Free Bolo Brigade by William H Keith Page B

her turbo-electric LaRouche, but the city center was lit more brightly than it usually was for the Grounding Day Festival, and there was a large crowd congregating at the Town Hall. Evidently, the Council had appropriated the old grange hall in Galloway and set it up as a temporary command center, a clearing house for information as well as a place where the citizens of outlying districts could come to make their reports and sound off about the government's incompetence.
    Howard, her secretary, had called Alexie on her private comm while she was still driving home, to tell her that she was needed at the grange as the Director General's personal representative; Director General Stanfeld had been caught out of town by the emergency, at the antipodes, in fact, visiting the fishery cities at Scarba.
    Alexie envied him. He didn't have to face this mob of screaming, shouting, frightened people. Theoretically, she didn't either—that's what undersecretaries and public relations spokespersons were for—but when she'd arrived and seen that crowd battling to get up the steps and squeeze into the main hall, she'd known that this was one task she couldn't delegate to anyone else. She just wished she'd had time to go home and change into more businesslike clothes first.
    She'd gone in through the private entrance in the back; there was no way she'd have made it in through the front, that was certain. Inside, she'd found a harried-looking Major Streven Fitzsimmons in a heated debate with Sam Carver. "And furthermore," Fitzsimmons was bellowing as she walked in, "if you don't exercise your authority over these yahoos out front, I'll have you put under military arrest."
    "What charge, Major?" Carver said in a low voice that carried plenty of unspoken menace.
    "Obstruction of government business! Rioting! Disturbing the peace! Any charge I damn well feel—"
    "That is enough , Major!" Alexie snapped.
    Fitzsimmons jumped, whirling around, looking guilty. "Ah, why, Alexie! I didn't know—"
    "Obviously." She looked at Sam, a tall, rangy, and ruggedly good-looking rancher with piercing blue eyes. She'd worked with him before, starting back when he'd been on her father's re-election committee, and liked both his refreshing directness and his honesty. "What's the word, Sam?"
    "We're being invaded and this uniformed jackass wants verification ."
    "Well, it's standard procedure, Alexie," Fitzsimmons said with huffy dignity. "We can't simply accept every wild story that comes in here!"
    "Looks to me like you have a fair amount of verification out front, Fitz," she told him. "Why don't you go out there and talk to them, maybe get them to start telling their stories one at a time. Instead of stonewalling them for a change."
    Fitzsimmons opened his mouth to reply, caught a hard look from Alexie, then closed it again. "Very well, ma'am," he said. "But you know how these wild rumors get started. One drunken rancher thinks he sees something, and the next thing you know half the planet's seen Melconian invaders!"
    "What do you think, Sam?" she asked the rancher as Fitzsimmons stalked off. "Is it a drunken story? Or Melconians?"
    "Neither. I heard it first from Fred Noyes, and he's never touched a drop in his life. You remember Fred, don't you?"
    "Yes. . . ."
    "He called me two, two and a half hours ago and told me a space ship had landed in the Sea Cliffs District, and could I please bring some of the boys over to have a look-see. He told me he thought the thing had crashed, said he and a bunch of his neighbors were heading out to try to find it."
    "Did they?"
    Sam's jaw hardened. "More like something found them. I went out there with about twenty boys maybe an hour later and found Fred up above Dreyden's Gulch. At least, I think it was Fred. I thought I recognized his jacket."
    "My God! What happened?"
    "If I didn't know better, I'd say Fred and his neighbors ran head-on into a small army. Some of them were burned to a . . . well, it was pretty bad.