"No, he didn't want to be pestered for money or jobs for relatives," Mrs. O'Coombe said. "He served under my maiden name, Rockaway. Sweet of him, was it not, Mister Valentine?"
Valentine made a note of that. He'd have to check the roll call records and medical lists to learn which legworm clan ended up taking care of him. They had left only a handful of wounded behind who seemed likely to survive, and even then only in areas controlled by their allied clans.
"How much do you know about Kentucky?" Valentine asked.
"My sources say there are many off-road trails thanks to the feeding habits of the legworms. I wanted vehicles that could use poorly serviced roads and even those trails."
"How did you get vehicles like these together?" Valentine asked. When he'd first seen her, he wondered if she'd hired mer cenaries. They knew about moving off-road with a column of vehicles. They had plenty of tow chains and cables ready to offer assistance to the next in line or the previous. He noticed the various trucks' engines had cloth cowlings stitched and strapped over them. The cloth had an interesting sheen. Valentine suspected it was Reaper cloth from their robes.
"Get them? Sir, they're from our ranch. We control property that covers hundreds of square miles. The ranch wouldn't function without range-capable wheels."
"Where do you ride?" Valentine asked Stuck.
He lifted a muscular, hairy arm and pointed to a pair of heavy motorcycles with leather saddlebags and rifle clips on the handlebars. "Me and Longshot are the bikers."
"Where's Longshot?" Valentine asked.
"Up here," he heard a female voice say.
Valentine looked up and saw a woman in old-fashioned biker leathers sunning herself atop the Bushmaster. She zipped up her jacket. "I'm the scout sniper."
She had strong Indian features, dirtied from riding her motorcycle. There was a clean pattern around where she presumably wore her goggles. You wouldn't necessarily call her "pretty" or "beautiful." Striking was more like it, with strong features and long black hair that put Valentine's to shame. "Comanche?" Valentine asked.
"Hell if I know. Tucumcari mutt: little bit of everything. You?"
"North Minnesota mix," Valentine said.
"Hey, want to see me feed these beasts?" Stuck asked.
Valentine nodded.
He walked over to the Chuckwagon's trailer. It had big twin tanks that Valentine had assumed were powered by gasoline or diesel or vegetable oil.
Longshot hopped down, and Stuck opened a latched cooler strapped on a little platform between the tanks. Two buckets rested inside. A ripe fecal smell came out, so powerful it almost billowed. Valentine watched Stuck and Longshot, apparently oblivious to the odor, each lift a bucket and pour it into one of the tanks.
"Everyone pisses and shits in the old honeybucket," Stuck said. "Food scraps are good too, especially carbohydrates."
Stuck took a leather lanyard from around his neck. Valentine noticed a Reaper thumb on it, interesting only thanks to an overlarge, pointed nail capping it. The lanyard also had two keys. Stuck used one of them to open a locked box on the tanker trailer and took out a plastic jug of blue-white crystals with a metal scoop sunk in.
"This is my job. I check the test strips and seed."
He extracted a long dipstick from the fragrant tank, wiped it on a piece of paper about the size of a Band-Aid, carefully placed the test paper in a clip, and held it up to a color-coded, plasticized sheet. Nodding, he made a notation on a clipboard that rested on the box's hinged cover.
"The Kurians guard this stuff like the Reaper cloth factories," Stuck said, leveling and dumping three roughly teaspoon-sized portions of the granules into the larger scoop.
"I've seen those factories," Valentine said. "Or one of them, anyway, in the Southwest."
"This tank's just about done," Stuck said. "Takes about thirty-six hours to do three hundred fifty gallons. Then we refill off this tank while we fill the other with waste, or pig corn, or melon rinds, or what have you. In a pinch, these engines can run off of kerosene, regular diesel, or even waste cooking oil, but this stuff's easier on 'em, and Habby doesn't bitch about changing gunked-up fuel filters."
Valentine watched him dump the crystals into the conversion tank.
"Always makes me wish I'd learned more science and chemistry and stuff, instead of just getting good at taking Reapers and Grogs apart," Stuck said.
"So where did you get that stuff? I've never even heard of it," Valentine said.
"The Great Dame is friends with some big bug in Santa Fe. He's playing both sides of the border, scared there'll be a reckoning if Denver Freehold and Southern Command pair up and hit the Southwest. He's a honcho in transport. Keeps trying to propose, but she shoots him down."
"What's your story, Stuck?"