But this was Hallmark, not Ballantyne, or Sevastopol’, or Earth. The keen military mind that had temporarily retaken its proper place in the battered skull knew that Hallmark was about as easy a target as an invader could wish for. The Kreelans always preferred more heavily defended planets, but it was no excuse for leaving a world like this one so lightly defended. With the orbital satellites gone, there was nothing standing between the invaders and the children but Hallmark’s joke of a Territorial Army. They didn’t stand a chance.
With a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, Colonel William Hickock raced toward House 48 as the first exchanges of ground fire began.
“Mary, the door has to be closed!” the man said, his voice flushed with fear as his finger hovered over the oversized red button. It was the emergency control for the massive vault’s blast doors and glowed like a flickering coal.
“But Reza hasn’t come back from the library!” she protested hotly, prepared to come to blows with the man if his finger moved any closer to the door controls.
“Look behind you, woman,” the man demanded, pointing over Mary’s shoulder with his other hand. “There’s nearly a thousand people in here, the Blues are popping rounds off out there, and you want me to keep this damned thing open?”
“What’s going on?” a steely voice suddenly demanded.
They turned back to the doorway to see Wiley striding across the hash-marked frame of the meter-thick blast door.
“Why isn’t this door closed, Parsons?” he growled. Wiley leaned past the open-mouthed Parsons to hit the button himself. The enormous door immediately began to cycle closed.
“But Wiley,” Mary blurted, suddenly realizing that the man before her wasn’t the one who normally wore this body, “Reza’s still out there!”
The old colonel’s eyes narrowed. “Where?”
“In the library,” she said. “I asked him to make sure everyone else got out. He said he–”
Wiley did not wait for her to finish. In one smooth motion he snatched the flechette rifle from Parsons and disappeared back out the door as it closed.
“Hey!” Parsons shouted indignantly after him. “That’s mine!”
But he did not try to pursue the old man as the door thrummed into its lock, the huge bolts driving home to seal them in, and the enemy out.
They hoped.
Reza found himself frozen at the window, watching the enemy’s advance. The landing boats had set down in a rough circle around the house complex, and the warriors they had been carrying were now emerging from out of the wheat like black-clad wraiths, their armor bristling with weapons. He couldn’t hear any more firing, and figured that the last of the defenders had been mopped up. It had been a massacre.
That was why Reza had decided not to make a run for the shelter. There was no point. Assuming he was not cut down on the way there, he would certainly be trapped in a tomb that the Kreelans could open without too much difficulty. The shelter’s vault should hold them off for a while, but not nearly long enough for human reinforcements to arrive.
Only one thing really puzzled him: why hadn’t the Kreelans used their ships’ guns to blast the vault like they did the freighters at the spaceport? Why go to the trouble of making a landing at all?
He was startled by the sound of small arms fire from right outside the library, followed by someone crashing through the front door, knocking the smoothly turning cylinder off its bearings.
Dropping without a sound to the floor under the heavy desk he had dragged near the upstairs windows, he waited for the inevitable.
“Reza!” he heard a voice unexpectedly shout from below. “Are you here, boy?”
Reza thought the voice sounded vaguely familiar, but he could not quite place it. Not knowing that the Kreelans had never been known to use such tricks to lure humans into a trap, like a timid snake he slowly slithered toward the banister to take a cautious look.
“Son?” the voice shouted again.
“Wiley?” Reza asked incredulously as he saw the old man crouching near the front door. “Is that you?”
“Lord of All, son!” he shouted. He gestured sharply for Reza to come to him. “Get your butt down here! We’ve got to get out of this place–”
A Kreelan warrior suddenly leaped through the damaged entryway, rolling with catlike agility to her feet.
In the blink of an eye, Wiley’s finger convulsed on the trigger of his flechette rifle, hitting the Kreelan’s torso armor with half a dozen rounds that killed her instantly. The impact flung her body against the wall. Her mouth still open in a silent snarl, she slumped to the floor, her talons twitching at the tips of her armored fingers.
With a pirouette that Reza thought should have been impossible for a man with one stiff, artificial leg, Wiley turned and fired another volley into the warrior’s partner, whose shoulder armor had caught on the lip of the canted entry cylinder door and prevented her from raising her own weapon. Her head vanished in a plume of bloody spray and gore.
“Come on, boy,” the colonel beckoned, “while we still have time.”
Reza wasted no time in bounding down the stairs to the lower level, hurling himself into the old man’s waiting arms.
“What… what happened?” he asked, looking up at the bloody smear on Wiley’s forehead where he had knocked his head against the frame of the old truck. “I almost didn’t recognize your voice.”
The colonel’s face broke into an ironic grin. “Seems God chose to give me back my marbles for one last game,” he said, holding Reza to him with one arm while the other held the flechette rifle pointed at the entranceway. “Listen,” Wiley said, “I don’t know how long I’ll be any good to you, son. This thing,” he tapped his temple, “can short out at any time, assuming the Blues don’t get us first.” He reached down to grab the strangely contoured rifle the first Kreelan warrior had been carrying. “Take this,” he said, passing the flechette rifle to Reza, keeping the alien weapon for himself. “All you have to do is point and shoot. Just don’t hold the trigger down too long or you’ll be out of ammo before you know it.”
“Wiley,” Reza whispered as they crouched down near the Kreelan’s body, “what are we going to do? There are Kreelans all over the place. I saw them from the upstairs windows. I suppose the people in the shelter will be safe for a while, but–”
“Baloney,” the old man spat. “Those shelters are the damned most foolish things anybody ever dreamed up. All they do is trap people in one place and make it easy for the Blues. It’d be better to give every kid a rifle and bayonet and teach them how to use it as they grow.” He looked pointedly at Reza. “But who’s going to give a planet full of orphans their own weapons?”
He suddenly closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with an age-spotted hand.
Reza saw that hand shaking as a tear rolled down the old colonel’s face.
“I’m starting to lose it, boy,” he muttered, his mouth drawn in a thin, determined line. “Wiley the Clown is knocking on the door–”
A muffled boom that set the windows rattling and dust sprinkling from the ceiling stole away the end of his sentence. The two of them stared at each other in the silence that followed, wondering what the noise had been.
“Maybe the Navy…” Reza began, but a gesture from Wiley cut him off.
“The squids aren’t going to hit a friendly site from orbit,” he whispered hoarsely. “They’d send in Marines. Every ship bigger than a corvette carries at least a company.”