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 have 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?”
“Yes, sir,” Reza replied in a voice that sounded small and alone. “But–”
“No buts, boy,” Wiley said gently, but firmly, leaving no room for argument. “This is it. For real. I’ll try to create a diversion for you.” He nodded toward where the screams from the breached shelter still rose and fell like pennants in a gale. “Besides,” he went on quietly, his voice echoing memories from another life that Wiley the janitor had never known, “I want to die the man I used to be. Not as some senile broom pusher.” His eyes pierced Reza. “You understand that, don’t you?”
Reza nodded, biting back the tears he felt coming, remembering how he and his real father had parted a lifetime ago. It’s happening all over again, he thought wretchedly. “Yes, sir,” he choked.
“Do whatever you can to stay alive, son,” Wiley told him softly. “If anybody can make it out of this, you can.” He embraced Reza tightly.
“I love you,” Reza said, holding on to his adopted father for the last time.
“I love you, too, son,” Wiley said, stroking the boy’s hair, fighting back his own tears.
Reluctantly, Wiley let go. Then he rose in a crouch, holding his artificial leg behind him like a kangaroo’s tail for balance. “Good luck, Marine,” he said.
This was how he wanted it, Reza told himself. He only wished it could be some other way. “You too, colonel,” Reza said, snapping his arm up in a sharp salute.
The old man saluted him in return before making his way to the front door. After pulling the second Kreelan warrior’s body into the lobby and clearing the exit, he squeezed through to disappear into the street beyond.
Feeling as if he were trapped in a holographic nightmare, Reza turned and made his way to the emergency escape at the rear of the library. Peering through the adjacent window, he saw that the area behind the library was clear, at least as far as he could see. The closest wheat fields were about two hundred meters away. Maybe a minute of hard running, he guessed. Only a minute. Plenty of time to die.
Holding the flechette rifle close to his side, he pushed open the door and headed outside, the door’s emergency alarm blaring uselessly behind him.
***
Wiley crouched near the rock wall, not too far from the first group of soldiers that Reza had seen being wiped out by the attacking Kreelans. He had exchanged the alien weapon for a pulse rifle and a spare magazine from one of the dead soldiers. The pulse rifle was a bit heavier than the flechette guns, but had more firepower in its crimson energy bolts than a flechette could ever hope to boast. Unfortunately, their higher cost made them a low volume commodity on all but the best-equipped worlds.
He snaked forward along the wall, trying to get a glimpse of what was happening at the shelter. The firing had stopped, as had most of the screaming.
“What are you bitches up to?” he wondered aloud as he peered through a hole in the wall toward the admin building.
Kreelan warriors were clustered about the entrance to the vault, standing in two lines that extended from the vault’s entryway where the great door had been blasted from its hinges, to where a vehicle resembling a flatbed trailer hovered in the center of the street. The warriors were passing objects from one to another, moving them from the vault to the carrier.
Bodies, Wiley thought. They’re taking the bodies away.
The lone wail that suddenly pierced the air made his blood run cold. He watched as a child, five or six years old, emerged from the vault and was passed along the chain of warriors like a bucket in a fire brigade to where the other bodies were being stacked on the carrier. There, a Kreelan in a white robe – a type of alien that Wiley had never seen or heard tell about – did something to the child, who suddenly was still.
His eyes surveyed the carrier closely, and he noticed two things: there were no adults, only children, and the children apparently were not dead, just sleeping. Drugged or stunned.
The old man’s mind reeled. There had never been a confirmed report of prisoners being taken in the war against the Empire. Sometimes, for reasons never understood, the Kreelans would leave survivors. But never had they taken prisoners.
Yet, here they were, making off with a few hundred children from this house alone. If they were doing the same at the other houses, they would be leaving with tens of thousands of children.
“I’ve got to get out a message, a warning,” he whispered to himself.
But a presence behind him, a feeling that he was no longer alone, removed that concern from his mind forever.
He whirled in time to see a huge enemy warrior standing behind him, her form lost in the sun’s glare, sword raised above her head. His old arm tried to bring the rifle around, his teeth bared in a snarl that matched the Kreelan’s, but he wasn’t fast enough. The warrior plunged her sword through his unarmored chest, burying the weapon’s tip in the ground beneath Wiley’s back.
His hand convulsed on the trigger of his rifle as he saluted Death’s coming, sending nearly a full magazi
ne blasting into the rock wall around them. And as the blood stopped surging through his arteries and his body lay still, he made a remarkable observation through his still-open eyes as the warrior knelt down to collect a lock of his hair: the Kreelan carried a scar over her left eye that was identical to Reza’s.
***
Pushing his way through the chafing wheat, Reza heard the hammering of a rifle and stopped in his tracks. He knew that it must be Wiley, and that the old Marine would never have fired off a full magazine like that unless he was in dire trouble.
He hesitated, wondering if he should go back, desperately wanting to. He knew that Marines did not leave their own behind, and Wiley was one of his own. He felt the envelope with Wiley’s letter burning in his breast pocket, and his indecision made him feel unworthy of it.
But he knew it would be too late. If Wiley were in trouble, there would be no helping him. And that was the way the old Marine had wanted to die, Reza reflected somberly. He silently hoped that he had taken out a dozen of the aliens with him.
Damn them all to Hell, he cursed.
Completely alone now, he continued on through the wheat, not knowing where he was going, no longer caring.
***
He had been walking for nearly half an hour when he heard the aerospace vehicle’s screaming engines. He threw himself into the dirt just as its dark shape passed directly overhead.
“I think I’ve had it,” he murmured, clutching at the flechette rifle as he lay still. He could hear the ship somewhere nearby, no doubt dropping off a hunting party. Maybe more than one, he thought glumly as he heard the ship move off to his left and hover again.
Then the ship left, its engines a muted roar against the wind, and Reza decided it was time to move. He got into a crouch and quietly made his way forward. Pushing aside some wheat stalks, he found himself face-to-face with a Kreelan warrior.
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