Valentine's Exile

by E. E. Knight

  "Colonel," Valentine said. "Southwest. Look southwest, hitting hardest there."

  "Field phones are shot," Ruvayed reported.

  "Wilcox, hustle us up a portable radio," Meadows said. The pri­vate disappeared down the stairs.

  The colonel searched the southern and western approaches to the airport. "Goddamn."

  "I'd like to see what's happening in the garage," Valentine said.

  "Go ahead. Pass the word that I'll be on the maintenance fre­quency, if I can get a radio up here. Send up a couple of messengers."

  Valentine handed his gun and ammunition harness to Ruvayed. "Keep an eye cocked to that hole. And watch the balcony," he said. The control tower had an electronics service balcony just below the out-sloping windows. Nothing but birds' nests and old satellite dishes decorated it, but it would be just like the gargoyles to land carrying a couple of sniper rifles.

  "Yes, sir," Ruvayed said.

  "Tell everyone to keep their heads down, Major," Meadows said. "Maybe this whole attack is a Kurian screwup. The mechan­ics moved a couple of stripped passenger craft the other day—from a distance it could have looked like we had planes ready to go."

  "Yes, sir." Valentine nodded. He turned for the stairs. Meadows didn't care one way or the other about salutes.

  "Goes doubly for you," Meadows called after him.

  The violent airshow going on outside must have been running short on fireworks; only one more small explosion sounded during the endless turns down the stairs. The elevator to the control tower was missing and presumed scavenged—nothing but shaft ran up the center of the structure.

  Valentine double-timed through the tunnel system and up to the first floor of the terminal. He trotted past empty counters under faded signs and motionless luggage carousels—the only part of the main terminal in use was a small area in front of the bronze Ranger statue (ONE RIOT, ONE RANGER read the plaque) where the con­sumables for the Razors were delivered every few days.

  "Major!" A voice broke through the sound of his footsteps. A corporal with his flak jacket on inside out called from the other end of the terminal, "They're hurtin' on the west approach."

  "Thanks. Tell the Bears to find Captain Post and be ready to counterattack if they hit us from the ground. Send messengers and a new field phone up to the top deck. Right away."

  The corporal nodded and ran for the stairwell.

  Valentine crossed over to the huge parking garages by scuttling under the concrete walkway to the upper deck of the lot. A wheel-less ambulance in the center of the parking garage served as an im­provised command post for the airport's close-in defense.

  The air was full of smoke and a fainter, oilier smell Valentine recognized as burning gasoline.

  Wounded men and burned corpses lay all around the ambu­lance. Captain Martin, a Texas liaison for the Razors, helped the medics perform the gruesome task of triage as he spoke to a pair of sergeants.

  Valentine listened with hard ears as he approached. Enhanced hearing, a gift from the Lifeweavers dating back to his time as a Wolf, made each word sound as though it were spoken in his ear. "Everyone to the dugouts but the observers," Martin said. "Yes, treat it like a bombardment. We'll worry about an assault when we see one."

  Martin recognized Valentine with a nod. "Weird kinda visit from Dallas. How did they pull this off?"

  "I doubt they're from Dallas," Valentine said. "We would have seen them taking off."

  More distant explosions—a series of smaller cracks that made up a larger noise like halfhearted thunder.

  "I'm putting the men in the shelters," Martin explained.

  "Good," Valentine said, not wanting to waste time explaining that he'd already overheard the orders given. "I'd like to take a look at the field south and west of here. Is there still an operational post where I can do that?"

  Valentine saw Ahn-Kha approaching from a forward garage stairwell, a man draped on each powerful shoulder. Ahn-Kha's arms, longer than but not quite as thick as his legs, held the men in place in a strange imitation of the classic bodybuilder's pose.

  Blood matted his friend's golden shoulder and back fur, Valentine noted as his old companion set the men down near the ambulance.

  "He's worth three Texans," Martin observed. Martin was still new enough to the Razors to watch Ahn-Kha as though half fascinated and half worried that the Grog would suddenly sink his ivory fangs into the nearest human. "Ten ordinary men, in other words."

  "The observation post?" Valentine reminded the captain, as Ahn-Kha checked the dressings on the men he had just set down. Enormous, double-thumbed hands gently turned one of the wounded on his side.

  "Second floor of the garage, back of an old van. It's still wired to the phone network."

  Valentine remembered. "I know it. Ahn-Kha!"

  The Golden One nodded to one of the Razor medics as she wiped her hands on a bloodstained disinfectant towel and squatted beside the latest additions to the swamp of bleeding men. "Yes, my David?"

  "Get your puddler and meet me at OP 6."

  Ahn-Kha's "Grog gun" had become famous, a 20mm behemoth of his own design that resembled a telescope copulating with a sawed-off kid's swing set. The other name came from a skirmish the Razors fought outside Fort Worth, where Ahn-Kha reduced an armored car commander to a slippery puddle of goo outside his hatch at six hundred yards.

  "Yes, my David." Over seven feet of muscle straightened. "I had to leave Corporal Lopez at the stairwell exterior door. He's dead, or soon will be," Ahn-Kha informed the captain.

  "What the hell, Major?" Martin asked. "What's so goddamn important about blowing us off the planet?"

  "We'll know sooner than we'd like, I expect," Valentine said.

  Another bomb shook dust onto the wounded.

  "Christ," Martin said, but Valentine was reminded of something else.

  "Make sure the men have their dust gear in the shelters," Valentine said. He ran down a mental list of what else the Razors might need to stop a column, and the two reserve regimental recoilless rifles could be useful. "Get Luke and John operational up here too, with plenty of shells. But the dust gear first." Matthew and Mark were vehicle-mounted, and probably smoldering with most of the other transport between the terminals.

  "You'd think we'd be drowning in it. Makes me think—"

  "They're probably on their way already."

  Valentine offered a salute. Martin's mouth tightened as he returned it—the Texans weren't big on military rigamarole, but there were ordinary soldiers present and the Razors knew a salute from their operations chief meant that the half-Indian major didn't expect you to speak again until you were ready to report on his orders—and hurried to the central stairway.

  Valentine went up a floor to the last garage level before the exposed top and hurried to the rusty old van, parked just far enough from the open edge of the parking lot so the sun would never hit it. Though wheelless and up on blocks, missing even its headlamps and mirrors, the Razors kept it clean so that the carefully washed smoked-glass windows at the back and sides wouldn't stand out from the dirt and Texas dust of the nonlethal variety.

  Valentine called out his name and entered the van through the open side door. Two Razors looked out on the Dallas skyline and the roads and train tracks running along the western edge of the airfield. Their ready dust-hoods hung off the backs of their helmets like bridal veils. Dropped playing cards lay on the van's interior car­pet, the only remaining evidence of what had probably once been plush fixtures for road-weary vactioners.

  "I've never seen so many planes in my life, that's for sure," one said to the other, a bit of the Arkansas hills in his voice. Valentine knew his face but the name wouldn't come. "Howdy, Major."

  "Hey, Major Valentine," the other said, after relocating a piece of hard candy on a tongue depressor that the soldiers called a "post-sicle." Captain Post had a candy maker somewhere in his family tree, and the men liked to suck on his confections to keep the Texas dirt from drying out thei
r mouths. "We got hit after all, huh."

  "I'm glad somebody noticed. Did it break up a good card game ?"

  "Depends. Lewis was winning," the Arkansan said.

  "Sorry to hear that, Lewis," Valentine said. He vaguely knew that the tradition of canceling all wins and losses in an unfinished game had sprung up during the siege at Big Rock Mountain the previous year, and was thus hallowed into one of the battalion's un­written rules.

  "What do these aircutters got against the Razors, is what I want to know," Lewis said.

  Valentine scanned the approaches to the airfield, then the sky. A larger plane, its wingspan wider than its body length, caught the sun high up.

  Whoever's up there knows.

  * * * *

  The second phase of the attack came within five minutes, as Valentine reported to Meadows through a field phone line patched into the portable radio now installed in the control tower.

  "Holy Jesus!" Lewis barked.

  The grass between the northwest-southeast parallel runways flanking the field bulged, then dimpled, then collapsed, sending a cloud of dirt to join the smoke still coating the field.

  "Between the runways," Ahn-Kha shouted from his position at a supporting column. And unnecessarily, as Valentine locked eyes on the spot and brought up his binoculars.

  A corkscrew prow the size of one of the old Thunderbolt's lifeboats emerged into daylight. Striped blacks and browns on a pebbly, organic surface spun hypnotically as it rotated. Brown flesh behind—the snout pulsed, ripples like circular waves traveling backward to the hidden portion of the thing. It rolled like a show diver performing a forward twist and nosed back into the earth. Overgrown prairie plants flew as the giant worm tilled and plunged back into the soil.

  "What the devil?" the Arkansan said, watching the creature dig, still spinning clockwise as it reburied itself.

  Tiny planes whipped over the inverted U of exposed flesh.

  "Tunnels, Colonel, they've tunneled to the airfield," Valentine said into the field phone. He consulted the map of the airfield and its surroundings, pinned to the carpeted wall of the observation van. "We need fire support to grid N-7, repeat N-7."

  The tunneling worm's other end finally appeared, another shell-like counterpoint to the prow. Valentine marked an orifice at the very tip this time, though whether it was for eating or excreting he couldn't say.

  The two identical warcraft, turbofans bulging above their broad wings, banked in from the west, aiming directly at the park­ing garages.

  Valentine dropped the field glasses and the phone handpiece. Something about the crosslike silhouettes of the aircraft suggested approaching doom.

  "This won't be good," Lewis said.

  "Out! Out! Out!" Valentine shouted.

  Ahn-Kha was already at the van door, perhaps ready to bodily pull the men from the observation post, but the three jumped from the van and ran for the central stairway.

  They didn't quite make it.

  Valentine heard faint whooshing noises from behind, over the Doppler-effect sound of the quickly growing engine noise. The men flung themselves down, recognizing the rockets for what they were.

  The planes had aimed for the floor beneath theirs, as it turned out. Though loud, the only damage the explosions did was to their eardrums. A stray rocket struck their floor of the garage over at the other wing of the structure.

  The van caught some of the blast from below. Their carpeted cubbyhole tipped on its side, blown off its blocks.

  "Let's see if the phone's still working," Valentine said.

  "What if they come around for another pass?" the Arkansan asked, teeth chattering.

  "They've got to be out of fireworks by now," Lewis said.

  "You alright, old horse?" Valentine asked Ahn-Kha, who was inspecting his puddler.

  One business envelope-sized pointed ear drooped. "Yes. The sight may be out of alignment. I dropped it in my haste."

  Back at the edge of the garage, in the shadow of a supporting column, Valentine gulped and met Ahn-Kha's eyes before cautiously peeping over the edge of the parking lot wall and surveying the field. A beating sound had replaced the higher-pitched airplane engines.

  Helicopters!

  Gradually Valentine made out shapes through the obscuring smoke of still-burning jellied gasoline and the more recent rocket blasts. A great, sand-colored behemoth with twin rotors forward, and a smaller stabilizing fan aft thundered out of the west. Smaller helicopters flanked her, like drones looking to mate with some great queen bee.

  One of the little stunt planes flew in, dropping a cannister near the holes. It sputtered to life on impact and threw a streamer of red smoke into the sky.

  Where's the damn artillery?

  "Field phone's still good, Major," Lewis said, extracting the canvas-covered pack from the van.

  "Spot for the artillery, if it's available," Valentine said, trying to give intelligible orders while racking his brain for what he knew about helicopter function. "Target that cherry bomb by the holes. And send Base Defense Southwest to Colonel Meadows."

  "Base defense southwest, yes, sir," Lewis repeated.

  Another plane roared by, seemingly inches from the garage, with a suddenness that momentarily stopped Valentine's heart.

  "I do not like these airplanes," Ahn-Kha said.

  Valentine watched the smaller helicopters shoot off more rock­ets, but these just sent up more thick clouds of smoke, putting a dark gray wall between the observation point and the holes.

  "If we can't see them ... set up the puddler. Lewis, any word on the artillery?"

  "Sounds like they've been hit too, sir," Lewis said, taking his hand away from the ear not held to the phone.

  The twin-rotored helicopter blew just enough smoke away with its massive blades so they could get a quick look at it as it landed by the hole.

  "That's your target," Valentine said. "See the smaller rotor, spinning at the end of the tail? Aim for the center of that."

  Smoke obscured the quick glance, but Valentine had seen something emerge from the hole dug by the worm, a turtlelike shape.

  "Our mortars, anything, get it put down on that hole!" They can shoot a hundred shells a day into the Dallas works, but they can't drop a few on hove Field.

  "Nothing to shoot at, my David," Ahn-Kha said, ears twitching this way and that, telegraphing his frustration. The Grog had his gun resting on his shoulder and its unique bipod. The gun muzzle was suspended by heavyweight fishing line from the bipod arching over it rather than resting atop the supports, allowing for tiny al­terations and changes in direction, typical of creative Grog engi­neering, right down to the leather collar that kept the line from melting. The black-painted line acted as a fore sight when Ahn-Kha wasn't shooting through the telescopic sight.

  Valentine felt impotent. "Tell Meadows it's a breakout," he said to Lewis. "I think the Kurians are trying to run for it with the helicopters."

  "Why didn't they just land on a street in Dallas?" Lewis asked.

  "We've got high-angle artillery there," Valentine said.

  "Sir," the Arkansan shouted as the smoke clouds cleared. Some kind of bay doors had opened at the rear of the massive helicopter, which rested on thick-tired multiple wheels. The turtlelike thing, which looked to Valentine like a greenish propane storage tank crawling across the runway without benefit of wheels, tracks, or legs, had turned for the big chopper.

  Ahn-Kha's gun coughed and Valentine's nose registered cordite. Ahn-Kha didn't bother to watch the shot. Instead he drew another highlighter-sized bullet from his bandolier and reloaded the gun.

  But the smoke was back.

  Valentine could just make out the helicopter through the thinning smoke. Explosions sounded from back toward the terminal, as another piece of the Razor military machine was blown up.

  Ahn-Kha must have been able to see the rear rotor for a second— he fired again. Valentine marked the strange tanklike thing entering the rear of the helicopter ... it was like watching
a film of a hen laying an egg run backward.

  "Where's the fuckin' support?" the Arkansan asked, voicing Valentine's thoughts exactly.

  Valentine heard engines on the ground. He looked to the south, where a few of the Razors' strange conglomeration of transport and patrol vehicles—including two prowlers—were barreling past the statue of Flight at the edge of the airport buildings.

  "Holy shit, the cavalry!" the Arkansan shouted.

  Valentine recognized the salt-and-pepper hair of the man at the minigun in the lead prowler. Captain William Post. It was hard not to join the private in screaming his head off.

  The aircraft spotted the vehicles too. A twin-engine airplane swooped in, firing cannon at the column. Valentine saw one big-tired transport turn and plow into the garage.

  Ahn-Kha fired again, and the helicopter wobbled as it left the ground, rear doors still closing. The helicopter lurched sideways— perhaps Ahn-Kha had damaged the rear rotor after all.

  The pilot managed to get the helicopter, which was skittering sideways across the field like a balky horse, righted.

  Light caught Valentine's eyes from above and he looked up to see muzzle flash from a big four-engine aircraft above. Some kind of gun fired on the approaching vehicles.

  But the Razors had guns of their own—and someone trained them on the staggering helicopter. Machine guns and small cannon opened up, sending pieces of fuselage flying. Black smoke blos­somed from the craft's engine crown, instantly dispersed by the powerful rotors.

  Ahn-Kha shot again.

  The Razor vehicles had to pay for their impertinent charge. The military turbofan planes swooped in—Valentine grimly noted a desert camouflage pattern atop the craft—and fired from some kind of cannon that created a muzzle flash as big as the blunt nose of the aircraft, planting blossoms of fiery destruction among the Razor attackers.

  Post's armored car turned over as it died. Valentine couldn't imagine what the wreck had done to his friend.

  Like sacrificing a knight to take the enemy queen, even as the prowlers exploded the double-rotored helicopter tipped sideways, sending its six blades spinning into the smoke-filled sky as it crashed. The helicopter's crew jumped out with credible speed, and Ahn-Kha swiveled his cannon.