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Bee was a "gray" Grog, a member of a muscular, thick-skinned fighting race of near-human intelligence. Or maybe they were as smart as humans, with a different way of presenting and learning. Grogs possessed good instincts for machinery and weapons, tools and plants and animals, but they fell apart when put in front of a sketch board where two-dimensional icons represented the solid objects they understood. He'd known her previous companion, a stinky bounty hunter named Price, and had rescued her from a circus menagerie years later. She'd gained a few scars and lost vision in one eye serving him. Bee fretted when he was gone too long.
And the people around headquarters indulged her sweet tooth, affecting her digestion and making her fretting worse. She'd broken some furniture on blood-sugar rampages.
He tried to ignore Bee snuffling over his dirty clothes as he reduced his facial hair to sink litter and combed out.
Clean and feeling human again, he stopped by his desk, glanced at his in-box and the lone red flag on the Alert Map and decided everything could wait. He was curious about the new arrival at the stables.
"No mail in the diaper bag this time, Major?" asked a corporal with a tray of sandwiches and coffee on his way out.
"Afraid not. Came in from a different direction. Those sandwiches look good."
"They're for that spy Martinez sent. That major fella."
"I don't think we're supposed to know about that," Valentine said, turning down the path to the stables.
So, the new broom at Southern Command was finally doing some whisking in Kentucky, Valentine thought. Well, he's welcome to it. He won't be able to complain about their use of logistical supplies. Most of the arms they were issuing to recruits were captured, the uniforms and gear were made in Evansville workshops, and the good people of Kentucky were feeding them. About all the pack trains were bringing in were bullets and medical supplies.
He took a deep breath and pretended to forget about the bad blood with General Martinez. Enemies in the Kurian Zone prowling Western Kentucky were his business, not vindictive old snapping turtles two big rivers away back at headquarters.
He took a deeper breath when he saw the woman bending over a tack-cleaning table outside the stable feed-room door. Victoria Pellwell stood at least six three. She was one of the tallest women Valentine had ever seen.
She scooped grain, corn, and nuts out of assorted livestock feed sacks, filling a flour barrel. Her civilian attire was rather striking-sun-faded red denim from neck to ankle, short, lace-up riding boots, hair bound up in a yellow handkerchief.
"Victoria Pellwell of the Miskatonic, I presume," Valentine said.
She set down her scoop. "David Valentine. As I live and breathe."
Valentine was tall himself, but he found himself staring dead level, or perhaps a little up, into her eyes as they shook hands. Vigorously. Valentine felt as though his hand was attached to a pump head.
"I'm pleased," he said, hoping she'd relinquish his hand before shaking it out, "but not as pleased as you are, it seems. Can't account for it."
She was no beauty. She had an upturned nose and her steady, rarely blinking eyes were set at an almost uncanny distance from each other, but it was an appealing face you didn't mind looking at. Her teeth were well aligned and gloriously white; he hadn't seen such teeth on a woman since his brief affair with the Quisling obstetrician in Xanadu.
She freed his hand. Valentine fought the impulse to massage his knuckles. "Your papers are practically an archive all by themselves, Valentine. You've got a good eye for detail and you've met a rare level of exomorphs."
"The Miskatonic has been helpful to me on occasion too," Valentine said. He'd learned to grow suspicious of people eager to praise him within a few seconds of meeting. They usually wanted something.
"I'm hoping we'll be even more so," she said, knocking over her small barrel as she turned and put her hand up to her mouth. Valentine's arm flashed out, caught the barrel and righted it before she could whistle, or quack, or whatever the finger in her mouth was for.
Pellwell made a popping sound with her finger against tight-stretched cheek and stamped her foot.
A train of little brown creatures, nose to stumpy naked tail, trotted out of the stable. They had powerful rear legs and smaller, delicate forelimbs with widely spaced digits. The first stuck its snout in the air and sniffed the feed.
Ratbits.
He'd seen them in the wild, if "wild" applied to a creature at least as bright as a human child. The muscular haunches allowed them a good running pace, bouncing along as though on springs. Their front paws were gifted with opposable fingers and thumb and tough stumpy claws to dig; in their faces were sharp teeth capable of chewing through all manner of obstacles. Big, sensitive ears shifted this way and that. Though their faces were unlike either rats or rabbits, the eyes were set forward in the face rather in the manner of a weasel or raccoon.
Valentine had last encountered them in the Texas hill country. They were an experiment by the Kurian Order in a vast establishment called "the Ranch." The Ranch was in ruins by the time Valentine crossed it, abandoned to the ratbits, oversized rattlers the Kurians had developed to wipe out the ratbits, and other unpleasant fauna cooked up by the Kurian genetic tinkerers.
The Kurians had been looking for something that bred faster, and were hopefully more manageable, than humans. The experiment had produced the ratbits, who turned out to be so successfully enhanced in intelligence and social inclination they launched a revolt, since they were no more enamored of being bred to be eaten than humans.
When Valentine had met them, there was some misunderstanding that led to violence. Their squeaks and chirps were unintelligible to humans, and they communicated by spelling out words with Scrabble tiles, working the tiles with the quick-handed facility of a blackjack dealer.
This group looked a little better groomed than those he'd seen in Texas. They smelled faintly of pine chips. One had patchy-colored fur, and another had nearly black stripes running down its pewter-colored back. The others were in shades of brown to gray, with a mixture of lighter rings around their eyes, noses, and running up their ears.
"Are these from Texas?" Valentine asked.
"I met them there four years ago," she said. "I was a junior member of the Miskatonic team that went into the hill country to see what might be salvaged from the experimental station."
