Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  But it was not until she saw the mushroom clouds that she had realized, truly realized, that what the news broadcasts had been talking about was not, in any way, unreal or remote.

  Roger had continued on to Station G. Probably because he couldn’t think of any other place to go right at that moment. It was noon exactly, by the aircar’s dashboard clock, when they landed.

  The people at Station G had tried to take the car almost the moment it touched ground. They were stuck there, in the cold of the ski resort, and nothing was working all of a sudden. Not even the heaters and waste recyclers. The cube broadcast in the main lounge had cut off in mid-word, and everyone’s net glasses and even clothes had died in the same instant. Some of them were wrapped in bedsheets and blankets, or even completely naked, running toward the car in the snow. They’d had their clothes off for some reason, sleeping or showering or making love or whatever, when everything had died. And what they had casually morphed off into the Tailor’s recycling slot or simply onto the floor was now inaccessible. A useless pool of fine polymer dust, or else a seamless, formless skein of continuous fabric that one needed to cut apart even to make a simple sheet to wrap around oneself.

  Everyone was desperate to get down off the mountain, to get away before the water pipes froze solid and they had nothing to drink but potentially toxic snow melted by body heat. To get down where it was warm before they all froze to death. The car was the only working vehicle around.

  They had ski poles and kitchen knives and broken-off chair legs for clubs. One even had a gun. Unfortunately for them, Roger had a tendency to idle the engines and feather the props, instead of simply cutting power right away.

  Having taken off with people literally clinging to duct edges and falling off, Roger decided to make a run to his father’s isolated Mirandan-style hunting lodge on the northwestern outskirts of the Angeleno Plateau, a place he had never visited nor knew more of than general location. They were en route there when the alien fighter picked them up and forced them back in the opposite direction.

  “When the engines got blown off, Roger decided to surrender. You found us a minute later.”

  “So you didn’t even try to run on foot?”

  “On foot? In the woods?”

  To the girl, the idea was unthinkable. Literally. Even with her life on the line, she simply hadn’t thought of it.

  In her world, mused Yosi, only VR characters ran through woods on foot. Real-life people rode around in cars, or walked down streets.

  Yoseph strolled over from the two craft he’d been examining.

  The “supplies” in the trunk of the aircar had turned out to be a case of soda and a few sandwiches.

  “Their so-called supplies,” he remarked contemptuously to Leo, holding up the little orange cooler, “A picnic lunch.”

  “And the aliens?” asked the Spartan.

  “What you’d expect.

  “Escape and evasion kits in the seat compartments, more-or-less the same as what you got in the Shock Corps.

  “Submachineguns, ponchos, vibros, ration bars, rescue beacons.

  “Body armor, surprisingly enough. That seems to be the only real difference.

  “A couple of regen shells per kit.

  “We can probably eat the ration bars, even. The alien seemed at ease eating him.”

  Yosi jabbed a thumb over one shoulder to indicate van Pieterzonn’s tattered corpse.

  “How can you be so… So heartless?” Patty interrupted, still sobbing.

  Without warning, like the flip of a switch, an unstoppable, burning tsunami of anger rose up from the pit of Yosi’s stomach.

  Alien invasions and aliens eating people and stupid Outsiders who pack picnic lunches instead of bug-out bags and give up when their cars quit. Why did Hashem drop it on his head, now of all times?

  “This is war, poor little rich girl,” he snapped brutally, eyes flashing with fiery contempt.

  “Can’t whore your way out of this one. The fucking aliens don’t give a shit how good you are at sucking dick.

  “Now shut the fuck up. Any more yapping from you, and, so help me, I’ll leave you right here, to wait for these fuckers’ rescue party. Got it?”

  Patty’s mouth snapped shut with an audible clack. She stared up at him in utter shock, all quivering lips and platter-sized eyes.

  “Yosi!” exclaimed Leo mildly, in a disappointed tone that spoke volumes.

  “Sorry, milord,” muttered Yoseph reflexively, suddenly ashamed at his loss of self-control.

  It was times like this that Leo most reminded him of Duke Reginald. When the outer, immature goofball suddenly disappeared without a trace, and the Duke Freeman who one day would be flashed out, if only for a split second, from underneath the childish facade.

  Yosi straightened out his shoulders with a deep breath. “Let’s go,” he said, “we’ve got to get out of here.

  “God only knows where that fighter’s wingman is, or his bots, for that matter, or when he was supposed to check in with base. They’ll get worried up there sooner or later, even if these guys got official permission to take a break instead of playing hooky to eat lunch and stretch their legs.”

  * 5 *

  That night it rained. Not an exuberant tropical shower, coming down in nearly solid streams to soak and renew the thirsty earth, but a lazy sort of moistness that seemed to hang endlessly in the air in tiny droplets, permeating everything with an irresistible, cold clamminess.

  Covered in goosebumps under his poncho, feeling the familiar, friendly heaviness of his rucksack chafe his shoulders, Yoseph Weismann slid silently forward through the dark mud and the damp brush of the forest floor. Behind him only the occasional crackle or brushing sound indicated Leo’s almost equally silent presence. The Spartan’s infantry combat skills might have gotten rusty through disuse over the near-decade since he’d graduated from high school, but there was nothing wrong with his E&E training. The girl, Patty, had crashed through the underbrush like a drunken rhinoceros for half the night, whimpers and heavy-footed missteps impossible to hide despite her poncho’s best efforts. You could hand a poncho to an Outsider civilian, Yosi had smirked to himself, but that didn’t make the Outsider civilian anything more than a pop-up target in a poncho. But now she was being quiet, too. Leo was probably carrying her again.

  Yoseph had expected a rescue party to appear within hours, looking for their missing friends. He’d taken great trouble to lay false trails and otherwise confuse matters as much as possible at the crash site before stealthing up and joining Leo’s rapid march away from the place. But no rescuers had shown up; at least none that overflew them on their way to the site. It was, as far as Yosi was concerned, a small miracle. Perhaps the aliens really had been hot-dogging around out of sector, without authorization. In that case, given the lack of active rescue beacons, their superiors up in orbit would be down to imagery analysis. And that would take time, especially if the fighter had never reported its real position and the would-be rescuers were looking in the wrong place.

  Yosi liked the thought. It implied an undisciplined sloppiness quite at odds with what he’d expect from the forces of a Great Power. But the problem with aliens, he reminded himself, was that they were alien. He could not assume that their ideas about discipline and military organization worked the way his did. The fact that he liked a theory because it made him feel better about the mess he was in, Yoseph reminded himself, did not mean that the theory was true. Reasoning from a sample of one was dangerous.

  Around two in the morning, the shelleaves began to give way to pine and eucalyptus and the occasional grove of highland bamboo. They were truly in the uplands now, well away from any semblance of man-made trails or roads. Precisely where a confused, scared Paradisian running from a wrecked aircar would not go.

  As Yosi’s little group climbed higher and higher into the foothills of the Dourados, the drizzling rain petered out and the rising disk of Daphne began to poke its rays through jagged breaks in the t
hreadbare clouds. Yesterday’s cheery companion of amorous lovers and merry pranksters, so brilliant at perigee as to enable the naked eye to see through the darkness with barely any enhancement from a poncho, shone tonight through the ascending ghosts of all the many things that ought not burn. The homes and hopes and bodies of seventeen million innocents who rose this morning, like any other morning, and went about their ordinary business, and suddenly were dead.

  It was an angry, crimson, flickering light, elbowing its way through thick, shaggy branches and stems to paint the world in blood. Beautiful and hideous at once, it was the light of change. And something within Yosi, something small, huddled and terrified, shuddered at its origins even as the rest of him raged and roared and laughed abhorrently, as black bubbles of pure, bitter hate percolated to the surface of his soul in response to this evil that dared invade his life, now, of all times. Now. Just as things were finally good.

  In the moonlight, a grim, tight-lipped Leo pressed silently forward, Patty’s still form slung over his good shoulder.

  It was four in the morning, and suddenly Yosi realized how inhumanly tired they all were. The girl was all but unconscious. His shoulders, raw from the pack straps, joined his sore feet in an extremely impolite and insistent concert. Even the heavyworlder, who normally disregarded all physical discomfort with the same cheerfulness with which he ignored the indignant victims of his practical jokes, looked haggard, gazing blindly at his surroundings past sunken cheeks and bloodshot eyes. He wouldn’t complain, but nearly fourteen hours’ forced march uphill through trackless alpine forest was bound to take its toll on anything flesh and bone, macho Spartans included. If the slopes were any steeper out here, they’d need pitons and climbing rope. Night was almost over, anyway. Only an hour and a half to sunrise.

  “Break,” escaped from Yosi as his pack thumped to the ground.

  “Time to set up camp for the day.”

  Leo set the girl down with more care than he would give a crystal vase. Patty whimpered softly and clung to him like a little girl as her blistered feet touched the ground. It was obvious now that the Spartan had carried her through half the night.

  “I’ll take first watch,” said Yosi to Leo, sinking the tent’s probe into the ground.

  The shelter would now copy the surrounding terrain as best it could, hiding its occupants from casual eyeball and sensor search.

  For the tenth time, he’d congratulated himself on bringing the camo tent and ponchos, and cursed, for he’d left the suits of armor and the assault rifles at home, the first step toward overcoming what everyone around him claimed was his baseless paranoia.

  “You have four hours to sleep. No arguments.”

  Yosi pulled out a caffeine lozenge to keep himself awake, ran Leo’s binoculars around the horizon twice, for good measure, and settled down to wait for dawn.

  * 6 *

  Yoseph shifted his weight slightly forward, letting circulation return to his legs.

  He had picked this spot well. While totally hidden, a man could see, for the most part, a good four hundred meters downslope of himself, and three hundred or so on each side. Upslope rose a near-vertical cliff peppered with sparse climbing vines and bushes clinging tenaciously to soil-filled cracks in the rock. Anyone trying to get at him from that direction would first have to take an aircraft to the top of the mountain. And then, unless they contented themselves with just tossing grenades and exchanging potshots with him as he retreated downslope, they’d have to rappel down. Still, the tent remained only a meter and a half away. The horizon, too, could be scanned quite well from here, as far as the nearest town in one place.

  Not that the nearest town was likely to be of any use, thought Yosi, glancing at the pillar of smoke rising off in the distance, a tiny copy of the massive gray column that towered over the mountain peaks off to the north-northeast, marking the still-burning ruins of San Cristobal.

  He didn’t know why the aliens had bombed Matorralia. It was just a sleepy village of about a thousand souls; mostly foresters and their families, and some folks who’d worked in the nature tourism industry. An insignificant flyspeck on the map, of no military significance whatsoever. Yet bomb it they had. A small tactical nuke. A little under ten kilotons, as far as the poncho AI could estimate from the available data. Probably compression fusion, not an A-bomb. No fallout that he could detect from where he was sitting, at any rate.

  Looking over the aftermath, probability of anyone surviving was basically nil. It had been a ground burst, or near enough as didn’t matter. The fireball had covered much of the town outright. The blast wave had knocked down the rest. Now the firestorm was busy finishing off the piles of rubble left by the blast wave.

  Perhaps it had been as simple as a bored spaceplane crew not feeling like returning to orbit with all their munitions unexpended. Or maybe some fool had taken a potshot at one of the alien aircraft with a hunting laser or some such. Who knew?

  Now that the Paradisian Forestry Service was gone, the fire would probably spread. Last night’s rain had wet the ground a good bit, and the wind was blowing mostly eastward so far. Still, he kept looking the firestorm over periodically, the better to avoid surprises. If it started to get serious and spread to the north-northwest, a forest fire could eat up the roughly seventy kilometers between him and the ruined town in less than an hour.

  By himself, Yosi could free-climb the cliff behind him in fifteen to twenty minutes, without undue difficulty. But Leo would need at least a few hand- and footholds carved into the rock up near the middle of the face, where it looked the smoothest, or else have to rely on vibros sunk hilt-deep into the stone. And the gear, not to mention Patty, would have to be hauled up by rope, in stages. On the plus side, no one was around anymore to fine them for climbing in a no-climb zone, or mutilating a protected rock face.

  Moving as slowly as possible, Yosi returned to the alien weapon he had been toying with for the past half-hour. It seemed a pretty straightforward, no-nonsense design. Except for a few minor differences, most of them more-or-less cosmetic, it could have been any human submachinegun…

  There was a disturbance in the air, too quiet to be a sound. And a sensation -- like a feather tickling the back of his brain. Another human being within a few steps. Most of the time this sensation was right, sometimes it was wrong. It never paid to ignore it.

  “Good morning, Leo,” he said without turning. His friend slid up beside him, sniffing the cool morning air. You could almost smell the grass grow, between the dew and the fresh, green odor of living plants all around.

  “Why didn’t you wake me two hours ago?” asked Leo irritably.

  “You needed the sleep. I was perfectly capable of staying up a couple of extra hours.

  “Their submachineguns work just like the Takashi. The caliber is a bit smaller, but the controls and guts are basically the same. The sight tracks the human eye just fine. The barrel steers with the aiming chevron. And the thing runs UCIP, like all the rest of their gear. Didn’t even have to crack it. Poncho needed something like two seconds to dig up some kind of generic legacy driver, and that was that. Their vibros are the same way. Tell me that’s not weird.”

  Yosi couldn’t tell moods very well today, but the answer didn’t seem to improve the Spartan’s disposition one bit.

  “Yosi. Sleep. Now. I’ll check in half an hour and you’d better be out like a light.”

  “Yes, milord.”

  Yoseph grimaced as he slid past Leo and into the tent and the sleeping bag.

  His sleep inducer was fried. This was going to be nasty…

  Fire. Fire everywhere. Hot, even through armor. Wood and cloth burn, plastic melts. The floor is a sea of molten goo, burning on the surface, bubbles of hot gas percolating to the top, exploding in parti-colored bursts of flame, some as big as a watermelon. The ceiling is dripping everywhere. Pretty soon, even his armor won’t be enough. Not if they drop another incendiary.

  A five-millimeter heavy barrel opens up nearby
, roaring like some great beast on a rampage. The flechettes punch right through the walls, carrying fist-sized chunks of wall with them. Shards of concrete fall everywhere, sending up little fountains of boiling plastic.

  Smoke blinds him, but he has the general direction. His finger eases back on the trigger and his Takashi snarls angrily back. Short, precise bursts, just like they’d taught him in grade school.

  There! A scream, curses. An ugly, foreign tongue, like dogs barking. Grenades come plopping down through the broken windows. He rolls -- and the burning muck is suddenly over his head.

  Lunge -- half swim, half crawl. There has to be a back door…

  He is out, just in time. The grenades are too much for the roof. It falls in behind him.

  Backyard. Flechettes chew the earth at his heels. There is a puddle to his right -- the next house, all plastic.

  A hollow, a fold in the ground, there has to be something… Run for it!

  There. A mortar round had landed just two meters away, leaving a shallow, blackened pit.

  He dives…

  Too late! Always too late.

  Suddenly, his left leg is gone at the hip…

  Yosi’s eyelids snapped open, like a pair of spring-loaded shutters. He screamed, but silently, internally, so that no one could hear.

  Well, maybe someone else like himself. Talented, the Spartans called it, when they were being polite. But even that was unlikely. Having a limited ability to sense and broadcast emotions himself, he was fairly certain that unless an empath was very strong or very near, his scream would remain unheard.

  Momentarily, a thought pierced his mind. Was there Talent among the aliens? If so, what forms would it take? He’d read the three he had killed with only minimal trouble, like reading a belter or an Omicronian. They were different, yes. But not so different that he couldn’t read them at all. Another enigma. Why? How? Belters and Omicronians were both original Homo sapiens stock, once upon a time. Surely these aliens could not have been, too? Yet their blood was red and smelled much like his own. And all their gear ran UCIP. Why would it run UCIP?