When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  Hani’s breathing was slightly labored under my weight, her face turned away from mine. “Hello, Hani...” I murmured into her hair.

  She whispered, “Welcome home, Athy.” The name I’d taught her to call me the night she arrived, the night I bent her over my balcony railing... She turned her head to face me, kissed me lightly on the lips. “We all missed you,” she said.

  It began again.

  o0o

  Then, later, she sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed, looking at me where I lay, and I could tell she was tired, wanting to sleep, eyes a little glassy, mouth looking somehow bruised, the room’s dim light shining off wet patches on her skin.

  But this is the job you do. And you stay at work ‘til you’re done.

  I said, “Do Janice and Mira resent that you’re my favorite?”

  Her brows drew together, eyes expressionless. A slight tightening in her face, as if she were about to speak, a movement of self-restraint. Whatever truth there was here would remain self-contained, invisible.

  She said, “We are... good friends. And here for you do with as you please.”

  Well. Talk about restating the obvious... “Do you resent that I take you into my bed so much more often?”

  I could see a nervousness blossom in her then, very carefully controlled. Maybe she was wondering if she’d done something wrong, something to make me suspect...

  She said, “If there’s something you’d like me to do for you, I’ll...” already reaching her hand out, putting it on my stomach, trying to guess what I was after. Leaning forward now, looking down at my crotch, trying to gauge if it was all right for her to wipe me off before...

  I said, “I just want you to talk to me, Hani. That’s all.”

  A long, expressionless stare, eyes slitted very thin, so that I could barely see their gleam. She said, “Some of the other pillow-girls say their masters like to talk. You... usually just talk to Fyodor and Margie.” She swallowed, looked away briefly. “If you’d like. I’ll do my best...”

  Masters. God-damn it. But what the hell did you expect, asshole? I smiled and patted the bed beside me, fluffed up a pillow for her, and said, “Come on, Hani. Let’s go to sleep now.”

  She looked relieved.

  Sixteen. Marching in the Dust

  A time of settling in. A time of training and retraining under pale tan skies limned with streaks of brassy cloud. Marching in the dust with my soldiers, veterans and newbies alike, showing them what I was made of, because a commander’s respected is earned, not owed.

  To my pleasure, Solange managed to get Kathy Lee Mendoza pulled from my old unit and brought in as Regimental Havildar-Major, putting her in charge of her own platoon in place of one jemadar-minor, preparing her for the day when she’d make the jump from non-com to officer herself, and then we all marched to her oddly-splendid choice of music.

  I was surprised how many filthy verses there were to old Mademoiselle. I thought I knew a lot of them. Kathy Lee knew hundreds more, including some Provençal lines that, when translated, made me blush.

  Showed the newbies how to shoot straight, not the operational stuff they show you in basic; field shooting, combat shooting. How to manage your ass in a firefight, because not every opponent will be some helpless iron-age warrior. Got Solange and Kathy Lee to start demonstrating armored hand-to-hand, because these suits do have limits. Did a little bareback hand-to-hand myself, morale-control maneuvers. Got my ass kicked flat by a hulking Mongolian boy who was so scared afterward I had to take him into town for a beer and peepshow.

  After a while they started doing what I said, not merely without question, but with alacrity. Trust the old man. He knows what he’s doing. Trusting me to bring them out alive and whole when the time came. Me hoping I could really do it.

  And feeling so much pleasure on the day I had Fyodor sew on my sixth hashmark, emblem of twenty-four complete years in service. Men and women, soldiers, shaking my hand, giving me a salute, realizing I knew them all by face and name, knew how they felt about things, what they liked to drink, who their burdars were...

  Sat with them in smoky bars and drank beer and laughed and sang and almost forgot that once upon a time I went home and pretended to fall back into love.

  o0o

  Stood in the combat service bay of a very large starship, shrugging inside my armor, checking it out, making sure the joints were programmed correctly. When you drop in armor, under combat conditions, it’s right, or you die. People did, from time to time.

  They call this thing a Carrier Starship, a smooth, shiny cylinder the size of a large asteroid, concentric shells around a hollow core, ends open to the void. Service bay big enough to hold a Master Race battlecruiser, one of those sleek black things, kilometers long, that can burn down an entire world.

  I had my people down near the rim, in one of the airtight holding cells, getting ready, waiting for our dropship to come pick us up. Had the regiment lined up, people checking each other’s hardware. Only minutes to go. Me and my thousand. Third Regiment of the First Battalion of Rissaldar Tatanya Vronksy’s Second Brigade in the Seventh Division of Legion IX, Victorious, Third Army of the Spahi Mercenaries, all under the command of Gosudar Aëtius Nikolaev, who alone among us was safe this day in the glassy towers of New York...

  Outside, through a clear and tenuous wall, we watched the rugged continents of Hataille rolling below. Rolling and burning. Even from five hundred kilometers up you could see them as smudges of dark smoke. Burning cities. Burning fields. Burning forests. Glowing holes in the ground so hot they created a towering column of wind above them, wind blowing straight up, fountaining debris into the sky.

  Down the west side of one continent, along a jagged range of mountains, along a seacoast filled with fjords and what had once been green, fertile valleys, a long line volcanoes was in full, violent eruption, jetting ash into the sky, lava spilling down across their flanks, flooding the landscape below.

  The north polar cap was shattered, exposing the cold, shiny black water underneath through thousands of cracks and open sea lanes.

  We passed over a bare, sooty plain, what had once been rain forest, now no more than a wilderness of emptied-out riverbeds, a place of dry-roasted carcasses, cooked away to cinders, waiting for the wind to come blow them away.

  Not even bugs left to eat them. Whatever passed for worms in this landscape toasted in their burrows, earth sterilized downward to bedrock, stone cracked from the heat, soil half-molten in places.

  Punishment, I realized. Not just conquest. There, but for the grace of God... No, not God. Just a figure of speech. Figure of speech about a figment of the imagination. I could picture Earth looking like this. I’d seen Aeli Saa looking worse.

  But there were no Hatailli policemen out among the stars, surviving unscathed. All of them were right down there. Whatever few had survived. Whatever few would choose to live on.

  My headset clicked, and Kathy Lee’s voice said, “All set, sir.”

  “Right. Rissaldar?”

  “Here.” Vronsky’s voice, sounding harassed.

  “Third Regiment ready to drop.”

  “Two minutes. Mark.”

  Right. Time to go.

  Then we were riding the dropship downward, sliding into Hataille’s upper atmosphere, aerodynamic surfaces biting into the air, ship shuddering around us, pilot AI not really caring whether we liked the ride or not, ejection tunnel lit only by somber red engineering lights, my thousand men and women lined up in four columns, by company, regimental adjutant to my left, jemadars Wu Chingda and Jimmy Dietz to my right, havildars major, plain and minor, lined up behind us with their platoons and cohorts, by maniple and octal.

  My own seven troopers, the octal that would accompany me in battle, right behind my back. Who knew what they were thinking now?

  I could feel my heart thudding softly in my chest, measured, calm, not quite slow. Been here too many times to be scared. Done this too often to be relaxed, though. It’s always
important. Pay attention. Stay focused. These people are counting on you...

  The AI’s featureless, affectless voice whispered, “Thirty seconds.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Fifteen...”

  I could sense the tension right through my command link. So what if the Masters have bombed them away to Hell and gone? So what? It never does any damned good. They’re waiting for us. Waiting to die.

  “Ten...”

  “Heads up, boys and girls.” I put my weapon against my chest, muzzle up, and locked my arm joints.

  “Five...”

  Kathy Lee said, “Maestro.”

  Well. What would it be this time?

  As I felt the tagalong field grab my atoms and fling me into the sky, music exploded in my ears. Flight of the Bumblebee, about eight measures in. She must be getting sentimental in her old age.

  From sixty kilometers up, a world looks more or less flat, but the sky is still black, threatening to fill with stars, never fulfilling that promise, landscape beneath your feet turning three dimensional, clouds hanging above mountains above plains above sea.

  We had our ballutes open now, acting as stabilizers, falling feet-first, keeping our rate of descent down around two kps, though the air was still so thin as to be almost nonexistent, drifting laterally toward our designated LZ, not far from the principal, still-intact Hatailli administrative center. Silence on the airwaves, nothing but a soft whisper of static from our weapons.

  I pumped the heads-up display, rotated through 3D, making sure everyone was in place. Good enough. Clicked up through the hierarchy, so I could see we were still on the battalion diamond’s left point, battalion itself correctly aligned to the brigade array. Good enough. Not my job to see to these things, but it’s a poor sort of army where a soldier feels responsible only for his own little part.

  Off to our east, something sparkled red through smoky haze, passive emission radar displaying a pattern of rising projectiles. Quick acceleration. Brennschluss. Deceleration under gravity, track curving uselessly away.

  Solange whispered, “Not very smart...”

  No, not very. But then, if they’d been smart they wouldn’t’ve gotten in this fix. “Kathy Lee.”

  “Sir.”

  “Suppression fire in range, your discretion.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I checked the slave-set altimeter. Thirty kilometers, and our ROD was down close to one kps. “Disengage ballutes. Port arms.”

  Bang. We fell away from the discarded ballutes, which would quickly sail off in the local jet stream, turning ourselves face down, accelerating again as we dismounted our weapons from their drop-safe mounts. The anti-aircraft defenses started to sparkle again, just as Kathy Lee’s people opened up with some high-velocity air-to-surface rounds, charges flaring blue-violet against the ground. The defenders’ missiles rose and fell, dropping back into the little holocaust we’d made underneath them.

  I said, “Five kilometers. Lock and load.”

  o0o

  The Hatailli were waiting, waiting beside a city made of ancient temples, warriors in garish costume, things like feathers sprouting from their bodies, lined up before us, rank on rank on rank, more than a million strong, sunlight pouring through the atmospheric haze, the thickening smog of a world being burned, slanting down yellow-orange on all their pretty pagodas and pyramids and obelisk towers.

  Skinny, four-armed green bipeds, ready with their rifles and bayonets, ready with their hand grenades and swords, their shoulder-held missile launchers and pathetic little canon. We could hear their drums beating as we came over the hills, bounding from crest to crest, could look down on them, marching in phalanx and hollow square, see their little tanks roar forward, jetting harsh diesel smoke, caterpillar tracks adorning the mud, crushing their roads to rubble.

  How long can this stuff have lain hidden, Hatailli knowing it was there, biding their time, until they thought they could win? Echoes from the past. Did the Aztec princes lie awake in the darkness, fingering the obsidian edges of their old wooden swords, and dream and dream of the day when they would rise up and throw off their alien masters?

  Maybe so. Maybe not.

  I said, “Solange.”

  “Sir.”

  “Order Nine-alpha.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  No reason for finesse in the here and now, no overarching strategy, no complex tactics. The regiment would separate into its sixty-four component octals, each with its officer or non-com and seven armored troopers. Engage battle, and do it’s job.

  “On my mark.”

  They saw us now, turning line-abreast, going ragged, shouting to each other, pointing, waving their guns and lances, tanks turning, field artillery firing irregular volleys, spraying fire and metal our way, the quick onset of panic.

  “Begin.”

  I ducked under a spinning shell and jumped away from the explosion, followed by my soldiers. Set my weapon on full automatic, feederchannel clicked over to aerosol rounds. Opened fire, the eight of us standing in a staggered line. Volley. Advance. Volley. Advance. Volley...

  I heard Solange tell her octal, “Fire at will. Leapfrog advance. Begin.” Heard the harsh crackle of their weapons, saw a sudden hole open up in the Hatailli lines, flashing fire, exploding green bodies, parts pinwheeling in the air.

  “Kathy Lee.”

  “Sir.”

  “Start in on the tanks and artillery now.”

  “Yes, sir. I think there’s a tac launcher at the city gate.”

  Shit. Almost missed it. “Yeah. That too.”

  Listened to her whisper the order code, assembling the four octals of the first maniple, first cohort of her platoon, having them feed in shaped HX. The nearest fifty or sixty tanks of the defender’s eight hundred or so went up in rapid array, hot metal sizzling as it flew over our heads.

  Flare of hard light from the city gate, the tac launcher vaporizing, taking out a half-kilometer of ornate city wall on either side.

  Over the snap and sputter of our weaponry, I could hear a low moaning sound from somewhere. Set my filters, looked and listened. Voices of the Hatailli. Four-armed green bipeds starting to throw down their guns, turning their faces away, running, crying out to each other. Tanks turning away, exploding nonetheless. Turret hatches opening, Hatailli tumbling out, rolling to the ground, trying to run.

  I said, “Rear-guard action. Order Seven-by-seven. Let’s finish it.”

  People training their weapons on fleeing Hatailli, switching over to self-propelled flechettes. Shooting them in their backs. If you listened closely, you could hear them scream.

  o0o

  Nightfall. Hardly a star able to shine down on us through the pall of smoke overhead, Hataille’s fat orange moon vast and fuzzy up in the sky, featureless, though I’m told the maria make a pattern that looks a little bit like One Lung Ho, the pseudo-Chinese AI media image that was so popular when I was a kid, grinning, gap-toothed, slit-eyed, cracking owner-tailored jokes...

  Darkness all around, lit up by light from the burning forest behind us, low bluish flames rising from certain quarters of the crushed city. We had the place surrounded. Made them wait. Shot down fleeing refugees until they turned and went back into their fortress. It would be all over in just a while.

  Me, walking slowly through the darkness, stepping around piles of Hatailli carcasses, heaps of Hatailli limbs that we’d kicked aside. Not far away, a couple of troopers making their way from one place to another, loping idly, practicing soccer passes with some small, round, dark object. Silent, though, still observing battle rules.

  Small cluster of armored people around a black human shape on the ground. Wu Chingda kneeling over her downed trooper, cracking open his armor, making her inspection. I looked over her shoulder, saw the boy’s armor had a small puncture, that there was a small, bloody wound in the right side of his chest, at the bottom of his rib cage, whatever it was probably embedded in his liver.

  “How’d you do that, s
on?”

  He looked up at me, a small brown man, in pain, ignoring it, acutely embarrassed. “I, uh, tried to field-swap my magazine. Round in the chamber fired.”

  And put the damn clip-mount in your liver. “They’ll do that.”

  “Sorry, sir.” He jumped slightly as Wu ran a diagnostic probe into the wound.

  She looked up at me, faceless in her armor. “Not too bad. Stop the internal bleeding, weld the damned hole shut and we can keep his ass around.”

  I smiled, unseen and unseeable behind my helmet mask. “OK.” I started to turn away, stopped and turned back. “Soldier.”

  “Sir.” I could hear the tension in his voice, teeth clenched as Wu put a field cautery inside his chest and started frying things.

  “Regs from now on.”

  “Ow. Uh, sorry. Yes, sir. Regs.”

  “We’ll talk about it when we get home. There’s a right way to do it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Relief through the pain.

  o0o

  The four of us kneeling together in the darkness, Solange, Wu Chingda, Jimmy Dietz and I, facing toward our burning city, soldiers around us getting into their arrays, waiting for the word, waiting while we talked.

  Tatanya Vronsky over the command link: “All right, it’s on your locus. The order is, move in through the city, kill everything you see with small arms fire. Take down the fortress and kill its occupants, at opportunity. Make no attempt to round up prisoners, nor pursue escapees beyond firing range.”

  I bit my lip. “Rules of engagement?”

  “Take down the fortress, Jemadar-Major. No cost-containment measures.”

  “And the hostage?”

  Brief silence, then, “No cost-containment measures.”

  “I see.”

  I heard her log out, and we all stood, turning toward our stations.

  Dietz whispered, “Why don’t they just use a thumper on it?”

  I shrugged. “Just in case.”

  Solange said, “They’re not going to scorch out, I don’t think.”