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"Out of timber. I'll take the mule team out tomorrow and get some more trees."
Pines and poplars had reclaimed the bootheel farmland, but the cleared ground around neighboring Rally Base meant a drag to fill the winter dry racks.
"Why not-oh, I forget. Today is one of your days at the fort."
"I should get cleaned up."
"Use the washroom with the running water. Nice to have the smell of a young man's shaving soap here," she said, frowning at her daughters.
"It is my fault Patrick would rather be a soldier than a storekeeper?" the elder of the sisters asked.
He slipped down the hall toward the full bath. "Patrick" was something of a tender spot in the family conversation. Letters from him had ceased altogether six months before. When he hired on with Shrivastava, giving an abbreviated version of his service history, the girl had quietly asked him how often men declared "missing in action" returned.
Fresh back from Kentucky, Valentine couldn't offer much hope. Especially since he'd just spent months in Kentucky seeking another missing soul.
* * * *
Valentine relished the heated water in the family bathroom. The rest of the help had to make do with stove-warmed water in the bunk-house. As he buttoned his shirt he searched the sink for stray hairs and soap residue. Mrs. Shrivastava might like the smell of this young man's shaving, but it would be rude to repay her graciousness with a dirty basin.
He grabbed his teaching satchel and walked over to the base, taking his time in the unseasonable heat.
"Argent, Max," the sentry at the gate identified him, stepping out from the shade of corrugated iron. Though he knew Valentine's face and alias, he still checked the ID provided by Styachowski's specialists. "Base is on alert. We've got a sidearm and carbine for you, if you don't have your own." The guard's eyes were unreadable behind his wraparound sunglasses.
"Thank you," Valentine said.
Valentine's weapons were arranged in netting hanging from the un-nailed floorboards of his bunkhouse. He visited the base as a civilian expert, and at the moment his boots and pocket knife were the only military-issue items he had.
"No drill," a sergeant who handed him a pistol belt with magazine harness said. He was heavy as a side of beef, and Valentine couldn't remember him pulling a shift in the guard hut before. "How's a model four?"
"I qualified. This serious?"
"Heavy river traffic reported. It may have landed."
Valentine had heard a largish patrol go out in the predawn but had thought nothing of it.
Pizzaro was an experienced enough forward area base commander to make sure nothing left or entered his base by regular schedules.
"Message too," the sergeant added as the sentry made a notation of the gun's serial numbers.
"The CO wants you to come by his office after your class."
"Can do," Valentine said, adjusting the pistol belt.
Valentine headed into the base, where windows were being filled with sandbags and extra men idled in the shade at the mortar positions, ready to get the tubes into action as soon as orders came down. The quick step of the men carrying the sandbags and the lack of joking put Valentine on edge.
He had militia today, mostly young men fresh from a year or two with Labor Regiment.
Unless the boys or girls were lucky enough in their LR term to get apprenticed into a technical field, they were dumped into the militia pool and made miserable enough that joining the regulars seemed like an elevation to paradise. Some stuck out militia service for a four-, six-, or eight-year term in return for land and tools, a "stake" in some new community in land won from the Kurians.
Only six years, and the militias rotated a lot of soldiers through good vocational training.
Texas had huge swaths of fallow land to fill with stakes. If the former militiamen were lucky, they never heard the words "or such time and duty as the needs of Southern Command require."
He had two classes, a basic literacy-and-science group fresh out of the bush and his
"advanced" class, who was learning about Southern Command and how it hoped to disassemble the grim Kurian Order surrounding the embattled freeholds.
Today would be his advanced group. They met in a dining hall, a wood-framed building with a roof and canvas sides, pulled up now to admit the breeze.
