Starfist:Flashfire

by David Sherman; Dan Cragg

  “Aw, hell, Bud, lay off!” an older man in the crowd said, “this war ain’t no business of ours!” and several other men murmured their agreement.

  “Come on, Charlette,” Timor Caloon said, putting his arm around his new daughter-in-law, “let us go home.” As they trudged back up the road, Timor turned to yell back at Clabber, “Bud, you gonna be our newspaper man, ya oughter learn how to spell.”

  “You gotta start pullin’ yer own weight around here, girl,” Aceta Caloon told Charlette one day. “You said you worked in a laundry? Well, girl, yew kin start by helpin’ me do my washin’ today.”

  “Mother,” Charlette answered, “my name is ‘Charlette.’ How’d you like it if I went around here calling you ‘woman’ all day long?”

  Aceta was not used to anyone talking back to her and for a moment she was speechless. “I kin see by those hands o’ yers that you never did a bit of housework in yer life. That ‘laundry’ yew worked in musta had all them machines, ’cause you ain’t never had yer hands in a washtub.”

  “I’m not washing anyone’s dirty clothes,” Charlette answered. “You dirtied them, you clean them.”

  At first Aceta said nothing, just regarded Charlette speculatively, as if she were deciding whether to hit her or let the insubordination go. Then she took Charlette by the elbow and gently guided her toward the back of the house, saying, “First time through I’ll show you how it’s done ’n we kin do the clothes together. But Charlette, you live in my house, you gotta help me with the work, until you get too big. After the baby you ’n Donnie gonna go off to live by yourselfs ’n you gotta know by then how to run a house proper. I’ll teach you somethin’ about cookin’ too. Donnie will need feeding.”

  Charlette discovered that the housework kept her occupied and her mind off what was really beginning to worry her more and more with each passing day. And her nails chipped and her hands got red and cracked.

  Charlette also found that the people of Cuylerville were a gregarious, hospitable community. Each family had its own garden and livestock, which provided plenty of nourishment for everyone. Apparently the thule harvest that season had been very good because there was plenty of money to buy amenities, such as alcohol to fuel the continuous parties and gatherings that were life in the village between harvest and planting times, and fuel for running the generators and machinery and other things the people wanted to improve the quality of their simple lives. They accepted Charlette with friendly curiosity. They seemed not to care there was a war on or that their government had declared its independence from the Confederation of Human Worlds or for anything else that took place outside the limits of Cuylerville. No one held it against Charlette that she was an off-worlder and a member of the Confederation army. No one, that is, except Bud Clabber.

  One day Clabber visited the Caloons. His face was red and he was perspiring heavily from the walk up the valley. He sat panting on the veranda of their house as the four Caloons—Charlette counted as one of them by then—took chairs out there with him. Sitting on their porches, drinking, smoking thule, and gossiping were the favorite pastimes in Cuylerville after the harvest.

  “Harvest was pretty good this year,” Clabber remarked, accepting a cool drink from Aceta as he took a chair next to Timor.

  “I’m thinkin’ of goin’ back to growin’ grains, Bud,” Timor said, matter-of-factly.

  Clabber started in surprise. “You cain’t do that, Timor!”

  “Why cain’t I?” he winked at Charlette. Apparently Timor had threatened to do it more than once, just to nettle Clabber in his prosperous self-confidence.

  “Well, well . . .”

  “ ’Cause ol’ Bud’ll lose his commissions,” Aceta volunteered.

  “Well, Aceta, that ain’t the only reason!” Clabber protested. “We all depend on the money we’re gettin’ for growin’ thule. Besides, they won’t be happy about it, Timor,” he cast a dark look at Timor Caloon.

  “Who’re ‘they’?” Charlette asked innocently.

  Nobody answered for a long moment and finally Donnie said, “The men in the county seat who make the real money off our crops. Mr. Clabber set the deal up with them so he gets a good commission, but what we get is the leavings. It’s like I tol’ Daddy, and it’s the reason I left here and went to Ashburtonville. You get in bed with them people and they own you.”

  “We’re all prospering from those crops, Donnie!” Clabber’s voice rose. It was obvious to Charlette that the joke had gone too far. “Them fellas won’t take too kindly, you do somethin’ stupid like this, Timor!”

  “Ah,” Timor shrugged, “I was in the army and now we got Charlette who was a soldier, ’n Donnie, he’s always bin pretty good with a rifle. We kin take care of ourselves, Bud. Yep, I might just switch this year.”

  Clabber snorted and shook his head and was silent for a while. Once he’d gotten control of himself he changed the subject. “Donnie tol’ us, Missus Charlette, that you was a soldier in the Confederation Army. Thet true?”

  Aceta Caloon shot an angry glare at her son. “Everybody knows that, Bud. Why you puttin’ the mouth on my Donnie?” she said.

  Clabber smiled and nodded his head. “But is it true? ’Cause if it is, I should report you to the authorities up at the county seat. You is an ‘enemy alien,’ I think it’s called. Donnie sez,” he glanced apologetically at Aceta, “that you worked in the quartermaster laundry at Fort Seymour. Thet true? See, folks, since I’m the gov’mint official in Cuylerville, I got certain responsibilities for the security of the folks in this village and havin’ an enemy soldier—no offense, Missus Charlette—livin’ here should be reported.”

  “Yew know damn well, Bud, that girl ain’t no threat to nobody in Cuylerville,” Timor snorted.

  “Well—”

  “Yessir, I did work there,” Charlette answered quickly, very relieved that Donnie hadn’t been able to tell anyone what she was really doing in Ashburtonville. She gave him the cover story they had devised. Aceta, who knew very well the part about Charlette being a laundress was not true, kept silent. “So you see, Mr. Clabber, I’m actually a deserter from the army,” she concluded. That word was bitter in her mouth but she spit it out anyway.

  “Well. Well, I see,” Clabber said. He was silent for a moment, nodding his head. Then he slapped the arm of his chair with a hand and said, “But I gotta report you, Missus Charlette, yew unnerstand?”

  “Well, report away, then,” Aceta said.

  “O’ course,” Clabber waved a hand, “we might work sumptin’ out, jist between the five o’ us.”

  “ ’N what might that be?” Timor asked, his voice tinged with suspicion. He knew what was coming.

  “Well,” Clabber sat forward in his chair and rested his hands on his knees, “you did very good this last harvest, Timor. We all did. We did ’cause I got the connections to get y’all good prices on your thule. Now suppose you jist give me two percent more of what I’m a gonna git you fer next season’s harvest—”

  So that was the reason he’d come visiting. Timor Caloon shot to his feet. “Bud Clabber, I known you all yer goddamned miserable life, but if yew don’t get yer goddamned ass off this here porch right goddamned now, I am gonna kick it all the way back down the valley! ’N you send any goddamned ‘report’ on my daughter-in-law to those goddamn crooks up at the seat, this here village is gonna get a new middle-man right goddamned quick! And I am gonna switch crops this year! You tell them people if they want grains they kin get ’em from me direct, otherwise they better keep their asses up at the seat! Now git outta here!”

  Clabber’s face went white and he wasted no time scrambling off the porch. Safely on the road back down the valley he shook his fist at the Caloons and shouted, “Yew are a goddamned fool, Timor Caloon! You are gonna mess up the best thing this village has ever had goin’ for it! Yew all’s gonna regret this, I swear and be damned, you are!”

  Charlette was truly amazed at Timor’s outburst. She had never heard him talk so
much since she’d come to Cuylerville. Aceta began to laugh. “Old Timor don’t ever say much, Charlette, but when he do, oh, Lord, hope yer on the other side of the world!” and she began laughing. It was the first laugh Charlette had heard out of her. Then they all began laughing. Far down the road Clabber heard the laughter and he turned and shook his fist at the Caloons again.

  “Donnie,” Timor Caloon said to his son after they had laughed themselves out, “that man is trouble for you and Charlette. I think I’m a-gonna have to kill him before this is over. Maybe some other folks too. Those bastards up at the seat he deals with are all crooks, Donnie, ’n they’d slit a man’s throat soon as look at him. You was right, son, we never shoulda got involved with ’em. I think next season I really am goin’ back to growin’ grain and vegetables. Thet’ll really piss ’em off.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything on my account that might bring trouble on your family,” Charlette said. She was alarmed. This is getting worse and worse, she thought despairingly. And then something that had been growing on her for a while now suddenly gelled—she was becoming attached to the Caloons!

  “Don’t ya worry,” Aceta said, “we kin take good care of ourselfs. But Timor, what you think about these children here?”

  “I think you need to put some distance between yourselfs and Cuylerville. When will the Figaro be back?”

  Donnie Caloon shrugged. “Four, five months, if she makes it back at all, with the war on and all.”

  “Well,” his father answered, “we better jist be on our toes until then. Mebbe it’ll all blow over. But fer right now, break out the rifles, son. We better see if we remember how to shoot. You come along too, Charlette. You was in the army. Ya oughter know a sight picture from a mess kit.”

  The Caloons owned two old-fashioned projectile firearms, shoulder weapons that Timor called “rifles.” They had been designed primarily for hunting and Timor used them mainly for keeping blackbirds and other pests away from his crops.

  “Each one of these will hold five of these twenty-millimeter ca’tridges in the tube magazine and one in the breach,” Donnie explained to Charlette. “You operate this one by working the slide back and forth to eject the spent ca’tridge and put another in the breach. The other, Daddy’s favorite, is semiautomatic. The gas from the ca’tridges works the action for ya, so alls ya gotta do is pull the trigger six times and she shoots six times. But this rifle is a light gun and if ya fire heavy loads it kin get away from you mighty quick.”

  Charlette had qualified as an expert with the various types of handheld weapons that were standard issue in the Confederation Army, but she had only attained Marksman status, the lowest needed to qualify in arms, with the standard individual infantry weapon. But she was not afraid of guns.

  “Normally we use real light shot for blackbirds, but we have heavier loads for bigger game. If you wanna bring a man down, you use these,” he held up two cartridges about seventy-five millimeters in length, one blue, the other red. “This red one has nine nine-millimeter balls in it and this blue one has one twenty-millimeter slug. Either one of these at close range will bring a man down, but watch out for the blue one because she kicks real bad.”

  “How ‘close’ is close?”

  “Well, the slugs are good out beyond one hundred meters, if you aim right. The balls spread out twenty-five millimeters for every meter so at three meters, about across the size of our living room, they’d hit your target with a spread of seventy-five millimeters, knock him right through the front door. Now, let’s practice a bit out back of the house.”

  Charlette found that she could fire the rifles with accuracy, but for the next week her right shoulder was sore and black and blue from the recoil. Her right cheek hurt a bit too from absorbing the guns’ recoil, but that was only from the first five shots. After that, Donnie had shown her how to hold the weapons properly.

  “Daddy says until we’re sure there won’t be any trouble we keep them full loaded with the safeties on, one in each of our bedrooms at night, close by during the daytime. Just remember, when you fire, press the safety stud to the left to take it off and never put your finger on the trigger until yer ready to shoot.”

  As prepared as they were for violence, when the night visitors finally did come the Caloons slept right through it because the raiders struck not at them but at the Pickens family who lived some two hundred meters farther up the valley. There were three raiders, heavily armed. They cut Amelia Pickens’s throat and told her husband if he didn’t want his three daughters murdered as well, the thule crop next season had better be a good one. Then they disappeared into the night.

  Timor Caloon emerged from the Pickens’s home, his face white with suppressed rage. “Wait here,” Timor Caloon told the horrified villagers standing around outside. He returned in a few minutes with Bud Clabber and five other men, all armed with rifles. Clabber moaned and protested his innocence but his pleas fell on deaf ears. “Ol’ Bud here, he’s volunteered to take us to visit these gent’men in Bibbsville. Donnie, go git yer gun, we’re leavin’ in a few minutes.”

  “I want to come along,” Charlette said.

  Timor Caloon looked to his wife, and then Donnie, who both nodded slightly. He fixed Charlette with an appraising look, turned to the crowd and asked, “Ennybody here got a spare rifle they kin loan my daughter-in-law?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  Trenches and tunnels. Lieutenant General Cazombi had wanted to turn the warren of storage tunnels on the Bataan Peninsula into a warren of strongpoint-studded combat tunnels and trenches. The 3rd Provisional Division’s engineers worked valiantly, and gave Cazombi what he wanted. Those trenches and tunnels were how Cazombi’s understrength force had managed to hold out long enough for the 27th Division and then the Marines to arrive. When General Billie arrived, he made it clear that he wanted everybody in the tunnels and trenches. And he wanted the Marines in a tunnel that had strongpoints facing across a no-man’s-land without trenches. What a general wants, he gets.

  Which doesn’t necessarily mean everybody else is happy.

  “I hate tunnels,” Corporal Kerr muttered as he led his fire team to a strongpoint. Each Marine carried three Straight Arrow antitank weapons in addition to his blaster.

  “But these are our tunnels,” Corporal Doyle protested.

  “I wasn’t talking to you, Doyle,” Kerr growled.

  Doyle looked at him indignantly.

  PFC Summers studiously avoided looking at either of their bobbing heads; they carried their helmets so they could see each other in the tunnel. Why did he have to be the one stuck in a fire team with two corporals?

  “You were on Waygone, you were on Kingdom,” Kerr said sourly. “Don’t tunnels remind you of anything?”

  Doyle opened his mouth to say something, sucked his words back, and reconsidered. “Yeah, well. But they aren’t here.”

  Kerr’s jaw clenched. He didn’t care whether Skinks were around or not; he had fought Skinks in tunnels on two operations, tunnels reminded him of the implacable aliens.

  Summers couldn’t help himself, he looked from one corporal to the other despite not wanting to look at either. He had joined 34th FIST after the Kingdom campaign and hadn’t yet encountered the hostile aliens the Marines called Skinks. He hadn’t even heard of them until he reported to Camp Ellis for duty. FIST Sergeant Major Shiro had briefed the replacements on the Skinks. Until then, Summers had believed that all stories of alien sentiences—especially hostile alien sentiences—were fiction, mindless entertainments. The sergeant major’s briefing hadn’t emphasized tunnels, yet Corporal Kerr was seriously disturbed by tunnels because of the Skinks. Thirty-fourth FIST had encountered the Skinks twice, or at least Company L’s third platoon—the platoon Summers was in—had. They were the first humans to do so—at least, the first humans who lived to tell the tale.

  Except that they weren’t allowed to tell anyone; 34th FIST was permanently quarantined to make sure nobod
y told. A shiver ran up Summers’s spine. He didn’t know whether the shiver was because of the Skinks, or because of the quarantine—he never intended to make a career of the Marines, just one adventurous enlistment, but apparently assignment to 34th FIST was for life.

  Assignment to 34th FIST had proved to be more adventurous than anything Summers had ever imagined.

  “Here we are.” Kerr’s voice broke into Summers’s thoughts. The fire team leader ducked into an unoccupied bunker and turned on the lights.

  Summers followed Doyle into the cramped room and automatically threw a hand over his nose and mouth—the place owned a stench that would gag a kwangduk.

  “Damn doggies,” Kerr swore, and kicked a piece of litter at the wall. It squelched. Clearly it was “organic.” “Look at this crud and corruption. I’ve seen kwangduk nests that were cleaner than this!”

  The bunker was indeed filthy. The walls and ceiling were stained from things Summers didn’t even want to guess at. The floor probably was, too, but it was covered with so much garbage, he couldn’t see it to tell. Some of the debris was obviously organic—bone chips and globules of slimy. The fearsome odor rising from a two-liter can in one corner was evidence of its use as a latrine. And the yellowish-brown goop on the bottom of the firing slit said dumping the can through the firing slit was the flushing system.

  A sudden noise sounded from some crushed cans. Summers and Doyle both jumped and pointed their blasters in that direction. A small, sharp-muzzled face peeked out from under the debris. Kerr moved fast to stomp the beast, but it was faster, skittering from its hiding place and slithering into a narrow crack in the wall of the bunker.

  “The doggies eat those things,” Kerr snorted. “And they say Marines are animals.”

  “If you’d lived here under these conditions, you’d eat them, too.”

  The three turned to the new voice. Sergeant Linsman’s head hovered in the entrance to the bunker, his helmet tucked under his arm. All three of the Marines were used to seeing disembodied heads hovering in midair, none were surprised at his appearance, though both Doyle and Summers had jumped at his unexpected voice.