Empire (13 page)

The Confederation Services will find no finer pupil for the military arts and the leadership on which the Confederation depends for its continued survival.

(Signed,)

William T. Hickock

COL, CMC (Ret.)

“Wiley,” he began, “I don’t know what to say…”

“It’s the least I can do,” the old man said quietly. “If it’s what you want, that’ll give you a little muscle to get past some of the stuck-up boneheads screening people for the academies.” He looked around, as if he had suddenly forgotten something “But that’s for another time,” he said as he stuffed the envelope and its precious contents into a pocket in Reza’s shirt. “You’ve got to get out of here, son.” He looked hard at Reza, then pointed to the flechette rifle in the boy’s hands. “Think you can handle that thing?”

“Yes, sir,” Reza replied in a voice that sounded small and alone. “But–”

“No
buts
, boy,” Wiley said gently, but firmly, leaving no room for argument. “This is it. For real. I’ll try to create a diversion for you.” He nodded toward where the screams from the breached shelter still rose and fell like pennants in a gale. “Besides,” he went on quietly, his voice echoing memories from another life that Wiley the janitor had never known, “I want to die the man I used to be. Not as some senile broom pusher.” His eyes pierced Reza. “You understand that, don’t you?”

Reza nodded, biting back the tears he felt coming, remembering how he and his real father had parted a lifetime ago.
It’s happening all over again
, he thought wretchedly. “Yes, sir,” he choked.

“Do whatever you can to stay alive, son,” Wiley told him softly. “If anybody can make it out of this, you can.” He embraced Reza tightly.

“I love you,” Reza said, holding on to his adopted father for the last time.

“I love you, too, son,” Wiley said, stroking the boy’s hair, fighting back his own tears.

Reluctantly, Wiley let go. Then he rose in a crouch, holding his artificial leg behind him like a kangaroo’s tail for balance. “Good luck, Marine,” he said.

This was how he wanted it
, Reza told himself. He only wished it could be some other way. “You too, colonel,” Reza said, snapping his arm up in a sharp salute.

The old man saluted him in return before making his way to the front door. After pulling the second Kreelan warrior’s body into the lobby and clearing the exit, he squeezed through to disappear into the street beyond.

Feeling as if he were trapped in a holographic nightmare, Reza turned and made his way to the emergency escape at the rear of the library. Peering through the adjacent window, he saw that the area behind the library was clear, at least as far as he could see. The closest wheat fields were about two hundred meters away. Maybe a minute of hard running, he guessed.
Only a minute. Plenty of time to die.

Holding the flechette rifle close to his side, he pushed open the door and headed outside, the door’s emergency alarm blaring uselessly behind him.

* * *

Wiley crouched near the rock wall, not too far from the first group of soldiers that Reza had seen being wiped out by the attacking Kreelans. He had exchanged the alien weapon for a pulse rifle and a spare magazine from one of the dead soldiers. The pulse rifle was a bit heavier than the flechette guns, but had more firepower in its crimson energy bolts than a flechette could ever hope to boast. Unfortunately, their higher cost made them a low volume commodity on all but the best-equipped worlds.

He snaked forward along the wall, trying to get a glimpse of what was happening at the shelter. The firing had stopped, as had most of the screaming.

“What are you bitches up to?” he wondered aloud as he peered through a hole in the wall toward the admin building.

Kreelan warriors were clustered about the entrance to the vault, standing in two lines that extended from the vault’s entryway where the great door had been blasted from its hinges, to where a vehicle resembling a flatbed trailer hovered in the center of the street. The warriors were passing objects from one to another, moving them from the vault to the carrier.

Bodies
, Wiley thought.
They’re taking the bodies away
.

The lone wail that suddenly pierced the air made his blood run cold. He watched as a child, five or six years old, emerged from the vault and was passed along the chain of warriors like a bucket in a fire brigade to where the other bodies were being stacked on the carrier. There, a Kreelan in a white robe – a type of alien that Wiley had never seen or heard tell about – did something to the child, who suddenly was still.

His eyes surveyed the carrier closely, and he noticed two things: there were no adults, only children, and the children apparently were not dead, just sleeping. Drugged or stunned.

The old man’s mind reeled. There had never been a confirmed report of prisoners being taken in the war against the Empire. Sometimes, for reasons never understood, the Kreelans would leave survivors. But never had they taken prisoners.

Yet, here they were, making off with a few hundred children from this house alone. If they were doing the same at the other houses, they would be leaving with tens of thousands of children.

“I’ve got to get out a message, a warning,” he whispered to himself.

But a presence behind him, a feeling that he was no longer alone, removed that concern from his mind forever.

He whirled in time to see a huge enemy warrior standing behind him, her form lost in the sun’s glare, sword raised above her head. His old arm tried to bring the rifle around, his teeth bared in a snarl that matched the Kreelan’s, but he wasn’t fast enough. The warrior plunged her sword through his unarmored chest, burying the weapon’s tip in the ground beneath Wiley’s back.

His hand convulsed on the trigger of his rifle as he saluted Death’s coming, sending nearly a full magazine blasting into the rock wall around them. And as the blood stopped surging through his arteries and his body lay still, he made a remarkable observation through his still-open eyes as the warrior knelt down to collect a lock of his hair: the Kreelan carried a scar over her left eye that was identical to Reza’s.

* * *

Pushing his way through the chafing wheat, Reza heard the hammering of a rifle and stopped in his tracks. He knew that it must be Wiley, and that the old Marine would never have fired off a full magazine like that unless he was in dire trouble.

He hesitated, wondering if he should go back, desperately wanting to. He knew that Marines did not leave their own behind, and Wiley was one of his own. He felt the envelope with Wiley’s letter burning in his breast pocket, and his indecision made him feel unworthy of it.

But he knew it would be too late. If Wiley were in trouble, there would be no helping him. And that was the way the old Marine had wanted to die, Reza reflected somberly. He silently hoped that he had taken out a dozen of the aliens with him.

Damn them all to Hell
, he cursed.

Completely alone now, he continued on through the wheat, not knowing where he was going, no longer caring.

* * *

He had been walking for nearly half an hour when he heard the aerospace vehicle’s screaming engines. He threw himself into the dirt just as its dark shape passed directly overhead.

“I think I’ve had it,” he murmured, clutching at the flechette rifle as he lay still. He could hear the ship somewhere nearby, no doubt dropping off a hunting party.
Maybe more than one
, he thought glumly as he heard the ship move off to his left and hover again.

Then the ship left, its engines a muted roar against the wind, and Reza decided it was time to move. He got into a crouch and quietly made his way forward. Pushing aside some wheat stalks, he found himself face-to-face with a Kreelan warrior.

Death was literally staring him in the face.

With a cry of surprise, the Kreelan suddenly flew backward through the wheat, her body carried by the volley of flechettes fired from Reza’s rifle. The reflexive spasm by his right index finger on the weapon’s trigger had been the narrow margin between his life and her death.

Shaking like a leaf from the adrenaline surge, he quickly forged onward through the wheat, his heart hammering in his ears as his mind relived the brief battle a thousand times in the blink of an eye. He looked about wildly for more warriors, but with visibility of less than a meter, it would be another chance encounter, with the odds stacked well against him. Fate would not favor him a second time.

Unexpectedly, he burst onto an open quad. While he desperately wanted to cross over the clear ground instead of struggling through the wheat, he knew that to be seen was to be killed.

But the sounds of pursuit that suddenly arose above the wind and the whispers of the stalks as they caressed one another made his decision. There was no going back the way he had come. He pounded across the field at a full run, glancing back over his shoulder for signs of the enemy. The sound of his footsteps and his labored breathing thundered in his ears, as if his senses became more sensitive the further he went across the quad.

“No!” Reza shouted as the Kreelan ship suddenly shot overhead to hover directly above him. He raised the rifle and fired, but the flechettes merely ricocheted harmlessly, not even scratching the vessel’s hull. He stumbled, dropping the rifle, then began again to run toward the safety of the wheat, which beckoned to him from the far side of the quad.

I might make it
, he thought hopefully, as his legs pumped and his chest heaved. He bolted the last few meters to the waiting wall of golden wheat.

A Kreelan warrior, crouching unseen, suddenly rose up in front of him. The weapon she held looked incredibly huge. She squeezed the trigger.

For a moment Reza went blind and his ears rang from the buzz of a thousand angry wasps. But then he suddenly felt as if something soft and warm had embraced him, driving the air out of his lungs and the strength from his limbs. He crashed through the first few rows of wheat to land, unconscious, at the warrior’s feet.

* * *

“These animals have all met the standards you set forth, priestess,” the young warrior declared, her head lowered to honor her superior.

Tesh-Dar ran her eyes across the hundreds of human children arrayed like so much cordwood near the base of the shuttle, their bodies stunned and then drugged into a stasis sleep for the long journey ahead. Knowing – and caring – little about human physiological development, Tesh-Dar had set height as the main criterion for selection, as it was a convenient reference, easily measured. Any child taller than about one and a half meters was not acceptable. And therefore would die.

“Carry on, child,” she ordered, returning her subordinate’s salute and watching as they went about loading the human pups for transport to the great ship waiting in orbit. Across the planet, thousands of other human young were being collected for transport back home. Back to the Empire.

The sound of an approaching scout flyer drew her attention as it settled into a hover nearby. The clawed landing gear hummed from recesses in its belly and locked as it settled to the dusty patch of ground that served as their main landing zone.

Several warriors descended from the gangway before it had finished opening, bearing two bodies between them. The first, a small human, was deposited unceremoniously at the edge of the enormous pile of humans that would be left behind to die when Tesh-Dar’s party took their leave of this world. Hundreds of them lay there, many long since crushed to death by the inert weight of those on top. Few, except for the adults who had been killed out of hand, bore any blast or penetration wounds. After being stunned and measured, they were simply discarded like trash.

The second body, Tesh-Dar saw, was that of a warrior, her chest armor riddled with the tiny holes made by the humans’ flechette weapons.

Curious, nodding toward the dead warrior, Tesh-Dar asked, “What happened to her?”

The lead warrior, an elder as old as Tesh-Dar but far less accomplished, replied, “A young human killed her as he fled through the vegetation.” She flicked a glance at the tiny human body, her cobalt blue face passionless. “Kumar-Etana was not fast enough, it would seem.” She turned back to Tesh-Dar. “We stunned the animal, but it was not within your parameters, priestess.”

Tesh-Dar nodded for the warriors to continue their duties, her mind idly pondering the likelihood of such a situation. She had noted the size of the human when they threw it onto the open grave, and it was far too small to have been trained as a warrior. Yet, it had killed Kumar-Etana, who had never been noted for sloth in combat, in what Tesh-Dar had implicitly understood to be a fair match.

Curious, Tesh-Dar allowed herself to be drawn to the mountain of dying humanity. Pitiful cries rose from the heaps of flesh as the effects of the stun wore off, for those humans who would not be leaving with her were not given the stasis drug.

Prodding one or two of the bodies with her sandal, she stepped to where her warriors had left the small human who had killed Kumar-Etana. It lay face-down, its frail form wrapped in clothing that was torn and battered. She hooked one powerful foot under the animal’s left side and lifted, flipping the body over onto its back.

“The scar,” she gasped as she saw the creature’s face. Kneeling next to the human, she touched the scar over its left eye, wondering if it was possible for another human to have such a mark.