When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  Then she’d fall asleep, whether I was done or not.

  It was funny at first, then annoying. Eventually I took to just rolling her over on her back, pushing her legs apart, and getting down to the primary business of her job. Sometimes she’d wake up, startled and afraid, but mostly she’d stay asleep, rolling loosely under my weight, breath squishing in and out.

  It got to be funny again, at least to me, but she was frightened, waking up in the middle of the night, soaking with semen between her legs, sometimes with the mass of me still lying on top of her, snoring merrily away. Eventually, she resigned, took her penalty points, and went home, not as rich as she’d expected.

  After she was gone, I realized I’d enjoyed raping her in her sleep. Tried it on the next burdar, too, but she’d wake up at my slightest touch, smiling brightly, ready, willing and able.

  o0o

  A little while later, I got dressed and went for a walk in the moonlight, slinking away through the camp, past the smoldering embers of the fire, massive Saanaae slumbering out in the open, walked up into the middle of the big, hilly field, Alix’s Dorvo Valley. Not much noise now, just the wind in the grass, the trickling sound of the stream. A little murmur from one of the tents, followed a moment later by a brief spate of soft panting, then silence.

  I found a high spot, where the grass was short, sat down facing away from the Moon, toward the darkest part of the sky. Stars and more stars. Milky Way slanting down to the horizon.

  I should never have come here.

  But then, you’d never have seen Alix again.

  Worth it?

  I won’t know ‘til after it’s over. Think about this again as the lighter fires its engines, lifts off, carries you back into the sky. Talk it over with Solange, maybe, sitting in some bar on Karsvaao. If they have any bars yet. Hell, they must have.

  If Solange really cares.

  Well, who else would then?

  No one.

  But for a few brief days you loved Alix again. Loved her just the way you did when you were young. Just the way you did in all those faded memories. So what if it wasn’t quite so real to her? What difference does it make?

  I tried to think about Hani, about making love to her again when I got home. Tried to picture her lying quietly on the bed in front of me, legs spread, smiling up at me, cupping her hands around the, um, spot. Pulling it open so I could see just how...

  I shook my head hard.

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Might as well be fantasizing about some nice, hot garlicky hummus. Maybe a baked potato soaking in sour cream and butter. Hell, a fine, hot bath, with gentle hands to scrub your back. A dip in the pool on a day when you’ve been baking in the sun.

  Might as well fantasize about falling asleep when you’re really, really tired...

  A very small noise. Something stirring in the grass beside me. Something coming out, a field mouse or a mole. Some little lizard. Maybe even a snake. I looked...

  Sharp pang in my chest, adrenaline flooding into my blood, bringing me up on one knee, looking down at the damned thing. The poppit was just standing there, blue scales gray in the moonlight, on its eight stubby legs, beady eyes looking up at me, glowing faintly red, downshifting the midnight skyglow, mouth open, panting softly, a barely audible sound.

  A whisper, my own voice, “Shit...”

  I bent down warily, looking close. Nothing. No hardware. No harness. God damned thing is just fucking lost. If they wander away, get separated from the group, they’re just animals, and not very bright ones at that. Standing there looking at me, panting like some little dog. I could swear it was smiling.

  Probably glad to see a familiar shape out here in the middle of nowhere. Maybe some dim notion I’d take it back where it belonged.

  I stood, looming over it, seeing the eyes follow me, poppit turning slightly so it could keep me centered in its vision field. I stamped once, hard, and it made a sound like one of those little squeeze toys you get for babies and puppies. Made a little crackle of breaking bones as it died.

  I felt, for a moment, slightly short of breath.

  Leaned down and picked the thing up, felt its spilled juices tingling on my hand, threw it as hard as I could out over the big patch of red briars, a faint crash as it disappeared in the underbrush.

  Wiped my wet hand off on the dry grass.

  But that doesn’t solve anything, asshole. You still know what you’ve got to do. Maybe I’m just putting it off as long as I can. So I can lie on top of Alix and... pretend, for just a little while longer. One more glance, up at a sky full of glitter, then I turned and walked slowly back down to our tent.

  o0o

  The next day we worked and trained through the morning, reenacted their silly little ambush vignette, and I tried to tell them what to do, how to see, how to think about a situation like this. Stood them by the clumsily-repaired Kkhruhhuft models so they’d get a sense of scale, tried to see if any of them remembered real Kkhruhhuft from way back when. Not many. Not much use.

  One vivid image of them all slinking through the forest, sneaking up on some little band of unwary sagoths.

  A second vivid image of them all lying dead. Dead and cooked. Little black ants all over them, eating the juicy parts first, then the rest... How does the kiddie song go? Something about worms, beginning, “Did you ever see a hearse go by...”

  Trust children to get right to the heart of the matter.

  Later, I walked through the forest with Marsh and Davy, Alix holding my hand as always, Mace and Stoneshadow trailing along behind, talking softly in some Saanaae language or another. Not the principal administrative language, though. This one was harder, full of glottal stops and nonhuman fricatives.

  We followed a narrow mountain track, winding away from Dorvo Valley for long kilometers, sometimes through old, wide-open forest, sometimes along a brushy region of small, young trees, past the empty towers of an old power line, towers still painted gray, but rust blossoming here and there. No sign of the old wires. They may have been taken down decades ago, long before the Invasion, the towers left up because no one wanted the metal.

  Eventually, we stood near the top of the next mountain, taller than many of the others around it, looking back over the hazy landscape, mountains rolling away from us like some green and frozen old sea. Dorvo Valley was just a little bare-looking spot on the side of a distant hill, far away, bracketed by the moving shadows of low, puffy white clouds.

  The cave mouth would be invisible from the air, almost invisible from the ground, around the bend, down the next long defile, where some craggy brown rocks hung above the trail, higher trees leaning out into space. Below us, in a small, deep cut full of underbrush, we could see the brown and red carcass of a fallen giant, branches bare, broken away to stubs. They fall away one by one as the hillside slowly eroded, year after year, rotting down to mulch and gone.

  There were things like greenbriars hanging over the mouth of the cave, nothing else like them growing anywhere nearby. They’d been transplanted from somewhere else, like a flag marking the entrance to the underground.

  Davy was saying, “We found this completely by accident, Athy. Marsh and I were up hear on a real hunting trip, about three years ago, got up in the hills on a day when we should’ve stayed down below. It just started to rain...”

  Marsh said, “Hell of a thunderstorm, really. Worst I’ve seen in years. I thought we were going to be fried.”

  I could imagine the flaring light around them, sharp, hollow thunder banging hard, flat, echoing around the mountains like explosive gunfire.

  “Scared the hell out of us both.”

  He pushed the briars aside with a gloved hand, holding them up so I could bend low and step inside, feeling over my head as the ceiling receded. When I could stand erect again, I turned to watch as Marsh came in, then the two Saanaae scrunched down on their knees and hocks, bending their upper torsos as far forward as they could, struggling to crawl.
>
  It was gloomy in here, not much light coming from the entrance, the cavern of unknown depth, shrouded in darkness. I could make out a few humped-up shadows, nothing else.

  “OK...” Marsh pulled out a long flashlight, Sirkar issue with Native Police decals, snapped it on, screwed the beam a little tighter, swinging it around to pick out various parts of the room.

  He muttered, “Never know when well find some old bear in here...”

  “Why don’t you block the entrance?”

  Davy said, “We thought about that. Whoever left all this stuff didn’t. No big rocks around.”

  “Too much trouble. Someday we might come build a door.”

  Stoneshadow said, “Or move it all to another location.”

  The cave wasn’t as big as the darkness made me imagine, not a limestone cavern at all, just a low, wide pocket in more or less solid granite, once filled with clay, probably excavated by water. Dry now though, whatever’d let the water in now sealed.

  Boxes stacked here and there, some of them still bearing an NACDC decal. A stack of things like coffins. Some square gray metal crates with handles, each the size of a kitchen recycler.

  Looking at it all, I could feel myself getting colder and colder inside, feelings receding as far away as they could. I could sense Alix suddenly turning to look up at me, eyes curious. Sensing something? I don’t know if that’s possible.

  I walked over to the first pile of boxes, started looking at them, squinting in the dim light so I could read the labels. Combat field rearmament kits. Here, lightweight Ranger rifles, complete with an assortment of warheads. X-crackers. HKAP, dense, high-kinetic armor-piercing rounds. Aerosol concussion projectiles. Even some nerve gas I remembered would be useless against Kkhruhhuft but acted like capsicum spray on Saanaae.

  The coffins held twelve complete suits of Ranger combat armor. About half of them were still factory sealed, meaning they’d never been used. The rest were marked for transshipment to a repair depot somewhere, various fuckups and defects listed on the shipping tags.

  An open carton of fusion cells next to a charger unit and a shielded canister of tritium. I checked the code-date on the snap-ring connector. Twelve December, 2158. The fuel would be badly decayed now, but still useable. I looked up at Marsh, who shrugged.

  Stoneshadow said, “We’ve got a supply of deuterium, but we don’t know how to reset the fusion cells to burn it.”

  They’d be better off with the half-tritium mix they had now, but it’d keep right on decaying, so... “I can probably show you what to do. The suits’ll be badly underpowered, though.”

  Marsh: “Can we rig the cells in series?”

  I looked up into the shadows of his face. “In parallel. But it’s a waste of time.” I gestured at the coffins. “You don’t have a lot of the ancillary hardware anyway.”

  It was like someone else was telling them all these things. With this cave full of hardware I could put together a mean little combat team, but that was the operative word, wasn’t it? Little. They’d be lucky to last a full minute against a properly-armed soldier.

  I stood again, moving toward the back of the room. An old mortar of some kind, dating back to the 2140s. Maybe this stuff had belonged to a reserve unit. That might explain the stripped-down, banged-up armor. A half-dozen warheadless shells. Two shoulder-fired missile launchers, still capped, without their targeting mechanisms. A kit for cleaning the launchers, the missing gunsights still in their original containers. Six thin blue surface to air missiles, range eighty kilometers, leaning neatly against the wall.

  The warheads were some kind of shaped charge I never heard of before. Some Saanaae combat-support pilot was going to find himself in deep shit before this was over. I stood again, looking around the room, looking at my companions. All of them silent. All of them looking at me. I wonder what they imagined I was going to say?

  I walked back to the far corner, where a dozen gray metal cartons were stacked, followed by Marsh and his light. Odd looking things, marked with an unfamiliar NACDC stamp, right over an older seal, lettering faded. I brushed away dust. Coded 28 August, 2104.

  A sudden squint. That was about three weeks after we ran off the Master who found us... I popped the seal, lifted the latch, listening as the hydraulic lid whispered open. “Shine your light in here, Marsh.”

  He did so. Code date on the weapon was from some United States agency or another, just a gobbledygook of letters under a USASF circle-in-star-in-circle military decal, an old white label, plastic wrinkling as time slowly peeled it off the casing. TAC-FN/220.KT, a self-displaying disk of instructions in a little sleeve beside the control panel.

  Davy said, “You’d better close the lid now, Athy. They’re fully charged with U235 inside the lithium jackets. There’s a fair amount of induced radiation now.”

  Marsh said, “We think they’ll still go bang.”

  Land mines will do that. And this one would make a great big hole in the ground when it did.

  o0o

  Another long afternoon of playing with the little guerrilla children, showing them how to fight and die, watching them fall, bang, you’re dead, grin their little death smiles, watching them laugh and play together and talk about that magic little future of theirs.

  All over the galaxy, they would say, there must be people like us, waiting, just waiting for the Master Race to stumble and fall. The universe a tinderbox, and we the spark that touches it off.

  I showed Davy how to reset the fusion cells to burn deuterium, told him he’d be better off with the tritium-mix for another five years or so, then he should make the switch. Watched his eyes sparkle. Watched Alix’s eyes sparkle. Felt for myself a familiar unholy dread that didn’t matter one bit.

  Another evening, another splendid sunset, each sunset just a little redder than the one before it, sky painted by fading memories of all those vermilion September sunsets, ducks and geese stringing long vees across the sky, arrowing southwards, following the sun.

  I wish I could be here to see them again.

  But it won’t last forever, you know that. No matter what you do. No matter what hard choice you make.

  Another fine dinner, all my old friends, childhood friends, laughing and talking and eating their lovely cookout food. I could see how much they liked the two Saanaae, gathering round them, laughing and talking. Some of them knew a few Saanaae words. Stoneshadow seemed to like that.

  Marsh was more relaxed now, sitting by my side, drinking home-made beer from a heavy old glass mug, emblazoned with the sigil of Chapel Hill High School, class of 2039.

  That was the year his father graduated, and mine. Mike Itakë hadn’t come along until 2043.

  Bright young men, all of them, with a bright, unlimited future unfolding across their days. Would the aliens come again? Or had that lone damaged explorer ship failed between the stars, exploded and died? Maybe, just maybe, we were lost to them. Maybe the aliens wouldn’t find us again, if we were lucky, until we were ready for them.

  When?

  No one knew the hardware we’d captured was Kkhruhhuft military technology, firecrackers and wooden swords to the big guns of the Master Race.

  No one here on Earth had ever seen Shenádz.

  Another evening with Alix, out on the hillside, lying together beneath the stars. Smothering all her talk with kisses, drowning her happiness with my desire.

  I had her half undressed, ignoring her protests that people might be watching us, dismissing all those shadows down by the campfire, when she suddenly went still, hand on my shoulder, looking up at me with a serious face I was learning to ignore.

  She said, “Is something wrong?”

  Nothing to do but look back, fighting a sharp pang of something horribly like conscience. These people are your friends. This is the woman you love.

  She said, “Whatever it is, you can tell me, Athy.”

  Almost, but not quite. I put the feelings away. Put them in their little cubby hole. Slid the cover shut. Locked
it tight. Threw the key away, tumbling, twinkling like a lone, silver star, into the black sea of some imaginary night.

  She said, “I know you’ll probably have to go away again, Athy.” That sad look. Sad, but brave. Then looking back up into my eyes, light shining of unshed tears, lips forming into the barest of smiles. “You’ll come back again from time to time. I know that.”

  I nodded slowly, putting my hand on her abdomen, where I had the front of her trousers open, on the soft cotton cloth of her underwear. “I’m sorry, Alix. If I stay, they’ll...” What? What should I tell her? “If I stay, they’ll be watching me. And all this...” I gestured around, down at the people by the campfire.

  She put her arms around me, hugged me tight, held on for just a little while. Then we made love under the starry sky, people down below watching maybe, and Alix didn’t seem care, reveling just then in what we seemed to have, for ourselves alone.

  o0o

  Long after midnight. I sat up on the hill, surrounded by the little nest of crushed brown grass we’d made earlier in the evening, looking down at the dark, silent little camp, tents barely picked out by starlight, waning moonlight, Moon low over the western mountains now, by the red light of fast-fading coals.

  No movement. No sound, wind blowing softly over my back, threatening to raise gooseflesh, dead, broken grass prickly under my bare feet. Alix would be asleep down there, lying white-fleshed in our tent, asleep now for hours.

  Once, when I’d come out to piss, Marsh had been standing around in the darkness, all alone. He’d grinned at me, whacked me once, hard, on the shoulder, had gone off to his own tent to be with Sandy, to curl up and sleep.

  Tomorrow, of course, would come, and there was work to be done...

  Watching his back recede, I came very close to whispering good-bye.

  Good-bye, Marsh Donovan.

  I opened the phone and called through the Net to Shrêhht.

  Hello, Ath. I guessed you’d be calling again soon.

  No great surprise.

  Some other voice, flat, affectless, matter-of-fact: Packet tracer switching in, level Five-high.