by Moshe Ben-Or
“Go ahead,” said Yosi, setting his poncho to transcribe voice.
Leclerk paused, composing himself.
“My dearest Marie,” he began…
* 35 *
Yosi was overdue. The thought ground upon Leo’s mind. It had sat there all day. He couldn’t find a place for himself. Nothing fit, nothing distracted.
The interface cracker had done its job days ago. It had been ridiculously easy. The alien computer systems were so much like human ones, one had to suspect divine intervention. It had taken only forty-eight hours to trace the architecture and interfaces of the alien armor, only another forty-eight to reprogram all systems to deal with humans. Even the armor’s automedic could readily serve a human’s needs, so similar was the alien biology.
Of course, none of the suits could adjust to fit Leo. The aliens were built more along the lines of lightworlders. None had shoulders a meter wide while standing a meter sixty centimeters tall.
One of the suits did, however, fit Patty. Over the past few days, Leo had occupied himself with teaching her how to use it. She was a quick study, but, as with most Outsiders, her reflexes left much to be desired.
It was getting toward evening. Leo sat at the cave entrance, hidden by the camouflage tarp, staring at a clump of bushes across the stream and worrying.
Patty hugged him from behind. The girl always knew when he was in a bad mood, but today she couldn’t help him. Everything was packed. If Yosi didn’t make it by morning, they would move.
“What’s she like?” asked Patty, still hugging him.
“Who?”
“The Baroness.”
Leo gave a short bark of startled laughter.
“What, you think she’s competition?”
“I know I can’t live up to her…”
Leo turned abruptly and grabbed his lover by her shoulders, locking his eyes to hers.
“You don’t want to live up to her,” he said.
“Yes, the rumors are all true.
“Yes, there is nothing about pleasure and pain, and lust, and seduction, that she doesn’t know. Yes, just the scent of her drives men nuts. Yes, it was the best sex I have ever had in my life and probably ever will. Yes, on some level I want her still and probably always will, and no woman’s body can ever be anything but a pale imitation of hers.
“But she is like a jeweled clockwork spider, all gears and poison, cold stone and sharp metal. There is a big, dark, cold, empty space where her soul used to be. She sucks men dry and spits out the husks, and still she is hungry for more.”
Leo’s eyes unfocused as he remembered.
“You know, we used to talk a lot about Sparta. She was so entranced by it.
“A place where kings routinely die in bed of old age, where nobles poisoning each other to get to the throne is something out of an old history book, where a royal sibling is a friend and ally for life, not someone who is most likely to bump you off. A place where the royal prince could be best friends with the heirs to the thrones of the Core Duchies and not worry about which one of them would try to launch the next coup. A place where the people actually love the monarch instead of merely claiming to do so for fear of getting their heads lopped off…
“And then one day I got on my knees and asked her to marry me. Run away with me to Sparta.
“The King would never approve such a marriage, of course, but I didn’t care. I’d renounce my title, forswear my estate. I was of age, I could do it.
“We’d go off to the frontier, it didn’t matter. I could fly already – helicopters, tiltrotors, aircars, fixed-wing prop planes, bulk cargo haulers… Anything short of a fighter.
“I’d done a fair bit of hunting and farming, and herding, too. The Freeman heirs always do, growing up. So much of our duchy is open countryside. How could we rule our people if we didn’t even know how it feels to live like them?
“I’d make a living as a bush pilot on New Helena, maybe get a plot of land from the Land Bank… Anything to get her away from that snakepit.”
Leo paused.
It was too much. All that emotion came flooding suddenly back with the memory.
Isabella’s perfect, heart-shaped face. That fragrant, soft, wavy, jet-black hair. Those huge, black, almond-shaped eyes. That wonderful, smooth, soft, olive-colored skin. Those moist, impossibly red lips. Those perfectly round breasts. The nipples pushing up against the silk of her gown. The flare of her hips. The smooth length of her legs…
Flawless. Nothing out of proportion. Not a single blemish on her entire body. Not a freckle, not a birthmark, not even a single hair below the neck.
She never wore makeup. Her clothes didn’t have any of the hidden supports and tailor’s tricks that other, lesser women had to rely on to hide the imperfections in their bodies. She didn’t need any of it.
She could be perfect in anything. A gown, a tee shirt, a horse blanket, a potato sack, clean, dirty, covered in mud, covered in blood, it wouldn’t matter.
He could still smell the intoxicating scent of her, that impossible Isabella-smell that drove men mad. His palms tingled with the feel of her fine-boned, fragile hands in his own…
“And?”
Patty’s voice shattered the illusion.
“What happened?”
“And that was the one time I caught a glimpse of the other Isabella, the one that might have been, had she not been born Mad Baron Vladimir’s daughter.
“She had never met anyone who wanted her for her.
“Not for her body, not for her father’s power, not for the things she could give, not for the things she could do…
“She couldn’t imagine someone who would give up everything, just so that she could be free.
“She couldn’t even believe that such things happened in real life, much less comprehend how anyone could do something like that for her. Not for some fairy-tale princess in VR, but for real-life Isabella van der Rijn.
“It wouldn’t work, of course. There is nowhere she could go where Miranda wouldn’t follow her, where her father couldn’t find her, where she wouldn’t be a threat to someone merely by virtue of drawing breath. Not a cabin on New Helena, not across the Dead Zone. Nowhere. The moment she started running, she was a running corpse. And anyone running with her would be a running corpse, too. The death would just take a bit to catch up, that’s all.
“She said all that later, when she came to her senses, but that wasn’t what she blurted out first.
“She was so startled for a second, that she actually told me the full truth.
“Her eyes welled up, and she said that she couldn’t survive on Sparta. That there wasn’t a place on Sparta, for creatures like her.”
Leo winced, remembering the cold, wolfish smile and the glittering eyes on that perfect face, watching as Baron Vladimir’s palace guards dragged him away.
That perfect, melodious voice gone suddenly shrill, lashing at the hidden VR pickups in her bedroom. That one and only time they had made love in her bedroom.
He is a better lover, father. A better lover than you!
“I think she knows that there is something missing in her. That she is not quite human, down underneath. And she hates us all for having that something that she cannot.
“Don’t ever be sorry that you aren’t her.”
Patty pulled back.
“You know,” she said, “with all my friends I’d always felt like I was the older one. I hung out with people three and four and five years my senior, but still I felt older than them.
“You’re only three years older than me, but when you talk like this, I feel like you’re old enough to be my dad.”
“It must be the beard,” smiled Leo, stroking his newly-acquired bushy red growth.
He’d gotten tired of shaving a week ago. If he was going to play hill bandit for a while, he might as well look the part.
“No, I’m serious,” said the girl.
She was serious, of course, thought Leo. And she was right.
His childhood had ended there, on Miranda, as revolution raged in the streets, and David Alon’s plainclothes commandos fired at the Mad Baron’s Palace Guard, and blood seeped through Yosi’s bandages and dripped onto the pavement. And then, suddenly, in mid-stride, in mid-word, Yosi just stopped. And fell, like a broken doll.
That was the last time in his life he’d actually cried like a little boy. When he’d sprinted, carrying his adopted brother the last hundred meters to the armored aircar, and held his hand and begged him not to die, while Sarah Alon stuck him with needles.
The camo tarp pinged a warning, breaking the reverie.
Someone was coming. Some man. Too big and too loud to be Yosi.
Leo turned and grabbed his submachinegun, motioning Patty to be quiet, illogical though that was with the tarp masking all sound. A few flechettes passing through would hurt the thing not a bit, if it came to that.
* 36 *
Ricardo Sanchez looked around his new office. Two weeks ago, the place had belonged to the governor of Angeles Province. In a way, it still did.
The guards hadn’t even figured out that it was time to start panicking when his boys had come to get him. To his final moment, the idiot warden had babbled about how they’d “pay” for their “crimes.”
That was the thing about morons, thought Ricardo. They simply couldn’t adjust to rapidly changing realities.
Ricardo Sanchez wasn’t one of the morons.
The screams of protest over the suddenly-dead cube hadn’t even started to get loud when the thought had hit him:
Here was his second chance. The opportunity of a lifetime.
In an instant, in a flash, the old world was dead and gone. All old losses zeroed out and passed from existence.
A new world was coming. A world under foreign rule. Under alien rule.
But to them, it would be the humans who’d be alien.
The invaders had showed up six days ago. An armored column had come up from the southwest and occupied Monroe Airport. By next morning the runways had been cleared, and the first spaceplanes were landing. Two days after that, heavy cargo shuttles were splashing down again at Juan Delameda Spaceport. And by day five the aliens had set up shop in the casino district, smack in between the two.
Pretty soon, by his lookouts’ estimates, there were nearly two divisions of alien troops in the city.
The Oasis Casino was now a corps headquarters, at least judging by the number of antennae on the roof, the bearing of the guards, and the elaborate insignia of the occupants.
Discipline looked pretty tight, which Ricardo had judged to be a good thing. The other good thing was that some of the scouts sent into the city proper had turned into unabashed looters the moment they were out of their superiors’ sight.
The Legend of Thraxus come to life had been his worst nightmare. Ricardo thanked whatever deities there might be, that he didn’t have to face anything like that disputably fictitious hive mind, incorruptible and mad.
Perhaps later one could find the things these invaders liked, besides gold, rugs and fresh meat. Drugs maybe, or VR stims of some sort. Wine seemed not to be it, although alcohol in another form might work. One wondered if they gambled.
The alien language was an odd thing. He’d feared, for a little while, that it would scupper his whole venture before it began. No human throat could easily imitate that weird combination of grunts, hisses and gargling sounds. One shuddered at the thought of how strange the underlying linguistic structures might be.
But all he’d turned out to need were a few dozen recordings. Within twenty-four hours, the Professor had a working AI translator for him. The thing wasn’t perfect, but one could make oneself understood.
By way of a final test, the Professor had used it to interrogate an alien prisoner.
They called themselves “Zin.” It sounded like sort-of a buzzing sneeze.
The prisoner had been an infantryman. A buck private with the 355th Mechanized Infantry Division.
The other unit in the city was the 44th Armored Division.
Corps HQ was indeed at the Oasis. In fact, the Oasis was being prepared to receive XIIth Army HQ, commanded by someone called Prince Khharrq.
According to the prisoner, the aliens were fighting a holy war. Apparently, the Zin were the Master Race, chosen by their god to rule the universe. The bearers of the One True Faith. All other intelligent beings had been created by the god Allakh in order to serve them.
Ricardo had all but laughed out loud when he’d heard that pile of nonsense.
There he’d been sitting, thinking of how to deal with a bunch of weird alien cats from outer space, and out came this bunch of pseudo-Omicronian crap.
Heck, he’d thought, these people didn’t even plan to slaughter everyone, the way the Aryans would. They just wanted the whole universe to get down on its knees and pay homage to some stupid Big Juju in the sky.
Well, and kiss their boots, of course.
“Just a bunch of furry humans!” Ricardo had remarked at the time.
And the Professor’s detailed autopsy of the prisoner had showed that his boss was more right than he’d known.
The markers of Early Golden Age genetic engineering were impossible to miss.
The Zin were human. And also leopard and mountain lion, and even a bit of ordinary old housecat, all pasted together in a crude, amateurish mash-up.
Whoever had created these creatures couldn’t hold a candle to the likes of Francois Chirac, but the design had clearly been good enough for his purposes.
As far as Ricardo was concerned, this only confirmed that his plan would work, no matter how dangerous it seemed at first glance.
Others would have balked at the risk of it. Would have settled for a lesser score. But not himself. Not Ricardo Sanchez. That’s not how he operated.
When the boys had reported the arrival at Juan Delameda of a large pinnace bearing an obvious VIP, who was installed amid much pomp and ceremony at the Oasis, he had made his move.
Well-dressed and bearing gifts, he had himself clandestinely conveyed to within a few blocks of the invaders’ planetary headquarters.
He’d picked the location carefully.
A building bristling with antennae. Located well behind the casino district’s supposedly-impenetrable perimeter. Run by soldiers with branch insignia that looked nothing like everyone else’s. Soldiers whom the Professor had tagged as having the richest vocabulary so far encountered. Ones who’d been repeatedly seen moving about the city, looking not for rugs or jewels, but for functional media.
Ricardo Sanchez took risks. But Ricardo Sanchez wasn’t stupid.
Making sure to bow deeply and speak softly, he’d asked to see the major who ran the place, by name. And then his superior and his superior and so forth.
In about three hours, after much roaring and hissing, some mild abuse, and a few credible-sounding threats to eat him, Ricardo was prostrating himself before His Highness Prince Khharrq.
The prince had been amenable to his proposition.
Yes indeed, the Zin wanted a well-run and orderly planet; and yes indeed they did not want to bother administering things themselves, if they could help it.
In their language, he was Ras Dkhimin. In translation, something like “Chief Slave.”
But he was El Presidente in Paradisian.
Quite a change from Inmate 45, Angeles Province Death Row.
As for His Highness Prince Khharrq and his furry horde, Ricardo Sanchez would yet see, who would come to rule whom.
* 37 *
Klaus Weinberger pursed his lips, examining the row of faces before him.
The Monarchist Café in the basement of Sileño Hall was as good a place to meet as any on campus. The fluorescent bulbs flickered occasionally as the patched-together campus-wide power distribution network skipped a beat. The wall paneling was still the same red-tinted bamboo laminate it had been a hundred and twenty years ago, when he was a student, the green upholstered
chairs were still as soft, the tables the same near-indestructible epoxy-coated pseudooak. The royal coat of arms of the House of Núnez, inlaid in precious woods, still showed under the wall paneling’s thick coat of transparent lacquer.
There was a time when this place had been His Highness Prince Luiz de Núnez Hall, and he, though himself a student, could only enter this club room as a waiter, mused Weinberger. Now, only the old coat of arms remained of those long-past days.
As virtually his first act in office, General Palmer had ordered all symbols of the royal dynasty removed planet-wide.
Few among the faculty here at the Collegio de Engenharia had had any love for the king, and fewer still among the students. The place had ever been a Progressivist bastion. But no one had wanted to ruin the paneling at the Smoking Club, so they’d just painted things over with some more-or-less opaque lacquer.
Later, after the next revolution, someone had remembered about the royal coats of arms. With a bit of solvent and some ingenuity, the royalist decor came right back, this time as a harmless bit of nostalgia.
Regimes had come and gone. The Royal College of Civil and Military Engineering had become the National Military Engineering Academy, and then the Polytechnic University of San Angelo. But these old walls had remained through all the storms.
Now the old walls of Sileño Hall had seen yet a third regime fall. Although, unlike the last two times around, it wasn’t certain what, if anything, would arise to replace it. Or whether the walls would survive yet again.
“Marty,” asked the dean, “what is the status of food production?”
Five weeks ago, Marty Milena had been a professor in the Agronomy department. Today the Agronomy Labs’ algae tanks fed the three and a half thousand people in dean Weinberger’s care.
Thank God for the presence of mind Marty had had to preserve them when the city power grid had failed. Without this meter-fifty-five, fifty-kilo woman, there would be starvation here, as everywhere else.
“The tanks are at capacity, Dean. If we are to feed more people, we’ll need to set up new ones. If we could get our hands on a real industrial-grade tank, even a small one, we could feed eight thousand within two to three weeks. As it is, we are barely providing subsistence-level diets for the mouths we’ve got.”
