He shivered every time she touched him, twitching about like an overexcited horse. Perhaps he hadn’t been fucking that Pole in Helsinki. He jerked like a teen with a girl’s hand on his prick for the first time.
He proved an impatient and overeager lover. He spent himself rather sooner than she would have liked, though he was tenderer than most men afterward. If he had the impulse to slink out of her bed like a restless dog, he suppressed it admirably.
Giggling, she admitted to herself that he really wasn’t that good. Maybe it was nervousness, or he was just uncomfortable with physical intimacy with her. Or maybe she really was “one of the guys” to him, and he’d just dipped his toe into emotional bisexuality.
Or perhaps it was the tiny bunk. There wasn’t really room for two people on either the top or the bottom bunk. She couldn’t even really open herself the way she wanted to. The ship’s side got in her way on one side, and the high rails for the bunks made it difficult to get comfortable on the other. Only afterward did it occur to her that they could have just piled a couple of plastic-covered sea mattresses and all their bedding on the floor.
The journey home was more easily accomplished than the outbound leg.
They traveled with Sime and the Canadian and Greenland/Iceland representatives. Duvalier wasn’t even aware that there were people in Greenland, but the post-2022 climate had created a thin strip of habitable earth on the southern coast of the huge, icy island, and the Scandinavians had returned with their fishing boats.
Valentine joked that now that the Resistance had committed to continuing the struggle, it did not matter so much if the delegates all were lost in the chill northern latitudes or not.
They were back by late August, sped on by rumors of action heating up in Texas and Kentucky and all along the Appalachians. Valentine spoke often of August and September being a forbidding time of year, historically.
They were met by a small delegation welcoming them back to the Kentucky Alliance. Ahn-Kha’s name was cheered. His ears stuck out horizontally true, a sure sign of embarrassment. The summer heat and humidity of Southern Indiana felt dreadful after the Baltic cool.
Colonel Lambert was part of the official delegation, of course, along with Captain Patel.
“You arrived just in time,” Patel said, speaking mostly to Valentine. “All hell’s breaking loose to the south. The Georgia Control is attacking on a wide front. They’ve got troops stretching from Nashville to the Daniel Boone National Forest.”
“When did it start?”
“Day before yesterday.”
They’d been travelling for ten days. Did it have anything to do with events in Kokkola? Were the ripples already spreading?
At least Valentine had made no more mention of getting her out of the fight.
“I guess we’re alone in the fight. If there is going to be fighting.”
“Southern Command will get back in it, if I have anything to do with it,” Sime said. “I didn’t realize until this neutrality proposal how weak they must be. Nobody makes an offer like that if they think they have a chance at winning. It’s a bluff, and I intend that we should call it.”
They said farewell to Sime at the Evansville airport. A little two-engine scout reconnaissance plane was waiting for him to speed him back to Texarkana. Ahn-Kha shook his hand, his hairy face grave.
“We might have done better to negotiate,” Sime said. “Without the Lifeweavers—”
“Without the Lifeweavers we have a few more years of Bears, Cats, and Wolves,” Valentine said. “They’ll dwindle and die.”
“We’ve attempted to breed them,” Sime said. “That generation is at least a decade away from beginning to be useful.”
“Ordinary people are going to win this,” Valentine said. “Ordinary people in the Kurian Zone. Watch for it.”
“I hope you’re right, Valentine,” Sime said. “Well, good luck.”
He shook Duvalier’s hand—she still thought his touch a trifle reptilian, and he still reminded her of a Kansas Quisling, through and through. He boarded his plane.
“Well, the dice are thrown,” Colonel Lambert said.
They had a minute while the plane taxied and everyone moved out of the way.
Alessa Duvalier chuckled. “Valentine, you used to play chess. I sort of remember you got into it in Omaha with some bigwig there. What was it called when you move a few pieces at the opening to tempt your opponent into doing something stupid?”
“A gambit,” Valentine said. “You sacrifice a pawn or two in order to get your opponent to open up his defenses.”
“But whose gambit was it?” Ahn-Kha asked. “Ours or theirs?”
“Maybe we only took a pawn in Kokkola,” Duvalier said. “And now we’re alone in the fight. We have to live with that.”