by E. E. Knight
But you’re not Solon. You don’t know the cards he’s holding; he knows exactly how many aces you’ve got. Except for the Quickwood. Valentine hoped a few dozen Reapers had already been turned to wooden mummies by the beams he’d passed to Mantilla.
A whistle sounded from outside. Barrage?
Valentine took up his tunic and ran through the officers’ conference room, with Beck’s proposed layout still on the blackboard. He entered the radio lounge, where off-duty men gathered to hear news and music piped in by Jimenez and the other operator.
“What’s the whistle?” he asked Styachowski, who was sitting below one of the speakers, fiddling with Solon’s old bow and quiver. She’d had an idea to use Quickwood chips for arrowheads. The cane she relied upon was conspicuous by its absence.
“Thought I heard someone yell ‘star shell.’ I haven’t heard it followed up with anything. Maybe it’s a psych job.”
“Get to the field phones, please. I want you in the coms center in case it isn’t.”
Valentine hurried out to the front of the headquarters building. Sure enough, a star shell was falling to earth. A second burst far above the hill as the first descended. Valentine saw the men atop the building pointing and chatting. A few figures hurried to shelters, assuming real shellfire was on the way.
“Sir, you don’t want to be standing there if a beehive bursts,” a private behind the sandbag wall filling one of the arched windows called to him, referring to the flechette-filled antipersonnel rounds fired by larger guns.
The Cat stood, anxious and upset, listening to the night. There was a droning in the sky, faint but growing. Suddenly he knew why he was anxious. The chills . . .
“Reapers!” Valentine shouted to the men on the rooftop. “Reaper alarm!”
The sentry froze for a moment, as if Valentine were shouting up to him in a foreign tongue, then went to the cylinder of steel hanging from a hook on the loudspeaker pole atop the building. He inserted a metal rod and rang the gong for all it was worth. Valentine picked up the field phone just inside the headquarters entrance and pushed the button to buzz the com center.
“Operator,” the center answered. Another star shell lit up the hilltop, creating crossing shadows with the still-burning earlier one.
“This is Major Valentine. Reaper alarm.” He heard the woman gasp, then she repeated the message with her hand over the mouthpiece.
“Captain Styachowski acknowledges, thank you,” came the flat response.
Ahn-Kha appeared in the doorway behind him, a golden-haired djinn summoned by the clanging alarm. He had a Grog gun in his arm and a Quickwood stabbing spear between his teeth. A second spear was tucked under his arm.
“This is going—” Valentine began, then shut up as he saw what was coming from the east. In the glare of the star shell, he saw a little two-engined turboprop, the kind used by pre-2022 airlines to hop a few passengers between small cities, roar into the light at a hundred feet. The rear door was open.
“What the fuck?” one of the soldiers on the roof said, watching. A figure plunged from the plane, trailing a cathedral train of material that whipped and flapped in the air as it fell. A parachute that failed to open? A second one followed it, and a third, all with the same flagellate fabric acting as a drogue for the plunging man-figures. Valentine saw another plane behind, a different make, this one coming for him like a missile aimed at his position, its daring pilot almost touching the treetops.
“Your shoulder, my David,” Ahn-Kha said, as Valentine felt the barrel of the Grog gun fall against his shoulder. Valentine froze, a human bipod.
“Nu,” Ahn-Kha said, and the gun jumped on Valentine’s shoulder as the Grog fired.
The boom of the .50 echoed in the hallway. The plane reacted, tipping its wings to the side. At that height there was no room for error; the plane veered into the treetops. It roared through them to the music of snapping wood, then struck a thicker bole and pancaked. Exploding aviation fuel flamed yellow-orange in the night.
“Good shot,” Valentine said, hardly believing his eyes.
“Good luck,” Ahn-Kha returned. “I guessed to which side the driver sat.”
The star shells lit up the first figure’s landing in white light and black shadow. It hit the ground running, shrugging off the drapes of fabric attached to it. Only a Reaper could survive such a landing with bones intact . . . as did the next, and the next, striking earth to the sound of clanging alarm gongs.
Valentine watched, transfixed, and his “Valentingle” told him where the others were. To the west. Climbing the sheer face of the quarry, the one part of the hill almost unclimbable and therefore almost unguarded. He took one of Ahn-Kha’s spears.
God, two were headed for the hospital.
“Ahn-Kha, get the Bears!” he shouted, hurrying toward the hospital building. He ran past the old stable building that now housed the dairy herd. He paused in his race and threw open one of the barn doors. If these were the “unguided” sapper Reapers, they might be drawn to the heat and blood of a cow more than a lighter human.
A Reaper ran across the hillside, leaping from fallen tree to earthen mound like a child hopping puddles, making for the hospital.
“You! You!” Valentine shouted, waving his arms.
It turned, hissing, face full of malice, eyes cold and fixed as a stuffed snake’s. It squatted, and Valentine braced himself for the leap.
Tracer cut across his vision like fireflies on Benzedrine. Men in a hidden machine-gun nest, covering the open ground between the buildings and the artillery pits, caught the Reaper across the side. It tumbled, closing its legs like a falling spider, and rose dragging a leg.
Valentine was there in two Cat leaps, but he must have looked too much like a jumping Reaper to the machine-gun crew. Bullets zipped around him. Valentine dropped to the ground.
The Reaper staggered toward him, one side of its body recalcitrant, like that of a stroke victim learning to use his worse-off half again. Valentine heard screams from the machine gunners: a Reaper was among them.
He rose, spear ready, and realized that once he used Ahn-Kha’s point, he’d be unarmed. The nearest weapon was with the machine-gun crew, now dying under the claws of a sapper. Valentine ran for their gun pit, pursued by the half-leaping, half-staggering stride of the shot-up one.
The Reaper in the gun pit was feeding, back to him. Valentine jumped from ten feet away, landed atop its back and buried the Quickwood in its collarbone. The beast never knew what hit it; the Quickwood sank into the muscle at the base of its neck before the handle snapped off. Valentine’s body blow knocked it flat. It stiffened, legs kicking and hands pulling up fistfuls of earth in black-nailed claws.
Valentine ignored the bloody ruin of the soldiers in the machine-gun nest, noting only that one was a promising soldier named Ralston, who’d qualified at the bottom in marksmanship with his rifle, but when given a tripod and the sliding sights on a Squad Support Gun, came to the head of the class with his accurate grouping. He tore the machine gun from Ralston’s limp fingers and fired it in time to see the flash reflected in the eyes of the oncoming Reaper, lit up in the gun’s strobe light of muzzle flash as it came toward him. The 7.62mm bullets tore through even the Reaper cloth, blasting back the staggering nightmare into a jigsaw cutout of tarry flesh and broken bone. What was left of the thing rolled around aimlessly, clawing at and opening its wounds in search of the burning pain within, a scorpion stinging itself to death.
He opened the gun, put a new ammunition box on the side, let loose the tripod catch, and ran for the hospital.
The next fifteen minutes were a blur, and would remain so for the rest of his life. Not that he wanted to remember any of it. The fight lived on in his mind as little snapshots of horror. The hospital, looking as though a scythe-wielding tornado had passed through it, leaving Dr. Kirschbaum and Lieutenant Colonel Kessey in mingled pieces. Nail standing, eyes bulging, holding down the Reaper as it stiffened with his spring knife in its eye,
feeling its clawed hand digging bloodily into the muscle of his thigh, searching for the femoral artery as it died. The wave of Reapers, a dozen or more, coming across the hillside, throwing aside men like a line of hunters knocking over cornstalks for fun. One Reaper descending into the ready magazine for the 155s and a resultant explosion, lighting up the night and sending a railroad tie skyward like a moon shot. The Bears and Ahn-Kha meeting them, backed up by the Thunderbolt’s old marines, clustered in a protective ring around Valentine, pikes and guns working together to knock over the death-machines and then pin them until they stiffened. Styachowski, fear-whitened face like ice in the moonlight, carrying Solon’s bow and sending an arrow into a leaping Reaper just before it landed on Post’s back. When another Reaper broke the antique as she used it to ward off a blow that threatened to remove her head, she thrust up with another arrow held near the tip, putting the Quickwood into its yellow eye. Max the German shepherd, a pet of one of the construction engineers, licking the face of his dead owner, stopping only to snarl and stare at anyone who approached the body. The screams of panic from the maternity ward, where the pregnant women had drawn one of the sappers, a dozen men dying as they tried to pull it down as they protected the mothers to be with nothing but their knives and scissors. Hurlmer finally sticking a pike into it, his head torn off for the act. The fearful, confused eyes of the last Reaper to die, a wounded beast trying to escape by crawling amongst the cows, harried by bullet and pike until it died beneath a feed trough, corn-meal dust sticking to the blood coating its face.
All the while there was rattling fire from the crestline, as Quisling troops probed the hill.
At dawn there were fifty-three corpses lined up. Thanks to the backhoe and a lot of sweat from soldiers with shovels, each would have an individual grave. Woodworkers were hammering together the arrowhead tepee-cum-cross design of a Southern Command grave post and passing them on to painters. The men were gray and haggard after last night’s bitter fighting and the probe up the hillside. Valentine pulled as many men out of the line as he could and gathered them by the graves. They had to follow a circuitous path to get there to avoid observation from the spotters on Pulaski Heights; any gathering of men in the open drew mortar fire.
Ceremonies weren’t for the dead; they were for the living. There was a lay preacher to say the right words over the bodies. When they were rested in their graves, Valentine walked down the line of bodies in their shrouds, searching for words to add meaning to what had been random slaughter.
“We’re in a siege, men. This hill is like a medieval castle, and the enemy is at our gates. That enemy, the TMCC, is in the first phase of taking a position by siege. It’s called the ‘Investment.’ He’s already put an effort into destroying us. Last night we killed eighteen Reapers, thanks to the Quickwood. Eighteen Reapers.” Nothing else could explain the malevolent choice of targets: the magazine, the infirmary, the maternity ward. “That means there’s more than one Kurian Lord in the area, perhaps four or five . . . even six. Not many Kurians can work more than two or three Reapers at once. Thanks to the rising that we began across the river, I suspect some governors have already been kicked out of their holes.”
He picked up a handful of dirt, and tossed it on the row of corpses.
“Last night they tried to get our lives cheap. We kept the price up, thanks to the Quickwood, your courage and especially the sacrifice of those killed last night. Solon’s investment isn’t paying any returns yet.
“The fifty-three soldiers we’re putting in the ground pinned down thousands of troops with their lives. Those mortars, and the guns that will probably soon support them, could be used outside Hot Springs, or against the Boston Mountains. The forces around the hill, from the snipers to the machine-gun crews, are looking up the hill at us instead of at Southern Command’s Archangel operation. They’re here because our guns are covering the rail and water nexus for Solon’s territory. There’s no fast and easy way around us; it means moving on broken-down roads, crossing bridge-less rivers. Nothing moves by water or rail, east-west or north-south, without our stopping it. They’re not able to shift troops fast enough, and Southern Command’s eating up what they can move piecemeal.”
They liked the sound of that. Bared heads of all skin tones and hair colors, sharing a common layer of sweat and dirt, lifted, nodded, turned to each other reassuringly.
“Every town Southern Command takes is liberated partly by us . . . though at the moment we’re doing nothing here but having the occasional mortar shell dropped in our laps.
“Unless we’re lucky, the fifty-three here are going to have more company as the days and weeks go by. It could be that we’ll all end up on this hill with them. If that’s our fate, I hope we cost the TMCC as much as they did. If any of you want to say anything, now’s the time.”
“I’ve something to say,” Yolanda, the woman who had mutilated the captured guards back at the prison camp, began. “It is not right for such men to go into the ground without a flag to be under. They are soldiers. Soldiers are their flag.”
Free Territory flags weren’t stocked in the warehouses we raided, the overtired part of him said.
“So I made them one. The men who came in to get us, I thought of them as I made this. Styachowski helped me with the wording, and Amy-Jo on the mortar team drew the animal.”
She held it up. It was not a big flag. The base of it was red, rimmed with blue and gold roping . . . probably from a curtain somewhere in Solon’s imperial Residence. In the center was a silhouette of a tusked Arkansas razorback in black, pawing the ground angrily and lowering its head to charge. Blue letters stood out against the red as if luminescent. DON’T FEED ON ME read the block-letter slogan.
The men laughed, not at the amateurish nature of the flag but at the pithy sentiment it expressed. They liked it. Valentine felt a little electricity run through the men as she turned it so everyone could see. It was a fighting flag: black and blue set against red, the colors of a brawl. A team could rally round the image of an animal—that was part of the Lifeweaver Hunter Caste appeal—and a savage boar was as good as any. Wily, tough, stubborn, a brute that would gore any animal that dared hunt it—and ugly as its mood when challenged—it suited the dirty funeral attendees.
Valentine went to Yolanda’s side, and Styachowski came forward to admire the flag in the sun. Three parallel wounds, probably Reaper claw marks, stood out on her forehead.
“Let’s have it up,” Valentine said. “Ahn-Kha, where’s the pike Hurlmer got that one with?” Ahn-Kha walked along the graves until he found the aluminum conduit pipe.
It took a few minutes to rig wire through the grommets and fix it to the pole. Valentine recognized Yolanda from the prison yard, but he only knew Amy-Jo as one of the heroes from the hospital fight. She’d snatched up the infant Perry and barricaded the babe and his mother in a bathroom, holding the door shut as the Reaper pried it off its hinges before it was swamped by pursuing men.
“Where do you want it, sir?” Yolanda asked.
“Here at the graves,” Valentine said. “You said they deserved a flag above them. Can you think of a better place?”
“Make some more,” Ahn-Kha said. “Or at least another, for the headquarters. This battalion needs an emblem.”
“Hell, with the prisoners, we’re a regiment,” Styachowski said.
“Valentine’s Razors,” Post suggested.
The phrase passed up and down the ranks and more cheers broke out.
Valentine looked at his feet, embarrassed for the tears in his eyes.
Styachowski dug the pole into the ground and Amy-Jo and Yolanda found rocks to pile about its base. It wasn’t a big flag, nor was it high off the ground, but every eye was on it as it flapped in the fresh spring breeze.
“What kind of shape is the battery in, Hanson?” Valentine asked, after the memorial service dispersed.
“Is ‘piss-poor’ an appropriate military description?” the new lieutenant asked.
; “Can you quantify it a little more?”
Hanson scratched the growth on his chin. “Those Reapers that came up the cliff, half of them made straight for the guns. That suicide mission into the ready magazine—I lost men there. Ives, Lincoln and Lopez bought it in their gun pit. We found Streetiner in a tree. Smalls is missing, Josephs—”
“Smalls? Hank Smalls?”
“Yes. He was a designated as a messenger. When I heard the firing at the base of the hill, I sent him to tell the mortar pits to start preregistered fire missions. He never came back. There’s still some woodland that we haven’t searched yet. Maybe he ran and hid, and has been too scared to come out yet. Can’t say as I blame him.”
Valentine tore his mind away from Hank. He feared for the boy, but had to keep the rest of his command in mind. “How many guns can you have in action?”
“I’m jimmying the lists so I can keep three firing, sir. It won’t be quick fire, and I’d like another twenty men to start training.”
“We’re thin as it is. But ask Lieutenant Post about it.”
“Thanks, sir.”
“Feel free to practice on the Kurian Tower. No shell fired at that is wasted, as far as I’m concerned.”
“In all honesty, sir, I’m not sure I’m up to being battery officer. Could you give me a new commander? Like Styachowski? She knows the theory, and she’s good at putting theory into practice.”