"How did you get the message to give us?"
"After the one ate that poor coker, he grabbed me. That's where these bloodstains come from, his hands. The big pale bastard held me close, like he was going to dance with me."
The last dance, some called it.
"So the Reaper looked me in the eye and spoke, splattering flecks of blood on my face. I washed it off in the river, of course. Told me that you had time to quit Kentucky, forty-eight hours to leave with the rest of them. Of course, they had a message for the Evansville folks too. Then he carried me out like I was a toddler and chucked me in one of the commute boats the power plant workers use, and I got to Evansville as fast as the motor would take me."
"What are their demands to the Evansville people?"
"An exchange, they call it. Evacuation of Evansville. Anyone who wants to leave will be free to go into Kentucky. Then the south Illinois Kurians move in."
"I thought Evansville belonged to the Ordnance Kur," Lambert said.
"Must be some kind of deal they worked out," Valentine said.
"I don't know politics," Nicholas said. "I just wanted out of there."
They spent a few more minutes questioning him about numbers, and then they had him sketch out a map of the plant to the best of his ability. With that, they sent him to the small base hospital to be examined.
Lambert called her first staff meeting in the dining room of the big house. Moytana was there for the Wolves, waiting with the remaining platoon until Southern Command could send a replacement, Gamecock represented the Bears, and Captain Ediyak the rank and file of Valentine's battalion. Patel had charge of the base in the operations room. There seemed no getting rid of his former sergeant, for which Valentine would be everlastingly grateful. The door opened, and Brother Mark slipped in, looking tired and a little wild-haired. Valentine wondered if he'd been sleeping the previous night's party off.
"I was hoping to make this a friendly get-together," she began, ignoring Brother Mark, who was neither fish nor fowl in Southern Command but knew more about the Kurian Order than even the experts in the Miskatonic. "But the Kurians had other ideas. Word's probably gotten around the camp that they've moved against us already."
"Yes, terrible bombing," Brother Mark said.
"Bombing?" Valentine asked.
"The conference in Elizabethtown," Brother Mark said. "All the legworm clans sent representatives from the big towns to work out which way Kentucky's going to go. Franklin, Lexington, and Paducah aren't represented there, except by members of their underground. The town's been hit twice already, so you might say Kur is being represented after all. We're not sure if the planes should be part of quorum call or not."
"There wouldn't be a flying rattlesnake on the planes, would there?" Valentine asked.
"How did you know?"
"I ran into them in Dallas and again when I was out west. They're a remarkable organization. They can fly everything they need to a location, set up a small airport, and operate for as long as you can feed them fuel and munitions. They even can build simple bombs and so on if you give them high explosives and scrap for bomb casings."
"Brother Mark," Lambert said, "we're dealing with a separate event. The Kurians have seized the power plant that supplies Evansville."
"Which Kurians?" Brother Mark asked.
"Illinois, south of Chicago," Valentine said.
"Why should that matter?" Gamecock asked.
"I'm surprised you don't-," Brother Mark began.
"It's a binary problem with me, suh. Kurians are either dead, and therefore not a problem, or alive, in which case I try to make them dead."
"There's more to it than that," Brother Mark said. "To the Ordnance Kur, their Illinois cousins are practically enemies of the same degree as the people in Kentucky. To their minds, they're handing the city over to some 'neutrals.' The Ordnance wants the traffic on the river flowing free again. The Ordnance doesn't have much in the way of brown-water craft on the Ohio. They have boats from the Great Lakes, but they couldn't bring such substantial vessels to the Ohio without cutting them up into sections and reassembling them. And the rivermen in Memphis and Louisiana don't feel like raking the Ordnance's nuts out of the fire."
"Who's dumb enough to stick their nuts in a fire, I want to know," Moytana said.
Brother Mark harrumphed. "Chestnuts. It's a phrase going back to-"
Lambert rapped the table. "Let's get back to the situation at hand."
"Southern Illinois's no threat," Moytana said. "What forces they have are busy guarding against Grog raids out of the hills between the Ohio and the Mississippi, and the rest keep an eye on St. Louis. We could do worse. If the Ordnance decides to send that armored column that redhead wildcat claims is assembling and training there into Evansville, we wouldn't be able to stop them any more than the local leek cutters."
"Evansville has a hospital, workshops, manufacturers, horse farms, refineries for both ethanol and coal oil, factories even, never mind the agriculture-we need all that," Valentine said. "I'm not inclined to give it up."