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Valentine wasn't even sure where Sri Lanka was. To change the subject, he inquired about the dangers they might face on the river, motoring right up through the border of two warring states.
"It's a sort of truce at midchannel," Mantilla said, pacing from one side of the bridge to the other on the little tug. "Nobody likes to make a fuss, sinking each other's river traffic. The sons-of-whores military vessels will chase and shoot right and left, but the coal and grain barges pass without too much trouble. Of course, the Kurian captains are smart enough to do a little trade with our little luggers; a few tons of coal or steel given up here and there for a quiet run between the Kurian Zone and the UFR is a small price to pay. The bastards would rather pay up than fall in the schiesse with our side."
"Chummy."
"We stay on our side; they stay on theirs. Most of the time. Your little venture into Kentucky broke the rules. Our Kurian friends can't allow that to stand, you know. They'll strike back."
"It had better be with something better than what they've used so far," Valentine said as the Mississippi unrolled like a blue-green carpet in front of the little barge. "The Moondaggers were vicious, but they weren't much in a stand-up fight against people who could shoot back."
"They were supposed to take you quietly into custody. After a few culls, the rest would be exchanged back to the UFR in return for some captured Texas Quislings or some other property the Kurians wished not to lose. Your little rebellion in the Ozarks is getting too big for its britches."
"Our little rebellion. You're on our side."
"Very much so. If I speak strangely, it's only because I know of other rebels in other places and times."
The "and times" comment put Valentine on his guard. How much did he really know about Mantilla? What did the captain's name mean in Spanish again? Was it a cloak or covering of some kind?
Valentine wondered how Mantilla, a river captain, knew so much about the fighting. You'd think he'd spend his time studying depth charts and dealing with customs clerks and patrol boat captains.
With the usual methodical lucidity he had during illness, he thought the matter over in the glorified closet that served as his cabin. He didn't like being played, but unless Mantilla was an unusually cruel gamester, he didn't think he was being toyed with. Instead, the barge captain seemed to be trying to let him in on a secret without saying so directly.
He went to bed wondering just who, or what, their captain was. If he was, say, a Lifeweaver, why would he be doing something as exposed and dangerous as traveling up and down the rivers of the former United States-and perhaps into the Caribbean and beyond as well?
The other possibility was that he was a Kurian who had gone over to the side of his estranged relatives, the Lifeweavers, to help the humans, but that made even less sense.
There was a third option. Valentine had heard rumors, long ago in his days as a Wolf, from his old tent mate that there was supposed to be another kind of Hunter, another caste beyond the Wolves, Cats, and Bears. Of course, it hadn't been much more than rumor. His old tent mate had claimed that it was something the Lifeweavers tried to effect in humans but that didn't work out; they all went mad and were locked up in secrecy.
Then again, Valentine had met an old resistance leader in Jamaica who'd been modified in some way by the Lifeweavers. She'd seemed sane enough, even if most of the rumors about her were insane. She'd offered some insight into his future.
She'd turned out to be at least partially right.
Valentine didn't know how there could be such a thing as precognition. There were so many variables to life. He'd seen too many lives lost by someone being a step too late or a step too early.
He quit thinking about Mantilla. As long as he got them safely to Evansville. Or to the mouth of the Tennessee in Kentucky, even. Past Paducah.
He woke up to gunfire.
It alarmed him for an instant. The familiar crack put him atop Big Rock Hill and running through the kettles of south-central Wisconsin and in the dust of the dry Caribbean coast of Santo Do mingo and with the punishment brigade on the edge of the mine-fields around Seattle, not sure of which and remembering each all at once in dizzy, sick shock. Then he remembered Lambert had told him that Mantilla had said she could practice with her rifle up by Missouri bootheel territory.
He put on his boots, grabbed a piece of toast, and went up on deck to watch.
Lambert, dressed in some washed-out, sun-bleached fatigues, was firing her rifle from the seated position, looking down the scope through a scratched and hot-glued pair of safety goggles. Valentine had seen the rifle's cheap cloth case when he came aboard and wondered what she had in there. He recognized the weapon: It was one of the Atlanta Gunworks Type Threes he'd become familiar with when Consul Solon had issued them to his ad hoc group posing as Quislings on the banks of the Arkansas. They were sought-after guns in Southern Command, basically an updated version of the old United States M14.
Lambert looked like she had one rigged out for Special Operations. It had a slightly longer barrel with a flash suppressor and a fine-looking optical scope, as well as a bipod that could fold down into a front handgrip. The plastic stock had a nice little compartment for maintenance tools and a bayonet/wire cutter.
The bayonet was a handy device. It had a claw on the handle that was useful for extracting nails and the blade was useful for opening cans or creating an emergency tap in a keg.
But he knew the weight and length of the weapon all too well. Lambert, for all her determination, found it an awkwardly big weapon to handle.
She was using it to pepper pieces of driftwood, old channel markers, and washed-up debris lining the riverbank. She clanged a bullet off of what looked like an old water heater.
"You're a good shot," Valentine said.
"It's hard to be a bad one with this thing," she replied, putting her eye back to the sight and searching for a target. "I wish it wasn't so goddamn heavy, is all."
"Try mine," Valentine said, offering her his submachine gun. It was a lethal little buzz saw, with an interesting sloped design that fought barrel-rise on full-automatic fire. Perfect for someone Lambert's size. He'd carried it across Kentucky and back.
Valentine looked at the serial number on Lambert's gun. Something about the stock struck him as familiar. An extra layer of leather had been wrapped around the stock for a better fit on a big man. He'd last seen this gun outside Dallas-
