by Baen Books
Finally, after a few nerve-wracking moments, when I feared I was at last going to have to call for help, they winked back.
“This solution is surprisingly savvy for one of your rank,” Zamerling said, nodding in approval. “And a few kilometers of pipe are the price for your complicity?”
“That and a few hundred cases of Ad Astra,” I said. “Of course.”
Zamerling and I exchanged conspiratorial smiles.
“Of course, my lord! Shall we drink to it?”
“I thought you would never ask.”
The guards leaped forward to cut me loose.
I returned to Bleke House with only moments to spare before the tracker was due to reappear. When I returned to the sitting room, Parsons shimmered in as only he could.
“I am pleased to see you well, my lord,” he said. “All was successful?”
“Indeed it was, and more fascinating a situation than I could ever have imagined.” With the help of OP-634g providing images and an audio transcript, I narrated our sally into the bowels of Acqua Astra, the marvel of the giant aquavore, and the outcome of the negotiations with Mr. Zamerling. Parsons allowed one corner of his otherwise expressionless mouth to rise in what I saw as gushing approval for my perspicacity and wisdom.
“Well done, my lord. Mr. Frank and the Emperor will be pleased.” He surveyed the skid of gold-stamped cases. “And those?”
“A souvenir,” I said, with a grin. “Alas, but I have a wonderful story to tell that can never be filed on the Infogrid! At least, though, I’ve had a chance to take the waters.”
The Siege of Denver
by Brendan DuBois
In a dry trench about twelve klicks west of Denver, Private Melissa MacKay—originally from Hotchkiss, Colorado—rummaged through her battle pack, looking for some paperwork. This section of trench was pretty much identical to the other line of trenches that surrounded the besieged Mile High City, with duckboards on the ground and a dugout nearby to shelter her squad from the occasional incoming fire from the enemy. It was a cool morning, and a small pellet-burning metal stove outside of the dugout burning gave off a little heat.
A couple of meters down the trench, her squad leader, Corporal Stan Jankowski, did his best to shave using a handled mirror stuck into the dirt and a plastic cup of cold water. Next to Jankowski were his own battle pack, a field phone hanging off a stake connecting them to the sector’s CP—a burnt-out Best Buy box store out by Route 60—and his Colt M-10. Melissa looked on enviously at Jankowski’s M-10. She and the other squad member—Hector Morales, out getting their morning breakfast rations—were only qualified on the Colt M-4, the standard automatic rifle used by the U.S. Army and its associated National Guard units and allies for decades. But her corporal was the one member of the squad who could carry the M-10, the weapon of choice for fighting the Creepers.
It was a bulky thing, black and looking like an oversized grenade launcher. But after a decade of fighting the Creepers—and mostly losing—the M-10 was about the only weapon available to take on the damn bugs. An infantry weapon fighting an interstellar war. What a world. She lifted her head, looked west. There was movement several hundred meters away, some horse-drawn wagons, soldiers, and two old transport vehicles, belching out steam and smoke from their wood-fired engines.
“What are you looking at, Mac?” Jankowski asked, scraping at a cheek.
“The Signal Corps is moving around. Maybe they’ll do a launch today.”
“Only if the wind is right,” he said. “Hey, Mac, you’re a history nerd. Any idea when this man’s Army last had a balloon corps?”
“Little over a hundred years ago,” she automatically replied. “A few years after the end of World War I.”
“Right you are.”
A hunched-over figure was running towards their trench section, carrying a satchel in his hand.
“Morales is coming in,” she said.
Jankowski wiped at his face with a threadbare green towel. “Anybody else running in with him?”
“Nope.”
“Goddamn Army.”
Melissa said nothing. She knew what Jankowski meant. A typical squad could have up to twelve soldiers, and unfortunately, she and Morales and Jankowski were it. Not good, but not much you could do about it when platoons were taking on company jobs, and companies were taking on battalion jobs. Ten years of war had not only thinned out the planet’s population, but had done the same to its battered armed forces.
Morales reached the edge of the trench, rolled over and grinned. His light brown skin was dusted with dirt, and his helmet was at his side, connected to his MOLLE vest, and his M-4 was slung over his shoulder. He held up the satchel. “Who’s up for breakfast?”
“I’ve been ready for an hour,” Melissa said. “Let’s get to it.”
On a clear section of duckboard, Morales opened up the satchel, took out closed metal containers and a Thermos bottle. The young soldier moved quick and their breakfast was revealed: lukewarm and sweet coffee, cold oatmeal, and two links of sausage.
“There should be three links,” Jankowski said, voice tight. “Why is there only two?”
“That’s all I got from the mess tent, Corporal,” Morales said.
“Bullshit. They know we’re three here, and we should have gotten three links.”
“That’s all they gave me.”
“What, did you eat one on the way over here? Did you?”
Melissa said, “Hey, you guys take the sausage. I don’t particularly like 'em anyway.”
Jankowski glared at her and Morales looked relieved, and Melissa took her breakfast down a ways in the trench, so she could eat by herself. It didn’t take long, and when she was finished, she was hungry. She was always hungry. Even back home in Hotchkiss at their farm, there was never enough food to fill you up. Melissa walked back to Jankowski and Morales, and the corporal said, “Morales, you’re on clean-up. Hump the dishes back to the mess tent.”
“Hey, it’s Mac’s turn,” he said. “I’m the one who humped out there to get breakfast. It ain’t fair.”
“Don’t care, Morales, really don’t. You’re humping it back.”
Morales kept quiet but Melissa could tell he was pissed. But so what? Crap rolled downhill, and he was the freshest member of their thinned-out unit. When Morales scrambled back over the side of the trench, she saw objects starting to rise up by the transport wagons she had seen earlier.
“Lookie here, Corporal,” she said. “Looks like they’re inflating at least three balloons.”
The three dark gray shapes lumbered their way up into the morning sky. Jankowski said, “Well, I’ll be damned. Wonder how much cargo they’re gonna try this time.”
“You think they’ll make it?”
Jankowski wet a finger and held it up in the air. “Two things will determine that, Mac. One will be the wind direction in this section. That’s why they set up shop over there. So far it looks good. The other . . .”
He moved away from the western side of the trench, walked the few steps to the eastern side. Melissa joined him, as they stood on viewing platforms, looked out to the east, where several klicks away, the struggling city of Denver hung on. Before them was a blasted landscape of shattered buildings, broken roadways, rusted vehicles, clumps of grass and brush. On the horizon were the tall buildings of the city itself, hazy through smoke.
But she and Jankowski moved their heads almost as one, to note a dome-shaped structure, blue-gray in color, about two klicks away.
“The bugs,” Jankowski said. “They have a vote. They always do.”
Melissa leaned on the crumbling dirt of the trench. The area out there was No Man’s Land, although a more accurate title would be No Human’s Land. There was nearly a hundred percent chance that if you walked out there, you’d be barbecued within minutes. The dome was a Creeper base, one of seven that circled the city of Denver and which were established in the first year of the war, when the Creepers arrived in low earth orbit. At fi
rst it was thought they were a number of large comet-sized objects, until they maneuvered and achieved orbit and then . . .
Unleashed hell upon the earth.
First they exploded a number of nuclear devices in a careful pattern around the globe, immediately frying about 99 percent of electronics via EMPs, and then they maneuvered asteroids to drop into oceans, just outside of major cities around the earth, causing tsunamis that killed millions. Then bases like this one were set up on the ground, sheltering Creepers that came out whenever they wanted to burn and lase anything in their path. And if that wasn’t enough, the Creepers had a number of killer stealth satellites in orbit that fried anything powered by electronics—trucks, cars, aircraft, trains, power plants—essentially keeping the planet’s survivors stuck in the nineteenth century.
Ten years later the war ground on, with Denver and a host of other unfortunate cities besieged by Creeper forces, which did not allow people out or food in. And why Denver and not Pittsburgh, or St. Louis, or Knoxville? No one knew.
“Corporal?”
“Yeah.”
She thought she had him in a reasonable mood, so she pressed ahead. “When I was assigned here, the lieutenant said I’d be doing some makee-learnee with you.”
“So he did.”
“So how about giving me a couple of practice shots with the M-10?”
Jankowski just kept on staring out at the wasteland. He had been a quiet sort when Melissa arrived here a month ago, not doing much in the way of small talk, just working to keep this section of the trench squared away. Only once had she ever learned anything about Jankowski on her own, and that had happened last month, when temporary hot showers had been set up near the CP. Emerging from the shower, rubbing his torso and arms dry with a towel, wearing a pair of shorts, Jankowski had strolled by her, and on his right upper bicep was an intricate tattoo. The ink job displayed a mountain peak and the Gothic letter “D.”
D for Denver, meaning Jankowski was a native son, one of the fortunate who had been out of the city when the Creepers had set up their siege, and who had been trying ever since to go back home.
“Mac?”
“Yeah?”
“Not today.”
Melissa took a breath. “All right, Corporal.”
“Your paperwork,” he added. “When’s it due?”
“Sixteen hundred today, Corporal,” she said, feeling humiliated at being so late. “There’s a courier stopping by to pick it up.”
“Then get to it.”
“Yes, Corporal.”
About ten minutes later, there was a hammering rumble coming from the northeast. She looked up from paperwork balanced on her knee, and she said, “Corporal?”
He was at the edge of the ditch, binoculars in his hands, and he said, “I saw the incoming. Looks like the Creepers were hitting the Rocky Mountain Arsenal again, or maybe the Denver airport.”
She returned to her papers. “The arsenal’s been inactive for decades. And the airport got smeared on invasion day plus two.”
“What’s your point?”
“Doesn’t make sense.”
Jankowski made a noise that passed as a chuckle. “News flash, Mac, they’re aliens.”
“Yeah.” That was always question number one after the war began, trying to figure out why the Creepers came here, why they started the war the way they did, what was the point of traveling via interstellar space to fight like they were well-armed British soldiers against African natives in the late 1800’s. Didn’t make sense, nothing made sense, and one day Jankowski said, “You know, if we ever make it and a history of this fiasco is ever written, it should be called ‘World War Why,’” and Melissa thought that was a pretty good idea.
Morales rolled back into the trench, and said, “Heard an attack strike a couple of minutes ago. The airport?”
“Maybe,” Melissa said. “Might be the arsenal.”
Morales sat down on the duckboards, put his back up against the wall. “Damn bugs . . . but hey, looks like the balloons are ready to be launched.”
Melissa got up and went to the western side of the trench, and she admired the view: three elongated balloons, gently swaying in the slight morning breeze. She could make out little knots of soldiers at work at the base of each balloon, and her chest felt tight. Go, she thought, go. There was an article she had read last year in Stars & Stripes, about the Denver siege, and somebody had called it “The Leningrad of the Rockies,” after that horrible Nazi siege during World War II that had starved hundreds of thousands.
Morales stood next to her. “Think they’ll make it?”
“Up to the weather and the Creepers.”
“But there’s no people, no electronics on the balloons, nothing advanced. The Creepers should leave it alone.”
“Should isn’t a doctrine, Hector.”
Morales said, “You can always hope, can’t you?”
“And hope ain’t a tactic, either.”
Morales stayed quiet, and Melissa felt sorry for the kid. He was just a replacement, a boy who volunteered from one of the refugee camps in Arizona holding survivors from the L.A. tsunami strike, and he looked bright and strong enough to do his job. But would he be bright enough and strong enough when the proverbial bug crap hit the fan?
Jankowski called out, “Morales! You got watch.”
Melissa leaned against the dirt of the trench edge, watching the balloons rise up higher and higher as they were inflated. There was netting underneath each balloon, and the netting was filled with crates. Food and medical supplies, two items desperately needed in Denver, and the balloons were going to be unmanned. For some reason—why, why, why—the Creepers could sense humans in transportation, and previous manned lighter-than-aircraft had come to flaming ends. Efforts to dig tunnels or use old utility conduits to the city temporarily worked until they were blasted from the killer stealth satellites. This time, however, maybe this—
“Movement!” Morales yelled. “We’ve got something going on over at the dome!”
She whirled around and grabbed a set of binoculars and Jankowski raced up as well. Melissa focused in on the dome base. A slit was quickly dilating close and two Creepers—battle units—were skittering out.
Something heavy gripped her throat. This wasn’t the first time she had seen Creepers out in the open, but still, there was some sort of primal fear that bubbled right up at seeing the alien creatures on the move. Each was the size of Army transport truck, moving on eight articulated legs. There was a center arthropod, also articulated, and two large arms, circling around, like they belonged to a goddamn scorpion. The end of each arm was tool-based, sometimes claws or pincers, or sometimes a laser or a flame-type projector, always dangerous. Inside the exoskeleton was a creature, looking like a science-fiction writer’s nightmare of an intelligent insectlike alien. The structure was the same blue-gray as the dome base, and almost entirely indestructible.
As one, the Creepers shifted their direction of movement, and they were coming straight on an eastern approach, skittering and crawling over crushed metal, broken masonry, and torn up roads.
“They’re coming right at us,” Morales whispered, voice shaky.
Melissa said, “The hell they are. They’re heading for the supply balloons.”
Jankowski said, “Shit, you’re right, Mac.” He went to the field telephone, gave the handle a whir-whir, and spoke loudly and deliberately into the receiver. “CP Bravo, CP Bravo, this is Bravo 12. We have two Creepers, battle version, heading due east from dome eight, repeat, from dome eight. It appears they’re heading for the balloon launch site. They’re approaching grid coordinates, grid coordinates ten-niner-zero-zero-ten-four-five-six. Repeat, ten-niner-zero-zero-ten-four-five-six.”
Melissa pressed the field glasses firm against her eyes to control the shaking from her hands.
“Okay, Bravo 12, out.”
He slammed the receiver back into the field pouch and uttered an extremely foul obscenity.
Mo
rales said, “What did they say, Corporal?”
“They’re alerting the artillery, activating the QRF. Not sure when it’s going to show up.”
“Well, that’d be— “
Melissa blinked her eyes as both Creepers fired a quick flash from an arm. Laser shots. Damn.
Melissa turned. A truck was burning near the balloon site.
A whistling whine noise pierced the air.
“Incoming!” Jankowski said. “Duck down!”
Melissa squatted as artillery rounds started hammering the torn-up ground around the Creepers, protecting herself from any shrapnel or flying debris stirred up by the blasts coming from the 105 mm artillery stationed a ways back. When the echoes of the blasts rolled away she glanced up.
The Creepers were still on the move. The exoskeletons were practically impervious to normal munitions, except for a lucky sliver of shrapnel or the outgoing rounds from M-10’s like the one Jankowski carried, and the artillery blasts had probably only slowed them down for a minute or two.
“Mac! How far away are the Creepers?”
She glanced down at the range card, which marked easily identifiable landmarks in their area of responsibility, and then picked up the binoculars. There. The two creatures were quickly approaching a mound of debris that was topped by the burnt remnants of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, back during the early weeks of the war before commanders learned any powered aircraft was just a moving target.
“Eight hundred meters, Corporal.”
Another flicker-flare of lasers being fired from the marauding Creepers, and an anguished yelp from Morales. “They got one of the balloons! The bugs got one of the balloons!”
Melissa glanced back in time to see the balloon on the far right collapse, as flames raced up the fabric. Not going to make it, she thought, the resupply mission was about to be burnt to the ground before it could even get off the ground.