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Bloom's command car came roaring back into Fort Seng. Bloom hopped out before it even came to a stop, hauling with her a Kentucky "vol"-short for volunteer: a local who served in the loosest, most disorganized militia imaginable. Their only common element was a dark blue band around their baseball-style caps. Valentine smelled blood on him.
"The Kurians moved already. They didn't waste time. We aren't even out of camp yet," Bloom said. "I'm sorry I've got to leave passing you bad news. Evansville just hauled this guy out of his boat."
"Where?" Lambert said.
The vol spoke up. "It's lights-out for Evansville and Owensboro. A bunch of flying whatsits have taken over the power plant, and some Reapers and Moondaggers are holding the technical guys hostage."
The banks of the lower Ohio: The Greenwater Infrastructure Support Plant-the former Elmer Smith Power Plant-on the Ohio River dominates the skyline for miles around. Or rather its smokestack does, a weathered, two-color pillar that resembles a Louisville Slugger (once produced a few score miles upriver) from a distance.
It is a quiet plant, generators thrumming away and a faint wind tunnel sound from the smokestack. The plant is active and confused only on days when thundering mountains of coal are unloaded. Once carried by barge, they're now brought by Kentucky's dilapidated railroad on captured trains, and irregularly at that. The Kentuckians break out the old joke that "these colors don't run anything but short."
The river is much changed since 2022. First called by the French-men who explored it "La Belle Riviere," its banks are now coated with arteriosclerosis of trash and industrial waste. In more prosperous days the river carried a weight of cargo equal to that which passed through the Panama Canal: coal barges, oil, mounds of chemicals white or gray or sulfur-colored, grain, corn, soy, tobacco, and of course steel returning from the coal-fired furnaces of Pittsburgh.
The Kurian Order still dredges the river, off and on, to its usual main channel depth of nine feet. It maintains the locks that control the river as it descends the five hundred or so feet from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi junction at Cairo-where the few local Grog-traders are careful to correct your pronunciation to "Care-oh."
Now, in the warm-water outflow of the plant, tough carp and catfish survive the acidic, polluted river. The bass keep to their willow roots, stumps, and snags in their cleaner stretches of bank.
At this time of year, with the temperatures sinking lower and lower at night, fog runs along the river most mornings, sending querying fingers into the riverside ravines. The foggy wall represents the new state of affairs along the river. Much of the north bank outside Evansville belongs to the Kurian Order; the south bank to the Kentuckians. When once they exchanged jokes about wool-headed Hoosiers and barefoot Kentucky hillbillies, now the locals steal and shoot.
But around the power plant, the fog seems to cling extra thick, a shroud that suggests the unwary would do well to keep away.
They took the vol, who was named with a string of three personal names for first, middle, and last-John Robert Nicholas-into the main building, where members of Valentine's battalion were lugging boxes and setting up duty stations. Lambert escorted Valentine and the vol into her bare office, where a single box sat on her desk waiting to be unpacked.
"I want you to get them," Nicholas said, ignoring the bare decor. "You Southern Command people know how to deal with critters like that. We can make the soldiers jump when we have to, but this is beyond anything we can do without tanks and cannon and such-like. Don't belong on God's green earth, them things."
Nicholas shuddered. He raised his eyes to Valentine. "You'll kill 'em, right?"
"Private, Colonel Lambert's in command here," Valentine said. "Tell her how you ended up here."
Nicholas checked the insignia on their clothing. "That bird outranks that palm tree, right. I forgot. Our big bug is a senior sergeant."
"She outranks everyone on the base, Private Nicholas, so you're speaking to the right woman. Tell us what's going on."
Valentine went to the coffeepot, an expensive-looking plug-in model with silver handles and gold rings at the top and bottom that had probably been found in the house. Lucky it wasn't sitting in someone's knapsack. Or maybe it had been, and Bloom rescued it. In any case, she'd left it full of hot, delicious-smelling coffee for her successor.
The building had a pair of emergency generators, a portable gasoline-powered one and a fixed propane model, but Valentine couldn't hear either running. The power plant must still be putting out the juice, then.
"I'm to tell you that ya'll have a safe conduct pass out of Kentucky and back to the Mississippi for the next forty-eight hours, after which the skies themselves will fall on you. Those were the Tallboy's exact words, sir."
Valentine and Lambert looked at each other. The corner of her mouth turned up and Valentine shrugged.
"Now that you've passed the word," Valentine said, "tell us what happened at the plant and what exactly attacked you. We need to know as much as you can tell us about what and how many and where they are."
Lambert called in a young man she'd selected as her clerk to take notes. When he was seated, she let Nicholas begin:
"Six I saw. They came in over the fence like-No, I should start at the beginning. I was part of the ten-man security team. We do three days on, then switch and get four days off, then four days on, you know-"
"Yes," Lambert said.
"Just there to keep an eye on the river, you know. We had an OP up the smokestack. We could see the Owensboro bypass bridge on one side-only bypass bridge still up west of Louisville, I suppose you know, sir-and Evansville on the other. Luckily it wasn't my shift to be up in the wind this morning. At dawn everyone got called out to look up because there were these big things, like birds or bats only bigger than any turkey vulture you could even imagine. They were circling around the top of the stack. I think they drove Berk out. He started climbing down the outside ladder and they just harried him and harried him and he fell before he got to the first perch-rest. He fell and made a mess-spun as he came down and hit headfirst. We all ran inside after that and were looking out the windows to see what they were up to when the Tallboys came over the fence.
"Now that the plant's mostly automated, the people who work it just do maintenance on the machines and watch the load-never as much as the plant was designed to make, at least these days. That, and they work the loaders that keep the coal flowing-several people on that full-time. But those big fellers just came in and killed two of us right off the bat, and another jumped on Sergeant White, who was just trying to get away. The others herded us like dogs into the cafeteria and closed all the shutters. We just crowded in the center of the room while they circled. You ever had one of those things nipping at your heels, ma'am?"
"No," Lambert said. "All the Reapers I've seen have been dead."
"Let's hope that record remains unbroken," Valentine said.
"Then for no reason, one just reached in and grabbed a fuel man. At least I think he was-he was covered in coal dust. It fed on him. Got blood everywhere. I'd seen finished-up bodies a couple times, but this was the first time I'd seen one eaten in the flesh. Horrible sight. Most of us turned away. Figure I owed the poor soul that, you know? Someone said his name was Dewey," Nicholas added, looking at the clerk who was writing down his words.
