Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  “Well,” answered the Spartan, “they’re right, aren’t they?”

  Their poncho AIs estimated that the three smaller mushroom clouds rising over what had once been San Cristobal were airbursts of a bit over three megatons each. The bigger, fourth cloud was from a five-megaton ground burst. Presumably that one had targeted the Joint Mission’s planetside headquarters and the associated military base.

  The two brigades of spaceborne infantry stationed in San Cristobal had been the sole set of real ground troops on this planet. Their official mission had been to guard the base. Unofficially, they were there to intimidate the Paradisians and, one brigade being League Shock Corps and the other being Imperial Marines, to check each other.

  They had no nuclear attack shelters because no one could have possibly imagined needing such on a peacekeeping mission to Paradise. It was plum, quiet duty. Nothing but beaches and pretty señoritas and warm sun for the past thirty-five years.

  Even the League embassy out in the city didn’t have anything more than a simple reinforced basement, an emergency command post and bolt hole for noncombatants, built mostly as a precaution against the possibility of major civic unrest.

  The Joint Mission HQ had been a simple steel-frame building with plascrete walls. Its greatest form of defense had been sliding armored window shields designed to stop heavy machinegun fire. They’d doubled as hurricane shutters.

  “What the heck…” muttered Yosi, “Whaddaya mean you can’t ID ‘em? Stupid AI!

  “All right, I’ll ask our resident expert.

  “Oh great ace of the skies,” he said to Leo, “kindly look at the snapshots of these damned fighters and tell me what they are. I’ve got them coming and going, but still the stupid poncho AI can’t ID them.”

  “Well, I can’t ID these things either,” replied Yosi’s companion after a moment’s consideration.

  “Never seen anything like them in my life. Tail roots and lift body anchors sort of like Shomers, engine spacing and intakes like Huelongs, payload bodies more like the Berkut…

  “I have no idea what these are.”

  “That’s impossible!” muttered Yosi confusedly.

  “There’s no aircraft you can’t recognize…

  “Could someone have deliberately morphed their fighters to look weird just to confuse observers?”

  “No way,” answered the Spartan resolutely.

  Of this he could be sure. The air was his home turf, the way the ground was Yosi’s.

  “You’d have to have fighters deliberately designed for it.

  “Normal fighters are designed to morph things that are useful to morph. Grow tails and canards and wings, reshape the lift body and the intake inlets and the nose and whatnot.

  “But there still has to be a core payload body for the morphable elements to attach to. There still have to be nanite reservoirs at the attachment points.

  “You can’t move intake locations around at will. You can’t change your engine spacing on the fly. You can’t reshape the payload body. Not unless your plane is designed for it from the get-go.”

  “All right,” said Yosi, “this is getting weirder by the minute. Let’s try the long-range radio. Maybe we’ll pick up something.”

  “Dead,” answered Leo as his poncho failed to connect to the brick-sized metal box that sat in the top compartment of his backpack, “Overvoltage fault.”

  The thing wouldn’t reset, not even when he pulled the power pack and rebooted it clean.

  On the second attempt, it simply failed to boot at all.

  “An S-model radio?” mused Yoseph, “Those things are rated to two hundred kilovolts per meter.

  “These guys really went to town with the EMP, didn’t they? I wonder what they look like.”

  “What do you mean you wonder what they look like?”

  “They’re aliens. Paradise is being invaded by aliens.”

  Leo guffawed incredulously.

  Yosi could be an oddball even on normal days. Sometimes, the Spartan was sure of it, his friend would act like a complete tinfoil hat loon just because he got off on weirding people out. But this was going way up into the stratosphere even for Yosi Weismann.

  “You read too much science fiction as a kid. There are no aliens,” said the Spartan.

  “Once you eliminate the impossible…” shrugged Yosi.

  “Think about it, why would the Omicronians invade Paradise and blow up San Cristobal? What’s to gain? They couldn’t hold this place.

  “They’re what, fourteen jumps away from their border if they go through Imperial space? Twelve if they go through ours. That’s one heck of a supply line to hold through hostile space. It makes no sense.

  “They’re a bunch of evil, inhuman monsters sworn to exterminate me and everyone I’ve ever cared about. I hate them so much that I’d be happy to eat their flesh and drink their blood on a daily basis, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’d love to pin this shit on those savages. But the Aryan Archduchy is a rational Great Power.

  “So we didn’t nuke San Cristobal. The Empire didn’t nuke San Cristobal. The Omicronians didn’t nuke San Cristobal. Who’s left?

  “You can’t recognize those fighters because, until today, they didn’t fly anywhere in known space.

  “You know why they’re flying around in their resting displays? ‘Cause they’re confused.

  “I guarantee you, they got one hell of a fight at the jump points. They came into the atmosphere hard, expecting one heck of a fight on the ground, too.

  “And no one is shooting at them, all of a sudden. No laser fire from the ground against their spaceplanes, no missiles from planetside fortresses fired against their ships in orbit, nada.

  “Somebody up there in orbit is still trying to figure out if the whole thing is some kind of trap.

  “First they sent in the drones and imaged everything, and found nothing.

  “Then they tried drawing fire with the drones, and no one shot at them.

  “Now they’ve ordered their atmospheric fighters to make low-altitude, low-speed passes over populated areas and other likely points of resistance. See if they get shot at.”

  “You know,” Leo rubbed his neck, frowning, “it does make sense, doesn’t it?

  “That’s why they had those forward-swept wings and canards out. They want to be able to break hard and hit the jets the moment something pops on the threat display.

  “And those weren’t resting skins, now that I think about it. Shiny, mirror-smooth surfaces. No markings of any kind. As reflective as they can make themselves. They want to at least have a chance of surviving the first laser blast.

  “Maybe it really is a bunch of aliens.

  “You still want to go to station W?”

  “Station G is nearer,” replied Yosi.

  “A bit of a climb, but what the heck. It’s just a tiny ski bum hangout. Maybe it hasn’t been slimed or nuked.

  “There will be survivors. Tourists stranded on the ground away from anywhere in particular, Gaian pilgrims, climbers, backpackers, that sort of thing. A lot of them will head for the nearest Safari Station, if only ‘cause they’ll be looking for food and shelter. Maybe we’ll find someone who knows something.”

  After fifteen minutes of hiking north, it was Leo’s turn to give the danger signal.

  A sporty-looking little red aircar came from straight ahead, buffeting wildly in attempts at evasive action. The pilot was incredibly good, but the engines of his little craft were obviously melting. The alien in pursuit had no such problems. With an adjustable lift body, smart wings, and a fusion plasmajet designed to push his fighter into orbit simply by standing it on its tail, what he was doing was an exercise in pointless cruelty.

  The combat spaceplane literally flew rings around his victim, seemingly in no hurry to score the kill. After a few more loops, the alien pilot finally decided to end the fun and games, loosening a shot that cleanly shaved off all three ducted fans on the car’s left side.

  D
espite a massive shower of sparks from shorted electrical lines, there was no fire. Like all aircars, the little craft had been built for safety.

  The crew cabin popped off the craft body as the car spiraled downward, drifting along on a set of rescue orange parachutes for a moment before plunging into the forest below.

  Someone must have popped the manual release lines for the chutes, thought Yosi.

  The chutes flopped around in the air for a second, then disintegrated into confetti-like shreds of smoldering fabric and a puff of smoke. For an instant, before the puff dissipated, one could see a blue beam shining through it as the alien’s onboard laser scattered off the soot and water vapor.

  With nothing more up in the air to shoot at, Yoseph expected the alien to simply go away. Instead, the fighter cut his main engine and used his landing jets to begin a descent. Apparently, shooting up civilian aircars for fun was a-ok, but starting forest fires with the primary engine’s exhaust was a no-no.

  “We’ve got to help them!” yelled Leo, breaking into a sprint.

  Yosi cursed and ran after him.

  With his blood up like that, there was no stopping the man. They could drill you and drill you in school and in Basic about the right stuff to do, but the moment the red wine got served the first time ‘round, your brain just turned to water and poured out your ears. And then all you had was instinct.

  Heck, Leo hadn’t done anything even mildly related to standard infantry tasks for nigh-on eight years. He’d gone straight from Shock Corps Basic to fighter pilot school.

  And now there it was, his instinct. Bloody Horatio Freeman, waving his bloody saber, climbing the goddamned walls of Akotiki.

  He hadn’t even turned on his camo. Never mind full stealth, the way he was going, but at least sprint mode would be nice. Just bloody forgot it, the macho idiot.

  Well, if that damned Spartan chivalry was going to get them both killed, at least he was going to be there to even the odds.

  Luckily, ponchos had presets for times like this, thought Yosi. Ones you could instantly trigger on the run. And if you had preconfigured your overly excitable friend’s poncho as a slaveable device and then got close enough to touch it, you could even transfer them over on the fly.

  The problem, of course, was actually catching the idiot when he was galloping downrange like a thoroughbred with its tail on fire.

  They were about halfway to the crash site when the alien finally managed to land. From the way the pilot kept bobbing his craft up and down, it looked like he had problems finding an approach path that wouldn’t intersect any large tree branches.

  “Hold it.”

  With Leo finally slowing down out of a sprint, Yosi managed to get close enough to grab his friend by his backpack.

  “We go on light. And turn on your camo and slow down, for God’s sake!”

  Leo shrugged off his pack and, without breaking stride, tossed it up into the boughs of a mid-sized shelleaf.

  The pack, being a military model designed for quick caching, caught a large branch and pulled itself close to it, where it was safely concealed by the rigid leaves.

  With Leo again outdistancing him, Yosi had no choice but to toss his pack aside as well. He did break stride, but only long enough to tell his pack to go climb up next to Leo’s.

  It was then that they heard a scream. A female scream to be precise. Yoseph’s adrenal glands flexed, sending their product coursing through his bloodstream. His pistol sprang into his hand as if of its own volition.

  Leo put on more speed.

  Yosi mentally cursed athletes, heavyworlder genes, testosterone poisoning, fighter pilots and Spartan chivalry in turn as he tried to catch up.

  In moments they burst onto a clearing, enlarged by the crash.

  The aircar’s crew cabin lay on its side at the far end. The car itself had plowed into the ground a little farther down, as evidenced by the trail of crushed vegetation and bits of shiny metal scattered about.

  A body sprawled nearby, probably the pilot. The ground around him was spattered with blood.

  And over the corpse stood the killer, manifestly no warrior of any human Power.

  The tiger-striped feline raised its head. Blood glistened on yellow fur and black claws.

  A little to the left was a blonde. Yosi would have called her cute, under different circumstances. She was backed against a tree, screaming with abandon.

  Yosi wouldn’t blame her, either. The spotted alien who’d cornered her seemed more interested in play than in food, slashing at clothes and scratching skin without doing any serious damage.

  Akhnookh licked the blood off his fangs and took another bite. If this one was any example, these creatures made pretty good food. A little soft for his taste, though.

  It was good to have fresh meat after all those army rations. The screams of the thing Mrrlik was playing with were getting annoying. Was he going to finally kill it or would Akhnookh have to pull rank? Something moved at the far end of the clearing…

  Akhnookh’s head snapped up just in time to see his weapons officer’s chest erupt in a fountain of gore.

  He felt sharp surprise as a high-velocity flechette tore through his neck, severing his spinal cord at the third vertebra as it morphed from a needle into a disk.

  Before things went dark, he had time to see a twitching, headless Zin body, spraying blood all over the grass from the stump of its neck and to realize, with horror, that it was his own.

  Yosi snapped off two shots on the run, diving for cover behind a large shelleaf trunk while pulling the trigger the second time.

  This close, he could see that the fighter’s open cockpit had room for three. Where was the third target, and why wasn’t it shooting back? And what the hell was Leo doing standing in the middle of the bloody clearing like a goddamned clay pigeon, still un-stealthed?

  Yoseph opened his mouth to yell at his friend…

  …T’rrek drew his claws through the bark of a large tree. He’d forgotten his personal claw board when he’d packed for this deployment. It’d been months since he had anything to scratch that wasn’t Navy-issue plastic. His claws were losing that razor-sharp edge he prided himself on.

  To his surprise, scratching the bark felt more like scratching metal than wood. This planet had some tough trees! The effect, in any case was thoroughly unenjoyable. This stuff would only dull his claws further.

  T’rrek was in the process of trying a different kind of tree, when he heard gunshots coming from the direction of his fighter.

  Those two dry barks sounded entirely different from the issue submachineguns they’d left back in the cockpit. What in the Prophet’s holy name was going on?

  The kaafar in the clearing were unarmed. They just stood there and let themselves be taken.

  Akhnookh’s scanners showed no large creatures in the area other than the two in the clearing. That’s why he let his crew leave the guns behind when they got out of those damned too-tight flight suits to stretch out their legs and eat something that didn’t come out of a plastic packet.

  Proper compensation for the trice-accursed moronic idea of flying around low and slow, trying to draw ground fire, that’s how he’d thought about it.

  He’d love to meet the headquarters puke who’d had that brilliant idea in a dark alley with no witnesses. When the order came through on the radio, he’d thought his testicles would crawl all the way up into his throat.

  The least the crew deserved after that kind of treatment was a walk, a breath of clean air and a bit of fresh meat.

  Now that he thought about it, these weird trees probably had enough metal in their leaves and bark to conceal nearly anything from any airborne watcher.

  He had to make it back to the fighter right now!

  …Leo stopped in the middle of the clearing, pistol in hand.

  Yosi was efficient as usual. Two shots made two bodies, all in less than half a second.

  Sometimes it scared him exactly how good his friend-cum-bodyguard
was at killing things. Made a fellow a bit envious, every once in a while.

  Where was Yosi, anyway?

  …T’rrek slipped into the bushes at the clearing’s edge, moving as quietly as he could while running on all fours.

  He’d hunted some pretty alert things in his life. It was doubtful he’d be heard by ordinary senses.

  If the source of the mysterious gunshots had all the sensory capabilities of a full suit of combat armor, all this caution was probably in vain. Then again, he was alive so far, which probably meant that the shooter either possessed a more limited sensory capability or was otherwise preoccupied.

  Why hadn’t he heard any more shots, or any return fire from his crew? Last time he’d seen him, Akhnookh, at least, was within half a leap of the cockpit, eating lunch.

  The view out of the bushes resolved the matter of return fire. Both his crewmen lay dead on the ground. A big specimen of the infidel cattle they were here to conquer stood about halfway between T’rrek and the fighter. Strangely enough, it looked to be armed only with a pistol.

  There had to be others out there, but there was nothing for it. He had to get to his spaceplane. A leap would take him to the middle of the clearing. He could kill the kaafir there and jump for the fighter in an instant.

  Once in the cockpit, he’d have his weapon, cover behind the fighter’s armored side and the radio to call for help. Maybe he could even take off, if the enemy only had small arms.

  It occurred to him, irrelevantly at the moment, that if he lived through this, he would never fly a fighter again.

  He pushed the thought violently to the back of his mind. One problem at a time. Survival first. He’ll worry about the court-martial later...

  ...A large orange-and-black striped alien jumped out of the bushes to Leo’s right, aiming straight at him. The Spartan danced out of the way.

  Reaching claws missed tearing out his throat by millimeters, leaving behind angry red welts.

  The fellinoid landed where the heavyworlder had stood an instant ago, and Leo swung his pistol leftward, trying to bring the muzzle on target at point-blank range.

  They were too damned close together. The alien swatted at the pistol backhanded, hissing at him as it turned.