She could see Valentine melt a little at her mention of her stomach. He was always worried about the state of her digestion. “Who’s promising caviar and champagne?”
“Stands to reason. If a bunch of suit-and-ties from here to New Zealand are getting together for a gabfest, there’s going to be plenty of top-shelf food and booze. You know politicians.”
Valentine retied his hair. It was a time-buying move he liked to do when thinking something over. “There are one or two I like. Sime, for instance. The operator. He’s a snake—smooth, quiet, and poisonous. I’m damn glad he’s on our side.”
Might as well drop bait here, she thought. The conversational waters seemed promising. “Well, I have another worry. Remember how we hit that conference in French Lick.”
“Poorly,” he said. She assumed he meant the first attempt at an assault, rather than his memory.
“I think we went too large. We should have just gone in with twenty Bears,” Duvalier said. “Spilled milk gone under the bridge, Val. Suppose the Kurians catch wind of this and try the same thing.”
“It’s more their style to try to give everyone a disease or poison the water.”
“All the more reason to drink champagne,” she said. “I think we should go up there and do a little informal security work.”
Valentine looked in the direction of the colonel’s office. “Lambert’s been burned so many times with ops blowing up on her, I’m surprised she’s even sending anyone.”
“She told me Kentucky wants to be represented, too. They’re as good as any other freehold. The Southern Command delegation is letting us tag along.”
“Hmmm. Ahn-Kha’s been dealing with a delegation from the Kentucky government for the past few days. I thought they were touring the Grog settlements, but maybe they’re the delegates and they’re getting some kind of handle on the numbers and strength of our new allies. Who are the Southern Command delegates?” Valentine asked.
“Good question. I don’t know. Your old friend General Martinez, maybe?”
“I don’t see him leaving his commander-in-chief chair for a long, cold trip. He’ll send a mini-me, though. I’d hope they’d have enough brains to send Sime; he’s plainspoken and experienced at these conferences. He had a tough job to do at the establishment of the Kentucky Alliance.”
“Well, do you want to give it a shot?” she asked.
“I’ll let you know in a day or two,” Valentine said.
Blake, the young Reaper, was hunting rats in the barn. He squatted, as motionless as a waiting spider, and then when some sound or movement attracted his hyperalert senses, he pounced, as swiftly as a striking cobra.
Big as he was, he was unsettlingly fast, even to Duvalier, who had seen plenty of Reapers in action. Perhaps the lack of a link to an animating Kurian allowed his reflexes to reach their full potential.
However physically developed he was, his emotions were still those of a young child. When he missed the rat, he kicked straw about and let out a terrifying, high-pitched howl that set all the horses to stamping.
“Boy,” Narcisse said from her walker, roused by the noise. The ancient Jamaican—and something more—who’d been Blake’s caretaker since he was a few months old let her voice do most of the chasing these days. She had a way with him. “You calm down. Horses and folks tryin’ to sleep, see?”
He finally ran down a rat and drained it with a single crunch.
Of course a rat wasn’t enough to sate a growing Reaper. Blake had a primitive digestive system that couldn’t even handle cooked meat. He thrived on blood and could make do with animal fats, though if he had too much fat in the diet he became lethargic and craved salt water, which made him sicker. Every time an animal was slaughtered, a few gallons of blood went right to Blake and any spare was frozen for future use—though he much preferred the fresh, since sometimes the frozen separated while they were warming it up again.
Sometimes Duvalier cursed the fit of sympathy that had made Valentine
keep the thing in the first place. She often thought he should have quietly throttled it shortly after it was born, or left it to starve or die of exposure. There was just so little known about Reapers—that a Kurian could conceivably detect him and somehow take control of him didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility to her. Half of Fort Seng felt the way she did; the rest went out of their way to be kind to Blake.
Word came that the delegation to the all-freehold conference would be arriving by airplane—or rather airplanes. General Martinez himself, who’d never visited Southern Command’s allies in the new Kentucky Freehold or the Southern Command’s brigade supporting them, would make a short inspection visit before seeing the delegation off as it departed from Southern Command’s most easterly outpost.
Higher-ups meant there would be an all-officer scramble to make sure the brigade was presentable. With all the Grog, Wolf, and Bear teams at Fort Seng, things were bound to look a little shaggy, especially to someone with a reputation for tunic-button counting like General Martinez.
Duvalier decided to bury herself in the kitchens for the visit. She could lay out rat traps or make sure scrap food got to the camp pigpen or clean the coolers and refrigeration equipment and avoid the inevitable inspection-and-dinner that she could already hear coming like a distant thunderstorm. She checked the assignment list—one clipboard at headquarters was mandatory, the other volunteer; Lambert and her exec must have been up all night typing it out. She noticed that she just had one simple mandatory assignment—a water filtration equipment check. Easy enough. She’d just have to take a few test tubes of Fort Seng water to the camp’s medical office and see that the results were properly recorded and filed and then make sure that the water-purification tablets were stocked up in all the field cases. She noticed that Valentine had volunteered to lead a Wolf team on the farthest-out reconnaissance patrol during the visit.
She knew there was some kind of bad blood there, dating back to the brief Kurian occupation of what was then the Ozark Free Territory. She’d been busy herself, performing in a Little Rock club frequented by the Quisling officers to pick up information and be in a position to kill a few colonels if and when the need arose, and so she didn’t know all the circumstances, but the short version was that Valentine suspected Martinez of keeping his forces mostly out of the fight until they tired of hanging out in the mountain brush and were willing to undergo an orderly surrender.
She volunteered for the pens and coops. Animal waste didn’t bother her—actually very little bothered her, except being grabbed, poked, or touched. She sometimes wondered at her dislike of contact. After making a to-do list for obvious fixes with the livestock, she looked over some of the maintenance logs and found that there’d been no lead test of the supply—ever, apparently. She set about getting a water-testing kit from the company stores when she saw Lambert passing through headquarters with an unknown woman in Southern Command Guard rig with a captain’s bars.
“He’d like to make a short speech to the men, of course,” she told Lambert. “Where would you suggest that take place?”
Duvalier made a show of adjusting the strap on the testing kit so she could pause and listen.