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

cut its head off. But its brief pain and death would alert the Kurian that there was someone in the neighborhood with the skill to take out one of his drones.
    Instead she reached into her satchel and brought out a heavy fragmentation grenade and a loop of wire. With utmost care she crept to the rocky outcropping beneath the Reaper and slipped the wire around its ankle. A free piece of light cording (she always carried forty or fifty feet of thin cording that was practically weightless but strong enough to bind a prisoner or serve as a bootlace or hold a bundle together for transport) was tied to the pin in the grenade. She fixed the cording to a stout branch.
    Ever so slowly she tied off the grenade up tight against its boot.
    As soon as it took a step, the pin would pull. It would drag the grenade while the fuse burned—with a little luck it might even notice something bouncing around by its ankle and reach down to see what was the matter and have the grenade go off in its face. A Reaper with a foot blown off would be slowed considerably until it could bolt on (or whatever they did in the Reaper repair shops) an artificial replacement.
    With that done, she descended the hill at an angle that put the most rock, trees, and earth between herself and the Reaper, making a beeline for the little strip of town opposite the old resort grounds.
    She tried quieting her mind again, but it was difficult with the excitement of action near. The sentry Reaper meant there was at least one Kurian in the neighborhood. Was it at the hotel? If she was very, very lucky she might find out. Killing a Kurian would be the best way to kick off the action of her third summer in Kentucky.

    At the sentry station, two guards stood on duty at the gates. A culvert running between the hotel grounds and the road smelled faintly of sewage. She’d heard that the mineral springs at French Lick had an odor that attracted wildlife for the salts or whatever, but this was definitely human waste being dumped out of a latrine into the nearest standing water.
    She used it to approach the sentries. They were both keeping well away from the bog. They stood behind one of the gate’s thick posts out of the indifferent wind. Next to them a wooden beam painted optic orange served as a polite warning to stop.
    She considered just walking up to them and using her claws. With her arms inside her oversized duster, they wouldn’t know she had her claws on.
    The three curved metal blades were something of a joke to most Cats. She’d been made fun of in her earlier days with the Cats for carrying around that extra, easily identifiable metal. They weren’t as effective at killing as a single good knife, and were just about useless on something as tough as a Reaper.
    She argued back that they were more than weapons. They were great tools for quickly scaling a tree, any kind of wooden-sided construct like a barn, or an old-fashioned wooden utility pole. Theycould even be used to go up aluminum or vinyl exteriors if you didn’t mind the noise. And a kill by cat claws could be mistaken for an animal attack or a Reaper under the right circumstances, leading to confusion among the enemy.
    What she didn’t say was that she just felt safer with nasty sharp hooks extending from her fists.
    But after closer examination, she decided that the best approach was through an overgrown ditch that ran between the ancient railroad line bordering the hotel grounds and the road. There weren’t any dogs on patrol or at the gate. She could wiggle up like a salamander and not be seen until she was too close for them to do much about it.
    Crossing the highway would be difficult in the light, but not impossible. There was a dip in the road a few hundred yards north of the sentry gate, and she used it to make the crossing with a quick belly crawl.
    Once across she observed from the brush. They didn’t see her, or they would have whipped out binoculars. Unless they were very experienced