"We have some odds and ends needing transport back," Valentine said. "Sick and lamed men." Also a few who wanted out of it and were willing to take a dishonorable discharge to get away as soon as they could.
"Some might have to ride in the shell if there are too many. I'll need food for them, if there are many."
"That can be arranged."
"Then I'll be happy to offer transport back. In Paducah they will be surprised to see me again so soon."
"Captain Mantilla, once more I'm in your debt," Valentine said.
Mantilla pushed his hat back on his head. "It's my pleasure to aid a Saint-Valentine."
"It's just Valentine. As you can probably tell, I am about as Italian as I am Afghan."
Or does he know my mother was named Saint Croix? Valentine wondered.
"I've one more favor to ask. Do you know anyone on the river who can get a message up to St. Louis? There's a big church there that tends to the human population and the Grog captives. Slaves, I guess you'd call them. I have a friend near there that they help now and then."
"I'd be honored to bring a message to Sissy."
"Sissy?"
"Isn't that what you call Narcisse?"
"Do you know her?"
Mantilla dropped his chin so his eyes fell into shadow again. "Almost as well as you do, Major Valentine."
ater Pete's on the Arkansas River, the third week of November: Pete's is the informal abode of the river rats-the brown-water transportation flotilla of Southern Command and the sailors of the quick-hitting, quick-running motorboats of the Skeeter Fleet.
Pete himself is long dead, killed during Solon's tenure for theft of Trans-Mississippi Combat Corps property and smuggling supplies to "guerrilla bands" during the Kurian occupation. His widow followed him to the Reaper-gibbet soon after (hardly a word had to be changed in the indictment or the sentence), but his brother survived Solon's occupation of Arkansas and rebuilt the old riverside bar.
Built of ancient gray cypress beams the color of a January cloud-bank, part dockyard, part trading post, part gin mill, and part museum, Backwater Pete's is an institution. A new brown-water sailor who first sees the fireflies of tracer being exchanged at high speed while bouncing down the Mississippi comes to Pete's for his first drink as a real river-man. Newly appointed boat commanders and barge captains fete their crews there, and retiring master mechanics say their farewells beneath the pink and lavender paper lanterns and sensually shaped neon.
The bar is decorated with grainy pictures of boat crews as well as old Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and Playboy centerfolds, immortal icons of wet-haired desire. Wooden models of famous Southern Command river craft-mostly pleasure or sport or fishing boats and tugs converted to carry machine guns and old rapid-fire twenty-and thirty-millimeter "bush guns"-rest on a little brass-railed shelf above the bar. The traditional mirror behind the bar is more a mosaic of shards now, having been broken in so many brawls and patched together with colored glass it now resembles a peacock splattered against a wide chrome bumper.
Most newcomers say it smells like tobacco, recycled beer, sun-baked sweat, and mud fresh from a swamp where eggs go to die. The regulars wouldn't have it any other way.
On that warm night of a quick-fading autumn the bar saw a stranger. His clothing set him apart immediately: thick blue-black leathers that looked too oddly pebbled for cowhide but not stiff as snake-skin. He wore a small machine-gun pistol in a big soft holster across his midriff and a straight-bladed, sharkskin-handled sword across his back. Vambraces like a motorcycle rider might wear guard his arms, but odd bulges running up from the wrist suggest they might be offensive as well as defensive.
For all the weaponry, the high military boots with their lace guards snapped over, the scar descending from his right eye and fresh bruising to the left, and the long black hair tied back so it's out of his eyes, he doesn't look like he's after a fight. For a start, he looks tired: the haggard, leeched-out look of a man who has undergone prolonged stress. Then there's the odd hang of his jawline. A humorous tip to his jaw gives him a slight, good-humored smile.
"Cat. Or maybe a Bear," one of the grizzled river rats says to his companions dressed in more typical attire of soft white trousers and light canvas jackets, sockless in their rubber-soled boat shoes. They don't make room for the newcomer at the bar, river rats being as fiercely territorial as any Dumpster-diving rodents.
"What'll ye think a Hunter wants here?" a man with a patchy youth's beard asks.
"Someone to push up into a length of trouble," the oldster says, unaware of just how right he would turn out to be.
According to Southern Command tradition, Backwater Pete's served the best tequila on chipped ice in the Trans-Mississippi Free Republics. Not being an expert on tequila, Valentine opted for rum and tea, a concoction he'd grown used to during his sojourn in a Kurian uniform with the Coastal Marines.
The rum was of good quality, all the way from Jamaica. Valentine reread his accumulated mail over it while his mind subconsciously absorbed the rhythms of Backwater Pete's. A man in a bar had a choice to be alone, even if he could smell the sweat and engine oil on the man next to him, and he'd dumped his six new companions at a Southern Command billet-flop.
They were all the reinforcements he was getting, and he didn't like the look of them. Hatchet men sent to decide what was worth saving and what was worth discarding, plus one young doctor and an ancient nurse.
He savored his mail like a gourmet meal. The aches and pains from last week's wounds were forgotten in the excitement of mail.
He opened the one all the way from Jamaica first, wondering what tortured route it had taken to get to the UFR. Probably landed by some friendly smugglers on the shore of Texas, probably on the same boat that brought in rum, coffee, and fabric dyes. The Dutchmen from the Southern Caribbean were good about that sort of thing.
There was a picture of Amalee, dated six months ago and stamped by Southern Command's mails in mid-October, probably on the same boat that made the rum runs. She had deep copper skin and her mother's wide, bright eyes. She would be seven now.