The Children of the Sun

by Christopher Buecheler

  Tori was moving already, had started moving even before Two opened her mouth, but there was too much distance to cover. The woman made it to the alarm before Tori could reach her and yanked on the metal handle. Immediately, orange lights on the ceiling began flashing and a long, wailing siren echoed out from within the building. There could be no doubt; the Children’s security had been compromised, and now they knew it.

  Chapter 23

  Holding the Fort

  “Dupont, I want those fucking cameras working right now,” Miller shouted. The alarms were still blaring, and Vanessa felt a cold, tight ball in her stomach; she shouldn’t be here in the CC, where everything was observed by cameras and taking action meant issuing commands via phone or intercom. She should be out with what was left of her squad, fighting whatever invaders had entered the building.

  “Sir,” she tried.

  Miller ignored her, shouting at another aide. “Baker, take the timer down as low as it can go. Two hours. I want those charges going off in two hours. Then I want you to take your men and go stand guard at the Emperor’s door. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” the young man said, visibly distressed. Vanessa was not enthusiastic about sending a green lieutenant to lead the defense of the Emperor, but she supposed it was better than nothing.

  “Colonel Miller, I need to go,” she said, trying a more forceful pitch. This got his attention, and the colonel glanced over at her.

  “You’ll do exactly what I tell you to do and not a goddamn thing otherwise, Captain. You haven’t been chosen yet, and I still outrank you.”

  Guess he does know, Vanessa thought, and she bit her lip to keep from protesting.

  “Colonel, we’ve cut off the intruder!” called a man at one of the workstations. “He was buried, but we found him and killed his access. The cams are coming back online.”

  “Good work,” Miller said, and he swung around to look at the video screens. “At least we can see what we’re dealing with.”

  One by one the monitors switched over to their real-time feeds, starting with the fourth-floor gymnasium and moving up. When they reached the first sublevel, Vanessa drew a sharp breath in through her teeth. Dozens of soldiers were fighting against what looked like an ocean of vampires pouring forth from the stairwell and elevators.

  “Lock the elevators down right now!” Miller shouted.

  There was a slamming sound, and Vanessa turned to see the other two colonels coming into the room. There was a hierarchy among them, and Vanessa knew that Miller – the oldest and longest serving of the three – wouldn’t cede command to Davis until the attackers had been repelled. Still, she imagined their assistance would be very helpful to him.

  “What’s the status, Gene?” Colonel Palowski asked as he stepped up to the bank of monitors. “How many are there?”

  “Goddamned if I know,” Miller replied. “A lot, but most of them don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Look … that one soldier’s killed four of them.”

  Vanessa glanced at the monitor and felt her heart skip a beat. The woman on the screen was battling with two vampires, wielding both a gun and a blade, the bodies of those she had already defeated lying around her.

  “Carrie …” Vanessa muttered, and then she turned again to Miller. “Sir, please. Please!”

  Miller glanced back over at her, frowning. “You are way too valuable to throw away.”

  “Who else do you have?” Vanessa asked, trying not to shout. “Name me another soldier with more field experience at a higher level? Captain Perrault, maybe? She’s missing, and those people need someone to lead them.”

  “You expect me to let the Emperor’s Left Hand go charging off into battle and get herself killed?”

  “I’m not the fucking Left Hand of anything. Not yet. You know it, and I know it, and until it’s official I’m just Captain Vanessa Harper. That woman on the screen is one of my soldiers, and one of my friends, and she needs help. Let me help her!”

  Miller glanced at his fellow colonels. Davis seemed completely uninterested, and Palowski was smiling slightly. “I say turn her loose,” he said.

  “I’m not doing anything here,” Vanessa said. “I’m just standing around, and I am not good at just standing around, Colonel.”

  Miller sighed, looked back at the monitors and then again at Vanessa. He shook his head.

  “If you get yourself killed and the Emperor comes asking questions, everyone here will testify that it was your choice.”

  “Yes! Fine! Absolutely, it’s my choice, sir. I’m not comfortable staying here and I want to go help my people.”

  Miller paused a moment longer, then ran a hand across his face.

  “Go on,” he said, and before he had even completed the words, Vanessa was headed for the door. She had her sidearm and the extra clip, and she could scavenge a blade from a fallen soldier or vampire. It would have to be enough.

  As she left the Command Center, she heard Miller shouting another order. “Get those fucking garage doors closed! If any of them are still outside, let’s leave them out there.”

  * * *

  Each sublevel contained two stairwells, one at the east end and one at the west. Only the western staircase gave access to the ground floor, where the vampires were coming from, and it was this one that Vanessa tried first, hoping to get to the front lines immediately. She found that a group of soldiers had been pushed back into the stairwell, forming a sort of clot between the first sublevel and the second. Some of the vampires were making an attempt to break through the bottleneck, but they had so far been unsuccessful.

  “I want a status update, now!” Vanessa shouted at the lieutenant who seemed to be organizing the resistance, and when he looked over and saw Vanessa, he snapped to attention.

  “We’re at a bit of a standstill, ma’am,” he said. “The bats just came flooding down into level one. We managed to keep them off the lower floors and we even killed a few, but it’s been mostly a standoff.”

  “Understood. There aren’t any bats on level two yet, so they must not have reached the east stairs. That’s good. It means the folks up above are holding them off. Listen, Lieutenant … what do you have for arms?”

  “Assault rifles and handguns, mostly. Decent supply of ammo. Six frag grenades and two incendiaries. We might have an EMP or two, but …”

  “But they’re not robot vampires, so fuck that,” Vanessa finished for him, and the soldier grinned, nodding. “Fine. I need two or three more clips for my pistol and a frag if you can spare one. Keep the rest. Listen to me … you hold this staircase, you got that? I’m going to go lead a push upstairs, but right now you are the only thing between the bats and the Command Center.”

  “I’ll uh … I’ll try, ma’am.”

  “Don’t try. Do it. You’ve pulled these troops together and kept the bats back so far, and that is some A-plus work. When we get through this, I will personally see that you’re recognized for it. You have my word, all right?”

  The lieutenant swelled with pride. “Yes ma’am. We’ll keep them back.”

  “Good. Come find me afterward … I take care of people who deserve it.”

  “I will.”

  “OK. Go grab me that ammo.”

  He nodded and moved off toward a space underneath the stairs where a few men and women had gathered, a floor-plan spread out between them, arguing about tactics. They moved at his command, allowing him access to a small footlocker that someone had dragged up from the armory on the third level. He pulled the requested items from the footlocker and made his way back to her.

  “All yours, Captain,” he said, handing them to her, and Vanessa nodded her thanks as she pocketed them.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said. “I’m going to go up the east stairs and rally our troops on the first floor. We’re going to rush this stairwell from that floor and force them back up to ground level. Then we’re going to meet with your crew and use the rest of the frags to render the stai
rcase impassable, trapping them up there. All you have to do is hold them for a few more minutes.”

  “We’ll keep them up there, Captain,” the soldier told her, and Vanessa nodded. Then she turned, moving back the way she had come, racing down the long hallway past the entrance to the Command Center, past the senior officers’ living quarters, and finally past the door that led to the Emperor’s chambers. After that, there was only the eastern stairwell, empty for now, and she quickly reached the first sublevel.

  She shoved her way through the fire door and entered into a disorienting scene. Most of the lights on the floor had been disabled – what was left was a strange combination of blue-white LED light emerging from a few floor grids and the flashing orange of the whirling claxons – and the hall was filled with a cacophony of sounds. The sirens were still wailing, people were shouting, and there were erratic bursts of gunfire from the far end of the hall. She could smell the acrid scent of gunpowder in the air.

  “Captain!” someone shouted to her right, and Vanessa looked over. A private was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, holding a bandage against his right shoulder. The cotton fabric was stained with blood. Vanessa moved over next to him and hunkered down.

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  “One of the bats stabbed me before my buddy gunned him down,” he said. “It’s not bad, but the whole thing’s numb. Can’t lift anything, can’t even hold a gun. They sent me back for first aid, but the one medic we’ve got has enough on her hands. I’m just staying out of the way until we have to retreat.”

  “I’ll get some more bandages,” Vanessa said. “I can come back and wrap it.”

  The private shook his head. “Don’t. I’m not going to die, and I can’t feel my fingers so even if it was wrapped up, I’m not worth shit. The guys up front need your help.”

  Vanessa looked at him for a long moment, and the private managed something that resembled a smile.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Go on, Captain.”

  “Once we’ve got the situation in hand, I’m sending someone back to wrap up that wound. Stay safe, Private.”

  “You know it, ma’am,” he said, and he gave her a smile that looked more genuine. Vanessa tried her best to return it and then she was up and moving again, headed for the smoke and gunshots and screams.

  Carrie was there when she reached the line that the troops had managed to hold, about halfway down the hallway. She was crouched behind some hastily thrown-together barricades made from tables and other furniture, and had traded her blade for an assault rifle. Vanessa couldn’t see any vampires; the end of the hallway had filled with smoke. She came toward the barricade at a run, dropping to her knees and sliding up next to her soldier.

  “Hi,” she said as she arrived, and Carrie turned to look at her with an expression of surprise.

  “They let you out of the CC?” she asked.

  “I kinda made them.”

  “Good. Well, we took out a few of them but then shit got pretty hairy. They sent down some people who really know how to fight, and we had to retreat a bit.”

  “Probably Ay’Araf,” Vanessa said. “They led with the Burilgi – I saw you take out a few of them on the monitors – but once they realized it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, they turned the real fighters loose.”

  “I’m shooting first, worrying about specifics later,” Carrie said. “The important thing is killing bats.”

  “I hear you.” For a moment Vanessa thought of Charles, and of the things he had told her in those final days before he had succumbed to the cancer that had been eating away his brain. Then she pushed those thoughts out of her head.

  “You seen Park?” she asked.

  “Park’s dead,” Carrie replied, not looking over at her. “He was heading for the CC when the elevators opened. Burilgi fucker jumped right out and latched onto his neck. He was still alive when we gunned the thing down, but there wasn’t anything we could do for him. It tore him wide open, Captain … he bled out before the first medic even got here.”

  “Fuck!” Vanessa felt a wave of despair rolling over her, but she fought against it.

  “Yeah, it was bad. I was searching for Captain Perrault when the alarms went off and I had to come upstairs. If I’d still been in the barracks, it probably would’ve been me and not Park in front of that elevator.”

  “Shouldn’t have been either of you,” Vanessa said. “Someone hacked the surveillance systems and replaced their playback with the stuff from yesterday. Nobody noticed. Someone should’ve, and when we’re done with this, I’m going to find out who it is and break their goddamn fingers.”

  “I’ll help,” Carrie muttered. She fired another few shots into the smoke. Around them, other soldiers were doing the same, but it seemed that for the moment the vampires were not pressing.

  “This isn’t going to last,” Vanessa said. “Even if we can hold them here, the group on the stairs is vulnerable.”

  “I think we’re lucky they’re bottlenecked,” Carrie said.

  Vanessa knew they were lucky. In an open arena, the vampires would have swarmed them by now. Without the element of surprise, an individual Children soldier might be a match for one or two Burilgi at a time, but a horde of them with Ay’Araf commanders would be overwhelming.

  The bottleneck had saved them, it was true, but it might also be their undoing; there was no way out that Vanessa knew of, except through the Command Center. If that fell before the charges had been armed, then there would be no escape. At that point, she wasn’t even sure it would matter. The bats would be able to stop the countdown, take control of the facility, and gain access to every bit of knowledge the Children had collected, including the locations of their secondary headquarters and every safe house.

  “We have to push forward,” she said. “We have to trap them up there.”

  “I’m with you, Ness. What’s the plan?”

  “No idea. Have you seen any other officers down here?”

  “Saw a lieutenant, I think. He took a blade to the chest and they dragged him into that bunk room, over there.”

  Carrie pointed, and Vanessa glanced over, nodding. “Thanks. Stay here with the others and hold this position. I’ll be back in two minutes.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Vanessa got back to her feet and made her way down the hall toward the room Carrie had indicated. The door was half closed, and she could hear hushed voices behind it. She didn’t wait to see if she could make out any words, but rather strode directly in.

  The sight that greeted her was discouraging. There were perhaps two dozen soldiers in the room, and of those only two were on their feet. One was the medic, and she was talking quietly to a soldier while sewing up his arm. The other was a sergeant – and a relatively new one at that, judging by how shiny the triple-chevrons sewn onto his sleeve looked. The other soldiers were all lying on bunks, most of them incapacitated with wounds that ranged from severe to devastating.

  “Captain!” the medic exclaimed, startled by the sudden entry. She stood up, dropping her tools in mid-suture on the injured soldier’s chest, and stood rigid, saluting. Vanessa flicked her hand up to her brow and back down.

  “At ease, for fuck’s sake … finish sewing that guy up.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the medic said, and she turned back to her work. The sergeant stepped up in front of Vanessa and gave a quick salute.

  “It’s good to see you, ma’am. We could use some more combat experience up here.”

  “That’s what I hear. Where’s the lieutenant?”

  The medic glanced up, a sick and sorry expression on her face. “He didn’t make it. We … we put the bodies in the lav. We didn’t want the other soldiers to have to look at them.”

  “That’s the right call,” Vanessa said. She turned to the sergeant, who was looking uncomfortable. “That makes you the ranking officer up here.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the young man said, and Vanessa saw his Adam’s apple bob up and d
own as he swallowed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jackson, Captain.”

  “Right. You want to tell me what the fuck you’re doing in here, Jackson, and not out leading the men?”

  “I – I didn’t … I wasn’t sure if the lieutenant … and then, I mean …” The sergeant was stammering, and Vanessa felt an odd combination of pity and disgust welling up within her. This kid wasn’t ready, and it wasn’t his fault, but someone had made him a sergeant and that meant he had responsibilities. Hiding in this makeshift medical bay was not among them. Now she was going to have to play the bad cop.

  “The fucking lieutenant is dead,” she snapped. “Not only that, but you should have known better than to follow him in here to begin with. Your men are out there holding off the enemy and you’re in here with your dick in your hand. Where’s your rifle?”

  “O-over there, ma’am.”

  “Go pick it up and get the fuck out into that hallway. I want you to rally the troops that are out there and get them ready. We’re making a push for the stairs in five minutes, you got me?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Good. Get out there and maybe I’ll forget about this when it comes time to write my report.”

  “Thank you, Ca—”

  “Go!” Vanessa snarled, and Jackson went. The medic, a young recruit who Vanessa had never seen before, glanced up briefly, unable to contain a smirk. Vanessa met the expression with cool disapproval.

  “Pay attention to your work, Private,” she growled. “Fix these guys up as well as you can and then get down the hall with some bandages. There’s a soldier there who needs help.”

  “Yes, Captain,” the woman said, properly chastised. She had finished sewing up the soldier’s wound and made her way to the next bed.