Valentine's Rising (34 page)

Valentine cocked the flare gun. He looked down at Ahn-Kha. The Grog knew enough human gestures to give him a thumbs-up. He fired the pistol; the flare shot into the air with a sound like a cat spitting. The parachute opened and the signal drifted, a bright green star slowly descending, pushed by a wind from the southwest.

It sparked and sputtered across the sky on March 21, 2071, at 23:28—Captain Moira Styachowski made a note of the flare's time in her order journal. Valentine's Rising had begun.

 

By the time Valentine got to the bottom of the pole the flare had returned to earth. Its green glow pulsed from behind a pile of debris-flattened automobiles stacked like rusty pancakes.

“This is it, old horse. I'll see you on the other side.”

“My platoon has a good sergeant. Let me come with you.”

“I'll be able to do this a lot better if I know you're waiting at the station. Otherwise I'll spend the next two hours worrying about what's happening on that hill. Get out of here.”

“Until we meet again, my David . . . in this world or the next.” They clasped each other's forearms in the Grog handshake.

“
Arou ng'nan
,” Valentine said. Every language has a form of “good luck,” though the Grog form was a little more prosaic, hoping that spirit-fathers would intercede on one's side.

They trotted off in opposite directions. Valentine stayed clear of the road, tracing the route out to the edge of the Kurian Tower that he had walked while forming his plans. The foundation of the tower and the construction grounds around it were floodlit, and searchlights from strongpoints atop the first story probed the night.

Nail and five of his six Bears were crouching in the cover of a filled-in cellar. Valentine looked at the faces above the guns pointed at him. The Bears' Quisling uniforms lay in a pile that smelled of kerosene. The Bears didn't need black T-shirts or red sashes. They were in their battle gear, the savage-looking Bear mélange of Reaper cloth, leather, combat vests, fur and Kevlar. Rain cradled a combat shotgun in chain-mail-backed leather gloves. Another Bear Valentine knew vaguely as Hack wore a massive girdle with Reaper teeth fitted into the leather. He held a machine pistol in one hand and one of Ahn-Kha's Quickwood spears in the other, its end decorated with eagle feathers like a Comanche war lance. Red, whose freckled face narrowed and ended in a jaw so sharp it looked like it could split logs, had Reaper scalps—at least Valentine hoped they were Reaper scalps—at his shoulder blades and elbows. More strings of black hair hung from the belt-fed machine gun so tied to his combat harness that it looked like part of him. Lost&Found had a shining cross over his heart and Brass, almost as wide as he was high, had painted his face so it resembled a skull. A red-eyed plastic snake head had been slipped over the mouth of his grenade launcher, and he'd wrapped the butt and grips with snakeskin and painted “The Fire Dragon” on the side of the support weapon.

“Where's Groschen?”

“He's got the Grog gun, forward. We like to have a good sniper ready when we go in.”

“Signal him to pull back. I'm aborting this.”

Nail exchanged looks with another Bear. “But the green flare—”

“We're still throwing the dice for Boxcars. We aren't going to hit the tower. I got an opportunity to throw a scare into Mu-Kur-Ri. He's protecting his precious aura with everything he's got. Going in there with some kind of surprise is one thing. Breaking down that door into the teeth of six or seven Reapers, and troops besides—I won't do it. In five more minutes there'll be troops from Pulaski Heights here. We'd have as much trouble getting out as going in.”

“You're the boss,” Nail said. He looked up and out of the basement and made a buzzing sound. “Damn, we're almost in spitting distance of that bas—Groschen's pulling back, he'll be here in two minutes.”

“Very good, Lieutenant.”

“Sir, you look like hell.”

“I feel like it, Nail.”

The men got to their feet, slinging their weapons. One gathered up the kerosene-soaked clothes.

“Why are you bringing those?” Valentine asked.

“A little ceremony,” Nail said. “We'll save it for another day.”

Groschen, now clean-shaven, returned to the basement, the long Grog gun over his shoulders. “The tower's off. Hope you aren't bleeding yet,” Nail explained.

“No, suh.”

“You may still get to do it tonight. They sounded the alarm over at the prison yard.”

Valentine checked their line of retreat and led them out of the basement. When they were clear of the tower's sight-lines, Valentine gathered the Bears.

“Keep back about thirty feet. I like to be able to listen.”

They cut through the Ruins, zigzagging around the graveyard of a civilization. They struck another field-phone line, strung on four-foot posts, and cut it. As they neared the road to the prison camp Valentine heard a mass of men moving away from the prison yard. Had they stormed it bloodlessly?

Lieutenant Zhao led his men up the road, away from the camp, in files at each side of the road. The men looked spooked. Valentine thought it best to call out from cover.

“Lieutenant Zhao. It's Valentine.”

Zhao waved his right hand like he was wiping a table. The men crouched from the front of the lines and rolling backward, like rows of dominoes tumbling.

“Valentine who?” Zhao said. His hair was unkempt, his face was pitted from acne and he wore filthy glasses, but the only thing lacking in him as an officer was experience. Valentine had learned he was smart, hardworking and organized, which had led him to give him a company. But he'd evidently lost his head.

“Captain Valentine. Careful with the guns, men,” Valentine said, stepping out from the rubble.

“Sir, did the Kurian go down?”

“I called it off. What happened at the camp?”

“The guard-tower had a machine gun for covering the yard,” Zhao explained. “They slung it around and started shooting. Maybe they have night vision gear. We didn't go any farther. There's no cover for a hundred yards around the wire. I didn't want to risk those kind of casualties.”

“Lieutenant, there's five hundred men in there, maybe more. Five hundred of our men, POWs. I want them back.”

“I . . . I . . . I was using my judgment,” Zhao said.

“I won't question it. Let's go have another look.”

“We're going back?” a private said.

“If you were behind that wire, what would you want us to do?” Valentine said, looking at the objector. “Let's turn around, men. Who's in charge of your rear guard, Zhao?”

“Sergeant, umm . . . Franks is in charge of the tail of the column.”

“I didn't say tail of the column. I said ‘rearguard.' ”

Zhao looked at his feet, miserable.

“Let's turn it around, Lieutenant. I'll scout ahead with the Bears.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Valentine and the Bears doubled the column.

“Christ, I hate all these little generators,” Nail said. The lights of the prison yard glowed beyond the tumble of shattered buildings.

“Do you?”

“Of course.”

“Be glad for them. I think Groschen is going to get his chance with that gun.”

Time enough? Time enough?
Valentine wondered.

Valentine had seen Kurian concentration camps by the dozens. This had to be one of the shabbiest he'd ever seen. The camp was wired into sections of thirds, one-third for women, the center third for guards and the most crowded part for the male prisoners. A single tower stood over the central common yard—judging from the road ruts, trucks came to pick up and drop off prisoners. The fence, just a series of stout poles to hold concertina wire was not even double layered, or electrified, or topped with razor wire. At each corner of the camp, outside the wire, was a sandbagged guard post. Prisoner and guard alike lived under prefabricated roofs; the walls were nothing more than pieces of tent and tarp, though the guards' tents in the center had openings that served as windows. Valentine's nose picked up the smell of corn flour baking in the only complete structure in the place—a Quonset hut set in the guards' section.

The guards' section was a frenzy of activity. The guards were piling up boxes and sandbags at either end of their Quonset; nervous men peered out from under their helmets, rifles ready. Zhao had thrown enough of a scare into them that they had abandoned the outer guard posts, but four men still remained in the tower. The machine gun that so frightened Zhao was positioned to cover the road.

“What do you think?” Valentine asked Nail, after having Zhao take his men and spread them out to the front of the camp. He watched another Bear, the quasi-giant Rain who'd bearded Martinez, heat the blade of his knife with an old liquid lighter, careful to keep well out of sight of the camp. Not that the men would have much night vision outside the brightly lit camp.

“Piss-poor layout, even for a temporary camp. Why do they still have all the lights on? It's like they want us to pick 'em off.”

“Look at that,” Rain said. “The poor bastards in there aren't waiting for us.”

A trio of men were working at the concertina wire behind their tent in the tower's blind spot. Someone among the prisoners had been waiting for this moment; two men were working at widening the hole with pieces of wood as the first crawled through, cutting.

Valentine spoke: “Saves us the trouble. Nail, go back and tell Lieutenant Zhao to spread for skirmishing. Meet up with us there, at those concrete pilings that look like tree trunks. See them?”

“Sure, sir.”

“Zhao should just demonstrate. It's not a real attack. I want them to shoot at the tower, once we start. If they kill them all the better. I just don't want that gun aimed at us. Oh, be sure to call out before you come up on them. They're nervous.”

“Yes, sir,” Nail said, disappearing into the darkness.

“Groschen, Rain, let's work our way around to the north side of the camp. Try and find something we can throw down on that wire.”

By the time Nail caught up with them in a skeleton of reinforced concrete, the Bears had found an old metal fire door and pried it off its rusted hinges. It was a heavy, awkward burden, but Rain managed to get it up on his back.

“They're almost through the wire. What the hell are you doing?”

Nail looked up from the pile of TMCC uniforms he was lighting. “We're going Red, sir. It's a ritual. Haven't you ever seen Bears go into action before?”

“Not up close. The tower might see some of the light from that fire.”

“Let 'em. Nothing makes the Quislings shit like Bearfire.”

Valentine tried to keep his attention on the camp, but the little circle of Hunters going through their ritual distracted him. It was something out of another time and place, when men in animal skins nerved themselves for action through tribal custom.

They stared into the fire for a few minutes, sitting cross-legged and silently contemplating the blue-bottomed flames. First Nail began to sway; in a moment the others joined in, until they were moving in synch like seven metronomes, first right, then left, then right, all the while staring into the fire. When they were all moving in unison, exchanging grunts that meant nothing to Valentine, Nail rose onto his haunches and the others followed suit. Rain took out the knife he had sterilized, raised his Reaper-robe sleeve, and revealed a long line of little brown scars, hash marks running up to his triceps. He reached up with the blade and added another cut, parallel to all the others. He passed the blade to the next man, then sprinkled gunpowder out of a shell casing into the wound.