She used it to approach the sentries. They were both keeping well away from the bog. They stood behind one of the gate’s thick posts out of the indifferent wind. Next to them a wooden beam painted optic orange served as a polite warning to stop.
She considered just walking up to them and using her claws. With her arms inside her oversized duster, they wouldn’t know she had her claws on.
The three curved metal blades were something of a joke to most Cats. She’d been made fun of in her earlier days with the Cats for carrying around that extra, easily identifiable metal. They weren’t as effective at killing as a single good knife, and were just about useless on something as tough as a Reaper.
She argued back that they were more than weapons. They were great tools for quickly scaling a tree, any kind of wooden-sided construct like a barn, or an old-fashioned wooden utility pole. They could even be used to go up aluminum or vinyl exteriors if you didn’t mind the noise. And a kill by cat claws could be mistaken for an animal attack or a Reaper under the right circumstances, leading to confusion among the enemy.
What she didn’t say was that she just felt safer with nasty sharp hooks extending from her fists.
But after closer examination, she decided that the best approach was through an overgrown ditch that ran between the ancient railroad line bordering the hotel grounds and the road. There weren’t any dogs on patrol or at the gate. She could wiggle up like a salamander and not be seen until she was too close for them to do much about it.
Crossing the highway would be difficult in the light, but not impossible. There was a dip in the road a few hundred yards north of the sentry gate, and she used it to make the crossing with a quick belly crawl.
Once across she observed from the brush. They didn’t see her, or they would have whipped out binoculars. Unless they were very experienced counterinsurgents, that is, quietly relaying her presence up to the hotel while appearing not to notice.
She dropped into the chill water and mud of the ditch, and began her wet wriggle toward the gate, hugging her sword-stick to her
side so as to disturb as little vegetation as possible.
Her cat claws and several knives accompanied her, including a skinner and a tough all-purpose bayonet with a wire cutter, but the one she rarely touched was a well-balanced thrower. She extracted it from its neck sheath (easily reached while absently scratching your head or when ordered to put your hands up and behind your head).
She wanted to get right into action if it looked promising. She hated waiting. She’d wasted too many opportunities, letting a good moment pass in the hope of a perfect one. According to the Cat who had trained her, she should wait until one guard went off to take a leak, or was occupied in some bit of phone business, before disposing of the other. But Val and the Bears were waiting, the guards were bored at their post, and one of them had his back to her.
No sense waiting.
The thrower made hardly a whisper as it cut through the air and disappeared up to the hilt in the sentry’s back.
His companion gave the stricken guard a quizzical look—he didn’t scream put probably had an odd expression.
She followed the knife up the bank, sword blade ready and point down behind her, a classic samurai carry, though she hadn’t been given the lineage of her killing technique. Just as the sentry with the thrower in his back sagged, she struck the astonished guard.
Making sure of both of them with her razor-edged sword tip, she pulled the bodies into the wet ditch, minus one overcoat and hat. From the hotel she could pass as one of the sentries.
The sentry-box phone remained silent. She gave it thirty seconds to be sure. The thrill of remaining alive while two enemies bled warm into the cold of the ditch was exhilarating. Valentine sometimes remarked on her eyes after a kill. She’d known too many Quislings to feel sorry for these two. Valentine sometimes grew melancholy after action, as if he’d prefer to be the one dead on the ground while the harvesters of humanity triumphed. Moody bastard.
She suppressed a giggle and tried to regain the pose expected of a Cat of her years and lives.
She sent the two-beeps signal. Three beeps replied—message received. Now she just had to wait for the Bear-filled garbage truck to reach the gate. She cleaned her blades as she waited, hoping some other vehicle wouldn’t arrive first. How quickly could she kill a driver and his passengers, if any?
The garbage tractor puttered south down the highway, two tires of the trailer crunching vegetation on the verge, giving nonexistent faster traffic room to pass.
It pulled into the hotel driveway. The circular white behemoth waited a little way up the hill, perhaps a quarter mile away.
“There’s a lot of trash up there needs burning,” Duvalier said.
“Our specialty,” said the Bear at the wheel. After all these years, Valentine still didn’t much like to drive. Valentine’s hands were running up and down his gear, a familiar sign that he had the nerves. He calmed down in action, always did.
“Coming along?” Valentine asked.
“Mass mayhem’s not my style,” she said. “I’ll hunt around outside, see what I come up with. Something valuable might come out one of the fire exits.”
Valentine nodded. He gave her one last, long look that she felt somewhere between her hip points. “We’ll leave in a hurry. We won’t have time to look for you,” he said.
She touched her fingers to her stolen cap in a wretched excuse for a salute. “Just take care of yourself, since I’ll be too busy for the next couple of days to do it.”
She gave the trailer two hard knocks with the wooden sword sheath as it reeked past. The Bears answered with the classic shave-and-a-haircut tattoo, reversing the usual order of things.
That’s what the Bears lived for, reversing the usual predator-prey structure of the Kurian Order.