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"Brother Mark and Major Valentine have the best connections with the Army of Kentucky," Lambert said, smothering the incipient argument. "What's your assessment?"
All eyes turned to Valentine. "Hard to say," he finally said. "I think they'd welcome any allies. They're a flexible bunch. I think they'd adapt. Out of all of North America, as far as I know, they're the only ones who made use of legworms. Built a whole culture around them over the years. The Golden Ones are smart, tough, and reasonable-sorry to distill your people into a few words, old horse, but there it is-I think the Kantuck would want 'em."
"I doubt the Missouri Grogs or the Iowans would appreciate us marching a host of Uncle's relations through their lands," Glass said.
"If you could hurry me back to my people, I could sound them out on the matter," Ahn-Kha said. "I would be eager to be among my own kind again. It's been many years, and if they are in distress, I should be with them."
"Let's at least explore the idea. Major Valentine, you and Ahn-Kha and Ediyak come up with a plan, based on moving twenty thousand civilians. Make it twenty-five-Grogs eat a lot."
"That's a college stadium," Patel said. "Lots of food and water. We're talking divisional support."
"We're wasting our time talking about it, sir," Glass said to Lambert, though whether he objected to exploring the idea or further chatter was hard to say. Glass was notoriously asocial for such a popular NCO. "Not a whole population. No way we can take that many cross country without killing half of them."
"I agree. There's simply no way to move that many civilians," Patel said. "Not through hostile country."
"Be easy to do on the river, if we controlled those waters," Valentine said. "The river takes care of water and sanitation. You could fit a lot of Golden Ones in a barge, for a few days anyway."
"You might as well have suggested an airlift, sir," Patel said. "We don't own any part of the Mississippi, at least not on a permanent basis. The skeeter fleet is strictly hit-and-run. That's why our supplies and mail, what little we get of it, has to come overland."
"We need a brown-water navy," Lambert said.
"Then the question for us is-lease or buy?" Valentine said.
The Logistics Commandos: What the Ozark Free Republics can't make, they take. Southern Command has turned scavenging, black market trade, and outright theft into a science. Oftentimes, their toughest veterans retire into the freewheeling Logistics Commandos rather than retire to their allotted acreage and meager pension. Former Wolves and Cats often make the best LCs-they know the Nomansland terrain and the surrounding Kurian Zones and usually have a network of contacts.
In the field, the Logistics Commandos are wild cards, the last reserve of every commander. They'll follow behind a successful attack, grabbing everything from prisoners and intelligence and truck batteries to dropped weapons, always sorting, always prioritizing. On a retreat, they decide what can be saved and what must be sacrificed. Because nearly all of them are long-service veterans with combat experience, they can fill almost any role in a fight from artillery to signals.
Of course they can be difficult. They have an old soldier's nose for food and comfort, and the other forces of Southern Command often complain-with justification-that the Logistics Commandos grab all the best beds and let only their scraps of their ample tables and secondrate luxuries reach the rawer hands and newer heels at the front.
"These are the boats?" Lambert said.
"Everything that floats," Valentine said. He and Ediyak were taking the colonel on a tour of Evansville's waterfront with the commander of Evansville's River Guard, an ex-river patroller named Jackson.
Jackson was a very what you see is what you get fellow. He had no office, only a fast, heavy boat with twin machine guns set up on a mount that probably was supposed to be used for sportfishing. He took them on a waterborne tour of the three miles or so of Ohio River that unequivocally belonged to Evansville. The locals had many less-lethal boats, mostly used for ferrying people across the river or east-west travel between a southward loop known as the "west hill" and the heart of the old city to the east. Like many old river towns, its biggest vessel was a derelict casino barge, hollowed of all but the ceiling glitz, now used for sheltering livestock-mostly chickens and pigs-traded to the river traffic.
They had a few barges, coal and corn vessels for the most part, still held together as a city storage reserve. One was even rigged to hold freshwater. A single decrepit tugboat was still in service for pushing them around, if necessary, but by the look of the engine and the part-time crew, it wasn't up to the job of even getting a single barge to the Mississippi, let alone up it. There was also a smaller tug designed for firefighting. It could, Valentine supposed, be pressed into duty as a barge pusher, but it would need some modifications for tying itself on to a barge train.
There were plenty of men in Evansville with riverboat experience, according to Jackson. Most had fled the Kurian Zone once Evansville became known as a haven, so getting them back on the river and in hostile territory might call for an old-fashioned press-gang. Valentine didn't like the idea, but it might be their only option.
Jackson gunned his engines and weaved around a sunken wreck of a tug, sending his passengers lurching into each other. The wreck was rather picturesque, if you liked rotting wood and rusty metal. Waterfowl nests covered the wheelhouse roof. In the slack water next to it, the Evansville River Guard's other battle-ready boat sat, holding on to the wrecked tug with a boat hook, ready to dash out downriver.
A tiny brown-water navy was being put together by the city, mostly to help defend the booms and check approaching barges for enemies. Evansville's leaders decided their best chance for survival was to allow river traffic up and down the Ohio, provided it wasn't military supplies or fodder for the Reapers. Corn and coal and dry goods could pass after being checked.
The Kurians were putting extra troops on the "peace marked" barges to discourage deserters.
Valentine wasn't a fan of "hostile neutrality" or whatever the Evansville town fathers were calling their attitude about river traffic these days, but Southern Command had no business telling civilians how to run their affairs unless bullets were flying.
"Men aren't the problem," Jackson said, when they asked him what his capability was to get to the Mississippi junction. For now, grander plans weren't being discussed, even with someone in the Evansville armed service. "Machinery is. You get me the boats, I could fill them with hands."
"Can you build them?" Lambert asked.
"Marine motors are the real problem, okay. They have to be tough and reliable. What we have is cannibalized, fifty-year-old gear for the most part. We have plenty of people in Evansville who can steer a boat, read the river, fix an engine. The weapons and combat stuff, on the other hand-"
"Well, we have a lot of men who can do that," Valentine said.
"River fighting is a little different than on land," Jackson said. "It starts and finishes very quick. You need men who can put a lot of shit on target-begging your pardon ladies-fast and I mean fast, or you lose boats and the next thing you know you're swimming in an oil slick."
Lambert sat with them on an airy, upper-floor balcony of the mansion, resting in the quiet after their day on the river. Her bedroom connected with it. It had a nice view to the north.
