"They always give you a last chance."
"So this Kurian makes peace with Kentucky. What about the rest of them? It's all well and good to be neutral, but others gotta respect it or it don't mean jack."
"It's like a game to the Kurians," Stuck said to Valentine's Bears. "Sometimes their threats are empty; other times they are carried out to the last degree and beyond. They keep us guessing and on edge."
"Just good poker," Chieftain said. "Sometimes you can win a pile on the cheap, if you know how to bluff."
"I have Fort Seng, five-five," Habanero said from the radio.
Valentine walked over to the parked Rover. So much for sleep. "Tell them to get Colonel Lambert on the line. Wake her up if they have to. We need to talk."
You never knew how much of a Kurian threat was illusion and how much was steel. They were like magicians, always diverting attention from the operating hand.
Valentine put a steadying grip on Chieftain's arm.The Bear's hair had risen on top of his head. Valentine had known Bears who turned purple when readying for a fight, or whose eyes lit up like a pair of flares, or who turned into snorting, steaming, turf-tearing bulls. He'd never seen one give himself a war headdress before. Valentine had always assumed that Chieftain's name came from the Bear's characteristic tomahawks.
"Eloi and Morlocks?" Valentine asked, by way of calming him down.
"I could never much stand reading, Major. But I liked that H. G. Wells guy. Except for Food of the Gods; that one was just too weird."
"But maybe the most topical, considering tonight's conversation," Valentine said. But to be honest, he'd skimmed it too when he was thirteen.
"I read my share of the stuff when I was a boy," Valentine said, remembering the long winters in Father Max's library. He'd once thought it profitless idling, but it gave him a truer picture of the world before the cataclysm in 2022 than he received through bits and pieces of the reworked histories of New Universal Church photo-studies children in the Kurian Zone received.
Valentine had sat in any number of New Universal Church lobbies, waiting for free cocoa or bread issued in exchange for attending a short lecture. He'd paged through photograph after photograph of poverty, devastation from war, death by starvation and disease, every horror imaginable and most of them featuring children as victims.
In the Free Territories most of the history the kids learned had to do with the post-2022 resistance and the crimes perpetrated in the Kurian Zone. It was taken as a given that the Old World was a pleasant idyll. One side showed ugly pictures of a hell; the other painted fair, vague portraits of a heaven.
Valentine believed the reality to be a blend. Perhaps whether you lived in heaven or hell depended more on your mental attitude than anything.
Back to the present. One of the drawbacks of aging, Valentine thought from his venerable age of having recently turned thirty, is a tendency to dwell on the past. Living in many of his memories would mean a waking nightmare. Better to think about the future.
With that thought firmly in mind, Valentine examined the baton the flying Reaper had brought. Mrs. O'Coombe's crew was already calling it "Mothman."
The baton case looked like polished bone, possibly a femur from a preadolescent human. Valentine didn't know bones well enough to determine. Besides, the joints were sawn off where the tube had been threaded and capped.
He buried the cylinder and its caps. No telling what the Kurian might have planted in the baton in the way of location devices. For all he knew there could be an audio-video transmitter.
The offer itself took up only one paragraph. There was no signature or date. The paper had a watermark that looked vaguely like a stylized depiction of an eclipse-a ring of faintly red fire, offering just enough of a glow to read the letters in darkness. Perhaps that was the Kurian's version of a commitment.
Valentine touched it with a first-aid kit's tweezers.
A FAIR OFFER OF A SECURE FUTURE
-it began, and went on to outline the same deal the Reaper had spoken of. Autonomy for Kentucky save for the Kurian bridgehead at Louisville-a fair exchange for Evansville-provided it remained neutral in the war.
Frat returned, looking thoughtful, and stowed his rifle and gear. Valentine waved him over to the radio, where he was waiting to see if Lambert could make contact with Brother Mark-then perhaps he and the old churchman could have personal communication.
The lieutenant looked like he'd aged a year since Valentine had last seen him. Had the Kurian figured out a way to siphon off a little aura? He'd decided some time ago that that was what had happened to him at the Owensboro western bridge.
"How'd that thing ever find you, Frat?" Valentine asked. "Did it just flap down?"
"I thought I heard an engine-aircraft, maybe-and went up a hill so I could find a better listening spot.
"It gave a chittering sound from a tree above. I looked up and there it was. I thought my number was up. But it had a white hand towel in each mitt and waved them."
"You shouldn't go poking around alone," Valentine said.
"What, some good ol' boys around here will bend me over and make me squeal?"