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Fort Smith on the Arkansas River, March: hell on the border reads the sign hung just beneath the foot-tall stencils of the post&039;s official oes back to Fort Se of the Indian Territory, when prisoners brought in from the Nations waited in a dank series of cells for their turn before the Honorable Judge Parker, U S Grant&039;s "hanging judge"

Now the buildings around the Reynolds Bell Tower-the bell still serves as the post&039;s alar an air raid by harpies-still see their share of prisoners Runaways fros, and troubleht here to be interrogated, and either sent downriver into the Free Territory or brought up before a military court

Fort Smith is the responsibility of the Guards, the uniformed defenders of the Free Territory It marks the end of the commercial line on the Arkansas River and four eastern roads There is a civilian presence supporting the soldiery and schools and a hospital to accommodate them It is a hard-duty station Only the posts south of St Louis on the Free Territory&039;s border see oes by without the departure of a regiment or two of Guard infantry with their supports to cover soainst a real or threatened attack out of the Kurian Zone Lesser patrols depart and return at reports of everything from Reapers to horse thieves, downed telephone wires and hayloft arsonists

The graveyard south of Belle Point is filled with the Guards who caons

Duty at Fort S perfor companies inevitably called the "Worst Enters" by the sarcastic soldiers The women at Miss Laura&039;s, the most opulent of Fort Smith&039;s brothels, provide assorted horizontal refreshments, but unlike the free Best Center, it takes a week&039;s pay to enjoy a few hours of diversion The local beer, Shout the Territory, and entrepreneurs who don&039;t mind the occasional sound of artillery fire operate restaurants and pubs

Hunters in fro houses and pubs that welcome their kind Neither civilians nor Guards, they are no Fort Smith while within the broad boundaries of the post But so about the Hunters, even in civilian dress, makes the civilians wary and Guard hackles rise Perhaps it is the intense stares or the too-quick-for-the-eye flinches at unexpected movement or the tribal clannishness that sets them apart But ord colad to have them there

The orders in Valentine&039;s dispatch pouch that read "Survivors leave ending 9MAY2067" amounted to an epitaph to Foxtrot Coi force; even those still un-wounded after Little Timber would be distributed to other units If they decided to rebuild the coh As the senior unwounded officer, he et a few of the veteran NCOs, perhaps arguing that "third time&039;s the charm" for ill-fated Foxtrot, now deci the flimsy, Valentine decided to spend his leave in Fort Smith It would be easy for orders and mail to find him there; he could visit the library; perhaps he&039;d even be able to spend a few days fishing in the river or one of the lakes around the post if he could obtain a skiff, rod, and reel He needed quiet and solitude to help the ht about spending his leave in Weening Molly had invited him to visit in her letter, but she was no doubt en plans-he&039;d seen in the spring issue of the Service Bulletin that her swain had been pro around like the proverbial skeleton at the feast Her beau ht even consider it an insult

The part of hih that he considered fleeing to Hal Steiner&039;s enclave in the Arkansas bayou country Frat had written that Steiner&039;s unusual co had thrived since he&039;d first visited it years ago But Steiner&039;s independent land wasn&039;t part of Southern Command&039;s communication system He&039;d have to journey to the nearest post to check for orders

So he settled on Fort Smith Besides, he had another report to make This time he&039;d do it in person

The afternoon he arrived he first went to the corounds There he reported his presence in person to the duty officer, and by phone to Second Wolf Regiment Headquarters With that done, he drew a portion of his accumulated pay and was a free Wolf

He asked about the town at the civilian liaison officer&039;s station, but the sergeant behind the open, circular desk spoke with such enthusias house that Valentine decided he was getting a kickback He just picked up a raphed map and walked toward town

Blue-steel storm clouds rolled in the distance, so he decided to look around tohile the weather held There were Guards in their charcoal-gray unifore ponchos, rifles slung and helot farther away from the fort, heovercast, thumbs hooked in their suspenders, hats pushed back to reveal close-cropped hair The men and woroups, laughing and talking with aniy Valentine with his dirty buckskins, er possessions rolled in his hast hyperactive city squirrels

Constant war had not been kind to Fort Sarden" with neat shelves of ruinedwildflowers and surrounded by bushes A few old ho in a section of town the map called the Grove One of the house He&039;d heard the nas off the Immaculate Conception Church, he found it

Donna&039;s Den was a white two-story house with an antique iron railing running around the roof There was a chicken run and a garden in back The front had a flower garden, with a pair of wooden sofas and a lounge chair sitting a the blossoms The outdoor furniture supported do twitched an ear as he passed He s

His knock on the screen door summoned a shirtless boy who thundered down the stairs The boy had o around his tiny waist "Lieutenant Valentine, Second Regi at Valentine&039;s collar tabs and sewn-in nameplate "But the tunic is cut Zulu Company style, Lieutenant, sir What&039;s the story?" The boy sounded bored

"David is fine, to a veteran like you" That got a brief smile out of him "Do I speak to you about a room?"

"Mo back upstairs "One of Dad&039;s kind"

Donna Walbrook had flour in her hair and on her overalls Valentine&039;s nose picked up the scent of strawberries She wiped her hands on a towel as she ca more enthusiasm for Valentine&039;s presence than the boy had

"Brian has no h practiced, sot his teeth into building armoires Can I offer you a room?"

"Until the second week of May, if it&039;s not inconvenient"

"No such thing for a boy in buckskin Come into the parlor-just leave your bundle at the foot of the stairs"

It turned out the parlor had a small shrine to Hank Walbrook under a fraraph; it showed a Wolf with an old United States Arle on his head Walbrook&039;s belt and parang lay in a case, a few rifles- Valentine noted that they s over the fireplace She poured Valentine water out of a pitcher and presented hi he already knew all the answers

"Yes A sergeant, First Regi officer, but I understand he&039;s retired"

Valentine had never heard of him

"My husband was killed in February of &039;55"

"I&039;lance upstairs as he did the math "Brian isn&039;t from Hank, but he thinks he is I&039;ll explain it to hih to work it out We have two other Wolves staying at thethe ser to meet them"

"I would, Mrs Walbrook"

"First rule of this house is to call h the other rules They were brief and clear, un locker, and the necessity for stoking the boiler if there was to be enough hot water After negotiation involving Valentine reducing so, they settled on twelve dollars Southern Command script a day for his roo and laundry Lunch he could scrounge, buy, or have for free if he cared to walk all the way to the Guard canteen

"Any questions? I&039;ve been here fifteen years There&039;s nothing about the town I don&039;t know"

Valentine wondered how to phrase his request She wasn&039;t officially part of Southern Co e with a hand "You got a case of so you don&039;t want down in your Q file? I won&039;t scream and faint" Her eyes sparkled with interest

"There&039;s supposed to be a Coence Division office about somewhere I&039;ve seen bulletins issued from them, and the Western Border ones are marked &039;Fort Suide at the Fort, or the town map" He held out his map "You wouldn&039;t knohere it is?"

She looked disappointed "It&039;s hardly a secret They just don&039;t have enough people to staff an information desk for every Toe footprint"

"I need to file a report, in person" He&039;d tried through channels once, and nothing came of it "It&039;s more than a footprint"

"They&039;re in the oldThree stories, red brick, curved s at the top There&039;s still a nice little one-man museum on the first floor Schoolkids and recruits spend soh the museum"

"Thank you"

"And there&039;s a wonderful laundry just catty-corner Tucks, it&039;s called, and they will make those buckskins look like they&039;ve just been sewn They can get the bloodstains out Along with theahemnatural masculine odors"

The museum filled out about one quarter of the first floor of the building Donna had described Valentine had bummed a pair of jeans and a clean shirt off one of the convalescing Wolves-Gupti had a head wound and Salvador a knee brace; Salvador&039;s advice was to borrow fro he&039;d ever lent out his clothes Valentine borrowed clothes from Salvador and reported to the fort to let the; then went into town

The museu with the curator, a one-legged veteran with a solid build and a pistol in a quick-release holster-a forled from a breakaway chain around his neck; Valentine suspected it was for a case of captured assault rifles

He took a polite look at the exhibits, tracing everything fro the earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanoes of 2022 before Big R hit The next cabinet covered the Ravies plague-photographs of wild ht in action, cities aflame, stacked corpses riddled with bite marks and bullet holes Then the hopeful headlines fro newspapers about the Kurians, visitors from another world who had coside these were pamphlets, amateurish and smeared and filled with horrific sketches about how the Kurians were the cause of it all There were drawings of the robed Crisis Governors with captions asserting that the "Reapers" were nothing but death-collectors, vampirelike creatures who fed on humans for their masters

Then cas of the Grogs, a polyglot of beings brought by the Kurians from other worlds Blasted tanks Crashed planes Mushroo hauled down as bases went up in smoke to save them from capture

A room, shielded from the rest of the museum by a black curtain, was devoted to the Kurian Order as practiced across the planet save for a few remote Freeholds Valentine decided not to look in h of the KZ wim his own eyes

Valentine stated his business The custodian picked up a phone and dialed, and he told Valentine one of the "upstairs men" would be with him in a minute

Bone Lolasses He introduced himself as a CID "filter"

"What&039;s that?" Valentine asked

"I&039;ll show you"

He took Valentine back to the loading dock Like a big garage, the dock had a series ofbut structural supports Painted lines crisscrossed the floor The lines organized a sea of wire crates and metal trays filled with docuet a lot of captured paperwork," Lo that isn&039;t obviously useful, like the details of a colu carted here We get everything fro cookbooks to personal letters, complete with perfume and snips of hair I don&039;t want to bore you with all the procedures, but the filters read through it" He waved at another young man and a woman The other filters sat on wheeled chairs with a built-in desk, pencils handy under a droplight hanging froh loose paper "It can so on outside our borders Where there are shortages, weak spots"

"You divine trends from paperwork?"

"Once, based on requisitions that the logistics coe a to Shawnee Oklaho"

Valentine re for his lieutenant&039;s bars at Pine Bluff "It ended badly"

"Fassler and all his ed, yes"

"I heard crucified," Valentine said

"Maybe Couldn&039;t get theuns in time The Oklahoain, if it weren&039;t for soht not even know the naot a name for you What do you know about the Twisted Cross?"

Loed "I don&039;t know Let&039;s index it"

One of Lombard&039;s associates kicked out sideways and sent his chair-desk rolling down an alley between the boxes A white cat jumped out of the way

The "index" turned out to be an old library card catalog in a separate room, thickly insulated behind a safelike door There were several of the huge wooden cabinets filled with index-card-size drawers Valentine opened a drawer; under typed headings there were handwritten notations in a mix of letters and numbers

Gannet, Pony A (Capt "Chanute Leadership Corps")