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"I wonder sometimes," she said.
* * * *
Valentine's holding action was just one-third of the story. The Bears, Wolves, and assorted legworm-mounted troops had fallen on the support trains like hyenas on a pair of sick cattle.
Gamecock had found a piece of tentacle that looked like it came from a Kurian in the wreckage. It was already sealed in a specimen jar for eventual delivery to the Miskatonic.
Of course, there was no way to identify the remains positively. Valentine imagined the Kurians weren't above sticking some unimportant former rival or inconvenient relative in an aquarium marked "In case of emergency, break glass," so to speak, should a body ever need to be left behind while the Kurian stuffed itself up a hollow tree somewhere, or in the rear engine that managed to decouple and escape at full speed.
Moytana's Wolves had their own triumph, tearing up the artillery support hurrying toward the railroad cut. They were already working on chain harnesses so the legworms could haul the tubes up and down Kentucky's hills.
Seng was wrong about the delay. It took four days to get everyone organized, the refugees and the two men too shot up to move to a local brand.
Miraculously, Valentine had no one killed in the fight; his only losses were wounded-and the jibes from the rest of the expedition.
* * * *
They crossed the Big Sandy into West Virginia. Special Executive Karas commemorated the occasion by having his legworm riders offer a banquet.
They sacrificed an egged-out legworm to feed the troops. For all their size, legworms didn't offer much in the way of edibles. The tenderest pieces were the claw-like legs themselves. They reminded Valentine of the shellfish he'd eaten in New Orleans and the Caribbean. The farther away you traveled from the legs, the worse they tasted. The riders assured him younger legworms were both tenderer and tastier, as were unfertilized eggs-"Kentucky caviar."
Legworm flesh barbecue was something of an acquired taste and depended greatly on the quality of the barbecue sauce. Southern Command's soldiery invited or shanghaied into attending chewed manfully.
Valentine ate his with a lot of cider vinegar.
They put Karas' chair on another stump, this one only a foot off the ground at the high end of the picnic field's slope, but it still gave him a commanding view and a sort of dais from which to command his legworm-riding knights-errant.
Seng tapped Valentine on the shoulder. "Major, our ally heard about Billy Goat Cut. He wants to see you."
Gamecock and Moytana were there as well, along with a Guard captain whose command had taken a whole platoon of railway security troops prisoner. A small crowd of legworm riders and soldiers had gathered to watch events, while sneaky dogs, including Valentine's company mutt, raided unattended plates. Valentine saw Duvalier's freckled eyes in the crowd.
She had a broke-brim felt hat pulled down almost to her knees and looked lost in her ratty old overcoat.
The leaders of the assorted clans of the Kentucky Alliance arranged themselves behind Karas. His handsome face smiled down at them.
Valentine saw Tikka again, standing next to her adoptive brother, Zak. Zak had a welt at the corner of his eye, but then it was a rare day when there wasn't a good fistfight in the Alliance camp. Kentucky men fought the way New Universal Churchmen golfed, as both a recreation and a social ritual.
"The major first," Karas said. "Congratulations on your brilliant fight."
"Brilliant" wasn't the world Valentine would have chosen. Brilliant commanders bagged their enemy with a minimum of shooting back.
Karas stood up. "A presentation is in order, I think. Bravery must be rewarded, just as treason must be punished."
"Bow," Tikka urged in a whisper that somehow carried.
Valentine wanted to tell her that the only time a Southern Command officer bowed was as sort of a preamble before asking a lady for a dance (Captain LeHavre used to say that it gave you a last chance to make sure your shoelaces were tied), but decided to cooperate in the interest of keeping the new allies happy.
"I dub you a knight of the New Kentucky Homeland," Karas said as he looped the medallion over Valentine's head. Valentine notice that Karas' hands smelled like a cheap Kurian Zone aftershave called Ultimate, strong enough to mask a hard day's body odor in an emergency. Valentine liked Karas a little better. No one with royal pretentions would walk around smelling like a blend of gasoline and window cleaner.
Valentine straightened again.
"Kentucky thanks you, son of both Southern Command and our own Bulletproof."
Kind words, but Valentine hoped he wasn't using the word Ken-tucky the way the Kurian in the Pacific Northwest used to be called Seattle.
While Moytana, Gamecock, and the Guard captain got their ribbons and medals, Valentine examined his decoration.
It looked like a piece of old horse show ribbon with a brassy circle at the end. Valentine looked closely at the medal. It was an old commemorative quarter glued facedown on a disk of brass-the Kentucky state design, rather nicked and scratched, but as clean and polished as elbow grease could make it.
