the wagons and building the nightly laager around the oxen and cattle. "The ratbits have me worried."
"They seemed friendly enough," Baltz said, groaning and rubbing her back as she got off the horse. "Left us food, didn't they?"
"Nobody's dropped dead from poisoning," Zacharias agreed. "But it won't hurt to be in tight tonight. I figure on a brush with the Grogs when I set the pickets. I don't think we'll need eyes way out to buy us time to get set."
"Post," Valentine called.
"Sir?"
"New orders for tonight." Valentine stepped over and explained to Post what he wanted the sentries to do. Post made a circuit of the camp, passing on the instructions. He returned and idled next to Valentine, taking in the sky, until Valentine noticed his leg twitching.
"What is it, Will?"
"You okay?" He kept his voice down.
"Why shouldn't I be?"
"You look played out. I've never seen you this tired, even when we were crossing Santo Domingo."
'Tired of campfires and cold water, I think." Now that the journey was almost over, Valentine looked forward to turning over the quickwood and taking a leave. Saunders and the Thunderbolt, the Once-ler, Malia... He needed peace, a quiet room looking out over a lake, perhaps. He'd never work in the Kurian Zone again.
"You told me once to ask you about what you did to get your captaincy in the Coastal Marines," Post said, as though reading his mind. "You sounded unhappy about it. You said it would give me a real reason to hate you."
"Having second thoughts about not leaving with Car-rasca?"
"No, it's not that. Val, if it troubles you, talk about it. If anyone's in a position to understand, it's me. I wasted half a life under the bastards. After talking to you about my wife
that night back on the Thunderbolt, I felt better about myself than I had in years. Took the bottle right out of my hand."
Valentine felt uneasy. The Ranch was getting to him. Talking to Post was better than empty fretting. "Let's walk."
They walked, side by side, the summer-dried grass crunching under their feet as they circled the laager. At first, the words came slowly. He wasn't sure where to begin, exactly, and the events were vague as they came back to him, as disturbed mud obscures the features of a body being dredged from a lakebed.
He'd never even told Duvalier. So the story came hard at first.
"I came down from the north with fake papers saying I'd served on a cruiser on the Great Lakes. I talked right for the identity, and I'd been to some of the places in the background. They put me in this police boat on the Louisiana coast, looking for smugglers. There was a gunfight or two, but we had a pair of fifty-calibers on the patrol boat that settled most arguments when those opened up on the shoreline ..."
The Coastal Marines had a tip about a big cargo going out of the west side of Lake Pontchartrain, in a red-painted barge. He and a squad of men took the barge easily. The tug captain tried to bargain his way out, offered Valentine and the troops money, liquor, tobacco.
Valentine had none of it. His job was to impress his superiors with his diligence and efficiency, not pluck tempting feathers for his nest. Within the hearing of his sergeant and men, he turned down the bribe, made a show of moving the captain and his mates along with a pistol to the ringbolts.
Then he opened the cargo hatch.
Six families, in the dingy yellow overalls of Louisiana rural labor, were rousted from hiding spots among the more legitimate loads of cargo. There was resignation, not lamentation, as they were lined up, counted, and put in steel restraints.
He had no choice. A Reaper met the barge when it tied up at the Coastal Patrol dock.
"... and you're thinking 'So what?' It goes back to my first time leading men into the Kurian Zone. My first real responsibility. I took five families out of Louisiana after a raid. It was a hard march-we even had Reapers on us.
"When we got back to the Free Territory at the fort, each and every one thanked me. Hugs, kisses, tears. I even met one of them a couple years later. Her name was Theresa Bru-gen.... She was a nurse-trainee at a hospital where they looked at my leg wound. She cried when she saw me again.
"I've always been proud of that trip. Those twenty-six lives, twenty-six lives changed, saved-it was the first time I really thought I'd made a difference. When I turned the families from the red barge over to the Reaper-it was like that evaporated."
Post shrugged. "What could you do?"
The faces appeared in the darkness, this time accusing. "I could have got them out. It would have blown my cover. Someone else would have had to go get the quickwood. Maybe in a year, maybe in a month. There are other Cats. Other ships."
"Ships with me?"