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If the weight of keeping over a thousand fighting men of ad hoc backgrounds and muchly inclined to killing each other a few short months ago fed, sheltered, healthy, all the while improving their integration and skills, she didn't show it. Her eyes looked bright and alert, not a hair out of place, and her blotchy gray-green uniform could have been photographed and used as an example in an officer's reference manual.
She was a skilled officer when it came to keeping the brigade's rolling stock on the rails. She was also a by-the-book officer in her thinking. To Lambert's indisputably agile mind, better and more experienced heads than hers had laid down the tracks the military machine ran on-her job was to keep everything in repair and on schedule. Her one big attempt to lay down some new tracks had ended in near-disaster last year, a year of almost uninterrupted failure for the forces of freedom. Since assuming command of the tired, whittled-down remains of Operation Javelin in Fort Seng last year, she'd been even more of a stickler than she'd been in her days running the War College's administration, when everyone had called her "Dots" because of her thoroughness at dotting i's and crossing t's.
She gestured to an elegant carafe and went back to rapidly filling out a Southern Command report in neat block letters.
A year or two younger than he, Valentine had first met her as a newly promoted lieutenant attending the old war college in Pine Bluff.
Lambert lifted her short churchwarden pipe, relit, and took another puff.
"Tobacco is my vice," Lambert said.
Valentine's shock was authentic. "You admit to a vice, sir?"
She smiled. "Purely privately, Valentine. If you go public, I'll say I only smoke to cover the B.O. from the Bears."
"Good stuff," Valentine said, sniffing the air. It wasn't the usual mix of tar and bark, sometimes blended with a little hemp, one smelled when the real tobacco ran out.
"Gamecock has some connection in Lexington who knows another Carolina boy who knows someone else in Chattanooga and so on all the way back to the Cooper and Santee. They keep me supplied. It comes in with the Army of Kentucky mail."
Valentine sipped his water and took a bite of a sandwich. The bread needed salt and the shredded legworm meat tasted like it had just come from the smokehouse.
"Read your report on finding your big friend and your notes on those Texas-sized rodents our friend Pellwell trains. Anything you want to add off-paper?"
"No. But I'd like to keep Pellwell and her ratbits, if she'll stay."
"She'd stay at the mouth of hell if she can have her hairy band with her doing mischief, I suspect," Lambert said. "The Kurians will come up with a countermeasure, they always do. They'll probably come up with something that eats them or a bug that kills them. I'm sure we're only waiting on a batch of Reapers immune to Quickwood. They ought to show up right about the time we go into full production on the Quickwood bullets."
"We'll still kill a batch in the meantime, sir," Valentine said.
Lambert took another long, slow puff at her pipe. "That's what makes you unique, Val."
"Excuse me, sir?"
"Back when Stoyachowski and I were running our special operations department, we had her collection of 'Wild Cards.' Yeah, we took the name from her 'Bear' handle. We both knew you were one for the books."
Lambert wasn't free with compliments beyond the usual polite phrases. Of course, "one for the books" might not be a compliment.
"Could you explain, sir?"
"The hunters should be our best and toughest. They are, but they never last. Take the Cats-most quit after one trip in country. The rest-two, three, four outs and they were finished. Some go out again and never come back, others quit. The Bears are even worse. Like someone had planted rotten seeds in them, they sprouted differently, but it was always ugly. Some had the sense to request a transfer, others started in on drink and drugs and took themselves out of the TOE that way."
"I saw it in the Wolves, sir," Valentine said, wondering where this was headed. "My first hitch, with LeHavre, the senior lieutenant drank his way to a quiet desk job. Some go into the logistics commandos when they can't take the strain anymore."
"The Wolves wear out, the Cats disappear, and the Bears die violently. So what's your secret, Valentine? Do the seeds of self-destruction get in but never germinate?"
Valentine didn't know if he could tell her the truth-that he liked it. That truth was still something he was coming to grips with. The shadow inside, nibbling away at his soul every time he killed. In his darker moments, he wondered if he didn't thrive on blood in the manner of the Kurians and their Reaper avatars.
He thought it best to shift the subject.
"Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that, sir. Duvalier may be due for a rest. A year or two back in the Ozarks with good food-"
"My permission isn't the problem. She's not about to leave you any more than Bee. Nice dodge on that question, by the way."
He sat in silence, hoping she wouldn't take it for dumb insolence. Lambert neither liked him nor disliked him when they were both on duty. When she looked at him she might have been examining a rack full of tires for wear.
"No one knows what to make of you, Valentine. You're capable of looking someone right in the eyes and sticking the knife in, but you've half killed yourself fighting for people you didn't know ten minutes earlier."
"It's in the Southern Command oath, sir. Render aid and comfort to our people."
