Damn, he'd have to get wet after all.
The Kurians and their poor habits when it came to keeping roads, bridges, and utility lines in repair served them badly at the new bridge. They'd strung power lines along the side of the bridge to bring electricity into southern Indiana from the Kentucky plant. Valentine took his shoes off and tied them around his neck, and then waded out into the river and took advantage of cracks in the cement bridge pilings to climb up to the power lines.
Luckily the high-voltage lines were well insulated.
Valentine dangled from the line by his gloved hands, swaying in the funneled breezes under the bridge as he moved out over the river a few inches at a time. It was exhausting business, and soon his fingers, forearms, and shoulders burned and screamed. He hung, rested, caught his breath, and went on.
Once well out of the security lights around the roadblock at the north end, he swung up his torso and quickly rolled across the pedestrian wall on the bridge and dropped to the side, pressing himself into the shadows, and lay like a dead thing.
He quieted his mind. The only way to get past one was to camouflage yourself, body and brain. The first thing he'd been taught after becoming a Wolf was how to box up much of his consciousness and tuck it away for safekeeping. Breathe in, breathe out, letting go of worry. Breathe in, breathe out, giving your fear to the air. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, your body is nothing but a puff of air, flowing invisibly across the landscape. Valentine lost himself in half-remembered poetry, gone where all things wise and fair descend, moving toward "that high Capital, where kingly Death keeps his pale court in beauty and decay."
Breathe in, breathe out.
He watched the Reaper. There was something robotic about its motions. Was the Reaper idling? Perhaps the Kurian was concentrating on his Reapers at the power plant and ignoring his guard below.
The Reaper passed, and none of the bridge guards was eager to approach its perimeter. Valentine noted that in its passing, the Reaper's foot slapped the pavement of the bridge. One of its boots was missing the sole; on the other the heel was flapping.
This Kurian didn't take very good care of his avatars. Or it had just moved far, fast.
The guards left the center of the bridge to the Reaper. It paced like a trapped tiger, from the north side of the bridge to the south, crossing right lane to left, and then back from south end to north.
He looked up at the Kurian's nest. There it was, like a spider's egg sac in a hayloft, high and tucked out of the weather.
Sometimes it pays to take the hard way, Valentine thought.
Valentine got the rhythm of the Reaper's route around the center pylon. When it turned its back on him and began to walk away, he jumped up to the suspension cable junction with the bridge proper. He went to one of the suspension cables, looped a utility worker's harness over the cable, and began to climb hand over hand with wool stocking feet wrapped about the cold steel.
He moved up the cable like an inchworm. The belt harness enabled him to rest when he needed to catch his breath.
But it was a cold, bad climb. Numb fingers, couldn't feel his toes, aching arms and back . . .
He rested at the top, arm looped around a defunct aircraft warning light. Now it smelled like bat guano.
Off to the east he could see the power plant, lights illuminating the smokestack.
Valentine had seen Kurian cockleshells before. All he knew about them was that the paperlike material they were made of acted as both structure and climate control. For all he knew it was living cell material, some creature with no more ability to move or alter shape than an orange.
This odd bubo on the tower was about the size of compact car, perhaps the smallest such residence Valentine had ever seen.
He had considered bringing explosives on the venture, but the Angel Food was tricky stuff to work with, and Southern Command had departed with the good electric detonators. He might have to climb both ways only to have his bomb not work.
Valentine fixed a length of climbing line to the protective grid on the pylon-topping light and lowered himself to the Kurian's enclosure, rope looped around one leg and his waist.
The Kurian's nest was also a work of suspension. Two cork-screws of the odd material anchored it to the top of the pylon.
Valentine slipped on one of his Cat claws and slashed at one of the supports. The material was much tougher than it looked; it was like trying to cut wet nylon with a butter knife. Finally it gave way with a crackly groan.
Vision, air, sound-all cut off in an instant.
It was like someone had put a wet leather bag over his head. Seeing stars from it pressing against his eyes, he realized it must be the occupant.
Valentine had never been this close to a Kurian before.
He couldn't fight it without letting go of the rope and plummeting into the Ohio. If he reached up with his Cat claws, they'd go right through the Kurian, and he'd wind up scalping himself, or worse.
Consciousness filled with gluey sludge, he felt himself go dizzy and light-headed. The Kurian was taking over, denying him the use of arms and legs-
He settled for banging his head against the pylon over and over, hard.