VI

One of the nice things about Lamar, Colorado, was that when you’d gone a mile past the outskirts of town, the place might as well not have existed. There was nothing but you, the prairie, a million stars shining down on you from a sky clearer and blacker than the sky had any business being-and the person who’d walked a mile past the outskirts of town with you.

Penny Summers snuggled against Rance Auerbach and said, “I wish I’d joined the cavalry, the way Rachel did. Then I’d be riding out with you tomorrow instead of staying stuck back here.”

He slipped his arm around her waist. “I’m glad you’re not,” he answered. “If I were giving you orders, it wouldn’t be fair for me to do something like this.” He bent down and kissed her. The kiss went on for a long time.

“You wouldn’t need to give me orders to get me to want to do that,” she said breathlessly when their lips separated at last. “I like it.” Then she kissed him.

“Hoo!” he said after a while-a noisy exhalation that sent breath smoking from his lungs. Spring was coming, but the nights didn’t know it yet. That it was cold gave him another excuse to hold her tight against him.

After one more kiss, Penny threw back her head and stared up at the night sky through half-closed eyelids. She couldn’t have sent him a fancier invitation if she’d had one engraved. The sweet curve of her neck was pale as milk in the starlight. He started to bend to kiss it, then checked himself.

She noticed that. Her eyes opened all the way again. “What’s the matter?” she asked, her voice no longer throaty but a little cross.

“It’s chilly out here,” he said, which was true, but only part of an answer.

Now she exhaled-indignantly. “Wouldn’t bethat chilly,” she said, “specially while we were doin’-you know.”

He wanted her. They both had on long, heavy coats, but he knew she knew: she wouldn’t have needed to be the heroine in the story of the princess and the pea to tell. But, even though she wasn’t under his command, hauling her denims down and screwing her in the dirt wasn’t what he had in mind, no matter how much he’d been thinking about it when he’d asked her to go walking with him.

He tried to put that into words, so it would make sense to him as well as to her: “Doesn’t seem quite fair somehow, not when you were so poorly for so long. I want to make sure you’re all right before I-”Before I what? If all he’d wanted to do was lay her, that would have been simple. Crazy how being interested in her as herself made him-not less interested in her as a naked girl, but not so interested in that just for its own sake.

She didn’t get it. “I’m fine,” she said indignantly. “Yeah, it hit me hard when my pa got killed, but I’m over that now. I’m as good as I’m ever going to be.”

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t want to argue with her. But when people went from down in the dumps to up in the clouds too darn quick, that didn’t mean they got off the roller coaster and stayed up there. From what he’d seen, the ride kept right on going.

“Well, then,” she said, as if it were all settled.

“Look, here’s what we’ll do,” he told her. “Wait till I come back from this next mission. That’ll be plenty of time to do whatever we want to do.”And you’ll have had more of a chance to sort yourself out, make sure you’re not just throwing yourself at the first guy who’s handy.

She pouted. “But you’re going away for a long time. Rachel says this next mission isn’t just a little raid. She says you’re going out to try and wreck one of the Lizards’ spaceships.”

“She shouldn’t have told you that,” Auerbach answered. Security came natural to him; he’d been a soldier all his adult life. He knew Penny wouldn’t run off and blab to the Lizards, but who else had Rachel told about the planned strike? And who had they told? The idea of humans collaborating with the Lizards had been slow to catch on in the United States, at least in the parts that were still free, but such things did happen. Rachel and Penny both knew about them. Yet Rachel had talked anyway. That wasn’t so good.

“Maybe she shouldn’t have, but she did, so I know about it,” Penny said with a toss of the head that seemed to add,So there. “What if I go and find somebody else while you’re gone, Mr. Rance Auerbach, sir? What about then?”

He wanted to laugh. Here he was trying to be careful and sensible, and where was it getting him? Into hot water. He said, “If you do that, you wouldn’t want to tell him about a time like this, would you?”

She glared at him. “You think you’ve got all the answers, don’t you?”

“Shut up,” he said. He didn’t aim to stop a fight, or to make one worse; he spoke the words in a tone of voice entirely different from the one he’d been using.

Penny started to reply sharply, but then she too heard the distant roar in the sky. It grew louder with hideous speed. “Those are Lizard planes, ain’t they?” she said, as if hoping he’d contradict her.

He wished he could. “They sure are,” he said. “More than I’ve heard in a while, too. Usually they fly higher when they’re on their way to a target, then go down low to hit it. Don’t know why they’re acting different this time, unless-”

Before he could finish the sentence, antiaircraft guns east of Lamar, and then in the town itself, started pounding away. Tracers and shell bursts lit up the night sky, dimming the multitude of stars. Even well outside of Lamar, the din was overwhelming. Shrapnel started pattering down like hot, jagged hail. If that stuff came down on your head, you could end up with a fractured skull. Auerbach wished he were wearing a tin hat. When you took a pretty girl out for a walk, though, you didn’t worry about such things.

He never saw the Lizard warplanes till after they’d bombed and rocketed Lamar, and then only the flames shooting out of their tailpipes. After their run, they stood on their tails and climbed like skyrockets. He counted nine of them, in three flights of three.

“I’ve got to get back,” he said, and started toward Lamar at a trot. Penny came right with him, her shoes at first thumping on dirt and then clunking along the blacktop like his.

The Lizard planes returned to Lamar before the two of them got there. They gave the town another pounding, then streaked off toward the east. The antiaircraft guns kept firing long after they were gone. That was a universal constant of air raids, from everything Auerbach had seen and heard. Another constant was that, even when the guns were blazing away at real live targets, they hardly ever hit them.

Penny was panting and gasping before she and Auerbach got to the outskirts of Lamar, but she gamely stayed with him. He said, “Go on over to the infirmary, why don’t you? They’re sure to need extra hands there.”

“Okay,” she answered, and hurried off. He nodded to her back. Even if she remembered later on that she was supposed to be mad at him, it was better to see her up and doing things than tucked away in her miserable little room with nothing but a Bible for company.

No sooner had she disappeared round a corner than he forgot all about her. He made his way toward the barracks through chaos in the streets. Bucket brigades poured water on the fires the air attack had started. Some of those fires would burn for a long time, and were liable to spread; Lamar depended on wells for its water these days, and well water and buckets weren’t going to be enough to douse the flames.

Wounded men and women cried and screamed. So did wounded horses-at least one bomb had hit the stables. Some of the horses had got out. They were running through the streets, shying from the fires, lashing out in panic with their hooves, and making life more difficult for the people who were trying to help them and help put Lamar back together.

“Captain Auerbach, sir!” somebody bawled, right in Rance’s ear. He jumped and whirled around. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Bill Magruder, stood at his elbow. The firelight showed Magruder’s face covered with so much soot, he might have been in blackface. He said, “Glad to see you’re in one piece, sir.”