Knight, E.E - Vampire Earth 08 - Winter Duty by Knight E.E

Author:Knight, E.E [Knight, E.E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-20T08:00:00+00:00

The city is quieter than usual this December. Though often subdued in the winter, this time around the city is in lockdown. It’s not the troubles at the power plant, or the revolt in Evansville, or the proximity of the forces of Southern Command that has closed the bridge and wharf to Kurian Order traffic. It is the great groups of strangers of all varieties coming in, from long-haired legworm ranchers to statuesque urbane females with gleaming leather courier bags and attractive wool suits.

There’s a good deal of speculation about who the strangers are. The locals, for all their guitar picking and hurdy-gurdy cranking and trucks with smuggling compartments over the axles, are keener observers of Kentucky politics than it might seem. They suspect that they’re playing host to the Kentucky Assembly but are willing to let history be made before they start talking about it in the main street’s many cafés and bandstand joints.

The Crucible Legion, as it was now being styled, had its first field operation providing security on the streets of Owensboro. Valentine had a standing order to put anyone who called it “Valentine’s Legion”

to work filling potholes, and it didn’t take many days of punishment with wheelbarrow and shovel before the name disappeared.

Both the informal name and the formal request to go to Owensboro had come through Brother Mark, who’d decamped without a moment’s rest to the Assembly at Elizabethtown and engineered its move to Owensboro.

Valentine and Lambert allocated two companies to the security detail, one to provide a presence on the streets in town and a second in reserve just to the west, ready to move to the west bridge or travel on the Owensboro bypass as needed. Valentine gave the street detail’s command to Ediyak, and Patel’s company had the reserve duty. Ediyak had an intelligent charm about her that would mix well with civilians, and Patel could be relied upon to get his men from A to B in a hurry if it became necessary.

Valentine had little to do but get to know the town and keep his men from talking too much in the bars or being too high profile on the streets. The soldiers of the legion had the unusual orders to keep out of the establishments of the downtown they were guarding.

He felt odd patrolling a town not in Southern Command control, but as the Owensboro Emergency Council explained it, the delegates didn’t trust some of the hotheads in the more vociferous clans not to try to storm the convention center and force the vote their way at gunpoint.

While the forces of Southern Command couldn’t be called “neutrals” in Kentucky politics, they were famous for letting the civilians carry out votes without anything more than a soldier’s fatalistic interest in the events of elected officials.

All Valentine’s soldiers could do was provide an illusion of security. They stood in pairs and trios on the street corners and walked through the old town square and along the rusted, broken river walk. But

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