Baltic Gambit

by E. E. Knight

  Like anything, planning helped. She thought for an hour or so; then, when she’d decided how to approach him with the job, she finally had a clear enough mind for sleep.

  She found him with a corporal, laying out training gear for an excursion. Looked to her like it might be a scavenger hunt—there were plenty of bags, cutters, and tools. Even an automobile battery with a current rig that could be used to test everything from an electronic fuel injection system to an old phone.

  “We’re taking a trip, Val,” she said. Who could say no to orders?

  He sighed and set down his clipboard. “We are? Where?”

  “Lambert is sending me along with the delegation to the all-freehold conference or assembly or whatever they’re calling it. I need you.”

  “I’m needed here.”

  “Hate to pull rank on you, Val, but officially you’re just an auxiliary corporal on the Fort Seng roster. As a serving Cat, I’m nominally a captain. The major thing is just a courtesy.”

  “So are the captain’s bars, when it comes down to it,” Valentine said, yawning. “I bet you don’t even have a set.”

  “I do, but they’re from a member of the Iowa Guard who really should have known better than to stop and question hitchhikers. Look like ours, though.”

  “Let’s see them,” Valentine said. “Otherwise the order’s not official.”

  “I keep them up my ass for emergencies. You want to get a spoon?”

  Valentine grimaced. “That’s not regulation. Order’s still invalid.”

  “Now you sound like Lambert. She can’t give an order unless her butt is clenched to regulation tension. Listen, Val, you’ve been bitching at me for a couple years now that I need a break. Maybe we both do. Don’t you want to dine on caviar and champagne for a couple weeks? Have a month of travel with someone else worrying about all the arrangements?”

  “There’s no such thing as a joyride these days,” Valentine said. “This will probably be just as exhausting as an operation. If we get stranded over there, God knows how we’ll ever get back.”

  “We can get in a refugee pipeline, worst-case scenario,” she said. “C’mon, man, it’ll be fun. I have a good feeling in my stomach about this. Caviar and champagne sound pretty good compared to the summer’s legworm barbecues.”

  She could see Valentine melt a little at her mention of her stomach. He was always worried about the state of her digestion. “Who’s promising caviar and champagne?”

  “Stands to reason. If a bunch of suit-and-ties from here to New Zealand are getting together for a gabfest, there’s going to be plenty of top-shelf food and booze. You know politicians.”

  Valentine retied his hair. It was a time-buying move he liked to do when thinking something over. “There are one or two I like. Sime, for instance. The operator. He’s a snake—smooth, quiet, and poisonous. I’m damn glad he’s on our side.”

  Might as well drop bait here, she thought. The conversational waters seemed promising. “Well, I have another worry. Remember how we hit that conference in French Lick.”

  “Poorly,” he said. She assumed he meant the first attempt at an assault, rather than his memory.

  “I think we went too large. We should have just gone in with twenty Bears,” Duvalier said. “Spilled milk gone under the bridge, Val. Suppose the Kurians catch wind of this and try the same thing.”

  “It’s more their style to try to give everyone a disease or poison the water.”

  “All the more reason to drink champagne,” she said. “I think we should go up there and do a little informal security work.”

  Valentine looked in the direction of the colonel’s office. “Lambert’s been burned so many times with ops blowing up on her, I’m surprised she’s even sending anyone.”

  “She told me Kentucky wants to be represented, too. They’re as good as any other freehold. The Southern Command delegation is letting us tag along.”

  “Hmmm. Ahn-Kha’s been dealing with a delegation from the Kentucky government for the past few days. I thought they were touring the Grog settlements, but maybe they’re the delegates and they’re getting some kind of handle on the numbers and strength of our new allies. Who are the Southern Command delegates?” Valentine asked.

  “Good question. I don’t know. Your old friend General Martinez, maybe?”

  “I don’t see him leaving his commander-in-chief chair for a long, cold trip. He’ll send a mini-me, though. I’d hope they’d have enough brains to send Sime; he’s plainspoken and experienced at these conferences. He had a tough job to do at the establishment of the Kentucky Alliance.”

  “Well, do you want to give it a shot?” she asked.

  “I’ll let you know in a day or two,” Valentine said.

  Blake, the young Reaper, was hunting rats in the barn. He squatted, as motionless as a waiting spider, and then when some sound or movement attracted his hyperalert senses, he pounced, as swiftly as a striking cobra.

  Big as he was, he was unsettlingly fast, even to Duvalier, who had seen plenty of Reapers in action. Perhaps the lack of a link to an animating Kurian allowed his reflexes to reach their full potential.

  However physically developed he was, his emotions were still those of a young child. When he missed the rat, he kicked straw about and let out a terrifying, high-pitched howl that set all the horses to stamping.

  “Boy,” Narcisse said from her walker, roused by the noise. The ancient Jamaican—and something more—who’d been Blake’s caretaker since he was a few months old let her voice do most of the chasing these days. She had a way with him. “You calm down. Horses and folks tryin’ to sleep, see?”

  He finally ran down a rat and drained it with a single crunch.

  Of course a rat wasn’t enough to sate a growing Reaper. Blake had a primitive digestive system that couldn’t even handle cooked meat. He thrived on blood and could make do with animal fats, though if he had too much fat in the diet he became lethargic and craved salt water, which made him sicker. Every time an animal was slaughtered, a few gallons of blood went right to Blake and any spare was frozen for future use—though he much preferred the fresh, since sometimes the frozen separated while they were warming it up again.

  Sometimes Duvalier cursed the fit of sympathy that had made Valentine keep the thing in the first place. She often thought he should have quietly throttled it shortly after it was born, or left it to starve or die of exposure. There was just so little known about Reapers—that a Kurian could conceivably detect him and somehow take control of him didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility to her. Half of Fort Seng felt the way she did; the rest went out of their way to be kind to Blake.

  Word came that the delegation to the all-freehold conference would be arriving by airplane—or rather airplanes. General Martinez himself, who’d never visited Southern Command’s allies in the new Kentucky Freehold or the Southern Command’s brigade supporting them, would make a short inspection visit before seeing the delegation off as it departed from Southern Command’s most easterly outpost.

  Higher-ups meant there would be an all-officer scramble to make sure the brigade was presentable. With all the Grog, Wolf, and Bear teams at Fort Seng, things were bound to look a little shaggy, especially to someone with a reputation for tunic-button counting like General Martinez.

  Duvalier decided to bury herself in the kitchens for the visit. She could lay out rat traps or make sure scrap food got to the camp pigpen or clean the coolers and refrigeration equipment and avoid the inevitable inspection-and-dinner that she could already hear coming like a distant thunderstorm. She checked the assignment list—one clipboard at headquarters was mandatory, the other volunteer; Lambert and her exec must have been up all night typing it out. She noticed that she just had one simple mandatory assignment—a water filtration equipment check. Easy enough. She’d just have to take a few test tubes of Fort Seng water to the camp’s medical office and see that the results were properly recorded and filed and then make sure that the
water-purification tablets were stocked up in all the field cases. She noticed that Valentine had volunteered to lead a Wolf team on the farthest-out reconnaissance patrol during the visit.

  She knew there was some kind of bad blood there, dating back to the brief Kurian occupation of what was then the Ozark Free Territory. She’d been busy herself, performing in a Little Rock club frequented by the Quisling officers to pick up information and be in a position to kill a few colonels if and when the need arose, and so she didn’t know all the circumstances, but the short version was that Valentine suspected Martinez of keeping his forces mostly out of the fight until they tired of hanging out in the mountain brush and were willing to undergo an orderly surrender.

  She volunteered for the pens and coops. Animal waste didn’t bother her—actually very little bothered her, except being grabbed, poked, or touched. She sometimes wondered at her dislike of contact. After making a to-do list for obvious fixes with the livestock, she looked over some of the maintenance logs and found that there’d been no lead test of the supply—ever, apparently. She set about getting a water-testing kit from the company stores when she saw Lambert passing through headquarters with an unknown woman in Southern Command Guard rig with a captain’s bars.

  “He’d like to make a short speech to the men, of course,” she told Lambert. “Where would you suggest that take place?”

  Duvalier made a show of adjusting the strap on the testing kit so she could pause and listen.

  Lambert said the athletic field would serve. There was a wooden platform at the center that would allow him to address the whole camp with minimal amplification.

  “The major general likes a little more theatricality. I have a banner for the new year’s motto: Purpose to Everything.” The visitor paused after she repeated the phrase, as though expecting a squeal of excitement from Colonel Lambert. When no such oohing and ahhing arose, she cleared her throat and continued. “They’ll be expected to repeat it after the major general. Loudly.”

  Kurian Zone crap, Duvalier thought. Keep everyone up to date on the latest pap from on high.

  The water checks gave her an excuse to go get some fresh air. She’d read a short book once, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that she’d found in an overgrown house where she’d waited out a storm. Someone had stuck a whole bunch of college books in a plastic tub, and the other literature was too long to begin and too heavy to carry around, and she didn’t see what good a calculus and a physics book would do her apart from helping her fall asleep. At the end, the mistreated animals that’d revolted against their farmer found themselves led by a group of pigs that were even worse than the old, lazy farmer had been. The pigs grew so used to dealing with men that it was tough for the other animals to tell the difference. She’d felt that a few times during her stint in Southern Command, but attributed it to efficiently run military organizations being much alike, thanks to command-and-control necessity.

  Southern Command was in a fight for survival against beings that wanted to harvest humans as food, and the priority of the man in charge of that fight was to make sure everyone knew this year’s slogan? Someone’s water wasn’t hot enough to cook the crayfish, as her uncle used to say.

  It irritated her enough that she wanted to talk about it with someone. Narcisse would just laugh it off as meaningless tripe and not worth the emoting. Ahn-Kha was stoic about everything.

  She found Valentine with Captain Patel, picking out Wolves and a couple of aspirants for his patrol. The tents and barracks of Wolf country, as it was called at Fort Seng these days, put her a little on edge. The shaggy, rail-thin Wolves always eyed her hungrily. She felt a little like a chicken invited to dinner at the fox den.

  Valentine finished his business with Patel and escorted her out. A bag full of variegated human hair stood outside one of the tents, and she heard scissors snipping.

  “Colonel Lambert wants hair and beards regulation,” Valentine said.

  “Even the Bears?” she asked.

  “Patel and a couple of his big timber boys are going to find something for the rowdies to do,” Valentine said. “Gamecock has the rest finding their A uniforms. Which means no cut-off sleeves, from what I understand. We’ll put the Bears in the back.”

  “The whole camp should find something else to do during the speech. Rah-rah speechifying like that reminds me too much of the KZ. You know he actually has a slogan for the year? ‘Purpose to Everything.’ I already heard Corporal Manfried in the mess call it ‘Porpoise on Biscuit Ring.’”

  “Banner?” Valentine said. His face went poker-hand blank, which usually meant he was brewing something up. “Hey, Smoke, old road friend, you wouldn’t be interested in volunteering for the stage decor?”

  “I might. What do you have in mind?”

  “I’ve heard a lot of speeches from Martinez. I don’t want to inflict them on our poor fighting men without an opportunity for real entertainment… .”

  Maybe it was the slogan-of-the-month. Something sent her back to her childhood once she fell asleep. The Great Machine. She dreamt of it again.

  She’d first had the dream as a little girl, growing up in the gentle rolling hills of Eastern Kansas near the edge of the great flat plain of the rest of the state. Even in her little town it was still a vista of vast horizons, fifteen-mile views if you could just get up on a roof or high in a tree—always her favorite spots, in almost any weather. She liked being up out of the view of searching eyes, which always seemed to be attached to gossiping tongues.

  At the age of seven or eight (she couldn’t be sure which), she began to have dreams of the machine. Maybe they were connected to the visits of Quislings to her mother. They’d started before then, she suspected, but only once she’d been moved into her neat green-and-white-painted little school with the other Quisling kids did she hear about what her mother was undoubtedly using for payment for her access to the best education available, in one of the unofficial schools where she could be taught by someone other than the New Universal Church and its youth organizations.

  The dreams were horribly vivid. She was in her home, occupied with some chore, when a rumbling, growing as it approached like an avalanche, drew her to the window. Mechanical spikes like clock towers mixed with talons erupted out of the earth in showers of dirt, puffing out dark gas like a steam engine as they unfolded and expanded, always sending out more points, barbs, hooks, irregular rows and rows of them like the broken saw teeth or the shark jaws she’d seen in New Orleans. Mad lights blinked and searchlights opened and shut, sending patterns of light and dark and color over the landscape.

  The house would rock on its foundation and she sought escape to the roof, calling for her mother. Mother tried to follow, but a piece of the machine, like a mechanical tree root with the grasping ability of a hand, reached in the door and yanked her out of her shoes. There was nothing to do but clutch at the empty shoes and try to escape.

  Once she was on the roof she could see, like a mountain, a centerpiece of the Great Machine, with an eye atop the pyramidal mechanism like the seal on the old one-dollar bill. All the individual spines were connected to it deep underground. The pieces all hooted and chattered like a conglomeration of television sets, radios, and alarm klaxons. The noise was such that it was a weapon itself; you wanted to squat and put your hands over your ears. She wished some attack aircraft of the Old World would zoom in, shooting nuclear-tipped missiles into that eye, putting out the eye and silencing the cacophony, but the Great Machine couldn’t be destroyed. It didn’t have a weakness like a dragon’s missing scale or a space station exhaust port. No one weapon would wreck it.

  In fact, it did a good deal of destruction to itself. In her dreams the Great Machine was a shambles. Spines would collide with other spines, breaking both and sending rusty bits showering to the ground below. She could reach out and tear off pieces of it, the way she removed old aluminum siding from rotting homes in metal drives organized by the Youth Vanguard.

  Even as a tween
ager she realized that her dreams about the Great Machine were really about the Kurian Order.

  In waking life, she knew the Great Machine was a fantasy. It had long ago lost its power to scare her when she was awake the way thinking of it had frightened her as a child. Reason slumbered with the rest of her body, however, so it still had the power to terrify her in her dreams. Sometimes her mother was not pulled into the machine, but embraced it, let pieces of it enter her in an obscene fashion—the Great Machine dream had matured sexually just as she had.

  Sometimes the dream ended when it destroyed her house. When it went on, she ran through the streets while clockwork talons waved around and above, bending down to stab at the people on the ground like a heron taking a minnow or a lizard. Some of the people were running away with her, some seemed oblivious to the machine, and others, having been engulfed by it, were having their hands turn into gears, their eyes into lights, and their mouths into speakers.

  One thing was certain: the machine would never take her. In the twilight time between wakefulness and sleep, when the world was half dream and half dawn, she thought of how she would always keep a grenade at the ready, just in case a piece of the machine grabbed her. She would blow apart her own components, and hopefully a few of the machine’s, to prevent her mouth from adding to the noise or her fingers from becoming the gears bending a new spine toward the ground to impale another victim.

  The wonder of it was that the machine had reached for her so many times and missed. She wasn’t that good. Either she hadn’t yet struck a blow that really hurt the machine—in that case she’d have to redouble her efforts—or the machine itself was something of a lemon.

  It was probably some mixture of both. The Kurian Order was like a huge, overweight boxer. It could pummel a heavy bag easily enough; the heavy bag didn’t move, and the layers of fat and muscle, combined with its height, made it hard to really hurt it. But if you watched your step and didn’t get cornered, avoiding its clumsy, muscle-bound blows was fairly easy.