Choice of the Cat (Vampire Earth 2) - Page 38
"What's that?" Valentine asked.
"I'll show you."
He took Valentine back to the loading dock. Like a big garage, the dock had a series of metal doors on rails, a wide-open interior devoid of anything but structural supports. Painted lines crisscrossed the floor. The lines organized a sea of wire crates and metal trays filled with documents, binders, folders, and books.
"We get a lot of captured paperwork," Lombard said. "We meaning a big we-Southern Command. Anything that isn't obviously useful, like the details of a column, where and when it'll be, ends up being carted here. We get everything from Quisling cookbooks to personal letters, complete with perfume and snips of hair. I don't want to bore you with all the procedures, but the filters read through it." He waved at another young man and a woman. The other filters sat on wheeled chairs with a built-in desk, pencils handy under a droplight hanging from a hook attached to the back of the chair, going through loose paper. "It can sometimes give us a picture of what's really going on outside our borders. Where there are shortages, weak spots."
"You divine trends from paperwork?"
"Once, based on requisitions that the logistics commandos found in a hospital, we saw that huge amounts of bandages and surgical supplies were going to Shawnee Oklahoma. Turned out that the Fassler Revolt was in full swing."
Valentine remembered hearing something about it while he was studying for his lieutenant's bars at Pine Bluff. "It ended badly."
"Fassler and all his men got hanged, yes."
"I heard crucified," Valentine said.
"Maybe. Couldn't get them enough guns in time. The Oklahomans really locked down the counties in revolt. But again, if it weren't for some paperwork, we might not even know the name Fassler."
"I've got a name for you. What do you know about the Twisted Cross?"
Lombard shrugged. "I don't know. Let's index it."
One of Lombard's associates kicked out sideways and sent his chair-desk rolling down an alley between the boxes. A white cat jumped out of the way.
The "index" turned out to be an old library card catalog in a separate room, thickly insulated behind a safelike door. There were several of the huge wooden cabinets filled with index-card-size drawers. Valentine opened a drawer; under typed headings there were handwritten notations in a mix of letters and numbers.
Gannet, Pony A. (Capt. "Chanute Leadership Corps")
MIL-KAN ACT206928 11NOV61
Append CAP -6 INT -15( m, v) EX 61-415
"Don't even try," Lombard said. He took the card. "Seems this Pony-strange first name-Gannet was a captain from a Quisling body called the 'Chanute Leadership Corps.' Action Report 206-928 describes the fight. You see the date. Looks like he was taken, and there was something interesting about the capture-it appears as a separate appendix. His interrogation is also appended, and copies went to Division V, which deals with atrocities, and M, which deals with people missing in action. They must have caught him more-or-less red-handed at something. He was executed in '61 sometime between eleventh November and the end of the year. That's pretty fast nowadays. If you go to a card for the 'Chanute Leadership Corps,' you'll see-"
"I'm impressed. But the Twisted Cross?"
"Quisling unit, I bet," Lombard said.
"Yes."
Lombard went to a file drawer. "They have any other names?"
"I don't know. I wrote out my report. You want to read it?"
"Sure, in a sec. Okay ... Twisted Cross. They're designated a Quisling unit. Looks like they get around by train. That's odd. They're cross-referenced to Eastern Division."
"Why's it odd?"
"They provide railroad security, maybe?"
"Why is it odd?" Valentine asked again.
"Usually Quisling units stay in one area, under a lord or a group of lords. You wouldn't find the late Captain Gan-net's Chanute Leadership Corps operating in, say, Illinois. Unless that particular Kurian family was invading Illinois, I suppose."
Valentine gave him the copy of his supplemental report that he'd attached to his description of the battle at Little Timber. Lombard looked through the three pages at the rate of ten seconds a page.
"Aren't you going to read it?"
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