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"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.
"It's justice, sir," Nail said.
"No. It's not justice. It's vengeance." He looked down at the flushed face of the guard. "You decided to live like a savage, soldier. For that you get to die like one. Nail, I'm going to go out and talk to Lieutenant Zhao. I'll be back in fifteen minutes. I want this camp ready to move then."
As Valentine walked out, he heard Yolanda's friend address the strung-up man. "Fifteen minutes. Boy, you're getting off easy."
* * * *
They left the camp with one of Zhao's platoons in front of, and one behind, the liberated prisoners. The third platoon walked to either side of the files. Some of Zhao's men had already managed to lose their red-tape sashes. Beyond the column, in the darkness that matched Valentine's mood, Nail and his Bears reconnoitered.
Valentine walked beside Zhao. The lieutenant had made a hash of things, and Valentine's anger could easily give way to what Zulu Company's Sergeant Patel used to call a "two-boot stomp" dressing-down. It might let Valentine blow off steam, but whether it would do the rattled Zhao any good depended on the resilience of the man. Dawn was still hours away, but already the Quislings were reorganizing. Here and there in the dark, isolated snipers were taking potshots at the column. So far all the shots were misses, but they were unsettling-especially to the unarmed prisoners.
"Sir, the company hasn't had enough time together," Zhao explained. "It's not like all these men have combat experience. Some were militia called up during the invasion. I've only got a handful in each platoon trained as infantry."
"Lieutenant, I know you feel like you've been asked for miracles. That you even got everyone to the camp, in the dark, along a route you weren't that familiar with is a credit to you. You got all this going at a moment's notice. Don't worry about the rest."
"That Captain Beck-"
"Beck's not in charge."
