by Baen Books
And neither did my boss.
Her eyes moistened. “Are you sure, Sergeant Hart?”
“The end of my service was written last year,” I said, remembering the onset of my symptoms. “But the last page . . . it was going to be either in a hospice room somewhere, alone, or on the battlefield. I prefer the battlefield.”
Lieutenant Juarez just nodded, and in a quiet voice, whispered, “Bless you.”
So today was the day, or more accurately, the night was the night.
I demanded from my lieutenant that I didn’t get any kind of send-off—I was afraid that seeing all of my fellow troopers would spook me and I’d turn around at the last minute—so the only person to see me off was the same soldier as before, at the OP at the top of the stairs.
Corporal Tanner was there, blanket around his shoulders, and he said, “Hey,—Sarge, I mean—“
“Keep quiet,” I said, “and help us with this stuff.”
The “stuff” was two plastic sledges, with black boxes and components tied down, and ropes to drag them. He helped Ludmilla and me over the top of the berm, and he gave me a quick slap on the back.
“Take care.”
“That’s my plan.”
Ludmilla said “Soldier?”
“Yes?”
“Go away now. Far away.”
“Yes, ma’am,” and Tanner scampered down the stairway.
Now it was just Ludmilla and me.
“We go.”
“Great,” I said.
I followed Ludmilla’s lead, and moved slow, very slow. We dragged the sledges behind us, and she said, “We learn . . . from hard lessons . . . to move slow. Not set any pattern.”
“I see.”
I followed her slim body, as we traversed the torn up and scorched earth. Overhead the constant flares and burning lights of space wreckage coming into the atmosphere continued. My stomach and abdomen were burning, but having Ludmilla in front of me calmed me down some.
We went up and down a trench, around some burnt wreckage from attacks a decade ago—some kind of artillery piece, its barrel and support melted—and Ludmilla whispered, “Stop, now.”
“Okay.”
I sat there, and then Ludmilla rustled her way over to me and said, “I’m cold.”
I was dumb, but not that dumb.
I put my arm around her, and she cuddled in next to me, and I smelled her hair and fresh soap.
I can’t remember that last time I’ve been so happy.
I said, “How did you end up here?”
She said, “You mean, how I get into war?”
“Something like that,” I said.
I looked up at the lights flaring and burning through the night sky, feeling the dull and heavy presence of the dome base close by.
“I . . . was a child. On holiday. With my family. On a cruise ship from Vladivostok. The ship was called the V.V. Tereshkova. I don’t remember much. But the bugs come, drop their rocks . . . many tidal waves . . . our ship, she was sunk.”
“I’m sorry.”
She moved under my arm. “So. A long time back . . . somehow . . . I ended in life raft . . . washed ashore . . . when I grew up, in All Orphan Pioneer Party, I swore I would get my revenge . . . and here I am.”
“But . . .”
“But what, Walter?”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Are you afraid?”
“Some . . . but I know what’s ahead of me. It’s not good. I’d rather go out doing something . . . oh, I don’t know. Special. Heroic.”
“Good for you,” Ludmilla said. “I just want to kill the bugs. Let’s move some more.”
We dragged our sledges across the landscape, stopping at Ludmilla’s command, me not too sure what she was doing, only knowing that she must have been working from years of experience. It was hard to believe that in these plastic sledges, bouncing behind us, sometimes getting caught up in torn and blasted metal, that there was a weapon that would destroy this dome.
We were closer now, and we rested two more times.
“How further do we go?” I asked.
“Right up to the dome,” she said. “Where the access hatch dilates open . . . it’s the weakest spot.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
We cuddled up again and she said, “Now, your story, eh?”
“Not much of a story,” I said.
“Tell me still.”
“Grew up in Maine, up north of here. Small family. Deep in the woods . . . and, the war began.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven.”
“And?”
A particularly big piece of space debris came in, throwing off big sparks and flares.
She nudged me.
“And?”
Well, she asked.
“The weather took a hit with all the debris and water kicked up into the atmosphere,” I said. “The first year was tough, the second year was tougher. The little house we lived in was only heated by a fireplace. We took to going to bed for most of the day when the snowstorms came through. Dad, Mom and me. I was on a couch near the fire, covered in blankets and comforters. They were nearby, on a fold-out couch. One day . . . I don’t remember much. The fire had gone out. There wasn’t much wood. My parents wouldn’t get up, and then . . . well, they couldn’t get up.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah. I walked a while to a neighbor’s house. Got turned away. Went to another house. Was taken in, joined the Boy Scouts soon afterwards. When I got older, I figured out my parents starved to death, trying to keep me alive.”
Ludmilla kissed me on the cheek. “So we both have reasons to kill the bugs, eh?”
“We do.”
I kissed her back, on the cheek as well, and then I kissed her lips, and that’s how the time passed for a long lovely while.
Two more movements, and then we were up against the Dome. I was shuddering and feeling scared, and my body was betraying me as well. I threw up again and from the light of a big chunk of space debris, I see there was blood in what came out.
No matter.
Ludmilla took her time, opening the hard plastic containers, explaining how the different modules and pieces of the nuclear device were put together.
“So many experiments, so many failures,” she said, moving slowly and then stopping for a while. “Many brave men and women died to get the . . . knowledge? Information. Da. Information. We all learned hard way that the bugs monitor all electronics, from space, from the Domes. But to what level? So . . . volunteers. Would go up against the Domes, carrying various electronics . . . they would be burnt, captured . . . a lucky few would escape . . . but we learned. We learned.”
She looked around, very satisfied indeed.
“We rest now,” she said.
She came to me and we kissed again.
“Walter, your leg?”
“The good one or the fake one?”
“What happened?”
“It’s buried somewhere in a landfill in New Hampshire,” I said. “I had been in the Army a month. It hadn’t been a good month.”
“I want to know more.”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Okay, then.”
I think Ludmilla dozed in my arms, which was a good thing, because I could sense . . . something. Movement. Vibration.
A light slowly started bathing the area to the north of me, and then I turned and closed my eyes, because I knew what was happening next.
The Creeper Dome was opening up and with its opening, came a bright flash of light.
I turned in a second and off to the distant north, one and then two alien Creepers skittered over the dirt berm. They moved at a good pace, and from my vantage point, with a beautiful girl in my arms, I could see they were two Battle modes, coming back to their home base after a night of burning and lasering whatever they wanted. Seeing the armored arthropods up close again made me tense with fear and anger, and then they safely slipped into t
he dome, and the dilated opening closed.
Ludmilla stirred and moved away. “What . . . what happen?”
“Two Creepers just came back, into their base.”
She sat up. A line of light pink and red was beginning to form in the east.
“Good,” she said. “Two more that will die.”
The morning day looked to be pretty fine. My arms and chest felt heavy.
One’s last day.
“Ludmilla?”
“Yes?”
“You and I . . . we could run away. Go to the west. They’re looking for workers, farmers out west. We would never be found.”
She didn’t say no, and she didn’t say yes. A hand came into my hand, gently caressed it, and squeezed it.
“But we would always know that we had run away, wouldn’t we?”
But to live with you, I thought . . . and there was a stab in my gut, reminding me that the decision, one way or another, had already been made.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I said. “Show me what we need to do.”
Once again, we moved slowly, as different components were taken out, cables were hooked up, switches and such were inspected. Ludmilla said, “There were attempts, many attempts, to set up timers, or mechanical devices, or even a long, long cable to be used, to explode the device. It never worked. Some sort of . . . haze? Field? From the Dome? Only after volunteers hand-exploded, did it work.”
“Why two?”
“With one, it was too long to haul, too much chances of being found. And . . . two. There would be two to press the switch, in case one . . . runs.”
I nodded, just followed her directions.
All thought out.
And then, too soon, we were done.
We sat against a rise in the dirt, the bomb at our feet, ready and connected to go off and kill everything in the vicinity.
Two cables ran out of one of the black boxes, each ending in a trigger switch. I took one and Ludmilla took the other.
“What . . . now?” I asked.
The sun started to come up.
“Down there,” she said. “That’s the battery. You turn that switch down there . . . the light goes from red to green . . . powering up . . . when it turns to green . . . it’s time.”
“Okay.”
The sun came up higher. But there was little sound. No birds, no animals, nothing in this zone of death.
Ludmilla slipped her hand into mine, and then reached down, toggled a switch.
A red light came on.
She came back, cuddled up against me.
The light turned green.
“Ludmilla . . .”
“Please, Walter.”
“Wait, just for a bit.”
“Walter . . .”
“No,” I said. “There’s a reason.”
“What?”
I said, “I’m in intelligence. I keep track of things . . . according to the last orbital mechanics I saw, the new Orbital Battle Station should be showing up in a few minutes.”
She didn’t say anything and sitting against the dirt, I was feeling the vibrations coming through from whatever the Creepers were doing inside the Dome. There were probably human prisoners in there, and I hoped their souls or afterlife would forgive us for what we were about to do.
Then again, they might be thankful.
“Walter, I don’t understand.”
I squeezed her hand. “Wouldn’t it be something . . . if the Creepers’ orbital base was overhead, and they were looking down . . . they would see us destroying this Dome. Showing them that we’re still fighting. That we won’t give up.”
“Ah . . . how soon?”
“Very soon,” I said.
She moved even closer to me, kissed me.
“Da, that we do. We wait. We show them.”
So we sat there, the only free humans in probably miles around, and I was hoping for a lot more time, to talk to Ludmilla, to find out more about here, her life, her hopes, her regrets . . . thinking of what we might have been able to do together if—
There it was.
Rising up from the horizon.
“I see it,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“You . . . we will wait, then we’ll do it together. Okay?”
I kissed her and kissed her.
“Together,” I said.
The Orbital Battle Station was nearly overhead, and then—
Light.
See of Darkness
Mike Massa
"I swear I will faithfully, loyally and honorably serve the Supreme Pontiff and his legitimate successors, and dedicate myself to them with all my strength, sacrificing, if necessary, my life to defend them. I assume this same commitment with regard to the Sacred College of Cardinals whenever the Apostolic See is vacant. Furthermore, I promise to the Commanding Captain and my other superiors respect, fidelity and obedience. I swear to observe all that the honor of my position demands of me."
Pontifical Swiss Guard Oath administered to graduating recruits
The day that we locked the doors on the Sistine Chapel, the conventional wisdom inside the College of Cardinals was that His Holiness had died in his sleep from the flu stage of the devil-spawned plague. That wasn't, strictly speaking, true.
I should know.
I shot him myself.
If anyone's listening to this, then you know all about the zombie virus that the scientists called H7D3. It raced around the Earth, killing off hundreds of millions, and eventually billions. Some people appeared to be either naturally immune or capable of fighting through the first stage of the flu. That still didn't leave enough to deal with either the mounds of decaying bodies or the living, perpetually hungry afflicted, which outnumbered the sane by hundreds to one.
We, the Guard I mean, started with a strength of almost one hundred and fifty. There were another hundred or so Vatican Gendarmerie at the beginning, but unlike the Guard they were more like police, equipped for crowd control and border security. They could marry early, have children—so many of them made the difficult decision to desert their posts in order to protect their families.
Understandable. They weren't personally sworn to the Bishop of Rome. Just damned awkward for those of us that were left inside the walls. In the end, I doubt that many found any lasting safety. A few months on and there's no view from the parapet where Rome isn't mostly smoldering buildings and mobs of mindless infected.
By the time that the decision was finally made to use a vaccine made from the spines of the infected humans, we were at three-quarters strength and dropping and we were without the guidance of the Holy Father, whom we'd pledged our lives to protect.
Our Faith, all of our training, our weapons, the thick walls of Vatican City—how do you fight an infinitesimally tiny virus without medicine?
As it turns out, the pope had been aware of the existence of a vaccine. He also knew how it was made. We were told, later, that he had prayed for guidance and determined that the use of such a vaccine was sinful.
We were sworn to obey His Holiness or his successor.
So, no vaccine even though it was available before the worst hit.
At least he was consistent, which was more than could be said of much of the leadership of the Holy Church.
Which you will also know from the papers documenting the scandals of the church, such of those records that survived the Fall. One of the upsides of the Plague, as it turned out, was that we all got to start again, but I don't want to get too far ahead of myself.
I'm Hauptman Matteo Gagliardi, commanding the remnants of the Pontifical Swiss Guard. Until the light of this Fallen world is re-kindled, we will hold the ramparts of Vatican City.
Or die on them.
###
. . . I didn't start writing anything down at first. It was God's own truth; the disease didn't start out as a recognizable catastrophe; it began like something akin to a really bad joke. In retrospect, I can see that I began recording this diary after t
he most severe shock of my life. However, at the time I was just desperately reacting to one disaster after another.
If anyone listens to this, it's going to sound like several series of rationalizations, all meant to justify what I did. But you weren't there, were you, because if you were, that meant that you survived. You did what you had to do in order to stay alive, didn't you?
All that I have done has been to keep the Church alive.
The fact that my actions were utterly necessary, that the man I killed absolved me even as I completed the trigger stroke, was cold comfort. I planned to tell my confessor, Cardinal Crivetto, even though I had already been shriven.
However, he had responsibilities too.
The pope has a sort of a chamberlain, the Camerlengo. In normal times, he's simply a personal assistant to the pope. However, should the pope die, the chamberlain has some unique and traditional duties.
In his role as the Camerlengo, Crivetto is a senior member of the Familia Pontificalis, which is a fancy name for the staff that surrounds the pope. The overwhelming majority of senior Vatican officials is older men. In most cases, really old men with strong political ties to the existing power structure and a deep resistance to change. Benedict XVI had been a different sort of pope. From the start, he'd been preoccupied with re-establishing discipline in the senior ranks, even when the “ranks” pushed back.
It's only if you look at it that way that his selection of this Camerlengo, a young outsider from an obscure order not normally employed in Vatican City, makes any sense. When you think about it, this uncharacteristic choice was a miracle.
The special duties of the Camerlengo cannot be postponed, and are guided by deeply respected tradition. As soon as the pope appears to have expired, the Camerlengo must notify the College of Cardinals, who will gather in Rome as fast as possible. After their arrival, the Camerlengo then personally and formally confirms the death of the pope. He's to remove the Ring of the Fisherman, the symbol of papal authority unique to each pope, which doubles as a seal for all official papal documents. Afterwards, the Camerlengo must deface the ring, honoring the ancient practice that forestalled papal forgeries, before delivering it to the assembled cardinals.