March in Country (18 page)
Authors: EE Knight
Odd phrase coming from someone as squared away and get-to-the-point as Colonel Lambert. Well, they did go back a long way. Come to think of it, she was his oldest friend in the service, he’d known her longer than even Captain Patel, who’d been his sergeant in the Wolves, trying to keep the young, fresh-from-the-mint lieutenant he’d been from killing his platoon.
He’d learned to exult in surviving. Every time he passed through the jaws of the bureaucratized temple of Moloch that was the Kurian Order, he felt reborn and relished birdsong, a quiet hour with a book under the shade of a tree, or the feel of clean skin after a good shave, lather, and rinse. The person who knifed sentries and sniped from cover was the entity Southern Command and the Lifeweavers had created to do the dirty work of cleaning the Earth of the Kurian stain. The man who checked up his nostrils while he shaved liked to read and observe and fish quiet lakes and poke around for telling remainders of the early twenty-first century. That man was strangely untroubled by all the bodies left in the wake of the Other.
She was wrong about one thing, though. He did feel worn down. He wasn’t that old, barely past thirty.
“I’ll see about forcing a leave on Duvalier. As to the other member of the old Thunderbolt Triumvirate, I have to warn you about Uncle—or Ahn-Kha. I hate to part you two again so soon after the happy reunion, but he’s needed in Missouri.”
“I’d heard they were hard-pressed in Omaha, sir.”
“Yet another front in the war where it could be going a lot better. I understand they’ve been forced out of Omaha. Southern Command will probably try to form what’s left into a guerilla band.”
“Guerilla band? That’s like saying ‘form Dallas into a guerilla band.’ It’s a town, there are the old, the sick, the young. Pregnant females.”
“I didn’t think they hatched from a turtle hole, Major.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Let’s get on with the work,” she said, taking up one of the smoke-dried sandwiches. “I wanted your opinion on some NCOs for the ‘A’ Company Patel thinks we should form . . .”
Valentine spent much of the night finishing Ahn-Kha’s notes. He dropped exhausted into an untroubled sleep.
Ahn-Kha had his hard-boiled eggs soaking in salt water the next morning. He reached into them while drinking his pomegranate-colored juiceless “juice.”
“I’m almost done with your diary,” Valentine said. “There’s not much at the end, once the ravies overran everything.”
“We broke out. It was fairly simple. Each man wired himself with a bomb timed to go off in twenty-four hours. Fairly easy to deactivate, if in full possession of your faculties.”
“But if not?”
Ahn-Kha spread his fingers wide.
“That’s harsh,” Valentine said.
“None of them much wanted to stagger around the woods until they starved to death or ran down a child.”
“Not much of an end for ... what did you call it . . . ‘the gallant rebellion’?”
“One cannot see the future,” Ahn-Kha said. “I’d heard of bridges burning, maintenance garages burnt down. Not our doing. I think the Virginias people wound up the courage to do what we’d been doing, thinking that it would get blamed on the mine revolt. It may continue.”
Ediyak and Duvalier set down their trays and Ahn-Kha tucked in his elbows. He was relieved to see Duvalier. She’d gone south again with the Wolves to see what the Kurians were doing with that tower.
“I dropped by Cutthroat Room last night,” Duvalier said. “It reeked of his hairness’s Grog farts, so I didn’t knock.”
“Any news?” Valentine asked.
Valentine dragged himself back to the present. “They’ve still got the ground occupied. I didn’t see any work. I grabbed some mail I found on a car seat, nothing but the usual Atlanta snow shower of forms. DFSs and PCQs and RMVTs, whatever all those are.”
“Ediyak, you were in the Georgia Control, right?”
“Sounds like personnel forms, sir. Everyone has a thick file. Health, work, and personal assessments.”
“Assessments,” Duvalier said. “Make an ass out of men, or something like that.”
“Tell me more,” Valentine said. He pushed his meat ration onto Duvalier’s tray—she looked like she needed it. He wanted to force her to eat out of sheer boredom, so he’d keep Ediyak talking about paperwork if he had to.
“First, there’s your HSA—Health Status Assessment. That happens every three years for twenty-to-forties, every two years for forty-to-fifties, and every year after. I’m not so hot on that—stress. My blood pressure’s up. Normally, what would save me is my PQW—Performance Quality Workload. But I’ve been out here in the north of beyond for the last six months, so my CRI—Community Responsibility Index—is shot to shit. They don’t make allowances for being a hundred and fifty miles from the nearest VETAMIN—that’s a Volunteer Effort Task Association Municipal Infrastructure Node, for those of you who don’t know Atlanta acronyms.”
Ahn-Kha crunched on eggshells. “It gives me a headache. The poor people who keep track of all that nonsense.”
“What do you think of all that, Ali?”
She swallowed the mouthful she’d been idly chewing, winced as it hit her stomach. “They left a couple letters out by oversight. Typical Atlanta spreadshit. Back in Kansas once a year the doc just stuck a piece of wood on your tongue, a finger up your ass, and some salad tongs piloting the oyster bed. If you passed for female, that is.”
“Oyster bed?” Ediyak said, puckering her tiny nose.
“Slang Val and I picked up when we were on the Gulf Coast, passing for married. Not that mine’s been much explored lately. Hey, Fuzzy, want to go pearl diving later?”
“Only for these,” Ahn-Kha said, pulling another egg from the salt water.
“One thing, though, Val,” Duvalier said, turning serious. “The Control’s stepped up their patrols. Some planes were buzzing around too. I heard engines overhead day and night. They don’t want any more raids.”
“Do the engines circle over the tower?”
Duvalier switched from the alleged sausages to more reliable—and digestible—toast. “No, they went off and came back.”
“Could be they’re getting ready for a raid of their own. I think we’d better see if Gamecock can send half his Bears to back up the Wolves,” Valentine said. He had better report this to Lambert right after breakfast.
When the women finished their food and left, Valentine told Ahn-Kha about his people.
Lambert held an officer’s call over dinner that night. She passed the word that she wanted to talk about the threat from the Georgia Control.
They use the old formal dining room of the mansion. The woodwork here was left untouched by Southern Command whittlers, probably because all the ornate decor reminded them of a funeral parlor.
Ahn-Kha came along and brought an appetite, but couldn’t fit his legs under the table, so he sat on a window bench and looked out over the east lawn of the mansion. A headquarters rooster led his hens in an exploration of the terraced landscape.
The lamb and spring potatoes with rosemary were good. For dessert, they had hand-cranked ice cream. Valentine avoided the wine and had a stainless tumbler full of milk.
“I find,” Lambert said, when the dessert and small talk over coffee began to drag, “that it’s easier to solve a problem if you can define it. Anyone want to take a shot at defining the problem?”
By tradition, heads turned toward the junior officer, who was usually allowed to speak first. Valentine suspected that the tradition predated Southern Command. It prevented the lower ranks from keeping silent during a meeting and just agreeing with the superiors.
Glass, now the Sergeant Major for the entire battalion, attended the officer’s call for reasons of courtesy and efficiency.
“Atlanta’s moving in on Kentucky,” Ediyak said, speaking as the junior.
“Anyone heard otherwise?” Lambert asked.
The staff sat silent.
“Okay, the buildup isn’t a feint so they can take over Nashville and Memphis. But why do they think they can move on us?” Lambert asked.
“The Army of Kentucky’s still putting itself back together after that ravies outbreak,” Captain Patel said. “The legworm ranchers are tough enough when they have to be, but they’ve got communities and families to think about. They can only play guerilla part of the year.”
Valentine remained silent. He had an oddly defined role at the fort—on Southern Command’s paperwork he was a corporal of the militia, but in practice he was the executive officer for operations. Everyone called him “Major” and kept up the appearances, despite the fact that his career had been permanently broken by a court-martial verdict years ago. He had some ideas of where Lambert and Ediyak were taking this meeting—they’d quietly consulted his opinion—but while he had an idea of the strategy, the tactics to be employed were still a mystery to him.
Still, he had a role to play. They hadn’t exactly fed him his line, but it was time to put in his discussional ante.
“What keeps the Kurians from doing the same thing in Arkansas or Texas?” Valentine asked.
“Southern Command,” Patel said.
“More than that,” Valentine said. “The populace living there. Every village has some sort of militia. They’re armed and the guards have special dedicated support units to show up with the mortars and machine guns. It keeps the Kurians from doing anything beyond small terror raids. In the Kurian Zone, the poor bastards are subject peoples, as likely to help enemies as inform on them. In the Republic, the locals will break out the machine guns and dynamite if they think there’s a Reaper in the neighborhood.”
Which can be bad enough. Valentine’s first blood in the Free Territories had been in such an incident, in the little town of Weening.
“Why hasn’t the Ordnance moved against Evansville? Because there are ten thousand adults there being organized to fight if they have to. The Ordnance lost the Moondaggers to us, some good assault troops to that ravies outbreak, and their garrisons don’t dare concentrate too much or they might lose land to a rival Kurian. They can’t arm their people in the same ratio that we can, or they’ll risk a revolt. The Grogs are sick of dying for them, except for the ones that can be trained like dogs and a few elite units under close supervision.”
“What we need is an instant population,” Lambert said.
Valentine thought of an old Warner Bros. cartoon he’d seen at the theater in Pine Bluff. A little alien had run around sprinkling seeds with water, growing big bird creatures. He once thought that the Kurians probably had a similar system for growing Reapers, but he’d learned in his search for Gail Post that they used human females who possessed some kind of special genetic marker.
“Ex-soldiers from Southern Command would be my choice,” Patel said, after swallowing his usual after-dinner tablets of aspirin. He had bad knees, and popped the white caplets morning, noon, and night. “Some guard vet, has his twenty years and five hundred acres—or better yet an ex-Wolf. I could put the word out.”
“There aren’t enough ex-Wolves in all of the Free Republics, even if they all moved,” Lambert said.
“What would it take to occupy the lands between here and the Tennessee?” Ediyak asked. “Maybe Southern Command can offer some kind of bonus for settlers. I know the people in the refugee camp they put me in would jump at the chance to get their own land.”
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