Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth (6 page)

She suppressed a giggle and tried to regain the pose expected of a Cat of her years and lives.

She sent the two-beeps signal. Three beeps replied—message received. Now she just had to wait for the Bear-filled garbage truck to reach the gate. She cleaned her blades as she waited, hoping some other vehicle wouldn’t arrive first. How quickly could she kill a driver and his passengers, if any?

The garbage tractor puttered south down the highway, two tires of the trailer crunching vegetation on the verge, giving nonexistent faster traffic room to pass.

It pulled into the hotel driveway. The circular white behemoth waited a little way up the hill, perhaps a quarter mile away.

“There’s a lot of trash up there needs burning,” Duvalier said.

“Our specialty,” said the Bear at the wheel. After all these years, Valentine still didn’t much like to drive. Valentine’s hands were running up and down his gear, a familiar sign that he had the nerves. He calmed down in action, always did.

“Coming along?” Valentine asked.

“Mass mayhem’s not my style,” she said. “I’ll hunt around outside, see what I come up with. Something valuable might come out one of the fire exits.”

Valentine nodded. He gave her one last, long look that she felt somewhere between her hip points. “We’ll leave in a hurry. We won’t have time to look for you,” he said.

She touched her fingers to her stolen cap in a wretched excuse for a salute. “Just take care of yourself, since I’ll be too busy for the next couple of days to do it.”

She gave the trailer two hard knocks with the wooden sword sheath as it reeked past. The Bears answered with the classic shave-and-a-haircut tattoo, reversing the usual order of things.

That’s what the Bears lived for, reversing the usual predator-prey structure of the Kurian Order.

Once they were halfway to the hotel, she grabbed one of the sentry’s battle rifles and a bandolier of magazines and followed cover north. She was no sniper, but with enough trigger pulls she could put some quality shit on target, as her shooting instructor used to say.

She’d gone only a hundred yards or so when the crack of grenades exploding on that big veranda opened the action. Firing began, quick bursts that made her think the Bears were already slaughtering their way inside. With blood on the walls they’d be half mad with the fighting already.

She watched the hotel over the rifle sights for a few minutes. A man jumped out a third-story window, but lay on the ground clutching his shin. He was too far away to finish off without the luckiest of shots. She decided not to reveal her position just yet, in case there was someone up in the main parking lot on the hill above with a rifle and a view.

The shooting quieted; what little noise she could hear from the hotel now was probably grenade blasts. The question was, how much killing would they be able to accomplish before having to organize their getaway?

With the Bears raising hell and bringing down thunder, she decided that she would just be in the way of all the bullets.

She heard another faint explosion from off to the east. Had the Reaper sentinel triggered her grenade?

She tried to put herself in the minds of the startled Quislings in the hotel. They were staff types; they wouldn’t make a fight of it. There’d probably be a mad rush to the hotel parking lot, but to make
the road you had to drive past the hotel, right under the guns of anyone standing on the porch. No, a clever Quisling would make a different escape.

The hotel stables had several tough four-wheel drives and at least one motorcycle, plus the horses. A good rider on a fresh, strong horse could even outrun the Wolves in the thick timber of the Hoosier forest. The stables were out of sight of the hotel with a wooded hill and a gravel golf-course-type path between the two. They could get themselves organized away from the shooting… .

When she reached the stables, it turned out that she was the only one who’d thought of it as a likely escape route, at least so far. The stables seemed quiet and deserted, except for the sounds of the horses and the methodical movement of a couple of them grazing in the field. A couple of fresh hay bales had been tipped off a cart without being cut open, a sign that whoever was feeding the horses had found something more important to do in a hurry.

She stepped out onto the path and started for the stables. Better hiding spots for ambushing escaping Quislings could be found there, and she would have a few hundred yards’ worth of better view of anyone coming from the hotel.

Once at the stables, she set to work disabling the vehicles. She didn’t have time for permanent wreckage, but she could slow them up by a couple of hours by destroying tires and electrical systems. She started with the biggest truck, a double-rear-axle job with a horse trailer attached. It wasn’t until she’d punctured the tires that it occurred to her that it might be a good escape vehicle for the Bears, since it had Ordnance markings and you could fit both Bear teams in the trailer.

She sighed.
Too used to working alone
.

Footsteps behind.

A kid in jeans and a white T-shirt with food stains came tearing around the truck, running for his life. She couldn’t check the swing of her sword but she did alter its course, giving him a slight haircut and an abrasion as the flat of the blade skipped across his head. The boy fell at her feet with a cry as if she had killed him. He smelled like fryer grease and onions. He probably worked in the resort kitchen.

She readied her sword again and kicked him hard in the ribs. He yelped, but his appearance didn’t blur or alter. He wasn’t a Kurian escaping in disguise.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

The boy was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Tyler.”

“Get across the highway, Tyler,” she said, pointing. “The shooting won’t last much longer.”

“They’re killing the patients, too!” the boy sobbed.

“All the more reason for you to run. Now get!” She nudged him with the toe of her boot and he took off.

She wasn’t surprised. The Bears, with their blood up, would go through the place like a buzz saw. While they probably wouldn’t shoot wounded in their beds, she could see them blasting anything in Ordnance colors. The hotel served as a convalescent home for Ordnance wounded and they wouldn’t be able to tell who was who when shooting down a hallway. It was a healthy environment for physical rehabilitation. That’s probably why they kept a few horses around—gentle exercise.

Valentine would be upset. He put more stock into the niceties
than she did. She thought it was odd that you could do anything you liked to a man on a battlefield, but the instant he was in a hospital he was off-limits, until he got well enough to go back out onto the battlefield to get blown up again.

Speaking of blowing things up, since she had some time she rigged a couple of the trucks with her remaining grenades. It took her just a few minutes to booby-trap two of the bigger trucks.

Thankfully, boot heels on gravel could be heard some ways off. A fat man in a colonel’s uniform came puffing toward the stables. He moved quietly and gracefully for his rotundity, on little feet that bounced him along like a dancer. His face was a greasy sheen of sweat and his oversized mouth split his face in two, with wide-set pop eyes giving him a froglike visage. Along with the flab around his belly, he carried a big boxy briefcase full of maps and a smaller, expensive-looking leather satchel with papers and a power cord peeping out.

She hunkered down behind an official-looking open-topped four-wheel drive, but the fat colonel surprised her. He hung his overcoat on a gas pump for the utility vehicles, then headed straight for the motorcycle and set about attaching his cases, the map case in the back and the leather briefcase to the handlebars.

Well, if a speedy getaway is what you’re after, you can’t beat a motorcycle. The colonel looked more like he enjoyed a few brandies and pastries in a comfortable chair than a motorcycle saddle, but you never really know.

She carefully worked her way toward him.

His getaway seemed well planned, but his fingers kept failing him with the various latches and nets on the motorcycle for military
gear. She felt almost sorry for him, struggling to tie off an elastic cord that had its usual hook missing. She reversed her throwing dagger and sent it sailing at his head, hilt first.

It struck him on the back of the head with a satisfying
rap!
but did not lay him out senseless. Nor did his appearance blur, so he wasn’t a Kurian in an unusually imaginative disguise.

Instinctively, he turned around to see who’d thrown the rock or whatever had hit him, and he locked eyes with Duvalier.

“Oh shit,” he said. His face went white. He looked like he was about to faint.

She really should kill him. He was a colonel, and by the look of the fabric and cut of the uniform, someone well cared for by the Kurian Order.

But there was something about his rotund shape and pop eyes that made him a figure more to be laughed at than hated. She was picturing him lying on a lily pad with legs comfortably crossed and fingers clasped. Where did that image come from? Maybe that was how he survived in the snake pit of Quisling rivalries, by making those who might be enemies discount him on appearances. If he’d only make a move to a weapon…

Let this cog in the Great Machine live, Kansas girl,
she thought. She drew her sword. “You’re not on the Control’s list. You have five seconds to disappear.”

He hesitated for half a second, a full ten percent of his allotted time.

Valentine had once moved an ornery mule by doing a spastic dance. She lifted her sword above her head and stamped forward, raising a thin ripple of stable-yard chaff with her boot. He took the
hint and ran off in his light-stepping manner, leaving the map case and the briefcase half connected to the motorbike.

Good thing, too, or she would have had to run him down and probably kill him. Perhaps her spycraft on this operation wouldn’t be a complete waste. She was rather proud of herself for working in the mention of the Georgia Control, the biggest and best-organized Kurian Zone in the eastern half of the old United States. A little extra confusion about who did all the killing wouldn’t hurt.

She carefully looked his luggage over for hidden triggers or other gadgets that might destroy the contents—and her—and decided they were safe to touch. Still, it took a conscious effort of will to pick them up and tuck them under her arm. They were heavy enough, loaded with paper. She hoped she wouldn’t have to lug this crap back across the Ohio on foot. That would be just her luck.

Of course, the solution was munching alfalfa all around her. Now that she had time to think about it, a horse was the best way to make her getaway—especially if she took off in a direction a fleeing Quisling might take. If she headed north, she’d be in very tall timber in no time.

While a vehicle missing from the motor pool would attract attention to her escape, there was always the possibility of a horse not being noticed, or disappearing from its paddock out of fright over the noises echoing around the hill from the hotel. She might make a clean getaway, with no one looking for horse tracks until all the survivors had been interviewed.

A few minutes in the stables led her to choose a hardy-looking small thoroughbred gelding. She had a good deal of distance-riding experience and he seemed suitable. Though no one would call her a
born horsewoman, she’d found that smaller horses often had more endurance in them than the big, impressive ones. He seemed like he had a nice temperament, too. He gave her a friendly rub as she hooked a lead line to him.

It occurred to her that she hadn’t heard anything from the hotel in a while. Half the Ordnance in Indiana would be converging on the hotel now—and, not incidentally, giving up on the pursuit of the Fort Seng column retreating toward the Ohio.

As she saddled the horse and tied on some bags of grain, she heard a few explosions—possibly booby traps left behind by the Bears to strike the unwary.

She carefully bagged the captured papers and maps from the colonel’s motorcycle and hurriedly set them on the back of the horse. She threw the colonel’s overcoat over her duster and put a rag in his hat to make it fit her head. In one of the overcoat pockets she found a very nice pair of sunglasses with real glass lenses. They were a little large for her head but she could bend the bows a little. From a distance, she might be mistaken for an Ordnance scout or courier.

She found a patch of springtime mud and made a generous application of it to her face. Between that and the colonel’s sunglasses, and with the overcoat buttoned high, she was barely recognizable as a woman.

Satisfied, she walked the horse out of the stables. She probably should have ridden him a little before loading him; it would be a tedious process to saddle another one if he turned out to have a bad hoof, but he seemed fit enough. She turned due north and pointed his nose at the heart of the Hoosier forest.

There was one highway to cross and she’d be safely out of the French Lick area. She paused the horse on the edge of the highway to listen, then kicked him across.