"And there's a wonderful laundry just catty-corner. Tucks, it's called, and they will make those buckskins look like they've just been sewn. They can get the bloodstains out. Along with the ... ahem ... natural masculine odors."
The museum filled out about one quarter of the first floor of the building Donna had described. Valentine had bummed a pair of jeans and a clean shirt off one of the convalescing Wolves-Gupti had a head wound and Salvador a knee brace; Salvador's advice was to borrow from Gupti because there was every chance of him not remembering he'd ever lent out his clothes. Valentine borrowed clothes from Salvador and reported to the fort to let them know where he was staying; then went into town.
The museum was on his map.
He spent a few minutes chatting with the curator, a one-legged veteran with a solid build and a pistol in a quick-release holster-a former Bear. A single key dangled from a breakaway chain around his neck; Valentine suspected it was for a case of captured assault rifles.
He took a polite look at the exhibits, tracing everything from the last newsmagazines, stained and dog-eared, covering the earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanoes of 2022 before Big R hit. The next cabinet covered the Ravies plague-photographs of wild mobs caught in action, cities aflame, stacked corpses riddled with bite marks and bullet holes. Then the hopeful headlines from the few remaining newspapers about the Kurians, visitors from another world who had come to restore order to a shattered civilization. Alongside these were pamphlets, amateurish and smeared and filled with horrific sketches about how the Kurians were the cause of it all. There were drawings of the robed Crisis Governors with captions asserting that the "Reapers" were nothing but death-collectors, vampirelike creatures who fed on humans for their masters.
Then came a few fuzzy shots on bad stock of the Lost War. Drawings of the Grogs, a polyglot of beings brought by the Kurians from other worlds. Blasted tanks. Crashed planes. Mushroom clouds. Ruins. Flags being hauled down as bases went up in smoke to save them from capture.
A room, shielded from the rest of the museum by a black curtain, was devoted to the Kurian Order as practiced across the planet save for a few remote Freeholds. Valentine decided not to look in mere. He'd seen enough of the KZ wim his own eyes.
Valentine stated his business. The custodian picked up a phone and dialed, and he told Valentine one of the "upstairs men" would be with him in a minute.
* * *
Bone Lombard was about Valentine's age and had thick glasses. He introduced himself as a CID "filter."
"What's that?" Valentine asked.
"I'll show you."
He took Valentine back to the loading dock. Like a big garage, the dock had a series of metal doors on rails, a wide-open interior devoid of anything but structural supports. Painted lines crisscrossed the floor. The lines organized a sea of wire crates and metal trays filled with documents, binders, folders, and books.
"We get a lot of captured paperwork," Lombard said. "We meaning a big we-Southern Command. Anything that isn't obviously useful, like the details of a column, where and when it'll be, ends up being carted here. We get everything from Quisling cookbooks to personal letters, complete with perfume and snips of hair. I don't want to bore you with all the procedures, but the filters read through it." He waved at another young man and a woman. The other filters sat on wheeled chairs with a built-in desk, pencils handy under a droplight hanging from a hook attached to the back of the chair, going through loose paper. "It can sometimes give us a picture of what's really going on outside our borders. Where there are shortages, weak spots."
"You divine trends from paperwork?"
"Once, based on requisitions that the logistics commandos found in a hospital, we saw that huge amounts of bandages and surgical supplies were going to Shawnee Oklahoma. Turned out that the Fassler Revolt was in full swing."
Valentine remembered hearing something about it while he was studying for his lieutenant's bars at Pine Bluff. "It ended badly."
"Fassler and all his men got hanged, yes."
"I heard crucified," Valentine said.
"Maybe. Couldn't get them enough guns in time. The Oklahomans really locked down the counties in revolt. But again, if it weren't for some paperwork, we might not even know the name Fassler."
"I've got a name for you. What do you know about the Twisted Cross?"
Lombard shrugged. "I don't know. Let's index it."
One of Lombard's associates kicked out sideways and sent his chair-desk rolling down an alley between the boxes. A white cat jumped out of the way.
The "index" turned out to be an old library card catalog in a separate room, thickly insulated behind a safelike door. There were several of the huge wooden cabinets filled with index-card-size drawers. Valentine opened a drawer; under typed headings there were handwritten notations in a mix of letters and numbers.
Gannet, Pony A. (Capt. "Chanute Leadership Corps")
MIL-KAN ACT206928 11NOV61
Append CAP -6 INT -15( m, v) EX 61-415
"Don't even try," Lombard said. He took the card. "Seems this Pony-strange first name-Gannet was a captain from a Quisling body called the 'Chanute Leadership Corps.' Action Report 206-928 describes the fight. You see the date. Looks like he was taken, and there was something interesting about the capture-it appears as a separate appendix. His interrogation is also appended, and copies went to Division V, which deals with atrocities, and M, which deals with people missing in action. They must have caught him more-or-less red-handed at something. He was executed in '61 sometime between eleventh November and the end of the year. That's pretty fast nowadays. If you go to a card for the 'Chanute Leadership Corps,' you'll see-"
"I'm impressed. But the Twisted Cross?"
"Quisling unit, I bet," Lombard said.