality.
“The Consul will see you now,” the aide said. He was ushered into Solon’s underground office. The teal walls still smelled faintly of fresh paint. There was an oriental panel on the wall, three pictures, each in its own frame, separate works of art but forming a greater work together. The largest figure was of a warrior carrying a bow. Valentine looked in the corner of the office, where a recurved bow and a quiver of arrows had been placed.
“Colonel Le Sain,” Solon said, looking up from his paperwork. “Our ambitious young newcomer. Please sit down.”