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"You're a curious creature, son. I can never make out whether you're a shepherd or a wolf."
"Black sheep," Valentine said.
"No, there's hunter in you."
Valentine nodded to some relief sentries, and said to them, "When the post has been turned over, head over to the diner and get some food. Kentucky is buying our meals, for once."
He turned back to the old churchman. "When I was inducted into the Wolves, the Lifeweaver warned me I'd never be the same. I'd be forever sundered from my fellow man, or words to that effect. I was too keen to get on with it to pay much attention."
"It's a bargain most of the men in your profession make, and it's a very, very old one. War changes a man, separates him from someone who hasn't seen it. You're both exalted and damned at the same time by the experience."
"What about you?" Valentine asked. "You've seen your share of fighting."
"Oh, I was damned before I saw my first battlefield."
Valentine was organizing his soldiers to block nonexistent traffic two blocks away from the convention center, using old rust buckets dragged into position as roadblocks.
Mr. Lincoln, the only man killed, had been running to jump in the river when the charges in the legworm went off. There was some bickering when his underage daughter, who had accompanied him to the Assembly, was given his place in the voting. Some said her sobs swayed a few critical votes.
He heard the commotion, the yells and firearms being discharged after the vote was tallied.
Some security. There weren't supposed to be firearms in the conference center. Well, Valentine's men were responsible for the streets; it was the sergeant at arms of the Assembly who'd been negligent. That, or after the bomb attack, they'd allowed the delegates to arm themselves.
Valentine sent a detail under a formidably tall Texan to get the delegates to unload their pieces and opened up a line of communication to Lambert at Fort Seng, which could radio relay to Southern Command.
Tikka herself was the first out of the convention center. She had a red streamer tied to the barrel of her rifle. The streamer matched the flame in her eyes.
"The vote was 139 to 31!" she said, leaping into Valentine's arms and wrapping her hard-muscled legs around his back. Her lips were hot and vital. "Five blanks in protest," she said when she was finished kissing him. "Cowards."
"For the Cause?" Valentine asked.
"I wouldn't have run otherwise," she said. "I want to fuck, to celebrate. You had a hand in this."
"That's all I can afford to put in at the moment. I'm on duty."
"Isn't part of your duty to maintain close contact with your Kentucky allies?"
"The closest kind of cooperation," Valentine said. "But we've just had a bomb explode, and no one seems to have any idea who brought a forty-foot legworm into town and how it was parked next to the Assembly."
She slipped off. "Too bad. May I use your radio? I want to communicate with my command."
Energetic Tikka. Denied one piece of equipment, she'll requisition another.
Valentine nodded and led her to his radio operator. Tikka almost bodychecked him out of his chair in her eagerness to put the headset on. Valentine knew he should really get it confirmed and look at an official roll count for his own report, but he trusted Tikka.
Valentine noted the time and vote on his duty log, and carefully covered the page so the cheap pencil (taken from the narthex of a New Universal Church, where lots are available to write "confessions," which were, in practice, accusations against a relative or neighbor) wouldn't smear. You never know what might end up in some museum case.
"Yes," Tikka said over the radio. "Put Warfoot into effect and open up the training camps." She pressed her earpiece to her head. "Oh, that's a big affirmative. Couldn't have gone better. Lost one delegate, but every cause needs a martyr."
Valentine, when he later considered her words over the radio, wondered just how large a role Tikka had in Mr. Lincoln's martyrdom. He hoped Tikka was just being her usual, brutally direct self. What he'd seen of the birth of the Kentucky Freehold was bloody enough, without adding deliberate political murder to the tally.
The Kentucky Freehold: Births are messy endeavors, biological or political.
Even the name "Kentucky Freehold" could be considered a mess, because the territory under control of the Assembly didn't include her two most populous cities, but it did include a few counties in Tennessee between the Big South Fork and Dale Hollow Lake and the chunk of Indiana around Evansville.
In that winter of 2076, the Kentucky Freehold voted into existence by the Assembly was a name only. There wasn't even a cohesive idea behind the name. There was no constitution, no separation of powers, no way to raise money nor legitimate channels in which to spend it. In the weeks after the vote, the Assembly adjourned to their home clans, towns, estates, and businesses to work out quick elections of delegates to the new freehold legislature.
The one piece of business the Assembly did manage to conduct was to vote into existence an Army of Kentucky. The A-o-K, as it came to be known, was to receive all the "manpower or material necessary to effect a defense of the Kentucky Free State," but who was to give what was left to the parties concerned.
