by Moshe Ben-Or
And so, like the Empire’s vast armadas before it, like the Archduchy’s doomed Great White Fleet, the mighty Zin force had finally had no choice but to turn about and slink dispiritedly back whence it had so confidently started, stripping its own warships for parts and scuttling battleships for simple lack of fuel.
A bloody nose, and a painful lesson indeed.
Across the desolate vastness whose reaches they had so ably defended, the Leaguers had come chasing after their foe, keen on denying him any chance of respite. They did not have the strength, as yet, to take back Miranda. But until they built this strength, they would harass relentlessly. For such had ever been their way of war.
And so tonight, like most other nights, League raiders and Zin defenders again confronted one another in a high-speed game of lethal chess. Up there, far above, in the deep, velvet blackness, commands were barked and static crackled across the aether. There, man-made suns bloomed suddenly in the darkness, and shields flashed white with burn-throughs, and metal ablated, and ceramic shattered under thermal stress, and precious air erupted out into the void. There, curses mingled with screams of agony as blood flooded out of ruptured lungs, boiling and freezing at the same time as it frothed out into the vacuum. Up there, in the deepness far above, there was war and chaos and terror. But down here, beneath the bottomless arctic sky, all was peace and stillness and calm.
The deck of the missile boat rocked soothingly, cradle-like beneath her feet. The freezing, bracing, oxygen-packed oceanic breeze ruffled the fur hood of her parka as it gusted against her face, bringing with it the occasional droplet of slushy, salty spray. Only the rhythmic, leaden slapping of wave against hull interrupted the blissful silence of her solitude.
Solitude. Silence. Space. She had never properly appreciated these great luxuries before, thought Isabella. Like sleep and warmth and food and the absence of pain, solitude and silence and space were precious things whose true value remained unnoticed until they were taken away.
Yet one more thing to blame the Zin for. Another bit of the all-consuming monstrosity from which there was no escape, no matter how far she might run.
Here, in the vast reaches of the World Ocean, just north of the southern polar circle, she was as far away as it was possible to get from any piece of land on Miranda. Yet even in this remote arctic wilderness, the echo of war remained ever-present, if only in the form of tiny blue flashes in the nighttime sky.
In this seventh month of the largest war mankind had known since the Götterdämmerungskrieg, there could be no pitched battles down here on the surface of Miranda, any more than there could be a pitched battle up there, in the velvet blackness far above.
The hour was dark, and dawn seemed very far away.
Forty million of Isabella’s subjects lay dead, perished in the crossfire of the repeated invasions, or else killed by starvation and disease. Perhaps more. She had no exact count.
The mighty fortresses of Miranda lay shattered and silent. An alien army occupied the ruins of Miranda’s great cities. In the Grand Ballroom of the Purple Palace, nearly the only building left more-or-less intact in New Amsterdam, a giant alien cat lolled arrogantly upon the Gothic Throne.
Of the Great Treasures of the House of Rijn, Gungnir, Mjöllnir and Kara had been lost. Rota and Brunhilde, even if they could be brought back to flight status, could not be safely launched again. The Zin, twice bitten, remained ten times shy.
The surviving armored vehicles of the Planetary Response Force hid deep in the mountains and jungles of her homeworld, along with the few mobile surface-to-space missile launchers that still remained to her Orbital Guard.
Confined to three missile boats and a pair of tenders, Isabella’s shrunken court fled from tiny speck of land to tiny speck of land among the vast, unbroken waters of the World Ocean, remaining submerged for months on end as it sought to confuse her relentless pursuers.
Her people remained defiant. But they were battered. And starving, and sick. The coming year would only add to their misery, as the dust and soot kicked up into the atmosphere by the hundreds of nuclear detonations and the pyres of burning cities brought cold and starvation even to those who had never laid eyes upon a single Zin soldier.
She should have paid more attention to the food problem, thought the Baroness ruefully. With twenty-twenty hindsight it seemed a glaring, obvious error. Yet not so inexplicable, for all that.
Most other worlds, even net food exporters like Paradise and Novaya Zemlya, fed themselves primarily from the ancient closed loop of waste processor and algae tank. Almost everywhere in the known universe, crops and animals raised beneath the open sky provided either comfort foods for the middle class or luxuries for the well-to-do. In an emergency, such things could be readily dispensed with, generally occasioning naught more than a bit of grumbling and a little indigestion on the part of the suddenly-deprived.
But the one point six billion Mirandans beneath Isabella’s scepter had ever depended upon the generous bounty of their mother planet. Permitting the common Volk access to decentralized food production and storage had always been viewed as dangerous, and even she had not been brave enough with her military preparations to challenge that status quo. It was one thing to hand out new Charters, be gracious to the freiebürger, grant a Common Code, or reform the Volkswehr. It was another thing altogether to even contemplate giving the Volk sources of food independent of their Junkers.
But the invaders had hit the nobility’s centralized food storage facilities particularly hard, even before subduing the unruly infidel natives through starvation and indiscriminate mass slaughter had become Governor Ziad bin Sultan’s official policy.
Even without the Zin depredations against it, virtually the entire traditional food production infrastructure, from the kelp plantations, fish farms and rice paddies of the coastal temperate zone, to the rye, quinoa and potato fields of the highlands, to the yams, cassava and plantains of the tropics and the wild catch of the open sea, was being decimated by the suddenly-feeble, noticeably reddish sunlight, and the brutal cold wave it had brought.
Just about the only staple set to yield a decent global harvest despite the sudden cold wave was the one crop most Mirandans had never tasted.
The hardy Kerguelen pine had ever been a niche luxury export, geared mostly toward meeting Sparta’s insatiable appetite for top-quality organic pine nuts and award-winning oil. Now, with careful rationing, the pines would feed hundreds of thousands. But not millions. There simply weren’t enough trees, not in the pine plantations and not growing wild in the forests, either. And Kerguelen pine was not the kind of crop whose production could be expanded quickly.
Most of her days over the past four months had been consumed with the problems of rationing, dispersal and redistribution. A whole new infrastructure had to be built all at once, and built under wartime conditions, largely by people unfamiliar with even the most basic principles of said infrastructure’s operation.
Despite all her efforts, thought Isabella, almost everyone on Miranda would know hunger in the coming year. Even High Junkers. Her advisors’ most optimistic projections predicted five million deaths due to outright starvation in the course of the next twelve months. Even in the best possible case, at least twice that many Mirandans would die from malnutrition-aggravated communicable diseases.
Regardless of all protests, Isabella had restricted herself and her court to two thousand calories per person per day; mostly rice and kelp; some pine bread and a little fish on Sundays; the plainest of fare. She had promulgated a decree demanding that all other nobles, high and low, follow her example. As good shepherds in this national emergency, they were to take from their flocks only the absolute minimum necessary for their survival and the continued health of their fighting men, even as they delivered the life-saving technology that would see her people through.
Nonetheless, she had expected the Volk to be resentful. She had expected to collect supplies at gunpoint.
Yet no force
had ever been necessary. The food was freely given, even in excess of what was demanded. Everywhere she went, crowds would gather instantly, spontaneously. Kneeling; weeping with joy; holding up tiny, half-starved children to see; forests of outstretched arms seeking to reach her, to brush against the hem of her poncho; as if she was some kind of holy relic brought forth from a distant sanctuary to intercede on their behalf.
No one compelled them. Her few guardsmen had no need, as her father’s guards had before them, to bark orders at sullen crowds. Their sole difficulty lay in keeping the people back, in preventing them from simply crushing her by accident, by the sheer outpouring of their adoration.
Volunteers had taken to carrying little plastic squares in their left breast pockets. Simple, flat photographs of their Baroness in uniform.
These tiny bits of plastic, often covered with dried blood, singed, half-melted, pierced by shrapnel and flechettes, were carefully preserved by comrades-at-arms, even sometimes rescued under fire despite risk to own life and limb. Sealed in special black envelopes they were passed, like treasure, from Volunteer to Volunteer, from courier to courier, until reverent hands finally brought them home, to reign amid the ancestral masks and relics, the icons and the statuettes and the cross-topped obsidian obelisks of the family shrine, where the black-framed photograph of the fallen sat opposite the traditional shot glass full of schnapps and the tiny rice cracker.
Proof of duty fulfilled, now added on equal terms to the nourishments of alcohol and food. A thing to comfort a soul as it bid farewell to the world of the living.
Last week she had found, at one such shrine, a reproduction of a Gothic painting; the kind of thing one normally associated with church altars. A Warrior Madonna crowned with the Diadem of Miranda, mace-free hand raised in blessing. When the chill had finished running down her spine, she had ordered that the icon be carefully copied, and surreptitiously disseminated. Not through official channels, but by covert means, so that it would seem spontaneous. Only to have the Master of Whispers inform her that there was no need. The unknown painter’s masterwork was already spreading like wildfire. Completely on its own.
In the minds of her people, thought Isabella, she was no longer human at all. She had become a symbol, a magical object, an otherworldly embodiment of some mystical good that most of them couldn’t even put into words, but that was nonetheless worth more to them than anything else in the universe.
They would fight for her. They would die for her. They would give up their last slices of bread and the shirts off their backs for her. They were eager to. The worse their lives became, the more eager they seemed to give them up on her behalf.
But it wasn’t just the adoration of her own people that she had won.
The Nonaligned Worlds had fallen like dominoes before the Zin onslaught. Hapless Paradise had not lasted a day. The idiotic pacifists of Dove had surrendered without resistance, and lived to regret it. The squabbling clans of Icehole had barely managed to put up a fight, and the semi-comical strutting soldiery of Jagobar’s tinpot principalities had presented no more of an obstacle to the Zin juggernaut than would a wall of braid-encrusted papier-mâché.
The foolish waffle-eaters of Berten and Guntag had discovered, too late, the truth of the old adage that he who has the better iron, will ultimately possess all the gold. Their so-called “soft power” had meant absolutely nothing in the face of a vengeful alien armada. The very industry that had made the plump inhabitants of the Twin Worlds rich and comfortable was, as far as the Zin were concerned, spawn of Satan Himself, to be extirpated root and branch, with fire and sword.
Unlike rich Leaguers, the Zin weren’t interested in surreptitiously hiding assets from the depredations of confiscatory taxmen. Unlike corrupt Imperial mandarins, the Zin were immune to bribes. And the Twin Worlds had never bothered to invest in something as downright crude and expensive as a functional military.
Assisted by the onset of their Windy Season, the Zemlyane had fought bravely for their bunker-like homes. Bravely; but not wisely. After three weeks of heroic last stands and suicidal charges with fixed bayonets, the Zin controlled Novaya Zemlya as firmly as they did Paradise.
But the home of the sole Invited Delegate to walk away from the Delta Triangulae Conference had once again proven the exception among the Nonaligned rabble.
Isabella had spent many a night over these past seven months privately ruing the choice made by Baron Ulrich van der Rijn two centuries ago. But the Defiant Baron’s ghost would have good reason to take pride in his five-times-great-granddaughter.
Three invasions it had taken the Zin. They had lost an entire fleet the first time ‘round. And the second time hadn’t been pretty, either. It had cost them almost twelve million dead just to perch unsteadily upon the surface of this world. She had single-handedly prevented the invasion of Hadassah. Almost a quarter of the troops originally slated to reinforce the invasion of Haven had been redirected to Miranda at the last minute, to form the third and final Zin landing force. And it wasn’t over yet.
The Zin controlled the great cities, at least in daytime. They could, theoretically, go anywhere they wanted to go and do anything that pleased them, if they wanted to badly enough. But nowhere did they go without a fight. Governor Ziad himself needed a company-sized patrol just to go from his headquarters in the Purple Palace to the spaceport on the outskirts of town. Past the spaceport perimeter, the Zin did not dare go except in at least battalion strength. And no Zin aircraft, not even a fighter, was ever truly safe at altitudes below six thousand meters anywhere on Miranda. Not even over New Amsterdam itself.
Weekly digests of the latest correspondence between the Zin governor and the Ahmirr always made for pleasant reading, thought the mistress of Miranda. Sometimes, when she was feeling particularly dispirited, she would order up raw transcripts. The flaming anger on the one side and the stuttering efforts to paint a full face of makeup on a warthog on the other would be downright comical, if it wasn’t for the fact that the bastard governor was perched atop her Gothic Throne.
When Governor Ziad had had the bright idea, probably out of sheer frustration, to launch a bioweapons campaign as an aid to his hapless soldiery, Isabella’s advisors had actually competed for the privilege of answering the impertinent cat’s thrown gauntlet.
The Golden Age variant of the blue plague proposed by the Master of Treasures had the advantage of being nigh-on incurable with modern methods. The vicious blood pox proffered by the Master of Poisons could boast the surgical precision of being spread solely by new species of mosquitoes and tsetse flies designed to prefer Zin blood to any other.
By way of compromise, Isabella had authorized the use of both pathogens as answers to the Zin governor’s crude superflu. To this was immediately added a simple but effective modified cat pox, courtesy of Lord von Fromstein’s household lab.
Within two weeks, Lord van der Bijl, ever keen to outdo his neighbor, had scoured his ancient family’s famous vaults to slam the aliens with a never-before-seen, spore-forming, nanite-enhanced Golden Age monstrosity. While the latter was slow to spread, it could literally lie in wait for centuries, survive almost any decontamination procedure, and even tunnel through passive filters in order to infect the hapless host. The scores of weeping ulcers it produced as it slowly killed its victim were horrific to behold. And, of course, it was fiendishly difficult to cure once it seized upon a host.
When, despite all this, the Zin had dared to spread their virus in the swampy equatorial domains of the infamously talented Lord von Müller, they received in return six different hemorrhagic fevers and Governor Ziad’s superflu itself, reworked to not only exclusively affect the would-be conquerors but also double its lethality while preserving nearly the same morbidity.
Half a million dead Zin soldiers later, with nearly a quarter of his army rendered too sick to fight, the governor got the message. Zin vector teams were ignominiously withdrawn from the field, occasioning yet another jeering speech by Her Lady
ship, and another testy exchange between the hapless would-be Zin overlord of Miranda and his distant king.
The memory brought a sudden, vicious mental grin. But even here, with no ostensible audience but the empty darkness, Isabella’s face remained perfectly controlled.
She couldn’t even remember a time when she hadn’t lived upon a stage. The habits never left her, for the wage of failure had ever been the same. War was no different, in that way, than peace. The single rule that governed her life was literally carved in stone and metal, thousands of times, all over this world. Even upon the Mace of Miranda. The most important piece of advice left by Baron Pieter van der Rijn, First of His Name, to all the issue of his loins. Enshrined upon the family crest itself, beneath the rampant, mace-bearing lion that had ever served as Miranda’s royal sigil: Reign or Perish.
In the past three hundred years, none who had dared sit upon the Gothic Throne had died a natural death. True to the age-old proverb, the Lion ate his bearers.
The safest assumption was always the existence of an audience. No one could guarantee its absence. And even if it could be guaranteed, she herself was no longer truly sure what part of her was the real Isabella, and what part was the Mask of Reign that had come to encompass the entirety of her existence.
The Mask was everything, thought the mistress of Miranda. The Mask was life itself. As long as she maintained the Mask, her people would fight on. As long as she maintained the Mask, the enemy would never feel secure. And thus, through the Mask, there would be victory. However closely the darkness might gather, yet the dawn would come. As long as she maintained the Mask.
The Zin had no idea how badly they had actually hurt her with their bioweapons campaign. They had no idea how much of her emergency stockpile of antivirals had been used up, nor did they know that, despite her best efforts and with almost four million Mirandans dead, the superflu was still not fully contained. They did not know that the emergency pharmaceutical laboratories she had set up to provide medicine to the common Volk could barely produce enough vaccine to cope with the remaining flu outbreaks. Nor did they truly appreciate how much of her available defensive pharmacopoeia had to be held in reserve, to guard against the possibility of renewed biological attack, and what that meant to the average commoner when hunger made immune systems weak, and typhus competed with blood cough and dysentery to empty whole villages.
