Valentine's Exile

by E. E. Knight

  Way too many lives had been lost in the past thanks to mistakes.

  Valentine asked Hank to go fill a tray, saw that the light was on in Meadows' office, and poked his head in to see if his superior had anything new on the rumored attack.

  "Forward posts all quiet, sir," Valentine reported.

  "I'm not forward or quiet," William Post replied. His salt-and-pepper hair showed white traces of boric acid. "Narcisse made her chili last night." Valentine's old subordinate, an ex-Quisling Coastal Marine who'd helped him take the Thunderbolt across the Caribbean and back, and was one of the best officers he'd ever known, went back to sorting corn-flimsies. Valentine's ears picked up a stifled burp.

  "Anything happen here?" Besides the usual morning gas.

  Meadows had the look of a man just up from a twenty-minute nap that was the only sleep he'd gotten that night. He closed his shirt, his missing-fingered hand working the buttons up the seam like a busy insect. "Not even the usual harassing fire. They're finally running out of shells. Big Wings overhead in the night."

  Big Wings were the larger, gargoylelike flyers the Kurians kept in the taller towers of Dallas. Both smarter and rarer than the Harpies Valentine had encountered, they tended to stay above, out of rifle shot, in the dark. Some weeks ago Valentine had seen a dead one that had been brought down by chance, wearing a pair of binoc­ulars and carrying an aerial photograph, grease-penciled icons squiggled all over the photo marking the besieging army's current positions.

  "I had the A Company men turn in," Post reported. "The ar­mored cars are still ready to roll, and C Company's alerted. Just in case."

  "Thanks, Will," Valentine said. "Colonel, I still think they're preparing a surprise. I'd suggest we keep the line fully manned." Valentine regretted the words before his tongue stilled. Meadows was smart enough that he didn't need to be told the obvious.

  "Our sources could be wrong. Again," Meadows said, glancing at the flimsy-basket next to his door. It was piled with messages that came in overnight but weren't important enough to require the CO to be awakened. The belief that an attack was due had been based on Valentine's intelligence, everything from deserter interrogations to vague murmurs from Dallas Operations that the heart of the city was abuzz with activity. There was no hint of reprimand or peevishness in his tone. Meadows knew war was guesswork, and frequently the guesses were wrong.

  "Sir, Smoke came in while I was out," Valentine said. "I'll debrief her over breakfast."

  Post gave Valentine a playful wink as Meadows read his messages. Duvalier's appropriation of Valentine's bed whenever she was with the Razors inspired a few jokes about Valentine's "operations." Valentine suspected that the best lines originated from Post's salty throat.

  "How are the men up the boulevard doing?" Meadows asked.

  "The boulevard" was a wide east-west street that marked the forward edge of the Razors' positions. Snipers and machine gunners warred over five lanes of former Texas state route from blasted storefronts.

  "Unhappy about being on the line, sir," Post reported. Post had keen antennae when it came to sensing the regiment's mood. More importantly, he cared, and even better, he acted on their behalf. Post was a relentless terror to rear-area supply officers when it came to the well-being of his men. "They only got three days at the airfield." Comparatively fresh companies had been moved up in anticipation of the attack from the relative quiet of the old field.

  "Let's rotate them out if nothing happens by tomorrow morning."

  "Will do, sir," Post replied.

  "I'll see to Smoke now, Colonel, if you don't have anything else," Valentine said.

  "Thank her for me, Major. Grab a meal and then hit your bunk." Meadows tended to keep his orders brief and simple. Some­times they were also pleasant. Meadows picked up the flimsies from his basket, glanced at them, and passed them to Valentine.

  Valentine read them on the way back to the galley—or kitchen, he mentally corrected. Shipboard slang still worked itself into his thoughts, a leftover from his yearlong spell posing as a Coastal Marine in the enemy's uniform, and then living in the Thunderbolt after taking her from the Kurians.

  01:30 Potable water line reestablished to forward positions

  02:28 OP3 OP11 Artillery fire flashes and sounds from other side of city

  03:55 OP3 Barrage ceased

  04:10 OP12 Reports train heard north toward city

  The OP notation was for field phone-equipped forward observation posts. Valentine had heard the barrage and seen the flashes on the opposite side of the city as well, glimpsed from between the tall buildings, making the structures stand out against the night like gravestones to a dead city.

  The only suspicious message was of the train. The lines into Dallas had been cut, torn up, mined, plowed under, or otherwise blocked very early in the siege. Readying or moving a train made little sense—unless the Kurians were merely shuffling troops within the city.

  Valentine loaded up a tray and employed Hank as coffee bearer, and returned to his room. Duvalier twitched at his entry, then re­laxed. Her eyes opened.

  "Food," she said.

  "And coffee," Valentine replied, after checking to make sure she was decent. Hank being a teenager, he'd waited in the spot with the best viewing angle into the room and bed.

  "What's the latest from D?" Valentine asked, setting the tray briefly on the bed before pulling his makeshift desk up so she'd have an eating surface.

  "No sign of an assault. I saw some extra gun crews and battle police at their stations, but no troops have been brought up."

  Hank hung up Duvalier's gear to dry. Valentine saw the boy clip off a yawn.

  "The Quislings?"

  "Most units been on half rations for over a month now. Internal security and battle police excepted, of course. And some of the higher officers; they're as fat as ever. I heard some men talking. No one dares report sick. Rumor has it the Kurians are running short on aura, and the sick list is the first place they look."

  "Morale?"

  "Horrible," she reported between bites. "They're losing and they know it. Deserters aren't being disposed of quietly anymore. Every night just before they shut down power they assemble representatives from all the Quisling brigades and have public executions. I put on a nurse's shawl and hat and watched one. NCOs kept offering me a bottle or cigarettes, but I couldn't take my eyes off the stage."

  The incidental noises from Hank working behind him ceased.

  "They make the deserters stand in these big plastic garbage cans, the ones with little arrows running around in a circle, hand­cuffed in front. Then a Reaper comes up from behind one and tears open their shirt. They keep the poor bastard facing the other ranks the whole time so they can see the expression on his face—they're all gagged of course; they don't want any last words. The Reaper clamps its jaws somewhere between the shoulder blades and starts squeezing their arms into the rib cage. You hear the bones breaking, see the shoulders pop out as they dislocate.

  "Then they just tip up the garbage can and wheel the body away. Blood and piss leaking out the bottom, usually. Then a political officer steps up and reads the dead man's confession, and his CO verifies his mark or signature. Then they wheel out the next one. Sometimes six or seven a night. They want the men to go to bed with something to think about.

  "I've seen some gawdawful stuff, but . . . that poor bastard. I had a dream about him."

  "They never run out of Reapers, do they?" Hank put in.

  "Seems not," Duvalier said.

  Valentine decided to change the subject. "Okay, they're not massing for an attack. Maybe a breakout?"

  "No, all the rolling motor stock is dispersed," she said, slurping coffee. "Unless it's hidden. I saw a few entrances to underground garages that were guarded with armored cars and lots of wire and kneecappers."

  The last was a nasty little mine the Kurians were fond of. When triggered, it launched itself twenty inches in the air like a startled frog and exploded, sending flechettes
out horizontally that literally cut a man off at the knees.

  "I don't suppose you saw any draft articles of surrender crumpled up in the wastebaskets, did you?"

  She made a noise that sent remnants of a last mouthful of masticated egg flying. "Na-ah."

  "Now," Valentine said. "If you'll get out of my bed—"

  "I need a real bath. Those basins are hardly big enough to sit in. How about your water boy—"

  Hank perked up at the potential for that duty.

  Valentine hated to ruin the boy's morning. "You can use the womens'. There's piping laid on and a tub."

  Such gallantry as still existed between the sexes in the Razors mostly involved the men working madly to provide the women with a few homey comforts wherever the regiment moved. The badly outnumbered women had to do little in return—the occasional smile, a few soft words, or an earthy joke reminded their fel­low soldiers of mothers, sweethearts, sisters, or wives.

  "Killjoy," Duvalier said, winking at Hank.

  * * * *

  The alarms brought Valentine out of his dreams and to his feet. For one awful moment he hung on a mental precipice between reality and his vaguely pleasant dream—something to do with a boat and bougainvillea—while his brain caught up to his body and oriented itself.

  Alarms. Basement in Texas. Dallas siege. The Razors.

  Alarms?

  Two alarms, his brain noted as full consciousness returned. Whistle after whistle, blown from a dozen mouths like referees trying to stop a football brawl, indicated an attack—all men to grab whatever would shoot and get to their defense stations, plus the wail of an air-alert siren.

  But no gongs. If the Kurians had dusted again, every man who could find a piece of hollow metal to bang, from tin can to wheel rim, should be setting up as loud a clamor as possible. No one wanted to be a weak link in another Fort Worth massacre that caused comrades to choke out.

  Valentine forced himself to pull on socks and tie his boots, grabbed the bag containing his gas mask, scarves, and gloves anyway, and buckled his pistol belt. Hank had cleaned and hung up his cut-down battle rifle. Valentine checked it over as he hurried through men running every which way or looking to their disheveled operations officer for direction, and headed for the stairs to the control tower, the field's tactical command post. He took seemingly endless switchbacks of stairs two at a time to the "top deck"—the Razors' shorthand for the tallest point of Love Field.

  He felt explosions, then heard them a second later. Worse than mortars, worse than artillery, and going off so closely together he wondered if the Kurians had been keeping rocket artillery in reserve for a crisis. The old stairs rattled and dropped dirt as though shaking in fear.

  "Would you look at those bastards!" he heard someone shout from the control tower.

  "Send to headquarters: 'Rancid,'" Valentine heard Meadows shout. "Rancid. Rancid. Rancid."

  Valentine came off the last stairs and passed through the open security door. Meadows and two others of the regiment had box seats on chaos.

  Whoever had installed the glass—if it was glass and not a high-tech polymer—had done the job well; still-intact windows offered the tower a 360-degree field of vision. In the distance the crenel­lated Dallas skyline—one bifurcated tower the men called "the Eye" stared straight at the field thanks to its strange, empty-centered top—broke the hazy morning horizon.

  As he went to the glass, noting the quiet voice of the communications officer relaying the "Rancid" alert to Brigade, another explosion erupted in black-orange menace atop the parking garage—the biggest structure on the field.

  Valentine followed a private's eyes up and looked out on a sky filled with whirling planes.

  Not rickety, rebuilt crop dusters or lumbering old commercial aircraft; the assorted planes shared only smooth silhouettes and a mottled gray-and-tan camouflage pattern reminiscent of a dusty rattlesnake. There were sleek single seaters, like stunt planes Valentine had seen in books, whipping around the edges of the field, turned sideways so the pilots could get a good look at ground activity. Banana-shaped twin-engine jobs dove in at the vehicles parked between the two wings of the terminal concourses, one shooting rocket after rocket at the vehicles while the other two flanked it, drawing ground fire. A pair of bigger, uglier, wide-winged military attack planes with bulging turbofans on their rear fuselages came in, dropping a series of bombs that exploded into a huge snake of fire writhing between the Razors' positions and the southwestern strip.

  "Who the hell are these guys?" Meadows said to no one.

  The screaming machines, roaring to and fro over the field, weren't the only attackers on the wing. Flying Grogs in the hundreds, many the Harpy-type Valentine had first met over Weening during his spell in the labor regiments, swooped below the aircraft and even the control tower, dispensing what looked—and exploded—like sticks of dynamite at anything that moved. A few bigger wings—-the true gargoyles of the kind Valentine had seen lain out—circled above, possibly waiting for a juicy enough target to be worth what­ever they held in saddlebags hung around their thick necks.

  The Razors fought back, mostly from their positions in the parking garages and the heavy weapons point around a winged statue depicting "Flight" near the entrance to the terminal buildings. Small groups of men or single soldiers fired from behind doorways, windows, or the sandbagged positions guarding the motor pool between the concourses.

  Perhaps a gargoyle decided to hit the control tower. Valentine heard a heavy thud among the aerials on the roof, the scrabble of claws.

  "Out!" Valentine shouted.

  The trio looked up at the roof, apparently transfixed by the harmless scrabbling noises. Meadows' hand went to his sidearm, and the private fumbled with his battle rifle. In seconds they'd be dead, fragmenting brain tissue still wondering at the strange rac­coonlike noise—

  "Out!" Valentine said again, bodily pushing the private to the stairs with one hand, and pulling the communications officer from her chair with the other. She came out of her chair with her headset on; the headset cord stretched and unplugged as though it were as reluctant to leave its post as its operator. Meadows moved with dramatic suddenness as the realization of what might be happening on the roof arrived, and grabbed for the handle on the thick metal door to the stairway.

  "I'll get it," Meadows said. Valentine, keeping touch with both the private and the communications officer, hurried down the stairs.

  One flight. Two flights. Meadows' clattering footsteps on the stairs a half floor above . . .

  The boom Valentine had been expecting for ten anxious seconds was neither head-shattering nor particularly loud, and while it shook peeling paint from the stairs and knocked out the lights, the three weren't so much as knocked off-stride.

  Meadows joined them, panting. "The door must have held," he said.

  Or physics worked in our favor, Valentine thought. An explosion tends to travel along the path of least resistance, usually upward.

  "Maybe." Valentine said.

  The impact of three more explosions came up through the floor, bombs striking Love Field somewhere.

  "Orders?" Valentine asked.

  "I'm going back up," Meadows said. "They might think they finished the job with one bomb. The radio antenna's had it for sure, but the field lines might still be functional."

  "You two game?" Valentine asked the private—an intelligent soldier named Wilcox who was the military equivalent of a utility infielder; he could play a variety of positions well. Ruvayed, the lieutenant with the headphone jack still swinging at the end of its cord just below her belt, nodded.

  Valentine clicked his gun off safety and brought it to his shoul­der. "Me first, in case they crawled in."

  Meadows brought up the rear going back up the stairs. Valen­tine reached the security door. Dust had been blown from beneath the door in an elegant spiked pattern, and he smelled smoke and the harsher odor of burning plastic. He turned the handle but the door wouldn't budge.

&n
bsp; A kick opened it. The air inside had the harsh, faintly sulfurous tang of exploded dynamite.

  As he swept the room over the open sights on his gun, Valen­tine saw naked sunlight streaming in from a hole in the roof big enough to put a sedan's engine block through. Older air-traffic con­soles and the Razors' newer communications gear were blackened and cracked; the transformation was so thorough it seemed it should have taken more time than an instant.

  The glass held, though it had cracks ranging from spiderweb-bing to single fault lines. The quality of the stuff the old United States used to be able to make made Valentine shake his head in wonder yet again. Outside the planes still turned, swooped, and soared, engines louder now thanks to the hole in the roof.

  But he kept his eyes and ears tuned to the new skylight, his cut-down Atlanta Gunworks battle rifle ready. Another tiny plane buzzed by, the noise of its engine rising fast and fading slowly over the other, fainter aircraft sounds. Who the hell are these guys?

  Meadows pressed binoculars to his eye, scanning the ground in the direction of Dallas. "Not even mortar fire. It's not a breakout."

  "Bad intelligence?" Ruvayed asked. "They thought we had planes?"

  Another ribbon of fire blossomed against the parking garage facing the runway to the southwest. Valentine wondered about Ahn-Kha and Will Post. Both were probably at the hardpoints around the garages . . . why did they keep hitting that side of the airport? It faced the train tracks running out of the city, but the lines were torn up for miles.

  Another of the tiny, fast scout planes buzzed low over the overgrown airstrip there. Save for his speed it looked as though he might be on a landing approach. The plane jumped skyward to avoid a stream of tracer.

  "I wish we had some ack-ack guns here," Meadows said, binoculars trained up at some big multiengine transport circling the field. "All the high-angle stuff is close in to the city."