Baltic Gambit

by E. E. Knight

  She wandered around the town a little while the others registered them into the hotel and the conference. It was strange to walk along a street with doorways and shop windows beckoning, but not understand a single word spoken or printed. She recognized address numbers, and the letters were familiar but decorated with accent marks and what she’d learned in Germany were called umlauts.

  There was a very old patch of town with tiny wooden buildings laid out more haphazardly. Most were unpainted but in very good repair. She finally came across a permanent metal sign that also looked like a pre-2022 relic and explained that the old town was an example of traditional Finnish wooden architecture.

  Off the main streets, there were individual homes, often square and steep-roofed, and small, more-recent apartment buildings. Most of the homes had little patches of garden, some watched over by decorative gnomes or trolls.

  There was still a disturbing doubt. Perhaps the Kurians were planning something like their raid on the hotel. Or what if a shadow organization posing as the Baltic League selected this town and had forces positioned already? That seemed ridiculously unlikely, especially among these diligent, spic-and-span Finns.

  She borrowed one of the public bikes from a rack in town and took a training ride around the outskirts of town. She went a couple of miles up the roads leading north, east, southeast—the best maintained—and south. At each minor intersection she slowed and hopped off her bike and examined the roadway and the shoulders.

  She checked wheel tracks in dried mud puddles and such. It looked like most of the traffic this time of year was on bicycles. There were hoofprints, too, and some footprints.

  The one difficulty she had was at the Finnish garrison, right at the edge of town between the bayside and the airport. As she passed the gate, slowing to take a look through the fence at the brick dormitories, a couple of wolf whistles pursued her.

  Her mistake was thinking they were compliments. She ended up being pursued by a small silver car with a police bar running all around the roof. Lights zipped around the roof bar like photo flashes.

  She was questioned by a sergeant who spoke rough-and-ready English. She explained that she was part of the conference, gave her name and delegation so they could check her out, and waited.

  They cleared her and the sergeant told her to “enjoy us exercise air, Kentucky woman!” as he gave her bike—not her butt—a push down the road. These Finns were well behaved.

  The Kurians weren’t in the neighborhood, unless there was a very small advance party. If that was the case, they’d probably be Finns, hiding in town with the locals. They’d spot her as a stranger long before she recognized them.

  It should be night. Her body told her so, but the sun was still at a height she was used to thinking of as midafternoon. Weary, she turned the bike back toward town.

  She decided to relax, at least for her first night. The way things looked, she’d have plenty of time to pedal around checking out back roads. It never hurt to learn the local territory.

  They decided that Ahn-Kha and Valentine would acquaint the Finnish security with the intelligence they’d discovered. Ahn-Kha, as a voting delegate, might get more attention from whoever was running the show, and Valentine felt it was his duty to go along and see that the information was treated seriously.

  The sleeping arrangements weren’t ideal, but she’d fared worse many, many times. Ahn-Kha gallantly offered to give up his private room to her, but she refused. She suspected that was a relief to Valentine and Pistols. Ahn-Kha had many fine qualities, but his digestion still hadn’t adjusted to the fish-heavy Scandinavian cuisine. On the diet of salty fish, he produced gas that was probably a violation of some international convention on chemical weapons.

  The hotel suite was smaller than ones she’d known in the United States. It had one compact bedroom and a second sitting room with a folding sofa bed, plus a toilet and a shower. There were cots in the closet—the Finns had been expecting a larger delegation from the United Free Republics and Kentucky.

  Valentine and Pistols offered to take the sitting room.

  “I don’t see how you’ll manage that without sleeping on top of each other. The couch is fine by me,” she said.

  The little side tables were pressed into duty for gun cleaning and maintenance. Pistols spent some time with Valentine talking about the advantages of color-coding the bottom of his magazines with mildly luminous paint of the sort used for dots on gun sights, and they went to work on the magazines for Valentine’s old .45 Colt automatic, using colored tape for now.

  The conference had its “soft opening” the next day. There were no meetings or votes, just a lot of open meetings for the delegates to get to know one another.

  She was registered at the conference as well, a “nonvoting associate” from the Kentucky Alliance. A helpful man at the door with a cross-draw pistol somewhat hidden under a sport jacket directed her to the credentialing desk.

  The big open hallway between the glass wall and the individual conference rooms was almost empty. There was a circular desk near the doors with a few Scandinavian types (she was getting used to everyone being blond, tall, and in possession of magnificent teeth) and she opened with the universal line.

  “I’m sorry, does anyone speak English?”

  It turned out they all did.

  Even though the conference had not officially opened yet, there was still business taking place at the center in some of the smaller rooms, and the credentialing and security desk in the main lobby was busy. When she gave her name and freehold they retrieved a file for Kentucky—she noted it looked new and was nearly empty, whereas many of the others were dog-eared and filled—and opened it. The security man stepped over and looked at two photographs with the conference assistant, one that was faint and assembled line by line via some form of transmission, and a second, much better and more recent, of her leaning on the railing of Von Krebs’s yacht looking out to sea. She remembered Von Krebs fiddling with a modern-looking camera, but she hadn’t seen him take the snap of her.

  Effective little shit. Was he part of the security staff? Or were the transport people just supposed to take a picture of everyone they’d been assigned to convey?

  A uniformed security man took her over to a beige wall outside one of the conference rooms and had her stand on a little piece of tape. He moved to a second piece of tape and took her picture with a camera that spat out an instant color photograph. Back at the desk one of the workers stuck it in a device and centered it on her head, punched it out of its surroundings, and placed it on a badge with her name, then ran it through a laminating machine. Then they photocopied it—those machines were rare!—and put it back in the Kentucky file before handing her the conference identity card and the lanyard. The back had some simple safety instructions. She noted that all firearms had to be turned in at the security desk, but it said nothing about knives—or sword-sticks.

  “You must wear identification in this building, or for group activities at your hotel. The ninth floor is the conference area there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “May I help you with anything else?”

  It was worth a try. “Have the Lifeweavers arrived yet?” she asked. She wondered what she’d have to do to get an audience with one to request more Lifeweaver aid for Kentucky.

  The staff exchanged a couple of words and she recognized “Lifeweavers” repeated.

  The woman who’d made her ID smiled sympathetically. “No one can say. They always attend, though they take little part. Since the disaster in the South Atlantic only one or two are expected. They are here already; I am sure. I know the White Ravens are here.”

  “White Ravens?”

  She bit her lip in thought. “Do you call it something else? Those humans who communicate with them for us and guard them. They are connected in some manner, you know? Do you have such people in America?”

  “Oh, I see. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about that,” she said.

/>   She’d heard rumors about humans who joined up with the Lifeweavers to serve them, like priests attending to a living god. She’d be tempted to take an offer like that. She felt a strange sort of comfort in their alien presence. They were so wise and remote. It would be fascinating to see the cosmos through their eyes, even secondhand.

  She attached the little alligator clip and took a walk around the concourse on both levels. It was nearly empty, with just a few attendees like her vacantly wandering, or little groups of Baltic League organizers hurrying about with carts filled with plastic storage bins. She had a few curious looks from the sleek attendees.

  Well, she’d have an opportunity to talk with one sooner or later. A Lifeweaver or two would make all the difference in Kentucky.

  As she walked away, she heard more Finnish behind her, and a stifled giggle. Sometimes she cursed her enhanced hearing. Sometimes you didn’t want to hear everything that transpired behind your back.

  She wondered what the joke was, but felt certain it was about her. There was just something about Europeans that made her feel awkward. Back home, everyone was ragged.

  To be honest with herself, she felt a bit of a ragamuffin. It was one thing to shrug and say “screw that noise; I’m just here for the food” and another to be among them—these people were clearly taking the conference very seriously and putting on their best. And here she was, your basic Midwestern farmyard scarecrow. Her pants were thin at the knees and the collar of her shirt was frayed and wrinkled. And these were her presentable clothes.

  No wonder the late Thérèse Stamp had nudged her about buying new clothes.

  Curiosity satisfied, she wandered around the grounds of the conference center. At the sunken fountain plaza there were garbage bins and several sand-filled basins for tobacco. There were some extinguished matches and butts in the sand, but not many. As for the ground and the fountain itself, both were immaculate. Wait—there were a few silvery coins in the fountain, thank God. These Finns were starting to turn into civic-minded robots in her imagination. That, or there were a lot of make-work jobs cleaning public spaces for the refugees who’d come up the Gulf of Bothnia.

  She went into town and looked in shop windows. Finally, she found a store crowded with racks of women’s clothing, with more stacked in disorganized bins. All used or patched stuff, by the look of it. It smelled of industrial-strength detergent and critter killer. Hopefully it would be cheap.

  The shop had only a few staff, and all those seemed to chat with one another in a polyglot tongue that was discernible to her only through a couple of brief English phrases (“okay,” she’d learned, was virtually universal).

  A nice pencil skirt, some tights, and a new blouse and jacket later, she felt like a new woman. The clean, simple lines of the women’s fashions popular up here suited her thin frame. She could almost admire herself in the mirror in the neat, severe lines. Almost.

  As it turned out, her purchases were very cheap. The clothing became less expensive the more you had to buy. Rough work clothes and boots, along with winter layers, were the pricier, sought-after items up here. People had fewer occasions to dress in formal business attire, and it would hardly stand up to field use to be worth the purchase price.

  They didn’t even offer bags, but they showed her how to roll up the jacket and skirt and then bundle everything into the shirt for transport. She left the store ready for the conference, or whatever other social occasions the stay in Kokkola might bring.

  She wasn’t the only one who’d polished up a little, with the start of the conference looming.

  Ahn-Kha had found a barber to trim his silky arm and leg hair and whiskers. His facial hair all ended on a neat plane now, slightly longer at the point of his jaw, going up in a nice edge getting shorter and shorter as it approached his jawline. He looked almost dashing. She would have liked to see that scene, giving instructions to a local barber who probably couldn’t speak more than a few words of the various Scandinavian languages.

  Pistols had gone “Euro.” He’d changed his hair completely, right down to the color. It was now white, with perhaps the tiniest bit of ice blue tint. He’d also acquired a black leather jacket, cut like a classic old navy peacoat. It hid his pistols admirably and looked good on his stocky frame. The nautical attire made his face seem more the product of wind and weather than childhood disease.

  Valentine had gotten a haircut, but otherwise hadn’t changed much. His eyebrows had been trimmed, too, and someone had put a clean edge on his nails. He’d had all his clothes cleaned and pressed, but he hadn’t made any purchases. Valentine being Valentine, he’d probably bought some pathetic-looking family a hearty meal and new clothes.

  Sime, of course, didn’t need any buffing. He was always as polished as a jade statue. He had a slightly different smell to him, though; perhaps he’d been trying French soaps again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Pan-Freehold Conference of 2078: Each Pan-Freehold Conference has made history, in its way. The first, in 2048, was memorable just because it occurred. It meant the Resistance had enough of a structure that they could coordinate their efforts to meet somewhere in safety. It took place outside of Helsinki, which at that point was under disputable Kurian control, moving each day and meeting each night. The practice spawned the phrase “Helsinki White Night Shuffle,” still in use to describe a fly-by-night organization. Only five freeholds, four from the northern parts of Eurasia and Canada representing all of North America, attended, with others participating via shortwave. The only major achievement of the conference was setting up a system for communicating between freeholds, a system that remained one of the Resistance’s most deeply held secrets for generations.

  Another meeting wasn’t held for six years. The Pan-Freehold Conference of 2054 took place in the Australian Outback, starting the tradition of switching between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. While it was better attended than the first, it was considered something of a failure because the freeholds failed to come to a decision about the objectives for the next few years. It was also the first conference that had Lifeweaver observers attending—in this case five who were aiding the Australian/New Zealand/New Guinea/Indonesian freeholds.

  Four years later, the conference was held in Canada. It was successful but not memorable, except perhaps for the quality and quantity of the beer. The Black Year of 2062 was a disastrous affair held off the coast of Argentina. The Kurian Order managed to attack it with low-level precision bombers, creating chaos, and then seeded the entire island with air-dropped “wild” and very hungry Reapers. The 2066 meeting never really got off the ground because of security concerns; it took place mostly over phone lines and shortwave radios as they looked for security solutions for the next one. Security was a major concern of the next conference, held in 2070. The conference was dispersed among many safe houses in a remote district in the Akita prefecture of Japan, an area in the Dewa mountain chain where the people live quietly and strangers are marked. While the communications gear worked, and there were no raids, the camaraderie of previous conferences was missing—just as much was worked out during the nightlife, it seemed, as at the daytime meetings. The 2074 meeting, hosted by the South Africans deep in the bush, marked more than twenty-five years since the first Pan-Freehold Conference, and news from around the world was largely positive. Gains had been made nearly everywhere, and even formerly quiet Kurian Zones had seen an uptick of Resistance activity. For the first time, the Kurian Order seemed vulnerable. But again, the conference broke down over disputes about where the next blow should fall heaviest. The Chinese, North Americans, and Andean multifreehold associations each thought a good part of a continent could be reclaimed if supported properly by the others, and the conference ended in acrimony.

  By 2078 no one was expecting much. The past two meetings had been tumultuous and everyone was expecting a quiet, businesslike affair among the quiet, businesslike Scandinavians. Perhaps returning it to Finland would evoke old, romantic me
mories of revolutionaries scuttling from basement to basement, living on boiled potatoes, coffee, and rounds of head-blasting vodka mixed with aquavit and gin.

  Indeed, very little was agreed upon at the conference beyond the quality of the cuisine. The delegations all asserted what became known as the “after you, Alphonse” protocol for major cooperative efforts against the Kurians. There were the usual lower-level exchanges of technology and information, selection of books that could be used for coding messages, arrangements for liaisons to return home with different delegations—the inaction that Sime had promised had apparently become a reality.

  Duvalier had very little to do at the conference. On the rare occasions that required a vote by the delegates, Ahn-Kha was the only one of their party who was at all involved, though they showed the votes and delegates on large view screens. Ninety percent of these were ceremonial, according to Ahn-Kha, mostly devoted to voting posthumous thanks to some hero of the Resistance. Supposedly there were also secret votes, but Ahn-Kha said they probably wouldn’t be happening until the end of the conference, once the issues had been wrangled out.

  The United Free Republics and the Kentucky Alliance had arranged, through Sime, for a small per diem, which provided them with just enough Finnish currency to get a decent meal and toiletries. It turned out that Ahn-Kha and Valentine had also had the sense to bring a few bottles of real Kentucky bourbon as trade goods, and they commanded a very handsome profit for the pair at the nicest of the local bar/restaurants, as well as their hotel lounge. They shared their profits with her (“I used a little of your baggage allowance anyway, since you always travel so light,” Val explained), so between that and saving on her per diem by eating at the conference’s buffets, she had pocket money for indulgences. After a splurge on chocolate, she saved the rest for items that would last longer or perhaps a nice souvenir.