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After a day's work in the fields that no longer seemed quite so delightfully mindless, he was rinsed and brought to the little trailer park enclave again. This time, he thought he saw a shadow watching him from the woods sheltering the trailers from prying eyes.
It was laundry day. There were bedsheets drying on every line. She showed him a tub of iced beer. "Present from the med staff. Doctor says it's the right time in my cycle, so you've got me for the next two nights. Let's enjoy ourselves."
"Sure. But later, let's talk. Alone. Quiet," Valentine said, still not sure of her.
"If your tongue's not too tired. And don't go getting lovelorn. You're here because the Baron wants it so. Don't be surprised if when you're done with me, they move you on to another, or get you jacking off into a cup. They'll make use of those balls while you still have 'em. Soon as you knock a couple of us up, you're getting snipped high and sewn up tight. Washtub gossip says you're going to be guarding the officers' harem."
The Grog Auxiliaries: the Kurian Order keeps its place through its Church, police forces, riot squads, troops, and of course the Reapers. Some might say the paperwork and permits of existence in the Kurian Zone is a form of control, a little less obvious and more debilitating than the policeman on the street or the riot cop at his fire hose. Fear has its role too.
Of course, the Kurians sometimes have difficulty getting men to shoot down other men, especially in the early days of their advent. They brought the Grogs over through the Interworld Tree, telling them that a rich planet was theirs for the taking if they'd evict an indolent and degenerate infestation of scrawny humans.
So the Grogs came, though where they expected to frighten and herd away the humans (as their scouts who'd gone among the confused, starving multitudes in a few devastated areas had reported) they found resistance. But Grogs take to new modalities of warfare like ducks to different-sized bodies of water, and soon modified human weapons for their own use.
The Gray Baron's "Missouri Division" is a recent construct. The Grogs in central Missouri now recognize no law but their own, and are quite happy to raid north, south, east, or west-and the rich lands of Iowa have valuable cattle and swine worth stealing. Starting with nothing but a starving, co-opted Western Missouri clan of Grogs known as the Wrist-Rings, he built them up into a formidable fighting band over the course of a decade, absorbing bands of Grogs along the Missouri Valley with promises of easy duty-when not fighting.
He kept that promise. His warriors enjoy an enviable lifestyle, only chieftains south of the river live in the manner of his lowliest fighter. As for the clan chiefs, some believe they've died and returned to Earth as demigods, so much wealth and wives and slaves do they have at their command.
The next generation of fighting Grogs and their human masters is training even now, while a third is being selected and bred. What plans the Gray Baron has for them perhaps not even his human lieutenants may say.
Valentine wondered if Snake Arms's comment was a plant, to make him anxious. Or perhaps it was a warning about crossing the Gray Baron.
If he hadn't seen him in his command car, Valentine would have suspected the Gray Baron was a creation, a boogeyman developed by the Kurians to keep both their Grogs and soldiers in line.
Ahn-Kha was true to his word, as always. Two nights later Valentine was awoken by the discreet scratch of Patches. The ratbit had a little pack made out of a zip-up eyeglass case, and in it was a pad and paper.
Valentine had spent some time thinking about the vulnerabilities of the Baron's human/Gray One legion. For the first message, he just passed word of the supplies he needed them to gather from Brostoff's forward Wolf base. They might not be able to spare guns, but they had plenty to eat and drink ...
Valentine puzzled out why there were no Grog overseers. Men ordered, and sometimes struck men; the Grogs did the same for and to their own kind.
He had plenty of time to give it thought, under the orders and the implied threat of short whip, knotted rope, or crop in the hands of some ill-tempered NCO.
He'd seen, all too often, one race or species used to supervise another. It focused the subject people's animosity in the right direction-at least in the tyrant's terms-at a powerful tormentor. Every shortage, every injury, every illness could be blamed on the people charged with policing. The group on top had to be fiercely loyal to the existing order, or they'd fall-and a bloody, hard fall it would be.
Seemed crazy of the Gray Baron not to use this system on his human forced labor. But instead, a few men and women with clipboards and kepis kept quiet watch, little brutality required.
Probably the Gray Baron wanted to make sure his fighting Grogs didn't get any ideas about pushing men around. In Valentine's experience, all Gray Ones considered themselves superior to puny humans, most of whom weren't even as strong as a prepubescent youth.
Valentine wondered if the Gray Baron wasn't sitting on a throne of sweaty dynamite. If only he were more sensitive to the unspoken currents among Grogs-he might be able to find an ambitious revolutionary among the Deathring Tribe.
Over the next two days, Valentine paid more attention to the young people he saw in camp. Teenage and preteen humans and Gray Ones worked together, dressed alike in either green or blue overalls, putting up utility poles, working in the kitchens and laundry. They looked healthy, intelligent, and strong-they reminded him of the Kurian Zone propaganda posters where everyone had firm jaws and full heads of hair.
The cooperation between the younger humans and Gray Ones was the closest thing to symbiosis Valentine had seen. The juvenile Gray Ones did much of the heavy work, with the human youths directing and checking and correcting. But when not engaged in work, the roles were reversed and the Gray Ones ate first while humans served and poured, with humans cleaning their ears and nails and teeth, making sure the bedding was clean and the chamber pots empty. Perhaps to the teens, the Grogs were glorified, highly trainable pets that needed care, and to the young Gray warriors, the human allies were their slaves once the enforced egalitarianism of action was over.
The Baron's stronghold didn't feel like a Kurian Zone. The elements were there, a survivor at the top with absolute power, his close advisors and guards just below, then the common herd scratching for any kind of advantage or notice to climb up the next rung of the ladder.
Valentine had his chance to step up a rung with the Warmoon Festival.
It was his first time inside the old megachurch that served as the Baron's headquarters. He was, to his surprise, the Baron's new champion human bare-handed fighter, and despite his lowly status as forced labor, he'd won a front-row seat at the festivities. Even more oddly, Sergeant Stock was to lead his small party, which consisted of a teenage girl who had finished studies at the top of her class in the stronghold's school and a Youth Vanguard military track student commander who'd travelled all the way from a little town near Buffalo on Lake Erie to join the Baron's forces.
Again, a less Kurian Zone establishment could hardly be imagined. It reminded him of some of the older, forgotten corners of Southern Command, where staff inspectors were rare and the men built a little military world they liked. There were captured weapons and pieces of uniform hung on the timbered walls, hunting-lodge style.
Trying to get out of the press of flesh moving for the big central arena, he stepped off the corridor and into a sort of museum-cum-trophy hall. Some of it was a little gruesome. There was a collection of human scalps in one case, an early souvenir of the Deathring Tribe. Valentine saw some photos of piles of corpses, bodies lying in the streets in front of apartment buildings, one plummeting to earth after being tossed out by corpse-disposal teams, what looked like a wild band of ravies victims, shot down Goya-like and frozen in time and space, white eyed and screaming, in a photographer's flash.
The only time you ever saw photos of corpses were in Church museums featuring the sins of the Old World, such as the Nike and Coca-Cola corporations' slaughter of laborers in the sugar plantation killing fields of Cambodia or the murder of the Tutsi nation in central Africa by a New York diamond consortium.
Valentine guessed that the genesis of the Baron's organization was a body locator and gravedigger's unit, judging from some of the pictures and souvenirs in the first cabinet.
The "Warmoon" to the Gray Ones was the first crescent moon after the vernal equinox-the fang that signaled the start of the season when their obscure cosmology looked favorably on fighting.
