Winter Duty Read Online Free Page A

to Duvalier. “See if you can find it, Smoke.”
    He turned away and flipped the maplight switch on one of the running trucks, a high clearance pickup with the cab top removed and replaced by an empty turret ring. One of Easy’s Crew leaned back behind the wheel. If you looked at the side of his head that wasn’t sprayed all over the hood of the open-topped truck, it appeared as though he was sleeping.
    “You want us bringin’ our supplies, Cap’n?” one of the captives asked.
    Valentine looked at the captives’ rations. Blitty Easy’s Crew fed their captives on the cheap, as you’d expect. Hard ration bread. Sticks of dried legworm segment divider—interesting only as chewing exercise—and sour lard, with a half-full jar of a cheap orange mix that tasted like reconstituted paint chips to drink. Though it did sanitize water. They’d be better off cooking the poachers for food, but of course Valentine couldn’t suggest that .
    It took a while to get them organized, to distribute loads on pack animals. He’d send a patrol back for the vehicles.
    As he walked back toward Dorian’s sniper perch with Duvalier, he refilled his submachine gun’s magazine from a heavy box of 9mm rounds he’d found in one of the locked glove compartments. It had yielded easily enough to a screwdriver.
    “What was that?” he demanded of Duvalier once they were out of earshot.
    “A darn good killing,” Duvalier said, showing her teeth.
    “I said I’d make the first move,” Valentine said. Was he more angry at the killing, or orders being disobeyed?
    “You screamed, Val,” Duvalier said. “I thought you were calling for help. I gave the order to fire. What’s your malfunction, David? They were just border trash.”
    “Major, if you please.”
    Duvalier rolled her eyes heavenward.
    “Just doing my duty,” Duvalier said. “You even remember what yours is? We’re supposed to fight them in as many places as possible, the ‘fire of a thousand angry torches’ or however that speech by the former Old World president went.”
    The mood passed, as it always did. Valentine was more vexed at himself than Duvalier. At least she had the guts to admit she liked killing.
    Valentine took his mood out on the food snatcher wearing the stolen gloves as earmuffs. He got to arrange the bodies and see that each one’s face was faceup but covered by a shroud of some kind.

    Valentine felt better as they gathered Easy Crew’s collection of aura-fodder and vehicles and brought them into camp. A sergeant gave the usual recruiting speech as they broke camp the next morning. Anyone who wanted to join the fight would head back west to the new Southern Command fort on the banks of the Ohio guarding Evansville from the Kentucky side. They’d have an important job right off, getting the vehicles back with the guidance of a detail from the sick-train.
    They ended up with two. A fifteen-year-old boy with a lazy eye and a widow of forty-one who’d learned to use a rifle as a teen in the Kurian Youth Vanguard.
    “I quit when my mom got sick in her uterus and they stuck her in a van,” the volunteer explained. “Mom was right smart, could have been useful a hundred ways if they’d let her get operated on and recover.”
    Of course Sergeant Patel, the senior NCO back at Javelin, could make soldiers out of odds and ends of human material. There was always more work than there were hands.
    More aura for the trip home. A prowling Reaper would spot their psychic signatures from miles away, even in the lush hills of Kentucky. He and Duvalier would have to team up every night and sleep in their saddles.

    Four enervating days later Valentine had his wounded across the Mississippi. The Kentucky worm drivers turned homeward, their sluggish mounts willing to move only in the warmest hours of the day no matter how much pain they inflicted with the long, sharp goads.
    The Kentuckians would stay on their side of the river. Valentine felt guilty saying good-bye