Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  The truck turned at an intersection near the center of town, and finally passed through a section not lit up by the floodlights, shadowed by the looming mass of a series of warehouses where the farmers used to send raw food to the City for sale. I waited until the truck came next to an alley between the buildings, then I dropped off and rolled into the utter darkness after the vehicle passed over me.

  I laid there motionless for a few minutes just to make sure I hadn’t been spotted; but the sensors in my hood detected no motion, no heat sources and no wireless transmissions and I wasn’t hearing anything suspicious around me. I slowly rose to a crouch and edged back out into the street. The warehouses seemed broken down and abandoned to me, like the city had fallen decades ago instead of months. The street lights were out, but even in the dark I could see pockmarks in the walls of the buildings where KE gun darts had penetrated; and in places black stains that would have been deep red in the light. At least the Tahni had cleaned up the bodies, or more likely forced the humans they held in their work camps to clean them up.

  I hugged the walls of the businesses on my side of the road, across from the warehouses, and navigated the shadows. Broken glass crunched under my feet from the yawning windows of farm-machine sales showrooms, and the small part of my mind which had time for such inanities considered that the use of glass instead of transplas was another indication of what a backwater Canaan was. No one wanted to invest in a transplas fabricator when glass worked just as well and could be made with cheaper, more primitive equipment and readily-available sand instead of oil you had to drill for and process into polymer. And no one would waste cargo space on an interstellar freighter shipping something as cheap as transplas.

  I’d never have thought of that before I left; it was just something I accepted, like the fact we still harvested crops from the ground instead of growing them in orbital food factories, or that we raised cattle instead of cloning meat in a lab, or that we hunted game. All that would be unheard of on Earth or even the closer colonies like Hermes and Eden, and rather than feeling ashamed of our eccentricities, I’d grown to appreciate them and even miss them. Sneaking through the devastated streets of Harristown, I wondered if things would ever be the same again.

  I came to the end of the block and to the edge of another area brightly lit by the security tower lights that popped up all through the occupied portions of the town. I knew they had to have cameras and sensors on those towers as well, and it was going to be iffy whether I could make it through those areas undetected. I took a knee in the shadow of the last of the row of storehouses, hearing water drip fitfully from a drain spout somewhere behind me. Across the through street was the office of the Constabulary; it was a burned and collapsed ruin, as were the government buildings around it. I thought they had to have put up some resistance there to get that kind of attention.

  Beyond the burnt-out government offices, I could see the row houses where most of the people of the City had lived. They looked abandoned now, and some had burned. None had power and I saw slashes of green paint across the doors of the intact ones. I knew from previous briefings on Tahni occupations of colony worlds that this was a sign the Tahni military used to indicate that the structure had been cleared of enemy and then secured with anti-personnel mines. They weren’t taking chances with squatters, apparently.

  I dashed across the street at a sprint, keeping my time in the light to a minimum before I was back behind the cover of the Constabulary building. Closer to it, I could see the blast points where electron beams had exploded through the exterior walls. I remembered meeting Canaan’s Chief Constable once, here in Harristown, during a meeting of the Council of the Elders. Dad had taken us kids along so we could see how thing were run in the Church, and Constable Ajayi had taken a moment to say hello to my father. He’d seemed like a nice man, with a quick smile and a clear, piercing honesty to his dark eyes.

  I tried to imagine him leading the small Constabulary force armed with a few shotguns and scrounged hunting rifles against Tahni in battle armor, with KE guns and beamers. I wondered, as I picked my way around the rubble, if he was still in there somewhere, buried in a grave of stone and wood, or if he had been incinerated along with the rest of the dead?

  There was enough fallen debris that I was able to pick my way through the rowhouses while staying in the shadows, until I found an open alley to the next street over. That was where the comparisons to Hell really started to look accurate.

  The Tahni had set up the internment camp near the center of the industrial district, in what had been the storage lots of the city’s largest autoharvester manufacturer. They were already roofed over, so it had been a trivial matter to surround them with wire fencing and install guard gates. And the lights. The Tahni liked their floodlights. Maybe they just didn’t like the long Night here. I wondered if it scared them.

  From only fifty meters away, I could see the faces of the people inside the fence of the closest enclosure. They huddled together under blankets, sitting on the bare, damp concrete in what looked like family groups, with small children in the center. The faces of the adults were bad enough, the desperation etched into their eyes with a fringe of sheer terror threatening to overwhelm everything else, but the kids...

  My shoulders shook as I tried hard to convince myself not to throw everything away in a vain attempt to free them that very instant. The camps weren't that heavily guarded; I could probably get them out. And they'd all be slaughtered once they got to the perimeter fences, because I didn't have any transportation for them or any way to get them to the caves without being followed. I swallowed bile and moved on.

  The rain started again as I circled around the internment camps and the ugly, corrugated aluminum factories that housed them, and I welcomed it. Drumbeats of water on metal roofs and a haze of fog rolling through the streets obscured my passage but, more importantly, it obscured the sights of the camp from me. If I'd had to look at those faces a second more, all the reasoning in the world wouldn't have kept me from trying to break them out.

  Harristown wasn't a big city, despite the impression I'd had of it as a kid, and the industrial district was near the outskirts; it was minutes before I was within sight of the perimeter fence. I clung to the wreckage of what had been a fabricator repair shop and looked out at what had been the Harristown spaceport. It hadn't been much more than a fusion-form landing field with a few maintenance buildings and never more than a heavy lift cargo lander or two in residence. Now a half dozen troop transports and two assault shuttles were crowded onto the pads and Tahni maintenance tractors rumbled between them like dung beetles crawling from one pile of shit to another.

  What I wanted was tucked off to the right of the port, jammed in like the unwanted add-on that it was. Most of it was underground, for political reasons. The compact fusion reactor was buried at the edge of the port’s landing pad, and the lasers it powered were mostly concealed as well, except for the thick transplas of the emitter arrays. They were powerful enough to take down a starship in high orbit, and the orbital mirrors could direct their fire anywhere around the planet.

  The control buildings were all that stuck out, low-ceilinged domes of buildfoam clustered in a semicircle around the laser arrays, lit up by more security lighting, though not as glaring because we’d set it up rather than the Tahni. Set around the whole installation at thirty meter intervals were sensor pods, just bumps half-buried like decorative rocks. They were why I was here; now I just had to get to them. I couldn’t have approached from the other side, up the lakeshore, because it was all open ground. We’d had to use the forests for cover to avoid being spotted by their satellite coverage or aerial drones. But now I had to get through that fence again.

  And I didn’t have to wait too long before I saw my way through. A handcart filled with food was being pushed up the main road by four unguarded humans, scarecrows in flapping layers of baggy clothes that might have once fit normally before months of substandard rations. They were a couple
hundred meters away, but they were heading for the gate and I figured that meant they were taking rations to either the crews at the landing field or the ones at the planetary defense station.

  I yanked the small, cheap pack off my back and ripped it open, taking out the ragged, oversized duster I’d crammed into it back in the caves. It wasn’t the best disguise, but it would have to do. Hopefully, we all looked alike to the Tahni. I pulled it on over my Reflex armor, tucked my hood into a pocket and then sprinted along the row of buildings lining the road, exposed to the light for fractions of a second.

  I was almost even with them when I walked out onto the street like I’d just been out of sight taking a piss, and took a spot pushing the cart. The guy next to me was older, weathered and wind-beaten, with a beard limp with the rain and gone wild after months without trimming. He looked at me with wide, paranoid eyes but he didn’t stop walking.

  “Who the fuck are you?” He demanded, voice kept low.

  “I’m just here to help,” I said simply and honestly, keeping my eyes forward, on the twisting gravel road and the guard gate ahead.

  “Caleb?”

  I froze at the word, head jerking around as I recognized the voice. On the other side of the bearded man was a tall, gangly Asian male, gaunt with hunger and grey with stress. I knew his face, even with the added years and privation, knew the voice as well as I knew my own. It was Jason’s father.

  “Mr. Chen,” I rasped, my throat dry.

  “They said…” Alexander Chen stumbled over his words, nearly fell over his own feet. “Jason said you’d been killed in the Battle for Mars.”

  “Are you with the military?” The girl on the other side of Mr. Chen asked, voice too loud and face flushed. She couldn't have been more than seventeen.

  “Quiet,” I snapped at her, harshly enough to make her go pale. I turned back to Mr. Chen.

  “Jason sent me,” I told him, my voice pitched to barely carry over the clatter of the heavy cart’s wheels on the gravel. The gate seemed to be approaching way too fast, and I had to get him and the others settled down quickly. “I can’t say any more right now. All I can tell you is that I’m here to help; and right now, I need to get through that gate. The only way I can do that is if you all relax and act natural.”

  I looked each one of them in the eye. “Can you do that?”

  “Of course,” Mr. Chen said, nodding firmly and giving the others a look that said they’d better agree. The three of them nodded, the bearded man mumbling assent, a wild gleam of hope replacing his earlier paranoia.

  “Is Mrs. Chen…” I began, knowing I shouldn’t ask now, but needing to know.

  “She’s back in the camp,” he said, jerking his head the way they’d come. “She’s…okay, so far. As much as any of us are.” Another moment of nothing but the rumble of the cart. "I heard what happened to your family. I'm very sorry."

  "We've all lost people," I said, trying to shut those feelings down before they welled up. Now wasn't the time. "Let's try to make sure we don't lose anyone else in the next few minutes. Everyone needs to be quiet and be cool."

  That shut down the conversation and no one spoke as we got closer to the gate. The rain had died down to a trickle in the last few minutes but now it picked back up again and drummed a steady beat on the road, the plastic cart and our sodden clothes. The bearded man cursed softly while the girl pulled her collar over her head and whimpered, keeping a token hand on the cart. I took most of the task myself; the cart was pretty loaded down but it felt like nothing to me.

  The fog and the sheets of rain obscured much of the wire fence and turned the beams of the floodlamps into bars of light that pierced through the night and illuminated only a narrow slice of ground. The Tahni guards at the gate weren't even their heavily armored shock troops, just normal functionaries, the quality of soldier they would have pushed into a non-combat role. They wore light, soft armor and open helmets and carried laser carbines; their presence here was an indication of how little import the Tahni occupation commander must have given to the civilian prisoners.

  I kept my head down as two of the guards approached, their boots making squelching sounds in the mud to the side of the road. They spoke to each other in Tahni, not expecting any of the humans to understand, but my headcomp translated it for me.

  "Those technicians sitting dry on their asses are going to be eating well," one of them said to the other as he lifted the cover over the cart and pawed at the food containers.

  "Maybe if you'd pay attention to your lessons," the other one, who was the equivalent of a junior NCO by the insignia on his arm, replied, "you could sit in the dry, warm control center, too."

  The first man, who wore a rank akin to a Commonwealth Marine private, made an incomprehensible grunt and waved us through the gate as it slid aside. I let myself sneak a look out of the corner of my eye as we passed through, saw the pintle-mounted KE gun there swing around to follow us in a desultory manner, the Tahni soldier controlling it going through the motions by rote. I let out a relieved hiss when it turned away.

  "Thank God," I heard the teenage girl murmur to my right.

  "Let's not be thanking anybody just yet," I cautioned her in as casual a tone as I could muster.

  It was almost another kilometer to the control station, and the road only got worse with the distance. There were mud-filled ruts worn into it where vehicles had traveled in the rain and we had to fight to keep the wheels of the cart out of them. And we had to look normal, so I couldn't just muscle my way through and we had to move at slower than a normal walking pace. I felt horribly exposed and only the rain comforted me.

  We took a right off the main road and headed down a lesser-used track towards the control station; no heavy trucks had come this way and it was easier going, if just as muddy. We were at the sensor perimeter in another ten minutes, and this was where things got tenuous. As we passed by the innocuous metallic lump in the grass next to the road, I reached out with my neurolink and tried to connect with the security system.

  The Tahni wouldn't have bothered to reconfigure the existing system or change passwords; our computer security was much more sophisticated than theirs, probably because we'd had to worry about hackers for the last two hundred years, while their society didn't even have the concept. But they might have replaced the whole system with one of their own, if the commander here was particularly diligent. If that had happened, their system would detect my attempted connection and alarms would sound and the shit would truly hit the fan. I'd be lucky to get out alive and God only knew what the Tahni would do to Mr. Chen and the other people with me.

  I almost smiled when I received an answer in Commonwealth programming language granting me access to the system. The Tahni had gotten complacent after Demeter. They hadn't even shut down wireless access, much less replaced the computer system for the security perimeter. This wasn't the whole battle, but it was damn sure one domino down. If we could make it this far, surprise would still be on our side.

  I struggled to keep my eyes downcast and my demeanor defeated when the Tahni technicians came out of the largest of the dome structures to take charge of the food. They unloaded it, then replaced it with empties from the last delivery, and we were back on the road in less than ten minutes.

  "Did you get what you needed?" Alexander Chen asked me as we wheeled the cart back toward the city. He was next to me now, while the others stayed on the other end of the push bar and eyed me from time to time, like I was either a dangerous animal they didn't want to approach or a star athlete they were afraid to talk to.

  "I did," I assured him, not going into any details.

  "I know you can't tell me much," he said, grinning tightly as if he had read my thought. "But I need to know for Alandra's sake..."

  He trailed off, like he was afraid to hear the answer I might give. I put a hand on his arm and squeezed gently. It was as thin as a stick.

  "I can't get you out now," I told him honestly. "But I am coming back for
you and Mrs. Chen. I promised Jason I'd look out for you."

  "He's a good boy," Chen said. There might have been a tear trickling down his face, but it was hard to tell. "If anything happens to us, make sure he knows we're proud of him."

  I wanted to tell him that nothing was going to happen, that I was here now and everything was going to be all right. He and I both knew better.

  "I will," I said instead. For now, that would have to be enough.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Take in a breath,” I said like a chant, “get a sight picture, let it halfway out and just barely touch the trigger…”

  There was a hum-snap and Pete’s shoulder moved back a few centimeters with the recoil, but I was watching the target. It was a used plastic crate about a meter square, filled with water to weigh it down, and it was a hundred meters away, barely visible even on infrared under the darkened canopy of the trees. The heavy tungsten dart struck it near the center and it exploded in a spray of water three meters high. Pete whooped and pumped a fist, though he kept the heavy Gauss rifle pointed downrange. The IR goggles he wore had been in the shipment with the weapons and they were synched with the rifle’s sights, but he’d been having trouble getting used to them.

  “Good job, Pete,” I said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Keep practicing.”

  I moved down to the next firing position, where an older farmer with big hands and a boney face was putting round after round through the cluster of targets we’d set up at varying distances in the gaps between the genetically engineered pines and spruce of the New Forest.

  “Excellent, Mr. Danner,” I told him as I passed. “Take a break, you don’t want to get burned out and learn bad habits.” I turned to the line of people waiting a few meters behind him and waved the next one forward to replace him.

  We only had two dozen shooting stations set up; there just wasn’t room for more, given the need to keep overhead tree coverage between us and the satellites, and the further need to keep a thick enough backstop to keep the rounds from hitting anyone. It would take hours to cycle everyone through even once; but since it was Night anyway, we could have them sleep in shifts.