“Go on, Mary,” he called quickly, deciding the matter for her. “I’ll be all right.”
Mary finally nodded and began herding the preschoolers and the dozen or so numbed teens out of the lobby and into the street, forming them into a line that she aimed at the huge shelter blast door a block away. A stream of bodies was already pouring into it.
“Be careful!” she cautioned him.
He waved, then turned to begin his task. Starting at the end of the second floor that was bounded by a wall and no adjoining rooms, he worked his way through the stacks, noting with amazement the number of books, disks, and other things that had wound up on the floor. It was as if an army of gremlins had declared war on his tiny domain, flinging to the floor everything they could get their tiny invisible hands on.
“God, what a mess,” he murmured to himself as he continued to weave up and down the aisles, his eyes darting all around him to make sure there wasn’t anyone hiding behind a cart or under a desk.
Having finished clearing the upstairs, he paused a moment to take a quick look at the sky through the windows. Everything looked normal to him: the same pale blue sky, a few scudding clouds, and the ever present fiery ball that was Hallmark’s sun.
He turned away just in time to avoid being blinded by a flash that erupted from sunward and threw his shadow deep into the library’s atrium.
Reacting instinctively, he dove for the nearest cover he could find, a study carrel next to the teen non-fiction section, and waited for a blast wave to come rolling across the fields from whatever had caused the explosion. A dozen seconds later came but a single thunderclap, then several more explosions that sounded like huge fireworks.
“Orbital bombardment,” he muttered, daring to open one eye to peek toward the window. But nothing was visible on this side of the building.
He got up and quickly continued his sweep of the library, finishing up in the basement.
“Wiley?” he called, opening the door to his surrogate father’s apartment. “Wiley? Are you here?” Quickly checking all the rooms, Reza satisfied himself that the old Marine was not there.
“Probably in the shelter,” he told himself as he headed back out into the hall and bounded up the stairs into the lobby. His own feelings about the shelter were clear: while they had undoubtedly saved many lives, he still had nightmares about the one he was in on New Constantinople that had been breached. It had been a death trap, and he did not think he would be able to willingly lock himself into such a giant sarcophagus again.
As he came around the last row of books and past the desk, he caught sight through one of the tall thin windows of a black cloud rising in the direction of the spaceport. He skidded to a stop. Leaning forward, his quickened breath fogged the glass as he looked outside.
That’s what the flash and explosions were, he thought grimly. A single salvo from the attacking force had obliterated the spaceport and any interceptors it could have launched, had there been any. The two defenseless grain transports there had been reduced to molten heaps of slag. Their internal explosions had sent debris, including thousands of tons of wheat from their holds, into the air to fall onto the parched fields, which were now burning out of control.
He turned his attention to House 48 itself. The complex looked dead. Nothing outside moved except the Confederation flag, which fluttered in the light breeze with all the vigor of an unenthused geriatric. The street and walkways were deserted, people having hastened somewhere else before the inevitable landing began.
Perhaps the drills will pay off, Reza thought hopefully as he watched the sky. Maybe everyone managed to get to their posts and could protect this rock from whatever the Kreelans had to throw against them, at least until the Navy could bring in some real Marines to help.
But then white streaks appeared in the sky, trailing behind tiny pinpoints that bobbed erratically as they descended: the condensation trails of incoming assault boats. Reza hissed a curse at them, wishing them to fall from the sky like rocks and crush themselves against the unyielding soil of the fields, spattering their death-dealing passengers into lifeless jelly.
He stood there, counting them as they wound their way down, some arcing far away over the horizon toward the other houses and the few actual settlements Hallmark could boast. His hopes withered as he counted more and more, finally dying out completely as he reached fifty. And still more trails swarmed from the sky.
“Oh, God,” he moaned. Hallmark’s tiny Territorial Army – more than half of them untrained teenage orphans – could field a little over two thousand soldiers across the entire planet. But even if they had all reached their positions, and Reza doubted they had, it would not be enough. Not nearly enough.
The crackle of light weapon fire startled him. He looked to his right just in time to see a group of six camouflaged human figures diving for cover behind one of the thick stone fences in the House 48 complex.
A line of enemy warriors suddenly appeared out of the waving stalks of wheat at the end of town, coming in behind the humans crouched by the wall. Not being professional soldiers or killers from birth as were their opponents, the squad of defenders did not realize that they were being flanked. For the Kreelans, they were nothing more than a target of opportunity.
“No!” Reza shouted, banging his fists on the glass in a futile attempt to warn the defenders as the Kreelans filtered through an old gap in the wall that had never been repaired, their ebony armor glinting with Death’s promise. “Look behind you!” He watched helplessly as the encirclement began to close like a hangman’s noose, and he wished desperately for some way to warn them.
But it was too late. The Kreelans swept down upon the unsuspecting amateur soldiers like vultures converging on a dying man, too weak and confused to defend himself from their frenzied slashing and tearing. Reza watched the gleam of the blades as they hacked and pierced their victims, the Kreelans disdaining the use of energy weapons in any fight at close quarters.
He thought he saw a soldier reach out a bloody arm toward him, his face contorted in a plea for help, for mercy. In that instant, he was sure that the face was his father’s.
Reza closed his eyes as the blade fell.
* * *
Wiley was lying on his back under the old truck, tinkering with one of the servos that acted as a brake motor on the left rear wheel when he heard the thunder of the attack on the spaceport.
“What the devil?” he cried, banging his head hard on the old hauler’s frame as he tried to sit up. Gasping in pain, he flopped back down on the dolly, his hands clutching his temples as his head threatened to burst with pain. “Lord of the Universe,” he muttered, blinking his eyes.
But the eyes were no longer those of Wiley the janitor. They were hard and commanding, as the body and mind once had been. When the sound of the two grounded transports blowing apart reached his ears a moment later, he reacted as if a different man had inherited the old body. Without hesitation, he pulled himself completely under the truck in case the ceiling of the garage collapsed.
When it was clear that he was in no immediate danger, he moved out from under the truck with a grace and speed extraordinary for a man his age, moving his artificial leg with the finesse of a dancer. After hitting the switch that opened the garage’s rust-streaked articulated door, he jumped into the truck’s cab and started backing out through the still-opening door into the blinding sunlight beyond.
He raced down the rough track that connected the garage complex with House 48’s main buildings a few kilometers away, keeping his eyes on the sky. He ground his teeth when he saw the telltale streaks appear that heralded a landing with boats only, no decoys. He muttered a curse, knowing that the Kreelans must have been completely confident of an easy victory to leave such targets open to anti-air defenses, had any existed.
But this was Hallmark, not Ballantyne, or Sevastopol’, or Earth. The keen military mind that had temporarily retaken its proper place in the battered skull knew that Hallmark was about as
easy a target as an invader could wish for. The Kreelans always preferred more heavily defended planets, but it was no excuse for leaving a world like this one so lightly defended. With the orbital satellites gone, there was nothing standing between the invaders and the children but Hallmark’s joke of a Territorial Army. They didn’t stand a chance.
With a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, Colonel William Hickock raced toward House 48 as the first exchanges of ground fire began.
* * *
“Mary, the door has to be closed!” the man said, his voice flushed with fear as his finger hovered over the oversized red button. It was the emergency control for the massive vault’s blast doors and glowed like a flickering coal.
“But Reza hasn’t come back from the library!” she protested hotly, prepared to come to blows with the man if his finger moved any closer to the door controls.
“Look behind you, woman,” the man demanded, pointing over Mary’s shoulder with his other hand. “There’s nearly a thousand people in here, the Blues are popping rounds off out there, and you want me to keep this damned thing open?”
“What’s going on?” a steely voice suddenly demanded.
They turned back to the doorway to see Wiley striding across the hash-marked frame of the meter-thick blast door.
“Why isn’t this door closed, Parsons?” he growled. Wiley leaned past the open-mouthed Parsons to hit the button himself. The enormous door immediately began to cycle closed.
“But Wiley,” Mary blurted, suddenly realizing that the man before her wasn’t the one who normally wore this body, “Reza’s still out there!”
The old colonel’s eyes narrowed. “Where?”
“In the library,” she said. “I asked him to make sure everyone else got out. He said he–”
Wiley did not wait for her to finish. In one smooth motion he snatched the flechette rifle from Parsons and disappeared back out the door as it closed.
“Hey!” Parsons shouted indignantly after him. “That’s mine!”
But he did not try to pursue the old man as the door thrummed into its lock, the huge bolts driving home to seal them in, and the enemy out.
They hoped.
* * *
Reza found himself frozen at the window, watching the enemy’s advance. The landing boats had set down in a rough circle around the house complex, and the warriors they had been carrying were now emerging from out of the wheat like black-clad wraiths, their armor bristling with weapons. He couldn’t hear any more firing, and figured that the last of the defenders had been mopped up. It had been a massacre.
That was why Reza had decided not to make a run for the shelter. There was no point. Assuming he was not cut down on the way there, he would certainly be trapped in a tomb that the Kreelans could open without too much difficulty. The shelter’s vault should hold them off for a while, but not nearly long enough for human reinforcements to arrive.
Only one thing really puzzled him: why hadn’t the Kreelans used their ships’ guns to blast the vault like they did the freighters at the spaceport? Why go to the trouble of making a landing at all?
He was startled by the sound of small arms fire from right outside the library, followed by someone crashing through the front door, knocking the smoothly turning cylinder off its bearings.
Dropping without a sound to the floor under the heavy desk he had dragged near the upstairs windows, he waited for the inevitable.
“Reza!” he heard a voice unexpectedly shout from below. “Are you here, boy?”
Reza thought the voice sounded vaguely familiar, but he could not quite place it. Not knowing that the Kreelans had never been known to use such tricks to lure humans into a trap, like a timid snake he slowly slithered toward the banister to take a cautious look.
“Son?” the voice shouted again.
“Wiley?” Reza asked incredulously as he saw the old man crouching near the front door. “Is that you?”
“Lord of All, son!” he shouted. He gestured sharply for Reza to come to him. “Get your butt down here! We’ve got to get out of this place–”
A Kreelan warrior suddenly leaped through the damaged entryway, rolling with catlike agility to her feet.
In the blink of an eye, Wiley’s finger convulsed on the trigger of his flechette rifle, hitting the Kreelan’s torso armor with half a dozen rounds that killed her instantly. The impact flung her body against the wall. Her mouth still open in a silent snarl, she slumped to the floor, her talons twitching at the tips of her armored fingers.
With a pirouette that Reza thought should have been impossible for a man with one stiff, artificial leg, Wiley turned and fired another volley into the warrior’s partner, whose shoulder armor had caught on the lip of the canted entry cylinder door and prevented her from raising her own weapon. Her head vanished in a plume of bloody spray and gore.
“Come on, boy,” the colonel beckoned, “while we still have time.”
Reza wasted no time in bounding down the stairs to the lower level, hurling himself into the old man’s waiting arms.
“What… what happened?” he asked, looking up at the bloody smear on Wiley’s forehead where he had knocked his head against the frame of the old truck. “I almost didn’t recognize your voice.”
The colonel’s face broke into an ironic grin. “Seems God chose to give me back my marbles for one last game,” he said, holding Reza to him with one arm while the other held the flechette rifle pointed at the entranceway. “Listen,” Wiley said, “I don’t know how long I’ll be any good to you, son. This thing,” he tapped his temple, “can short out at any time, assuming the Blues don’t get us first.” He reached down to grab the strangely contoured rifle the first Kreelan warrior had been carrying. “Take this,” he said, passing the flechette rifle to Reza, keeping the alien weapon for himself. “All you have to do is point and shoot. Just don’t hold the trigger down too long or you’ll be out of ammo before you know it.”
“Wiley,” Reza whispered as they crouched down near the Kreelan’s body, “what are we going to do? There are Kreelans all over the place. I saw them from the upstairs windows. I suppose the people in the shelter will be safe for a while, but–”
“Baloney,” the old man spat. “Those shelters are the damned most foolish things anybody ever dreamed up. All they do is trap people in one place and make it easy for the Blues. It’d be better to give every kid a rifle and bayonet and teach them how to use it as they grow.” He looked pointedly at Reza. “But who’s going to give a planet full of orphans their own weapons?”
He suddenly closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with an age-spotted hand.
Reza saw that hand shaking as a tear rolled down the old colonel’s face.
“I’m starting to lose it, boy,” he muttered, his mouth drawn in a thin, determined line. “Wiley the Clown is knocking on the door–”
A muffled boom that set the windows rattling and dust sprinkling from the ceiling stole away the end of his sentence. The two of them stared at each other in the silence that followed, wondering what the noise had been.
“Maybe the Navy…” Reza began, but a gesture from Wiley cut him off.
“The squids aren’t going to hit a friendly site from orbit,” he whispered hoarsely. “They’d send in Marines. Every ship bigger than a corvette carries at least a company.”
Then they heard the spitting of Kreelan light arms fire and someone screaming, but while the scream was only from a single terror, it had many, many voices.
“Oh, my God,” Wiley said, closing his eyes. “They breached the shelter.”
Reza thought of Mary worrying about him, whether he would be all right by himself until he could get to the safety of the shelter. And now all of them – a thousand or more children and adults – were being massacred. Reza started to shake.
“Boy,” Wiley said quickly, afraid that both he and Reza would lose their will and their wits if he waited but a moment longer, “it’s now or never. You’re going to ha
ve to make a run for it on your own.” Reza opened his mouth to protest, but Wiley hushed him with a finger across his lips. “I can’t go with you, son. I’m too old and too slow, and my brain’s going to turn to mush again here pretty soon. I can feel it.”
He took something out of his coat pocket, the one over his heart, the only one on his janitor uniform that had a button on it. It was an envelope, plain except for the Confederation Marine Corps seal at the closure.
“I wrote this the same night I wrote the one for Nicole,” Wiley told him. “I knew you wouldn’t need it for a few years, but when you have a noggin like mine, you do what you can when you can. Here,” he said, pushing it into the boy’s hands. “Read it.”
Reza opened it to find a single sheet of paper inside. But the paper was by no means ordinary. In addition to the embossed Marine Corps emblem that showed through the paper when held up to the light, it carried the symbols of two Confederation Medals of Honor, the Confederation’s highest award for valor in the face of the enemy. During the course of the war, only fifteen men and women had ever won two such honors; the Medal of Honor was almost always given posthumously. Colonel William Hickock had been one of those fifteen, and the only one who still lived. The words that were scrawled on the page were few and to the point:
To Whom It May Concern:
Being of sound mind and body as I write this, I submit that the young man bearing this document, Reza Sarandon Gard, be considered for acceptance into the military academy of his choice upon reaching the Confederation legal age of decision, that being fifteen years from his stated date of birth.
The Confederation Services will find no finer pupil for the military arts and the leadership on which the Confederation depends for its continued survival.
(Signed,)
William T. Hickock
COL, CMC (Ret.)
“Wiley,” he began, “I don’t know what to say…”
“It’s the least I can do,” the old man said quietly. “If it’s what you want, that’ll give you a little muscle to get past some of the stuck-up boneheads screening people for the academies.” He looked around, as if he had suddenly forgotten something “But that’s for another time,” he said as he stuffed the envelope and its precious contents into a pocket in Reza’s shirt. “You’ve got to get out of here, son.” He looked hard at Reza, then pointed to the flechette rifle in the boy’s hands. “Think you can handle that thing?”
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