The Fires of Coventry

by Rick Shelley

  “But what are we going to do if the Federation takes over Coventry?” Ida asked, finally lowering her voice. “What are we going to do if we’re prisoners for the rest of the war … or forever?”

  Reggie took a deep breath. “It’s too soon to think about that. Maybe it won’t make any difference at all to us. Prisoners? How could they lock up fifty million of us? What good would it do if they could? We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

  “What do you mean, wait and see what happens? What kind of answer is that?”

  “Ida.” Reggie stopped, not certain what to say. He took a deep breath and let it out, trying to think, trying to find some order in what was happening. “Just see if you can get any local news. I’ll be right back.”

  Before he got to the bedroom door, and before Ida had finished pulling on the robe she had reached for as he moved, “God Save the King” started to play on the complink, very loud.

  Delbert Montcalm, the governor of Coventry, was standing at a table. The governor was clearly shaken, sweating mightily. He stared at the camera as the volume of the anthem was gradually lowered. Once Montcalm started to speak, the music faded to just a hint, background to his remarks.

  “My fellow Coventrians, an evil night has come to us. I order all members of the Home Defense Force to report to your emergency rendezvous locations. Assemble as best you can. Do whatever is possible. Leave now, immediately.” He paused, as if waiting for some sign that those people had left the rooms where they might be watching.

  “For the rest of you, I fear that I have little substantive to offer,” Montcalm said after taking a gulp of water. “The situation is not very clear yet. We do know that our world has been invaded by military forces of the Confederation of Human Worlds. They have landed in or near all of our major cities. There may be other landings as well that we do notknow about yet because the Federation forces have apparently destroyed all of our communications satellites. There has been no contact between the invaders and your government. They have made no demands, and have not responded to our inquiries.

  “We can only advise citizens to remain inside, to do no traveling that is not absolutely essential. Report anything pertinent that you see or hear to your local authorities. If you are confronted by soldiers of the Federation, do not make any foolish attempts at resistance. Leave the defense of Coventry to its Home Defense Force. Remain calm.

  “We will continue to provide you with all of the information we can. God save the king!”

  As the governor’s image was replaced by the Commonwealth and Coventry flags, the sounds of the anthem came up again, and “God Save the King” played through to the end before the news reader appeared on camera again.

  “As Governor Montcalm stated, there have been reports of Federation landings in or near every major city. Airports appear to be primary targets. The Coventry Information Network has been unable to make contact with the invaders. We have reports of minor skirmishes in Coventry City, The Dales, South York, and elsewhere. We have no details, nor do we have confirmation from the government. Over the next few minutes, we will attempt to bring you live reports from our studios around the continent.”

  “I’ll check downstairs,” Reggie said, still staring at the screen. He blinked several times. “You check on the children. Make sure that their windows are closed and locked, then leave their doors open a crack. I’ll be right back.”

  There had been no reports of enemy landings near Hawthorne. The children were asleep. The house was as secure as it could be—safe against common intruders, the homegrown variety, but doors and windows would not stop soldiers if they chose to break in.

  Like most single-family houses on Coventry, the Bailey home had been built to the oldest colonial tradition, centered on a courtyard that gave the residents a chance to go out-doors without hazarding any dangerous native animals, even though those were rare near the towns and cities. There were few windows facing outward on the ground floor, and those windows were mostly high and small. The larger windows, and all but one door, faced the courtyard, which could be closed off by a heavy gate. Even the garage where they parked the family floater—ground-effect motorcar—was inside the courtyard. But the shutters on the windows which faced out were ornamental now, not functional.

  Reggie turned the bedroom light down until it was little more than a luminous glow when he returned from his tour of the house. Reggie and Ida sat together on the bed and watched the news on into the night. At first, the thought of sleep would have been alien to either of them, but both had had a long, full day. They were tired, and not all of the fear and uncertainty in the galaxy could hold that off indefinitely. One or the other would doze for a few minutes, somehow never both asleep at the same time.

  The news remained spotty. There were reports of minor fighting, more reports of enemy landings. Several of the network’s bureaus went off the air—one by one, usually without warning. The assumption—never confirmed—was that they had been taken by the invaders.

  Thirty minutes before sunrise in Hawthorne, when Reggie and Ida both slipped into sleep, there had still been no reports of any fighting or landings around Hawthorne.

  It was past eight o’clock when Ida woke, not much later than she did on any normal morning, after a full night of sleep. She woke feeling groggy, disoriented. That was not normal. The loginess meant that it was a moment before she recalled the frightening news reports in the night and glanced toward the complink. The set was still on, but there was only a cyan background on the screen and a message from the terminal: INCOMING SIGNAL HAS BEEN LOST.

  “Reg!” She reached across the bed to shake his shoulder, keeping at it until he responded.

  “Huh … ? Wha—?” A touch of fear was obvious even in Reggie’s half-awake reply. Then, as he too rememberedwhat they had seen and heard during the night, he sat up quickly.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” Reggie said. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, a futile bulwark against the return of fear, a renewed constriction to his chest.

  “Nothing’s coming in from the net.” Ida pointed at the stark message on the monitor.

  “Let’s check on the kids.”

  “I’ll do that. You look back and see what we missed before the link went out.”

  Reggie nodded as Ida got out of bed. The house’s central complink would have stored everything coming in. That was standard, giving the Baileys a chance to select anything they might want to keep from news or entertainment channels. The complink’s buffer memory could hold six days worth of incoming signals from all seventeen available channels until overflow caused it to erase the oldest data.

  He played back the feed. As more net bureaus went off, the announcer in Hawthorne grew visibly more agitated. He kept looking around the studio, as if waiting for the appearance of armed men. At twelve minutes before seven o’clock, the local signal was lost, abruptly, while the news reader was in the middle of a sentence. The last few minutes of news, before first the signal from The Dales and then the local signal were lost, was especially troubling.

  “There was no report of landings here,” Reggie said when Ida returned. “But that’s the only thing that could have forced them off here in town.”

  “The girls are in their bathroom, getting ready for the day. Al’s still sleeping,” Ida reported.

  “Did you tell the girls anything?”

  “I didn’t know what to say. They’re only eight years old. I couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, by the way, we’ve been invaded.’ “

  “I guess not. We’ll have to explain. We’ll have to say something. Everything is off the net, even the school channels.”

  “Explain? I wish somebody would explain it to me.”

  “Look at the last report that came in from The Dales.”

  Reggie replayed the last news that had come in from outside.

  “We have been receiving scattered reports of burning in a number of locales,” the news reader said. The night had taken its toll on his appe
arance. He was beginning to look quite bedraggled.

  “There are definitely Federation troops in The Dales. We have this video.” As the images replaced the announcer’s face, he continued, “Federation forces used loudspeakers to order residents out of apartments and houses in the East Beach area and then set fire to the buildings. The residents were forced to head east, away from other populated areas. Before our video feed suddenly ended, we saw, as you are seeing now, Federation forces ordering still more residents from their homes, near the center of The Dales. You can also see some of the fires. More than three dozen buildings, that we know of, had been put to the torch before we lost our video feed.”

  After a few seconds, the Hawthorne announcer came on screen, his voice plaintive and worn now. He spoke slowly, as if having difficulty summoning energy. “We have lost the signal from The Dales. At present, we are receiving no feed from any other bureau on Coventry. All communications are out with the rest of our world. It is impossible to tell what is going on outside Hawthorne, and we have only sketchy information locally. All I can say now is—”

  Then he too was gone.

  “Forcing people out of their homes in the middle of the night, and then setting fire to them?” Ida stared at her husband, seeing her own fear reflected in his face.

  “Maybe it was just in that one area. Maybe something happened there to make the invaders mad. Or … I don’t know.”

  “But what if they burn our house?”

  Reggie’s shrug showed how helpless he felt. “What can we do? If they tell us to get out, we won’t have any choice.”

  “We’ve got to do something.”

  Reggie did his best to think of options, but after a moment he shook his head. “All I can think of to do is to fix up small survival packs for all of us. A change of clothes foreveryone and as much food as we might be able to carry.”

  Ida nodded while he was talking. “We’d better do it in a hurry. And dress in warm outdoor clothes, just in case.”

  Doing something, anything, felt better than doing nothing—even if those measures turned out to be useless.

  2

  Noel Wittington did not hear the governor’s speech. Nearly thirty minutes before Delbert Montcalm came on the public net to call out the Coventry Home Defense Force, Noel’s commander had, on his own initiative, ordered his people—Company A, First Battalion, South York Rifles—to their emergency rendezvous location.

  The South York contingent of Coventry’s HDF was organized as two infantry battalions. Even though South York was Coventry’s third largest city, neither battalion had ever approached anything close to its authorized strength. They were generally lucky to include enough members to fill half of the slots in their tables of organization. And getting all of the individuals who were carried on the muster sheets to training sessions had always been nearly impossible. Traditionally, a turnout of fifty percent was considered a success. The HDF had never been a high priority for most Coventrians, even its members. Since the start of the war a few more people had joined and gone through basic training; a few more “veterans” had started to meet their training obligations. But the war was far away, something for professionals to handle. Few people had foreseen the possibility that it might actually come to Coventry.

  Noel loaded his alert bag in his floater, then set his rifle, and his allotment of one hundred rounds of ammunition, and a box of field rations—designed to last one person for five days—in the car. The bottle of whisky and the dozen beers were his own addition to the prescribed call-out kit, a habit formed during monthly training meets.

  Twenty years old and single, Noel had spent the evening with his fiancée, watching a performance of A Comedy of Errors put on by a local repertory company that included several of Noel’s college friends. Noel had taken his fiancée home long before the mobilization order, and the invasion, came.

  He had even anticipated Captain Stanley’s call by nearly fifteen minutes. Hearing a lot of shuttles overhead, he had turned on the complink. Multiple shuttles, too noisy to be civilian, meant that something was drastically wrong. Noel was gathering his call-out kit even before the local news reader had reported the arrival of the enemy fleet and the landings. If the alert call had not come, Noel was prepared to head out to the emergency rendezvous site without orders. He had had plenty of time to follow the war news, and he retained his full share of youthful imagination.

  With a population exceeding two million, there was always traffic on the streets of South York, even late at night—private vehicles, trucks, busses, and the I-Rail, the monorail public transportation line.

  Noel lived fairly close to the center of South York, in what was usually termed the old city. It was an area with plenty of bachelors and a few unmarried young women, close to the centers for social life in the city, and close to the university that Noel attended fitfully.

  He was not the slowest driver under normal circumstances, and the call from Captain Hubert Stanley had made it clear that these were not normal circumstances. Federation troops were invading Coventry. Some were in or near South York. Their orders had been simple: get to the rendezvous as quickly as possible. Noel had a long way to drive, nearly eight miles across the center of South York and out to the northwest.

  He worried that he might run into the invaders. The captain had not been able to say where they had landed, or where they might have gone since. Noel had no idea what he might be able to do if he did run into Federation troops before he reached his unit. He thought that he might simply try to break through any roadblock, or try to go around it. He had his rifle on the seat next to him, loaded, with the safety off. If nothing else, perhaps he could shoot his way through any roadblock.

  Noel had never been on the wrong end of a gunshot. In his eighteen months in the Coventry HDF, he had fired only 120 rounds from his rifle, all at stationary targets on the practice range north of the city. Those targets had never fired back.

  No Federation troops blocked Noel’s race across South York. He made the drive in fourteen minutes, turning off of the road and following the unmarked grassy lane back to the rendezvous. It wasn’t until he was almost there that he thought to wonder why he had not seen anyone else from his HDF company on the road. There were only two other civilian floaters, and one of the company’s ground-effect trucks, at the rendezvous. The vehicles were all properly dispersed around the perimeter, under trees.

  Noel parked his floater, turned off the lights, and got out with his rifle. He stood next to the car and looked around in the almost total darkness. No one called out a greeting. He heard nothing. He saw no one approaching.

  I can’t be the only one here, he thought. There were those few other vehicles. Some of the others had made it.

  Or have they been bagged already? That possibility made him really nervous for the first time since he had heard, and then seen, the shuttles passing overhead. If the others had already been captured, there might be Federation soldiers waiting to add him to their catch as well. Noel brought up his rifle in both hands and moved farther away from his floater, sliding one foot along the ground and then the other, being careful not to trip over anything in the dark.

  Time seemed suspended. Noel thought that five, maybe ten minutes passed with nothing but the normal sounds of the night, insects and small animals that could be heard but not seen. As his eyes adapted to the dark, he saw shapes that would have been familiar, reassuring, in the light but which were menacing hulks now, perhaps hiding dozens, hundreds, of enemy soldiers.

  Noel whistled softly, a rising tone, a questioning sound. A moment later, he tried to whistle again, but his throat wastoo dry. Anybody here? For an instant, Noel thought that he had actually spoken. After that, he simply wasn’t sure.

  A light caught him in the face, blinding him, pulling panic out of his core like magma reaching for a vent on the surface. Before that panic could erupt, before his finger could spasm across the trigger of his rifle, he heard a familiar voice.

  “W
ittington, over here. Straight ahead.”

  Noel recognized Captain Stanley’s voice and obeyed his directions as the light went out. A galaxy of stars seemed to orbit just in front of his eyes. Noel kept one hand out in front of him, feeling for obstructions, as he slid one foot in front of the other. He blinked furiously, trying to get his eyes to adapt to the dark once more. He had taken only a couple of steps before the flashlight came on again. This time it was directed at the ground, several paces in front of Noel.

  “You’re staggering like a drunk,” Captain Stanley said.

  “It’s the torch. You blinded me,” Noel replied.

  “Here, slip a helmet on.” The captain handed him a battle helmet. Those were not routinely taken home by the members of the HDF, as maintaining the electronics took some expertise. The helmets, and the few mapboards that the South York Rifles possessed, were normally stored at the armory and brought out only for drills and maneuvers.

  Noel put the helmet on, lowered the visor, and switched on the electronics and night-vision circuits as the captain turned off his flashlight again. The helmet was not the latest model. All of the HDF’s helmets were nearly obsolete, replaced in the Army and Combined Space Forces more than a decade before. The Coventry HDF did not even possess field skins, part of the normal gear for any full-time soldier or Marine for a generation. But the helmets did function, giving the wearer relatively decent vision at night. Coventry’s Parliament had never taken its HDF seriously, always making it one of the lowest priorities when the annual budget debate was held. Even after the start of the war, too many members of Parliament had held to the notion that the Home Defense Force was a vanity. The borders of the Commonwealth were too far away, and the military might of the central government too vast for part-time soldiers to have any effect.