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On the ground, if you knew the country, you knew which homesteads held people who were friendly to the fight against the Kurians, ready with a cot, meat, and clean bedding for one of the “fighting folks.” They sometimes paid a price, too. The Kurian Order paid informants well, and often carried out brutal reprisals. There were sad moments when she walked up a familiar path only to find the house ransacked and empty. You never learned the full story. Sometimes there was a little line of chest-high bullet holes against a basement wall, sometimes not.
The hot anger you felt at the destruction of people who treated you like family kept you going through hunger and illness for another six months or a year.
The problem was this shit epoch she’d been born into. Fifty years earlier and she would have been able to fly anywhere—Paris, the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef. If she’d been born fifty years in the future, assuming a big chunk of Earth could be cleared of the Kurian Order, they’d be flying all the time again. The knowledge was all there, even now new planes were being built. It was up to her generation to get rid of the Kurians, and do it mostly on foot, while dusty, sweaty, and thirsty.
Sometimes she hated those in the past, who didn’t know how good they had it. Even though she was fighting for them, she held a grudge against the future generations, too. She had risked her life fighting across a big piece of the old United States for their sake, after all.
Valentine and Ahn-Kha never groused about these awful years.
Hell, Ahn-Kha wasn’t even on the right planet; he should have been born light-decades or whatever they were called away.
She’d keep on trudging, of course. And when they finally shot her in some basement, would anyone remember? Yeah, there’d be some statue looking over a park somewhere. “Tomb of the Unnamed Resistance Guerilla,” but the name Alessa Duvalier would be nowhere, once the handful of friends she had in the world died.
Well, maybe not. When she returned from this trip, assuming fate gave her that outcome, she should really sit down with that journalist Boelnitz back in Evansville and tell him some of her stories. Maybe she’d make it into an appendix chapter having to do with the Twisted Cross or the Golden Ones or the discovery of what was going on at Xanadu, that Reaper ranch in Ohio.
Montee set the plane down on a blacker-than-black runway with big yellow lettering and numbers in vast blocks. The hieroglyphic numbers and arrows must have meant something to him, because he made several turns on his way to park the plane inside a little hangar at the end of a row of much larger hangars near the terminal.
This was a serious airport. Hangars and multiple areas for the planes, not just a patch of land with some tie-downs near the airstrip.
“Welcome to Canada,” Montee said over the intercom. “Ontario, to be exact. You’ll be happy to know we’re spending the night somewhere warm. We’ll be deplaning out of public eye,” Montee said, emerging from the cockpit as a little tractor pulled the plane into the hangar. His boots were untied, she noticed. Did he trim his toenails in the air or something? “Fourteen-hour overnight, refueling, and maintenance. The airport has twenty-four-hour food and drink, for those of you who just want to sleep in the seats or the aisle. There’s a functioning pre-2022 hotel nearby. This is not my first time at this airport, but I tend to bed down by the plane, so I can’t vouch for the cleanliness of the sheets.”
“What do we use for money up here?” Stamp asked.
“That’s taken care of, courtesy of Southern Command,” Alexander said, patting a travel satchel slung over his shoulder. It had a luggage tag that matched his watchband.
They all worked the kinks out of their frozen bodies and deplaned. They were tucked in way at the end of the hangars. A military-looking jet with camouflage and drop tanks for extra fuel was the only other flying occupant in the hangar. Red tool cases on wheels and some machine-shop gear filled one wall. A pair of uniformed men watched them through glass from a little hangar office with doors to both outside and inside the hangar.
“Want to go halvsies on a room, Red?” Pistols asked her.
“Yes, but not with you,” she replied.
The airport in Free Canada was the busiest she had ever seen, even accounting for military activity in the better-equipped Kurian Zones. There were twenty or thirty small planes in various degrees of readying for flight, taxiing, landing, and embarking and disembarking passengers.
“That’s Canada for you,” Montee said. “Lots of remote little hamlets. Only way to get there is by plane, with the roads mostly in disrepair. If the Kurians want to come up from the south, they’ll have to cut their way through an awful lot of trees. Fuel’s no problem; they’ve got fracked oil out the wazoo all over the place.”
They would have a night’s rest at the airport. There was a three-story hotel nearby if they wanted, and there were plenty of homes in the small town that took in “layovers” less expensively. Montee handed out a labeled envelope to each of them with Canadian currency inside. It had pictures of birds and bears and wolves, the wildlife kind.
She ended up getting a room at the pre-2022 hotel with Valentine and Ahn-Kha. It had a whitewashed outside and most of the lights around the entryway doors still worked, bathing the drive up to the hotel doors in warm, welcoming light. The desk staff’s English sounded a little strange to them, kind of a Green Mountain Boy nasal twang. It wasn’t cheap—or maybe the Canadian paper currency they’d been given didn’t count for much in this particular province. Hard to say. They had to pay extra for towels, and declined a soap-and-shampoo purchase three times.
“You’re getting the shampoo free with the bar of soap,” the desk clerk said.
“Or the bar of soap free with the shampoo, if you want to look at it that way.” The manager laughed, though the humor in his statement was a little hard to detect.
They asked for extra blankets and paid a “laundry fee” for them. For such a classy-looking hotel, the Canucks sure bled you with a thousand fees.
But, it was warm, and it was quiet once night fell and the buzzing of the air traffic lessened to a single night landing after nine. She awoke, feeling very refreshed, to the sound of Valentine in the shower.
“He is getting his towel money back in hot water, I think,” Ahn-Kha said. He was in a foul mood; the way the toilet was set next to the bathroom wall made it hard for him to properly use the facilities.
She wasn’t looking forward to another long day in the bouncing, cold plane. And in all likelihood she’d get stuck next to Pistols again.
Time to straighten matters out with Postle once and for all. After her morning ablutions she spent a few minutes in the washroom sharpening her cat claws.
She and Ahn-Kha waited while Valentine drank coffee with Sime at the other end of the lobby.
Ahn-Kha was a living anthill, crawling with kids from a fecund family of travellers. They were using his long forearm and back hair to pull themselves up onto his shoulders, where the view was higher than anywhere else in the terminal.
“I told Sime about the possible penetration of the conference,” Valentine said.
