Baltic Gambit: A Novel of the Vampire Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

eating jerked beef and chalky ersatz chocolate out of his ration bag than have some nice fresh meat.
    “Suit yourself,” she said. She used the razor-edged butterfly knife to slice off a leg from one of the dead bodies. The corpse twitched a little as she worked.
    “I wonder if they’re the ones who spotted us?” Valentine asked.
    “Nah, some Reaper picked up on the Bears. That’s the way it usually goes. They’re crap on lifesign discipline, just like every other kind of discipline.”
    Holding her joint so that it would drain, she followed him on Scour’s trail.
    They found the Bear at the litter-strewn harpy camp. Thehandlers were lying under a tree with blankets over them so nothing but their boot tips showed. Half a dozen dead harpies were much less ceremoniously scattered about, with Scour collecting them into a pile. Duvalier was grateful that Scour hadn’t done anything more artistic with either set of bodies; she’d seen Bears do everything from sticking heads on tree-limb poles to laying them out so they spelled an obscene message.
    “There’s a big wasp-nest thing in that tree you should take a look at, Mister Valentine,” Scour said.
    She looked up, saw a shape about the size of a laundry bag. “What the hell is that?” she asked, sidestepping for a better view.
    Scour shrugged. “They might have been guarding it.”
    At first Duvalier thought it was a plastic garbage bag full of laundry stuck in a tree. Then she saw that the material she’d thought was laundry was pale pink projections, like long fingers with five or six joints, gripping the trunk and limbs of the tree.
    Perhaps it was two organisms, symbionts, the brain and the hand.
    “Looks like that brain’s grown itself a set of fingers.”
    “Wells’s two essentials,” Valentine said.
    “Wells?”
    “Something from
War of the Worlds
.”
    Duvalier knew enough of Valentine’s biography. He’d been raised in the basement library of a priest, the closest thing the remote Northern Minnesota community had to a teacher.
    “I think—I think that’s like their version of one of the old cell phone towers,” Duvalier said. “The tissue transmits or boosts or relays whatever link exists between the Kurian and its Reaper.”
    “Scour, you want to do the honors?” Valentine asked.
    The Bear looked up and down the tree, evaluating it. “Sure, Major.”
    “Let’s get that tree down, then.”
    “Jeez, Val, what did that tree ever do to you?” Duvalier asked, reaching into her pocket and slipping on her cat claws. “I’ll do it, seeing as how you two are just too grown up to go up a tree.”
    She climbed above the mass of flesh, keeping an eye out for harpies. Keeping her legs around the pole and gripping the tree with one set of claws, she drew her sword from the stick and plunged it into the tissue, just where the black, beetlelike shell met the fingers. She thrust up and down, sawing with the blade.
    The fingers released and the keg-sized object crashed through the branches below and onto the ground. It waggled to right itself and began to crawl off at a surprising pace, but Valentine and Scour were upon it, Val using the legworm pick he usually carried while in country and Scour wielded a short, iron-headed club like an oversized meat tenderizer. They broke the shell open like a couple of hungry seagulls attacking a dropped crab.
    Val thrust the entire head of his pike into the shell and did an impressive imitation of a man scrambling a barrel full of eggs. The fingers made it hop one final time before curling up tight—one caught Scour’s foot and he howled.
    “That ought to do it,” Valentine said, lost in the process of extracting his pick from the mess in the shell.
    Duvalier dropped to the ground, drew her butterfly knife and went to work on the clinging fingers. They’d torn through the Bear’s boot and reduced his foot to pulp from the heel forward.
    It would be a long, painful limp home for the Bear.
    “So, are we