The Fires of Coventry

by Rick Shelley

  “You know where that rocky area is, southeast of here?”

  “What rocky area? This is as far as I’ve come this way.”

  “It’s a mile or so from here, a limestone protrusion of some sort, breaking right up in the middle of a patch of trees. There are some small caves, just little holes really. It shouldn’t be hard to find room for our things. And there’s a lot of loose rock lying about as well.”

  “If we’re going to take everything we’ve brought out, it’s going to take several trips. Have we got time?”

  “We’ll have to make time. If we don’t get it done tonight, we might not get another chance.”

  Although the temperature was fifty degrees Fahrenheit, both men were sweating long before they finished. They needed three trips. The first time, they had searched for twenty minutes before finding a suitable place to hide their stores.

  “I came out here several times, some years back, looking for good caves to explore,” Eric said. “I didn’t find what I wanted, but there are several we can use.” After those years, his recollection had been slightly deficient—the rocky area was farther off than he had thought and the caves even smaller than he recalled—but they did find one hole that was suitable. The entrance was under a sloping slab of limestone, just barely large enough for one of them to slide through at a time. Four feet down, it opened up onto a dry shelf eighteen inches high, three feet wide, and six feet deep. The main hole went down another six feet before it became too narrow for anything larger than a malnourished rat.

  “None of the caves I found were big enough to shelter people,” Eric said after they finished storing their last load. “This must be the biggest I ever found.”

  Reggie was trying to recover his breath after their exertions. He looked toward the eastern sky and shook his head. “We’d better hurry. It’s going to be light before we get home.” After a pause, he added, “Ida’s going to be frantic.”

  “We can save a few minutes if we cut directly across toward home instead of going back to the other place first.”

  “You sure you can find your way without getting us lost?”

  Eric hesitated, then said, “Not sure enough, I guess.”

  Although he panted with effort through most of the return trip, Reggie did not stop for a break, and he managed to keep Eric moving as well. They did not move nearly as quietly as they had coming out. Reggie was more worried about Ida than any danger of noise. She would be almost beyond panic at the length of time he had been gone.

  Eric and Reggie could see their houses in silhouette as soon as they emerged from the forested area behind their tracts. The black of night had muted into the grays that preceded dawn. The men angled toward their homes directly instead of going along the property line between them and turning away from each other only at the end.

  Reggie was out in the open, feeling much too visible, when he heard the noise in the sky. He dropped to the ground instantly, before he looked up. Just to the northwest, no more than a half mile away, the dark shape of a military shuttle was heading in, dropping at a steep angle, obviously ready to land near the center of Hawthorne. Two more shuttles followed, coming out of the north, from the direction of The Dales. They circled around, almost as far south as Reggie’s house, before angling back toward the oldest part of town.

  After a moment of nearly paralytic fear, Reggie got to his feet and sprinted for the house. Ida was at the door. She pulled it open before Reggie reached it, and almost pulled him through the opening.

  “What was that noise?” she demanded.

  Out of breath again, Reggie had difficulty answering her question, but did finally manage.

  “Where have you been?” Ida asked next. “You were gone so long I was sure you were dead, or too hurt to move.”

  Reggie collapsed on the nearest chair and leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs, while he tried to suck in air. It took more than a minute before he could talk without excessive difficulty, or the feeling that he might vomit. He told her what he and Eric had done that had taken so long.

  “He’s afraid some of the others might take what we’ve got if we do get turned out.” Reggie looked at the wall, roughly in the direction of the center of town. “If those shuttles mean what I think they mean, that time might come awfully soon.”

  “You really think we might lose our home?” Even after five days of hearing stories—and not hearing any official reassurances that the rumors were false—Ida Bailey still could not fully accept the possibility. She didn’t want to believe.

  “If they want to destroy the house, there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop them,” Reggie said.

  That wasn’t the answer that Ida had hoped to hear. She turned away from her husband, not wanting him to see how his words affected her. But he didn’t need to see her face to know. He felt the same things. Reggie had put as much of himself into building the house as anyone could have. And there were all the years of memories, the years of living that they had put into the place. It was the only home the children had ever known.

  “You’ve been up all night. You’d better get a little sleep while you can,” Ida said. She sucked in a deep breath. “If those shuttles did land in town, this could be the day.”

  Reggie stared blankly at the back of his wife’s head. Yes, it could be, he thought. Probably is. But he didn’t want to say that. Ida had sounded fragile, as if she were about to burst into tears. Reggie wasn’t certain what he should, or could, say—certainly nothing that would make her feel any better.

  “Ida …” Reggie stopped, and she turned to face him, strain visible in her face, more than he had ever seen before.

  “I guess I had better try for a little sleep,” he said when nothing else occurred to him. “You’ve still got the packs for us to carry if …”

  “Yes. I ran fresh food supplies through the replicator after you left, enough for a couple of days.”

  “I think I should eat before I go to bed.” Reggie had just realized that he was hungry. “It’s been a long night.”

  When he finally collapsed across the bed, after a meal and a shower, he fell asleep almost instantly. There was no need for the rest of the family to be quiet while Reggie slept. It would have taken extraordinary noise to wake him. He had dressed before flopping on the bed, all but his shoes. If the Federation troops came before he woke on his own, he didn’t want to waste time putting on clothing. There would be more important claims on that time. If …

  The children knew what was happening, even if they did not fully comprehend it. They had spent too much time on the complink before not to notice that nothing new was on it, and that they couldn’t be certain of contacting their friends. The girls were frightened, and could not understand why soldiers would come to take over their world, or why they might turn people out and burn their homes. Tears came easily to them, and questions that their parents could not begin to answer. Twelve-year-old Al was torn between his fear and not wanting to show that fear. He wanted reassurances, but he talked of fighting the invaders. Like his sisters, he had been suffering nightmares for the last several nights, waking at the most frightening scenes.

  Ida had been making her own preparations during the days, and at night while Reggie was out on his treks. There was a small compartment in the cellar, a three-foot cube built out under the courtyard, waterproof and lined with insulating plascrete that might keep the contents safe against fire. The first items that Ida had put inside were data chips—photographs and letters, important documents, the keepsakes of her family. Maybe they would survive in the underground vault. And, the biggest maybe of all, maybe the familywould someday get to come home and reclaim them. If they were forced to leave.

  Ida did her crying when there was no one around to see. Silent tears never stopped her from working. At times, the crying seemed uncontrollable, yet if another member of the family came into the room, it stopped instantly.

  Whatever happens, we will survive, Ida told herself every time she s
tarted thinking of all of the terrible things that the war might bring. Somehow, we’ll make it.

  She spent as much of the daylight hours as she could staring out windows, wondering how much warning they might have before Federation soldiers came down the street and ordered them out. After the shuttles had come over and headed toward the center of Hawthorne, Ida concentrated on looking in that direction. The children got up and dressed, then ate breakfast. Ida urged them to have seconds, without saying why. Even sweets, usually forbidden in the morning, were there for the children.

  Eat while you can, Ida thought. Then she had to leave the kitchen to make certain that the children would not see tears come to her face. She went upstairs and looked out the window in the girls’ room that faced the center of Hawthorne.

  It had been two hours since the shuttles had passed overhead and Reggie had returned from his night out in the forest. Almost anything could happen in two hours, in imagination, at least. Ida searched as much of the horizon as she could see, expecting, fearing, to see plumes of smoke rising, perhaps the start of a huge conflagration that would span the horizon like a forest fire out of control in late summer. Three years earlier, a wildfire had come within two miles of the house before nature, aided by local residents, had finally beat it out.

  It was past noon when Ida finally saw the smoke.

  “Go wake your father,” Ida told Al. The boy had come into the room a few minutes before. He took one look out of the window, then ran for his parents’ bedroom.

  It was less than two minutes later when Al returned, followed closely by his father. Reggie crossed to the windowand put an arm around his wife’s waist, pulling her close to him as he looked at the three columns of smoke he could see—while he tried to estimate where the fires were, how far away.

  “Almost to the center of town, I think,” Ida said.

  “It might be a long time before they get to us,” Reggie said. “Have you heard any more shuttles coming in?”

  “Nothing.”

  Al squeezed in next to his father so that he could see out the window too. “They’re really burning people’s homes?”

  “They’re burning something,” Reggie said. “I wonder if we can get through to anyone on the net.”

  “There’s been nothing all morning,” Al said. “I’ve been trying to link to some of my friends. Nothing’s going through.”

  “Not even next door?” Reggie asked. “The Knowles boys?”

  “Nothing. I ran over there a little while ago to see if maybe it was just our system that was out, but they can’t get anything either.”

  The three were all staring out the window when two more pillars of smoke started to rise.

  “It looks like they’re working toward Royal Oaks Pike,” Reggie said.

  “That’s just the next road over!” Al said.

  Reggie pulled away from the others. “I’m going up on the roof to get a better look. If there’s just one group doing the burning, it could be days before they get to us.”

  “Or maybe just tonight,” Ida said.

  A narrow stairway led to the roof over the main wing of the house. A low parapet surrounded the flat roof. Now and then, the Baileys had spent evenings up there, eating or just enjoying cool breezes in the summer after the sun set. The last time they had eaten on the roof had been a couple of months before. Late in autumn, it would be too cool, especially if the wind came out of the northeast, carrying a polar chill inland.

  Ida went to see to the girls, wanting to reassure herself that Angel and Ariel were still safe, that the distant smokehad not somehow hurt the twins. Al followed his father. When the two of them got to the roof, they could see more smoke, farther away and off to the left.

  “That looks like it’s clear out on the other side of town,” Al said, pointing.

  Reggie nodded. “It means that there’s more than one group working.”

  “Why are they burning things?” Al stared at his father until he answered.

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know why they came here in the first place. It’s not like we had an army on Coventry.”

  Al needed a moment before he thought of another question. “What will it be like if we have to go live in the woods?”

  “I’m not sure. Like camping, I guess, but we’ve never done any of that. I guess it’ll be cold at night, uncomfortable, dirty. If it goes on for very long, it might be hard to find enough food to fill our stomachs every day. We’ll have to hunt for animals, look for berries and other plants we can eat.”

  “Like in the adventure vids?”

  “Something like that, I guess.”

  “Dad,” Al said after they had been silent for nearly ten minutes, watching more fires start up along Royal Oaks Pike—no more than four miles away.

  “What?” Reggie turned toward his son, then sat on the edge of the parapet, which put their eyes almost at the same level.

  “I don’t want to die.” There was a tremor behind the words, and fear in the boy’s eyes.

  “Nobody wants to,” his father said. “We’ll make out okay, I think, even if they drive us off into the woods. We’ll just have to use our wits and keep going until the Commonwealth comes to drive the Federation off.”

  “Will anyone come?”

  “Of course they will.” Reggie hoped that he sounded more confident of that than he felt. “The government got message rockets out before the Feddies could stop them.

  We’re an important part of the Commonwealth. They won’t let the Federation stay here for long.”

  How long? he asked himself. Will we be able to hold out until they get here and free us?

  Part 2

  5

  “This video has been magnified considerably, but little detail is visible,” Colonel Laplace told the second gathering of all of the sergeants during the voyage out from Buckingham. Victoria and her escorts had made their second Q-space transit and were halfway through the twenty-four-hour layover that the colonel had promised before making the final jump to Coventry.

  “The scout ship was unable to approach the planet close enough to get anything better. The Feddies were prepared, and knocked out each of the drones within ninety seconds of launch.” Laplace turned sideways so that he could see the pictures on the bulkhead monitor. For thirty seconds he remained silent, watching.

  “In addition, more Federation ships arrived in-system while our scout ship was on the scene, forcing it to break off surveillance. To the best of our knowledge, the initial invasion was carried out by a single regiment. Since Coventry had negligible defensive capability, that would have been more than sufficient.” Laplace hesitated. The invasion of Coventry would force some new thinking on Buckingham. Every world in the Second Commonwealth would have to be defended now—every important world, at least, and with membership in the Commonwealth voluntary, every world was important. The prospect seemed impossible to Laplace; troops and money both would be lacking for that enterprise. But it was plainly no longer enough to garrison only “frontline” worlds. After Coventry and Reunion, fighting could touch any world in the Commonwealth.

  “Our official intelligence estimate—for whatever thatmight be worth—is that total Federation manpower on Coventry cannot total as much as three regiments, with naval assets in orbit to protect them from chaps like us. But we have direct knowledge of no more than the initial invasion force. This”—he gestured at the screen—”poses questions for which we have no satisfactory answers. The fires. There are too many for us to assume that they result merely from military action, that they represent places where the local inhabitants defended themselves. There appear to be fires in virtually every city and town on the planet, growing numbers of fires. Our tentative analysis suggests that the fires are being deliberately set. We have no idea what purpose there is to that, why the Federation might be doing it … and the chance that the locals might be starting the fires can’t even be eliminated. The only possibilities that we have been able to come up with to explain the
phenomenon strain credulity almost to the breaking point.” He paused again, staring at the video replay.

  “We’ll know more when we arrive over Coventry and can get new video showing what has happened in the interim, and perhaps make contact with the planetary government or residents.” The colonel turned away from the screen and looked at his sergeants, most of whom were still staring intently at the video.

  “We haven’t identified any concentrations of Federation troops. To the extent that our scout was able to determine, those troops have been widely dispersed, covering every settled portion of Coventry. Dispersed as occupation troops would be if no military counterstroke was anticipated.” Laplace did not have to emphasize that statement. Any sergeant in the Royal Marines could leap to the thought: How could they possibly think that we wouldn’t come?

  “For those of you who might not have looked at the database yet, Coventry has only the one major continent, and that contains virtually all of the population. The greatest concentration of people is in the northwestern region of that continent, in three major cities, that is, cities with more than a million population, and a score of smaller cities and large towns, with even smaller communities scattered along theseacoast, several major river systems, and along routes connecting the larger population centers. There are lesser concentrations elsewhere on the continent, decreasing in number and size the farther one gets from the capital at Coventry City.

  “We won’t be able to determine our landing pattern and initial objectives until we see what the situation is when we arrive. Regimental operations has several possible scenarios for you to study and go over with your men. We will likely not have a final plan of action until we’re ready to board shuttles for the landing. That means that we will rely on the basic skills of a Marine even more than we do in most circumstances—basic skills and the intelligence to improvise as needed.

  “That’s all for now, gentlemen. Take the next three hours for training. After evening mess call, get your men settled in for the night as quickly as possible. I anticipate the call to board shuttles in under twelve hours, at 0300 hours ship’s time.”