Winter Duty Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ROC

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  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, July 2009

  Copyright © Eric Frisch, 2009

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Knight, E. E.

  Winter duty: a novel of the Vampire Earth/E. E. Knight.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-06048-3

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  To John O’Neill,

  who keeps the heroic dream alive

  Dies iræ! dies illa

  Solvet sæclum in favilla

  Teste David cum Sibylla!

  —REQUIEM MASS

  USUALLY ATTRIBUTED TO THOMAS OF CELANO, C. 1200

  CHAPTER ONE

  The old Jackson Purchase, Kentucky, November of the fifty-fifth year of the Kurian Order: Summer and winter contest the season, with fall waiting on the sidelines as though waiting to determine a winner.

  Gloriously warm, some might even say hot days give way to chill nights of thick dew and fogs. The trees cling to their leaves like bony old women chary of nakedness, and the undergrowth remains thick and green or brown.

  A line cuts through the growth, trampled and torn into a furrow that circumnavigates only the biggest trees. A stranger to Kentucky of this era might conclude a bulldozer had gone on a rampage, but to natives the furrow is instantly recognizable as a legworm trail.

  Capable of eating their way across country at a steady three miles an hour, or doubling that if the riders chain the jaws and scythes shut and prod them along with pokes to their sensitive undersides, the giant yellow caterpillarlike creatures provide a ride smoother than any wheeled conveyance. Especially considering the broken-up state of many of Kentucky’s roads, cracked when the New Madrid fault went in 2022 and exploited by new growth.

  The trail ends at a camp.

  The two worms huddle next to each other in the cold, contracted as tightly as their segmenting allows. One would almost say “unhappily,” were the odd, segmented creatures capable of anything as prosaic as happiness or its antonym. Their skin is never more reminiscent of old fiberglass attic insulation than this late in the year, when new winter growth turns the outer layer into tufts and tatters.

  Each of the worms bears a pair of curious wooden yokes across its back, projecting from its sides like yardarms of a sailing ship. Each pair supports full hammocks, two to either side of the legworm. A few more walking wounded limp here and there in the camp, bringing food and cleaning those in the hammocks under the supervision of a blue-uniformed nurse. The nurses look exhausted, having spent the day walking up and down the back of the beast with the practiced air of a circus performer, plunging a hook into a fleshy yellow tuft to drop down and check on a patient, offer water, or adjust a towel hanging so as to keep the sun out of the wounded soldier’s eyes.

  The rest of the camp not on guard cooks, bakes, or sleeps dead-deep and dirty. There’s always too much to do in a hospital train.

  A thin strip of woodland and a slug-shaped marsh sit beyond the farthest picket, where a pair of figures lies on their bellies just below the crest of one of the low rolling hills of this quarter of Kentucky where it falls off toward the Mississippi River. Their prone bodies are pointed, like a pair of compass needles, at another camp, smaller in numbers but more spread out in size—a careless campsite, more interested in avoiding one another’s smells and sounds than organization or security.

  The watchers are male and female, though it is hard to tell by their hair or apparel. If observed from anywhere but atop them, they might be mistaken for a couple of dropped bundles of laundry. The female’s long brown overcoat is so patched that the fabric takes the appearance of a camouflage pattern. A thin, freckled face and a fringe of knife-cut red hair can just be made out behind the bug eyes of a pair of mini binoculars. Her longer, leaner companion carries more weapons and gear. He’s clad in an odd fusion of weaponry, pebbly leather, and slate gray uniform that looks more like the overalls a utility worker might wear, with thick padded knees and elbows. He’s worn-looking from scarred face to pocked and scratched bootheels. In contrast, clean and silky black hair covers the back of his head in a luxurious fall down to his shoulders.

  Her binoculars sweep from campfire to sentry, from thick-tired four-wheel vehicle to tent to trailer. She’s counting, assessing, calculating risk and threat potential.

  His unassisted eyes remained locked on a huddled group of figures in the center of camp. They’re neither tied nor restrained; instead they sit behind a staked-out square of construction pegs and red twine, eating hockey puck-sized biscuits the color of gravel from a freshly opened box. Mothers have mashed and soaked them in water for their children; the others either break up the rations with fingers or bite into them, depending on the condition of their teeth. One of the stronger captives, a hulk
with a pair of gloves over his ears serving as elephantine earmuffs, wrestles a heel of bread from a weaker, old man with a neat goatee. Their guards do nothing to intervene. It’s gone all too soon, save for a few biscuits given up by the older specimens behind the string to the mothers and children.

  It’s hard to tell exactly what the watching man may be thinking; he keeps his face a careful mask. But a careful observer might note that he’s blinking more than his companion as he watches the huddled captives try to feed their children.

  David Valentine suspected his eyes were glittering red in the dark, like eyes reflecting a camera’s flash in old pictures of wedding guests. The night vision he’d had ever since becoming a Cat came with some odd side effects. It was a gift of humanity’s Lifeweaver allies in their war against the Kurians, but a double-edged one. While his pupils could open as wide as if under a pharmacological effect to let more light in to the sensitive, and multiplied, rod-shaped cells beneath, that also left him vulnerable to headaches when exposed to sudden glare and color vision that was a little off from what most people experienced.

  Though the tears interfered with his vision, Lifeweaver-improved or not.

  His light-thirsty eyes watched the strangers’ nighted camp. The sky might have been a pane of glass between Earth and the stars, and the moon would be up in a couple of hours, when it would glow like a searchlight.

  They’d been lucky, oh, so lucky. Both parties had approached and camped without cutting each other’s trails, and only his train had bothered with a proper reconnaissance.

  His wounded and their caregivers were settling down just on the other side of a low hill and a stretch of soggy woodland between.

  A meeting engagement, then. Whoever found out the most about the other fastest would have the advantage. No sign of scouts discovering his wounded, or he suspected he’d see more action in the camp.

  “Who do you think they are?” he asked the woman next to him. Alessa Duvalier had trained him in the business of operating in the Kurian Zone.

  “Poachers. Nomansland trash.”

  All the layers of clothing made them look like bloated ticks. A ratty undershirt covered by variegated flannel with a windbreaker over that, and then an old military gear vest with ponchos in assorted configurations pinned back but ready to rearrange if the strangely warm fall rain started up again.

  Headhunters returning from a successful raid, probably bound for Memphis or Nashville. The Kurians had few scruples about stealing population from one another’s territories. Human rustling could make a person rich.

  In this case what the raiders were doing was a little less dangerous. They’d probably rounded up people displaced by all the fighting in Kentucky in the summer and fall, or perhaps caught escapees from some Kurian principality or other making a run for the Free Territory across the Mississippi.

  Twelve poachers. Plus two kids and the women. That he and Duvalier could see. Maybe more in the tents or out of camp hunting or on errands. They were old-school with their transportation: a gas ATV, a few motorbikes, tough-looking mules and llamas, a knot of sleek brush ponies, and two trucks towing big horse trailers for their captives, riding like livestock on the way to the slaughterhouse.

  Damned if he’d see them driven into those carts again.

  But twelve. A job for a company of soldiers.

  Or a small, very careful team. He had one of the best Cats in the business lying next to him. She’d volunteered for the operation in Kentucky last summer. He still wondered why.

  Duvalier lowered the binoculars. The wide, light-hungry pupils turned on him. Valentine picked up a faint glitter in the darkness, like polished copper reflecting flame. “You’re thinking about those scruffs.”

  Slang for future aura-fodder. Anything to keep from thinking of them as someone who might be a brother or a daughter.

  “And if I am?”

  “Will you at least let me go in first and shave the odds?”

  Of course his orders said nothing about rounding up strays. He had to consider that if it went bad, his wounded could end up driven to the Kurians south or north of here.

  The rewards in return for the risk didn’t amount to much. The people who had the guts and resources and luck to make it to the Freehold often needed years of education before they were more of a blessing than a burden. Without someone to schedule every moment of their lives, they wandered like lost sheep or were taken advantage of by hucksters and con artists.

  Their kids, however, took to the Free Territory like famished horses loosed in good pasture. The ones with memories of the Kurian Zone often made the best fighters in the Cause. They accepted the discipline and regulation and privation without complaint. They soon learned that the Quisling thugs who’d robbed and bullied everyone under their authority ran like gun-shy rabbits when put up against trained soldiers. Even more, the Reapers, instead of being invulnerable avatars of the local dread god-king, could in fact be hunted down and dynamited out of their holes and killed.

  Colonel Seng, who’d led Javelin across Kentucky in the most skillful march into enemy territory Valentine had ever experienced, had once been one of those children.

  The Free Republics could use another Colonel Seng.

  But twelve. Plus two kids and the women.

  He couldn’t do twelve. Not all at once, not without running too many risks of a mistake. Duvalier might be able to, but it would take her all night in her methodical manner. But perhaps he could stampede them.

  Two paces away, Alessa Duvalier lay swathed in her big overcoat with her sagging, flapped hunter’s cap pulled down low. You had to look twice to be sure there was a person there rather than an old, lightning-struck stump.

  Her eyes sparkled red, alive at the thought of cutting a few throats. Duvalier had a personal grudge against all Quislings. She’d selected Valentine years ago to become a Cat, tutoring him in sabotage, sniping, assassination, intelligence gathering—all the variegated duties that covert operations in the Kurian Zone entailed. They still bore faint, matching scars on their palms that sealed the odd bond between them, a strange blend of mutual respect and an almost filial blend of conflicting emotions.

  “They’ll send out scouting parties in the morning, sure as sunrise,” Duvalier said.

  “Bound to cut the legworm trail,” Valentine agreed.

  “We could nail the scouts headed our way.”

  “Which might draw more trouble, if this is just an advance party of a bigger operation,” Valentine said. “Besides, it won’t help those poor souls in the trailers.”

  Duvalier’s mouth opened and shut again. “Let’s skip the usual argument. I know you’ll just pull rank anyway.”

  Valentine answered by stripping off his uniform tunic as she muttered something about crusades and hallelujahs and saving souls.

  “We’ll need someone good with a rifle,” Valentine said. “Just in case they don’t bite.”

  “That old worm driver, Brian something-or-other—he has that scoped Accuracy Suppressed. He hit a deer on the run with it. His kid’s always carrying it around.”

  They ended up bringing the son—his name was Dorian—forward. The father came along as spotter. Dorian’s father claimed the boy was just as good a shot, with better eyes. He’d already seen action that summer and been blooded at what in better times would be called the tender age of fifteen at the river crossing where Valentine had taken out a company of Moondaggers with a handful of Bears. Dorian’s swagger showed that he considered himself a hardened veteran.

  Valentine could just remember what it was to be that young.

  He outlined the plan and had Dorian repeat it back to him.

  “Steady now, Dorian. Don’t pull that trigger unless they throw down on me, or I signal. And the signal is . . . ?”

  “You hit the dirt,” Dorian said, even though they’d already been through it once.

  “Remember to check your target. I’ll be moving around a lot in there. Can do?”

  “Ca
n do, Major Valentine.”

  It felt good to run. Valentine enjoyed losing himself in his body. Idleness left his mind free to visit the nightmare graveyard of his experiences, or calculate the chances of living to see another Christmas or summer solstice, or think about the look on the old man with the goatee’s face when his fellow prisoner ripped the heel of bread right out of his hand. So he escaped by chopping wood, loping along at the old easy Wolf cadence—even the rhythmic thrust of lovemaking.

  Though the last left him feeling vaguely guilty for not being attentive enough to the woman.

  Since they’d said good-bye to the Bulletproof legworm clan after the battle across the river from Evansville, he had nothing but memories of Tikka’s vigorous sensuality and the musky smell of her skin. They could be revisited at his leisure. Now he had work to do.

  He had the sense that their affair was over, her curiosity, or erotic interest, or—less flatteringly—the desire to cement good relations between Southern Command’s forces and her clan being satisfied.

  He crouched in a bush, watching the young sentry, who seemed to be watching nothing but stars and the rising moon.

  Valentine checked his little .22 automatic, which he usually carried wrapped up in a chamois with his paperwork. Over the years he’d had cause to kill with everything from his bare hands to artillery fire, but he’d found a small-caliber pistol more useful than any other weapon. It was quiet, the rounds were accurate at close range, and you could carry it concealed. With the lead in the nose etched with a tiny cross so it would fragment and widen the wound, it did damage out of proportion to the weight of the round.

  He wondered if the Kurians’ death-machine avatars, the Reapers, felt the same electric nervousness when they stalked a victim.

  Of course, in a meadow like this, in open country, Reapers did not stalk, at least not for the last few dozen meters. They acted more like the big, fast cats Valentine had seen loose in the hill country in central Texas, covering the distance in an explosive rush that either startled their prey into stillness or made escape futile.