When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

“I think Margie likes them. They talk to her, at any rate. They’ve been playing Bingo together, Sunday afternoons at the Burdar guild-hall...”

  Miriam slid into the pool, splashed water back at Helga, who laughed, jumped in with a solid thud, grabbed her playmate and started trying to hold her under, the two of them thrashing the water to froth. I said, “Ever think you might like to go home, old sod? You and Margie together?”

  Silence. They shared a bedroom now, had done so ever since Kaye pointed out it might be a nice thing for me to let them do. I think she was maybe nine years old then, back for a summer’s furlough from her second year at Spartaki. Well. Kaye had her own burdar now, a nice, quiet young man name Heinzie who cooked her meals and cleaned her crib and, presumably, served in her bed.

  Fyodor said, “What for? We like being here with you. Going all over the galaxy, seeing all the worlds, all the different kinds of people. Besides, if we’d gone home, we’d be old now...”

  I looked up at him. Face full of lines, skin dark and leathery. But still strong, still healthy, that strength and health just one more gift of the Master Race. “How old are you now? I forget.”

  “I’m eighty-five. Back home I’d be all done.” A critical look. “You don’t look so bad yourself for an old soldier of sixty-seven.”

  No. Not so bad, old soldier who can still use the services of two twenty-year-old women. Fyodor saw me looking at them and laughed.

  He said, “Will the havildar be coming home soon? Margie misses our little Kaye.”

  Our little Kaye. Like we really were some kind of family. “She’s due in at the spaceport tomorrow. We’ll have a nice dinner together.”

  A pleased nod. “I’ll tell Margie. She’ll want to do something special.”

  Footsteps on the rocky path, a young woman in Spahi fatigue kit picking her way down among the boulders, looking toward where Helga and Miriam were playing. Maybe the sort of woman who’d want them for herself. Or maybe just curious about the Old Man’s burdarage.

  She stopped in front of me, saluted, sunlight glinting off her havildar-minor’s single chevron-pin on her collar. “Begging the subadar’s pardon.”

  I said, “Where’d you learn to talk like that, soldier?”

  I could see a flicker of exasperation in her eyes, a moment of frustration with the Old Man’s unmilitary ways. They teach them that in Spartaki school, of course. She said, “Sir, Tahsildar MacMillan requests you come to BHQ-comm right away. There’s a message for you.”

  A moment of cold unease. Message. Kaye? No. They wouldn’t send a staffer for me, no matter how important a personal message. They knew I wouldn’t approve. I sighed and stood, stretching. “All right, Havildar-Minor. Let me put my pants on and you can lead the way.” She’d have a staff car back up the hill, parked among the trees. I turned to Fyodor. “Finish the picnic. If I don’t come back by sundown, just go on home without me.”

  He nodded, used to the sort of thing. A subadar in charge of two million men can’t get through an entire day with something coming up. I followed my young soldier up the hill.

  o0o

  Evening, only a little more than twenty hours later, dull orange sunlight slanting down through the window to pool on my bedroom floor as another one of Sêret-Anh’s short, lovely days drew to a close. Miriam curled up in the bed, already asleep, black hair like a dense, dark nebula against the white of her pillow. I could hear the water running in the bathroom, tub filling, Helga’s voice soft, humming to herself.

  Well. In a little while Margie would be calling us to dinner. I should probably awaken Miriam, the two of us join Helga in the bath, get cleaned up again. Or maybe not, she looked so peaceful sleeping there.

  The door opened, native-made wooden hinges creaking slightly, Kaye coming in, sitting down on one corner of the bed, looking at Miriam. “That’s what I feel like,” she said.

  She was a handsome, strapping young woman, tall, sleekly muscular, reddish-brown hair cropped short, the way Wu Chingda had always worn hers. Not much of Alix in her. Not much at all. I said, “You young people really ought to have more energy. Too much clean living I guess.”

  She drew her legs up onto the bed, hugged her knees to her chest. “I’ll be going home right after dinner. I want to spend a little time with Heinzie before we ship out.”

  I nodded. Bad luck to be gone for months, then have only one night to relax before... “I’ve got to go back to BHQ-comm anyhow.”

  She said, “How long?”

  “Gosudar Nikolaev has ordered the Third Army to stage from Pendahrrit. We’re ready to go, of course, but it’ll take about a week for the corvettes to get here and load us aboard.”

  Concern a deep shadow on her face. “We were still in hyperspace when word came in over the net. They say the First’s taking a hell of beating.”

  I nodded again. “Still rumor. No one knows what’s really happening.”

  She said, “I could hardly believe it when I heard. Anyway, I’m glad I was close to home when the news came. Been Hell if I’d been stuck on Earth, trying to join up with whatever outfit had a slot.”

  I said, “How’s your mother, Kaye?”

  She shrugged. “A lot older than I expected. She seemed glad to see me.”

  “I wish...” Nothing. Nothing to wish for. Understanding in Kaye’s eyes.

  A discrete knock on the door, Fyodor letting us know dinner would be on the table soon. The bathroom door opened, steam puffing out, blond hair framing Helga’s face in the doorway. “Kaye! Join us?”

  She smiled. “Sure.” Leaned down and shook Miriam. “Come on, sleepyhead. Time for a bath.”

  Then she looked at me, face serious again. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t know where they came from or who they are. Maybe they know who we are. They sure as Hell came armed for bear.” I slipped out of my robe, following her toward the bath, and thought, Dear God...

  A cold hand reaching from the future right into our past.

  o0o

  I wasn’t really surprised when a group of fast packets made rendezvous with the Third Fleet, on its way to Pendahrrit. We’d suspected all along the Master Race had starships faster than the standard corvettes and sluggish transports we were used to. On the other hand, there’d never been so much as a clue they could dock in hyperspace.

  These ships were nothing like the big ones. No sign of accommodation for the many species who served the Masters. The hull was filled with machinery, tunneled around and through with a maze of poppit-size crawlways, larger corridors for machinery, rounded places about the size of a Master’s transit cartridge.

  We met in a compact space obviously and hastily converted for our use, Gosudar Nikolaev and four of the five subadars of the Spahi Armies, the principal leadership of the human race, in a manner of speaking. Dangerous, maybe, to have us all together like this, but...

  Shrêhht, of course, came close to filling our little hole, curled against one bulkhead, unable to rise. They’d had to bring her in on some kind of dolly, squeezing her through a cargo tunnel whose diameter was barely larger than her own.

  Nikolaev speaking: “Masters have managed to put up an integration service for us on the Net now, and reports are coming in quickly. Invaders have hit 716 target centers, clustered in the galactic west, on the southern side of the lens...”

  In the general direction of Andromeda.

  The was a holograph projected onto the air between us, spiral arms picked out in blue and gold, galactic core made of redder suns. One whole quadrant of the Milky Way was picked out in dots of hot pink, like sparks in a bed of ashes.

  Nikolaev said, “There just aren’t enough Master Race installations back along their presumed track to establish if this is anything but an illusion. No reports from garrisons outside the galaxy.”

  Presumed garrisons, at that. There were enough detailed rumors to suggest that the Masters had ventured outside the galaxy from time to time. But they still w
eren’t talking. Strategic error, just now.

  Nikolaev said, “The Invaders have dropped on all the big refit bases in this sector. Major poppit-breeding worlds, Master Race industrial complexes. Big mercenary strongholds. Every single one of the major bases belonging to the Spahi First. We haven’t heard from Subadar Bharadwaj in three days now.”

  The missing man in our formation.

  I said, “Looks like they knew what to expect.”

  Nikolaev said, “Field Marshall Shrêhht has something she’d like to show us.”

  Squirming forward now, sliding a padded valise to the center of the room, hazed by the holograph galaxy. “Things aren’t going well. My people lost their bases in this sector as quickly as you did. We’ve knocked down a few ships, blown a couple of landing teams. Mostly its going... their way. We did manage to catch a single ship, a small scout really, cut off from one of their formations, and bring it down more or less intact. We were inspecting the wreckage when an Invader squadron moved in and took out our team. We’ve got a few holos and... this.”

  She opened the valise, revealing a small coldbox, unlatched it and dumped the contents out on the floor.

  “So,” I said. “They were carrying prisoners, then.”

  Shrêhht prodded the stiff, dead little poppit on the floor, pried its lips back with her tentacles, revealing triangular white teeth. “We don’t think so. There were maybe a dozen species aboard the scoutship. Most of them unfamiliar. These appear to have been part of the hardware.”

  What, then? A rebellion from some other part of the Masters’ empire, a part none of us had ever heard of before? A civil war among the Masters themselves?

  Nikolaev said, “The absence of a discernible Master Race evolutionary history in this galaxy was the only clue we had. Not enough to go on. This...” He gestured at the dead poppit.

  Shrêhht said, “They have to have come here less than a hundred thousand years ago. It’s taken them just that long to take over the entire galaxy.”

  “And now, whoever chased them here has come looking for them.”

  Historical precedent. When the Huns invaded China, the Chinese kicked their asses and ran them off into Central Asia. Then, just to make sure, sent a big expeditionary force to kick their asses again. Huns didn’t come to Europe looking for a tottering Roman Empire to conquer. Just trying to get away from an opponent tougher than they were.

  I said, “Fatal error?”

  Shrêhht sat looking at me for a moment. “No way to know.”

  Nikolaev said, “The Invaders’ technology is better than anything we’re familiar with. No way to know if the Master Race has anything comparable.”

  Shrêhht said, “And no way to know if it can be deployed in time.”

  Or even if... it’s what we want.

  o0o

  Pendahrrit lay well below the plane of the galaxy, off in the same direction as Andromeda. From our hillside, you could see it up there. A faint, misty oval of light, the most remote thing naked-eye visible to a human being, anywhere in the sky. Maybe the farthest place you could one day dream about going, the remote shore of a universe too large to comprehend.

  Sitting in silence. I and Kaye, sitting back to back, warm on each other while Pendahrrit’s soft, alien-scented wind played over us. Shrêhht and some girlfriend she’d brought from the Kkhruhhuft staff compound. A couple of quiet Sheqarii technicians. A Saanaae officer, frightened green centaur whose galactic police force had been, so suddenly, pressed into military service.

  Poor Saanaae. Useful at last.

  We talked in whispers, while Pendahrrit’s few stars slid by overhead. Is this the moment? Do we turn on them? Welcome the Invaders with open arms and glad little cries? No way to know, dear friends. Dear comrades.

  If the Master race falls now, it may be that we fall with them. Perhaps the Masters fled from an uprising of angry slaves in the long ago and far away. Or perhaps they escaped from some slavery of their own. It may be that, if they fall, we will find ourselves no more than the slaves of slaves, and then how long will we have to wait?

  Forever?

  Maybe so.

  We want to be free, all of us, some day, somehow. But when you stretch out your hand to the paymaster...

  o0o

  Final dawn, by the light of Pendahrrit’s fiery yellow sun. A wide, grassy field, burned brown by rocket exhaust, earth steaming under a vast and hazy, nitrogen-blue sky. Lighters standing, row upon row, fantastical rocket ships waiting to take us away, up to the warships and transports. Waiting to carry us into battle. And the two million men and women of the Third Army of the Spahi Mercenaries, humanity’s finest, my men and women, stood in row on silent row, eyes forward and steady, backs straight, brows clear.

  Ready for my command. The thud of my boots soft on the grass as I walked among them, a soft crackle on dying vegetation. Not even an echo, not under such a sky as this.

  I stopped for a moment by Kaye’s maniple of sixteen. Looked into her eyes. Saw her smile, my hard-eyed daughter, a crooked little half-smile, suddenly familiar, that bit of Alix within her after all. Shook her hand, took her salute, took the salute of her troopers, snapped in unison, a sudden rattle of plastic and steel. Walk on down the rows to the front of my army.

  Came to stand before old Aëtius Nikolaev, whose flag would be riding aboard the ships of the Third. Saluted. Say the word then, Subadar Athol Morrison. “Third Army, ready for battle, sir.”

  The gosudar, leaning on his cane, gray eyes alight somehow, murmured, “What was it the old Native American warriors used to say, Subadar? It’s a good day to die...”

  I looked back at him for just a moment, thinking about that silent little seed in my head, wondering if it would ever awaken and call me to the real battle. Then I said, “Oh, Nikolaev. It’s never a good day when a soldier must die.”

  He only nodded, as if he couldn’t quite understand, and took my salute. I spun on my heel and went back to stand before the rank and file, stand in front of my soldiers, for those final moments under the sun.

  I put the command phone to my mouth. “Tahsildars at ready.”

  Acknowledgements from up and down the line, from the commanders of all my legions, our battle flags snapping in the wind.

  “Sound the clarion call.”

  Distant trumpets floating on air.

  “Drum-Major.”

  “Sir.”

  Then the pipers piped and the drummers drummed and we all marched away into the sky.

  Deleted Scene

  The following scene was deleted from When Heaven Fell in an early draft, simply because it didn’t fit, and didn’t advance the plot in a book that was already getting to be longer than what I had contracted to produce. I regretted taking it out, as it was one of my favorites, and when I prepared the current edition I swore I would put it back in. Sadly, during the editing process, I saw it still doesn’t fit. But here it is anyway, for my heart’s sake, and for the curious reader who wants to understand Athol Morrison a little more.

  o0o

  In the late afternoon, Lank took me out for a long walk in the old-growth forest east of Chapel Hill, the woods along New Hope Creek, which had been growing since the old farmland was abandoned not long after World War 1. The trees here were tall and spaced far apart, the hilly land underneath so darkly shadowed there was hardly any underbrush, just a spongy carpet of tan pine needles and moist, crumbling leaf mold.

  We left his jeep on the rutted, deteriorating remains of Whitfield Road, where young trees were beginning to grow up through the pavement, strung our bows and walked into the woods. Recreational hunting. Not expecting to catch anything. Just an excuse to go out together, walk down an old gravel trail, ground crunching softly underfoot.

  “Where’d you get these?”

  It was clearly a pre-Invasion sporting weapon, with an adjustable mercury balance built into the handle and a dial that could move the pull through a range from fifteen to eighty kilograms. With the one, you’d shoot
at paper targets, maybe squirrels and birds if you were really good. With the other you'd punch deep holes in trees or, more likely, take down game at extreme range.

  Lank said, “I had them before you left, Athy. Found them in an old sporting goods store, still wrapped in their waterproof cases . . .”

  I imagined him as a small boy, dragging these things home and hiding them in his room. What for? No point in asking.

  And, looking away, he said, “I was going to give you one that Christmas, Athy. I figured you might want to go hunting with me some time.”

  Just like that? I could feel little spikes of guilt growing inside, maybe just what he had in mind. “Did you go hunting alone after I left?”

  He looked at me and smiled slightly. “Sure. And I even got Dad to go a few times. Mostly Marsh, though. I think he felt a little sorry for me.”

  We walked off the trail then, pushing through a thin wall of underbrush and into the real forest. It was gloomy here, luminance about like dusk, but a clear yellow-gray light was filtering down through the trees. You could see a long way, past tall brown trunks, the occasional off-white birch, all the way to a background of forest, no sky, something like a gray haze seeming to develop with distance.

  Humid here. I could feel it in my lungs as I breathed.

  And spores here as well. Here on Earth, breathing the air for which my lungs were made, there were things that could infect my tissues, move right into home-sweet-home, trigger allergies, even kill me. If I stayed here very long I'd start to get sick, would need access to a Spahi-class medical expert-system.

  Lank said, “How're things going with Alix, Athy? You two all right?”

  He wasn't wearing his priestly uniform now, just old jeans, patched brown leather boots, a sleeveless shirt bulging here and there with soft fat, bow and quiver slung under one shoulder.

  I said, “I’m fucking her, if that's what you mean.”

  He looked away and grimaced. “Not what I meant. You really are obtuse, you know?”

  “I guess. What did you mean, Lank?”

  He stopped walking, turning to hold me with a long, serious stare. “She's had a hard life, Athy. Harder than me. Harder than Marsh and Davy. Harder than Mom and Dad.” A pondering look. “Harder even than you. I'm worried about what's going to happen to her when you leave.”