Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (27 page)

T
he
Defenestration of Kokkola: It proved to be the shot heard round the world. It also led to a good deal of historical inaccuracy. There were a few countries that mixed up players, participants, and notes. Most of the freeholds played up their own role in the affair—it was always the cowards on the other side of the world who were ready to hand over the keys to the planet to the Kurians.

As best as can be determined, the Kurian plan was to co-opt a few key players at the conference to ensure that the vote tilted their way, toward what’s now called the “Terrible Truce.” Of course there were a few ready to end the fighting and work something out that left their freehold intact. Then there was the legendary Rolf of Trondheim. The plan for him, it appeared, was to use a Kurian posing as Alessa Duvalier to either render him indisposed for the vote, or perhaps have the creature dispose of him in some manner and then switch over to his appearance and have the most renowned Resistance fighter in the Baltic League vote for peace and perhaps sway enough from the Guns group to allow it to pass.

None of the more serious reporting that followed gave any credit to Alessa Duvalier, which was just the way she liked it. Rolf of Trondheim and, of course, the photogenic Ahn-Kha were given most of the credit for
uncovering the plot and starting the Grand Offensive against the Kurians (within a year, it was possible to buy a stuffed Ahn-Kha in Helsinki to give to your children).

For once, a conference of humans settled on the right course of action. The Kokkola Resolve was short and to the point: immediate, all-out warfare from every freehold against the Kurians whenever and wherever they could be found was voted on and passed with just a few abstentions.

She needed food. How long since she’d eaten? Twenty-four hours, at least, since she’d had a meal. An incredible aroma permeated the buffet room and her mouth went soft and wet from the saliva that filled it so quickly that she had to swallow in surprise.

As she heaped a plate with food, she watched the security station work their phones, with increasingly worried faces and urgent switching of communication modes. Police and men in uniform began to appear and stand at the doors.

Duvalier fell upon the roast like a famished hound. As she ate, Ahn-Kha gave her the news.

It hit her hard.

When she was a little girl, she heard stories about angels who were secretly helping mankind. They’d come down to Earth to give mankind knowledge, weapons, and most important, the freedom from fear they needed to face the Reapers in battle.

She always wanted to meet the angels. Through a strange combination of circumstances involving a Quisling who’d been molesting her, she did. She’d murdered the evil rat, which seemed a strange gateway to an encounter with an angel, but that’s how it happened.

Hard to imagine angels playing politics.

To say the abandonment was a blow was an understatement. It was like she was standing on an entirely different planet. Everything she had thought to be true had suddenly gone wrong. The people, entities, angels—whatever you wanted to call them—who had inspired her, trained her, that she’d fought for, were quitting the fight just when it seemed as though they were getting ahead in the struggle.

What utter and complete bastards.

At least the rumors that the Lifeweavers were actually Kurians running both sides of the war were laid to rest. If that were the case, they’d keep playing their roles as long as each side needed an “other” to keep the confusion and killing going.

All the risks she’d run… Maybe it would have been better if she’d died in some ditch in Nebraska, rather than live to see this. All this time she’d fought with hope—lately it had been turning into certainty, after seeing how easy the shambles of the Kurian Order states collapsed if you just kicked them hard enough—and now that certainty was gone and hope was picking up its coat and hat.

Her gut was doing flip-flops. She briefly wondered if she’d passed out from exhaustion and was dreaming all this. The line of Lifeweavers up on the stage, all roughly the same age and looking like their bodies had been designed rather than lived in, added a surreal quality. But no, her gut sometimes woke her up, but a sour belly had never made an appearance in a dream that she could remember. This was all too real.

She recognized one of the Lifeweavers in the party. His appearance now was exactly as it was then, when she and Valentine received the mission to go into the Midwest and assess the threat of the Twisted Cross. His robes were a little more formal, chosen for the occasion, no doubt.

Of course, everything with the Lifeweavers was for appearance’s sake. She’d come to terms with their being master illusionists long ago. There was no reason they couldn’t all be standing on the stage in the guise of old cereal box characters, if they so chose. They went with what worked, and tall, elegant, attractive, and stately individuals in prophet-hair and robes seemed to work with humans.

“My lord,” she called. “Father Cat!”

One of the security detail interposed, but the Lifeweaver waved him away. And there she was, face-to-face with a living demigod.

“How could you abandon us?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“We met years ago, in Arkansas, at the lodge for the Cats. I had a new aspirant with me, black hair—”

“Perhaps it was another using this guise,” the Lifeweaver said. “We find it easier to work from templates. Wait, you are Alessa Duvalier? Yes, we know you, the red wrath of the Midwest. Have you met Rolf of Trondheim? He is another great one of your vintage.”

“Do you think we like this? We don’t. The negotiations were handled by others, the decisions made by others. As it was explained to us, we get two planets, forever and absolutely, in exchange for Earth.

“I gave my life to you,” Duvalier said.

The Lifeweaver nodded gravely. “No, you gave it to your kind. It’s the oldest and best definition of heroism.”

“How can you quit on us? We’re winning this thing for you! Do you understand? Winning!”

“Precisely. You and those like you made this settlement possible. Had this planet been in the relative state it was thirty years ago, or even fifteen, we would never have had such an opportunity. You certainly deserve our thanks, and more.”

“Thanks? No thanks,” she said. “Why are we being given up? I know your kind have died here, too. Isn’t there another—”

“Why do they want Earth? First, you humans are rich in aura, and you breed quickly under different levels of stress and deprivation.Second, they made a case that Earth, being one of the few direct portals to Kur, and yet also a portal to many other worlds, was an ideal route for invasion. Earth is their new castle gate. Holding Earth saves them a fight on other worlds.”

She felt like she was flailing. What would Val say? Some cool, long-ranged argument, she supposed. She pretended to be him for a moment: “And once life here is consumed to the bedrock, what then? Don’t you think they’ll come across those gates, ‘forever and absolutely’ or no? When they come, won’t they be stronger than ever?”

“We will be stronger, too,” the Lifeweaver said. “If it is a matter of being left, there will be some population transfers allowed. You have little to hope for on the new Earth. Your emigration could be arranged to one of the worlds reserved for us. There is a plan to settle some humans on Eheru to ensure the survival of your species. Of course, the climate will not be that of your native Midwest.”

“Leave my home, friends, the whole shooting match?”

“I do not say it will be easy, only that we can offer you a better future than you have if you remain on Earth.”

“Leave—my planet?”

“We respire and take in water much as you. You would find one of our worlds peaceful. ‘Idyllic’ is not too strong a word. It would be easy to forget you are an exile among your fellows. No problem about leaving, as long as it is done quietly. The Kurians are only too glad to be rid of as many of our children among men as possible.”

“You don’t think much of humanity.”

“I don’t? You are from the United States, once a refuge for those who abandoned their cousins and fellow citizens in some land that had gone to devils incarnate. Look just a hundred years ago in your own history, at the Laotians after Vietnam, the Persians after the Shah, the Poles who fled their beloved land. They built better lives in peace. You might do the same.”

She began to respond, but he held up a hand. “I am being told we are in no small amount of danger. If you’ll excuse me, we must remove ourselves.”

She ran to the windows of the second-floor concourse and looked out at the endless sunset of a Kokkola summer.

A sea of gray backs filled the street in front of the conference center. The bigger ones shoved the smaller out of the way to climb onto prominences like benches and the decorative border around the plaza fountain. They hooted and honked, making it sound like a traffic jam caused by a huge flock of Canada geese.

By instinct she joined Ahn-Kha, Pistols, and Sime.

“Are they dangerous on land?” Pistols asked.

“Very,” Duvalier said. She’d seen a little of what Big Mouths could do when she was in the Delta country south of New Orleans. “They can shoot across short distances in a blur. They don’t look like
they can move any more quickly on land than a sea lion, right up to the point when they launch themselves like a missile.”

“There must be thousands of them,” Sime said in wonder.

Rolf, the Norwegian Bear, appeared with an old revolver in his hand. “The best I could get, at this point,” he said.

“The garrison won’t be able to do shit to them,” Pistols said, handing Rolf the Judge. He looked big enough to handle it.

They seemed to be just milling about, waiting, nudging one another, and squabbling over comfortable spots on the roads and verges and parkland about the conference center, rather than moving in for an assault.

“I hate those fucking things,” Rolf said in slow, unsteady English. “Trondheim was full of them in the summers. They bred them, fed them bodies for the giving of the taste of human flesh a fondness. In the end, they turned them loose in Trondheim, too.”

“How did you beat them?” Duvalier asked.

“Kill enough and they start eating each other. They are cannibals of the bad wounded and the fresh dead. Easier meal than chasing down men.”

“They will not harm anyone,” one of the security people was shouting. Others took turns yelling in different languages. “They are here as bodyguards for an emissary from Kur, a member of the Great Circle itself.”

Sime was standing in a knot of shorter delegates from the Butter faction, trying to calm them down.

“What is the Great Circle?” Ahn-Kha asked.

“Like I’d know,” Duvalier said.

“A Kurian is about to speak to the conference.”

“So much for our trip to warn security,” Ahn-Kha said. “I wish my David were here. Or perhaps not. He might go mad.”

“I can go plenty mad for both of us,” Duvalier said. “If one more person tries to tell me what great news this all is, I might turn into a one-woman mental asylum for manic-obsessive cockpunchers.”