Free Winter Duty by E. E. Knight

tobacco, recycled beer, sun-baked sweat, and mud fresh from a swamp where eggs go to die. The regulars wouldn’t have it any other way.
    On that warm night of a quick-fading autumn the bar saw a stranger. His clothing set him apart immediately: thick blue-black leathers that looked too oddly pebbled for cowhide but not stiff as snake-skin. He wore a small machine-gun pistol in a big soft holster across his midriff and a straight-bladed, sharkskin-handled sword across his back. Vambraces like a motorcycle rider might wear guard his arms, but odd bulges running up from the wrist suggest they might be offensive as well as defensive.
    For all the weaponry, the high military boots with their lace guards snapped over, the scar descending from his right eye and fresh bruising to the left, and the long black hair tied back so it’s out of his eyes, he doesn’t look like he’s after a fight. For a start, he looks tired: the haggard, leeched-out look of a man who has undergone prolonged stress. Then there’s the odd hang of his jawline. A humorous tip to his jaw gives him a slight, good-humored smile.
    “Cat. Or maybe a Bear,” one of the grizzled river rats says to his companions dressed in more typical attire of soft white trousers and light canvas jackets, sockless in their rubber-soled boat shoes. They don’t make room for the newcomer at the bar, river rats being as fiercely territorial as any Dumpster-diving rodents.
    “What’ll ye think a Hunter wants here?” a man with a patchy youth’s beard asks.
    “Someone to push up into a length of trouble,” the oldster says, unaware of just how right he would turn out to be.

    According to Southern Command tradition, Backwater Pete’s served the best tequila on chipped ice in the Trans-Mississippi Free Republics. Not being an expert on tequila, Valentine opted for rum and tea, a concoction he’d grown used to during his sojourn in a Kurian uniform with the Coastal Marines.
    The rum was of good quality, all the way from Jamaica. Valentine reread his accumulated mail over it while his mind subconsciously absorbed the rhythms of Backwater Pete’s. A man in a bar had a choice to be alone, even if he could smell the sweat and engine oil on the man next to him, and he’d dumped his six new companions at a Southern Command billet-flop.
    They were all the reinforcements he was getting, and he didn’t like the look of them. Hatchet men sent to decide what was worth saving and what was worth discarding, plus one young doctor and an ancient nurse.
    He savored his mail like a gourmet meal. The aches and pains from last week’s wounds were forgotten in the excitement of mail.
    He opened the one all the way from Jamaica first, wondering what tortured route it had taken to get to the UFR. Probably landed by some friendly smugglers on the shore of Texas, probably on the same boat that brought in rum, coffee, and fabric dyes. The Dutchmen from the Southern Caribbean were good about that sort of thing.
    There was a picture of Amalee, dated six months ago and stamped by Southern Command’s mails in mid-October, probably on the same boat that made the rum runs. She had deep copper skin and her mother’s wide, bright eyes. She would be seven now.
    Seven.
    Nice of Malita to write. The letter was mostly of Amalee’s do ings and development and included a clipping from the Kings-ton Current , describing the exploits of Jamaica’s “Corsairs” off the coast of Cuba.
    Nothing from Hank in school—Valentine had made a call to make sure he still was in school. He was just getting to be that age where a boy notices all the interesting ways nature arranges for girls to be put together.
    Molly wrote him as well. He had three letters from her, increasingly worried as the months of last summer went by.
    He found a dry piece of bar and penned her a reassuring reply.
    There was one more letter to write. It had to be carefully phrased. Narcisse up in St. Louis would have to tell Blake that there