CHAPTER ONE
The Hub, April, the fifty-sixth year of the Kurian Order: A new military nerve center is growing in the sleepy old resort town of French Lick, Indiana. The roads have been cleared, the rail line up to Indianapolis reopened, and even the tiny airport has a new wind sock, camouflage hangars, and a generator.
It’s a well-chosen spot. Beneath the layers of dirt and rust, the town is something of a gem in a tarnished setting.
French Lick in its Gilded Age heyday saw multiple trains daily from Chicago bringing city folk to its two huge resort hotels in the woods of Southern Indiana. It once was the seat of smoky back rooms where political prospects were reviewed and selected by the parties. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the last of the breed, chosen in this corner of Indiana in one of the conference rooms of the older of the two vast hotels.
The popularity of the resort waned during the Interstate Age, but the second Gilded Age of the late twentieth century saw the two big old hotels restored to their former glory, especially the cavernous, cream-colored West Baden Springs resort with its huge indoor rotunda. The natural beauty of the Hoosier National Forest had not changed.
French Lick had a role to play in the chaos of 2022. During the last days of the United States government in its brief move to Indianapolis, the Kurian Order and its new adherents maintained a headquarters there, briefly, for the fighting that broke up what was left of U.S. civil authority. After that, the Grog armies moved on west to St. Louis, and the Kurian Order returned to the East to make use of the long-established institutions of government and education near the Atlantic Coast. With no more tourists, French Lick quieted again, save for a small training headquarters eventually established by the Northwest Ordnance, the premier Kurian Zone of the old Rust Belt stretching west from Pittsburgh and Cleveland, through Michigan and Indiana, to the borders of Chicago and the huge patch of still-productive farmland in Central Illinois.
With a thriving new freehold in Kentucky and its attached nub at Evansville threatening the Ordnance, the vast Southern corporate state known as the Georgia Control, and potentially the patchwork of Kurian ganglia on the East Coast, something had to be done.
A third try is inevitable.
“I’ve heard we Cats have nine lives,” Alessa Duvalier said, waiting for the dusk to deepen. “I’ve never known one to get past the first.”
The freckled redhead was talking to herself, as people who spend the better parts of their waking hours outside and alone often do.
It was a way to handle the fear, to vent it like a waiting steam engine releasing pressure. In this particular time and place, any emotion was dangerous, and fear was probably the worst of all. The Reapers would pick up on it as easily as the soldiers would see her setting off Roman candles on the hillside.
She’d learned over the years to cauterize her emotions on the job. No matter what she saw, heard, or guessed was going on around her, she couldn’t let it in.
The problem was, it had to go somewhere. Emotion was a funny thing. You could suppress one, but the pressure built up anyway and came out as another, say with hatred converting itself to an inappropriate laugh, or anxiety to a nervous tic. You could get rid of a little by talking it out with yourself, but only a little.
With her, the excess always seemed to pour into her stomach. She had a bad gut, undoubtedly ulcerous, but in her line of work chances were that she wouldn’t live to suffer from it in middle age and beyond.
Opening and shutting her hands and flexing her thighs and calves in her belly-down position in a patch of liverwort beneath a thick stand of mountain laurel, she ignored her sour stomach and the occasional vile-tasting burp and contemplated the aging opulence of the resort beneath. Someone had put some serious money into this patch of hilly, heavily wooded nowhere. A local goat rancher had told her that it was the waters—they were once reputed to have healing potential and to be something of a cure-all.
She’d tried it. There were several out-of-the way natural springs in the hills. Apart from a silky tang like Epsom salts, she didn’t see what was so special about the water, other than it had made her void her bowels three times in the subsequent twenty-four hours. Her gut felt about the same as it always did, sour with a little stab now
and then, as though it was afraid she’d forget about it.
So, the poopy water caused a pair of behemoth hotels to be built. You couldn’t fault the setting, a nice stretch of flatter land for golf courses and tennis courts surrounded by higher, but hardly mountainous, hills. It made for pleasant hiking. She sometimes wished she’d lived in an era when the big challenge of your day was a tennis game. Screw the Kurian propaganda spouted by the churches; any culture that can solve so many problems that you have time for the frivolous work of improving your backswing or whatever it is called is admirable.
Naturally cautious, she was ready to bag the idea of stealing into the hotel. Usually, she’d look at a place this big and dance a little jig—the larger the location, the easier it was to find a weak spot to penetrate. This hotel, however, had multiple rings of security—outer patrols on horseback, ATV, and foot accompanied by dogs, then an inner ring on the grounds checking both the outer patrols and a final layer at the entrances. All the lower-floor windows were bricked up with heavy-duty glass blocks. Vehicles were being searched at the main gate at the highway and there were temporary (by the look of the fencing) dog runs between the entrances just in case someone decided to try a climb to the roof or an upper floor.
Short of parachuting in or finding an unguarded secret entrance, she didn’t see how she could do it.
Five grueling days ago Evansville’s defense and security staff had received a tip through a chain of family relations, it seemed, that something big was up at French Lick.
Hitching a ride with one of the Evansville militia who owned a motorcycle and a sidecar, she and a Wolf named Clay hurried over a mix of defunct roads and smugglers’ trails into South-Central Indiana to check out the story. Southern Command’s forces at Fort Seng, just across the river from Evansville, went on the alert as she left, and were making preparations for moving a mechanized strike team.
That was the advantage of an independent brigade with an aggressive officer in command. Colonel Lambert got Fort Seng up and moving fast.