March in Country (17 page)
Authors: EE Knight
Valentine had never seen a document composed entirely of wastepaper repurposed as manuscript pages. Two great wads of it, rolled up and filling a plastic-lined leather map tube that Ahn-Kha had evidently stitched together and sealed against the elements. Ahn-Kha had written mostly in English but here and there in his own language—the printing looked like a cross between Viking runes and mathematical formulas. Every now and then there were little pyramids of writing with horizontal lines between.
“What are those?” he’d asked the Grog while he was still awake.
“Names. In my language. In case it fell into the wrong hands.”
“Didn’t they ever find it?”
Ahn-Kha had been around humans enough to imitate a shrug. “It was my pillow. It looked like a big roll of wastepaper wrapped up in a towel. Remember, my David, they didn’t know I could write.”
“I had no idea you were such a diarist.”
Valentine fell asleep reading about a mine revolt in Kentucky, marveling at his friend’s eye for detail.
He brought it up over breakfast, where Ahn-Kha was taking up two seats and three-quarters of the table. At the rate his friend was eating well-salted hard-boiled eggs, they’d have to add a few more chicken coops.
“If I didn’t know better, old horse, I’d think you were thinking about publishing your memoir. Some of your descriptions get a little rich for a military report.”
Ahn-Kha bit his hard-boiled egg, shell and all, and salted the remaining half before popping it like a pill.
“My David, like many of my kind, I have a poor memory for that which I don’t see, smell, do, and touch every day, or has been taught to me in song or rhyme. Set the letter ‘V’ of your dictionary to music, and I should improve my skills in your language for the rest of my days—but to look something up once and then remember it, that is very hard for me. I remember the manner in which we were—what was your word—de—”
“Debriefed.”
“Debriefed, yes. I remember the manner in which we were debriefed. The volume of information and detail we were expected to provide on that which we’d seen once, and briefly—I started taking notes early on.”
“I remember you writing on some old kid’s tablets during the drive on Dallas. But to keep a diary when the Kurian Order’s sending you underground in chains—that takes dedication.”
“The practice kept despair at bay at first. Later, once the practice had worn down and rutted deep into habit, it became a way of clearing my head for sleep at night. Whatever my problem, if it had been put down on paper, it could be reread and rethought with the dawn. Never underestimate the power of a good night’s sleep.”
“Depends on what you’re dreaming about,” Valentine said. Valentine rarely slept really well, being troubled by dreams. Alcohol drove away the dreams, but he didn’t care for the other side effects. Sex brought an emotional purge and exhausted oblivion, but it seemed doubtful that he’d see Caral again anytime soon. Or Tikka, who was leading the Army of Kentucky. With the Ordnance still looking for a way to reclaim Kentucky from the north and Atlanta probing at their southern flanks and the AOK healing the wounds inflicted by the ravies outbreak, she had better things to do than recreational lovemaking.
Valentine cleared his desk and spent the day touring Fort Seng with Ahn-Kha, introducing him to the NCOs and as many of the troops as possible. Golden Ones were gifted engineers, and Ahn-Kha quietly offered suggestions for a second river landing and a new road linking the artillery positions with the motor pool.
The motor pool had grown since Valentine last inspected all the vehicles. They’d captured some light armor from the Northwest Ordnance when they moved in on the winter offensive in the wake of the ravies outbreak and were working on refits using bits and bobs scavenged from Evansville.
A messenger found them atop one of the scout cars, testing the rotating ring for a machine gun. Both had oil on skin and fur.
“Colonel Lambert requests the Major’s company at a working dinner, sir,” the recruit relayed.
Valentine didn’t recognize the boy. New recruits, most from the Kentucky backwoods desperate for new clothes, a bed, and chances of pay started out as messengers so they could learn the location of the companies and the officers and NCOs of the base. The best Lambert kept, the others went across the river to join Evansville’s home guard regiment now training under Fort Seng’s supervision.
Valentine acknowledged the request and fought off a groan. Lambert and her working dinners.
The outer office was empty by the time he’d showered and changed his shirt. Valentine heard voices from the base com center across the hall.
He knocked and was invited in. The air was so thick with smoke it formed its own weather system. He saluted and sat at the usual polite invitation, slouching a little to get his head below the worst of the fog bank.
Valentine admired Lambert, for all her taste for cold sandwiches and milk surrounded by baskets of flimsies.
If the weight of keeping over a thousand fighting men of ad hoc backgrounds and muchly inclined to killing each other a few short months ago fed, sheltered, healthy, all the while improving their integration and skills, she didn’t show it. Her eyes looked bright and alert, not a hair out of place, and her blotchy gray-green uniform could have been photographed and used as an example in an officer’s reference manual.
She was a skilled officer when it came to keeping the brigade’s rolling stock on the rails. She was also a by-the-book officer in her thinking. To Lambert’s indisputably agile mind, better and more experienced heads than hers had laid down the tracks the military machine ran on—her job was to keep everything in repair and on schedule. Her one big attempt to lay down some new tracks had ended in near-disaster last year, a year of almost uninterrupted failure for the forces of freedom. Since assuming command of the tired, whittled-down remains of Operation Javelin in Fort Seng last year, she’d been even more of a stickler than she’d been in her days running the War College’s administration, when everyone had called her “Dots” because of her thoroughness at dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
She gestured to an elegant carafe and went back to rapidly filling out a Southern Command report in neat block letters.
A year or two younger than he, Valentine had first met her as a newly promoted lieutenant attending the old war college in Pine Bluff.
Lambert lifted her short churchwarden pipe, relit, and took another puff.
“Tobacco is my vice,” Lambert said.
Valentine’s shock was authentic. “You admit to a vice, sir?”
She smiled. “Purely privately, Valentine. If you go public, I’ll say I only smoke to cover the B.O. from the Bears.”
“Good stuff,” Valentine said, sniffing the air. It wasn’t the usual mix of tar and bark, sometimes blended with a little hemp, one smelled when the real tobacco ran out.
“Gamecock has some connection in Lexington who knows another Carolina boy who knows someone else in Chattanooga and so on all the way back to the Cooper and Santee. They keep me supplied. It comes in with the Army of Kentucky mail.”
Valentine sipped his water and took a bite of a sandwich. The bread needed salt and the shredded legworm meat tasted like it had just come from the smokehouse.
“Read your report on finding your big friend and your notes on those Texas-sized rodents our friend Pellwell trains. Anything you want to add off-paper?”
“No. But I’d like to keep Pellwell and her ratbits, if she’ll stay.”
“She’d stay at the mouth of hell if she can have her hairy band with her doing mischief, I suspect,” Lambert said. “The Kurians will come up with a countermeasure, they always do. They’ll probably come up with something that eats them or a bug that kills them. I’m sure we’re only waiting on a batch of Reapers immune to Quickwood. They ought to show up right about the time we go into full production on the Quickwood bullets.”
“We’ll still kill a batch in the meantime, sir,” Valentine said.
Lambert took another long, slow puff at her pipe. “That’s what makes you unique, Val.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Back when Stoyachowski and I were running our special operations department, we had her collection of ‘Wild Cards.’ Yeah, we took the name from her ‘Bear’ handle. We both knew you were one for the books.”
Lambert wasn’t free with compliments beyond the usual polite phrases. Of course, “one for the books” might not be a compliment.
“Could you explain, sir?”
“The hunters should be our best and toughest. They are, but they never last. Take the Cats—most quit after one trip in country. The rest—two, three, four outs and they were finished. Some go out again and never come back, others quit. The Bears are even worse. Like someone had planted rotten seeds in them, they sprouted differently, but it was always ugly. Some had the sense to request a transfer, others started in on drink and drugs and took themselves out of the TOE that way.”
“I saw it in the Wolves, sir,” Valentine said, wondering where this was headed. “My first hitch, with LeHavre, the senior lieutenant drank his way to a quiet desk job. Some go into the logistics commandos when they can’t take the strain anymore.”
“The Wolves wear out, the Cats disappear, and the Bears die violently. So what’s your secret, Valentine? Do the seeds of self-destruction get in but never germinate?”
Valentine didn’t know if he could tell her the truth—that he liked it. That truth was still something he was coming to grips with. The shadow inside, nibbling away at his soul every time he killed. In his darker moments, he wondered if he didn’t thrive on blood in the manner of the Kurians and their Reaper avatars.
He thought it best to shift the subject.
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that, sir. Duvalier may be due for a rest. A year or two back in the Ozarks with good food—”
“My permission isn’t the problem. She’s not about to leave you any more than Bee. Nice dodge on that question, by the way.”
He sat in silence, hoping she wouldn’t take it for dumb insolence. Lambert neither liked him nor disliked him when they were both on duty. When she looked at him she might have been examining a rack full of tires for wear.
“No one knows what to make of you, Valentine. You’re capable of looking someone right in the eyes and sticking the knife in, but you’ve half killed yourself fighting for people you didn’t know ten minutes earlier.”
“It’s in the Southern Command oath, sir.
Render aid and comfort to our people
.”
Render aid and comfort to our people
.”
“You’re open-ended in your definition of ‘our people.’ Kurian Zone folks, Grogs ...”
“I reckon it only makes sense if you go through life looking for friends or looking for enemies, sir,” Valentine said. “I picked friends.”
“In any case, I’m glad to have you. The Valentine fame adds a touch of dangerous glamour to this endeavor. We had two more recruits join while you were out, brothers who shared a cousin who served with you in the old Razorbacks. I hope you’ll keep taking those trips into KZ country.”
“Duty, honor, country,” Valentine said. “I think they’re in that order for a reason, sir.”
“And coming back,” Lambert said. “I like it when you head out. I love it when you come back.” She went to work with a bent paper clip on the burnt-out plug in her pipe.
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