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The Rescuer and his Vendetta: If Major David Stuart Valentine has a reputation in Southern Command shared by both his subordinates and superiors, it is probably as a retrieval specialist.
On his first true command in the Kurian Zone, while trekking across Wisconsin, he and a wounded comrade were aided by the family of Molly Carlson. She ran afoul of a high-ranking Quisling and Valentine pursued her all the way to the living cesspool of the Zoo in Chicago to bring her back.
His first major mission for Southern Command involved bringing a legendary plant similar to an olive tree out from Hispaniola in the Caribbean. The tree, known as Quickwood, was lethal to the Reapers and caused a deadly catalytic reaction in their systems. Though his mission to return a large quantity failed because of Consul Solon's conquest of the Ozark Free Territory, he had a chance to have a say in the ownership of Arkansas at Big Rock Hill, where he and a handful stood against everything Solon could throw at them.
He found a friend's wife who'd vanished into the Kurian Order, at a medical facility where certain women who were immune to a physiological reaction were used for their wombs to create Reaper after Reaper. He brought a pair of captured Lifeweavers back from the Pacific Northwest. One of the reasons he was so eager to come along on Operation Javelin, the failed bid to establish a freehold linking the free territories in the Northeast with the Transmississippi, was that he had learned there was a large guerilla army operating in the Appalachians led by his old friend Ahn-Kha.
Now, in this grim spring, comes one more extraction of a couple of dozen tool-pushers. As it turned out, the rescue turned out to be a key event determining the future of Kentucky and its resistance against the powerful Georgia Control.
Tension throbbed from the back of his neck, up his skull, and over his ears to his temples. It was always the day before leaving that was the worst.
Valentine walked in the door of the little Evansville house, enjoying a minor dereliction of duty. He'd met Major Grace that morning and answered a series of questions. Hard to believe a man who wore a major's cluster with Southern Command's General Headquarters didn't understand that sometimes you went into the enemy's territory just to rumble, so to speak.
Valentine explained that a weaker force could be effective only if it could choose the time and place for a fight. Waiting until the enemy brings the fight to you might ensure that your men were well rested and fed, but livestock pens were full of animals both well rested and fed.
It was in a handy neighborhood, on a nice little rise close to the west side market and the riverfront, but the home itself badly needed paint, screens, and gutters. Plastic and bricks were keeping out the bugs in one window. Most of the nearby homes had similar improvised repairs. Wild dogs and a few desperate hookers wandered the fringe of the neighborhood, concentrating at a little pawnshop/bar/tinker's at the corner. It was a part of the city in constant flux, people who'd escaped other Kurian Zones tended to set up squats there. A few who found one way or another to rise a little in the city's social strata mostly moved out, but some stayed to aid, or prey on, the newcomers.
He was an hour late, he'd told Caral six thirty.
The house smelled like herbs. It always did. Apart from some poultry, Caral picked up a little money by making herb mixtures, labeling them in old Kurian pill bottles and selling them at Evansville's market days. Her house was always smelling of basil or oregano or garlic. With spring in full bloom there was a little extra in the air. Wildflowers that would go in iced tea in the summer were hanging upside down in masses from the ceiling over the big tiled living room that had been converted into her workroom.
"Home, babe," he called, dropping on her big wooden table a cloth sack of new potatoes and asparagus he'd picked up.
"You're late, hubbs," Caral said, emerging from her basement and removing her thick roasting apron. She'd appealed to Valentine from the first, shapely, using a few strategic dibs and dabs of makeup, but with a tomboy's taste in clothes.
Like now, for example. Beneath the apron, nothing but cutoff shorts and slippers made of old carpet. Her breasts had always intrigued him-she had the widest aureolas he'd ever seen. They were the size of a dessert plate.
She smelled like woodsmoke and accepted a kiss on the cheek.
"Thanks for taking a bath, David," she said in his ear. "My sweet, clean-living old man."
"Hot shower. Privileges of the headquarters building at Fort Seng."
She poked around in a nearly empty cupboard. Twentieth-century kitchens had overmuch room for late twenty-first century lifestyles, especially in a frontline city like Evansville.
"We missed your birthday."
"Subject to requirements of the service," Valentine quoted.
"Well, I made something just the same. Hope it hasn't gone stale. You said you'd be back Tuesday."
She practically went en pointe to reach in the cupboard. She probably knew exactly how attractive the strain made her legs and buttocks. "Here we are."
She walked over to him, holding a cupcake on her palm, offering it from a position midway between her eyeline and breasts.
"A cupcake?" Valentine said. "That's above and beyond, Caral."
"Tough part was the cake flour and confectioners' sugar," she said, lighting a little homemade candle with a wooden match. Valentine watched the twin pendulums of her heavy breasts sway as she did so. "It doesn't exist in Evansville. I had to go begging from the household cooks on Millionaire's Row. Sorry, the vanilla's that Kurian Zone crap. Might as well shop for a moon rock as a vanilla bean these days."
"Would you even know what a real vanilla bean looked like?"
"I've seen them in books," she said. "Your candle's drooping."
"Something else isn't," Valentine said, running a finger down her cheek. He blew out the flickering flame.
"Let's eat," she said.
He woke early, long before dawn, but luxuriated in the sound of her breathing and the tangy, animal smell she'd left on him.
