The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (45 page)

The Vampyre moved at half again the bomber’s speed. Ripped through the last bank of clouds. Framed by the lightning. Fired its lasers.

The beams cut the night, touched the bomber, converged. Too far away. Hardly hot. But warming, warming. Every microsecond brought the sleek black interceptor closer, and the wand of light grew deadlier.

And then the other beam jumped upward from the bomber’s tail. Swords of light crossed in the night. And the shrieking Vampyre impaled itself upon the glowing stake.

Reynolds was watching his infrared when it died. The mere touch of the enemy laser had been too much for the system’s delicate opticals. But he didn’t need it now. He could see the bomber, ahead and below, outlined in the flashes.

There were alarms ringing, clamoring, slamming at his ears. He ignored them. It was too late now. Too late to pull away and up. Too late to shake the lasers.

Now there was only time to find a victim.

Reynolds’ eyes were fixed on the bomber, and it grew larger by the microsecond. His hand was on the missile stud, waiting, waiting. The warheads were armed. The computers were locked, tracking.

The Alfie loomed large and larger in the eyeslit. And he saw its laser slicing through the dark. And around him, he could feel the Vampyre shake and shudder.

And he fired.

Four and five were flaming arrows in the night, climbing down at the Alfie. It seemed, almost, like they were sliding down the laser path that the Vampyre had burned.

Reynolds, briefly, saw his plane as the others must have seen it. Black and ominous, howling from the stormclouds down at them, lasers afire, draped in lightning, spitting missiles. Exhilaration! Glorydeath! He held the vision tightly.

The Alfie laser was off him, suddenly. Too late. The alarms still rang. His control was gone.

The Vampyre was burning, crippled. But from the flames the laser still licked out.

The bomber burned one missile from the sky. But the other was climbing up a jet. And the Vampyre’s fangs now had a bite to them.

And then the night itself took flame.

Reynolds saw the fireball spread over the forest, and something like relief washed over him, and he shuddered. And then the sweat came back, in a rushing flood.

He watched the woods come up at him, and he thought briefly of ejecting. But he was too low and too fast and it was hopeless. He tried to capture his vision again. And he wondered if he’d get a medal.

But the vision was elusive, and the medal didn’t seem to matter now.

Suddenly all he could think about was Anne. And his cheeks were wet. And it wasn’t sweat.

He screamed.

And the Vampyre hit the trees at Mach 1.4.

T
HERE WERE CIRCLES
under Warren’s eyes, and an ache in his voice. But he continued to read.

“…in Newark, New Jersey, local police are engaged in pitched street battles with the Special Urban Units. City officials in Newark, elected by the A.L.F., mobilized the police when the S.U.U. attempted to arrest them…

“…latest announcement from S.U.U. headquarters says that Douglass Brown and six other leading A.L.F. figures died while attempting to escape from confinement. The attempted escape came during a surprise attack by Community Defense Militiamen on the jail where Brown and the others were imprisoned, the release says…

“…both the Community Defense Militia and the Liberty Troopers have been mobilized from coast-to-coast by their leaders, and have taken to the streets. The Liberty Troopers are assisting the Special Urban Units in their campaign against the Community Defenders…

“…President Hartmann has called out the National Guard…

“…riots and looting reported in New York, Washington, and Detroit, and numerous smaller cities…

“…in Chicago is a smoldering ruin. Mitchell Grinstein is reported dead, as well as other top A.L.F. leaders. A firebombing has destroyed a wing of the new Police Headquarters…Loop reported in flames…bands of armed men moving from the ghetto sections into the Near North…

“…Community Defenders in California charge that they had nothing to do with original attack…have demanded that the bodies be produced and identified…mass burial, already ordered…

“…bombing of Governor’s mansion in Sacramento…

“…Liberty Alliance has called all citizens to take up arms, and wipe out the A.L.F…. that an attempted revolution is in progress…this was the plan all along, Alliance charges…California attack a signal…

“…A.L.F. charges that California attack was Hartmann ploy…cites Reichstag fire…

“…Governor Horne of Michigan has been assassinated…

“…national curfew imposed by S.U.U…. has called on all citizensto return to their homes…still out in one hour will be shot on sight…

“…A.L.F. reports that Senator Jackson Edwards of New Jersey was dragged from his police sanctuary in Newark and shot by Liberty Troopers…

“…martial law declared…

“…reports that last bandit plane has been shot down…

“…Army has been mobilized…

“…Hartmann has declared death penalty for any who aid so-called revolutionaries…

“…alleges…

“…charges…

“…reports…”

I
N
K
ENTUCKY,
a forest was burning. But no one came to put it out.

There were bigger fires elsewhere.

Gregory Benford

A professor of physics at the University of California in Irvine, Gregory Benford is regarded as one of science fiction’s “killer Bs” for the award-winning novels and short fiction he has written since 1965. He is considered one of the preeminent modern writers of hard science fiction for such novels as
Eater,
which works cutting-edge astronomy into its story of mankind’s first contact with aliens in the twenty-first century. However, Benford has also been praised for his explorations of humanist themes, notably in his Galactic Center sextet of novels of human-alien contact and human-machine interface comprised of
In the Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, The Stars in Shroud, Great Sky River, Tides of Light,
and
Furious Gulf.
His short fiction has been collected in
In Alien Flesh.
He is the author of
Foundation’s Fear,
a novel set in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series; has collaborated on
Beyond the Fall of Night,
a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke’s
Against the Fall of Night;
has written a medical thriller,
Chiller,
under the pseudonym Sterling Blake; and has written a popular science book,
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia.
His work as an anthologist includes
Nuclear War,
the alternate history compilation
Hitler Victorious,
and four volumes in the What Might Have Been series. The publication of his novel
The Martian Race,
about the first manned mission to the Red Planet, was timed to coincide with the 1999 touchdown of the Mars polar lander.

Gregory Benford

TURKEY

TROUBLE.
K
NEW THERE’D BE
trouble and plenty of it if we left the reactor too soon.

But do they listen to me? No, not to old Turkey. He’s just a dried-up corn husk of a man now, they think, one of those Bunren men who been on the welfare a generation or two and no damn use to anybody.

Only it’s simple plain farm supports I was drawing all this time, not any kind of horse-ass welfare. So much they know. Can’t blame a man just ’cause he comes up cash-short sometimes. I like to sit and read and think more than some people I could mention, and so I took the money.

Still, Mr. Ackerman and all think I got no sense to take government dole and live without a lick of farming, so when I talk they never listen. Don’t even seem to hear.

It was his idea, getting into the reactor at McIntosh. Now that was a good one, I got to give him that much.

When the fallout started coming down and the skimpy few stations on the radio were saying to get to deep shelter, it was Mr. Ackerman who thought about the big central core at McIntosh. The reactor itself had been shut down automatically when the war started, so there was nobody there. Mr. Ackerman figured a building made to keep radioactivity in will also keep it out. So he got together the families, the Nelsons and Bunrens and Pollacks and all, cousins and aunts and anybody we could reach in the measly hours we had before the fallout arrived.

We got in all right. Brought food and such. A reactor’s set up self-contained and got huge air filters and water flow from the river. The water was clean, too, filtered enough to take out the fallout. The generators were still running good. We waited it out there. Crowded and sweaty but O.K. for ten days. That’s how long it took for the count to go down. Then we spilled out into a world laid to gray and yet circumscribed waste, the old world seen behind a screen of memories.

That was bad enough, finding the bodies—people, cattle, and dogs asprawl across roads and fields. Trees and bushes looked the same, but there was a yawning silence everywhere. Without men, the pine stands and muddy riverbanks had fallen dumb, hardly a swish of breeze moving through them, like everything was waiting to start up again but didn’t know how.

ANGEL

We thought we were O.K. then, and the counters said so, too—all the gammas gone, one of the kids said. Only the sky didn’t look the same when we came out, all mottled and shot through with drifting blue-belly clouds.

Then the strangest thing. July, and there’s sleet falling. Big wind blowing up from the Gulf, only it’s not the sticky hot one we’re used to in summer, it’s moaning in the trees of a sudden and a prickly chill.

“Goddamn. I don’t think we can get far in this,” Turkey says, rolling his old rheumy eyes around like he never saw weather before.

“It will pass,” Mr. Ackerman says, like he is in real tight with God.

“Lookit that moving in from the south,” I say, and there’s a big mass all purple and forking lightning swarming over the hills, like a tide flowing, swallowing everything.

“Gulf storm. We’ll wait it out,” Mr. Ackerman says to the crowd of us, a few hundred left out of what was a moderate town with real promise.

Nobody talks about the dead folks. We see them everywhere, worms working in them. A lot smashed up in car accidents, died trying to drive away from something they couldn’t see. But we got most of our families in with us, so it’s not so bad. Me, I just pushed it away for a while, too much to think about with the storm closing in.

Only it wasn’t a storm. It was somethin’ else, with thick clouds packed with hail and snow one day and the next sunshine, only sun with bite in it. One of the men says it’s got more UV in it, meaning the ultraviolet that usually doesn’t come through the air. But it’s getting down to us now.

So we don’t go out in it much. Just to the market for what’s left of the canned food and supplies, only a few of us going out at a time, says Mr. Ackerman.

We thought maybe a week it would last.

Turned out to be more than two months.

I’m a patient woman, but jammed up in those corridors and stinking offices and control room of the reactor—

Well, I don’t want to go on.

It’s like my Bud says, worst way to die is to be bored to death.

That’s damn near the way it was.

Not that Old Man Turkey minded. You ever notice how the kind of man that hates moving, he will talk up other people doing just the opposite?

Mr. Ackerman was leader at first, because of getting us into the reactor. He’s from Chicago but you’d think it was England sometimes, the way he acts. He was on the school board and vice president of the big AmCo plant outside town. But he just started to
assume
his word was
it
, y’know, and that didn’t sit with us too well.

Some people started to saying Turkey was smarter. And was from around here, too. Mr. Ackerman heard about it.

Any fool could see Mr. Ackerman was the better man. But Turkey talked the way he does, reminding people he’d studied engineering at Auburn way back in the twencen and learned languages for a hobby and all. Letting on that when we came out, we’d need him instead of Mr. Ackerman.

He said an imp had caused the electrical things to go dead, and I said that was funny, saying an imp done it. He let on it was a special name they had for it. That’s the way he is. He sat and ruminated and fooled with his radios—that he never could make work—and told all the other men to go out and do this and that. Some did, too. The old man does know a lot of useless stuff and can convince the dumb ones that he’s wise.

So he’d send them to explore. Out into cold that’d snatch the breath out of you, bite your fingers, numb your toes. While old Turkey sat and fooled.

TURKEY

Nothing but sputtering on the radio. Nobody had a really good one that could pick up stations in Europe or far off.

Phones dead, of course.

But up in the night sky the first night out we saw dots moving—the pearly gleam of the Arcapel colony, the ruddy speck called Russworld.

So that’s when Mr. Ackerman gets this idea.

We got to reach those specks. Find out what’s the damage. Get help.

Only the power’s out everywhere, and we got no way to radio to them. We tried a couple of the local radio stations, brought some of their equipment back to the reactor where there was electricity working.

Every damn bit of it was shot. Couldn’t pick up a thing. Like the whole damn planet was dead, only of course it was the radios that were gone, fried in the EMP—ElectroMagnetic Pulse—that Angel made a joke out of.

All this time it’s colder than a whore’s tit outside. And we’re sweating and dirty and grumbling, rubbing up against ourselves inside.

Bud and the others, they’d bring in what they found in the stores. Had to drive to Sims Chapel or Toon to get anything, what with people looting. And gas was getting hard to find by then, too. They’d come back, and the women would cook up whatever was still O.K., though most of the time you’d eat it real quick so’s you didn’t have to spend time looking at it.

Me, I passed the time. Stayed warm.

Tried lots of things. Bud wanted to fire the reactor up, and five of the men, they read through the manuals and thought that they could do it. I helped a li’l.

So we pulled some rods and opened valves and did manage to get some heat out of the thing. Enough to keep us warm. But when they fired her up more, the steam hoots out and bells clang and automatic recordings go on saying loud as hell:

“EMERGENCY CLASS 3

ALL PERSONNEL TO STATIONS”

and we all get scared as shit.

So we don’t try to rev her up more. Just get heat.

To keep the generators going, we go out, fetch oil for them. Or Bud and his crew do. I’m too old to help much.

But at night we can still see those dots of light up there, scuttling across the sky same as before.

They’re the ones know what’s happening. People go through this much, they want to know what it meant.

So Mr. Ackerman says we got to get to that big DataComm center south of Mobile. Near Fairhope. At first I thought he’d looked it up in a book from the library or something.

When he says that, I pipe up, even if I am just an old fart according to some, and say, “No good to you even if you could. They got codes on the entrances, guards prob’ly. We’ll just pound on the door till our fists are all bloody and then have to slunk around and come on back.”

“I’m afraid you have forgotten our cousin Arthur,” Mr. Ackerman says all superior. He married into the family, but you’d think he invented it.

“You mean the one works over in Citronelle?”

“Yes. He has access to DataComm.”

So that’s how we got shanghaied into going to Citronelle, six of us, and breaking in there. Which caused the trouble. Just like I said.

MR. ACKERMAN

I didn’t want to take the old coot they called Turkey, a big dumb Bunren like all the rest of them. But the Bunrens want in to everything, and I was facing a lot of opposition in my plan to get Arthur’s help, so I went along with them.

Secretly, I believe the Bunrens wanted to get rid of the pestering old fool. He had been starting rumors behind my back among the three hundred souls I had saved. The Bunrens insisted on Turkey’s going along just to nip at me.

We were all volunteers, tired of living in musk and sour sweat inside that cramped reactor. Bud and Angel, the boy Johnny (whom we were returning to the Fairhope area), Turkey, and me.

We left the reactor under a gray sky with angry little clouds racing across it. We got to Citronelle in good time, Bud floor-boarding the Pontiac. As we went south we could see the spotty clouds were coming out of big purple ones that sat, not moving, just churning and spitting lightning on the horizon. I’d seen them before, hanging in the distance, never blowing inland. Ugly.

When we came up on the Center, there was a big hole in the side of it.

“Like somebody stove in a box with one swipe,” Bud said.

Angel, who was never more than two feet from Bud any time of day, said, “They
bombed
it.”

“No,” I decided. “Very likely it was a small explosion. Then the weather worked its way in.”

Which turned out to be true. There’d been some disagreement amongst the people holed up in the Center. Or maybe it was grief and the rage that comes of that. Susan wasn’t too clear about it ever.

The front doors were barred, though. We pounded on them. Nothing. So we broke in. No sign of Arthur or anyone.

We found one woman in a back room, scrunched into a bed with cans of food all around and a tiny little oil-burner heater. Looked awful, with big dark circles around her eyes and scraggly uncut hair.

She wouldn’t answer me at first. But we got her calmed and cleaned and to talking. That was the worst symptom, the not talking at first. Something back in the past two months had done her deep damage, and she couldn’t get it out.

Of course, living in a building half-filled with corpses was no help. The idiots hadn’t protected against radiation well enough, I guess. And the Center didn’t have good heating. So those who had some radiation sickness died later in the cold snap.

SUSAN

You can’t know what it’s like when all the people you’ve worked with, intelligent people who were nice as pie before, they turn mean and angry and filled up with grief for who was lost. Even then I could see Gene was the best of them.

They start to argue, and it runs on for days, nobody knowing what to do because we all can see the walls of the Center aren’t thick enough, the gamma radiation comes right through this government prefab-issue composition stuff. We take turns in the computer room because that’s the farthest in and the filters still work there, all hoping we can keep our count rate down, but the radiation comes in gusts for some reason, riding in on a storm front and coming down in the rain, only being washed away, too. It was impossible to tell when you’d get a strong dose and when there’d be just random clicks on the counters, plenty of clear air that you’d suck in like sweet vapors ’cause you knew it was good and could
taste
its purity.

So I was just lucky, that’s all.

I got less than the others. Later some said that me being a nurse, I’d given myself some shots to save myself. I knew that was the grief talking, is all. That Arthur was the worst. Gene told him off.

I was in the computer room when the really bad gamma radiation came. Three times the counter rose up, and three times I was there by accident of the rotation.

The men who were armed enforced the rotation, said it was the only fair way. And for a while everybody went along.

We all knew that the radiation exposure was building up and some already had too much, would die a month or a year later no matter what they did.

I was head nurse by then, not so much because I knew more but because the others were dead. When it got cold, they went fast.

So it fell to me to deal with these men and women who had their exposure already. Their symptoms had started. I couldn’t do anything. There was some who went out and got gummy fungus growing in the corners of their eyes—pterygium it was, I looked it up. From the ultraviolet. Grew quick over the lens and blinded them. I put them in darkness, and after a week the film was just a dab back in the corners of their eyes. My one big success.