"C'mon, Valentine. You're mixing up people and places with an idea. I asked you this once before: What's making you take up the rifle instead of a tractor wheel or a book or a fishing rod? What's the Cause?"
"Being free of the Kurians", Valentine said.
"There you go. It's an idea, not a person or a place. People, well, people can be awfully little. I've covered a lot of land in my life. There's beauty and ugly, fertile and sterile everywhere. It's ideas that matter. Good ideas, right ideas. Ideas are bigger than any of us. They don't get old, and they sure don't issue orders to get anyone court-martialed. You think I've given up on the Cause?"
"I don't see how you're helping it as much here as you did back home", Valentine said.
"Valentine, I didn't get put here. I volunteered to be an officer in the PeaBees. Remember your first time out on your own? The Red River operation?"
"Distinctly", Valentine said.
"You told me that when you got those folks out, you really felt like you'd accomplished something. Even more than the Reaper you and your Wolves snipped".
Valentine didn't mention his spell in the Coastal Marines, when he was working as a mole in the uniform of a Coastal Marine Quisling, the refugees he'd rounded up ... canceling whatever karma he'd built getting the Red River families out, or the Carlsons.
"I like PeaBee work. Being the picket line between the Seattle KZ and Pacific Command has its dangers, but there are opportunities too, if you ever heard that Chinese philosophy".
Valentine thought he saw the light beginning to break through the clouds.
"I'm still getting people out and up to Canada, or down into Oregon and east. It's a little trickier - in a way it's like threading the needle between two Kurian Zones - but it can be done. There's a Resistance Network in Seattle, a damn good one. They've got members at some key checkpoints. They get the people to me, and I take it from there. Every once in a while one of my PeaBees really distinguishes himself and then he goes too. There are advantages to being the one who signs the casualty reports. Want to help?"
"Can do, sir".
"My ears must be going too. That voice sounds like my old lieutenant".
* * *
Valentine spent the next few months leading his platoon through the different operational assignments as they trained under real conditions. Five veteran PeaBees joined his platoon to help the men learn,
but even under their guidance there were losses. A man was electrocuted on a raid against an electrical substation. Even worse, on river watch, three men just disappeared, probably lost to Big Mouths, judging from the crushed plant life leading back to the Snoqualmie River.
But there were rewards to PeaBee work too. Valentine guided dozens of individual families - perhaps a couple of brothers, a wife, and child one time, grandparents with a cluster of grandchildren another, and two sisters with their collective broods - from rendezvous points in the Kurian Zone, then across to the PeaBee positions. From there they were brought to hiding spots, where the PeaBees fed them - who knew what kind of three-card monte shuffle LeHavre's Brigade Supply staff was playing with Pacific Command?
The whole 775 Company was reunited at the end of October, and in their first real operation punched a hole down "Highway 1", clearing mines that allowed a column of Bears, most likely an Action Group, to drive into the Kurian Zone. Valentine wished he'd left a mine or two.
Valentine grew to like their captain, a Canadian named Mofrey, whose grandfather had served with a regiment he called "the Princess Pats". Captain Mofrey still clipped his grandfather's little badge on his steel PeaBee helmet. Every time a Pacific Command regular told him to remove it, he did, only to put it back on as soon as the regulars had passed out of eyesight. All Valentine could learn of his reasons for being in the PeaBees was a conviction for "gross insubordination". Could an affection for an old badge land someone in the PeaBees?
He even saw Gide once or twice, usually on picket duty. She'd made it into the Pacific Command regulars, and they'd trained her as a scout/sniper. She still carried his carbine. The PeaBees were watching the Quisling positions from a railroad culvert in the predawn when they heard the password whispered.
They came just as alert as if they'd heard a rifle bolt being worked, but waited, and then next thing Valentine knew there was Gide, crawling through a plant-choked culvert with a scout in front and a scout behind.
She seemed as astonished as Valentine at the meeting, but for the moment pretended not to know him, and Valentine went along with it.
"Made it right to the edge of downtown", Gide said as they warmed themselves in a basement a hundred meters back from the railroad tracks, Valentine's platoon headquarters. All he could offer them was a hot mush trying to be oatmeal, with a couple of pieces of dried fruit broken into it. "Tough to get there. Water's out, because of the Big Mouths. Bridges are too well guarded".
Valentine was tempted to tell her that some of the bridges were watched by the Resistance, but they didn't cooperate with Pacific Command because of the depredations of the Action Groups.
"Were you just there to look?" Valentine asked.
"We can't discuss operations", one of the other scouts said. "Need to know, you know".
"Except to say girlfriend here is deadly with that gun of hers", the other scout said. "One time a Reaper picked up on our smell or whatever. She killed it with one shot. It just fell over and froze up. Never seen the like".
"Robie!" the senior one warned.
The scout shrugged. "Shit, PeaBees are still Pacific Command. Don't tell me you weren't happy to see the uniform comin' out of that ditch".
"Kinda friendly with the Pee-Pants, aren't you?" the senior said to Gide as she sat next to Valentine, back against the cold concrete brick wall.