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"What's that idiot doing?" Nail said.
Valentine peeped over the edge of the sandbags. Beck stood in the open, waving a white rag with his remaining active arm. "Hold your fire!"
"My former captain," Valentine said. "Never short of guts."
There was another shot from the darkness. Beck didn't even flinch. He kept shouting and signaling.
"Boy's wiring is definitely not grounded," Nail observed.
* * * *
Fifteen minutes later some order had been restored to the camp, now darkened by the destruction of the generator. Zhao's men were in a screen around it, their guns pointed in a less dangerous direction while Valentine organized his prisoners. Some blocks away a building burned; Valentine guessed it to by Xray-Tango's headquarters.
A quick headcount gave him five hundred twenty-seven men and sixty women. All were in this particular camp because they had been captured in Southern Command uniforms. Beck explained the half-assembled nature of their accommodations in a few terse sentences.
"The expected us to just be here a couple days. Then they found work for us, the flood started-a few days turned into weeks. Men were scheduled to ship to Texas, women to Memphis, by rail or water, whichever opened up first."
"Solon owes his neighbors for the loan of troops," Valentine said.
"Yes. We're the only currency the Kurians accept. During our captivity, their investment accrued interest."
This last was with a jerk of the chin toward the women. About one in four were visibly pregnant. Fertility drugs in the feed, perhaps.
"Don't let the expectants fool you," a woman who introduced herself as Lieutenant Colonel Kessey said, when Valentine waked over to the crowd of women wrapping up their belongings in bundles. "Most have combat experience." Kessey had an eyepatch and some burn tissue across her scalp, but put up a hard-nosed front as she organized her rescued women. "The guards used us like their common harem. They used to laugh and say we should thank them- pregnancy keeps you off work detail, saves you from the Last Dance."
"Can't say that I blame them," Valentine said.
She lowered her voice. "All the women get the lecture in basic. Rape Survival Strategy, given by women who've been there and made it back. I used to joke about it. "In case of capture, break his balls." Not so easy when there are six of them."
"How many can walk as far as the river?" Valentine asked.
"All of them, sir," Kessey said. "We have litters, just in-"
A scream from the Quonset hut cut her off. It was followed by another.
"Excuse me, would you?" Valentine said, hurrying off to investigate. Shouts blended in with the screams.
It was what he dreaded. The two guards captured in the tower had been strung up by their heels inside the hut. One had blood pouring down his body. Amid the bustle of Beck's prisoners grabbing weapons and anything else remotely useful, some of the vengeful prisoners had taken matters into their own hands. Two women, thin and hollow-eyed, stood in a circle of hooting men. Both had knives; one held the wounded guard's severed genitals before the other's eyes. Some of the male prisoners were tying together the legs of another man with a bloody wound in his leg, ready to string him to the ceiling fixture when the castrated man died.
"Stop that!" Valentine shouted. "Lieutenant Nail!"
Nail sat on an overturned desk, smoking a captured cigarette as he watched the show. "You want to interfere with those hellcats, you go right ahead," Nail said.
"Nail, you're relieved. Sergeant Rain!"
"You'll just have to relieve me too, sir," Rain said.
Valentine went over to the woman with the bloody knife. She'd already opened the trousers of the next man, who was babbling for mercy. Valentine took one look at his red, contorted face and held out his hand to the woman. "You there, hand it over."
She tried to give him her bloody trophy, with a smile. Valentine felt sickened, the way some go faint at the sight of another person's blood but can calmly hold a bandage over a pulsing wound of their own. Not many months ago he'd been the one mutilating corpses. He lifted his hand to push the slimy object down, out of sight of the others-
She flinched at the gesture, flinched with the fear in her eyes of someone who had been hit before, many times. Valentine felt a hard hand on his arm.
"Mister Bear," the other woman said. She had wide-set round eyes set beneath short white hair and a hard line of a jaw. "Yolanda has to wear a diaper all the time now. These men gang-raped her. They said her ass was too tight. So they took a knife and cut it so it'd open wider. That man bleeding to death, he had the blade, and this other piece of shit helped hold her down."
"Wasn't me, sir," the inverted man said. "We surrendered proper n'all."
Valentine looked into the haunted eyes of the woman who had stayed his arm, and then to Yolanda's face. He studied the profile; her darkly beautiful features reminded him of his mother's in another time and place.
