Baltic Gambit

by E. E. Knight

  “All that lifesign bunched up this close?” Captain Patel, in charge of the Wolves, said, leaning on his cane. “Can’t risk it. If we have to run back the way we came, they’d slow us up.”

  Gamecock put a hand on his pistol. A silencer rode in a little pocket attached to the holster.

  A glance passed around the group. “No, nobody’s shooting anyone captured by Southern Command’s uniform,” Valentine said. “We can manage without the Wolves. Duvalier, would you mind helping scout the trail? I know you’ve been busy and on edge for four or five days, but we miss a stillwatch, we’re in for it.”

  Valentine’s deference irritated her. Hadn’t she proven she was as tough as any? “As long as I can do it alone,” she said.

  She was moving along the fire trail that ran just below a ridgeline. Even with thin moonlight, the view of the rolling forest was spectacular. The night was alive with birdsong. It comforted her—birds always either went too quiet or shrieked when disturbed, and most birds found Reapers as disturbing as humans did.

  The only tracks she’d come across were from motorcycles, probably the group the Wolves had captured.

  The linen-tearing sound of gunfire and the heavier chatter of machine guns startled her.

  Two figures—no, three—struggled up the hill. She moved down to intercept.

  It was Valentine, with a Wolf and one of the Bears. She knew the Wolf, a veteran corporal named Winters. The Bear had a long, narrow face with close-trimmed full beard and curly hair. He reminded her a bit of a poodle.

  “Let’s move,” Valentine said, with his old rank-of-major authority.

  David Valentine had a bad leg, ever since a Twisted Cross bullet blew through his thigh, clipping the bone. Duvalier always wondered if there were some remaining fragments hurting a nerve, or if something had been irreparably severed. In any case, he limped, but could still keep up a hard, mile-eating run when he chose. She fell in beside him, and the Bear ran behind, heading northeast. Wolf scouts could be seen intermittently through the thick trees.

  “It’s a staggered fallback. The Bears counterattacked while the Wolves set up for firing. Then the Bears dropped back behind the Wolves—that’s when I grabbed Scour here.”

  That’s how Duvalier learned the name of the Bear.

  “You abandoned—”

  “We can hit back. Maybe. This many Reapers has to mean Kurians nearby.”

  “Twisted Cross, maybe,” Duvalier said.

  “Another possibility.”

  “Why northeast?” she puffed.

  “Higher ground, better signal, closer to the highway leading back up to Bloomington and Indianapolis.”

  The first warning of the harpy attack was a flutter from the treetops.

  A pair of red flares wobbled up into the sky with a hiss from farther up the ridgeline, their parachutes opening roughly above them, probably fired by the harpy handlers. The signal would bring the creatures, who were most likely scattered all over the ridge, into the fight.

  “Goddamn them!” Scour shouted. He followed the flare contrails up the hill, unslinging a combat shotgun.

  “Stay together!” Valentine ordered, shouldering his short machine pistol and firing a blast at a harpy swinging down on them like a huge spider monkey dressed in a leathery cape. An ugly, pig-nosed, snaggletoothed face snarled at them. Valentine fired another burst and it fell over a thick tree limb like a big chamois hung up to drip dry.

  Uselessly, Duvalier thought. A Bear will do what a Bear does, whether it’s shit in the woods or go after some guano-crusted Quislings.

  Valentine’s muzzle sparked again and the gun made its brief mechanical buzz.

  He knelt to reload, and a harpy dove at him from the night. She stepped quickly to his back, sword low and ready, then swung it up. The harpy banked awkwardly to avoid her, scrabbling with its feet at her face close enough for her to hear the air being cut by its claws, and even more awkwardly crashed, opened from shoulder to bandy hind leg.

  “That tree!” she said, pointing with her blood-smeared sword down the slope. The tree was a stunted oak, widespread branches spread low, ideal for eight-year-old kids but impossible for a harpy to flap through.

  As they ran Valentine’s gun spat again.

  “You’re hit,” Valentine said. “It’s not bad.”

  She didn’t feel it. There was a hot, sticky sensation up near her hairline.

  The harpy tore a grenade off its waist bandolier. The grenades were fixed so the safety pin came out at the same time it was removed. It threw with its powerful wing-arm, the lever falling off, and the deadly top shape bounced toward them.

  Valentine made a move toward the grenade, bending to scoop it like an infielder dealing with a grounder. She was faster and swept his good leg as she threw herself against him. The grenade bounced past and exploded next to the tree trunk. Splinters and shrapnel-torn bark flew off into the darkness.

  More flares exploded up the hillside. The harpy that had just thrown the grenade and was grasping another turned its head and took a short, bounding leap into the air, following its nose aloft toward the flares, flapping hard enough to stir the fallen leaves beneath as it gained speed to rise.

  When the ringing in their ears subsided and they could hear each other, Valentine said, “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

  Irritating in the face of being saved, as usual. “I could ask you the same. Who runs toward a live grenade?” she rasped, applying a field bandage to the claw cut near her hairline.

  “The harpies are gone, anyway,” she said. “Speaking of which, we have a couple of dead ones lying around. Should I cut a haunch for stew?”

  Valentine made a face. He’d rather half starve eating jerked beef and chalky ersatz chocolate out of his ration bag than have some nice fresh meat.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. She used the razor-edged butterfly knife to slice off a leg from one of the dead bodies. The corpse twitched a little as she worked.

  “I wonder if they’re the ones who spotted us?” Valentine asked.

  “Nah, some Reaper picked up on the Bears. That’s the way it usually goes. They’re crap on lifesign discipline, just like every other kind of discipline.”

  Holding her joint so that it would drain, she followed him on Scour’s trail.

  They found the Bear at the litter-strewn harpy camp. The handlers were lying under a tree with blankets over them so nothing but their boot tips showed. Half a dozen dead harpies were much less ceremoniously scattered about, with Scour collecting them into a pile. Duvalier was grateful that Scour hadn’t done anything more artistic with either set of bodies; she’d seen Bears do everything from sticking heads on tree-limb poles to laying them out so they spelled an obscene message.

  “There’s a big wasp-nest thing in that tree you should take a look at, Mister Valentine,” Scour said.

  She looked up, saw a shape about the size of a laundry bag. “What the hell is that?” she asked, sidestepping for a better view.

  Scour shrugged. “They might have been guarding it.”

  At first Duvalier thought it was a plastic garbage bag full of laundry stuck in a tree. Then she saw that the material she’d thought was laundry was pale pink projections, like long fingers with five or six joints, gripping the trunk and limbs of the tree.

  Perhaps it was two organisms, symbionts, the brain and the hand.

  “Looks like that brain’s grown itself a set of fingers.”

  “Wells’s two essentials,” Valentine said.

  “Wells?”

  “Something from War of the Worlds.”

  Duvalier knew enough of Valentine’s biography. He’d been raised in the basement library of a priest, the closest thing the remote Northern Minnesota community had to a teacher.

  “I think—I think that’s like their version of one of the old cell phone towers,” Duvalier said. “The tissue transmits or boosts or relays whatever link exists between the Kurian and its Reaper.”

  “Scour, yo
u want to do the honors?” Valentine asked.

  The Bear looked up and down the tree, evaluating it. “Sure, Major.”

  “Let’s get that tree down, then.”

  “Jeez, Val, what did that tree ever do to you?” Duvalier asked, reaching into her pocket and slipping on her cat claws. “I’ll do it, seeing as how you two are just too grown up to go up a tree.”

  She climbed above the mass of flesh, keeping an eye out for harpies. Keeping her legs around the pole and gripping the tree with one set of claws, she drew her sword from the stick and plunged it into the tissue, just where the black, beetlelike shell met the fingers. She thrust up and down, sawing with the blade.

  The fingers released and the keg-sized object crashed through the branches below and onto the ground. It waggled to right itself and began to crawl off at a surprising pace, but Valentine and Scour were upon it, Val using the legworm pick he usually carried while in country and Scour wielded a short, iron-headed club like an oversized meat tenderizer. They broke the shell open like a couple of hungry seagulls attacking a dropped crab.

  Val thrust the entire head of his pike into the shell and did an impressive imitation of a man scrambling a barrel full of eggs. The fingers made it hop one final time before curling up tight—one caught Scour’s foot and he howled.

  “That ought to do it,” Valentine said, lost in the process of extracting his pick from the mess in the shell.

  Duvalier dropped to the ground, drew her butterfly knife and went to work on the clinging fingers. They’d torn through the Bear’s boot and reduced his foot to pulp from the heel forward.

  It would be a long, painful limp home for the Bear.

  “So, are we scrubbed?” Duvalier asked.

  “Scour’s the handle, Cat,” Scour said through gritted teeth.

  “Yeah, we’re scrubbed,” Valentine said. “The Kurians will slip away.” Valentine was shaping a branch with a good, solid ninety-degree spur into a crutch for the Bear.

  “Why do they want Kentucky so much, Val? You’re the big staff college strategist.”

  “I was court-martialed before I could attend a single class,” Valentine said flatly. He’d never been quite the same since, Duvalier noted. He’d risked everything, for so little reward, only to have his own command turn on him to score a few crap political points with some Kansas Quislings who’d undoubtedly done worse than Valentine ever had before they learned to shave… .

  A good man, more or less ruined by his own people. Who needs Kurians when you have a few enemies in your own high command?

  “I know you have all of Seng’s old workbooks and so on. I’ve seen you up late studying. So tell me. They weren’t doing much of anything with it before. Raising low-grade meat and hog feed. You can feed a hundred times as many with the Rio Grande valley, and they hardly put up a fight over that. It’s not people, either. The legworm clans never offered up lives, and even if you took all of them it wouldn’t be much more than a small city’s worth.”

  Valentine handed the crude crutch to Scour. “I used to think it was because Kentucky’s a schwerpunkt—centrally located. Key ground. You can hit the Ordnance, the East Coast, or Nashville and the Georgia Control using it as a base. But we haven’t done any of those things, or begun to lay the foundation for doing them, and with all the spies they probably have crossing the bluegrass, they know it. Has to be something else.”

  “So they know something about Kentucky we don’t.”

  “That’s my conclusion,” Valentine said.

  “This is all very interesting,” she said, “but it’s not getting us a step closer to either Kentucky or that hotel.”

  “You think something’s still to be gained?” Scour said.

  “Only if we move quickly, while they’re excited with the column on the run,” Duvalier said.

  “I hate running with my tail between my legs,” Valentine said.

  “We could still get at them. It might be easier than ever now,” Duvalier suggested. “They’re going to have every man they can trust with a gun after our column, either on them or moving to cut them off from the Ohio. It’s a big hotel, there, and I know a way a small team could still get in. We need a couple of Wolves who can drive a truck and a Bear team.”

  “They wouldn’t expect us, not with us on the run,” Scour said. “How about the old bringing-in-wounded-prisoners trick?”

  “No,” Valentine said. “Nothing out of the routine. Ali, you’ve been watching the hotel. What’s possible, keeping in the ordinary?”

  “It’s a big building,” Duvalier said. “Lot of mouths. Lot of laundry and garbage.”

  Valentine stood silent for a moment. Then his face went poker-hand blank, a sure sign to Duvalier that something was in the offing. “We need a couple of teams of Bears who don’t mind getting a little stinky,” Valentine said.

  “Garbage would be an improvement on some of those guys,” Duvalier muttered under her breath, making sure her head was turned away from Scour even so. “Ears like a wolf” was a twenty-first-century aphorism, after all.

  By dawn they were in a garbage truck turning off the road and crossing the rail stop that had once, and now again, shuttled passengers to the great resorts.

  “Garbage truck” was, of course, a polite term for it. It was, in fact, a much-overhauled farm tractor pulling a big, multiwheeled flatbed that had been converted into a sort of a vast wagon. The workers could drop any of the sides or the back to shovel on or shovel off garbage. Or just tip it over.

  Duvalier rode high on the back, balancing on one corner with the aid of a little loop of knotted line, wearing what the Bears called her “scalp.” One of the garbage workers had been a stocky female with short brown hair hanging out of her hat. Duvalier decided she must have long ago given up on the appearance of her hair, or it would have been in some kind of protective bandanna under her cap. As it was, she knife-cut it off the prisoner when the Wolves presented the garbage haulers and taped it in her hair after the clothing strip. She didn’t quite fill the bulky woman’s overall, but a towel doubled and draped across her shoulders gave her the appearance of more heft. Her garrison belt with its assorted components filled out the waistline nicely.

  As for the men in the farm tractor, it had a cracked-up vintage windshield polarized against the glare of the sun. Between the tinting, ample dirt, tiny cracks, and accumulations of grease that might have something to do with the loads it hauled, it was a wonder Valentine and the other Bear in the cab could see to drive, never mind being recognized.

  Two Bear teams, twenty Bears in all, rode in the garbage. They’d rigged camouflage netting above themselves and tossed a few of the larger, lighter pieces of garbage onto the netting, allowing for a more comfortable, but still smelly, ride underneath. Most of them sat or knelt or squatted on pieces of cardboard or trash can liners.

  If they were stopped and searched, the poor bastard Indiana Patrol or Ordnance Guard would be in for a dreadful surprise, she thought. With luck they’d be taken prisoner quietly; they were now near enough for the outer hotel guards to hear shooting.

  A rough-looking bunch, the Bears. They’d immigrated to Fort Seng when the fighting dried up around the Ozark Free Republics. Most veteran Bears, she’d been told, grew addicted, in a fashion, to the fighting madness that seized them in action. “Going Red” was one of the many phrases for it.

  Their attire could be called a uniform only in the sense that it had the classic insignia pinned on it. And a name badge somewhere on the left breast. Otherwise, it was a mass of Reaper cloth, bulletproof armoring, legworm leather (popular thanks to its availability in Kentucky and the fact that it combined the ruggedness of leather with a breathable, insulative quality like layers of denim and athletic gear), regular fatigues, and in a few cases, painted plate steel or Kevlar. Some wore heavy helms with combat masks that made them look like samurai or old comic book superheroes; others liked to fight in nothing but a headband and tinted safety glasses. Their weapons were equall
y varied: short machine guns handy for room entry, combat rifles, sniper gear, grenade launchers, and fully automatic shotguns, plus sidearms and blades that gave them a piratical aspect.

  One thing they all had on this job was demolition gear, satchel charges, bags of grenades, and incendiary devices. The Bears had learned through long experience that slippery Kurians tended to retreat up or down, and the best way to deal with that was just to blow the hell out of their refuge—soft-skinned, boneless Kurians were notoriously sensitive to explosive fragments and concussions.

  Duvalier double-checked the connections on her headset. She heard a low crackle in her ear. The short-range communicator was working.

  “We’re counting on you,” Valentine said. “Two beeps for go ahead.”

  They had light headset field radios captured from the Ordnance. They’d been modified by the electronics guys to send beeps using the Ordnance’s own communications gear. The beeps were so brief and used the edge of some “wavelength” that the Ordnance network ignored it as static, but a rewired sender-receiver could get Morse code out of the beeps. They worked through most of Northern Kentucky, and here in the sprawling Hoosier forest, the network sent and received perfectly.

  He winked at her from his scarred eye. “Thirty minutes. It’s less than a mile cross-country.” He handed her a little earpiece with a button on it attached to a transmitter about the size of a pack of cigarettes. She stuffed it into the pocket of her duster and instinctively checked the edge on her sword-stick. It drew blood.

  “See you at the gate,” she said, giving him a bloody thumbs-up.

  Valentine had a reputation as a sniffer of trouble, and his confidence warmed hers. She’d had a feeling of dread the past few days, but it was gone now. Perhaps the Kurians attending this conference had fled. Now she just felt like a hunter who knows where the game is waiting.

  They idled the garbage tractor and opened the hood. Valentine hung a flashlight so it shone into the engine, making his face less recognizable by contrast just in case a passing patrol was familiar with the garbage detail. She checked her “beeper.”