Baltic Gambit

by E. E. Knight

  Ahn-Kha was the official delegate representing Kentucky. He was a last-minute change; the original delegate was to have been the leader of the Gunslinger legworm clan, but when he learned he would have to cross the Atlantic, he judged his chances of ever seeing the back of the clan beasts again to be slim, and withdrew his name.

  Ahn-Kha was more than willing to travel once more with Valentine and her. “With the three of us together, let the mountains of Europe tremble.”

  “We don’t know we’re going to the mountains,” Valentine said.

  “Glaciers, then.”

  “For all we know, the meeting’s on a ship anchored in some fjord,” Valentine said.

  Duvalier wouldn’t mind that at all. She’d seen pictures of fjords in old books and would enjoy the opportunity to visit one in person.

  Duvalier really wasn’t that surprised by the decision to select Ahn-Kha for the honor. He was impressive to look at, and had a reputation that extended from the Virginia tidewaters to beyond the Mississippi and Missouri. He was “Golden”—meaning lucky—to the coal miners of West Virginia and Kentucky, and there was no question about his loyalties.

  The Kentucky Alliance, practical as always, knew that the Baltic League would not be able to offer any real help to their allies on the other side of the Atlantic. Even under a best-case scenario, a trickle of weapons might make it over, or valuables that could be used to buy black market items of similar quality, say some of the production of Atlanta Gunworks that “fell off a truck” passing through the Cumberland Gap.

  What exact powers and instructions he received from the Kentucky government Duvalier never learned, but Ahn-Kha described his brief as “to assess the situation and use my best judgment.”

  Fair enough.

  Sime gave a sly smile when they met at the Evansville airfield. “I’ll be the voting delegate for the United Free Republics,” he said. “We’ll have to check, but you are probably the first Xeno to attend as a delegate.”

  “The Lifeweavers always are there, right?” Duvalier asked him. She was looking forward to a chance to have a talk with them, if she could ever corner one. They’d almost vanished from the middle of the United States. The ones Val had brought out of the Pacific Northwest were being hidden in a vault somewhere, apparently, and without a few Lifeweavers to guide them in the war against the Kurians, things would continue to go the same piss-poor path they’d been on the last few years.

  Sime shrugged. “I would think so. I have never been to one of these, but I’ve read all the available reports of the previous delegates from Southern Command.”

  The group from Southern Command was the same size as Kentucky’s. Sime’s group made the Kentuckians seem like bumpkins. As always, Sime was dressed immaculately in colors flattering to his dark skin. To her he reeked of KZ apparatchik with his finger-bowl manners and careful talk that said very little.

  He shook her hand as she climbed into the plane. “Welcome aboard,” he said, as though he were personally flying them to Europe. His hand was as strong and hard and cool as tortoiseshell. He didn’t seem the type for manual labor, so she wondered where the calluses came from.

  With Sime was an executive assistant named Alexander—it seemed to be his first, last, and only name. He gave her a card with an address at a contractor’s office in Texarkana that read only “Alexander” with “Capabilities Enhancement” beneath it. Shadowing Sime was a bodyguard named Postle who wore a civilian fishing vest. He must have had either very bad acne or a terrible case of chicken pox as a child, for he was dreadfully pockmarked and scarred. Everyone save Sime called him Pistols, as he wore no fewer than three visible guns and, she suspected, had a couple more concealed. Within two hours of meeting him, she knew that he had fifteen years in Southern Command’s Guard and had washed out from Wolf candidacy because of flat feet. The heaviest of the guns, kept on his hip, was “the Judge,” which could fire shotgun shells, but he’d fitted it with Reaper-killing distillates of Quickwood, which were, sadly, unobtainable in Kentucky. A stiff leather shoulder holster held “the Jury,” which he named because it was a 12 + 1 .45 Colt. Finally, there was “the Executioner,” a snub-nosed .357 revolver worn on a belly band rigged for a ten o’clock cross draw. “Killed six Quislings with it without reloading, all shot in the back of the head in graves I made them dig,” he said. She was more interested in his utility knife, which had a built-in flashlight and a deadly-looking backstabber that he claimed was an old commando dagger.

  Sime’s other companion was a woman named Stamp skilled enough with cosmetics and hair coloring that it was hard to determine her age, but Duvalier’s best guess was that she was just about ready to turn fifty but able to keep up appearances for ten years younger. Like Sime, she had the air of limo service about her. She didn’t seem the personal secretary type; indeed, she spoke to him as if she were giving orders, though Sime had been named publicly as being in charge of the delegation from Southern Command. Duvalier thought she looked like some duchess or baroness from a painting in an art museum save for her modern—and very stylish, from what little she knew of such things—clothes.

  Duvalier found that she liked her instinctively. Stamp always knew what to do with her hands. If they weren’t doing something, they were casually crossed in her lap. Duvalier disliked fidgety women who were always fretting at hair and attire.

  As they found their seats, Postle looked at her small backpack and his mouth dropped open. She wasn’t sure if the astonishment was feigned or not. “That’s all you’re taking, girl? I’ve never known a woman to travel so light. I think I’m in love here, Sime!” He poked her square in the right breast with two extended fingers. “Just put some meat on those bones and I’ll call a preacher.”

  Ahn-Kha, who was eyeballing the shape of the Bucking Bronc’s seats and already shifting his feet in discomfort, flattened his ears against his head. “I do not enjoy heights or constant motion,” he grumbled.

  “Prone to airsickness, Old Horse?” Valentine asked.

  “I hope not,” Ahn-Kha said. “It might be best to provide me with a very large bucket.”

  “I hope Postle didn’t offend you,” Sime said, picking up Duvalier’s bag for her. “He’s always in the locker room, so to speak. You’ll get used to it, hopefully sooner than I did.”

  Pistols reached up and rubbed Sime’s bald head. “We should all do this for luck on the flight.” He sat down next to Duvalier.

  “Sergeant Postle, please,” Sime said. “You have your seat at the back. Get in it.”

  “That big Grog’s going to need to take up two seats, and I don’t want to be anywhere near him if he spews. I’m comfortable right here.”

  Duvalier just settled deeper into her duster and put a towel behind her neck to make her head more comfortable.

  The plane lurched into motion as the ground crew dispersed from the final checks, taking the chock blocks with them. It took up so much runway on takeoff that she had a brief moment of terror when it appeared they were going to run out of runway before getting the tires off the ground. But the plane clawed its way into the sky, picking up altitude and speed.

  She felt Pistols’s poke in the tit for the first hours of the flight, not that he’d pushed into her flesh so hard, but just from the shock of the greeting.

  The plane had one major shortcoming. The heaters for the cabin were either broken or entirely inadequate. She huddled in her duster, hands jammed into pockets, colder than she’d ever been on any stakeout, or at least that’s how it seemed to her.

  Pistols pressed against her shoulder for much of the flight. In more comfortable surroundings she would have objected, but under the circumstances she was grateful for the shared body warmth. He mistook comfort for interest, and when he purposely moved her hand, pressing it against his half-erect penis down the pant leg nearest her, she got up and changed seats, risking Ahn-Kha’s airsickness.

  When they made it to the wooded hinterlands of Michigan for the first fuel and maintenan
ce check, she had to use all four limbs just to get out of her seat. The field had a single building about the size of a gas station and a wind sock on a high flagstaff. There were pine trees all around and above them some overgrown power lines. She couldn’t even see any roads on her side of the plane.

  “That was a weenie-shrinker,” Pistols said. He stamped life back into his feet as he reached up for her bag.

  “One-hour break, everybody,” Sime said. “They’ll have coffee and rolls and some kind of protein in the main building of the airport.”

  “You mean the only building of the airport,” Alexander said with an implied sniff. His nose and cheeks were bright red—perhaps he’d been fortifying himself against the cold the old-fashioned way.

  “Ten bucks to a quarter it’s venison sausage,” Valentine said, emerging from the cabin where he’d been helping Montee with the navigation. He’d grown up in the Northwoods a few states over.

  “And a warm toilet seat, please, God,” Stamp said. Duvalier could sympathize. “I apologize for being crass, everyone, but it’s an icebox back there.”

  Though he treated her dreadfully, she liked Pistols better than Sime, as at least he was authentic and up-front. He was an awful bastard, but you could just climb into the big-girl panties, deal, and move on. Sime was like an overalert dog—she nervously waited for him to reveal his nature and bite. Or piddle.

  She didn’t like how Sime looked at her. A snake looking at a bird with a broken wing would show more empathy. When you met his gaze, even by accident, he either stared you down, unblinking, until you broke off or he looked at something in the neighborhood of your face, say, your earlobe, and stared through and past it as if you and your earlobe weren’t even there.

  As for the other two in Sime’s party, she was hoping to keep clear of Alexander; about Thérèse Stamp, she hadn’t quite made up her mind. Like the others in Sime’s contingent, apart from Pistols, she believed she could throw her into a New Universal Church fertility-enhancer cocktail party and not be able to tell Quisling from freeholder.

  She didn’t mind having another woman along, to tell the truth. Stamp could siphon off some of the male energy.

  The Bucking Bronc was a tough little plane. Montee said it was day/night and all-weather, which was good for a flight north of the Great Lakes in April, when the first Midwestern thunderstorms met winter weather still boiling out of Canada and the always unpredictable North Atlantic. The passengers might be bounced around in the rough air like pills in a stunt cyclist’s pocket, but the aircraft itself pushed bravely northeast at cruising speed through two fronts’ worth of weather.

  Valentine liked Montee as well. Val took a couple of turns in the front seat working the controls or helping with the radio getting weather reports from exotically named Canadian operators and stations. Valentine had picked up flying out west somewhere or other. She vaguely knew his father had something to do with aircraft in the pre-Kurian years. After the novelty of being at the altitude the Bucking Bronc could reach wore off, she relaxed and slept pillowed against Ahn-Kha’s softly hairy arm, waking to find that someone had tucked a blanket around her.

  She didn’t speak much with Ahn-Kha or Val, and everyone but Pistols pretended to sleep on the flight.

  The cold was dreadful. Even Val, who never complained about weather, admitted that the enforced idleness of the plane seat drove the cold between buttons and gaps, ever inward.

  Flying made her wistful for the lost comforts of the old, pre-Kurian world. She’d ruined her feet walking innumerable miles, paralleling old railroad tracks or tree-broken roads. How easy it was to skip from cloud to cloud rather than plod along, down in the thorns and the bugs, desperate for cool, clean drinking water and famished for a good roast potato just dripping with sour cream.

  All those wasted days, with nights shivering in some ruin full of bats and raccoons. It’s so much nicer up in the clear blue air, watching the patterns clouds made on the ground. No wonder birds sing all the time.

  In the air, all your stops were planned days in advance. Hot food, warm rooms, flush toilets with paper. Montee was no dummy. Well, obviously he was no dummy to handle all the math and weather analysis and navigation and mechanical checks. He had brains, and the good sense to put them to use in a comfortable cockpit with a big reclining chair.

  On the ground, if you knew the country, you knew which homesteads held people who were friendly to the fight against the Kurians, ready with a cot, meat, and clean bedding for one of the “fighting folks.” They sometimes paid a price, too. The Kurian Order paid informants well, and often carried out brutal reprisals. There were sad moments when she walked up a familiar path only to find the house ransacked and empty. You never learned the full story. Sometimes there was a little line of chest-high bullet holes against a basement wall, sometimes not.

  The hot anger you felt at the destruction of people who treated you like family kept you going through hunger and illness for another six months or a year.

  The problem was this shit epoch she’d been born into. Fifty years earlier and she would have been able to fly anywhere—Paris, the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef. If she’d been born fifty years in the future, assuming a big chunk of Earth could be cleared of the Kurian Order, they’d be flying all the time again. The knowledge was all there, even now new planes were being built. It was up to her generation to get rid of the Kurians, and do it mostly on foot, while dusty, sweaty, and thirsty.

  Sometimes she hated those in the past, who didn’t know how good they had it. Even though she was fighting for them, she held a grudge against the future generations, too. She had risked her life fighting across a big piece of the old United States for their sake, after all.

  Valentine and Ahn-Kha never groused about these awful years. Hell, Ahn-Kha wasn’t even on the right planet; he should have been born light-decades or whatever they were called away.

  She’d keep on trudging, of course. And when they finally shot her in some basement, would anyone remember? Yeah, there’d be some statue looking over a park somewhere. “Tomb of the Unnamed Resistance Guerilla,” but the name Alessa Duvalier would be nowhere, once the handful of friends she had in the world died.

  Well, maybe not. When she returned from this trip, assuming fate gave her that outcome, she should really sit down with that journalist Boelnitz back in Evansville and tell him some of her stories. Maybe she’d make it into an appendix chapter having to do with the Twisted Cross or the Golden Ones or the discovery of what was going on at Xanadu, that Reaper ranch in Ohio.

  Montee set the plane down on a blacker-than-black runway with big yellow lettering and numbers in vast blocks. The hieroglyphic numbers and arrows must have meant something to him, because he made several turns on his way to park the plane inside a little hangar at the end of a row of much larger hangars near the terminal.

  This was a serious airport. Hangars and multiple areas for the planes, not just a patch of land with some tie-downs near the airstrip.

  “Welcome to Canada,” Montee said over the intercom. “Ontario, to be exact. You’ll be happy to know we’re spending the night somewhere warm. We’ll be deplaning out of public eye,” Montee said, emerging from the cockpit as a little tractor pulled the plane into the hangar. His boots were untied, she noticed. Did he trim his toenails in the air or something? “Fourteen-hour overnight, refueling, and maintenance. The airport has twenty-four-hour food and drink, for those of you who just want to sleep in the seats or the aisle. There’s a functioning pre-2022 hotel nearby. This is not my first time at this airport, but I tend to bed down by the plane, so I can’t vouch for the cleanliness of the sheets.”

  “What do we use for money up here?” Stamp asked.

  “That’s taken care of, courtesy of Southern Command,” Alexander said, patting a travel satchel slung over his shoulder. It had a luggage tag that matched his watchband.

  They all worked the kinks out of their frozen bodies and deplaned. They were tucked in
way at the end of the hangars. A military-looking jet with camouflage and drop tanks for extra fuel was the only other flying occupant in the hangar. Red tool cases on wheels and some machine-shop gear filled one wall. A pair of uniformed men watched them through glass from a little hangar office with doors to both outside and inside the hangar.

  “Want to go halvsies on a room, Red?” Pistols asked her.

  “Yes, but not with you,” she replied.

  The airport in Free Canada was the busiest she had ever seen, even accounting for military activity in the better-equipped Kurian Zones. There were twenty or thirty small planes in various degrees of readying for flight, taxiing, landing, and embarking and disembarking passengers.

  “That’s Canada for you,” Montee said. “Lots of remote little hamlets. Only way to get there is by plane, with the roads mostly in disrepair. If the Kurians want to come up from the south, they’ll have to cut their way through an awful lot of trees. Fuel’s no problem; they’ve got fracked oil out the wazoo all over the place.”

  They would have a night’s rest at the airport. There was a three-story hotel nearby if they wanted, and there were plenty of homes in the small town that took in “layovers” less expensively. Montee handed out a labeled envelope to each of them with Canadian currency inside. It had pictures of birds and bears and wolves, the wildlife kind.

  She ended up getting a room at the pre-2022 hotel with Valentine and Ahn-Kha. It had a whitewashed outside and most of the lights around the entryway doors still worked, bathing the drive up to the hotel doors in warm, welcoming light. The desk staff’s English sounded a little strange to them, kind of a Green Mountain Boy nasal twang. It wasn’t cheap—or maybe the Canadian paper currency they’d been given didn’t count for much in this particular province. Hard to say. They had to pay extra for towels, and declined a soap-and-shampoo purchase three times.