March in Country by E.E. Knight Read Free Book Online Page B

like a pitchfork thrust into rain-soaked soil.
    Adrenals on fire in the small of his back he ran up, parang and .45 out, noise of the shots be damned, in time to see Duvalier sawing at the dead Reaper’s forearm tendons with her own camp utility knife. Released from the death grip, she stood up and turned to meet him.
    “You have your talk?” she panted, smiling.
    Seeing red and needing a fight, he resisted an impulse to slap her. “What was that, letting a Reaper grab you?”
    “Val, that was a hyperalert Reaper. I saw him come out of camp. He was feeling fine and ready for a night in the bush. His master must be somewhere nearby to have such a good connection. Hope he felt it wherever those squids keep their appetite. Just a sec—”
    She vomited up watery bile. “That’s better.”
    Duvalier had suffered for years from what she called a “delicate stomach.” A combination of bad water and worse food while wandering the Great Plains meant that anything stronger than rice and stewed chicken gave her indigestion.
    Valentine scanned the horizon three hundred sixty degrees, looking for something that might serve as a Kurian tower. “How did you kill it?”
    She stuck the blade of her camp knife into its jaws, pried them open a little wider. The Reaper’s stabbing tongue flopped sideways, like a broke-back snake smashed by a rock. With the jaws held open, Duvalier reached in and pulled out a blade about the size of a largish pen. It had a triangular base and narrowed to a fine point.
    “Nasty little pigsticker Chieftain rigged for me.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed the spring-loaded holder for a stiletto. “You have to hit a button. I’m glad he grabbed me by the upper arms instead of the wrists.”
    “I should think so,” Valentine said, good and mad.
    “Spit, the stick up your ass must like it there, I can hear it getting longer. I had it under control, Val. I’ve been hunting these dickless assholes longer than you. Stinkbait here thought I was easy pickins.”
    Valentine massaged his sore leg. “Thanks for the heart attack.”
    “Your heart! Ha. You’re a little soft between the ears, and I can’t speak for what’s between your legs, never having been with you in the Biblical sense, but I think that heart of yours is unharmed and untouched as ever. You’re all cold blood and hot steel, like those killer robots in the old whatchacallit we saw at the movie palace in New Orleans.”
    Valentine was examining the Reaper’s dress. It wore a tight-fitting jumpsuit that reminded him of the padding a baseball umpire wore over his chest. It was almost stylized. The monk’s robe look wasn’t popular in Atlanta, it seemed.
    “What’s next, Val?” Duvalier asked.
    “We strip your kill here. The material and the fangs will be worth something to the smugglers or the Kentuckians. Then we head back for Fort Seng and deliver the bad news. Georgia is on the march.”

CHAPTER THREE

    Odds and Sods: As it ages, any large institution develops quiet filtering areas where less useful or odd-fitting pieces wash up, to be either sluiced out of the prospector’s pan or picked out for some more useful activity. In a well-run organization, these pools are managed so that those in them perform activity that’s at least marginally useful.
    In a more sclerotic bureaucracy, those who find themselves in such filter pockets may moulder away quietly until retirement, in happy or unhappy obscurity depending on temperament, devoting most of their time and talent to making a more comfortable barnacle shell for themselves.
    Sometimes, out of a mixture of talent and boredom, an individual will energize the sluice.
    Fort Seng, just south of Evansville, Indiana, in the early days of what soon would be the Kentucky Free Alliance, was that sort of place. Fort Seng was remarkable in its organizational gravity. It served as a swamp not for one such organization, but for three.
    By designation, it was under control of Southern