When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  Below us, the darkness was absolute, black on black, and you could hear a distant, hollow murmur, wind sweeping the canyon walls. “All right,” I said, “it’s lovely. Now why are we here?” Sarah was upset when Shrêhht announced we were going away for a little while, Zváiroq visibly startled, her rumble of protest silenced by a gesture from Shrêhht.

  One of the other Kkhruhhuft made a shuddery murmur, untranslated since she was not wearing a vocoder.

  Shrêhht said, “If we are lucky, if we’ve timed our visit right, we’re here in time for the beginning of the darkdemons’ migration. They go out and return several times before going on their way for the season. The first night is always the best.”

  “And is there some reason we left the others behind?”

  “It’s... not done.”

  Oh. All right. I stood and waited.

  Around me, the Kkhruhhuft soldiers suddenly grew tense, anticipatory, one of them whispering, shushed by another’s sibilant hiss. Shrêhht suddenly lifted one arm, pointing with her chela, down into the darkness. There.

  A faint glimmer in those depths, a sparkle of green and gold, just on the edge of vision. A distant rustle of sound, a rustle like leather sliding on leather. A distant fluttering sound. Wings?

  A faint stream of light down below, the Kkhruhhuft whispering again, again quieted with a hiss of reprimand. Obviously I wasn’t the only one seeing this for the first time. The colors continued to spread and brighten, began to make jeweled patterns below, as if a thousand mirrors were turning up toward the sky, so they could reflect starlight.

  Not starlight, though. Green and gold. Bits of silver and brooding red. Pale, pale blue, all very faint, but brightening.

  Shrêhht’s deep voice whispered now, something like, “Aaahhhhh...” The vocoder was silent, yet... Awe. From a Kkhruhhuft. Somehow disturbing.

  And the stars below quickened abruptly, leaping into a three-dimensional pattern of fiery gemstones, flying into an upward-turning spiral, reaching for the sky. I heard the rustle and flutter of a million wings. Climbing, climbing...

  Darkdemons fountained into the air above us, wings on fire, trailing patterns of light, silver and gold, dark copper and bright, shining brass, forming a brilliant tree against the night, an upward-striking thunderbolt pattern, the licking flames of some vast, cold bonfire.

  Whirled over us in the shape of a spiral galaxy, smaller, denser, then large, more diffuse. A barred spiral, a dense elliptical, a chaotic, craggy irregular. Exploded like the Crab Nebula, whirled into the shape of the Trifid, grew smaller and smaller, melding with the stars, streaming away into the heavens. Here. Then gone.

  I felt like I’d been holding my breath for hours.

  Maybe I had.

  Oh, Sarah, it would have given you joy to have seen this.

  Well. The camp wasn’t so far away, no more than a dozen kilometers. Maybe she’d seen something of it after all...

  A sudden awareness of body heat, the oily smell of Kkhruhhuft hides suddenly oppressive. Surrounded by them, their shapes now blotting out the sky, my only avenue of escape a quick leap over the rim and into the abyss...

  I looked at Shrêhht, realized she was holding out one hand, proffering a scrap of cloth. A blindfold.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “Put this on, friend Morrison.”

  “Why?” Sudden cold fire in my chest.

  “Put it on, soldier. The answers will be forthcoming.”

  I tried looking into her eyes. Nothing, of course. Just that hand made of chelae and tentacles, holding a scrap of white cloth. Not a condemned man’s blindfold, no. Comrade Shrêhht, asking for my trust.

  I took it from her hand, tied it on, and let them lead me away.

  When the blindfold came off, we were standing on the floor of some vast, arid cavern, dry, dusty air sharp in my nose, tiny motes swirling in the torchlight. Not a natural cavern, no. The floor was more or less flat, paved with close-fitting, hewn-stone blocks. Cavern walls vertical, planed smooth, almost polished, ceiling far away, beyond the reach of the torchlight.

  A cavern so large buildings like those of Hánáq could be fit inside, step pyramids and plaza, planters full of empty dirt, dry fountains full of things that looked like cobwebs and crumbled leaf mold. No paint on these buildings that I could see, just bare brown stone, stone worn away, as if by time. As if they’d lain here for so long the nearly-still air of this place had begun to wear them away.

  I turned and looked at Shrêhht, at the other tall, shadowy, silent Kkhruhhuft. “Well. Where are we?”

  She said, “This place was called Kmárhh, a long, long time ago.”

  We started walking again, one of the other Kkhruhhuft leading the way, Shrêhht and I merely following. “How long ago?”

  She said, “We think it was built around forty thousand years ago. No one really remembers.”

  As we walked, a haze of dust began rising around us, as if no one had walked here in all that time. Forty thousand years? Then this place had been more than twenty thousand years old when the Sinnott came to conquer Kkhruhhuft at the Masters’ behest.

  “What was it for?”

  “It was the capitol of the world.”

  Was. “And now?”

  “Nothing. Darkness and dust. Not many people even remember that it’s still here.”

  “Are there others? Were there?”

  “Hundreds. Some collapsed and gone, most still intact. All empty. This is the way Kkhruhhuft lived. Before...”

  Before all that. Right. But, unlike Shrêhht, unlike and of these Kkhruhhuft, I could remember. To me it was more than just some distant dream. “So why did you bring me here? Just to show me some ancestral ruins? Hardly worth a blindfold. I wouldn’t tell the Masters about your secret museum.”

  A slight chuffing of Kkhruhhuft amusement. “You’re here to make another decision, Athol Morrison.”

  Another decision...

  The cavern opened up into an area thousands of meters across, hundreds of meters high, well lit enough that our escort could extinguish their torches, could put them down in a rack obviously made for just such torches and walk forward into the red, flickering light. More buildings here, taller, with steeply-sloped sides. More modern buildings, with many small windows, like the office buildings I remembered from the cities of old Earth.

  In the middle of this space was a large, open platform, bonfire blazing at its center, filling the cavern with its reddish-yellow light, burning in a huge cup, smelling of creosote-soaked wood. Gathered round it...

  All right, you’ve already guessed what’s coming, Athol Morrison. Not a hard thing to guess at all. Now, what do you do about it? Run? Flee into the dark caverns and hope you elude them? Or maybe hope you just die out there, so the decision won’t have to be made...

  People around the altar fire, standing in little hollows maybe made fore the priestesses of some eons-dead religion. Hollows perhaps made by those feet, as Kkhruhhuft came to stand in this place for all the long millennia of the ages before the masters came.

  Kkhruhhuft now. And others. Saanaae centaurs standing here and there, firelight glittering of shiny green scales, flat, spatulate teeth throwing odd shadows across their faces. A little black Sinnott spider. A few soldiers from a race I knew was called the Zarret, people who looked like blue snakes with arms, with eyes like faceted glass jewels, eyes full of rainbows. A pair of Sheqarii technicians, standing on either side of a mobile surgical unit, the sort that Spahi units carry with them on extended operations. They can save your life, and have saved mine.

  Usually, they don’t include the technicians, just the unit, which can be programmed for one species or another.

  Who else should I expect to see here? Davy, perhaps, dressed in Lincoln green, standing on his tree limb like some idiot out of an old, old movie. That you, Errol Flynn? Marsh, perhaps, Sandy by his side, risen from the dead. Maybe, if I looked hard, I’d find Alix standing beside me, reaching out to take my h
and, eyes shining with happiness and hope.

  I turned and looked up at Shrêhht. “Well. What now?”

  Tableau. Me, small, frail, merely human. Mighty Kkhruhhuft, playtoy monsters from some Cretaceous nightmare, larger by a little bit than your typical T. rex. A good deal more dangerous. Toothy Saanaae, only a little larger than men, scarier-looking than a fairy-tale demon. Soft-eyed Sheqarii, calm in demeanor, little black Sinnott, straight from a child’s dream of spiders. A fucking jewel-eyed snake.

  Oh, God damn it.

  It’s always been called the Mercenaries Plan, she said. Always. Sinnott brought it to us, as we brought it to the Saanaae and Zarret, as the old Raighn warriors, long dead, brought it to the Sinnott. As we are bringing it now to you.

  There are a million sentient species in this galaxy. A few hundred suited to the task of soldier, to the difficult role of policeman. And a dozen species across all the millennia who we felt we could trust.

  I stood, staring upward into her so-nonhuman face, all fangs and scales and featureless eyes, full of regret. Just now, I could see the expression on Marsh’s face as the sensed the gun at his head, as he heard that little click the trigger makes when it’s pulled, metal sliding on metal, a faint snick as the spring compresses and the firing pin comes out of its dock. I wonder if he heard the sharp whack of steel on brass, the hiss of burning primer. Maybe the bang even got to his ears before the bullet shattered his mind.

  A last moment of startled awareness: So damned loud... Maybe the last thing he felt was that stabbing pain in his ears. Then nothing. I hope.

  I said, “So it means nothing to you that Yllir Waÿÿ failed. Failed so utterly. That your own kind will come and erase your whole lineage.” No response. “Nothing that I sent my friends to their deaths?”

  She said, Yllir Waÿÿ failed so utterly, so easily, because these Saanaae saw to it... A gesture to our centaur comrades. Just as you saw to the suppression of a clumsy plot among the Sirkar Native Police on Earth.

  How does the phrase go? Best done quickly. And the Saanaae had taken a lot more damage than just the destruction of my few old friends.

  “Then what do you think you’ll accomplish by this... Plan?”

  She said, One day, they will make a mistake, Athol Morrison. When that day comes, it behooves us to be ready.

  “And how long have you been waiting for them to make that mistake? How long have you been ready?”

  She said, No one knows, anymore. No one remembers. A hundred thousand years? Maybe more.

  “How much longer do you plan to wait?”

  The Sinnot’svoice was thin and raspy in the still, dry air, but real, surprising me with clumsily-formed English syllables: “We have forever, if need be.”

  Forever?

  “Why me? Why now?”

  Why you, Athol Morrison? Because you honor your duty, though you do not love the Master Race. Because you killed your friends to save your people from destruction, though it would’ve been so much easier simply to stand aside. As for why now...

  She reached to the edge of the altar and picked up something, a little black box, handed it to me. It was one of the wrist weapons, little black boxes the size of a pack of cards that could slice the top from a mountain, go on to slice off a thousand mountains more. We’d turned them all back in at the end of the Xú conflict. Every last weapon accounted for in the Master Race files.

  One of the Sheqarii standing next to the surgical unit said, “We brought it with us when we came. It’s why we’re on Kkhruhhuft. This is not something you could transmit over the Masters’ net.”

  I turned it over in my hands, feeling the soft, almost undetectable vibration of the dark, warm, metallic surface. With this, I could kill them all, could open Kmárhh to the sky. “Where did it come from?”

  The Sheqar said, “They were transshipped through the main armory on Hanta Sheqari, headed for Earth. Millions of them. Enough to equip the entirety of the Spahi Mercenaries.”

  “Why?”

  The Sheqar said, “No one knows why, Athol Morrison.”

  Shrêhht said, “Because they are afraid. Because they think we can protect them.”

  Thin, white anger. “Afraid? How can a Master be afraid? They aren’t even... real. You know that. Poppits can be afraid, maybe. Not the Master Race.”

  She gestured at the weapon. “Maybe so,” she said. “But they are arming us all now. It never happened before.”

  “And you think this is their ‘big mistake’?” Not much of a fatal error. No matter how well armed were, no matter how widely scattered, they had the ships, the FTL communications net. We really had nothing.

  She said, “No, such a rebellion would be useless. They’d come and bomb our worlds away to magma, and we would be gone.”

  “What, then?”

  “They think we can protect them. They think we will. That is a mistake.”

  Maybe so. All we protect is ourselves. Our friends. I suppressed the faces of Davy and Alix, threatening to come up out of the darkness where I’d left them. But I could still feel Alix’s body clench under my hand as she watched Marsh die.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Join us. Join in the waiting. Find more humans, one here, another there, people we can trust. People who will wait with us. When the moment comes, we’ll know.”

  “And if it never comes?”

  A faint hiss of Kkhruhhuft laughter. “We won’t know that until all of forever has passed us by.”

  Right. “And if I consent?”

  The Sheqar by the surgical unit held up a tiny silvery button, something no larger than a watermelon seed. “This is a deactivated net node. Direct access to Master Race realtime communication services. It’s what they use to talk to each other. We can put it in your brain, and you can be trained to use it through some simple biofeedback training. The bandwidth is very narrow. You modulate your brainwaves to send messages in a simple code we’ve devised.”

  “What good will that do? Master Race controls the net.”

  “If they turn the net off, they’re in the dark as well. If they leave it on, our communications net is open.”

  “It won’t take them long to find a way around that.”

  “But it won’t be instantaneous, Athol Morrison. There will be a window of opportunity.”

  “When,” Shrêhht said, “the time comes.”

  When. If. Little words with which to cover the face of eternity.

  I said, “I need to think about this.”

  Shrêhht said, “Think, then.”

  o0o

  Walking alone by along the rim of the darkdemons’ canyon, listening to the wind, watching the stars tilt slowly overhead, sparse one way, so very dense the other. Head full of images.

  That little being attacking me in some dingy alleyway. Screaming and hissing as I ripped off his arms. Why? I can’t even remember. It wasn’t on a war world, merely one where a garrison lived, a seedy place where the natives, long downtrodden, saw to our whims. Maybe I cheated him at cards, who knows? All he did was die.

  Alix’s eyes on me, the day I went away. That final morning. Not really seeing me anymore. Inward turning, full of some secret knowledge. Hani looking down at my hand, as we said goodbye at the spaceport. Looking down at my hand, then turning away. Images so simple and desultory I knew they were hardly worth remembering. But I remember them anyway.

  Remember them, perhaps, because I cannot forget. Or maybe because I don’t want to. Happy memories of Hani displaced by happy memories of Sarah. Neither of them able to push those memories of Alix aside. Alix insufficient to suppress the memory of my one short night with little Wu Chingda. Herself no more than a cover to slide over the memory of Solange Corday.

  So I think about these hollow memories, and avoid thinking about the real issue. Burdars and natives just so much meat, there to be eaten, or wasted and thrown away.

  Damn it, take out your communicator and place the call. What are you waiting for? Dial the
phone. It won’t take long. Kkhruhhuft police will come and take them away. People will be tortured. Names named. Just place the call. Then go get Sarah and go home. Home to a warm Spahi crib on a nice garrison world. Fuck her until you wear her out. There’ll be another one ready to take her place. Fuck her, and the next and the next, and get drunk with your friends and do your duty until the day you die.

  It’s as simple as that.

  I took the wrist weapon from my pocket and held it tightly in my hand. Warm. Vibrating softly. You could strap it on, dial a command link through the phone, fire it down into the valley and watch the darkdemons, if there are any left, watch the darkdemons burn.

  That’d bring them down on you right enough. Shoot the gun. Let it make the decision for you. I put it back in my pocket and walked on.

  o0o

  And, still later, with Sarah brought to the darkdemons’ rim, awakened from a sound sleep, bleary eyed, confused, unprotesting, standing with me under the stars. Dawn would come in just a little while, lighting the edge of the sky with a rime of salmon pink, washing the stars away, flooding the world with light, letting us see down into the valley. But not yet.

  I stripped her naked, hardly able to see her before me, dark woman silhouetted against a dark night, stars overhead hardly lighting us. Kissed her. Felt her respond, as she always did. You are so very good at your job, Sarah Morgan. Little Sarah, who is still only seventeen years old.

  Put her up on a flat rock at the edge of the valley, on her hands and knees, facing away from me, well braced, legs apart. Took off my own clothing and stood behind her, fumbled between her legs, put my self in. Nothing from Sarah. A little intake of breath, muscles clenching, back arching as she held herself still for me. Letting me do what I wanted.

  Stars above us, glittering now, splendid, shining.

  Sarah whispered, “Look...”

  Stars moving above us, green and gold and red and pale, pale blue, growing brighter, brighter still, forming patterns, swirls, galaxies of living light.

  I stopped what I was doing then, disengaged, and listened to the joy in her voice, the wonder. Sat down beside her on the warm stone and watched the glory of the darkdemons’ return.