by David Weber
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This one is for Sheellah and Sharon, the ladies we love and who put up with both of us while we were working on this. We hope the margaritas helped!
AUTHORS’ NOTE
The authors wish to thank Commander Wieslaw Gozdziewicz, Polish Navy, and Lieutenant Colonel Cezary Reginis, Polish Army, for checking our Polish. They were incredibly helpful, although we ended up “regularizing” the grammatical shifts so as not to confuse our English readers even though they told us better than that!
YEAR 1 OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE
. I .
AURORA, MINNESOTA,
UNITED STATES
The wet, soft sound of an ending world burned in Lewis Freymark’s ears as he crouched to drop more wood into the fire. Spits of sleet hissed as they filtered into the flames, and the tarp he’d rigged to break the worst of the wind flapped in the drenched, blowing darkness.
It was almost enough—almost—to drown out the sound of his daughter’s cough.
He hunched his shoulders, bending over, using the end of a limb to rearrange the burning branches. They didn’t really need it. But it gave him a few more minutes before he had to look up, face Janice and the kids again, and he couldn’t do that. Not yet. His heart cried out to take them all in his arms, shelter them against the cold, promise them that he was there and that somehow they’d get through this as they’d gotten through everything else. But he couldn’t do that, either. He couldn’t because this time he couldn’t be their strength. Because this time his own despair would only have broken whatever scraps of hope might still sustain them.
There’d been no weather reports in months—not since the “Shongairi” had brought nightmare and destruction to Earth—but there was snow somewhere beyond the sleet. Freymark could smell it. He could feel it in the icy little teeth biting into the back of his neck as he crouched, using his body to give Janice and Stevie and Francesca and Jackie—oh, especially Jackie!—any extra fragment of windbreak he could.
And in his heart, he knew it didn’t matter. He’d grown up in Duluth, fifty-odd miles from this unquiet, hopeless refugee camp. He knew northern winters. He knew how cruel they could be, even without murderous aliens from beyond the stars. And because he did, he knew exactly what would happen.
For a while, he’d thought they’d make it. The farmhouse outside the town of Babbitt had belonged to his cousin, but Jake and Suzanne had been in St. Paul when the initial Shongair kinetic strike turned the entire Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area into fire, ash, smoke, and death.
Freymark and Janice were supposed to have joined them for the river cruise … until Francesca’s impacted wisdom teeth required immediate surgery, instead. They’d just gotten home from the oral surgeon’s when the initial strikes went in.
Minneapolis–St. Paul hadn’t died alone. Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Spokane, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Ottawa … the dirge of murdered cities had rolled like the fanfare of Apocalypse. And the unending list had only grown and grown in the months since. There’d been fresh reports almost daily, at least until the Internet, the communications satellites—even the emergency band radios—had gone down. Duluth had been destroyed two months after Minneapolis–St. Paul in one of the Shongairi’s “reprisal” strikes. Freymark didn’t have a clue what the “reprisal” had been for, but it didn’t matter. Not really. Not beside the death toll which had swept across his country and his world like some black, bottomless tide.
Yet he and Janice and the kids had been safe. They’d loaded up the SUV, headed north for sleepy little Babbitt, where there was nothing for the invaders to waste their “kinetic bombardments” upon. Where they’d known Jake and Suzanne’s farmhouse would stand empty. Indeed, his greatest fear had been that they’d find someone else already squatting on the family farm, but civilization hadn’t gone into the crapper that quickly. Not then.
Jacqueline coughed wetly behind him again, and he clenched his jaw tighter, feeling the cold closing in, staring into the flames as they crackled against the hateful dark.
Jake and Suzanne’s family garden had helped a lot over the summer, and he and Janice had preserved what they could. Neither of them had known a thing about canning, but they’d dragged out Suzanne’s canning supplies, chased down instructions on the Internet, and printed them out while they still had electricity (and before the Puppies took out the Net), and they’d managed to put up a lot of food. Or it had seemed like a lot, just looking at it in the pantry. Until he’d thought about feeding a family of seven through a Minnesota winter.
Yet they could’ve made it. He knew they could have. Babbitt was still a functional town, its mayor and city council had managed—somehow—to hold their community together, and if they hadn’t been delighted to see strangers, neither had they tried to turn them away. Besides, he hadn’t been a stranger. Not really. And Douglas and Carla Jackson had spoken for them—Carla had been Suzanne’s sister, and Freymark had known her since he was nine, visiting his aunt and uncle in Babbitt—and helped the Freymarks settle in at the farm. And there were still deer to eke out their food supplies, and there were always fish in Birch Lake. And so he’d been able to tell himself that whatever happened to the rest of the world, his family would make it.
Until three weeks ago, anyway.
There were a lot of things Lewis Freymark would never know, and one of them was why the Puppies had decided to strike Babbitt. The town had never had more than fourteen or fifteen hundred citizens, although it had probably crept higher than that over the summer and early autumn as other refugees filtered in. How it could have posed any kind of threat to star-traveling aliens was more than he could imagine. Maybe it had been a reprisal for something someone had done, or maybe it had been no more than pure viciousness on the Shongairi’s part. He didn’t know, and it didn’t matter anyway.
What did matter was that Babbitt had disappeared into the same horrific fireball which had claimed a seventeen-year-old boy—a boy turning into a man any parent could have been proud of—named Dennis Freymark.
Dennis had taken the SUV to town to trade some of their precious canned food for medicine. The Babbitt Medical Center had continued to serve the town and its froth of refugees, but Mayor Oswald and the city council had collected the stock of Babbitt’s half-dozen pharmacies under lock and key—and armed guard. They probably would have let Dennis have at least some of what he needed, anyway, but it never hurt to contribute a little something to the town’s food stocks in exchange.
Only there’d never been an exchange. And the blast front and fire had swept outward from the devastated town, burning through the tinde
r-dry leaves of autumn with no one left to fight it. He’d had just enough warning to get Janice and the kids, grab Jake’s sportorized Lee-Enfield deer rifle, a couple of boxes of ammunition, and all the food they could carry, and get as far as the lake before the flames swept through, devouring everything in their path. He’d sheltered in the lake water—icy cold, even at the height of summer, much less in the fall—neck-deep, holding Jacqueline in his arms and feeling her shiver—as the fire roared and bellowed around them. And when the flames were done, the farm was gone.
So they’d come here. Almost twenty miles west of Babbitt, to what had been the almost equally small town of Aurora. All of Babbitt’s handful of survivors had ended up here, in the refugee camp that sprawled across the high school’s athletic field on the west side of the town, near the lake. There was another on the football and baseball fields between Forestry Road and Third Avenue, on the other side of town, but there were precious few amenities for either. The high school had long since filled every classroom with refugees; there was no space inside it for late arrivals, however desperate their need, and so they crouched in whatever shelter they could while the exhausted city government tried hopelessly to find better asylum for them.
He could smell the overstrained portable toilets—and the communal latrine pits—from here. Water had to be hauled in from the lake, using some of the town’s old water trucks, drawn by the priceless handful of horses who’d survived and been pressed into service as supplies of gasoline and diesel vanished. Food was already scarce and getting scarcer every day, despite mandatory rationing that restricted adults to no more than fourteen hundred calories a day, and medical supplies were nonexistent. The surviving doctors and nurses worked eighteen-hour shifts at the local hospital, a mile southeast from where he crouched feeding the fire, but they were swamped by far too many patients with far too little nourishment, shelter, and warmth, and that was only going to get worse. Winter was coming on fast, there’d be no new shipments of fuel, there was no electricity, none of the refugees had anything remotely like the clothing needed to survive it, and housing was desperately short. There would have been far too few supplies, far too few roofs, under the best of circumstances, far less the ones they actually faced.
The authorities were trying hard to find someplace for the fresh influx to go, but the town was already packed—by Freymark’s lowest estimate, the city’s population had to have at least tripled—and most of them were at least as malnourished, and cold, and wet as his own family. And so he crouched here, burning scavenged branches, praying someone could find them a roof, wondering where the next armload of fuel was coming from, while Jackie coughed behind him in her mother’s arms, and there was nothing—nothing at all—he could do.
He looked up as someone dumped another scant pile of branches beside him.
“City police just dragged in a flatbed of downed trees,” Alex Jackson said, squatting on his heels and laying the ax he’d salvaged from the burned farm’s barn beside him. He looked at least a decade older than his fifteen years. “I was over there with the ax.” He twitched a parody of a smile. “Gave me first dibs for helping cut it.” He shrugged. “Supposed to be a wheelbarrow load headed this way in another half hour or so.”
“Good, Alex.” He reached out, squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “Good.”
He put all the approval left in him into those three words, and God knew Alex deserved it. His parents and his sister had caught a ride into Babbitt with Dennis on that terrible day. The Freymarks were all he had left, and Lewis Freymark put an arm around him and hugged hard, eyes burning as he thought about Dennis. Thought about his broad shoulders, his curly hair, his mother’s eyes. About the way his son—his son—had always had a smile for his mom, a joke for his kid brother, his sisters. And Freymark had been even prouder of his boy when he paused quietly outside the closed bedroom door one rainy autumn night and heard Dennis—Dennis, the perpetually smiling, the always optimistic—weeping with quiet desperation when he thought no one else could hear.
Dennis, who the Puppies had taken from him and from Janice. His death had torn his father’s heart in half and shattered his mother’s. Only one more death among billions, but the one death which had reached right up inside them and ripped out their souls. So yes, Freymark understood Alex. Understood his pain, the strength that somehow kept him going, and he hugged the son of his dead friends, the son who needed a father as he’d never needed one before, because he would never hug his own again.
And now they were losing Jacqueline. Jackie, the baby, the laughing sprite who’d turned into a solemn-eyed ghost as the grim reality ground its way through every shield her parents—and Dennis—had tried to erect against it for her sake. She was only seven, for God’s sake! Only seven. She would’ve been eight in another three months, but she didn’t have three months. Maybe none of them did, if the rumors of the Puppies’ bioweapon were true, but it didn’t matter for Jackie.
He wasn’t a doctor, but he didn’t need to be one. It was pneumonia. He could hear it in the wet cough, the labored breathing—feel it in the raging temperature, see it in the chills. In the way she was just … fading away. And without the medicine Dennis had died trying to get and Aurora simply didn’t have, there was nothing they could do about it. Nothing but keep her as warm as they could, try to get fluids into her somehow … and hug her. Hold her. Be there for her as that last, precious ember flickered its way forever into the dark. Manage somehow to smile for her when she roused and called out for “Mommy” or, most heart-wrenching of all, for “Poppa.” To tell her it would be all right and urge her to rest, torn between the terror that she might slip away without ever awakening again … and the prayer that she would, because the father who loved her more than life itself knew it was the only peace she would ever find again.
And there was nothing—nothing—he could do for her, or for Stevie, or Camila, or Francesca. Not in the end. He was their father. It was his job to save them, and he couldn’t do it, and dying himself would have been easy compared to that.
His daughter coughed again, and he looked over his shoulder.
Janice sat on an overturned plastic crate, hunched forward, trying to shelter the tiny, blanket-wrapped body in her arms. Janice—his strength and his rock, who was always there for him and the kids, whose face had grown thin and gaunt, and whose eyes could no longer share the hope she promised her children. Janice, whose cheek rested on the crown of that small head while she whispered lullaby words so softly he couldn’t hear them through the rattle of sleet, the sigh of the ice-fanged wind, and the weeping of his own heart.
He made himself stand, straighten his spine, square his shoulders, and somehow produce a smile. It was his turn to be Dennis, he thought, steeling himself before he bent to kiss his wife, take his own turn holding their daughter while she trickled away from them. It was—
He froze, his head jerking up as a sound he hadn’t heard since before The Day came thumping out of the windy, frigid dark.
“Lewis!” Janice cried, struggling to her feet with Jackie in her arms while the other kids jerked upright in the pitiful nest of blankets where they’d huddled together, sharing body warmth.
“I hear it!” he said tautly, and picked up the rifle he’d clung to through fire and water and cold. He could remember Jake teasing him the summer when he’d loaded the magazine by hand, without stripper clips, and gotten the overlap on the rimmed .303 cartridges wrong and locked up the magazine. This time, he was sure he had them in the right sequence, even if it wasn’t going to matter in the end.
“Stay here,” he said flatly. “Alex, stay with Aunt Janice. Keep her and the babies safe. Frankie,” he took time to throw one arm around his fourteen-year-old daughter, hugging her hard. “Take care of Mom.”
“Dad,” she whispered into his chest, “don’t go!” She looked up, eyes gleaming with upwelling tears in a face that was far too thin. “Stay with us!”
“I can’t, Punkin,” he told her gently and re
leased her to reach down and ruffle Stevie’s hair as he and Camila clung weepingly to their mother.
He looked up, met Janice’s eyes, and saw the knowledge in them. The knowledge that she would never see him again. And that it probably wouldn’t matter in the end, but that he had to try anyway.
“If—when—the shooting starts, head farther into town. Find a place to hide with the babies,” he told her, cupping her cheek in his hand. “I’ll find you … after.”
“I know you will,” she lied, pressing her cheek harder against his palm. “We’ll be waiting for you. We love you.”
Her voice wavered on the last three words, and he closed his eyes for a moment. Then opened them again.
“I know,” he said, and leaned close, kissed her forehead. Then he drew a deep breath and headed off into the wind and the cold through the suddenly panicked refugee camp as the running lights of not one helicopter, but at least three, came out of the lowering cloud and circled.
They were the first aircraft he’d seen since “Fleet Commander Thikair” had made what would happen to any human aircraft which dared take to the air perfectly clear. Freymark had seen the video Admiral Robinson had posted on the Internet, watched three dozen Shongair shuttles being torn apart by just four F-22s, so he’d understood exactly why Thikair had been so emphatic.
A part of him was surprised Puppy helicopters sounded exactly like human helicopters, but he shook that thought aside. Rotary wing aircraft were rotary wing aircraft, he supposed. No doubt they had to sound alike. But these were clearly headed for the parking apron between the high school and the sports fields. It was probably the only open area big enough for them to set down—the city cops kept it clear as the area where any available supplies could be distributed to the camp—and he made himself move faster, joined by other armed men and women in ones and twos and threes. There were at least two dozen of them by the time they reached the parking lot, armed with a motley assortment of weapons—everything from modern AR-15s to his own ancient Lee-Enfield and God knew what sort of handguns. But two things they all had in common: desperate determination … and no hope at all.
