Valentine's Exile (6 page)

“Ready? Send them forward now.”

“No. I'm going to have a talk with them first.”

“It's your aura, Val.”

Ahn-Kha lifted his improvised cannon. “I'll go along, my David.”

Valentine looked around, and pointed to a scrawny, fuzzy-cheeked Razor. “You come too, Appley.”

“Yes, sir,” young Appley said, uncomprehending but conditioned to respond to orders.

Valentine passed the boy his order book. “If we get some kind of dialogue going, I want you to look like you're taking notes.”

“You want me to write down what they say?”

“If you want. Write your mom if you want; I just want you writing when anybody is talking. Can do?”

“Can do!” Appley said. Major Valentine only offered a “can do” to key jobs, and it was the first time the boy had heard the phrase applied to him.

“Great. Follow a little behind.”

Ahn-Kha walked beside him. “Why such a youngster?” the Golden One asked, speaking from the side of his mouth—an eerie-looking effort, thanks to his snout and rubbery lips.

“Would you use that boy in an ambush?” Valentine asked.

“Of course not.”

“I hope the Kurians think that too.”

When he figured he was close enough, Valentine stopped and looked around at his feet. The Kurian vessel reminded him now of a pill rather than a propane tank. Or perhaps a malformed watermelon; the “top” half was a bit bigger than the bottom. Some kind of bright blue sludge clung to the bottom.

“Reminds me of heartroot come to maturity in a drought,” Ahn-Kha said. Heartroot was a mushroomlike Grog staple.

Valentine picked up a piece of shattered glass and threw it at the tank. It bounced off. Valentine noted that the blue sludge shrunk away from the vibration. Perhaps a Kurian? They were bluish on the rare instances when they appeared undisguised. But why would it be hiding outside the tank?

“Anyone home?” he yelled.

The blue sludge quivered, shifted up the faintly lined side of the tank vessel. The lines reminded Valentine of the nautical charts and plots he'd seen on the old
Thunderbolt
.

“I've come to negotiate your relocation from Texas,” Valentine yelled. He looked over his shoulder; the boy was scribbling. He was also cross-eyed when looking at something up close and Valentine stifled a snicker.

The blue goop bulged, then parted. Valentine startled, and no longer had to fight off laughter when he recognized a Reaper emerging from the protoplasm. The two-meter-tall death machines were living organisms linked to their master Kurian, used in the messy, and sometimes dangerous, process of aura extraction. The Reaper fed off the victim's blood using a syringelike tongue, while the Kurian animating it absorbed what old Father Max had called aural energies. Others called it soul-sucking.

The Reaper climbed out of the blue sludge and lifted its hood, pulling it far forward over its face to block out the sun. Sunlight didn't kill them, unfortunately, but it interfered with their senses and the connection with the master Kurian.

Valentine silently wished for one of Ahn-Kha's Quickwood spear points or crossbow bolts. Two years ago Valentine had brought a special kind of olive tree-like growth called Quickwood back from the Caribbean. It was lethal to Reapers, but had been consumed in the insurrection in the Ozarks known as Operation Archangel the previous year.

“Look, they shat out a Reaper,” Valentine said. The kid laughed, a little too loudly.

Ahn-Kha raised his long gun just a fraction.

Valentine revised his estimate of the interior of the tank. At one Reaper per Kurian, there could only be a dozen or so Reapers inside the tank. The flexible, octopus-crossed-with-bat Kurians could squeeze into nooks and crannies, of course, but the impressively built Reapers could only be packed so tight. And all breathed oxygen. At one Reaper per Kurian—there was a theory that without at least one Reaper to supply it with aura, a Kurian starved to death—that meant a dozen Kurians. Others claimed, with little to back it up but speculation, that the Kurians could “bottle” aura to last until a new Reaper could be acquired. Still others said a Kurian could absorb aura through its touch, a “death grip.”

Experience told Valentine that if the third were true, the Little Rock Kurian who had died under his fists hadn't managed it in the last few painful seconds of its life.

“Far enough,” Ahn-Kha said as the Reaper approached, raising his gun a little higher.

“
i shall speak for those within, foodling
,” the Reaper said, staying out of grabbing distance. Valentine had to concentrate to hear its low, breathy voice, always averting his gaze from the yellow, slit-pupiled eyes. Reapers had a deceptive stillness to them, like a praying mantis. Their grip was deadly, but their gaze could be just as lethal; the few times Valentine had looked closely into one's eyes he'd been half hypnotized.

Valentine took a step forward. “Use the word ‘foodling' again and ‘those within' will have to crap out a new negotiator. ”

The Reaper, apparently as egoless as a Buddhist statue, ignored the threat. “
your terms
?”

“First: You left behind a lot of men in Dallas. Tell them to surrender without another shot fired. No conditions, but officers and military police will be allowed to keep their sidearms, the combatants can keep individual weapons, noncombatants will be under protection of their own people. We're not taking them into custody. They can march wherever they want on whatever supplies they can bring out of Dallas. Second: What's left of Dallas, including artillery and transport, shall be turned over to us, intact. If both those conditions are met, we'll load your tin can on a transport and take you to any border region you like, along with any remaining of your kind that didn't manage to tunnel out of the city.”

Valentine knew he had overstepped his authority—in fact this was more like running a track-and-field triple jump over his authority—but he wanted to make the deal before the Kurians had time to call for some other form of help. For all he knew flying saucers might already be on their way—

“
we no longer control dallas
,” the Reaper said, even more quietly. “
certain handlers remain within, but the skulking soldiers of your breed inside are increasingly obstinate
.”

“Not my problem.”

Valentine almost cracked a smile. In their millennia of scheming before taking over the planet in 2022, the Kurians hadn't accounted for human obstinacy.

“
we shall consider
,” the Reaper finished, though one of the Kurians within thought up the words.

“Don't consider too long. In fifteen minutes we're going to try high explosives. If that doesn't work we'll start piling tires around your capsule. Then we'll douse everything in gasoline and light it. You'd better have good air-filtration equipment in there; you burn oxygen, same as us, and a good tire bonfire can go for weeks.”

The Reaper twitched in the direction of Valentine and Ahn-Kha shouldered his gun, but instead of the expected attack the Reaper lurched back toward the capsule and acted out a strange pantomime, or perhaps a game of charades where “jumping spider” was the answer. It lurched, it spun, it backbent—

Valentine heard his order book hit the ground behind him.

The Reaper fell over, then picked itself up. It returned to its previous position facing the three humans, holding itself stiffly and moving off balance, like a marionette with tangled strings.

“
we agree,
” it said, just before it toppled over again.

“I'd have given two more fingers to have seen that,” Meadows said that night, rattling the ice in his glass. An orderly refilled it from an amber-colored bottle and disappeared back into the throng of officers and civilians at the celebration. The old Sheraton next to the interstate had seen better days—to Valentine it smelled of sweat, sour cooking oil, and roaches—but perhaps never such a universally happy crowd.

Valentine didn't feel like celebrating. William Post, possibly his best friend in the world apart from Ahn-Kha, had been maimed as he led the assault on the helicopters. The surgeons were fighting to save his life along with those of the other wounded.

Luckily that was the only fighting going on. The army of the North Texas Cooperative had marched out of its positions, and then the city, as the sun set.

“You bit off too much, Major Valentine,” Brigadier General Quintero growled. Quintero had refused alcohol as well. He reminded Valentine a little of the negotiating Reaper; one side of his body sagged a little thanks to an old shell fragment that had severed muscle in his shoulder. “I can just tolerate those Dallas scoundrels relocating, but I don't like the idea of Texas truckers carrying that fish tank to Arizona.”

Valentine liked Quintero, and if the general was speaking to him in this manner he could imagine what had been said to him since the afternoon, when Dallas broke out in white flags and the frontline troops cautiously advanced into the city.

“Could I make a suggestion, General?”

“Eiderdown quilts for the Quislings?” Meadows put in, trying to soften the scowl on Quintero's face.

Valentine ignored the jibe. “Route the Kurian ‘fish tank' to Arizona via Dallas, with the drivers in a secure cabin-cage attached to a breakaway trailer. I'll ride shotgun if you need a volunteer. We won't be shy about telling passersby what's in back. Maybe a riot starts and you declare hostilities resumed and renegotiate the surrender more advantageously. Maybe the Kurians get pulped, and those Dallas troops get convinced that the only way they'll ever be safe again is to throw in with us.”

Quintero turned it over in his mind, sucking on his cheeks as he thought it through. “You are a mean son of a bitch, Major. Excuse the expression.”

“I'm glad you're on our side,” Meadows added.

CHAPTER TWO

The attenuated Razors' brief period of excited anticipation, carried since getting off the Dallas train and hearing about their billet, ended as soon as they saw the “hotel.”

Even in its heyday no one would have called the roadside Accolade Inn worthy of a special trip. The subsequent years had not been kind to the blue-and-white block, four stories of stucco-sided accommodations thick with kudzu and bird droppings. Someone had put in screens and plywood doors, and each room's toilet worked, though the sink fixtures were still in the process of retrofit, having been stripped and not replaced. Neat cots, six to a room, sat against water-stained walls.

“Not bad,” a goateed Razor said when Valentine heard him test the john's flush after washing his hands in the toilet tank. “Better than the sisters have at home.”

Sadly, the attenuated regiment fit in the hotel with beds to spare. A third of their number were dead or in either a Fort Worth or Texarkana hospital.

The latter was Valentine's first stop after getting the men to the hotel. A First Response Charity tambourine-and-saxophone duo just outside the hospital door accepted a few crumpled pieces of Southern Command scrip with the usual “God Blesses you.”

“Continually,” Valentine agreed, though over the past year it had been a decidedly mixed blessing. The pair stood a little straighter in their orange-and-white uniforms and reached for pamphlets, but Valentine passed on and into the green-peppermint tiles of the hospital.

He made it a point to visit every man of his command; the routine and their requests were so grimly regular that he began entering with a tumbler of ice—he made a mental note to steal and fill a trash can with ice before heading back to the Accolade—to spare himself the inevitable back-and-forth trip. But his mind wasn't at ease until he visited the last name on his list, Captain William Post.