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

chasing after a girl named Molly Carlson who’d helped him when he was slowed by a wounded comrade.
    The old-fashioned gallantry of the gambit impressed her, though she wondered if he could make a good Cat. To operate in the Kurian Zone, you had to have no more regard for those rounded up for the Reapers than you would for a livestock car full of pigs rattling toward the slaughterhouse. She had been a Cat for five years at that time—she started very young, still in her teens—and had seen his type. They usually ended up doing something courageous, suicidal, and ultimately useless.
    One odd thing about his file also intrigued her, and years later she still had no idea of the real answer. His mother’s name was missing. Not missing, as in never entered, but missing, as in someone had gone in with a razor blade and cut the name out of the permanent record, then made a fresh copy so that a quick glance made it look blank.
    Valentine had told her, openly enough, that his mother was a beautiful Sioux originally from the Canadian side of Lake Superior, and his father a Pan-American mutt from the San Francisco area. Easy to believe, given his features, bronze skin, and thick black hair—now with a contrasting brush of gray at the temples and an off-color strand or two up top. He didn’t seem to think his mother any big secret, so why did someone at Southern Command want it that way?
    Still, the men liked him. In the field he was a fighter; back at thefort he spent most of his time trying to make their conditions more livable. She liked him. She wouldn’t mind travelling with him again on what was basically courier duty. Maybe they’d get some of their old closeness back that they’d had down south when he was posing as a Quisling marine. She found herself more than half looking forward to the trip.
    Like anything, planning helped. She thought for an hour or so; then, when she’d decided how to approach him with the job, she finally had a clear enough mind for sleep.

    She found him with a corporal, laying out training gear for an excursion. Looked to her like it might be a scavenger hunt—there were plenty of bags, cutters, and tools. Even an automobile battery with a current rig that could be used to test everything from an electronic fuel injection system to an old phone.
    “We’re taking a trip, Val,” she said. Who could say no to orders?
    He sighed and set down his clipboard. “We are? Where?”
    “Lambert is sending me along with the delegation to the all-freehold conference or assembly or whatever they’re calling it. I need you.”
    “I’m needed here.”
    “Hate to pull rank on you, Val, but officially you’re just an auxiliary corporal on the Fort Seng roster. As a serving Cat, I’m nominally a captain. The major thing is just a courtesy.”
    “So are the captain’s bars, when it comes down to it,” Valentine said, yawning. “I bet you don’t even have a set.”
    “I do, but they’re from a member of the Iowa Guard who reallyshould have known better than to stop and question hitchhikers. Look like ours, though.”
    “Let’s see them,” Valentine said. “Otherwise the order’s not official.”
    “I keep them up my ass for emergencies. You want to get a spoon?”
    Valentine grimaced. “That’s not regulation. Order’s still invalid.”
    “Now you sound like Lambert. She can’t give an order unless her butt is clenched to regulation tension. Listen, Val, you’ve been bitching at me for a couple years now that I need a break. Maybe we both do. Don’t you want to dine on caviar and champagne for a couple weeks? Have a month of travel with someone else worrying about all the arrangements?”
    “There’s no such thing as a joyride these days,” Valentine said. “This will probably be just as exhausting as an operation. If we get stranded over there, God knows how we’ll ever get back.”
    “We can get in a refugee pipeline, worst-case scenario,” she said. “C’mon, man, it’ll