"Suit yourself", she said, popping the capsules and following them with a swig of water from a big bottle.
Valentine would have just about given a finger for a thermos of Space Needle-quality coffee. He set his kayak in the current and took up the reins from the new team with winter-chilled muscles.
"At least the weather's broke", Nageezi said, smiling. "Seattle stopped the rain".
"That's a bunch of crap", Valentine said, irritated at her chemically enhanced cheer. "They don't control the weather".
"Screw yourself", she said quietly, but Valentine's ears picked it up.
"What's that?"
"Suit yourself".
She's a Quisling. What do you care what she things?
Because, for one night, you're a Quisling too.
Valentine could live with it. He just hoped the Outlook was filled with Bears fresh from a Resource Denial operation.
The Big Mouths swam excitedly up the Green River. They could already taste the hot pork they expected to be waiting for them. Valentine marked the end of a lake on his map, and broke a chemical light. He signaled for the last portage.
Nageezi took two more bennies at the end of the portage as they slipped into the Snoqualmie, heading downstream at last. Valentine unhooked the reins from his Big Mouth team. He could paddle from here. It would warm him up.
He visualized the bodies strewn in the streets of the housing block, the fearful families in the church, and tried to summon a little of the Bear energy for the final push, but it stubbornly refused to come out of hibernation.
They rounded a bend, shot past a few boarded-up buildings heavy with snow, and there it was. The Outlook.
Valentine paddled his kayak next to hers. "Let's get a little closer". He shook a chemical light and stuck it under the water and repeated a circular signal three times; the red-eyed amphibian behemoths gathered round the kayaks.
They pulled their craft to the edge of the river, beneath a substantial lip of land, Valentine hiding the chemical light in his vest. He checked his knife, and took his guns out of their waterproof plastic sheaths.
"Feel that ring on your finger yet?" Nageezi asked. They anchored their kayaks in the shadow under the earth and rock lip. A paved river path was just on the other side of a set of white-painted warning stones.
"Not just yet. I want to hit the Outlook first".
She checked the safety on her .45, worked the slide. "If I get hit, try not to let them eat me".
"Same here", Valentine said, trying to remember not to reach for
the flare gun until all the Big Mouths were out of the water and hopping toward the entrances the way they'd been trained. He adjusted his rifle sling around his neck - the Chinese carbine had a hell of a kick and he wanted it tight against his shoulder...
She peeked over the lip of the riverbank. "You know there's a tradition in the OXFs. If a commander falls, and the second still wins a victory, all the spoils go to him. Or her".
The gun flashed toward him and fired.
Valentine lurched away as the muzzle turned toward him - over a decade of being around guns taught one to keep out of the way of barrels - but even Cat reflexes weren't faster than a bullet. At first he felt a hard thump at the bottom of his right rib cage. Then he discovered he was in the water, bobbing toward the falls, blood warming the interior of his suit.
He saw a Big Mouth turn toward him. Its jaws opened and Valentine instinctively pulled his feet away, oddly calm.
The last thing he remembered before the jaws engulfed him was Nageezi's face in the dark, as she gestured, lifting a chemical light of her own.
She was smiling.
troops: An easy path to promotion and power for any human with a military background is to volunteer to serve as an Officer of Xeno Forces. High ran f( and its powers and privileges come quickly to volunteers for the OXFs, but at the cost of a social stigma. Mixing with nonhumans leaves OXFs in a strange netherworld, secretly despised by those they fight for and openly by those they fight against.
Though the rumors of bestial mating rituals and cannibalism are unfounded, and can usually be traced back to Freehold propaganda or melodramatic fictionalizations, there's no denying that OXF attract their share of bad apples. Men who can't win promotion or fit in elsewhere sign up for OXF training, where standards are looser and faults overlooked.
Of all the odd troops OXF have led - or tried to lead - the actions involving Big Mouths evolve the most consistently chilling accounts. Sometimes the only evidence of one of their attacks is a strong fishy odor, bloodstains, and a few bitten-off heads, hands, and feet missed after the seaside scrum and feed. Almost ungovernable, and known to turn on their OXF leaders in victory, defeat, or starvation, they are perhaps the most bloodthirsty Grogs to fight or lead.