Valentine's Exile (Vampire Earth #5) - Page 5
The Nut, May: The Nut was an Arkansas State Medium Security Correctional Facility known as Pine Ridge before the Kurian Order, and would probably have remained another overgrown jumble of fence and concrete were it not for Mountain Home, the nearby town that fate selected to be the capital of the Ozark Free Territory (2028-2070).
There are any number of legends as to how Mountain Home ("Gateway to the Ozarks") became the seat of the Free Territory and the headquarters of Southern Command. The more colorful legends involve a poker game, a fistfight, a bad map, a general's mistress, or a souvenir shot glass, but the most likely story concerns Colonel "Highball" Holloway and her wayward signals column.
The colonel and her sixteen vehicles were one of hundreds of fragments fleeing the debacle south of Indianapolis that marked the end of the United States government as most Americans recognized it. While topping a hill northeast of Mountain Home two of her trucks collided, and Colonel Holloway established her signals company in the nearby town of Mountain Home. USAF General J. N. Probst, in charge of a substantial shipment of the first ravies vaccine, heard Holloway's test transmissions and rerouted his staff to make use of the army's facilities. Soon the fragments of everything from National Guard formations to a regiment of Green Berets were being inoculated and reorganized around Mountain Home. Civilians flocked to the protection of the military guns and vehicles, and a government had to be established to manage them. Some chafing in the first years as to whether Southern Command ran the Ozark Free Territory or the Ozark civilians ran Southern Command settled into the American tradition of military subordination to civilian authority-provided the civilians abided by the Constitution and held regular elections.
In those chaotic years the only law was martial-unless one counts the occasional lunchtime trial and afternoon hanging of looters and "profiteers" by horse and bike-mounted posses. Military justice required an incarceration facility, and as the only other prison nearby was being used to house ravies sufferers in the hope of finding a cure, Pine Ridge became Fort Allnutt, named for its first commander.
Sometime after his death it became "the Nut."
The Nut is an asterisk-shaped building that might pass as a college dormitory were it not for the bars on the windows. Double lines of fencing separate it from the fields-the prisoners grow their own crops and raise their own livestock and the better behaved they are the more time they get outside the wire-and subsidiary buildings have sprung up around it. Two technical workshops, a health clinic, the guard dorm, and the courthouse that doubles as an administrative center surround the six-story concrete asterisk. Finally there's "the Garage," an aluminum barn that houses a few wrecks used for spare parts. The Garage is where condemned men are hung, traditionally at midnight on their day of execution.
Valentine was proud of his memory, but in later years he never recalled his arrival at the Nut with any real clarity. Mostly he remembered a military lawyer reading the charges against him to a gray and grave presiding officer: torture and murder of prisoners under his supervision during the rising in Little Rock the wild night of what was occasionally being called Valentine's Rising.
Six men had died at the hands of the women he'd freed from the Kurian prison camp. They were guards who had used dozens of women under their supervision as sort of a personal harem. Valentine had never known their names and it was strange to hear them read out in court with all the formality that legal proceedings required-one wasn't known by any name other than "Claw."
Southern Command rarely tried its officers for the execution of armed Quislings-men caught fighting for the vampires were disposed of under a procedure informally called "bang-and-bury."
Two generations of bitter feelings between the sides, and the Kurian habit of sending their own armed prisoners straight to the Reapers, had hardened both sides.
"The court finds cause for a trial." Valentine remembered that phrase. The judge declared that Valentine should be kept within Fort Alnutt until the date of his trial, set for the end of the month: May twenty-third, to be precise.
This rapidity struck Valentine as strange; his knowledge of Southern Command jurisprudence was based on one bad hearing after the destruction of Foxtrot Company at Little Timber Hill and the occasional Southern Command Bulletin article, and it was rare to be tried within six months of one's arrest.
And with those words he went dumbly through the sanitary procedures at the jail entrance, climbed into shapeless baby-blue scrubs with large yellow Xs sewn onto the back, each leg, and the chest pocket, and went to his cell.
His cell he remembered. As a major he got his own room in what his guard escort told him was the nicer wing of the Nut. There was a door with a small glass window rather than bars, and windows that would open to admit a breeze, though the sturdy metal frame was designed so that he couldn't crawl out.
The room had five one-foot-square green linoleum floor tiles across, and nine deep. The bolted-down bed bore a single plastic-wrapped mattress and a depressed-looking pillow in a cotton case that smelled like bleach, as did his combination sink and toilet. His ceiling had a brown-painted light fixture but no bulb: "They don't waste fluorescent tubes on cons, so the sun decides 'lights out,' " the guard said. "Hot chow in the cafeteria twice a day, and we bring out a soup and bread cart to the exercise yard for lunch. Questions?"
"How do I get a shave?" Valentine asked, rubbing his three-day beard.
The guard, whose name tag read Young, but looked as though his first name should be "Gus" or "Mick" or something else hearty and friendly, stuck his thumb in a belt loop. "There's two razors in the showers. You have to use them under supervision. Be sure to put it back in the blue cleanser-"
"I'm not a suicide."
"Didn't say you were. We keep an eye on sharp edges here. Lots of the guys just grow beards until trial."
Valentine looked at what appeared to be a hundred keys at the guard's waist. "Is there a library?"
"Mostly paperbacks held together with rubber bands, and porn. There's a bookcase or two for the highbrows. We've got a store with the Provisional Journal and Serial Digest for sale; you can earn money in the fields or with janitorial work. Kitchen's full up now."
"Thank you." The formal politeness came out despite the circumstances.
"No problem, Major Valentine. Good luck with the trial. There's a packet of rules and instructions under your pillow. We do an hourly pass through if you need anything."
"A lawyer would be nice."
"You'll have a meeting tomorrow or the next day."
His uniform "scrubs" were poorly finished on the inside. Loose threads tickled whenever he walked. By the time he finished biting off the stray threads with his teeth it was time for dinner.
Officers awaiting trial had a small cafeteria to themselves. Valentine ended up being at the end of the blue-and-yellow file escorted by Young and another guard to the central cafeteria.
Dinner, plopped onto a tray and eaten with a bent-tined fork and a spoon that looked as though it dated from the War of 1812, consisted of an unappetizing vegetable goulash with ground meat.
Two clusters of officers ate together at opposite sides of the cafeteria. A narrow man with long, thinning, butterscotch hair in the smaller of the two cliques looked up at Valentine and made a motion to the seat next to him, but Valentine just dropped into the seat nearest the end of the food service line-and immediately regretted it. He felt alone and friendless, as though already dead, forgotten and entombed in this prison. After dinner some of the men smoked, and Valentine went to the slitlike barred windows and enjoyed the breeze created by the kitchen extractor fans. The Ozarks were black in the distance, the sun masked by haze.
"Shooter or looter?" a reedy voice said.
Didn't even hear him come. Valentine felt thick and tired, brain too apathetic to even function-if he didn't know better he'd suspect one of the mild Kurian sedatives had been put in the food.
He looked at the man, short and close to bald, with an ivory mustache and growing beard, smoking a cigarette from a whittled holder. The eyes were crinkled and friendly.
"Pardon?"
"Shooter or looter, boy? You're the new squirrel in the nut. What they got you in for?"
Valentine tried to make sense of the metaphor and gave up. "Murder. Quislings."
"Then you're a shooter. That's those three over there." He turned his chin in the direction of the group with the long-haired man. "I'm Berlinelli. Malfeasance in the performance of my duties."
"Meaning?"
"Looter. I was doing what a lot of other guys were doing, on a larger scale. Siphoning gasoline and diesel out of captured trucks and selling it."
"I thought everyone in prison was innocent," Valentine said, a bit startled at the man's frankness.
"If you're a snitch it's no hair lifted. I'm pleading out."
"I haven't even talked to my lawyer yet. I need to write some letters. You wouldn't know where I could get paper, would you?"
"Who's running your floor?"
"The guard? Young, I think."
"He's a decent guy. Just ask him." He tapped his wooden cigarette holder on the windowsill and winked. "Got to get back to my tribe. It's Grogs and Harpies in here; we don't mix much."
"Thanks for crossing no-man's-land."
"Just a little recon. Mission accomplished."
Valentine asked Young about paper and a pen as they locked him back in his cell. The long-haired man was two doors down.
"Ummm," Valentine said. "Corporal Young?"
"Yes, Major?"
"Could I get some paper and a pencil? I need to write a few people and let them know where I am." And he should write Post and give him the findings of the aborted investigation, which amounted to a few more facts but zero in the way of answers.
"Sure. It's a standard SC envelope; just don't seal it. Censors. I'll slip them under the door gap tonight on my rounds."
"Right. Thank you."
Young unlocked Valentine's door. Valentine couldn't help but glance at the fixture of a secondary bar, a bolt that could be slid home and twisted, fixed to the metal door and the concrete with bolts that looked like they could hold in Ahn-Kha.
"Major Valentine," Young said. "I heard about you on my break today. The fight on that hill by the river in Little Rock. It's . . . ummm … a privilege."
Valentine felt his eyes go a little wet. "Thank you, Corporal. Thanks for that."
A sticklike insect with waving antennae was exploring his sink. Valentine relocated it to the great outdoors by cupping it between his palms.
He gave the insect its freedom. He used to be responsible for the lives of better than a thousand men. Now he commanded an arthropod. As for the general staff training . . .
"What the hell?" he said to himself. "What the hell?"
He met with his military counsel the next day right after breakfast-some sort of patty that seemed to be made of old toast and gristle, and a sweet corn mush. The officer, a taciturn captain from the JAG office named Luecke who looked as though she existed on cigarettes and coffee, laid out the charges and the evidence against him. Valentine wondered at the same military institution both prosecuting and defending him, and, incidentally, acting as judge. Most of the evidence was from two witnesses, a captured Quisling who'd been in the prison camp and a Southern Command nurse lieutenant named Koblenz who'd been horrified at the bloody vengeance wreaked by the outraged women.
Valentine remembered the latter, working tirelessly in the overwhelmed basement hospital atop Big Rock Mountain during the siege following the rising in Little Rock. He'd countersigned the surgeon's report recommending a promotion for her.
He'd sign it again, given the opportunity.
"They've got a good case. Good. Not insurmountable," Luecke said.
"And my options are?" Valentine asked.
"Plead guilty and-see what we can get. Plead 'no contest'-get a little less. Plead innocent and fight it out in front of a tribunal." She turned the cap on her pen with her fingers but kept her eyes locked on his as though trying to get a read.
"When you say 'not insurmountable' you mean?"
"Good. I like a fighter. For a start you're a Cat. We're hip-deep in precedent on Cats not getting prosecuted for collateral casualties. We can blame the women for getting out of hand-"
"I'm not hiding behind the women. Try again."
The pen cap stopped twirling for a moment. "If it were just the Quisling we could toss a lot of dust around. Lieutenant Koblenz will be tough; her statement is pretty damning." The cap resumed its Copernican course.
"She must have presented some case of charges for them to hunt me down so fast."
"She didn't file them. They talked to every woman who survived that camp and the battle. All the others couldn't remember a thing."
"Then who's behind this?" Valentine asked.
"Your former commander, General Martinez. I should say General Commanding, Interior, I suppose. He got promoted."
Valentine's head swam for a moment. When he could see the tired brown eyes of his counsel again he spoke. "He's got a grudge against me. I gave evidence at a trial-not sure if it can even be called that."
"Interesting. Tell me more."
Valentine tried to sum the story up as concisely as he could. He had come out of Texas with his vital column of Quickwood and was ambushed by "redhands"-Quisling soldiers who wore captured uniforms from Southern Command stockpiles. He had a pair of Grog scouts-they were smarter than dogs, horses, or dolphins and were far more capable fighters. The Grogs survived with a handful of others, and with a single wagonload of Quickwood made it to General Martinez, more by accident than design, at his refuge in the Ouachitas. Martinez had two of his Grogs shot at once, and it was only by putting a pistol to the general's head and arresting him for murder that Ahn-Kha survived.
The trial ended in a debacle and Martinez's camp was divided; many of the best soldiers decided to quit the place with Valentine. Ultimately they made it to Little Rock where the rising took place.
Captain Luecke remained poker-faced throughout the story, and only moved to set her pen down. "I don't know much about General Martinez, or what happened during the Kurian occupation," she said. "I spent it aspirating mosquitoes in a bayou. I'm going to ask for a delay in your trial date so I can prepare a defense, if you agree. Fair warning: It'll mean a lot more time for you in here."
She was a cold fish, but she was a very smart cold fish. As she packed up Valentine was already missing the smell of tobacco and coffee.
"Captain?" Valentine said.
"Yes, Major?"
"I'm not sure I want to fight this. I let prisoners get tortured and murdered right under my nose."
She sat back down. "I see. Guilty, then?"
"I . . ." The words wouldn't come. Coward. You're quick to condemn others.
"You don't have to decide this second. Can you do something for my satisfaction?" Yes.
"Give me the names of some of those women. And no, we're not going to point fingers and say 'they did it.' I just want to hear from all sides about what happened that night."
Valentine thought back to the too-familiar faces of the siege, especially those stilled in death. And not always faces: Petra Yao was only identified by the jewelry on the arm they found; Yolanda, who had to wear diapers thanks to the mutilation; Gwenn Cobb who walked around with her collar turned up and her shirt tightly buttoned afterward-rumor had it they'd written something on her chest with a knifepoint; the Weir sisters, who never talked about it except for their resulting pregnancies; Marta Ruiz, who hung her head and grew her hair out so it covered her eyes. . . .
Christ, those cocksuckers should have gotten worse.
Valentine felt the old, awful hurts and the heat of that night come back. The thing, the shadow, the demon that sometimes wore the body of "the Ghost" flooded into his bloodstream like vodka until his face went red and his knuckles white.
There were things a decent man did, whatever the regulations said, and let any man who hadn't been there be damned.
"Still want to plead guilty?" she asked.
Valentine tried lowering his lifesign. That mental ritual always helped, even when there weren't Reapers prowling. "Prepare your case."
The men in the exercise yard kicked up little rooster tails of fine Arkansas dust-Valentine hadn't seen its like even in Texas; soft as baby powder and able to work its way through the most tightly laced boot-as they walked or threw a pie-tin Frisbee back and forth.
He got to know his three fellow "shooters" there. They took their sourdough bread and soup out as far from the prison as possible and sat next to the six-inch-high warning wire that kept them ten feet from the double roll of fence.
Colonel Alan Thrush was the highest-ranking, not distinguished-looking or brimming with the dash one expects from a cavalry leader. He had short legs and the deft, gentle hands of a fruit seller. "Caught a company of Quislings doing scorched earth-with the families inside-on a little village called McMichael." McMichael had risen against the Kurians in response to the governor's famous "smash them" broadcast shortly after Valentine's move on Little Rock. "Left them for the crows in a ditch."
Unfortunately, his men left the customary set of spurs on the forehead of the Quisling officer in charge, and the commander of a column of infantry following made the mistake of pointing out his handiwork to a pink-cheeked reporter who neglected to mention the charred corpses in McMichael.
Colonel Thrush intended to fight out his court-martial. He said so, slurping a little beet soup from his pannikin.
Valentine was the only major.
Captain Eoin Farland was a clean-faced, attractive man whose wire-rimmed glasses somehow made him even better-looking. A reserve officer who'd been put in charge of a fast-moving infantry company in Archangel, he'd been far out on the right flank on the drive to Hot Springs. His men recaptured a town, stayed just long enough to arm the locals, and when he asked the local mayor what to do with six captured Quislings who had gunned down a farmer hiding his meager supply of chickens and rice, the mayor said, "Shoot them."
"So I did. I'd seen it done before in the drive, especially to Quisling officers."
"But he put it in his day report. Can you believe that?" Thrush laughed. "Shoot, bury, and shut up."
"Says the man who left bodies in a ditch," Farland said.
"Not better, that's for sure," the thin man with the long, honey-colored locks said. Valentine had learned that his last name was Roderick, that he held the rank of lieutenant though he looked on the weary side of forty, and nothing about the charges against him. Every time anyone asked, he shrugged and smiled.
"Are you asking for court-martial?" Valentine asked Farland.
"No. I'm pleading guilty. They've got my paper trail. Something's holding up the show, though, and my trial date keeps getting postponed."
"As does mine," Thrush said.
"What's gonna happen is gonna happen," Roderick said. "I'm asking for lobster and real clarified butter for my last meal. How about that? Better get it."
"Shut up," Thrush said.
"You start planning yours too, Colonel."
Valentine only got one piece of mail his first week in the Nut. It came in an unaddressed envelope, posted from Little Rock, and bore a single line of typescript:
HOW DO YOU LIKE IT?
"You've got a visitor, Major," Young said after the sun called lights out the next day. Valentine wondered if the guard ever got a day off. He'd seen him every day for a week.
Something felt wrong about moving across the prison floor in the dim light. Sounds traveled from far away in the prison: water running, a door slamming, Young's massive ring of keys sounding like sleigh bells in the empty hallway.
Valentine expected to be taken to some kind of booth with a glass panel and tiny mesh holes to speak through, but instead they brought him to a big, gloomy cafeteria on the second floor of the asterisk. Light splashed in from the security floods outside.
Young made a move to handcuff him to a table leg across from a brown-faced man in a civilian suit. Valentine was jealous of the man's clean smell, faintly evocative of sandalwood-in the Nut one got a new smock once a week and clean underwear twice.
Valentine wondered at the smooth sheen of his visitor's jacket. The civilian's gray suit probably cost more than everything Valentine owned-wherever they were storing it now.
"Don't bother, please," the man said, and Young put the handcuffs away. "It's an unofficial meeting. Won't you-"
Valentine sat down. He noticed his visitor nibbled his fingernails; their edges were irregular. Somehow it made him like the man a little better.
"Major Valentine, my name's Sime."
He said the name as though it should provoke instant recognition. Valentine couldn't remember ever having heard it.
Neither man made an offer to shake.
Sime tipped his head back and spoke, eventually. "I'm a special executive of our struggling new republic. Missouri by birth. Kansas City."
"How did you get out?" Valentine asked. Jesus, that used to be the first question he'd ask those fleeing the Kurian Zone in his days as a Wolf. Old habits died hard.
"My mom ran. I was fourteen."
"What's a 'special executive'?" Valentine asked.
"I'm attached to the cabinet."
"That superglue is tricky stuff."
"Quick but dusty, Major."
"You are going to come to the point of this?"
"Tobacco? Maybe a little bourbon?" Sime made no move to produce either, and Valentine wondered if some assistant would emerge from the shadows of the big, dark room.
"No, thanks."
"Trying to make things more pleasant for you."
"You could get me a bar of that soap you used before meeting me."
"How-oh, of course. Ex-Wolf. I'm very sorry about all this, you know."
Valentine said nothing.
Sime leaned forward, placing his forearms on the table with interlaced, quick-bitten fingers forming a wedge pointed at Valentine. "Are you a patriot, Major?"
"A patriot?"
"Do you believe in the Cause?"
Had the man never read his service file? "Of course."
"Body and soul?"
This catechism was becoming ridiculous. "Get to the point."
Sime's eyes shone in the window light. "How would you like to do more to advance the Cause than you've ever done before? Do something that would make the rest of your service-impressive though it is-look like nothing in comparison?"
"Let me guess. It involves the charges against me disappearing. All I have to do is go back into the Kurian Zone and-"
"Quite the contrary, Major. It involves you pleading guilty."
A moment of stunned silence passed. Valentine heard Young shift his feet.
Valentine almost felt the edge of the sword of Damocles hanging above. "That helps the Cause how?"
"Major Valentine. I'm personally involved in-in charge of, in a way, some very delicate negotiations. A consortium of high-level officials in the Kurian Zone-"
"Quislings?"
Sime wrinkled his nose and opened and shut his mouth, like a cat disgusted by a serving of cooked carrots.
"Quislings, if you will," Sime continued. "Quislings who run a substantial part of the gulag in Oklahoma and Kansas. They're offering to throw in with us."
"I see why you use good soap."
"Stop it, Major."
Valentine turned toward Young.
"Listen!" Sime said, lowering his voice but somehow putting more energy into his words. "We're talking about the freedom of a hundred thousand people. Maybe more. An almost unbroken corridor to the Denver Protective Zone. Wheat, corn, oil, livestock-"
"I see the strategic benefits."
Sime relaxed a little. Valentine felt nervous, his dinner of doubtful meatloaf revisiting the back of his throat. "Still don't see how my pleading guilty helps."
"These Quislings are afraid of reprisals. Maybe not to them, but to some of the forces they command. The Provisional Government organizing the new Free Republic wants to show them that we're not going to permit atrocities."
"Show? As in show trial?"
Sime turned his head a little, as though the words were a slap. He looked at Valentine out of one baleful eye.
"You have me. You also have this: plead guilty, and it comes with an offer. You'll get a harsh sentence, most likely life, but the government will reduce it and you'll serve somewhere pleasant, doing useful work. Five years from now, after we've won a significant victory somewhere, your sentence will quietly be commuted to celebrate. You could return to service or we could arrange a quiet little sinecure at a generous salary. When was your last breakfast in bed? I recommend it."
"I have the word of a 'special executive' on that? I've never heard that title before:"
"Consider it as coming from your old governor's lips. He knows what you did in Little Rock. I'm speaking for him and for the other members of the Provisional Government."
Valentine took a deep breath.
"Do this, Major, and it'll be the best kind of victory. No bloodshed."
"That's the carrot; where's the stick?"
"You haven't given me an answer yet."
"Let's say I fight it out."
"Don't."
"Let's say I do anyway," Valentine said.
Sime looked doubtful for the first time. "The Garage." The air got ten degrees warmer in the dark of the cafeteria.
"Will you accept a counteroffer?"
"I'm a negotiator. Of course."
"Do you know Captain Moira Styachowski?"
"I know the name from your reports. She served with you on Big Rock."
"Get her in here. I hear that same offer from her, and I'll take it."
"Ah, it has to come from someone you trust. I feel a little hurt, Major. Usually my title-"
"I've had a gutful of titles in the Kurian Zone. You can keep them."
"I'll see what I can do. If she's on active service I might not be able to get her."
"She's the only-no. If you can't get her, get Colonel Chalmers. I've dealt with her before."
Sime extracted a leather-bound notepad and wrote the name down. "She's with?"
"A judge with the JAG."
"Very well. Thank you for your time, Major."
"I have nothing but time."
"Don't be so sure. Take my deal." Sime looked up and waved to Young.
The next day rain tamped down the dust on the exercise yard. The shooters and the looters stayed on opposite sides of the pie slice between the frowning brown wings D and E, trying to keep their pannikins full of lukewarm lentils out of the rain as they sat on long, baseball-dugout-style benches.
"Anyone got an offer from a civilian named Sime?" Valentine asked.
Farland and Thrush exchanged looks and shrugged. Roderick sucked soup out of his tin.
"We're getting pushed back again," Farland said. "God, it's like getting a shot when the doctor keeps picking up and putting down the big-bore needle."
Roderick stopped eating and stared. "I had rabies shots. Harpy bite."
"He said all this is more or less of a show. To convince some gulag Quislings that Southern Command won't just shoot them dead if they join us."
"News to me," Thrush said. He returned his pannikin to the slop bin and returned, twitching up his trousers with his deft little hands before he sat. It took Valentine a moment to remember when he'd last seen that gesture-Malia Carrasca's grandfather in Jamaica would go through that same motion when he sat. "You know, they might be firing smoke to get you to plead out."
"They've tried murderers before," Farland said. "My uncle served with Keek's raiders before they hung Dave Keck. But he killed women and children."
"And Lieutenant Luella Parsons," Roderick said. "When was that, fifty-nine?"
"She shot the mayor of Russelville," Farland put in. He wiped raindrops from his glasses and resettled them.
"Yeah, but she claimed he was working for them. Said she saw him talking to a Reaper."
"I heard they tried General Martinez himself for shooting a couple of Grogs," Roderick said.
"That makes sense," Thrush said. "If you ask me, it's a crime not to shoot 'em."
"Actually it was," Valentine said. "I was there. The two Grogs he shot were on our side."
"First I've heard of it. Were the charges dropped?" Farland asked.
Valentine shook his head.
"You made a powerful enemy, Major," Thrush said. "Martinez had a lot of friends in Mountain Home. He had the sort of command you'd send your son or daughter off to if you wanted to keep 'em out of the fight."
"Technically I was under him during Archangel. His charges are why I'm here, or that's what my counsel says."
"Bastard. Heard he didn't do much," Farland said.
"I wouldn't know. I was over in Little Rock."
Roderick grew animated. "Heard that was a hot one. You really threw some sand in their gears. What was her name, Colonel . . ."
"Kessey," Valentine put in. "She was killed early on in the fi