Empire Read online

  “Fifteen,” she lamented. “It is forever.” The thought of spending the next six months here until her fifteenth birthday was appalling, but having to wait until she was seventeen was simply unbearable. Strangely, applying to one of the academies was a thought that had never occurred to her in her former life. La Seyne was very traditional, clinging to many of the ancient Western traditions brought by its early settlers. Most of the women born there spent their lives caring for their husbands and raising their children, any thoughts of becoming a “professional” being scorned as sacrilegiously self-serving. But, to get out of here in six months instead of two and a half years, she was more than willing to abandon tradition.

  “It’s a lot less than I’ve had to spend on this rock,” Reza said darkly, his pre-pubescent voice carrying the resignation of the damned. His eyes blazed so fiercely that they burned her with shame for thinking that the paltry time she would have to spend here was unendurable. Reza had been here for some time before she had arrived, and would still be here after she had gone.

  “Please,” she choked, suddenly flushing with empathy for him, for all of them, “forgive me. I did not mean it that way.” She reached out and gently stroked his cheek with her hand. “Mon Dieu,” she whispered, “how horrible.”

  Reza shrugged, his face dropping its melancholy veil. “It could be worse,” he said. “At least it’s not like for some of the really little kids who came here without even remembering or knowing their parents, like little Darrow over there.” A tiny black boy a few seats down nodded heartily and gave her an enchanting smile. “At least we knew our parents and can remember them.”

  Nicole nodded thoughtfully as Reza turned his attention back to the others.

  “Does anybody else have anything?” He looked around the table like a chairman of the board or councilman, his eyes intense pools of jade. “Okay, that’s it, then, except to remind you that we’re on alert for Muldoon and his slugs. Nobody goes anywhere alone, so stay with your blockmates. Jam your doors when you go to sleep and don’t open them again until your team leader – Thad, Henson, or Charles – comes to pick you up in the morning. Little kids, if you hear the fire alarm, don’t leave your room unless you recognize one of our voices outside and we give you the right signal on the door. Muldoon pulled that trick last year and nailed a girl from Screamer’s bunch. He’s going to be gunning for us for a while this time, and there won’t be another load of newbies for him to go after for another two weeks, so watch out and stick together.”

  With a murmur of acknowledgments, the children quickly got up from the table. Moving in formation with almost military precision, they dumped their trays in the waiting bins and followed their team leaders to the bunkhouse, leaving only Reza and Nicole behind.

  “Should we not go with them?” she asked, wondering if the two of them would be safe, alone.

  “No,” he told her, gesturing for her to follow as he got up from the table and headed toward the tray bin. “We’re not going back with them tonight. They’ll be all right, but I think it’s too dangerous for us to go back to the bunkhouse until tomorrow, at least.”

  “But,” Nicole stammered, “where will we sleep?”

  “Trust me,” Reza told her. “I have a place Muldoon can’t get into very easily.”

  He led her outside, following a path that led them through the various buildings that made up the House 48 complex. It comprised the bunkhouse itself, which was really a collection of dormitories; the school, which was only occupied during the winter, when even Muldoon could not bear to herd the children into the fields; the tiny medical clinic; and the administration building. The last, ironically, was also the largest, as it also housed House 48’s shelter, visible from the outside by the universal red and black striped blast portal that was kept lit at all times. The exact same buildings could be found at any of the other Houses dotting Hallmark’s surface. All of them were pre-fabricated, tough, cheap and easy to build and maintain. They were true modern architectural wonders, and all ugly as sin.

  Up ahead, Nicole could make out a squat structure at the end of the path, the last of House 48’s buildings that didn’t seem to fit in with the others. Light showed through the slender windows, evenly distributed around the circumference of the octagonal building, reaching from about waist-high nearly to the roof over the second story.

  “My home away from home,” Reza announced, gesturing toward the revolving door. It looked almost like an airlock, and was intended to keep the dust of the fields out of the building.

  “What is it?” Nicole asked as Reza ushered her through the door, the cylinder swishing closed behind them.

  “It’s the House 48 Library,” he answered.

  Nicole was about to laugh until she realized that Reza was completely serious. As they emerged through the door and into the light of the interior, she saw the look of unabashed wonder on his face. Her smile slipped as she thought of how many times he must have come through that door, and yet his expression was as if this was the very first.

  “Reza,” she asked, following after him into what must have been the lobby, “what is so important here?” She looked around at the meager collection of holo displays and the disk racks. “These devices are very nearly antique!”

  Reza favored her with a quizzical look, as if her question had revealed a stratum of incredible, if easily forgivable, ignorance. “This,” he said disdainfully, pointing to the disk racks and study carrels arrayed around the lobby, “is junk: old periodicals, some of the new literature, and other stuff. I stopped bothering with that a long time ago.” He led her around the front desk as if he owned the place, which she suspected he might, in a way. Then he punched in an access code to a locked door. She noted that there appeared to be no one else here, a thought that was not entirely comforting. “This,” he explained quietly, “is why this place is important.”

  Pushing open the door, they found themselves in a darkened room, but there was still enough light for Nicole to see angular shapes that radiated away into the darkness. Reza closed and locked the door behind them. Only then did he switch on a light.

  “Oh,” Nicole gasped. In the gentle light that flooded the room, she saw row after row of books, real books, with pages and bindings. Some were made of the micro plastic that had found its way into favor over the years, but most were made of genuine paper, the exposed edges yellowed with age, their covers and bindings carefully protected with a glistening epoxy sealant.

  “Besides being real antiques,” Reza told her, “and having some monetary value for anyone who can waste the transport mass charge to haul them around, they can be a real brain saver in this place.” He picked up a volume, seemingly at random – although he knew by heart the place of every book in the room – and held it up for her to see. Hamlet, the book’s binding said, followed by some strange symbols and then the author’s name: Shakespeare.

  She took the book from him, careful not to drop it. It was terribly old, and one of the few such books she had ever seen. Every major publisher had long since done away with physical books. Electronic media were so much cheaper and more efficient.

  But it was not the same, as her own father, a devoted book reader himself, had often told her. Watching the action on a holo screen left too little to the imagination, he had said once, holding one of his own precious volumes up as if it were on an imaginary pedestal. The screen fed the mind, but its calories were empty ones, bereft of the stuff on which thought depended. She had thought him quite comical at the time, her own young life having evolved around the holo images that invaded their home daily. But perhaps, as was most often the case, his words had more than just a kernel of truth in them.

  “You asked why this place is so important to me,” Reza said, watching as she turned the pages, his ears thrilling to the sound. “I’ll tell you why. When you come in from the fields, you eat, you sleep, and then you get up to go to the fields again. Over and over, for as long as you have until you can leave here.

/>   “And every day that you let yourself do just that, just the stuff you have to do to get by, even when you’re so tired you can’t see straight, you die just a little bit. Not much, not so much that you notice that day, or even the next, but just a little. Your mind starts eroding, and you start forgetting about anything that you used to think was interesting or important, whether anyone else thought it was or not. Pretty soon, all the useless crap that we do here becomes more and more important to you, as if it really had some meaning.” He spat out the last few words, disgust evident on his face and in his voice. “After a while, you start finding yourself in conversations about how many kilos of rocks people dug up. There’s even an official contest. Did you know that? People talk about how many blisters so-and-so got, and who had sex with whom, what kind of stunt Muldoon pulled today, on and on and on. Remember the porridge you liked so much?” Nicole grimaced, the tasteless paste still coagulating in her stomach. “That’s what your brain starts turning into around here. Mush.

  “And the worst part is that they start not to care about anything or anyone, even themselves. Why should they, when the most important thing they did today is clear a few more meters for some farming combine that doesn’t even give us a percentage of the grain they grow?”

  Nicole’s mouth fell open at that.

  “That’s right,” Reza told her, his eyes burning with anger. “All of our food is imported from Peraclion, because the grain there has a higher bulk than stuff grown here, for whatever reason, and so it’s more expensive to ship long distances. So all our stuff goes out-system, and Peraclion feeds us… after a few kickbacks get paid off to some of the admins here.

  “So,” he shrugged, “here we all sit, droning our lives away until we’re old enough to either enlist directly or apply for an academy assignment. We’re slave labor for the farming combines that need the land cleared but are too cheap to send machines to do it.”

  His expression turned grim. “But the worst part for most of the kids here is that, regardless of how bright they were when they came, they fail the entrance exams because they haven’t gotten the right schooling, or can’t even figure out what abstract means, let alone come up with an abstract thought.” His face twisted in an ironic smile. “No fighter jocks coming out of that group.”

  Reza had no way of knowing at the time, but his last remark struck Nicole to the core. She loved the thought of flying, and had always secretly dreamed of piloting one of the tiny, darting fighter ships she saw in the movies. And in that instant, she knew what she wanted to do with her life, now that the old one was gone, washed away.

  “And what of you, Reza?” she asked, her thoughts returning from her own hoped-for future. “Your mind has not turned to mush, I take it?”

  “No,” he told her, his expression softening as he lovingly ran his fingers along the spine of a book, “not yet, anyway. Thanks to this place.”

  “I still do not understand, mon ami.” She still could not see what Reza was driving at.

  “When you come in here and pick up one of these,” he gestured at Hamlet, “or even watch one of the crappy holos out in the main room, you’re not just an orphaned kid marooned on a dustbowl planet anymore, with no more rights than any slave might have. It’s a way out of here. You’re a hero, or a villain, or anything else you could imagine, and a lot of things you probably can’t. Every time you turn a page you can go somewhere, even someplace that’s never been. But anywhere you go is somewhere far away from here. And the best part about it, the part that keeps me alive and sane, is that the words in the books leave a lot of blanks that your mind has to fill in. It makes your mind work without you forcing it to, and you get better and better at it without killing yourself like you have to sometimes in the fields.”

  Nicole considered his words for a moment, her mind conjuring up images of some of the children she had seen around her since arriving at House 48. So many of them, it now seemed to her, had just been blank, without expression, without animation. Had they not been breathing, one might have thought them dead. And, perhaps, in a way they were.

  “But Reza,” she asked, suddenly finding a hole in his escape theory, “how do you find the time? Or the energy?”

  “I make it,” he said grimly. “I come here every night after dinner, no matter how tired I am, no matter if there’s mud from the rain or snow in the winter. And on the one day off we have after our six workdays, I spend all day here.” He shrugged. “What else am I going to do? I’d like to just spend that time sleeping like most of the others. I hate being tired all the time, but it’s too important. I’m not going to let myself turn into a vegetable in this place. When I’m fifteen,” he vowed, “I’m going to pass the academy entrance exams. I’m going to make it into OCS and be a Marine.”

  “And then,” Nicole said, finishing the thought, “you will seek revenge.” He nodded, but turned his eyes away from her. He did not want her to see the hate that burned so fiercely there for the enemy that had stolen his parents, his life, from him to leave him marooned here.

  “Reza?” a voice called from the desk area. “Are you in there?”

  Nicole was surprised at the immediate change in Reza’s expression as a smile lit up his face like a beacon.

  “Hi, Wiley!” he called, quickly unlocking the door and letting it swing open. “Hey, I’ve got someone I want you to meet.”

  A face poked through the door, and for a moment Nicole was sure it was an enormous apple, left too long to dry, its sun-worn skin crinkled into innumerable peaks and valleys as it aged. The wrinkled face was topped by an unruly mop of gray hair that must have been cut with scissors by the man himself. Peering out from the apple-face was a pair of ice blue eyes that once might have been the object of interest and desire for many a woman, but now were clouded with an expression that left some degree of doubt as to the owner’s intelligence.

  Those eyes swept from Reza to Nicole, and a mischievous smile crept across the man’s face. “You got yourself a lady-friend,” he exclaimed, his voice one of neutral innocence, rather than with the lecherous undertones that Reza would have expected from almost anyone else. “Showing her your collection, are you?”

  “Yeah, Wiley,” Reza nodded, turning to Nicole. “This is Nicole Carré, one of the newbies who came in this morning, and the newest member of our group. Nicole,” he gestured toward the old man, “meet William Hickock, Colonel, Confederation Marine Corps, Retired. He’s been my mentor and protector since I came to Hallmark,” Reza explained. “And in case you were wondering, these are all his books. He brought them with him when he first came here.”

  Nicole’s eyes widened. A collection like this must be worth a fortune.

  The old man stuck out his hand, nodding his head toward Reza. “Nice to meet you!” he said with a disarming grin. “All my friends just call me Wiley.”

  Nicole could not help but smile as she took the man’s hand, noting the restrained strength of his grip. “Enchanté, monsieur,” she said, bowing her head slightly.

  As she looked back up at Wiley, she knew that something was not quite right, but she was not sure what it might be. There was something in his voice, or the way he carried himself, slouching slightly as if in acquiescence, that seemed out of character for a former Marine colonel.

  Then she noticed the scar that crept away from the man’s forehead and into his scalp like a lumpy, pink centipede, and she realized that his last battle – for that surely was where the scar was from – must have very nearly killed him. As it was, it left him less a man than he used to be, with some tiny part of his brain destroyed. She immediately pitied him, but she did not let it show on her face.

  But Wiley, slightly brain damaged though he was, was nonetheless quite astute. “Yeah, missy,” he told her, his voice wistful as he traced his finger along the scar as it wandered halfway across his skull, “I lost a few marbles, I guess. Lost this, too,” he said, rapping on his right leg, the metal prosthesis echoing hollowly.

  “But
hey, that there’s old news,” he said, brightening suddenly as if someone had just turned an invisible toy wind-up crank on his back. “What are you all up to?”

  “We’re watching out for Muldoon again,” Reza told him seriously, his voice reflecting as much concern as if a Kreelan attack had been underway. “He really took a fancy to Nicole.”

  Wiley’s face changed for just a moment, so quickly that Nicole might have missed it had she not been looking right at him. A glow of anger flared in his eyes, the kind of chilled anger that came from living a life where death was always just a moment away, a life that was far too short for sorting out the complexities of human evil. She was sure that, had Muldoon been within arm’s reach of the old man, he would have killed him in that blink of an eye.

  Then it was gone.

  “Well isn’t that the damnedest thing,” Wiley whispered, shaking his head. “I just wish he’d leave you kids alone.”

  “That’s the main reason we’re here, Wiley,” Reza said, looking sadly at Nicole. Reza had read – memorized, more like it – the biography of Colonel Hickock, and he knew that the tragedy of the man’s intellectual demise was little short of monumental. “I was wondering if we might be able to stay with you for a couple days or so.”

  “Why, sure, Reza!” the old man exclaimed, delighted. “You know you’re always welcome. I like company, you know.” He gestured with his still-strong hands for them to come with him. “Come on, come on, let’s get you settled in downstairs.”

  They followed him out the door, Reza locking it behind them. They went through the lobby and down some stairs into the building’s basement, the bare plasticrete walls echoing their footsteps.

  Opening a door that had MAINTENANCE stenciled on it in neat block letters, Wiley showed them into the room beyond. “It ain’t much,” he said, ushering them in, “but it’s home.”

  Nicole found herself in what looked like an apartment, replete with a tiny kitchen, a separate bedroom, bathroom, and a fluffy, comfortable-looking sofa that took up nearly half of the living room. On the walls, themselves painted a light pastel blue, were holos of ships and people in uniform, even a few actual photographs, all presented in what Nicole guessed were expensive frames. While various other knickknacks could be found throughout the room, everything was neat and orderly, every visible surface clean of dust or the slightest trace of dirt. It was immaculate, but homey, without any of the fastidiousness that was nearly pathological with some people.