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He stared at Valentine. Valentine recognized the challenge and tried to meet his eyes, held them for a long moment, and then found an old lighting fixture over Sime's shoulder suddenly of great interest.
Perhaps he had been unfair to Sime.
"Like you, I'm ready to make sacrifices for victory," Sime continued. "I was ready to give you up to get Kansas. And if I could trade your life for a different outcome in Kansas, I would, like a shot."
"The feeling's mutual."
"Would you, now, if it came to it?" Sime said. "If you could get the high country of Kansas back for us by just putting that pistol to my head and squeezing the trigger, would you?"
Valentine took his hand away from his belt and crossed his arms.
"It's never that easy," Valentine said.
"Your father would have."
"You knew him?"
"Not firsthand. But I know the history. He was what we called a plantation burner. Left a lot of scorched earth-and scorched bodies-behind. But it made the Kurians pull out of most of Missouri. I won't argue the results. I'm sorry if he told you different, but that's the truth of the matter."
"He never told me anything at all."
"You a fan of football, Valentine?"
"I know the basics, but I never had much time to follow it."
"I'm a big fan. We have some fair mud leagues running the spine from Little Rock to Texarkana. I'm a Buzzsaw man, myself."
Valentine had overheard enough sports talk to be conversant. "I've heard of them. I think they won the championship a few years back."
"Two seasons ago. Every good team needs what I like to call a hatchet. With the Buzzsaws, it's a linebacker. It's the crazy mean player, the guy who puts people down for a game or two. So instead of covering assignments, the opposing team's eyeing the hatchet, wondering who's going to be broken next. Bad sportsmanship? Maybe. But I've learned something before I started shaving my gray hairs. Most good organizations have a hatchet or two to do the dirty work."
"I see."
"You'd make a pretty good hatchet. You have the right name, anyway, thanks to your father's, well, fierce reputation."
Valentine shrugged. The gesture made him feel like a hypocrite-a shrug from a subordinate always annoyed him-but he was only too happy to use it himself with the slippery Sime. "I always thought of myself as more of a screwdriver. Always being used for jobs other than the one I'm designed to do."
Sime was good to his word. An Assembly ID showed up for Valentine the next day. Though he had to report to the Assembly's own sergeant at arms to get his picture taken with a Polaroid and have a card made.
The Assembly itself was run by the Agenda. That office was held by a woman, thin and wan and brittle-haired; she looked like a cancer victim. Brother Mark introduced Valentine to her. She greeted him gravely, made a polite mention of the power plant and said she hoped Kentucky would support his command in the manner of allies who'd bled together, and then she moved on to other business.
Her handshake was a frail one.
"You are no doubt wondering," Brother Mark said. "Some kind of cancer, but it's not public knowledge. She's doing her best to get through the Assembly before it claims her."
"Brave woman."
"From a great old family in Lexington," Brother Mark said. "Our good Agenda believes that however this goes, the Kurian Order is going to extract their revenge on whoever leads the Assembly. She intends to die quietly this winter and deny them the satisfaction."
Once the formalities were taken care of, Brother Mark showed him around the pre-22, poorly lit convention hall, which smelled like musty carpet and popcorn to Valentine's sensitive nose. A lectern platform stood at one end, with most of the folding chairs around more-or-less arranged to face it. On the platform was a lectern with its own podium and a small desk just above a discreetly placed recorder's station.
The Kentuckians, a smattering of representatives from the Evansville area, and even a delegation from the rebels in West Virginia-he'd hoped Ahn-Kha would be among them but the golden Grog would have stood out among the men like an elk in a goat herd-had gathered into three distinct groups.
As Brother Mark explained it, the biggest faction in the room was the Militant Independents. A mixture of legworm clans and burghers, these Kentuckians believed that Kentucky now stood in a position of strength to negotiate with the Northwest Ordnance north of the Ohio and the Tennessee Kurians and the Georgia Control to the south. They had a provisional charter drawn up that declared Kentucky a self-governing territory with a promise not to engage in operations outside its old United States borders, nor to shelter fugitives or guerrillas.
"The fugitive law is the real sticking point," Brother Mark said. "Almost everyone in the legworm clan has a relative or an in-law who fled the Kurian Zone. They'd be grandfathered in, of course, but there's sympathy for escapees."
"How do they know the Kurians will go along with it?"
