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"Good to be working with you again, old horse."
"I could say the same, my David."
"If this goes to shit, you beat out of here, okay?"
"I'll run with you on my back to the Missouri River if that happens."
At first, Valentine thought the distant smear might be a legworm. Then he saw heads bobbing among the brush, appearing and disappearing through the gaps like targets in a carnival shooting gallery.
"Our Baron's guys, do you think?" Valentine asked.
"Almost certainly," Ahn-Kha said. "A band of Gray Ones would not stay so tightly in line."
Valentine watched the bobbing heads for a few more minutes. There were men at the front and the rear of the column, it looked to be no more than two or three, with a hundred Grogs or more in between. Two of the men, presumably the officers, rode horses. Valentine couldn't tell the breed with certainty at this distance, but they looked like tough, squat mustangs.
The men wore a vertical-striped camouflage, ranging from a buttery tone at the lightest to a rabbitty brown. He'd seen the pattern a few times on his previous trips into Iowa, when he'd wandered as a rather vengeful exile shortly after Blake had been born and relocated to Missouri. It was equally effective in light woods as prairie. Instead of helmets, gray kepis with another band of the camouflage material running around the brim sat on their heads.
The Grogs wore smocks or vests made out of the camouflage as well, probably ponchos or tenting repurposed for oversized Gray Ones' heads and shoulders. Big, bolt action rifles proportioned like Kentucky squirrel guns with oversized stocks hung by short straps around their necks in the human stock-up, muzzle-down fashion, allowing the Gray Ones to use all fours on the march.
Valentine noted that their rifles had some kind of latch attachment and rest so they didn't bump and chafe on the march. Good officers, these.
"At least this Baron grants them their stride," Ahn-Kha said. "Remember in New Orleans, the way men were always trying to make them walk upright when marching? They can do it, but it is not a natural gait and is fatiguing."
"They cover more ground per minute this way. Those officers are really puffing to keep up. The Baron should put his men on bikes."
"Perhaps you can suggest that when you meet him," Ahn-Kha said.
"If we're lucky, he won't ever notice us," Valentine said. "Your call, old horse."
"I see no signs of wounds or fighting," Ahn-Kha said. "They seem well fed and well rested. Dirty, looks like. See the pollen crusted into the sweat stains. I would say they have been out a few days. Perhaps they are on their way back in any case."
That was the real danger in contacting opposing forces. Valentine had heard stories of surrendering men being shot outright, if the opposition didn't feel like taking the trouble to secure, feed, and transport prisoners.
Ahn-Kha checked his weapons, squatted and stretched, and cleaned each ear with his tiny end finger. "My teeth clean?" he asked Valentine, showing his prominent near-tusks of a well-matured Golden One.
"I remember the dentist visiting the old Razorbacks and saying he needed machine tools to do you," Valentine said. Ahn-Kha rinsed his mouth with wet sand morning and night, if he could find it, and used baking soda and a brush when it could be had. "Yeah, they look great."
"Nothing puts my Gray Cousins off like a bad set of teeth," Ahn-Kha said. "Let us empty tracks."
"Make tracks," Valentine corrected. Ahn-Kha was more nervous than he let on, he only flubbed his English when preoccupied.
Ahn-Kha hailed them.
Valentine wondered what they would think. A scarred, bitten Golden One with shorn hair leading an equally scarred human dressed in Scrubman rags.
"Peace, peace, I call peace," Ahn-Kha said, approaching the soldiers. He carried his rifle by the barrel so that the butt faced the troops, a friendly gesture to Grog eyes.
Valentine waited for the order to deploy or ready weapons, nerving himself for a wild flight, but it didn't come.
The officer turned up the corner of his mouth under his kepi brim and Valentine relaxed. A little. Perhaps the officer found this an interesting diversion in a dull patrol. Valentine noticed that both he and his sub-officer, and the two human NCOs, all had full beards or mustaches. Strange for Kurian Zone troops. They were usually fit and trim and cleanly cut as a recruiting poster.
Now that he could get a better look at the horses, he decided the duns were Kiger Mustangs, a tough breed, surefooted, agile, and durable. After 2022, a good many horses had gone feral and multiplied on the plains, and over the generations the cream of those rebroken to saddles were called "Kigers."
"I don't know you," the officer said, from under an impressive walrus mustache. "But come in peace."
"A rhapsody in your name, chief," Ahn-Kha said. "I have been years south of the Missouri River and in S'taint Lewee. I hear my relatives now live under the protection of the one called the Gray Baron."
"Your English is excellent, civilized one," the officer returned.
