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"At headquarters? I'm not a favorite of theirs."
"So I gathered. Honestly, I was expecting you to be a gilt-edged bastard. 'Let Valentine deal with them, he's such a grog-lover' they told me. And a few other things. But never mind. I found out where Fort Seng was, and decided I should look you up. Headquarters gave me transport docs to get rid of me, I think. I got myself attached to some volunteers heading out your way. I brought five I'd trained as a proof of concept."
We're collecting quite a menagerie in Kentucky, Valentine thought.
"Please tell me I haven't wasted my time," she said.
A visionary. Well, he'd been faulted more than once for following an ideal rather than military duty. Besides, another thinker around might give Brother Mark someone to latch on to on quiet evenings when Valentine would much rather be reading or enjoying one of Gamecock's raucous poker games.
"You want a chance to prove your concept? Get hard operational data?" Valentine asked, already bubbling with ideas. An animal about the same size as a cat, with sentient intelligence ... It was her turn to blush. "Of course." Oh, God, what had they said about him at headquarters.
"When you say reconnaissance, what do you mean? What do you think their capabilities are?"
She gathered her thoughts. "Well, you can't just send them out and have them report what they see. They need specifics. They can count and identify some things. How many trucks are in the warehouse . That sort of thing."
"Map reading?" Valentine asked.
The teeth reduced their wattage. "Still working on that. You have to get them pretty near their objective. Surely you can see the potential."
So young. So eager. So bright.
He hoped he wouldn't have to bury her, the way he had Rand. His shy intelligence, those remarkable teeth. Of course, if she really were that smart she would have kept pursuing that comfy departmental chair, rather than trying to come up with a new way to beat the Kurians.
"You ever been in the KZ?"
"Kurian Zone? Not really. Only the trip to Texas. I did my first internship in Kansas and Missouri, though, with the Gray Ones."
Valentine felt a pang. His old friend Ahn-Kha had taught him that terminology. Apparently it had made it into the scientific vocabulary.
"We're going out on a task in a couple days," Valentine said. "Lives will be at risk. We could certainly use you, but I want to see your team in action and interacting with our men. So let's try a test. If they do well, we'll bring you along for a real test under operational conditions."
"Thank you, Major Valentine."
"Most people call me Val when salutes aren't being tossed back and forth. Especially friends."
"I'd like that," she said, extending her hand.
Valentine hoped he didn't hesitate too much before gripping hers and submitting to another socket-rattling pumping of his arm.
"Thank you for the opportunity," she said.
Valentine needed time to think and plan and assemble his key officers. Perhaps coming along would be the best thing to ever happen to Miss Pellwell. She'd either be shocked into returning to her Miskatonic digs with renewed hopes of that chair, or she'd blossom into yet another oddly fitting cog in the Fort Seng machine.
Valentine had time for only a brief word or two with Colonel Lambert about what he'd discovered before he was thrust back into the affairs of training the battalion and improving Fort Seng.
He learned a little more about Pellwell. They chatted over tea during an after-dinner cards, charades, and chess session at headquarters.
The tea was out of a small supply left to him by a grateful mother. Most of the talk came from Pellwell.
Victoria Pellwell's grandfather was Southern Command's "very first Bear." The first to survive the transformation the Lifeweavers attempted on the volunteers, that is. She told him he was actually the third to go through the ordeal, which made him a very brave man indeed. Still, it was not a perfect case study. Her grandfather permanently lost the ability to speak, save for being able to bark out a word or two now and then that had nothing to do with the matter at hand.
For all that, he served twenty years as a Bear, surviving horrific wounds. As a child, she remembered him mostly pointing and grunting. He'd collected a formidable collection of Grog artifacts: weapons, tools, even a skull or two, and had a sort of dreadful candy bowl made out of a Gray One's oversized palm that he kept filled with butter toffee. "That's where I caught the exomorph bug, looking at his collection," Pellwell explained.
"Whatever happened to him?" Lieutenant Gamecock asked. The commander of Fort Seng's three Bear teams had been interested enough to leave a poker game and start lurking about the edges of their conversation. He made it very clear that he wasn't eavesdropping, only listening with interest and perhaps too shy or too sensitive to barge in until a decent gap appeared.
Pellwell seemed to welcome the question. Gamecock was handsome enough, with rugged features and a real fighting bird's brush of thick hair atop his head. That, combined with his old-fashioned South Carolina charm and cadences, made most of the women of Fort Seng lick their lips and throw their shoulders back when he approached. Perhaps he was just sniffing out the newest female addition in search of a fresh conquest.
"He was killed when Consul Solon came in, with our town's militia. At a little place called Viola, east of Mountain Home."
