“Ah,” Muldoon gasped as the uniform suddenly flew open down to his crotch, releasing his manhood from its fleshy confines. “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time, honey,” he said in quick gasps as he waddled forward on his knees, taking up station between her legs. His hands groped under her blouse, and he sighed as he squeezed her breasts. “They’ve grown since last time,” he said over the muffled screaming that made its way through the sock stuffed in her mouth. “Did you know that?”
His hands, shaking from the adrenaline rushing through his system, worked their way down, down over her belly, then grabbed roughly between her legs, his fingers probing through her panties.
Nicole closed her eyes and fought against the wave of nausea that would kill her with the gag in her mouth. But she knew that suffocating on her own vomit would be better than succumbing to what this man had in mind. She squirmed as his fingers grabbed the elastic waistband of the flimsy panties the orphanage issued, his dirty, untrimmed fingernails scraping her tender pubis as he began to pull them down, to tear them off.
“You’ll like it,” he soothed. “I know I wi–”
The last word was cut off by the sudden grating of the van’s cargo door as it slammed open, letting the bright glare of the sun shine into the darkened interior and momentarily blinding its occupants.
“What the hell?” Muldoon roared, whirling around like a rutting walrus facing off against a competitor, his erect penis pointing like an accusing finger toward the man who stood in the doorway.
It was Wiley. But in Muldoon’s state of hormonal confusion, he did not notice the eyes that burned from under the knitted brow or the expression that had once belonged to a fierce warrior, a man who had killed – and, in a way, died – for God and country. He wasn’t looking at Wiley. He was staring into the face of a colonel of the Confederation Marine Corps.
“Close that door and get out of here, you senile old fart!” Muldoon screamed, his face turning a beet red as he reached for the door. His hand faltered when he caught a glimpse of something metallic in the old Marine’s hand.
Without saying a word, Colonel Hickock pumped two rounds from the pistol into Muldoon’s skull. The tiny flechettes minced the big man’s brain as they ricocheted within the bony structure, lacking enough velocity to make a clean exit out the back.
A third red eye gracing his forehead – the only evidence of injury and proof of the colonel’s marksmanship – Muldoon somersaulted out of the van like an obscene high diver, his twitching body flopping to the dirt like a two hundred kilo bag of fertilizer.
“Come on out, son,” Hickock said in a low growl that Nicole would not have recognized without seeing the man’s lips move in time to the words.
Big John, his face sad now, crawled out of the van as he was told, neither his face nor his body reflecting any sign of defiance or resistance. And when the colonel turned away toward Nicole, sure that the boy was not a threat, Big John walked into the wheat field toward where the hungry fires burned. With his lover and benefactor dead, his own twisted and defiled soul had no more desire to live. Unseen and unheard, he cast himself into the flames.
“Wiley!”
The old man turned to see Reza huffing up the road from where he had emerged from the blazing fields, his face mottled with bruises and caked with blood.
“Where’s Nicole?” he gasped, running up to the van, “Muldoon, he–” Then he caught sight of the mound of flesh lying motionless on the ground and the gun in Wiley’s hand. “Oh, Jesus.”
“Better help your girl, son,” the old man said slowly, shaking his head as if something was in his ear. “And take this,” he handed Reza the gun. “I won’t be able to keep track of it much longer. The other kids,” he went on groggily, “they came and told me what happened, and…”
The man who was Colonel Hickock never finished what he set out to say.
Taking the gun, Reza watched with soul-deep sorrow as the man’s eyes suddenly transformed to reflect the good-natured innocence of Wiley the janitor. All traces of Colonel Hickock that had been there just a moment before disappeared like mist under a hot sun.
“Where’s Nicole?” Wiley asked, cocking his head and looking around as if he had just come on the scene.
“Oh, God,” Reza gasped, leaping into the van, terrified of what he might find. “Nicole!”
Relieved to find that she still had most of her clothes on, Reza carefully pried away the tape that covered her mouth, pulling the roll of gauze bandage out of her throat. Then he freed her hands and feet.
“Reza,” she choked, hugging him so hard he heard one of his ribs crack. “Reza, I was afraid…I thought you had died.”
He kissed her, and then held her even tighter, rocking her back and forth. He never wanted to let her go.
“You know what they say about bad pennies,” he whispered, not willing to let on just how close he had come to losing it out there, how close he had come to losing her. “They just keep turning up.”
“If Wiley had not shown up,” she shuddered, “Muldoon would have–”
“Shh,” Reza whispered in her ear. “Don’t think about that.” He looked down at Muldoon’s bloated corpse. “It’s over now. For good.”
“Come on, kids,” Wiley said quietly, his child-like eyes watching the smoke as the wind shifted back toward them, the dark curls billowing into the sky. Even in his senile state, he was no fool. There were no firefighters on Hallmark. The fires would be left to burn themselves out, and anyone caught in them would be dead or horribly maimed. “I think we’d better be getting back.”
Reza helped Nicole out of the van, careful to keep her clear of Muldoon’s stiffening body. She paused to give it a single look, just to make sure he was really and truly dead. Satisfied, she let Reza lead her away.
Arms around each other’s waists, the three of them made their way back to Wiley’s battered utility truck. They were a tiny family with no home, but with enough love to make life worth living on any world.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mon cher Reza,
Things are going so fast here. I have been here only ten months, and already I have begun the real flight training, my head now filled with tactics and maneuvers that we will only now begin to apply. I made my first flight yesterday – with an instructor, of course – and might be able to solo in another twenty flight hours.
I cannot tell you how exciting it is to fly! To be so free, strapped to such a powerful machine (oui, even the tiny trainers they use here!) is like nothing I have ever imagined. I have spent many hours in the simulators, but they do not do justice to the real thing. My only regret is that you are not here to share in my happiness. I know you would love it.
As you suspected, I have many ‘suitors,’ as you call them, but I have not the time for them. To study and learn to fly and fight is all I allow myself to be interested in, for I am determined to be the best pilot in my class. Perhaps later I will consider such things, but we have gone through too much getting me here, non? I will not throw that away for anything, ever.
I must go now, my brother. The Officer of the Deck is shouting for lights out, and I am so very tired. The days sometimes are so long here that it reminds me of working the fields! I will write again as soon as I can, probably next week after a class exercise that is coming up.
Please, Reza, take care of yourself and give my love to Wiley. I have leave coming up for next month and hope to find a transport to Hallmark so I may visit. I will let you know. Please – write when you can. Sometimes it is all that keeps me going.
All my love,
Nicole
Reza read the letter several times, as he always did, before he folded the paper and put it in his breast pocket. Mary, the librarian, was hardly liberal when it came to printing out hard copies of personal mail (paper – even synthetic – was very expensive), but she made an exception for Reza. He did not even bother to read Nicole’s letters on the vid-screen when they first arrived, but printed them out straigh
t away. Holding the paper in his hand when he read her words made her seem a bit closer, more real. They had agreed to write this way, rather than send personal vids. Most of the other kids thought he was crazy and ridiculously old-fashioned, but somehow it made Nicole seem more real to him. His hand strayed to the small silver crucifix around his neck, his most prized possession that he never let out of his sight. It was her gift to him on the tear-filled day when she left for Lakenheath, nearly a year ago now.
He looked out the window to watch the kids file by on the way to their noonday meal, and he wondered if Nicole would even recognize this place when she came to visit on her first leave. When she came home, he told himself. For that is what he had finally decided Hallmark was: home.
Muldoon’s death had sparked a high-level Confederation investigation of the orphanage system and the Hallmark Farming Combine, and had resulted in nothing short of a miraculous change in the lives of the orphans. The field work, a back-breaking tradition for more than twenty years, was abolished as cruel child labor. The chief administrators of the orphanage system – not just at House 48, but all across the planet – were interviewed, cross-examined, and dismissed if they could not answer the commission’s questions satisfactorily. Many of them now found themselves in prison at the sort of hard labor that the children had endured.
The farm combine itself received a tremendous fine for its part in the exploitation of the children, and more than a few of its senior managers also wound up in Confederation prisons.
All this was no surprise to Reza after he had first seen the makeup of the commission: thirty-five Navy and Marine Corps officers, with a handful of civilians from the General Counsel. Though he had been retired for quite some time, the name of Colonel William Hickock still carried a lot of weight. The Marine Corps took care of its own.
Now the orphans enjoyed three solid meals a day (although the food wasn’t much better than it used to be, Reza lamented), went to school full time, and did not have to go to the fields anymore except to play baseball.
Reza had to shake his head at that, remembering how Wiley had taught them how to play the ancient Earth game in one of the open, dusty quads. The children, their minds focused on futile toil for so long, ate up what Wiley showed them. Soon there were baseball games going on all over the complex every day after school using bats, balls, and mitts that the older kids put together in the machine shops that were part of the physical plant and power generator station.
The game had spread like wildfire, and kids had been sent from almost every other house to see how it was played. There was even talk of forming a league with equipment donated by the Marine Corps. Reza was terrible when he came up to bat, but he could pitch better than anyone else in his house, and was looking forward to meeting the kids from other houses.
It would be a first for all of them.
Yes, Reza thought, things certainly have changed. He now spent time in the library not only because he wanted to, but because Mary had appointed him chief assistant librarian. He attended school, alternating half days and full days, depending on the courses that were being taught by the new instructors who had been brought in. He spent the rest of his time before dinner working the desk and helping the other kids who had begun to mob the little building, so much so that the administration was thinking about expanding it. Preparing school papers, reading tutorials, or just for fun, Reza had never seen so many kids here before. They had never had time under the old regime, and Reza often wondered why the combine had financed the library in the first place, it had been so little used.
Fate certainly could be fickle, he told himself wonderingly as he watched the animation on the faces of the other children, where before one could only see exhausted eyes and blank expressions.
“We’re human again,” he said quietly to himself, unconsciously patting Nicole’s letter in his pocket
Getting up from his desk in Mary’s office, Reza headed out to answer the bell at the front desk, thinking that his remaining time on Hallmark wasn’t going to be so bad after all.
* * *
Thirty million kilometers away, deep in the blackness beyond the orbit of Hallmark around its yellow star, a gravity well appeared at a point without a name or special significance, warping the void around it into a vortex of space and time. As the well deepened toward infinity, it created a fleeting, transient event horizon, and matter was instantaneously injected through the tiny rift in the fabric of the universe.
A solitary Kreelan warship, an enormous battlecruiser that dwarfed any vessel ever built by Man, emerged from hyperspace. Her sublight drive activated, and she turned her raked prow onto a trajectory toward the nearby planet. Her sensors reached out before her like ethereal hounds sniffing out their quarry, searching for the planetary defense network orbiting the human world.
On what humans would have called the ship’s bridge, a warrior priestess sat in the throne-like chair from which she commanded the great vessel and its crew. She tapped her ebony talons in a gesture of anticipation that had been one of her trademarks for many cycles of the Empress Moon, the sharp rapier tips eroding even the resilient metal of the chair’s arm. She had left her mark in many ships of the Fleet in the hundred and more cycles of service she had rendered unto her Empress. But this ship, the Tarikh-Da, had always been her favorite. It was the greatest warship the Empire had ever built.
She had been greatly honored when the Empress had chosen her for this mission, for it was the first of its kind in the war against the humans. For all the cycles since the Empire had made contact with them, the ships of the Empress had come to the enemy’s planets to do battle. They came to destroy these lesser beings in feats of combat to honor their ruler and expunge the plague of yet another species not worthy of Her spirit.
But this was to be different. There would be killing, yes, but only the older ones. The pups, the young, these were to be spared. They were to be taken back to the Empire.
She glanced at the tactical display, noting with satisfaction that hers was the only ship within parsecs of this human enclave. Not that it would have mattered, she thought. The Empire’s flagship could annihilate a fleet of lesser vessels, but had never been unleashed upon the humans; it would have offered the Children of the Empress no challenge, no honor.
“Their defenses have activated,” the weapons officer reported. “Orbital batteries are reorienting toward our approach vector.” A pause as she studied her instruments. “There are no planetary emplacements.”
Which they already knew, the priestess thought to herself. She nodded toward her subordinate, pleased with her diligence. Prudence required that they be sure. Humans would never have made such good opponents had they been perfectly predictable.
“Very well,” she replied. “You may deal with them at your leisure, Mar’ya-Nagil.” She did not have to add that the ship’s main batteries were to remain silent; the huge guns would not only destroy any satellite defenses, but the planet’s surface below, as well. “Report to me when the defenses are destroyed.”
“Yes, Tesh-Dar,” the young warrior replied, proud that the priestess was again in command of her vessel, the ship on which she had spent most of her own life. She turned to her task as if the Empress herself had given the command.
Tesh-Dar, high priestess of the Desh-Ka, watched the golden planet grow larger in the huge three-dimensional display before her. One hand softly drummed on the command chair, while the other reflectively probed the scar that stretched down across her left eye.
* * *
Reza was putting books back on the shelves when the raid sirens began to wail. He looked up, wondering at the sound. Drill sirens erupted frequently enough, their goat-like bleating the butt of many jokes among adults and children alike.
But this was no drill. The low, mournful growl of the raid siren boomed from a rickety tower atop the main admin building, then rose to a screeching pitch that set the windows shuddering before dropping back again.
A chill s
lithered its way up Reza’s spine and froze him in place for a moment. His gaze met with several others nearby, all of them welded to their seats or the floor where they stood as the siren began to climb toward a deafening crescendo once again.
Then pandemonium erupted. Children and adults broke free of their momentary paralysis and began to flee. They poured from the library stacks like forest animals driven before a blazing fire, tossing about whatever they were holding like plastic confetti.
“Reza!”
He heard his name called above the commotion as people pushed through the exits and into the street beyond. The children headed for the shelter while the adults ran for the Territorial Army armory to draw their weapons.
“Reza! Where are you?”
He looked stupidly at the armload of books he was still carrying, suddenly realizing that picking up Canton’s Sonnets: A Jubilee Collection probably was not terribly important at the moment, if for no other reason than the collection was filled with uniquely ghastly verse.
“Here, Mary!” he called, carefully putting the books down on a shelf before running to the banister that overlooked the first floor atrium.
“Reza, make sure there isn’t anyone left up there, will you?” she asked, her face flushed with excitement and anxiety. “Hurry, dear, we’ve got to get to the shelter!” The younger children were gathered around her like ducklings to their mother, their faces registering the fear of the adults who were now running headlong to their defense posts.
Reza called back, “Go ahead and get started. I’ll meet you there!”
Mary looked toward the door, then back at Reza, indecision checking her. Reza was mature for his age, but she was not sure if she should leave a boy not quite fourteen years old to his own devices in an emergency like this.
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