Winter Duty

CHAPTER SIX

The banks of the lower Ohio: The Greenwater Infrastructure Support Plant-the former Elmer Smith Power Plant-on the Ohio River dominates the skyline for miles around. Or rather its smokestack does, a weathered, two-color pillar that resembles a Louisville Slugger (once produced a few score miles upriver) from a distance.
It is a quiet plant, generators thrumming away and a faint wind tunnel sound from the smokestack. The plant is active and confused only on days when thundering mountains of coal are unloaded. Once carried by barge, they're now brought by Kentucky's dilapidated railroad on captured trains, and irregularly at that. The Kentuckians break out the old joke that "these colors don't run anything but short."
The river is much changed since 2022. First called by the French-men who explored it "La Belle Riviere," its banks are now coated with arteriosclerosis of trash and industrial waste. In more prosperous days the river carried a weight of cargo equal to that which passed through the Panama Canal: coal barges, oil, mounds of chemicals white or gray or sulfur-colored, grain, corn, soy, tobacco, and of course steel returning from the coal-fired furnaces of Pittsburgh.
The Kurian Order still dredges the river, off and on, to its usual main channel depth of nine feet. It maintains the locks that control the river as it descends the five hundred or so feet from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi junction at Cairo-where the few local Grog-traders are careful to correct your pronunciation to "Care-oh."
Now, in the warm-water outflow of the plant, tough carp and catfish survive the acidic, polluted river. The bass keep to their willow roots, stumps, and snags in their cleaner stretches of bank.
At this time of year, with the temperatures sinking lower and lower at night, fog runs along the river most mornings, sending querying fingers into the riverside ravines. The foggy wall represents the new state of affairs along the river. Much of the north bank outside Evansville belongs to the Kurian Order; the south bank to the Kentuckians. When once they exchanged jokes about wool-headed Hoosiers and barefoot Kentucky hillbillies, now the locals steal and shoot.
But around the power plant, the fog seems to cling extra thick, a shroud that suggests the unwary would do well to keep away.
They took the vol, who was named with a string of three personal names for first, middle, and last-John Robert Nicholas-into the main building, where members of Valentine's battalion were lugging boxes and setting up duty stations. Lambert escorted Valentine and the vol into her bare office, where a single box sat on her desk waiting to be unpacked.
"I want you to get them," Nicholas said, ignoring the bare decor. "You Southern Command people know how to deal with critters like that. We can make the soldiers jump when we have to, but this is beyond anything we can do without tanks and cannon and such-like. Don't belong on God's green earth, them things."
Nicholas shuddered. He raised his eyes to Valentine. "You'll kill 'em, right?"
"Private, Colonel Lambert's in command here," Valentine said. "Tell her how you ended up here."
Nicholas checked the insignia on their clothing. "That bird outranks that palm tree, right. I forgot. Our big bug is a senior sergeant."
"She outranks everyone on the base, Private Nicholas, so you're speaking to the right woman. Tell us what's going on."
Valentine went to the coffeepot, an expensive-looking plug-in model with silver handles and gold rings at the top and bottom that had probably been found in the house. Lucky it wasn't sitting in someone's knapsack. Or maybe it had been, and Bloom rescued it. In any case, she'd left it full of hot, delicious-smelling coffee for her successor.
The building had a pair of emergency generators, a portable gasoline-powered one and a fixed propane model, but Valentine couldn't hear either running. The power plant must still be putting out the juice, then.
"I'm to tell you that ya'll have a safe conduct pass out of Kentucky and back to the Mississippi for the next forty-eight hours, after which the skies themselves will fall on you. Those were the Tallboy's exact words, sir."
Valentine and Lambert looked at each other. The corner of her mouth turned up and Valentine shrugged.
"Now that you've passed the word," Valentine said, "tell us what happened at the plant and what exactly attacked you. We need to know as much as you can tell us about what and how many and where they are."
Lambert called in a young man she'd selected as her clerk to take notes. When he was seated, she let Nicholas begin:
"Six I saw. They came in over the fence like-No, I should start at the beginning. I was part of the ten-man security team. We do three days on, then switch and get four days off, then four days on, you know-"
"Yes," Lambert said.
"Just there to keep an eye on the river, you know. We had an OP up the smokestack. We could see the Owensboro bypass bridge on one side-only bypass bridge still up west of Louisville, I suppose you know, sir-and Evansville on the other. Luckily it wasn't my shift to be up in the wind this morning. At dawn everyone got called out to look up because there were these big things, like birds or bats only bigger than any turkey vulture you could even imagine. They were circling around the top of the stack. I think they drove Berk out. He started climbing down the outside ladder and they just harried him and harried him and he fell before he got to the first perch-rest. He fell and made a mess-spun as he came down and hit headfirst. We all ran inside after that and were looking out the windows to see what they were up to when the Tallboys came over the fence.
"Now that the plant's mostly automated, the people who work it just do maintenance on the machines and watch the load-never as much as the plant was designed to make, at least these days. That, and they work the loaders that keep the coal flowing-several people on that full-time. But those big fellers just came in and killed two of us right off the bat, and another jumped on Sergeant White, who was just trying to get away. The others herded us like dogs into the cafeteria and closed all the shutters. We just crowded in the center of the room while they circled. You ever had one of those things nipping at your heels, ma'am?"
"No," Lambert said. "All the Reapers I've seen have been dead."
"Let's hope that record remains unbroken," Valentine said.
"Then for no reason, one just reached in and grabbed a fuel man. At least I think he was-he was covered in coal dust. It fed on him. Got blood everywhere. I'd seen finished-up bodies a couple times, but this was the first time I'd seen one eaten in the flesh. Horrible sight. Most of us turned away. Figure I owed the poor soul that, you know? Someone said his name was Dewey," Nicholas added, looking at the clerk who was writing down his words.
"How did you get the message to give us?"
"After the one ate that poor coker, he grabbed me. That's where these bloodstains come from, his hands. The big pale bastard held me close, like he was going to dance with me."
The last dance, some called it.
"So the Reaper looked me in the eye and spoke, splattering flecks of blood on my face. I washed it off in the river, of course. Told me that you had time to quit Kentucky, forty-eight hours to leave with the rest of them. Of course, they had a message for the Evansville folks too. Then he carried me out like I was a toddler and chucked me in one of the commute boats the power plant workers use, and I got to Evansville as fast as the motor would take me."
"What are their demands to the Evansville people?"
"An exchange, they call it. Evacuation of Evansville. Anyone who wants to leave will be free to go into Kentucky. Then the south Illinois Kurians move in."
"I thought Evansville belonged to the Ordnance Kur," Lambert said.
"Must be some kind of deal they worked out," Valentine said.
"I don't know politics," Nicholas said. "I just wanted out of there."
They spent a few more minutes questioning him about numbers, and then they had him sketch out a map of the plant to the best of his ability. With that, they sent him to the small base hospital to be examined.
Lambert called her first staff meeting in the dining room of the big house. Moytana was there for the Wolves, waiting with the remaining platoon until Southern Command could send a replacement, Gamecock represented the Bears, and Captain Ediyak the rank and file of Valentine's battalion. Patel had charge of the base in the operations room. There seemed no getting rid of his former sergeant, for which Valentine would be everlastingly grateful. The door opened, and Brother Mark slipped in, looking tired and a little wild-haired. Valentine wondered if he'd been sleeping the previous night's party off.
"I was hoping to make this a friendly get-together," she began, ignoring Brother Mark, who was neither fish nor fowl in Southern Command but knew more about the Kurian Order than even the experts in the Miskatonic. "But the Kurians had other ideas. Word's probably gotten around the camp that they've moved against us already."
"Yes, terrible bombing," Brother Mark said.
"Bombing?" Valentine asked.
"The conference in Elizabethtown," Brother Mark said. "All the legworm clans sent representatives from the big towns to work out which way Kentucky's going to go. Franklin, Lexington, and Paducah aren't represented there, except by members of their underground. The town's been hit twice already, so you might say Kur is being represented after all. We're not sure if the planes should be part of quorum call or not."
"There wouldn't be a flying rattlesnake on the planes, would there?" Valentine asked.
"How did you know?"
"I ran into them in Dallas and again when I was out west. They're a remarkable organization. They can fly everything they need to a location, set up a small airport, and operate for as long as you can feed them fuel and munitions. They even can build simple bombs and so on if you give them high explosives and scrap for bomb casings."
"Brother Mark," Lambert said, "we're dealing with a separate event. The Kurians have seized the power plant that supplies Evansville."
"Which Kurians?" Brother Mark asked.
"Illinois, south of Chicago," Valentine said.
"Why should that matter?" Gamecock asked.
"I'm surprised you don't-," Brother Mark began.
"It's a binary problem with me, suh. Kurians are either dead, and therefore not a problem, or alive, in which case I try to make them dead."
"There's more to it than that," Brother Mark said. "To the Ordnance Kur, their Illinois cousins are practically enemies of the same degree as the people in Kentucky. To their minds, they're handing the city over to some 'neutrals.' The Ordnance wants the traffic on the river flowing free again. The Ordnance doesn't have much in the way of brown-water craft on the Ohio. They have boats from the Great Lakes, but they couldn't bring such substantial vessels to the Ohio without cutting them up into sections and reassembling them. And the rivermen in Memphis and Louisiana don't feel like raking the Ordnance's nuts out of the fire."
"Who's dumb enough to stick their nuts in a fire, I want to know," Moytana said.
Brother Mark harrumphed. "Chestnuts. It's a phrase going back to-"
Lambert rapped the table. "Let's get back to the situation at hand."
"Southern Illinois's no threat," Moytana said. "What forces they have are busy guarding against Grog raids out of the hills between the Ohio and the Mississippi, and the rest keep an eye on St. Louis. We could do worse. If the Ordnance decides to send that armored column that redhead wildcat claims is assembling and training there into Evansville, we wouldn't be able to stop them any more than the local leek cutters."
"Evansville has a hospital, workshops, manufacturers, horse farms, refineries for both ethanol and coal oil, factories even, never mind the agriculture-we need all that," Valentine said. "I'm not inclined to give it up."
"All those hospitals and factories and whatnot won't be much good if they blow up the power plant," Gamecock said. "You don't just pick up megawatt generators, you know."
"All the more reason to get them back," Valentine said.
"How do we do that against dug-in Reapers?" Moytana said.
"With enough covering fire, we can blow them out," Gamecock said, looking at the map.
"No, my guess is, despite wherever the hostages are, most of the Reapers will settle in near the generators or electronics-something we can't replace easily," Moytana said. Moytana's gray hair had turned a little whiter in the year Valentine had known him. "According to your vol, they're holding all the hostages in the workers' cafeteria."
"Logical." Gamecock put in. "Easy to feed them. Big enough for everyone to stay in one room, under observation. Warm and cozy."
"Packed in like that, a Reaper or two could kill them all in under a minute," Valentine said, remembering a "sporting event" he'd once attending in Memphis where a single Reaper executed ten men before a basketball shot-clock expired. Without the use of its arms.
"One problem. All those windows. We could put six Bears in that room in less than a second through those windows."
"Wolves can keep the gargoyles and harpies off of our backs. Bears take care of the Reapers. Power plant is back in our hands."
"If we can trust the map," Moytana said. "Someone needs to make a close reconnaissance before we plan anything. For all we know this is an elaborate trap-get all the Bears inside the place and blow it to hell. I think they want us to hit it," he continued. "They've probably got the whole place rigged. A ton of dead technicians, lights out in Evansville and Owensboro, and the resistance takes the fall."
"They're not that clever," Ediyak said.
"It doesn't hurt to act as though they are," Valentine said. "I'll ask Smoke about getting over there and taking a look tonight. She'll need transport."
"Better get her over here," Lambert said. "Where is she?"
"My quarters," Valentine said.
Lambert picked up the phone atop the table and gave instructions.
Most of those at the table found something interesting in the woodwork.
"My Wolves will drive her," Moytana said. "Light-duty truck, something inconspicuous."
"Any way we can get a twist on them?" Gamecock asked.
"Put the Whirlpool plant to work making generators," Brother Mark said.
"Something more immediate."
"There might be an easier way than assault," Valentine said.
"Head back to the Mississippi with the rest of the brigade?" Ediyak asked.
"No. Who's running those Reapers? We need to find the Kurian. Take the mastermind out of the equation and the whole thing will fall apart."
"He could be anywhere," Gamecock said. "We know there's no tower around, so it's probably hiding. When a Kurian wants to stay hidden, they're next to impossible to find."
"I don't think so," Valentine said. "He has to be near enough to the plant so he can control his Reapers day or night. Their range is limited to a dozen or so miles by day, maybe less. Kentucky is thickly wooded and hilly. He needs a high perch for good transmission."
"And one well guarded. Let's not forget what chickenshits they are, suh," Gamecock said.
Duvalier knocked and entered the room. She was wrapped up in one of Valentine's field coats. The table greeted her and she plopped down in a corner.
"Where on the river on the Ohio side is there a garrison?" Valentine asked the table.
Duvalier spoke up. "That's a pretty empty stretch, especially with Evansville in revolt."
"I say it's in a boat," Moytana said. "All it has to do is go over the side."
"In this weather?" Lambert said. "Kurians don't like cold. I think it would kill 'em. No, it's holed up. Brother Mark, could it be in the river somewhere? They look aquatic."
"That I don't know," Brother Mark said.
Lambert continued. "I was in a sort of a park that re-created their home planet-not Kur, which I think is warmer. It was quite warm, with shallow water."
"Boat still seems likely," Moytana said. "Mobile."
"No, it's high up," Ediyak said. "If it gets in trouble, it just launches itself into the air. They can glide for miles."
"How do you know?" Lambert said.
"I heard . . . before I defected over," she replied. "A friend in the underground told me he'd seen one glide away from a fire they'd started in his tower. He sailed off like he was in a glider."
Moytana was studying a map on the wall. "The bridge," Moytana said.
"Bridge?" Lambert said.
"New Bridge, the people in Owensboro call it. Just east of the city. Suspension bridge with two high pylons."
Lambert shook her head. "Too easy for us to get to."
"Not necessarily. Both ends are guarded."
"I've crossed it, a couple weeks back," Duvalier said. "North to south. I had a picture of a Moondagger and some letters, claimed I was looking for him. Smugglers bribe their way across all the time. One of the smugglers told me that it's actually harder to go north to south than the other way. Going north, they just check to make sure you aren't bringing weapons and ask about your business."
Moytana nodded. "The Kurians don't want their Ohio populace slipping across the river any more than they want Kentuckians visiting Ohio. That Kurian can get high enough so it's got a clear view of the power plant. The bridge and power plant can't be more than ten miles apart, I don't think. Clear line of sight, that is-not by road. Escape by air. Escape by boat. Escape by highway. It's perfect."
"Just guesswork," Gamecock said. "You know how many old cracking towers and water tanks and cell towers we've hit because somebody theorized that a Kurian just had to be there? All we came away with was a lot of rust on our gloves and birds' nests. I still say we wait for good, strong daylight and take out the Reapers. A Kurian's just a big bucket of ugly without his walking teeth."
"Not guesswork," Moytana said. "Our scouts have seen some new uniforms on that bridge recently. We've been paying attention because of this armored column reputed to be up from Bloomington way and it's the only intact bridge within sixty miles of Evansville. We keep a close watch on it through a telescope. There are some troops in big woolly overcoats that have showed up. All tall men in winter duty hats. They don't do anything; they just keep an eye on the Ordnance regulars. They look like high-level security types. Be easy for a Reaper to look like one from a distance, especially at night. He'd just pull his hat down and turn his collar up. We thought they might be there to clamp down on desertions or make sure smugglers aren't bringing necessities into Kentucky. But maybe not."
They worked out the details of Duvalier's reconnaissance, and Moytana took her out to find a pair of Wolf drivers for her. The nights were coming earlier and earlier, and they wanted to get her to the power plant by nightfall.
While Duvalier was off scouting the plant, Valentine spent an hour with his rifle and a weighted satchel on his back, training in an old grain elevator in Evansville. It had a similar-loading escalator that Valentine thought similar to the suspension cabling on the bridge, though the bridge's was larger and more graceful looking. He did a good deal of climbing on the inside of the elevator in the dark, getting used to the feel of hanging and climbing and resting. Then, when his muscles couldn't take the load anymore, he practiced balance work, using the gun as a balancing pole.
Duvalier returned the next morning while Valentine was sleeping. She was exhausted and smeared with coal dust and rust streaks. After everyone had gathered again, she gave a somnam- bulistic report, correcting a few details on the vol's map and delivering the unwelcome news that a platoon of Moondaggers now occupied the power plant as well.
"How do we get at the Kurian without it getting away?" Gamecock said. "In the time it takes my Bears to fight their way onto the bridge, it could escape."
"We don't even know it's there," Brother Mark said. "And even if it is there, it will in all likelihood be presenting itself as a garbage can or a loose wire hanging from a floodlight."
"Not in this weather, I don't think," Valentine said. "It'll be inside where it's warm."
"I might be able to find it," Brother Mark said. "There's just one difficulty, however. It would have to be communicating with its Reapers. Or even better, feeding."
"Is that all?" Duvalier said. "You let me in to the plant again, and I'll arrange that."
"How?" Valentine asked, unaccountably nervous at the idea.
"I'll know that when I get there."
"When will we attack the bridge? Strong daylight?" Lambert asked.
"No," Valentine said. "We'll need dark, with no moon. The bridge is too well-guarded for anything else."
"I don't like breaking up my Bears," Gamecock said. "They're too used to working together as a team."
"You won't have to," Valentine said. "That bridge is a job for a whole regiment-which we don't have-or one man. If he's there, I'll get him."
Duvalier stiffened. "Val, the last time you went off on your own wildcatting, it took me and a town full of Grogs to go get you back. Let me go."
"No, you're going to be busy at the power plant, getting it back in once piece."
They worked out a plan involving Duvalier, the Wolves, and the Bears creating a diversion at the power plant, while Valentine and Brother Mark made a try for the Kurian on the bridge.
The big basement in the Legion House-as the men were beginning to call it-was something of a treasure trove. Besides a spare generator and the new communications room (inhabiting what had been before then a wine cellar; the precise climate control equipment was kind to the electronics-and the operator), it had an old bar that was now filled with boxes and odds and ends of the previous occupants, arranged like sedimentary layers in an archaeological dig. There were a few holdovers from when it was a nature center: glass cases and displays. Valentine planned to empty them and return them to the "lobby" behind the main doors, where they could post Javelin memorabilia. Above that were the stored clothes from the owner and his family, elegant suits and dresses too delicate for his men to make much use of. Then above that were piles of Moondagger clothing, uniforms and slipperlike footwear and odd Kurian icons, the most artful of which was a wooden frieze of the curve of the Earth's surface in near-silhouette, as though drawn from a picture taken from orbit, with a great nail like a railroad spike driven through it. The spike had curious etchwork in it. Valentine would have to have Brother Mark take a look at it when things calmed down and see if he could make anything of it.
Valentine found an interesting, richly woven Moondagger outfit that looked part prayer robe and part dress clothes and part military outfit. It must have belonged to some high-ranking Moondagger, judging from the beautiful knitwork around the collar and seams and cuffs. It had an attractive cummerbund or waist-wrap-he wasn't sure of the word-of a flexible material like a bandage that had numerous zip pockets. Inside, Valentine even found a little Ordnance currency.
Valentine had sought find some decent attire from the ex-owner's wardrobe, an outfit suitably impressive and redolent of status, but the Moondagger robe-uniform might serve even better.
Luckily it didn't smell-some of the Moondagger stuff was now rank and musty beyond belief.
With his clothes selected, Valentine and Brother Mark worked out a rough timetable. It was a cloudy night, as had become usual as November wore on.
He and Brother Mark put together a small truck and a canoe, tying it in the bed and on the roof and looking for all the world like they were departing for a fishing trip.
Then it was a bumpy drive with Valentine, Brother Mark, and a Wolf corporal at the wheel. He knew the roads, trails, and railroad cuts for miles around and promised to get them to the other side of Owensboro-a town that was still more or less neutral. Wolf scouts had gone into town, overcoats thrown over their uniforms but weapons carried openly, and eaten at a diner with Ordnance soldiers at another table. They both paid their bills with Ordnance currency. Kentucky might be semi-free, but it was still integrated with the Kurian Order economically.
Discussion about the quality of the apple pie available in Owensboro or the amazing coffee at the Hitch had to be curtailed when they parked above the river. Valentine and the Wolf scouted and decided they were near enough to the bridge to make it a quick trip but far enough to avoid observation from the guards. Valentine and their driver set about untying the canoe while Brother Mark set out food and thermoses. They were all in for a long, cold night.
"Cold night," Brother Mark said. His breath steamed on the riverbank in the shadow of the bridge on the northeast side. They had left the Wolf back with the truck. "So much for our In-long-lingering summer."
"Indian summer, you mean," Valentine said. "Indian summer's a good thing, especially up among the lakes in Minnesota."
The Quisling guards didn't have any dogs on this side; Valentine was thankful for that. He'd heard barking up on the bridge at the guard change and briefly worried about patrols.
The bridge itself was elegant, a delicate-looking road bridge. Two tall pylons, one at the north end, one at the south, supported the bridge with a series of cables. They looked rather like a pair of matching spiderwebs, Valentine thought. The cables weren't tied to bigger main cables such as in more famous suspension bridges such as the Golden Gate. Instead they all linked to one of the two supporting pylons.
"You near enough?" Valentine asked.
"There's a Kurian on that bridge. That's all I may determine."
"What does it feel like?" Valentine asked.
"How do you mean?"
"The mental impression they give. Is it a voice, or thoughts?"
"It's like a chill. An open window on a still winter day in an otherwise warm room. Like the heat is leaving my body and flowing toward-it."
Valentine thought it odd that Brother Mark might be describing the cold tingle that sometimes came over him when he passed close to a Reaper.
"I just need to know where to go."
"Somewhere high, is my guess. They can sense longer distances that way without the clutter of animal and vegetable life."
Valentine looked at the riverbank. The Ohio was lined with refuse, mostly bits of plastic: bags, cracked bottles with blocky lettering advertising energy and stamina, cartons that looked like they were meant to hold eggs, chunks of foam clinging together like the chunks of ice Eliza hopped across to escape slavery.
There'd been a saying among the workers at Xanadu in Ohio-he'd learned it while digging ditches: Flush it in Ohio, and it washes up in Indiana. Valentine had taken it to mean that the less competent of the Northwest Ordnance were given duties in Indiana, but it appeared the phrase had a literal truth to it as well.
Owensboro, across the river, slumbered. There were burned-out ruins on the north side near the older of the town's two bridges. The closer of the two had long since collapsed-or been destroyed to simplify the border between Kentucky and the Indiana portions of the Ordnance. The "new" bridge was a little over a mile to the west, linking a bypass road that ran around the edge of what had been the suburban part of the old river town.
The Wolf had told him that Owensboro was a lively little town, popular with shady traders who brought Kurian Order products into Kentucky and returned with legworm hides, crafts, tobacco, bourbon, and marijuana. The big conference center practically in the shadow of the old bridge was still intact, the site of a bustling flea market on "Market Saturdays" every other week.
Valentine searched the bridge. He found what he was looking for even without Brother Mark-a little cocoonlike structure high on the north pylon of the bridge.
"There," Valentine said, pointing.
Brother Mark squinted. "I am afraid my vision is not what it once was."
Valentine handed him some binoculars. There must have been enough light for him to see, for he followed the delicate cabling of the bridge up to the north pylon.
"Temporary," Brother Mark said. "That, my daring Valentine, is the Kurian equivalent of a hammock-tent. Or the Kurian is very small and very young, a new bud off an old sire. Where else would he get multiple Reapers?"
Brother Mark muttered something else about budding in secret or an authorized increase.
"Is he there?" Valentine asked.
"I'm-I think so. There's some activity. As I said, it may be young. But it's able to control multiple Reapers at once. It must be a prodigy."
"All the more reason to kill it when it's young."
Brother Mark lowered the binoculars. "Savage."
"It's the truth, savage or no."
Brother Mark reached into his pocket and extracted a bandless watch. "Better get on with it, then."
Valentine changed into the black Moondagger robes and thick wool socks. He didn't have a beard, but if he tousled his hair right, it gave him a mad, Rasputin-like air that went with the Moondagger apparel. He didn't have the little curved knife many of them carried either; they were prized trophies for Southern Command's soldiers.
The robes had plenty of room in the sleeves to hide his Cat claws on their breakaway twine.
"Go back to the boat," Valentine told Brother Mark. "If you see a lot of shooting without the flare going off, just head back for the other side. If they loose the dogs in the woods, head back to the other side. If I'm still alive, I'll figure some way back, hopefully through Evansville. I'd rather not swim in this water if I don't have to. We'll have a frost by morning, judging from this wind, and I don't want to die of hypothermia thanks to wet clothes."
Brother Mark's lips writhed. "I'll do what I can to confuse matters."
"You'll do nothing. The Ordnance bridge guards are professional soldiers. I broke through a sentry point once and they chased me across half of Kentucky."
"No, I was referring to our friend in that oversized wasp nest. I have some . . . abilities where our Kurian friends are concerned, and if it's an inexperienced mind, I may be able to keep him occupied so you can approach with him unaware."
"I'm glad I decided to bring you along," Valentine said.
"Further proof that I'm good at what I do," Brother Mark said. "Hurry along now, daring Valentine."
Brother Mark was a man of deep waters-if he was a man. Valentine was beginning to wonder if he was in fact a Lifeweaver.
But he didn't have time to think about it. The Bears were scheduled to hit the power plant in two hours-or when Valentine sent up a green flare.
He took his Type Three out of the horsehide sleeve, checked the action, placed a magazine inside it, and tucked his Cat claws into the wide sleeves of the Moondagger uniform-robe. With that, he set off up the riverbank.
Valentine considered trying to bull his way through with his brass ring and the Moondagger outfit, but it looked like the sight lines for the guard posts covered the entire bridge. If he passed one they'd be able to see him all the way to the other.
Plus, there was a shadowy figure in the middle of the bridge that Valentine knew, without a doubt, was a Reaper. Undoubtedly there to guard its master Kurian in its nest high above.
So the easy way was out.
A Reaper, when alert and aware, was the most dangerous thing on two legs walking the earth. The eyes, ears, voice, and appetite of their Kurian, the avatars lived off of the blood of their victims. Terrifyingly strong and juggernaut tough, they were almost impossible to sneak up on, as they could sense a sentient mind nearby. As they fed, they passed vital aura, spiritual energies Valentine only half understood, to the puppet-master animating them. After feeding, the Reaper sometimes lapsed into a half-awake state. Some believed the Kurian became either insensible in the manner of a drunkard or preoccupied with savoring the vital aura-that was the time to strike. Or during daylight, when the sun's energy interfered with the connection between Kurian and Reaper.
If I can't go up from the top of the bridge, I'll take the bottom.
Valentine heard a dog growl up on the bridge as he approached. He froze.
There weren't sentries patrolling the base of the bridge on this side. But up by the lights there were guards pacing here and there, checking the approach to the bridge.
Damn, he'd have to get wet after all.
The Kurians and their poor habits when it came to keeping roads, bridges, and utility lines in repair served them badly at the new bridge. They'd strung power lines along the side of the bridge to bring electricity into southern Indiana from the Kentucky plant. Valentine took his shoes off and tied them around his neck, and then waded out into the river and took advantage of cracks in the cement bridge pilings to climb up to the power lines.
Luckily the high-voltage lines were well insulated.
Valentine dangled from the line by his gloved hands, swaying in the funneled breezes under the bridge as he moved out over the river a few inches at a time. It was exhausting business, and soon his fingers, forearms, and shoulders burned and screamed. He hung, rested, caught his breath, and went on.
Once well out of the security lights around the roadblock at the north end, he swung up his torso and quickly rolled across the pedestrian wall on the bridge and dropped to the side, pressing himself into the shadows, and lay like a dead thing.
He quieted his mind. The only way to get past one was to camouflage yourself, body and brain. The first thing he'd been taught after becoming a Wolf was how to box up much of his consciousness and tuck it away for safekeeping. Breathe in, breathe out, letting go of worry. Breathe in, breathe out, giving your fear to the air. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, your body is nothing but a puff of air, flowing invisibly across the landscape. Valentine lost himself in half-remembered poetry, gone where all things wise and fair descend, moving toward "that high Capital, where kingly Death keeps his pale court in beauty and decay."
Breathe in, breathe out.
He watched the Reaper. There was something robotic about its motions. Was the Reaper idling? Perhaps the Kurian was concentrating on his Reapers at the power plant and ignoring his guard below.
The Reaper passed, and none of the bridge guards was eager to approach its perimeter. Valentine noted that in its passing, the Reaper's foot slapped the pavement of the bridge. One of its boots was missing the sole; on the other the heel was flapping.
This Kurian didn't take very good care of his avatars. Or it had just moved far, fast.
The guards left the center of the bridge to the Reaper. It paced like a trapped tiger, from the north side of the bridge to the south, crossing right lane to left, and then back from south end to north.
He looked up at the Kurian's nest. There it was, like a spider's egg sac in a hayloft, high and tucked out of the weather.
Sometimes it pays to take the hard way, Valentine thought.
Valentine got the rhythm of the Reaper's route around the center pylon. When it turned its back on him and began to walk away, he jumped up to the suspension cable junction with the bridge proper. He went to one of the suspension cables, looped a utility worker's harness over the cable, and began to climb hand over hand with wool stocking feet wrapped about the cold steel.
He moved up the cable like an inchworm. The belt harness enabled him to rest when he needed to catch his breath.
But it was a cold, bad climb. Numb fingers, couldn't feel his toes, aching arms and back . . .
He rested at the top, arm looped around a defunct aircraft warning light. Now it smelled like bat guano.
Off to the east he could see the power plant, lights illuminating the smokestack.
Valentine had seen Kurian cockleshells before. All he knew about them was that the paperlike material they were made of acted as both structure and climate control. For all he knew it was living cell material, some creature with no more ability to move or alter shape than an orange.
This odd bubo on the tower was about the size of compact car, perhaps the smallest such residence Valentine had ever seen.
He had considered bringing explosives on the venture, but the Angel Food was tricky stuff to work with, and Southern Command had departed with the good electric detonators. He might have to climb both ways only to have his bomb not work.
Valentine fixed a length of climbing line to the protective grid on the pylon-topping light and lowered himself to the Kurian's enclosure, rope looped around one leg and his waist.
The Kurian's nest was also a work of suspension. Two cork-screws of the odd material anchored it to the top of the pylon.
Valentine slipped on one of his Cat claws and slashed at one of the supports. The material was much tougher than it looked; it was like trying to cut wet nylon with a butter knife. Finally it gave way with a crackly groan.
Vision, air, sound-all cut off in an instant.
It was like someone had put a wet leather bag over his head. Seeing stars from it pressing against his eyes, he realized it must be the occupant.
Valentine had never been this close to a Kurian before.
He couldn't fight it without letting go of the rope and plummeting into the Ohio. If he reached up with his Cat claws, they'd go right through the Kurian, and he'd wind up scalping himself, or worse.
Consciousness filled with gluey sludge, he felt himself go dizzy and light-headed. The Kurian was taking over, denying him the use of arms and legs-
He settled for banging his head against the pylon over and over, hard.
OUT OUT OUT! Valentine ordered the confusion.
Seeing stars, hardly knowing which way was up, Valentine felt his stocking foot slip, and he found himself upside down, suddenly free of the clammy, cold bag.
Something below spun as it fell through the night: the Kurian, looking a little like a torn scarf with sewn-on legs as it dropped life- lessly toward the river, pushed by the wind rather than riding it.
And then he realized he was dangling by one lucky loop around his leg, enervated and confused, a hammering sound in his ears.
Valentine found purchase on the Kurian's cocoon and dropped on it like a man poleaxed. The texture of the surface against his cheek felt like a dried, oversized spitball.
Except he'd done a little too good a job with his claws-the structure fell away. It fell slowly and silently, like a Japanese paper lantern might, catching air within. Or perhaps the material was a substance engineered to be near lighter than air.
The rope around his leg whipped this time like a startled snake. Valentine lashed out and grabbed one of the severed struts that had held up the cocoon. He plunged his Cat claws into it.
Hanging there, Valentine swung his leg, retrieved the rope, and hung again by two supports. Where were the damn rungs? Other side. Valentine didn't so much swing as roll to the other side, feeling with stocking feet for purchase. Finally the steel rung was in his hand and he could think again.
Valentine wondered what the goddamn thing had done to him. It felt like it was still hanging there. He waved his hand behind his back-nothing.
Despite the ladder, getting back down wouldn't be so easy.
Valentine was caught in the horns of what Duvalier had called "the assassin's dilemma." Early on in his training, she said that any fool could walk up and kill a target, provided you learned enough about its habits and grounds. The pro knew how to get away clean, or if not clean, at least alive.
If he fired the flare from here it would certainly be seen by the observers at the power plant, but the troops on the ground would wonder who'd fired it and why. But he couldn't delay until he could creep away; it gave more time for the hostage-takers at the power plant to figure out why the Reapers were acting so oddly and react.
No, Gamecock's Bears had to strike, and soon.
But Valentine had an unexpected ally. The Reaper, suddenly undirected and fearful, froze, looking this way and that. Did its master Kurian's final mental state-assuming they felt anything so prosaic and human as fear-remain in its brain psyche the way a flash left a white echo on the retinas?
The Reaper rushed toward the guards on the Indiana side of the bridge. Unfortunately for the men there, they were the closer contingent.
The first man it reached it just knocked aside with a sweep of the arm that left its victim turned around like a broken doll and twitching. It grabbed a man seated in a small, triangular armored car-was Valentine's crouched image, the last thing its master Kurian saw, reminiscent of the guard's position?-and pulled the man's arm out.
Valentine could hear the screams even high up in the wind.
It took a pull or two, but the Reaper got the man out of the car. The window wasn't big enough for the purpose, so the door had to come off, with the man's torso used as leverage.
Valentine checked his equipment and began his descent. Equilibrium and energy slowly returned, and he dropped the last ten feet to the base of the bridge.
Soldiers from the south side of the bridge were nervously peeping over the lane divider, watching the Reaper hunt their comrades like a loosed dog in a chicken run.
Valentine snuck up next to an Ordnance officer.
"Are you just going to stand here and let your men get shredded?" Valentine demanded.
The officer turned on him. "Waiting for-Who the hell are you?"
"I'm with Vengeance Six," Valentine said.
"What the hell's Vengeance-"
"Moondagger special operations," Valentine said.
"Then where's the beard and dagger?"
"It interferes with the disguise," Valentine said, hoping the man would see only a scarred man with dark hair and features.
"That's a nice Atlanta Type Three," an Ordnance NCO said. "I thought all you Moondagger types were issued Ordnance Columbus Assault-"
Valentine wanted to quit answering questions, and the best way to do that was to start questioning himself. "Captain, have you ever dealt with a rogue? They're unpredictable and very dangerous, worse than any rabid dog you've ever imagined."
"Glad to have you, but I'll need to-"
"Almighty, man, the thing's killed one of your men already. Let's work out who's subordinate to whom later. I need some light. A sudden burst of light always confuses them." Valentine passed him the oversized plastic derringer that served as his signal gun. "Send up a flare, would you?"
"Sir, where did you come from?"
"New Universal Church School, Utica," Valentine said, giving the name of one of Brother Mark's alma maters. "When I point up, fire the flare."
"Who are you to be-"
Valentine whipped off his glove and flashed his brass ring.
"If you want to try to corral it, be my guest," Valentine said.
"After you," the captain said. The wild Reaper was carrying around the unfortunate driver's head, hissing at it like Hamlet speaking to the jester of most excellent fancy.
"Where the hell did he come from?" an NCO asked a lieutenant in an undertone that Valentine heard easily as he walked toward the Reaper.
"I hate these special operation types," the captain said. "They never let us know anything until we start catching hell."
Valentine trotted up the side of the bridge toward the north side, which was like a disturbed anthill as the Ordnance soldiers ran this way and that. Only three men stayed at their station: a group at a machine gun covering the roadblock on the bridge. They swiveled the muzzle of their weapon to aim it at the Reaper.
Valentine put his Type Three to his shoulder. He knelt and braced against a pedestrian rail between the bridge side and the traffic lanes.
He raised his left hand and waved his pointed finger skyward.
When the flare exploded into a green glow, the Reaper froze in its activities for a second, startled. Valentine, positioned so that even if he missed he wouldn't strike one of the few remaining Ordnance troopers on the other side of the bridge, squeezed the trigger.
The heavy round struck the Reaper squarely on the butt. Valentine doubted the bullet penetrated more than one layer of the strong, unearthly weave the Reapers used in their robes.
Reapers can scream when they want to. It's a high-pitched sound reminiscent of sheet metal tearing. The men at the crew-served gun, seeing Valentine shoot, opened up with their weapon as well.
Their target, probably frightened by the sudden light, pain, and noise, flattened itself under the fire and scuttled north like a crab and sprang off the bridge with an uncanny jump.
The men with the machine gun tracked it, spraying tracer off into the night. It cleared nine feet of Indiana-side fence topped by three foot loops of razor wire, landed, and disappeared into the darkness.
Leaving behind a heel from its boot.
"You're in a helluva lot of trouble, buddy!" Valentine yelled at the gunner. "I was about to put a round down its throat when you startled the bastard into fleeing."
"Thing was going nuts. What-"
"Now I have to chase it down in the goddamn woods. You know how dangerous that is, going into the woods after a wounded, pissed-off rogue like that?"
The green light began to pulse as the flare drifted down.
"You want us to sic the dogs on-" a corporal began.
"No, they'll just scare it. I'll have to hope it calms down enough so I can get a decent shot. And for Kur's sake, keep your men out of those woods. We've had enough bled for one night."
"Yes, er-"
"Get that gate. Unlike Jumpin' Jack Slash, I can't drop sixty feet and take off running. Is that a box of defensive grenades? Give me two. There's a good man. You never know."
Valentine hung the grenades on the Moondagger cummerbund and trotted off down the road. A pair of Ordnance medics went to work on the human wreckage left behind.
"Keep those dogs out of the woods," Valentine yelled at the officer, pointing.
He confused the officer just enough to get him to turn, and in that moment Valentine hopped over the rail of the bridge and dropped the twenty feet to the riverbank. Valentine took off into the Indiana woods.
He felt strange pity for the Reaper. What it remembered of its existence as a puppet of the master Kurian, Valentine didn't know. Would it be worse to awaken, confused and pained as a newborn, to a world of bullets and explosions all around and instinctive hunger that needed feeding, or to suddenly have control over your body again? Or was it something in between, where the Kurian gave his avatar ideas, needs, and desires, and let it carry them out with a little nudge now and then or a few words bubbling up out of the subconscious?
Valentine and Brother Mark rowed back across the river, fighting the downstream current that threatened to carry them within sight of the bridge. It would be light soon. There was a little highway stop with a good roof that the Wolves used to keep an eye on the bridge. They could warm themselves there and have a hot meal that would refresh them for the slow, bumpy ride home.
"What's that?" Brother Mark asked, pointing behind them.
Valentine put the oar across his thighs and looked over his shoulder. Something like a turtle's back was cutting through the current. Valentine saw a face come up for air.
"That," Valentine said, "is a Reaper head."
It wasn't swimming hard to intercept them; it was just following.
Valentine put his oar in the water and took six vigorous strokes while he thought. Then he set the oar in the bottom of the canoe and carefully turned around.
He took up one of the Ordnance hand grenades. It was the more powerful of the two used by their military, designed to be thrown from cover at an advancing enemy. Javelin had captured plenty from the Moondaggers, who used them to clear buildings.
"Hold up for a moment," Valentine said.
After a quick read of the yellow letters on the side to double-check the instructions, Valentine stripped off the red safety tape and pulled the fuse pin. The grenade whispered like a snake.
He knew better than to stand up in a canoe, so, kneeling and bracing as best as he could, he hurled the grenade at the following head.
It was a poor throw. It plopped short and detonated in a fountain of water with a rumbling roar that sounded like an oversized toilet flushing.
"Well done, my man," Brother Mark said.
"We'll see," Valentine said.
The last of the water fell and the head was still there, though it had halted and drifted with the current. It took a cautious stroke or two toward them again, letting the current put more distance between them.
"Not easily discouraged," Brother Mark said.
"Row hard," Valentine said.
Paddling hard enough to froth the river, with Valentine steering and Brother Mark puffing with the effort of providing power, they beached the canoe on the little brush-overgrown spit that they'd used to cautiously launch it a few hours before.
The Reaper scuttled up and out of the water sideways, like the crabs Valentine had seen on the Gulf Coast.
"Lord, oh lord, the thing's stalking us," Brother Mark said.
It had killed before but not fed. Valentine saw the yellow eyes, bright with something that was probably hunger in this cold, fixed on the slower-moving Brother Mark.
Valentine no longer felt sorry for the creature. The easy sympathy that came when he pictured it wandering the woods, confused and hungry, had been replaced by pale-skinned, black-fanged reality.
"Anything in your bag of tricks that lets you suggest something to a Reaper? Like going back across the river and trying the hunting in Indiana?"
Brother Mark closed his eyes, opened them, and then closed them again, this time firmly. "No, Major, nothing, I'm afraid. I get no sense of a mind there, not even a human one."
Valentine put his sights on it and it froze. It retained enough knowledge, then, to know what a pointed gun meant.
That made it more dangerous.
It slipped behind a tree with a swift step that cut the air like the sound of an arrow in flight.
"Shit," Valentine said.
He had one hope left.
A predator has a stronger survival instinct than most people credit it with. To the hunting cat or the pursuing wolf, serious injury is synonymous with death. If not defending young or scrapping with a challenger for territory, a predator will usually shy away from an aggressive display, especially if you can overawe it in size and noise.
Of course this isn't the case with all meat eaters. A wolverine or a bear will often welcome a fight.
He handed his remaining grenade to Brother Mark. "If it gets its tongue in me, toss this. They get lost in the act of feeding. You could run up and hang it off its back."
Valentine had lost a comrade in the old Labor Regiment that way near Weening, the night he killed his first Reaper. Weening still had the skull nailed to the town gate. The kids sometimes chalked words under it that appealed to a teenage sense of humor.
Valentine rolled up the Moodagger sleeves and slipped into his old, comfortable Cat claws. He advanced on the Reaper, arms spread wide.
It peeked from around the bole of the tree at him.
"Ha!" Valentine shouted. He swept one outstretched arm against winter-bare branches, stripping bark and crackling twigs.
"Ha!" Valentine shouted again, pantomiming a lunge as he approached.
"HA!" he tried again, stomping hard with his good leg.
If it came at him, he might still live. A good swipe across the nose might blind it.
The Reaper was dripping water from its robes but not moving. Nothing to do but go all in.
Valentine ran at it with a scream, and its eyes widened. It sprang away, running hard to the east up through the riverbank brush.
Valentine pursued it for as long as he could keep up the sprint and then lobbed a rock in its direction. His aim was better this time. The stone struck it in the leg and it jumped, crashing through some low-hanging branches and falling. It picked itself up and kept running.
"Yeah, you do that," Valentine puffed.
Valentine wasn't looking forward to the walk back to the truck. He'd have his rifle up and his sphincter tight the whole way, leading Brother Mark in wide circuits around anything big enough to hide the Reaper.
He had the funny feeling they hadn't seen the last of this fellow. And he'd have to pass the news to the Kentucky volunteers that there was a wild Reaper loose on their side of the river.
Just what the remaining Wolves and Bears would want to hear after the action at the power plant-assuming some catastrophe hadn't left the grounds of the power plant strewn with bodies.
They drove back Fort Seng at a crawl, the vegetable-oil-powered diesel banging away in first and second gear over the broken-down roads. Valentine, exhausted and half-asleep in his seat, had the driver take them to the power plant first.
He was relieved to see a pair of Wolves step out and halt them on the last turn before the plant. They had to carefully go off road and route around a roadblock the Wolves had cut, unsure of the possibilities of a counterattack from the bridge and wanting to hold it up long enough for the Bears and Wolves-and one unpredictable Cat-to escape.
They found the power plant in Southern Command's hands and only lightly damaged in the offices, where explosives had been used to drive out the confused Reapers.
Valentine felt dwarfed by the immense architecture of the power plant and the towering smokestack. It seemed like a monument that would stand forever, like Independence Rock in Wyoming or the great Kurian tower in Seattle.
"Made angel food out of 'em, sir," Chieftain, the senior Bear NCO, said. He liked to decorate his uniform with feathers of various raptors-and a vulture or two.
Silvertip, another Bear who loved Kentucky and had decided to settle there and become a dealer in legworm leather, was partially undressed, sitting in the chill air and carefully scrubbing blood out of his studded leather with an old toothbrush. "Six," Silvertip said. "Don't remember ever taking so many in one day before."
"The Ghost did that," Chieftain said. "Shut down their master. Wolves saw the flare, certain enough, and got word to us. We went in and found the whole place in a tumult."
"Where's Ali?" Valentine asked. There were several leather-winged harpy bodies in a pile near the gate. Not enough for Valentine's taste, but they'd picked off a few.
"The Cat? I think she's sleeping in the kitchen."
There were Wolves near the exterior door, all asleep with bits of a meal scattered across the floor except one sergeant in deerskins quietly putting a freshly cleaned Remington back together. He pointed Valentine in the direction of the cafeteria.
The cafeteria had blood and black Reaper tar on the floor and a good deal of damage to the walls from bullet holes. The windows were broken where the Bears had come in.
Valentine found Duvalier in the kitchen, curled up between a steaming stove and a basket of potatoes. One of his Wolves was opening cans of tomatoes and pouring them into a vast soup pot.
She was sleeping cradling her sword stick, looking like a little girl snuggling with an anorexic doll. Valentine nudged her with a toe.
"Good job," he said as she blinked awake and yawned.
"You found the Kurian."
"Where we thought he was," Valentine said. "Just a little one."
"He was hungry enough."
"How did you feed him?"
"With the Moondaggers," Duvalier said, pouring herself some coffee from an urn. "It was like one of those Noonside Passions episodes I used to watch in New Orleans. I pretended to be a girl looking for her brother who was being held in the power plant, and this sergeant promised to get him back for me. The name I gave was for a dead man. Lying bastard. So he slobbered on me for a bit and then fobbed me off on a private to take me back to the gate where other family members were waiting, trying to shout messages to the men in the cafeteria.
"I played up to the private a little, the sergeant saw it and got jealous, and the next thing you knew they were fighting. Some officer-priest broke it up, took me away for 'counseling' and he started groping me five minutes later. I screamed bloody murder and the next thing you know half the Moondaggers were fighting with each other. I'll admit, I egged it on a bit by snatching a dagger and sticking it in the priest's kidney. The Reapers broke it up and killed two of them and hauled the bunch of us into the cafeteria. Then they lost it and started running around like a chickens with their heads off. Next thing I knew the Bears were coming in the windows."
"Your feminine wiles have lost nothing over the years," Valentine said.
She snorted. "Dream on, Valentine. I think they put Chope or one of the other Church aphrodisiacs in that syrupy fruit juice they drink. I tell you, Val, there isn't enough hot water in the world to wash off the grubby fingerprints."