When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  I opened my command phone and logged into the net.

  Twelve. Scouring the Heavens Clean

  The new day came on slowly, first the indigo backdrop of false dawn, then ashen light washing away the stars. When the sun rose, it burned the sky pale orange, scouring the heavens clean before painting them blue.

  I sat outside the open tent flap, watching Alix sleep, watching her stir this way and that, rolling onto her back, arms and legs sprawled however they happened to fall, mouth hanging open, shadowy dawn gleaming on her teeth.

  Behind me, I could hear other people begin to awaken, moving around in their tents, murmuring softly to each other.

  And it had been a long night for me, a night of thinking about what we’d said, Shrêhht and I, of thinking about what could happen. Would happen. She’d read me Marsh’s record. Enough to know his fate was sealed. Enough to know he might as well climb a high cliff, ascend to the top of the tallest tree around, apologize to his friends, say his prayers...

  I could imagine him dead.

  Not difficult at all.

  Soft and broken and still upon the ground.

  Alix’s fingernails made a soft, delicate rasping sound as she scratched in her sleep, one hand moving up onto her thigh, fingers making a tentative movement, some of them connecting, some not. Almost conscious then. I watched her eyelids, watched them flutter gently, eyes moving back and forth under the skin.

  Living out the last vestiges of some chaotic dream. This way. That. Back again. Nerves firing, tuning up for the day, like flight software putting engine gimbals through their paces, making sure everything was as it should be.

  I thought about Davy and his family. Pretty easy to notice his wife and children were nowhere to be seen. Keeping them safe? Or just keeping reality out of his dream?

  Behind me, I could hear one of the Saanaae stumble to its feet, could hear an oddly querulous murmur in the fluid cadences of the principal Saanaae tongue. I’d learned a bit of it while I was on Rouhaaz, not enough to follow these garbled mutterings.

  Suddenly, Alix’s eyes were open, fog of sleep burning away fast. Eyes on me, seeing, becoming aware. Then further awareness, mouth closing, one hand going up to her hair. Her knee came up and she started to close her legs, stopped, relaxed. I could see her thinking, but couldn’t see the thoughts themselves. She said, “Good morning, Athy.”

  o0o

  By midmorning, washed in the stream, dressed and breakfasted, we went out with Davy to see what he called “maneuvers.” They were up in the woods, under Marsh’s command, in the area behind the old Catholic church, men and women in Lincoln green, the two green Saanaae stripped naked, scales aglitter, all of them slinking along, from tree to tree, shadow to shadow.

  Davy pointed, one hand on my forearm. In the distance I could make out shadowy forms, some large, some small. Dark cardboard cutouts of men with guns, skirmish lines of cardboard Saanaae, some kind of fieldgun over there, and... That little thing. Several of them. I looked hard. Little bitty cardboard poppits, shapes indicating they had some kind of hardware strapped to their backs, just the way real poppits would, though you’d rarely see them in combat.

  I looked harder. Far away through the trees were two larger shadows, almost imperceptible. A pair of Kkhruhhuft in combat armor.

  Davy wouldn’t know anything about this. Marsh? Most of it, but not all. That bit about the poppit “recorders” could’ve come only from the Saanaae, who, perhaps, would remember a scene like this.

  So. Combat? No. This little party of Sagoths and Saanaae, poppits in tow, was simply going from one place to another. Ambush, then.

  And those well-hidden Kkhruhhuft?

  To teach my little friends just how careful they’d have to be. If they didn’t spot the Kkhruhhuft, attack them first. I could imagine the harsh words they’d hear from Mace and Stoneshadow.

  I tapped Davy on the shoulder, took his combat rifle out of his hands, popped the clip and looked. White plastic fragmentation warheads on subsonic boosters. You could kill a man with this if you shot him in head, neck or chest. Probably kill a Saanaa too, if you were careful.

  All you’d do to a Kkhruhhuft is piss him off royally, like firing beebees at a Doberman, unless, maybe, you hit him right in the eye. No eyes on an armored trooper.

  Davy whispered, “We’ve got plenty of X-cracker charges. We’re just using these for practice.”

  Swell. X-crackers are great for putting dents in armor. I was hit in the helmet with one during a training exercise, a squad of us assaulting a bunker supposedly occupied by “unfriendlies” whose technology mimicked what humans had had in 2159. Made my ears ring for a week.

  Up ahead, Marsh’s people were almost upon the enemy column. No one was looking at those shadowy Kkhruhhuft, and the two Saanaae were hanging back now, waiting. Exchanging glances. Probably laughing.

  I snapped the clip back in, lifted the rifle, read the range off the targeting system. Twelve-hundred meters. Less than half the effective range of this weapon. One. Two. Three.

  I fired a quick burst, rifle chattering like a high-powered stapler, watched the cardboard head fall off one Kkhruhhuft. Leaves fluttering in the breeze. Again, cutting the legs from under the other. Resighted on the column, back to front. Knocked down the five model Saanaae. Took out all the little poppits. Took the heads off motionless human statues.

  Listened to a fading echo of rattatatat.

  Silence.

  Pretend guerrillas looking around, confused, wondering where their targets had gone. The two live Saanaae were staring back at me now, also motionless. The female saw me look at her, quickly put her gun on the ground. The male was a little stupider, lagged a corresponding moment behind.

  Davy said, “Jesus. Lank said you could shoot, but I never would’ve believed...”

  And Alix whispered, “What if they’d been real, Athy?”

  I tried looking her in the eye. “Then they’d’ve been shooting back.” Glanced at Davy again. He didn’t seem to get it, but maybe Alix was figuring things out. Maybe. Just a little bit.

  Down the hill, Marsh’s troopers were inspecting the cardboard carnage, people looking up at me from time to time, frowning, murmuring to each other. The two naked Saanaae started walking back up the hill to where I waited, leaving their guns behind them on the ground.

  o0o

  Not far from the camp there was an old, old stone pit, too small to have been a Twentieth Century quarry, but somebody’d dug stuff out of there at some time in the past, gouged into the side of a steep hill, leaving a sheer granite cliff where trees and bushes would never grow again, not ‘til ice and tiny roots had done the work of tumbling it down.

  Below, they’d dug a small pit in the rock, leaving behind a hole the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Water from a little stream tumbled down the cliff face, filling the depression with clear, cold water, which spilled over the rim, stream reforming in the woods below.

  The overflow waterfall had already dug a little lip, so the surface of the water was about a foot below the rim of the pit. There was moss here, wherever the shadows were deep enough, soft like velvet.

  Now, while Marsh and his people gathered by the pond, eating packaged lunches, while the Saanaae lurked back in the forest, away from me a little bit, eating their own oddly-scented meals, I sat on the stone rim between Davy and Alix, watching ripples on the water, the reflection of cliff and sky, looking through a cloudscape image at the lifeless bottom of the pit. The water here must be quite acidic.

  Davy, munching on some kind of squishy pocket-bread sandwich, said, “So what did you think?”

  Of what? Your silly little show? “Davy, is my brother involved in all this?”

  “Who, Lank?” He looked past me at Alix for a moment. “Well, no, not really. He thinks this is a big mistake.”

  “But he does know,” said Alix, staring into the pond now, not looking at me anymore.

  Bad enough. “Who else? My father? Your wife?”

>   A surprised look. “Miriam? No. She thinks I’m part of an orienteering club. That’s our cover, you know.”

  And Alix said, “Davy, your dad’s always been too thick with Chief Catalano. We’d never...”

  A glint in Davy’s eye. “My father died because yours wouldn’t help him, Athy.”

  But I wasn’t here then and don’t remember. I said, “And you think this is going to accomplish anything?”

  A serious, clear-eyed look into my face. Wondering. A small sigh. “Not in the beginning, Athy. In the beginning, we knew it was just a game, like the Liberators. You know.”

  Of course. But...

  He said, “Even after we found the arms cache,” one hand smoothing the black plastic stock of his rifle, “it was still a game. We left everything in place, closed up the entrance. But it was the seed of an idea. The military left their weapons stockpiled everywhere when they surrendered. Because hope never dies.”

  “So. When did it change for you?” Not that I didn’t know the answer.

  He glanced back into the trees at Mace and Stoneshadow. “When we found out it had happened. Out there.”

  “But you know how quickly and easily they were beaten down, don’t you?”

  A shrug. “It seems like that’s what happened, even though the Saanaae like to pretend otherwise. All those big claims about ‘how we almost won.’ I’m not stupid.”

  “Then why?” A gesture round, at men and women in Lincoln green, eating beside a clear artificial pond in a woodland full of ruins.

  “Because what happened once can happen again. And again and again. Sooner or later...”

  Sooner or later, what? You kneel down before this new god or you die, the lesson of the Persian Zoroastrians.

  Davy, eyes faraway, said, “It doesn’t matter that the Saanaae alone failed. Failed because the Kkhruhhuft, because people like... you, I guess, helped put them down. It doesn’t matter if humans alone fail and fall. It’s the idea of rebellion that counts. And the realization that it can spread among the worlds...”

  “Do you understand what may happen?”

  A slow nod. “We fail. We fall. Some people die. Maybe humans and Saanaae are deported again. Some of us will land on other worlds, if that happens. There’ll be other enslaved races there as well. And we can tell them how we almost succeeded.”

  No, Davy, you’re not stupid. What, then? Tell him about those other worlds? Tell him about races that resisted too hard, races that held on to the bitter end? There are worlds out there where no one lives any more. The Master Race will make a slave-species if it can, make an empty colony world if it has to, create a smoking, uninhabitable mineral resource node if that’s the only option...

  “What did you expect from me?”

  Alix put one hand on my thigh, and Davy said, “I was impressed by your display of shooting back there, Athy.”

  “So?”

  “There are ten million other human beings out there just like you, Athy. Armed. Trained. Scattered around the galaxy.” His eyes held a bright vision now. I felt sorry for him. Sorry for all of them.

  o0o

  It’s one of a very few details kept secret by the Spahis. Who was there. Who was not. The Saanaae don’t know, for the ones who were there are dead.

  I’d crouched with my troopers in a golden forest on Aeli Saa, up in the Mohsetz Mountains, looking out over the Rëae Plains. There was wind all around us, high clouds scudding under a yellow-gray sky, the city of Mohyyz a low urban sprawl through which wound the old Tremëe River, where King Turi Amaq united the people of the world.

  Beyond the city, the spaceport, where rocket gantries had once grown, where proud Saanaae centaurs rode into the sky, conquering their dead black moon and the lifeless worlds beyond, before venturing out to the stars. There was something on fire at the spaceport now, dark smoke rising high, sheering off in the wind.

  Almost over now. Soldiers from the sky. Fighting. Fighting. Saanaae doing all the dying. In a little while it would be over. Ghastly business. Necessary business.

  The alert tone chimed in my helmet. “Heads up. Watch yourselves.”

  It made a long, lovely yellow contrail across the sky, a string of tiny, brilliant beads, more of them to the left and right, and far ahead of us, out over the sea, dropping down among the islands as a squadron of FTL bombers popped out of hyperspace and tracked across the face of Aeli Saa, distributing their loads.

  One weapon, one only for Mohyyz, capital of the world, bespeaking contempt for these rebellious little policemen.

  Dropping. Dropping. Hastily improvised Saanaae defensive weapons began sparkling over the city, the best they could do, hoping against hope that...

  Something flashed around the falling weapon, picking off the defensive warheads. Falling, turning, centering itself over the city. Flash. The weapon burst open, core of light spreading.

  My video pickups shut themselves off, leaving me in darkness. I heard someone else grunt. A touch of fear in someone’s voice. I said, “Easy, there.”

  The ground surged under my knees, once, hard, I heard the forest start to crackle, then the audio pickup went down as well. I could hear the sound of my soldiers’ breathing, whispering over the net into my ears.

  Hard sigh of wind, rustling branches, like the wind just before a storm, and my eyes reopened on fading golden light. Mohyyz was gone, replaced by an irregular scorch pattern several kilometers across. You could see shock waves fading out in the ruins beyond, whatever was left of those scattered small towns and hamlets.

  My senior havildar said, “Holy shit...”

  The Master Race symbolic representation means something like “non-radiogenic energy inverter.” We always called them thumpers. Because that’s the noise they make.

  Thump.

  o0o

  Cleanup time. Walking through the ruins of some little village. Nothing left of the place. Splashed wreckage, no single piece much larger than a domino. Wisps of smoke. Smashed corpses. Dead things that looked a bit like a cross between a komodo dragon and a tarantula. One of these lying beside a broken-bodied Saanaa, head resting peacefully on one dead haunch, its own legs fearfully twisted and torn.

  My soldiers muttering softly to each other, the names of various useless and forgotten deities coming up every now and again.

  Rounding a naked brown hill, finding a large piece of rubble, the marble-like torso of some Saanaae statuary, beside it a smallish female Saanaa, maybe a little less than half the size of a standard adult, left arm sheared away at the elbow, right foreleg broken, jagged gray bone poking through the hide, smeared with yellowish blood.

  Staring at us. Wide eyed. Motionless.

  My havildar said, “Fuck.”

  This was getting to be difficult. Harder than I ever dreamed.

  No one spoke. No one moved.

  A whisper of sound from the little Saanaa girl. Good right arm holding the ruin of the other.

  “Havildar.”

  “Sir.”

  “Take the team down to the river. Pick out a camp for the night. We’ll make pickup in the morning, move on to the next site. We’re about done here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Relief in his voice.

  We kept doing it and doing it.

  Never got any easier.

  People hurting inside just now.

  Give them a break.

  I listened to my squad clatter slowly away, could tell how dispirited they’d become. Morale dropping. Time to ask for a rotation out. Fatigued, you see.

  The little girl kept looking up at me. Knowing, I suppose. Waiting.

  When I unlimbered the torch and pointed it at her, she didn’t flinch, didn’t recoil. But she screamed when I pulled the trigger, a short, high, choppy squeal, bucked and gargled as the fire ate her away.

  In the morning we rotated out, went on back to Santulliq, where I knew a promotion was waiting. Promotion. Unit citation. Posting to Boromilith, where I’d command a full company.

  o0o


  In the late afternoon, I found my two Saanaae wanderers alone in a clearing, sitting together, touching one another, gazing into featureless eyes, shawls and belts doffed and neatly folded. Maybe they were preparing to dance. Maybe not.

  The female nodded to me, that horsy little head-toss I knew so well, and in her quaint talking-dog voice said, “Welcome, Jemadar-Major.”

  “Hello, Stoneshadow.” I stood with my back against a tree, weight on my heels. “I don’t know your rank.”

  The male said, “True rank is a thing of the past. We have the jobs your Masters give us. That’s all.”

  “My Masters?”

  “The Masters here on Earth. The ones who buy our contracts.”

  Funny way of putting it. The Master Race has nothing like money, just an internal resource allocation system. I once heard it referred to as the System Chargeback Router. Don’t know if there’s any truth in the term, and it doesn’t much matter.

  Stoneshadow said, “What do you think of our little... operation, Jemadar-Major?”

  “I think you’re going to get my friends killed along with you. Maybe everyone on Earth, if it’s more than just a few of you.”

  Nothing. Just looking at me.

  “So. What do you think this will accomplish?”

  “I think you’ve heard the way Captain Itakë puts it. Keep the dream alive. And someday...”

  “You think no one knew about Yllir Waÿÿ? You think it was just some private Saanaae dream?” Yllir Waÿÿ was what they’d called their rebellion, before it erupted across the worlds.

  A moment of silence, then she said, “No, Jemadar-Major. It’s everyone’s dream. Live, die. Succeed, fail. What difference does it make, so long as we keep on trying? They can’t kill us all. It can’t go on forever.”

  “So you want to see all of your people dead? Or all of mine?”

  She said, “Do you think, perhaps, I want to see your people destroyed because of what you did to mine?” She stood, walking toward me, standing still, towering over me, eyes reflecting afternoon light, foreclaws digging into the litter. “No, Jemadar-Major. Some day we’ll return to Aeli Saa. Not you and I. We’ll be long dead. But humans and Saanaae together. Even Kkhruhhuft...” It’s nice to dream, while the dream lasts.