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"If you're a snitch it's no hair lifted. I'm pleading out."
"I haven't even talked to my lawyer yet. I need to write some letters. You wouldn't know where I could get paper, would you?"
"Who's running your floor?"
"The guard? Young, I think."
"He's a decent guy. Just ask him." He tapped his wooden cigarette holder on the windowsill and winked. "Got to get back to my tribe. It's Grogs and Harpies in here; we don't mix much."
"Thanks for crossing no-man's-land."
"Just a little recon. Mission accomplished."
Valentine asked Young about paper and a pen as they locked him back in his cell. The long-haired man was two doors down.
"Ummm," Valentine said. "Corporal Young?"
"Yes, Major?"
"Could I get some paper and a pencil? I need to write a few people and let them know where I am." And he should write Post and give him the findings of the aborted investigation, which amounted to a few more facts but zero in the way of answers.
"Sure. It's a standard SC envelope; just don't seal it. Censors. I'll slip them under the door gap tonight on my rounds."
"Right. Thank you."
Young unlocked Valentine's door. Valentine couldn't help but glance at the fixture of a secondary bar, a bolt that could be slid home and twisted, fixed to the metal door and the concrete with bolts that looked like they could hold in Ahn-Kha.
"Major Valentine," Young said. "I heard about you on my break today. The fight on that hill by the river in Little Rock. It's . . . ummm ... a privilege."
Valentine felt his eyes go a little wet. "Thank you, Corporal. Thanks for that."
A sticklike insect with waving antennae was exploring his sink. Valentine relocated it to the great outdoors by cupping it between his palms.
He gave the insect its freedom. He used to be responsible for the lives of better than a thousand men. Now he commanded an arthropod. As for the general staff training . . .
"What the hell?" he said to himself. "What the hell?"
* * * *
He met with his military counsel the next day right after breakfast-some sort of patty that seemed to be made of old toast and gristle, and a sweet corn mush. The officer, a taciturn captain from the JAG office named Luecke who looked as though she existed on cigarettes and coffee, laid out the charges and the evidence against him. Valentine wondered at the same military institution both prosecuting and defending him, and, incidentally, acting as judge. Most of the evidence was from two witnesses, a captured Quisling who'd been in the prison camp and a Southern Command nurse lieutenant named Koblenz who'd been horrified at the bloody vengeance wreaked by the outraged women.
Valentine remembered the latter, working tirelessly in the overwhelmed basement hospital atop Big Rock Mountain during the siege following the rising in Little Rock. He'd countersigned the surgeon's report recommending a promotion for her.
He'd sign it again, given the opportunity.
"They've got a good case. Good. Not insurmountable," Luecke said.
"And my options are?" Valentine asked.
"Plead guilty and-see what we can get. Plead 'no contest'-get a little less. Plead innocent and fight it out in front of a tribunal." She turned the cap on her pen with her fingers but kept her eyes locked on his as though trying to get a read.
"When you say 'not insurmountable' you mean?"
"Good. I like a fighter. For a start you're a Cat. We're hip-deep in precedent on Cats not getting prosecuted for collateral casualties. We can blame the women for getting out of hand-"
"I'm not hiding behind the women. Try again."
The pen cap stopped twirling for a moment. "If it were just the Quisling we could toss a lot of dust around. Lieutenant Koblenz will be tough; her statement is pretty damning." The cap resumed its Copernican course.
