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

Author:E. E. Knight [Knight, E. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, General, Fantasy Fiction, Occult & Supernatural, Horror Fiction, Vampires, Valentine; David (Fictitious Character), Kentucky
ISBN: 9780451463012
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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 if a file of Northwest Ordnance gunboats came chugging down the Ohio, all they could do was point the delegates to their designated bombproofs.

Of course, an illusion could be a powerful thing, as Valentine had learned at substantial pain in the Kurian Zone.

Owensboro had a police force, of sorts, who appeared to have one law for the town’s residents and another for strangers and transients. Valentine had to keep in the good graces of the local police captain, his deputies, and his “detectives”—who, as far as Valentine could tell, were in charge of extorting money from the shadier local establishments.

The Kentucky Assembly met at the waterfront conference center that played host to Owensboro’s famous flea markets. Instead of socks and shoelaces and genuine Japanese electric razors, they traded votes during the day and drinks at night.

Valentine set up his command post in the old town welcome center right on the main street, with

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