After mapping a route and leaving the Wolf with his pack radio back at a base camp on the other side of the old Hoosier National Forest, she penetrated the “base” to see what she could through her old pair of mini-binoculars from the hills.
Something was definitely up. It was at the bigger of the two mammoth resort hotels, a round white thing built around what she guessed was some kind of spectacular dome.
Intelligence did not have a lot of information on French Lick. The round white resort was a recuperative hotel for wounded who needed longer recoveries or adjustments to artificial limbs and so on. The one a little south on the road was allegedly a retirement home for military personnel, run by the New Universal Church. Like most institutions devoted to the elderly, it was a fiction, with the majority of the aged given a few weeks to settle in and relax, with a series of snapshots taken to send to the relatives back home before a death from a food-poisoning incident or a flu outbreak would be regretfully announced—just enough messy detail to let others delude themselves into thinking that the pensioner hadn’t had a last dance in the arms of a Reaper.
She’d learned a few things observing the hotel. She got a sense of its rhythms, where people would be, doing what, and when.
At night the huge rotunda of the hotel was lighted up like a Christmas party. Massive amounts of food were brought in, for two hundred people or more. The old hotel hadn’t seen that many rooms occupied in eighty years. From what she’d been able to observe, it wasn’t the usual Quisling high command work-hard-and-sneak-in-some-play conference, either. The only women she’d seen brought in were in uniform or had the look of professionals and a spouse or two in riding clothes for the hotel barn to the northeast. Back when she was scouting Texas or Kansas or Tennessee, with this many high-ranking Quislings they would have been bringing in sexual entertainment by the busload.
There was a time when her path inside would have been to pose as one of the hookers. She doubted she could turn the trick, so to speak, these days. Too many miles in too much weather without enough food. She wasn’t a sleek, youthful Cat anymore; now she was more like a rangy, bug-bitten feral. A man would have to be very, very desperate to risk his job security and his life over an aging specimen such as her. She’d always played down her looks, but now that they’d faded like dried flower petals, she missed them, just a bit.
But what youth and beauty couldn’t achieve, age and experience could. The latter were more reliable anyway, and they didn’t make her feel like a trollop. Might as well chance getting a little closer.
She wiggled another fifty or sixty feet down the slope just to the northwest of the hotel and paused where she could make out an Ordnance Army sign stenciled in white at the parking lot:
ORD AF 3RD TRAINING BATTALION VS-LSH
She had a better vantage on the parking lot now. Yes, something big must be going on inside. There were mobile communication trucks with strange little antennae that reminded her of the rack on a charcoal grill or xylophones.
There were all sorts of vehicles here parked in the lot or on the grass, even command cars and escort vehicles with markings she didn’t recognize. The Ordnance and the Georgia Control were here in force, the pierced crescent of the Moondaggers, but there were a couple of other symbols—a Roman-looking eagle and something that resembled the twisted serpents and staff of the old caduceus, and a pyramid with an eye atop it not that different from the one that appeared on old U.S. currency. She committed them to memory; she could always pick them out of one of the intelligence ledgers later.
The lights inside the hotel flickered and she heard a throaty roar as an up-on-blocks trailer serving as an emergency generator kicked on. They probably had a salvaged generator from a diesel train or two ready to go for just such a contingency.
“Hmmmmmmmm,” she said to herself. Indiana’s more-promise-than-lick rural electricity must have choked. She reached into one of the capacious pockets of the mottled old duster she wore in the field and extracted a piece of dried meat.
Ruminating, you might call it. She tore off a hunk and chewed vigorously. One had to have a good set of teeth and strong jaws to handle Kentucky jerky. There might be a little beef or pork in there for flavor, but it was undoubtedly legworm flesh, as sure as Spam came in a can with its own opener.
A couple of soldiers in Ordnance uniform trotted out to the generator trailer and climbed inside. She traced the wire running to the hotel’s green-painted substation, artfully hidden by shrubbery.
She reached for her sword hilt before knowing why. Peripheral vision had triggered nerve synapses—
Almost seven feet of walking, robed death came out of the hotel’s rear entrance and headed for the generator trailer. Even at this distance it was unmistakable. The Reaper paused and slowly surveyed the western hills overlooking the hotel. Duvalier dropped into her usual koan that reduced mental activity to the point where, hopefully, the Reaper wouldn’t sense her mental and emotional activity—“lifesign,” she’d learned to call it, but God knows what the Kurians thought of it as. She always pictured a dark beach, only the stars above glittering in the milk-warm air, and her sitting on the sand. It was half memory, half fantasy with her ever since she’d spent the night on a beach like that while visiting the Texas coast. All she’d done was mentally edit out all the garbage that the tide had thrown up to litter the beach. Her mental camera concentrated on her toes, then her whole body, and back and back it pulled across the beach, reducing the image of her until she was lost in the gentle surf.
The koan also had the practical effect of relaxing her, so if she had to she could go into action loose, with sure and steady hands.
A Reaper meant a Kurian. With these woods and hills, it had to be nearby. Probably in the hotel—nothing else in the area matched its level of security.
If a Kurian were here overseeing his generals, it was just possible that there would be
other Kurians in attendance. Was the alliance already settled, and this conference was just to hammer out the details? Or were they still determining who would do what in joint action against Kentucky in the future? If it were the latter, there might be a party of Kurians keeping an eye, or whatever sensory node the Kurians used to keep from getting consumed by their cousins, on their generals. They’d also want to make sure rival rulers weren’t offering deals to the Quislings that might put them at a disadvantage.
That was their weakness. Time would tell if it was fatal. If the Kurians had shown any ability to work together, they would have subjugated humanity as easily as humans controlled life and death in a chicken coop.
That might explain all the security. Even air had some difficulty getting in, judging from the guards on the roof near the rust-streaked, multi-ton HVAC units.
Security might keep her out, or if it didn’t keep her out, find her once she made it inside the hotel.
She thought about calling in the cavalry. A single Reaper was a factoid. Intriguing, and further confirmation that something major was in the works here, but she wanted evidence before making a case that the disheveled elegance of the French Lick resort was worth the fight. Maybe they were only deciding on a new communications network or, given the problems with the electricity, establishing a new national grid for the Eastern Kurian Zones. Shooting it up would bring a world of hurt down on the assault force. They’d be lucky to make it back across the Ohio even if they scattered into small parties.
No, she couldn’t ask men to die on a hunch.
Full dark came on and the insects filled the night with their signaling. Eating and sex. She knew the Kurians ate. How did they reproduce? Maybe the meeting was just a big insemination (or whatever they did) party to produce a new generation. It would be funny to tell the Bears they had to shoot up an orgy.
The “doughnut” part of the hotel glowed like hot embers.
“Lit up like Christmas,” she said, taking a handful of Indiana mud and generously coating her face. They must have no shortage of diesel oil for the generator. The inner ring of security would have their night vision compromised by the hotel’s lighting. Dogs wouldn’t be fooled, but dogs were at their most useful when they knew what they were looking for. She’d had dogs practically step over her only to whine and lunge at night-feeding rabbits.
She worked her way around to the west entrance, cradling her old, seemingly gnarled sword-stick. The two men at the door looked solemnly alert. A broad patio almost encircled the round part of the hotel. Soldiers were standing and smoking. Perhaps she could try there.