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And making a bad job of it, too, to Valentine's mind. The artillery's position could be observed from across the river.
Valentine remembered Rockaway as soon as he saw the face, but there had been changes. He limped worse than Valentine and seemed to have lost weight everywhere but his midsection. He was a rather plain-looking, freckled young man with sandy hair and a delicate chin like his mother's. He seemed lost in the big service jacket the A-o-K wore, but he still had his Southern Command helmet. Valentine was surprised someone hadn't talked him out of it when he was left behind. Javelin ran short on helmets long before they hit Evansville.
"Did you pick out these emplacements?" Valentine asked as others kept trotting up to Corporal Rockaway for instructions.
"Orders," Corporal Rockaway said. He had some of his mother's Texas accent too. "We're supposed to show our teeth so there won't be any funny business like at Utrecht. Hey, Doc. What the heck are you doing all this way?" O'Coombe's doctor stepped forward. "We've come a long way to bring you home. I'm glad to see you well. When we'd heard-"
Rockaway smiled, which much improved his face. "Hell, Doc, well's a relative term. You put my first diaper on me, and I'm here to tell, I'm back in diapers now and will be for the rest of my life. Some emergency patching to the digestive tract, they said. And I have to drink lots of water to help things along. But I can still fight; I just leak a little doing it. I like fighting these Moondagger sons of bitches. If everything-Well, tell Mom not to worry."
"You can tell her yourself when this is done. She's back with the Gunslinger camp," Valentine said.
"She came all this way too? Devoted of her. When the news came about my older brothers, she just tightened up her mouth and hung black crepe around their pictures and made big donations in their names to the Rear Guard Fund."
Valentine had no business getting involved in family dynamics. He jerked his chin at Frat, and they excused themselves.
Once they were out of earshot, Frat said, "Heart's in the right place but the kid doesn't know much about setting up a battery. If anything goes down, he's making it easy for the Moondaggers. They're not all cross-eyed and stigmatic, I don't suppose."
"Not hardly," Valentine said, remembering the sniper's bullet that had sprayed Rand's brains all over headquarters.
Valentine spotted Tikka emerging from a knot of hilltop woods, walking the ridgeline. Corporal Rockaway limped up to her, and they spoke for a few minutes. Tikka pointed as she spoke, both toward the ridge on the other side of the river where the Coonskins and the Moondaggers were encamped, and behind, where the rest of her train was presumably approaching and deploying.
Once again, she made a show of strength, putting some of her vehicles and horse wagons in plain view on the hill.
She was kind enough to invite Valentine to accompany her to the peace conference. All she asked was that he wear one of the A-o-K field jackets and a hat, and keep to the back with his mouth shut.
Duvalier managed to work her way into the party too. Boelnitz tried to get permission to come along, but Tikka insisted that he stay back on the riverbank.
"Remember what happened the last time we were invited to a conference?" Valentine said.
Tikka grinned fiercely. "As a matter of fact, we're very much hoping for an encore."
"Without legworms? Won't you be at a disadvantage?"
"They'll be assuming that, yeah."
VIPs arrived in cars and passenger trucks; the Gunslingers and Bulletproof and a smattering of other old Alliance soldiers on horseback or in wagon trains. Many arrived via old-fashioned shoe leather.
They met out on the small lake, a widening in the Kentucky River separating Coonskin land from the Gunslingers.
Valentine felt like he'd read about a peace meeting like this before, but he couldn't place the exact circumstances.
The two sides rowed out to a pontoon houseboat anchored midlake. There, on the sundeck atop the houseboat (after both sides verified that neither had filled the living quarters with gunmen), they met.
Their forces lined the tree-filled banks to either side of the river. Valentine didn't understand the fascination. There was little enough to watch.
He wasn't important enough to go up on the top deck with the Kentucky or Coonskin principals. But he could listen from the base of the ladder facing the west side of the river.
There were introductions, neither side being particularly gracious beyond the grace required of opponents who were used to shooting each other on sight. If the Gunslingers were colder in their formalities, it was because they'd suffered more outrage at the hands of the Moondaggers.
In many more words than the Reaper's avatar used, they offered the representatives of the Kentucky Assembly essentially the same status as Jack in the Box had spoken of: a neutral Kentucky, running its own domestic affairs but leaving the outside world to the Kurians. The Agenda and Tikka were no more inclined to welcome the proposal from some Moonskin mouthpiece and a few traitors than they were through Valentine's birdlike Reaper.
"Glad to see you admit we whupped you out of Kentucky," Tikka said.
"We stayed only long enough to chase Southern Command out," a Moondagger responded. "Then we returned to our allies."
"Formerly our allies," Tikka said. "They turned on us; they'll turn on you someday. Remember that."
"You are the traitors," an educated Kentucky accent said. "The Kurians indulged you, and you paid them back by aiding terrorists and wreckers and murderers-"
