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Southern Command's troops cheered that.
"Some of you went to school. I only had one teacher my whole life. A simple man. A plumbing contractor, before 2022. That man was my father. He taught me to ride. He taught me to shoot. He taught me to tell the truth.
"One day I was looking at pictures of animals of the world. I liked big cats, lions and black panthers and tigers. He told me that one tiger needed to eat as many as three hundred deer in a year. Three hundred! Of course, the tiger must eat them one at a time. No tiger kills three hundred deer at once."
The spring breeze contested the voice again, but Karas could project, though the men upwind were cupping their ears to catch his words.
"Imagine, though, if those three hundred deer could talk as we do. If they could take the tiger's tally. If they could organize against this tiger. If three hundred deer together hunted the one tiger, threw themselves against it, biting and goring and kicking, I reckon that tiger would never hunt again.
"We have one great advantage over the Kurians. Human beings naturally come together, the way water droplets find their way to pools. The Kurians like to remain individual drops.
"Divided, all we can do is crawl to the Kurians and lick their boots, begging not to be killed. Their tigers are the master of any one of us. United, we will hunt the tigers."
"I'm going to ask you to follow me east into the mountains. There we'll start the biggest tiger hunt you've ever seen. Then with the forces that are meeting there, we'll come back and start taking over town after town, county after county here in Kentucky. Can I count on the men of Arkansas, of Texas, of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri? We're pledged to you, Wildcats and Gunslingers, Coonskins, Bulletproof and Mammoths, and of course my own Perseids."
Valentine cheered along with the rest of him. If he understood it right, Javelin was now the largest operation against the Kurians since Archangel.
Lambert and Brother Mark and the rest had told them they'd have support of some of the legworm ranchers in Kentucky. He thought they meant foodstuffs and fuel; he'd never dreamed they'd be fighting at their side.
Why had they kept so much secret from the officers involved? To avoid disappointment if Karas turned out to be a windbag, full of bluster and promises? Or did Lambert feel it necessary to keep this from Southern Command's own higher-ups?
Valentine laughed at himself as Bee thumped him on the chest, not really understanding the reason for the cheering but enjoying the mood. As the men and women roared their lungs out, thrilled that Kentucky wasn't just supporting their advance but coming to their side, he was considering the possibility of informants high up in Southern Command's officer list.
After the speech ended men and women of the Alliance handed out coins of brightly polished nickel, it looked like. They bore an imposing stamp of Karas in profile. The reverse had a five-pointed star with a 10 at the center and "TEN DOLLARS" written around the edge.
"The king's coin," the boy who handed Valentine his coin said. "Lot more where these came from."
"Long live the King of Kentucky, then," Ediyak said in reply. "What do you s'pose we can buy with it?"
Valentine examined the engraving. A faint halo had been etched around the profile. "A whole lot of trouble, if this man wants us calling him king."
Across Cumberland Plateau, April: It is a land of sandstone bluffs and old coalfields, swimming holes and iron bridges, old loblolly pine plantations run amok and new deciduous forests.
Almost every kind of tree found east of the Mississippi can be found here, mixing among each other and gradually reclaiming land from the pines, each occupying land according to water requirements, with chestnuts and shortleaf pines atop the ridges and poplar, blacky gum, and maples in the bottoms.
For much of the early United States history, the eastern escarpment served as a barrier to the gradual migration west. The tough bluffs running the southeastern border dividing Kentucky from Virginia served as a natural choke. Cherokee and Shawnee hunted the land until passages through the Cumberland Gap were mapped out and opened. Even so, the region remained somewhat wilder than the states north and south until the exploitation of coal and timber resources made the area profitable.
The picturesque sandstone gorges once drew photographers, and protect the homes of cliff swallows and bats, but to David Valentine that spring they were a frustrating maze dotted with dead towns so decrepit they reminded him of his first operations as a Wolf in the run-wild forests of Louisiana. Negotiating ridges and valleys meant weary hours of scouting and camping as the columns wound their way east through the twisting, turning cuts, where one mile of red-shouldered hawk flight meant perhaps three up and down and back and forth.
Luckily, it is a wild region empty of Kurian holds. Kentucky always has gone its own way, even in its uneasy relationship with the Kurian Order.
Self-reliant to what some might call a fault, they saw off the first emissaries of the New Order in the chaos of 2022 with torch and buckshot, demanding to be left alone. Neither at war with the Kurians or cooperative with their Reapers, they bring coal to the surface and legworm grubs to market to trade for the goods they need. Every time a Kurian tries to establish a tower in the Cumberland, he finds his Reapers hunted, his Quisling retainers ambushed and hung, and the alleged rich prospect of Kentucky dissolving into a confusion of legworm tracks and ash.
The tribes have formed a feudal society, quarrelsome when at peace, uneasily united when threatened from outside. Every feudal society needs a king to smooth the former and lead them in the latter.
* * * *
Karas' coins turned out to be only so much shiny dross when it came to bartering with other legworm tribes. Valentine's company went back to trading the crank-powered radios, rifles, and learn-to-read Bibles for butter and eggs.
But the legworm riders did offer spare worms, rigged for hauling cargo. Valentine's company received two, one to carry burdens while the other grazed in its wake, with roles switched the next day. Every third day the column rested now, to give the worms time to feed and recover. For all their size, they could be delicate if mishandled or underfed.
As they passed the more settled central part of Kentucky, the land became a patchwork of small towns and huge, clannish ranches. The towns were controlled by "badges" but rarely saw a Reaper, though Valentine heard fireside tales of bounty hunters and human traffickers who collected criminals and troublemakers.
Contacts with the underground dried up once they reached the ranch lands. Though the soldiers broke into a few locked NUC storage rooms in the dead of night, Valentine scanning for Reapers and his sharpshooters standing by with their blue-striped magazines in the rifles, they rarely returned to Javelin with full carts.
Where no small, easy game were to be had, Valentine felt it necessary to organize a hunt for larger prey.
"This is what's called hitting them where they ain't," Patel said to second platoon.
