Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  This morning, if you didn’t know that Takawa had lost by cardiac arrest, you would never guess it. The Empire’s Freestyle Fighting team had excellent doctors, and the loose jacket neatly hid the regen shell.

  Leo switched off the binoculars and restored them to their usual place in his pocket.

  “Waiter!”

  Yoseph had time for a “Don’t even think about it!” but there was no stopping his friend.

  “Get me a Mighty Pepper.”

  Yosi had no idea how anyone could stand the horrible, cloyingly sweet-spicy things, but Takawa seemed to genuinely like them. He wasn’t just pretending for the commercials. Clearly there was no accounting for taste.

  As the drink arrived, the Spartan emptied the pepper shaker into it and stirred carefully to make sure the powder dissolved.

  “Send this to that guy, over there. The one in the Imperial jacket.”

  “Here we go!” thought Yosi.

  “I hope Takawa has a sense of humor. I have no intention of spending the night in a hospital, waiting for the doctors to put these two back together again. At least there won’t be a legal Settlement of Honor over this. That kind of thing is prohibited here, Baruch Hashem.”

  “And what’s the point in aggravating Shin Takawa?” he asked out loud.

  “I’m bored.”

  “And if you start a fight? Two regen shells not enough for you? You’re looking to add a couple-three more?”

  “Why’re you being such a spoilsport? Harder to fight with four broken ribs and a messed-up lung than with one arm. His heart’s probably not up to anything more strenuous than a leisurely walk in the park, either.”

  The waiter arrived at Takawa’s table, saying something and proffering the drink. The Imperial took the glass and slowly emptied it, without taking his eyes off Leo.

  As the level of fluid in the glass dropped, Leo’s eyes widened in direct proportion.

  “Dear Goddess! What did he do, turn off his taste buds? That stuff must taste like liquid fire!”

  “Maybe they got scorched beyond all sensitivity after the first sip,” offered Yosi, amusedly trying to be helpful.

  It wasn’t going to be a fistfight, that’s for sure.

  Having finished his drink, Leo’s adversary had produced a pen and was drawing something on a napkin with swift, sure strokes. Shortly he summoned the maitre, and a moment later a frosted glass of something clear and the napkin arrived before Yoseph’s friend.

  Whatever it was, Yosi’s net glasses were marking it as physiologically safe for heavyworlders to consume. He didn’t bother to inquire further. As long as Leo was in no physical danger from it, he could suffer whatever consequences Takawa’s return stroke dealt. That, after all, was only fair play.

  Not to be outdone, the Spartan instantly snatched up the glass and took a sip. At his friend’s expression, Yosi was forced to hide his smile behind the teacup he was still holding.

  Tears on his eyes, the heavyworlder drained his glass even slower than Takawa had drained his. Whatever it was, it was extraordinarily sour.

  Putting the glass down, Leo glanced at the napkin that came with it, looked up at his smiling opponent… And bolted across the terrace, through the transparent door and down the corridor.

  Drawn on the napkin was the same obscene gesture Leo had grinningly flashed at the Imperial competitor the night before, right after the medal ceremony.

  Suddenly, Yosi remembered that Stomach Helper, a highly potent, quick-acting laxative manufactured by Luàn Pharmaceuticals, was reputed to have a phenomenally sour taste.

  The net glasses confirmed the guess. Based on the amount he’d downed, Leo would be “incapacitated” for at least twelve hours. This meant that he wouldn’t leave the hotel, which meant that his retainer was free for the day.

  Too bad Shin Takawa was an Imperial, thought Yosi as he mock-toasted the man with his teacup. A fellow with the panache, brains and humor to beat Leo at his own game would be worth befriending.

  At the table across the terrace, the man in the crimson jacket bowed ever so slightly in acknowledgement. Perhaps the sentiment was mutual.

  A few minutes later, passing by his friend’s door on his way to the beach, Yosi knocked and called out: “See you tomorrow!”

  The answer was a loud groan, followed by the sounds of a hundred-and-fifty-kilo heavyworlder jumping out of bed and galloping to the bathroom.

  * 3 *

  It is amazing, Yosi would reflect decades later, how the guiding hand of the Holy One, Blessed Be He, so often manifests itself in a seemingly trivial series of supposed coincidences. If any of a million and a half tiny, inconsequential things hadn’t happened or had happened just a bit differently, then Yoseph Weismann and Leonidas Freeman would not have greeted Invasion Day hiking an unmarked goat trail a few dozen kilometers northwest of the spot where National Highway One stops following the coast on its run from San Cristobal and turns westward to climb through the Paso Chungara and onto the Angeleno Plateau.

  If Shin Takawa hadn’t dosed Leo with Stomach Helper and a morning trip to the beach had seen the nature hike postponed indefinitely in favor of another bout of skirt chasing… If Vera Lederman hadn’t scored that last-moment touché and Leo’s efforts to soothe the agony of her defeat had morphed into the whirlwind romance that everyone had spent weeks anticipating… If the men’s heptathlon event had been scheduled for a few days earlier, and Leo had decided to remain in the city and watch it live…

  Then their lives would have ended on what the Universal Standard Calendar termed the Seventeenth of November 3771, at precisely 11:56:21 San Cristobal Time.

  Everyone who managed to survive that day would forever remember where they were and what they were doing at the precise moment when the world was overturned. Yoseph Weismann would be no exception. For the rest of his days he would distinctly recall the growing sense of dread he’d felt as he looked up at the lazurite Paradisian sky.

  “I’d swear those are entry trails. Hard and fast, with plenty of dodging around.” Yosi muttered.

  “A couple of minutes old, I’d say.”

  “Yup,” replied Leo.

  “Somebody had to come down in a hurry. Must have been one heck of an in-orbit emergency for the escape pods to burn in and bounce about like that. And this airspace is a restricted zone, too. Fines starting at ten million credits, unless you’re a Ministry of the Ecology UAV. They must’ve really been up the creek out there.”

  “Escape pods?” replied Yosi, unconvinced. The more he looked at those contrails, the more nervous they made him feel. There was only one place he’d ever seen contrails like that, outside VR.

  “The heck you say! Look at that trajectory! Does that look like a tumbling escape pod to you? Those are attacking spaceplanes coming in from orbit or I’m a monkey’s uncle! Look, there’s another pair coming in right there!”

  “Attacking spaceplanes?” guffawed Leo, now seriously annoyed.

  “Really, Yosi, you’re such a paranoid loon sometimes, you know that?

  “Whose spaceplanes? This is Paradise. No military bases except the Joint Mission, no paramilitary camps, no pirates or smugglers since the last Imperial War. The Paradisians don’t even have an army, or a navy worth the name! What are these spaceplanes here to attack, the Joint Mission HQ in San Cristobal that’s full of League and Imperial officers? What, is the Empire going to bomb its own people? The Archduchy going to start a war with both us and the Imperials at once? Even if those bleached-out loons were up to it, they’d have to get all the way to Paradise from their border undetected, and then catch the Joint Mission flat-footed, too.

  “At most, and I’ll give you the ‘at most’ here, somebody at the Joint Mission is having some kind of exercise.”

  There was a series of sudden, photographic flashes. For a moment, shadows split and re-split, dancing around insanely under the battering of contesting blue-white suns.

  Seconds later, while Leo still stood gaping in slack-jawed shoc
k, a strong gust of wind sent the shelleaf canopies rocking and rattling like a thousand death-drums.

  “That an exercise, too?” asked Yosi acidly, jabbing his thumb at the rapidly rising mushroom clouds that now topped the jag-toothed mountaintops over to the northeast.

  Leo’s knees buckled.

  “Allmother be gracious!” he muttered as his teeth clicked together from the impact of his bottom hitting the ground.

  “Coach, Fedya, Moshe… Vera and her gang… Uncle Mark and the twins… Seventeen million completely innocent people… What kind of savages…”

  “The headquarters of the Joint Peacekeeping Mission for Paradise, the Palàcio de los Cortes and the Palàcio Blanco are all perfectly valid military targets, Captain Freeman,” snapped out Yosi in his steeliest mask-of-command battlefield voice. “All the rest is just Acceptable Collateral Damage.”

  The last thing he needed was for Leo to go all wobbly in the knees.

  “Bullshit!” swore Leo, jumping back to his feet. The mention of his Shock Corps title seemed to instantly clear the cobwebs from his brain.

  “San Cristobal is at sea level. Those mountains over there are over three kilometers tall. Yet we saw the flashes.

  “Those were multi-megaton airbursts popping off at optimum altitude to maximize surface blast. You don’t hit military targets with multi-megaton airbursts, you hit them with ground bursts, or kinetic impactors! This is deliberate, unprovoked targeting of a civilian population! It’s got to be the Omicronians, those goddamned psycho bastards!”

  “I’m glad you’re back to normal,” answered Yoseph mildly, rapidly stripping out of his hiking clothes. “Now get your war gear on.”

  Yosi pulled what looked like a folded rectangle of plastic out of his backpack and shook it out into the familiar default shape of a military poncho. He slipped the sleeveless, bag-like garment on over his tallit katan and morphed it into the iconic woodland-patterned hooded overall familiar to every man, woman and child in known space.

  “Shit!” swore Leo as his clothes failed to respond to the command to morph away from his body. He’d have to rip the fabric off now, or cut it with his vibro.

  “No, they won’t morph,” remarked Yosi.

  “EMP barrage nailed the civvie nanites when the invasion first started. We didn’t even notice and no one bothered to warn us. No EBS on Paradise. They all ‘embrace peace’ out here and all that stupid Outsider crap.”

  “Duh!” thought Leo, feeling like a complete fool.

  Of course there would have been an EMP barrage. That’s what you always did when you attacked by surprise. Pop off a bunch of EMP-enhanced warheads high up in the ionosphere. Kill all the nets, most of the civvie electronics, everything. Lights out.

  It would’ve been bad enough back home, to get caught flat-footed like this. But here… With no planet-wide Emergency Broadcast System, there was no way to turn all commo devices on forcibly to broadcast alerts.

  Paradise had local warning systems for hurricanes and whatnot, but even those probably wouldn’t have been activated for the early stages of an invasion. At home, a system-wide EBS invasion alert would have sent civilians to shelters and reservists to mobilization stations. Over here, an invasion alert would just create useless panic. The Paradisians had no defenses to speak of. The average civilian on this planet didn’t even have ready access to military-grade small arms. In any possible war, their own government expected them to be nothing but a bunch of passive spectators.

  There would have been a breaking news alert when the enemy first appeared in-system. Maybe even some kind of broadcast news bulletin interrupting regular entertainment. Many people tuned in through their net glasses or the cube, or something, would be at least tangentially aware of what was happening, but even with that there were no guarantees.

  As for everyone who was asleep, or in the shower or whatever… They wouldn’t even know that something was wrong until the bombs hit the ionosphere.

  Right now, any place the invaders hadn’t simply wiped off the map had to be pure pandemonium. No info, no transport, no communications. Nothing working. Hell, half the people on the planet were right now still trying to figure out how to open their damned front door because they’d never used the manual switch, while the other half were busy figuring out how to put on clothes now that their Tailor wasn’t around, assuming they even had usable clothes lying around from the night before.

  Of course, paranoid loon that Yosi was, he’d made sure anything he wore could be quickly taken off and put back on without morphing. That’s why he’d chosen those baggy, Israeli-style hiking pants and robe.

  A wintertime cold wave in New Israel’s northern polar regions meant temperatures occasionally dropping a bit below zero and a bunch of half-frozen slush that melted completely within the week. Kids who grew up in their southern hemisphere never saw snow at all, except in VR. All their traditional clothing was loosely fitted, designed to cope with the desert heat.

  Leo kicked aside the pile of torn, dead fabric at his feet and pulled out his poncho. There was no need for civilian clothes now anyway, especially dead clothes.

  The bitch of the situation was, here they were in the middle of a shooting war all of a sudden and all they had were pistols and vibros. And it was all his fault.

  “Hell’s bells, I shouldn’t have talked you out of being so damned paranoid this one time around,” mumbled Leo, slipping the garment on over his head. “At least when it came to your submachinegun.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” replied Yosi, sliding his pistol into his poncho’s newly-extruded holster.

  The empty pouches of his normal fighting preset felt so disconcerting, all of a sudden, that he was compelled to morph them all away. The few spare magazines of pistol ammunition arranged at his belt felt disturbingly light and inadequate in the face of the towering mushroom clouds on the horizon. Even his soft vest had been left behind at the hotel.

  Last time around, at least there’d been no shortage of weapons or gear.

  All his life he’d prepared for the inevitable, and still it had caught him unaware! He was cursed. Just plain cursed!

  The grim thought surfaced instantly as a surge of cold fury, a low, menacing growl directed at the evil clouds and the yet-invisible enemy behind them. The bastards would pay for this, too.

  “Now you can kill all the invaders all by yourself, so we can go home,” grinned the Spartan, eyeing his friend’s bared teeth.

  “Leo, did I ever tell you what an atrocious sense of humor you have?”

  “A million times. Most notably while inside a certain shipping container full of Mirandan wine, hiding from the palace guardsmen of our mutual friend, the late, unlamented Baron Vladimir van der Rijn.”

  “What did I ever do to deserve you?” chuckled Yosi.

  At the time, with the choice between bleeding to death and a guillotine looming clearly in the future, it hadn’t been half as funny.

  “Here,” he said, proffering a hypo, “have some rad-hard. I doubt we got too much of a dose, what with the distance and the shelleaves, but why take chances?

  “Besides, if the Omicronians really are behind this mess, then those were old-school, dirty, plutonium-cored Teller bombs with uranium tampers, not the nice, clean, modern compression fusion warheads we use in the civilized world. Who knows where the fallout will go?”

  “You brought rad-hard?” asked Leo incredulously as he automatically jabbed the hypo against his jugular vein.

  “Yup,” responded his friend smugly.

  “And nerve gas kits, and a couple of spray cans of defensive nanites, just in case. Never leave home without ’em. Those animals might drop anything on populated areas, at any time. War nanites, chemicals, sytoxin, you name it. We’re close enough to two Safari Stations to get spillover. The wind is way too unpredictable in these mountains.

  “God help us if they start dropping meme bombs. Multera or Zombi would nail us dead before we could blink.

  “While
we’re on the subject of prophylaxis, why don’t you take some SH-1?”

  “Yosi, I love what a paranoid loon you are,” smiled the Spartan as he chewed on the pair of palm-sized hexagonal orange tables that would give him partial protection against sytoxin for the next three days.

  The taste was absolutely horrible, but who cared, given what the things did?

  With SH-1 in his system, he’d actually stand a chance against a small dose. He’d still get sick as a dog and have to take lots more tablets. Unless he made it to a major hospital soon afterward, survival would still be far from a certain thing. But a twenty-five percent chance trying to beat sytoxin poisoning armed with nothing but SH-1 was a heck of a lot better than certain and horrible death.

  Yosi’d had to take the stuff by prescription twice a week for years. Nowadays, he didn’t need to take it regularly, but he still took a tablet now and then. It made sense that he’d bring some along on the hike, although bringing a forty-count box could be called overkill. But nerve gas kits and defensive nanites…

  He supposed that, too, kind of made sense. The stuff was small, light, easy to carry. And easily concealed in an out-of-the-way compartment of a backpack, where one’s concerned friend wouldn’t semi-humorously rib one over it.

  Growing up, he’d never paid attention to what, besides a ridiculous amount of firepower, Yosi had felt compelled to keep around in order to make himself feel safe. He’d slowly mellowed out about the giant pile of guns and ammo, these past few years. But it made sense that the WMD defenses would be the last things his friend would put aside.

  “Stealth up!” yelled Yoseph suddenly, hitting the ground.

  A split-second after Leo had triggered his poncho’s maximum stealth mode, a pair of silver darts shot by, nearly skimming the treetops. A few moments later, the ground shook to a deafening thunder.

  “Arrogant fucks, aren’t they?” remarked Yosi from where he lay.

  “Deliberately turned off their in-flight camo. Flying around in their resting displays like nothing down here can hurt them.”