by E. E. Knight
If Valentine wanted pain, all he had to do was think of his mother, on the kitchen floor, the smell of stewing tomatoes, what was left of his sister lying broken against the fireplace . . .
Heart pounding, a cold clarity came over him. The next minutes would be either him or them. Doubts vanished. Everything was reduced to binary at its most simple level, a bit flip, a one or a zero. Life or oblivion.
Three ... two ... one ...
"Smoke 'em up," Gamecock yelled.
A Bear from each four-man group pulled the pins on big, cyclindrical grenades. The senior nodded and they all threw toward where they heard orders being shouted.
Valentine smelled burning cellulose. The smoke grenades belched out their contents. There was a stiff breeze on the heights and the smoke wouldn't last long. Gamecock put two fingers into his mouth and whistled.
"Action up! Action up!"
The Bears exploded out of the cover like shrapnel from a shell burst, save that each piece homed in on the target line with lethal intent.
Valentine followed them through the smoke. Gamecock kept toward the left, where more of the hill and therefore more unknown opponents potentially lay, so Valentine went around the right, trying to keep up with the barking mad Bear with the clipped ears.
White eyes with a thick bushy beard appeared from the growth to the right—a Moondagger opening a tangle of branches with his rifle butt. Valentine swung his machine pistol around and gave one quick, firm squeeze of the trigger and the man fell sideways into the supporting growth, held up by a hammock of small branches and vines. He heard a shout from behind the man, a yapping, unfamiliar word, and fired blindly at the noise.
He followed the sound of bursting small arms fire up the hill.
The four-man groups divided into twos, covering each other as they went up the hill in open order and they vanished into the smoke.
"Target in sight. Grenades!" Gamecock's disembodied voice sounded through the smoke.
Bullets sang through the trees, tapping off down into the thicker timber, followed by the tight crash of grenades going off uphill. Valentine felt the heat of one on his left cheek as it passed.
Then he was through the smoke. A wide, bright green mortar tube sat, a bloody, bearded man fallen against the arms of the bipod, looking like a dead roach in the arms of a praying mantis. Just beyond, a severed head lay next to what had been its body.
A brief flurry of gunfire turned to cries and screams as the Bears did what they did best: close quarters fighting. Only it was closer to murder.
The Bear with the cuts on his nose was perhaps the most impressive of all. He grapevined through the position with only his .45 gripped carefully like a teacup, his body following the foresight like it was a scouting dog. Valentine saw him drop three Moondaggers spraying bullets from assault rifles held at their hips in the time it would take Valentine to clap his hands.
Valentine saw Moondaggers fall, blown left and right by shotgun blasts or gunfire. The men on the other side of the slope saw the slaughter and ran from their positions and into the thickest timber they could find while their officers fired guns in the air, trying to stem the panic.
By the time Valentine realized the top of the hill and the mortar postions were theirs, the Bears were already over the hill and chasing what was left of the Moondagger infantry and mortar crew down the gentler reverse slope. Gamecock recalled his team and sent them to the right to check out the rest of the hilltop. The Bear with the old M14 knelt against a moss-sided rock, squeezing off shots as he squinted through the scope.
A bullet came back and he sank down, reloading. He rolled to his right, fired three times, and then rolled back behind the rock. No shots came back this time.
Some bit of sanity recalled him to duty. Valentine posted Preville by the mortars and followed a path north, finding himself atop a limestone cliff with a good view of the river valley and the treetops they'd advanced under. He withdrew into cover and fired first the red flare and then the blue, but as the first went off he saw work was already started on the bridge. Rand had put the engineers to work as soon as he heard firing from the bluff top, figuring the mortar crews would have better things to do with Bears roaring up through the woods.
Valentine hurried back up to Preville and reestablished contact with headquaters. They connected him with Moytana, who reported the destruction of two armored cars. He'd delayed the center column, forcing them to come off the road and deploy, before retiring and leaving a screen of scouts who were giving enemy position reports as they fell back. The center column wouldn't reach the bridge for hours yet.
The long day would be over soon.
Valentine looked around at the dead being arranged by a couple of Bears in a neat row under the trees, their faces covered and arms and legs placed tightly together. Most of them had jet black hair and copper skin. Valentine recognized again the old game he'd seen so many other places—Santo Domingo, Jamaica, New Orleans, Chicago: elevate an ethnic minority to a position of authority, where their position and status depended on the continued rule of the Kurians above. More often than not, the more-visible middlemen took the blame for the misdeeds of those at the top.
Valentine counted heads. All the Bears were upright, including the four keeping watch to the south and west.
"Not even any wounds? Your command's not even scratched, it seems."
"Not exactly unscratched, Major," Gamecock said. "You left something behind, sir. Left ear. Lobe's gone."
Valentine reached up, grabbed air where the bottom of his ear should be.
"You could take up painting French countrysides cafes," a better-read Bear laughed.
"Doberman can fix up your ears so they match," Silvertip said, pointing to the Bear with the docked ears.
"Want me to go look for it, sir?" Preville asked, perhaps desperate to get away from the combat-hyped Bears.
"You, with the iodine. Spare a little."
"Absolutely, Major," the bear said, exhibiting what was perhaps the deepest voice Valentine had ever heard in Southern Command.
"What's your name?"
"Redbone," the Bear said.
"Thanks, Redbone. Good shooting with that pistol. You don't give lessons, do you?"
"I can make time."
* * * *
Valentine could turn the hill over to the Guard infantry now. With a few platoons posted on the bluff and some more companies spread out in those woods, the flanking column could bust itself to pieces in this manner, and every moment his forces on the west side of the river would grow stronger as men, vehicles, and legworms crossed, platoon by platoon.
With the brigade across and flanks well secured by river and limestone cut, the men could afford to relax and swap tales of skirmishes against Moondagger scouts. The Moondagger columns, discovering that Javelin had escaped the bridge choke point, skulked off for the sidelines like footballers who'd just given up a fumble.
The Wolves were coming in with reports that they'd turned tail.
"A mob. That's all they are," someone ventured.
"Like most bullies, they're toughest against people who can't fight back," Valentine said. "What happened to the third column?"
"Don't rightly know, sir," Moytana said. "Some of the scouts thought they heard explosions a mile or two to the east. The column turned toward them, then reversed itself, then turned back again east before it swung around south to where they were when we were first watching them. That's all they saw before it got dark."
The work of Ahn-Kha, perhaps, with ambushes or miscellaneous sounds of destruction getting the Moondaggers marching in a circle, chasing the noises of their own troop movements.
Valentine wondered what would have happened back at Utrecht if they'd united with the Green Mountain Boys. The Moondaggers had come to oversee a surrender, not wage a war. If only Jolla hadn't felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of command.
He'd leave the might-have-beens to the historians and armchair strategists. He had to
check on his commanding officer.
* * * *
For two days the column crept southeast as Bloom recovered from her taste of Bear blood. The doctors complained that it made her even more restive than usual.
The Moondaggers hovered in the distance, keeping in between the brigade and Lexington. Valentine wondered what sort of orders and threats were passing between various Kurians, high Church officials, and the Moondagger headquarters in Michigan. Bloom was soon up to half days in her jeep after one more Bear-blood transfusion.
Valentine, now that she was on his mental horizon, suddenly saw Tikka everywhere: giving orders to her fellow Bulletproof, cadging for strips of leather to effect repairs on tack and harness, giving advice to the cooks on the best way to quick-smoke legworm meat.
Perhaps it was just his libido, but she always seemed to be reaching, squatting, climbing, or bending over, the muscles of her backside tight in jeans and legworm-leather chaps.
She caught him coming out of the wash tent after dinner and revealed a glass flask tucked in her summer cotton shirt snuggled up next to a creamy breast.
Valentine had seen hundreds of liquor advertisements while paging through the tattered ruins of old magazines, but for all the tales of subliminal depictions of fornication in ice cubes, he'd rarely so wanted to reach for a cork in his life.
"I came here to collect on a promise," she said, taking the kerchief out of her hair and letting the carmel-colored curls tumble into into a waterfall splashing against her shoulders. "Or are you going to Cin-Cin me out of my reward?"
What the hell. He should do something to celebrate his brief command of the brigade. Tikka seemed like five and a half feet of uncomplicated lust. He'd just have to make sure to use a condom for something other than keeping rain out of his gun barrel.
uDo you want to be seen walking into my tent, or will you sneak in under cover of darkness?"
"Let's go to mine. It's more secluded. I'm picketed to make sure the dumb things don't blunder into the stream."
"I'll change so I can blend in."
He buttoned his shirt and threw his uniform coat over his arm and went to his tent. While he put on his leathers, she refilled her pistol belt from the company supply.
"What in the world did you do to your rig?" she asked. "All your hooks and catches are gone."
"My maiden aunt Dolly was always complaining about the chips to her furniture. Kept snagging doilies at headquarters too."
She licked her lips. "I think I can tell when you're joking now."
"Good."
They walked through the knee-high grasses to the legworm camp, a little below the Southern Command encampment and closer to the stream. They wound through grazing legworms. On the hill opposite the stream, two riders sat on a mount back-to-back, keeping watch.
She beckoned him into her tent. Some tack odds and ends sat in a chest that opened out into shelves, and various ponchos and bandannas hung on a grate-like folding clothes tree. Her bed was a net-and-frame double with a rather battered-looking down mattress. It looked too rickety to support both of them.
"You should have taken better care of your leathers," she said, disrobing with a matter-of-factness that made Valentine remember a girl he'd once known in Little Rock. "You know, it's supposed to be the mark of a real well-suited pair of riders if they can do it without any punctures or lacerations. Kind of a good omen for their future together."
She had muscular buttocks and legs, good shoulders and a sleek, feline back. Her breasts, high and small and capped by determined, thumblike nipples, gave the tiniest of bobs as she danced out of her leathers. Their full firmness made her waist look even narrower by comparison.
"I could put some barbed wire around my nethers."
"Don't you dare," she said, coming forward and into his arms.
Her kiss was as wanting, hungry, and open as a baby bird's mouth. It had been so long since he'd had a woman press against him like this, her arms tight on his shoulder blades, he'd almost forgotten the delightful feel of breasts crushed against his chest, or a round hip just where his hand could fall as he tested the curves.
He lifted her easily and she laughed, pulling at his ears. She still had the day's sweat lingering between her breasts. It smelled like salt and sun and that powerful, caressing scent that women carried like a secret weapon for infighting. One of her heels pressed against the small of his back; the other rubbed the back of his leg. His pants seemed insufferably confining. They worked together to get him out of them.
She dropped to her knees, employed her mouth, but he hardly needed encouragement.
"Now. Hurry. God, I'm so fucking horny!" she said.
They didn't even bother disturbing the bed. The tamped-down grass was cool and smooth inside the tent's shade, and there was less chance of breaking it as she bucked and gasped under his thrusts.
After, she played with his hair. "God, that was good. I even forgot about Zak while you were doing that Morse code with your tongue. Why didn't we do this four years ago?"
"I had someone else then. Or I thought I did."
"That redhead? She could be pretty if she tried. And cut back on the attitutde."
Valentine let her be wrong. He didn't want to talk about Malita and his daughter. In the rather formal, most recent letter, she'd been described as half monkey, half jaguar, climbing trees as easily as most kids walked.
Valentine felt strangely uncomfortable at the mention of Duvalier.
"We could try making up for lost time," he said, changing the subject. He reached for her.
* * * *
So began a love affair carried out as discreetly as could be managed in a camp full of soldiers. Luckily Kentucky was full of glades, quiet hillsides, and swimming holes. Valentine had a tough time being spared from his duties, shorthanded as the headquarters was with their losses and Bloom still needing a long night of uninterrupted sleep. They had a magnificent yet lazy, four-hour afternoon fuck when Valentine had a midnight to four/eight to noon watch.
Once she tried to use her mouth on him as he was supervising the empty headquarters tent—empty save for one sleepy radio operator with his back to them—and he had to send her back to the Bulletproof camp.
Good thing too, because Duvalier came in soon after. She extended her tongue at Tikka, disappearing into the dark in a disappointed flounce.
"That Reaper the Wolves thought they saw turned out to be a scarecrow," she said. "Some clever clod rigged it to a little track so the wind blew it around his cornfield."
She looked at his trousers. "You trying to win a blue or something?"
Valentine, embarrassed, finished zipping up.
"Odd that we haven't had more trouble with Reapers."
"They keep away from big bodies of men, at least if they're alert. Too many guns. Plus, I don't think the legworm ranchers like Reapers poking around in their grazing lands."
"Any problems between the Moondaggers and the ranchers?"
"I went into Berea right after they left and played camp follower. They left the townies alone. Of course, the Kentucks hid their girls and showed their guns."
"Si vis pacem, para bellum" Valentine said.
"No, these guys favor buckshot and thirty-oughts," Duvalier said. "Does the Atlanta Gunworks make the Sea-biscuit mace-'em? I never heard of it."
* * * *
After his duty, he retired to his tent. He heard someone tap outside.
Probably Tikka, wanting to finish what she started in the headquarters tent. He rose and was surprised to see Lieutenant Tiddle standing there, looking freshly shaved and combed.
"What is it, Tiddle?"
"Can we talk, sir? Like, off the record?"
"Come in."
Tiddle rubbed his nose, looking like he was desperate to jump on his motorbike and disappear in a fountain of dust. "Major Valentine, that story you heard about the Colonel and Colonel Jolla ain't quite what happened."
"Excuse me?"
"We lied to you, si
r. We sort of agreed about it. There was a struggle over a gun, sure, but it was Colonel Bloom's. When the shells started falling and Colonel Jolla was just standing there and started talking about surrendering while watching it like it was a rainstorm and not doing anything, she took command. He put his hand on his pistol and told her she was guilty of mutiny. The next thing we knew, they were fighting. Then we heard the gun.
"She was the one who put the barrel under Jolly's chin. Awful sight. We took another bullet out of Jolly's gun and put it in Bloom's."
"Why are you changing your story ?"
"I—we all agreed, as we were treating Colonel Bloom, that whatever their fight was about, Colonel Jolla wasn't right in the head, ever since we lost the colonel. I remembered that story they taught in school about how the president wasn't giving any orders in 2022 and then he shot himself, and we decided that something like that was happening with Jolly."
Valentine decided Tiddle bore watching, in more ways than one.
"I'm still not sure why you're changing the story."
"Will this cause trouble for his family with line-of-duty death and all that."
"No. Let's leave it be," Valentine said. "Conscience clear now?"
"The lie's been bothering me, sir." He sighed, and is face relaxed into the more agreeable expression Valentine had seen here and there around the brigade.
In Southern Command, if a court found that a soldier had been killed while in the commission of a crime under either military or civilian laws, their death benefits were forfeit.
"Don't worry, Tiddle. You did the right thing. Both times."
"How can it be right both times?"
"Good question. Why don't you think about it for a while?"
Valentine decided to forget everything Tiddle had told him, if possible. Whatever Boom had or hadn't done, survival was their main concern now.
"Sir, if you don't mind me saying, there's one more thing that's worried me."
Trust established, Tiddle seemed intent on unburdening himself entirely. Valentine wondered if he was going to hear about Tiddle's loss of virginity to a cousin.