Free Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth by E.E. Knight Page A

a full complement.”

    She returned to her little garret platform and watched the sky. It was a partly clouded night without enough ambient light to really make out the clouds, so the night sky seemed like a jigsaw puzzle with two thirds of the pieces missing.
    Did she need a rest? Maybe. She wondered how her stomach would handle an ocean trip. It used to be she had good days and bad days with her digestion; now they were mostly bad days. Valentine suggested milk and yogurt, and even brought her yogurt back from a dairy in Evansville that he bused over to for his own purposes—Val was a big milk drinker and liked it as straight from the cow as possible, whereas most of the time Fort Seng made do with reconstituted powdered milk that was hard to distinguish from a piece of chalk dissolved in a glass of water.
    It would be nice to be tasked with something that didn’t involve penetrating a Kurian Zone and taking out some manner of well-guarded target. The delegates would have plenty to eat and drink—what did they live on up there? Vodka, herring, and reindeer meat, she suspected. If it was to the north. Maybe it was, who knows, Malta in the Mediterranean. She’d once read a book on Malta and all the sieges it had survived—everyone from Greeks to Turks to Germans. Sun would be better than glaciers.
    Transport. Her feet could use a rest, too. The idea of not walking or bumping along on horseback appealed.
    She wondered if they could shoehorn Ahn-Kha into the trip. Kentucky was more than just people now; there were a couple of thousand Golden Ones and a few hundred Gray Ones camped out south and west of Fort Seng. The Golden Ones had already scouted out a limestone quarry for building dwellings that would be more substantial than tents. His reassuring, muscular bulk sometimes prevented problems with local roughnecks from even starting. And he’d be warm at fifty thousand feet, or if the weather turned on them at the North Pole, or wherever over there they were heading.
    Her closest thing to a partner, in war and in her personal life, slumbered in his loosened uniform. Only his soft, moccasin-like legworm-leather boots with their crepe-rubber soles were off.
    He had a sparse little room. He had a few books, most of them histories. Valentine was a Civil War buff and swapped books with other enthusiasts. His little collection of toiletries, the expensive soap that he always managed to acquire one way or another, was arranged on a small shelf by the door, with his towel and washcloth both hanging on hooks. A wardrobe held spare and dress uniforms and a smattering of civilian stuff, and some overalls he wore when quartering logs with axe and wedge and sledge and splitting maul.
    He kept himself exercised that way when at Fort Seng. Something of the old hot desire she used to feel for him could still rekindle when she watched him quartering wood. He worked relentlessly, back muscles writhing like coiling snakes as he placed his logs. Then he let the axe slide through his fingers until he swung it effortlessly around, letting the weight of the blade build momentum through the swing until it struck with a resounding
thwack!
that echoed off the barn and south hill.
    Wood cutting was a metaphor for how he approached most jobs. He broke any task up into smaller pieces, then struck hard at each little piece of it. She heard him give a talk about strategy on the campaign in Texas to his Razorbacks once, where he predicted that the Kurian rule in Texas would be quartered and split into kindling.
    She’d recruited David Valentine after his name had been passed to her by the Lifeweavers. She read his confidential file—it was easy enough to swipe, since in those days Southern Command’s headquarters had very little security in the personnel department—andshe’d become intrigued by him after reading a lengthy report he’d written about his experiences in Wisconsin and Chicago. Chicago was not mission-related; he’d gone there