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On the other is a single man lying as though nested in a patch of hairy vetch, watching the camps turn off and in for the night. He's dressed in a curious assortment of legworm leathers, insulating felt vest and gaiters, canvas trousers, and a nondescript green service jacket with rain hood missing its drawstring. One of the canny, nettle-scratched, and well-nigh uncatchable wild boars who root the nearby Green River marshes might recognize a kindred spirit if he came snout-to-nose with the man. Both know they're a potential meal if they're not careful, both have a dozen tricks to throw off trackers and hunters, or better yet, to avoid being observed in the first place. And both can be unbelievably fast and fierce when cornered.
Scarred on face and missing an earlobe, weathered, and with a few strands of gray in his still-thick black hair, he has an uneven set to his jaw that can look humorous or thoughtful. At the moment you might say thoughtful, thanks to the slow-moving piece of fresh grass shoot working at the right side of his mouth the way a cow absently chews her cud. He's not looking at the military camp. What's behind that wire and passing in and out of the tents has long since been observed, estimated, and recorded in a battered pocket notebook.
Instead he gazes at the mobile-homelike cluster of temporary housing for the most important members of the construction staff, especially the extra-wide one with the words SITE GREEN CONSTRUCTION SUPERVISOR V. CHAMPERS stenciled next to the doorbell.
They're not wasting any time, Valentine thought. Maybe he'd wasted too much, first in Tennessee trying to trace the traffic from the Georgia Control to its terminus, then observing the construction site for two days, slowly devouring his precious supplies-mostly canned WHAM! legworm meat, uninteresting unless you liked faintly barbecued-flavor chewing exercises-he'd brought.
After a long session of sassafrass tea-fueled negotiations with a shifty backwoods family of smuggled-goods dealers-he turned over the Pooter and its contents. He'd finally settled on a well-fitting pair of snake-proof military boots, two bottles of bonded bourbon, and a sum of Nashville cash he suspected was counterfeit. He kept only an Atlanta Youth Vanguard star-cluster leader key fob and a mobile file cabinet stuffed with papers and marked ASST. STAFF FACILITATOR MACON.
He'd spent a lot of time reading, while watching the construction site and getting a feel for its rhythms.
He waited, reading and watching, lying like a snake in the tall grass on an old saddle-sheepskin so dirty the mottled brown passed for camouflage. Dirty or not, it still protected his belly from the cold earth. Beside him, in a protective deerskin sheath, his Atlanta-built Type Three, 7.62mm, four feet of match-barrel battle rifle, waited like a sleeping friend.
He hoped it would stay sheathed for the night.
When his hard-running Wolves had first reported the construction and military traffic-one of the long-range patrols had cut across a road leading back to Clarksville recently used and partially cleared and sensibly followed it north to the source-he'd taken the matter up with Colonel Lambert. Their bloodied-but-still-training companies of ex-Quislings, sort of a "Foreign Legion" grudgingly acknowledged by Southern Command but at the string-knotted end of the supply chain, now had something much more ominous to face than a few ravies-addled psychopaths starving in the woods.
The under-construction tower was like a sandglass being filled from the heavens above. Once it was up, the Kurians within would control everything within a fifty-mile or more radius.
Putting a monkey wrench in the Kurian gears was a job for the whole brigade, or maybe just a few men. Valentine shaved that down to one, then reluctantly accepted the company of a wolf messenger and Alessa Duvalier as far as the outskirts of Central City.
"One?" Lambert had asked, her usual brisk-some might say fussy, others attentive-manner shocked into immobility.
"I'm not going to fight. I'll go and have a talk with them," Valentine said.
That's still what he planned to do, go and have a talk, armed with information obtained from Macon's files. He checked the hilt of the fourteen-inch parang strapped to his thigh, the .45 automatic at his hip, and his quiet little silencer-threaded .22 tucked under his arm. The legworm pick was holding up some camouflage netting above his body.
One worry. There was at least one Reaper in the camp, and a man who left a Reaper out of his calculations could easily find himself dead and strung up like a weasel on a gamekeeper's gibbet.
Alessa Duvalier, a redheaded tangle of living razor wire who'd trained him as a Cat almost a decade ago, lurked somewhere alongside the road leading to the gates, ready to hunt the hunter should the Reaper venture outside the gate. While it could leap even the nine-foot-high fencing around the military camp, Reapers didn't like to exhibit their lethal prowess around their allies. It unsettled their underlings. They'd rather engage in quiet little murders in basements and abandoned barns.
Getting to the construction housing would be easy enough. The trailers had nothing of value to protect. No valuable machine tools and construction equipment, no carefully guarded armories. Only a few hard hats and their laundry and some greasy baking foil.
Night fell early, cloudy and cold, and he waited for the guard change, slowly chewing the last of his canned WHAM! to convince his stomach he'd eaten more than he actually had. He gave the fresh guards another two hours to become not-so-fresh, marked the location of the lone dog patrol, and wiggled with his rifle down to the construction camp fence.
The smell of new spring green was everywhere. Some wild daffodils had opened, their yellow bluish in the dark. Their sweet aroma invigorated him.
He made it to the garbage pit behind the construction camp and waited out the dog patrol.
Thanks to the heavy equipment, they made a good job of it. The pit was ten full feet deep and much wider. Already it was littered with refuse, packaging, and bits from the construction already under way.
Valentine lay at the lip, pretending he didn't own a working nose.
The stuff these Georgia Control workers tossed out! There was foil everywhere, smelling of a better grade of barbecue sauce than the WHAM! he'd consumed. In the United Free Republics, the make-do populace would never toss out practically brand-new foil. It would be washed, flattened, and folded by whichever kid had reuse chores that week. Once holed and useless, it would be added to the mass of insulation around an icebox or root cellar or compost pile, if it didn't end up expanding the capacity of some old-timer's still.
The Control, one of the richest and best-organized Kurian Zones, encompassing as it did much of the old Carolinas, the civilized northern slice of Florida, and a good piece of Alabama and Tennessee besides, had resources the hardscrabble free territories couldn't dream of. Ports for trade, overseas air, the rich coastal waters to feed their population-
Then again, perhaps the Georgia Control had never fought a real war against determined humans choosing to die in battle instead of pierced by the tongues of the Kurian's Reapers. They could bite off pieces of their neighbors, but they might prove just an oversized band of vicious riot police. Everyone had thought the Moondaggers invincible until they fought real troops with real weapons.
The dog patrol passed, checking the overgrown ditches next to the road. Valentine saw a shape creeping behind, close to the brush, arms and legs splayed like a spider, wrists and ankles bent and fingers splayed in an unsettling manner
Reaper. Keeping watch over the dog and its handler.
This one scuttled more like a scorpion than in its usual biped locomotion, moving so it couldn't be easily observed.
Valentine pulled back into himself, imagining his consciousness a blue ball of energy he could shrink to a marble and place in his pocket. Reapers hunted mankind, seeking lifesign. It was an energy given off by sentient creatures in response to their size and mental development.
The Reapers had the usual senses, of course. No one knew how good they were, though Valentine had some idea they lay somewhere between the handler and his dog. He'd taken in an infant Reaper after escaping Ohio, and his "son" was growing up near Saint Louis under the guidance of a woman who'd saved his life on Hispaniola.
