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"Is that the good news? Alert called off?"
"You're messing up your ordering," Pizzaro said, checking some frayed wiring on a quartz lamp. Valentine looked at the manufacturing stamp. It had originated in Mexico City. "Let's stick to the good news. I got a courier packet. Highbeam is on-I have this from Lambert herself. I've got to punch your ticket and give you escort to the staging briefing. Even my staff doesn't know this yet, and I want to keep it that way, but this post will be Point Zero. You'll set off from here. If it wasn't for the alert, we'd already be laying plumbing for a new camp."
"Was that the good news or the bad?" Valentine asked.
"Thought you'd be pleased to hear that all that scouting you've been doing in Kentucky is about to pay off."
"I never found what I was looking for."
"Anne . . ."
"Ahn-Kha," Valentine supplied.
"Sorry, not much with Grog talk. Sounds like dogs snarling at each other to me."
"So what's the bad news?"
"I'm sealing the base. First recon reports are in: It's a strong Grog column out of Cairo area.
It's those gangly, hunched-over ones with the pig-ugly faces. They're avoiding contact and mostly hunting and scavenging. There aren't many settlements up that way but I'm getting reports of thievery-stealing livestock and chickens and whatnot. Anything they can sneak off when no one's looking. Some folks have disappeared, but we're not sure if they've run or the Grogs got 'em."
"Doublebloods, they call themselves," Valentine said. "Odd of them to come across the river like that. They keep to themselves."
"You spent some time in Illinois. Anything else you can tell me?"
"The Illinois Guard has a lot of stations around Mount Vernon, keeping watch on the Doublebloods. I had someone in the Illinois Guard I wanted to meet."
Sergeant Heath Hopkins. He died badly.
"So they're neutrals."
Pizzaro had enough troubles with the big gray Grogs inhabiting the riverbanks on his side of the Mississippi, the lonely Kurian tower watching river traffic from Cairo, and the Kurians on the other side of the twisting river in Kentucky and Tennessee. Valentine wasn't that surprised he didn't know much about the Doublebloods. There were pissworthy fires closer to the colonel's feet.
Valentine dredged up his very limited experience. "More like they hate everybody.
Kurians tried to make a half Grog half human and it didn't work out. They're ill-tempered, even for Grogs, so the Kurians planted them on the borders of Southern Command, hoping they'd be trouble for us. Problem is, they all remember which direction the trucks that brought them came from, and it wasn't southwest."
"Can you savvy their lingo?"
"No more than a few phrases they use to communicate with the other Grogs. But I'd rather not walk on into the camp. This could be a man raid."
"A what?"
"They're amazons. Something amiss with their reproductive system. Not many male embryos live to be birthed. The ratio is four or six to one or thereabouts, if the Illinois Guard has the numbers right. There're problems up and down the Doubleblood genetic line, and the only way they're surer of a live birth is with a human donor and a Doubleblood female.
Inbreeding worsens the defect. They're smart enough to grab new males now and then."
"Good God."
"It's not so bad. I hear they stick two layers of bagging over your head. Insurance,"
Valentine said.
The colonel tapped down some wire pegging with his foot and made a note in a pocket-sized sheet of paper. Valentine wondered if it was about the Doublebloods or the wire.
"What kind of weaponry?"
"Just small arms for fighting. They hunt with bows or crossbows and slingshots. They'll carry explosives to blow open locked doors. Tell your patrols to keep their distance."
