Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  All the Zin knew, all the Zin saw, was that they had come as hunters, but now it was they who had become the hunted. Other worlds had fallen in days and weeks, but on this planet everything they tried seemed to turn against them.

  Miranda had become a millstone around their necks. Everywhere they stepped, the soil of Isabella’s world burned beneath their paws. And not just her own people were watching.

  The other ambassadors may have fled when it became clear that the Zin invasion was inevitable. Ambassador Ben-Aharon had simply dusted off his Rear Admiral’s epaulets, and took up a second title as the head of the League Advisory Mission to Miranda.

  Not just Mirandan eyes had watched her waving the Baronial Mace, vowing resistance to the death. Not just Mirandan ears had listened to her coldly barking orders at the missile boat crew as she personally lead the decisive attack against the Zin. Not just Mirandans had witnessed, awestruck, the spectacle of Her Ladyship standing, swathed in freshly-dripping bandages, amid the still-smoking ruins of her Helligoland command bunker, hurling contemptuous defiance at the hapless invaders who had once again failed to kill her.

  Her people had spread the best footage liberally on League social media. She was a star now on Sparta and on New Israel and in the Serpent Swarm. Even Havenite netizens were impressed. But more importantly, the approbation did not stop with random teenagers and enamored housewives. The intermittently-readable contents of Admiral Ben-Aharon’s sealed dispatches to his masters had gone from cautious doubt, to reserved admiration, to unabashed enthusiasm.

  Not a single living soul had seen the Baroness Isabella shaking like a leaf in the freezing pitch blackness of the sinking escape pod. There was no footage of Her Ladyship fainting dead away in her cabin from pain and loss of blood as her missile boat sped away from ruined Helligoland. Only the priceless Golden Age autodoc and its attendant medbots had been on hand to witness that. She had never permitted the Mask of Reign to slip. Not once, not for a moment; from this day all the way back to her first day upon the Gothic Throne. And especially not in the past seven months.

  Her Mask was perhaps the greatest in Miranda’s history, mused Isabella. Greater even than that of the First Baron Himself.

  The thought felt almost sacrilegious. Yet, as she turned the startling notion over and over in her mind, it seemed to fit. For upon the sheer raw power of her Mask, Isabella van der Rijn, the youngest Baroness in Miranda’s history, had risen now to heights unsurpassed. So far above the realm of mere mortals that even a single tiny stumble would inevitably bring about a lethal fall. So far that there might, indeed, exist no safe way to climb back down.

  The Baroness Isabella was now, in the minds of millions, a superbeing. No longer Isabella the Good, but Isabella the Great. The Spirit of Miranda made flesh, as immovable and indestructible as the Raucherfjellen. A creature of iron, with nerves of pure steel, a heart forged of titanium alloy and ice-cold antifreeze flowing through her veins. The war goddess who would surely lead them to victory.

  And in the minds of the Leaguers, too, she was now an archetype from legends come to life. One with the Spartan duchess contemptuously ignoring whizzing bullets and ricocheting cannonballs as she stands in full regalia upon the castle battlement; the Havenite matron leading her shattered, defeated clan to safety amid erupting volcanoes and crashing walls of glacier ice; the Israeli halutsah surrounded by half a dozen terrified children, an old hunting laser in her hands, facing down a band of bloodthirsty raiders; the Belter refuge boat captain overseeing, one hand upon the grip of a pistol, the drawing of lots for the few still-functional coldsleep pods. And this, mused Isabella, almost as much as the naked adoration of her own people, was key to her eventual victory.

  Despite the Zin armada’s failure to reach Volantis and isolate New Helena, it was the League’s darkest hour, too. Even the desperate early days of the First Imperial War could not equal this apocalypse. Not in scale, not in urgency, and certainly not in the consequences of defeat. Only the Jews had anything in their historical memory, other than the Götterdämmerungskrieg, to compare it to.

  Just the other day, the Office of the League President had published an updated casualty count. Theresa Thibodeaux had felt the need to pronounce the number personally.

  The woman’s face had resembled a stone mask as she mouthed the horrific figure. One billion, seven hundred and eleven million, eight hundred and twenty-five thousand, nine hundred and thirty-three confirmed dead, as of that morning. More people than there were on all of Miranda. And that number was certainly low.

  With the Zin firmly in control of Tienchen, the jump points of New Helena hung by a thread. Every renewed assault threatened to overwhelm the defenders. Of the fledgling colony on Timon, there had been no word for months. Hadassah, though as yet uninvaded, reeled under orbital bombardment. The great underwater cities of Bretogne lay flooded and ruined. The surviving population had retreated into secret holdfasts buried deep under the kilometers-thick ice of the Cold Side, from there to launch incessant raids and rocket barrages against the Zin perched unsteadily amid the burning deserts of the Hot Side. The waters and scattered islands of the Temperate Zone, once the center of human life on the planet, were now a no-man’s-land where swarms of Leaguer missile boats played a brutal game of bloody cat-and-mouse against Zin warships up in orbit. Of the enormous orbital habitats of the Normann Belt, nothing remained but scattered debris. And the once-unthinkable was now reality. The enemy had successfully established bridgeheads upon the surface of Haven itself. For the first time since the signing of the Delta Triangulae Treaty, a foreign invader now contested a League Core World.

  Yet, of all the human Powers, the Zin had underestimated the League the most. Not even a shade of panic or despair had affected The Calculator’s demeanor as she, having delivered the horrific casualty figures in her monthly State of the War speech, urged the Citizens to even greater effort and self-sacrifice.

  Now that their Category Four Naval Reserve had been fully mobilized, the Leaguers’ naval establishment had expanded twelve-fold compared to its peacetime size. Yet still their forces continued to grow.

  Everywhere in the League, high school classes were canceled. All holidays, even the Jews’ Shabbat, were suspended for the duration of hostilities. Where the Militia had not claimed its members for battle, The Youth Labor Reserve was mobilized in its entirety, helping to man the factories and the mines.

  Everything was rationed. Food, water, even sleep. The enormous, dispersed stockpiles of strategic matériel amassed over centuries of preparation were being fed relentlessly into one of the most efficient war machines in the history of Man. Everyone not fighting was working twelve to fourteen hours a day, day in and day out, on nothing but distilled water and two thousand calories a day in unflavored algae paste.

  For two centuries the Members had spent nigh-on fifteen percent of their collective GDP on military preparations. For two centuries they had organized, rehearsed, developed contingency plans. It had seemed to almost everyone, perhaps even to the Leaguers themselves, that a day would never come when all that they had amassed would actually come to be needed.

  Yet now such a day had come. And an enemy whom the Zin had expected to overwhelm in three months was turning out to possess armed forces larger than those of the Empire, an entity more than five times its size.

  With the doors of the All-League Emergency Naval Recruiting program now open to every able-bodied male and female aged sixteen or older, and the Members’ enormous shipyards producing warships faster than they were being destroyed at the front, it was now the Zin Ahmirrat that was getting increasingly agitated.

  Theirs had been a very feline plan, mused the Baroness of Miranda.

  The sudden leap from ambush. One great blow to win a swift and final victory against all potential enemies. A massive avalanche of ships and warriors designed to overwhelm humanity’s armed forces by shock, surprise and sheer weight of numbers.

  An arrogant plan, born of over-reli
ance on remote sensing and a contemptuous disregard for the intangibles that could only be discovered through agent-based methods. Thwarted before it began, though the Zin knew it not. Thwarted by the very intangibles that their king had held in such contempt. By the vastness of the Empire’s resource base. By the stubborn fanaticism of the Aryans. By the utterly unexpected, vicious death trap that was Miranda. Above all else, by the essential nature of the four Members who made up the Delta Triangulae League.

  Isabella could pinpoint exactly when the Zin had realized that the quarry might be too large for their teeth, that the sudden, victorious leap had turned into a deadly grapple whose ultimate outcome was increasingly far from certain. When their unshakable early confidence had first been marred by a trickle of doubt. A trickle that was now, when the overwhelming Zin tide had everywhere slowed to a crawl or even begun to retreat, well on its way to becoming a torrent of sheer, bloody panic.

  It was when the Havenites had unleashed the merkaba kedoisha. A hyper-maneuverable racing shell whose pilot, wrapped for the occasion in kittel, tallit and tefilin, had answered amen at his own funeral, before being sealed by welding inside the control pod that would double as his coffin. A three hundred megaton thermonuclear warhead, guided relentlessly to its destination by a man who, in defense of his home and people, had set aside all fear of death. A man whose only concern was reaching the specific, designated enemy capital ship he had been ordered to take with him into the Hereafter. Or any other enemy capital ship, in case of contingencies.

  When the Zin armada had finally cleared the minefields at the jump point, smashed up the mighty jump point fortresses and pushed aside Haven’s regular fleet, the Holy Charioteers of the Rabbinate had led the counterattack, massed in waves of thousands. At first, before the initial score of man-made suns had bloomed suddenly in the darkness, the Zin had mistaken them for a new kind of torpedo bomber.

  If the Havenites’ ploy had been but a desperate, last-ditch improvisation, like Admiral Rennekampff’s suicide corvettes, the Zin would not have been unnerved. No, what had unnerved them was the realization that these vessels had been purpose-designed decades prior. That Haven’s renowned racing shell manufacturers had, in absolute secrecy, built thousands upon thousands of them before any conceivable threat had even potentially materialized. That the tens of thousands of yeshiva-students-turned-suicide-pilots had been selected and trained long in advance. That, for five hundred years, unbeknown even to the overwhelming majority of its own people much less the external universe, the Rabbinate of Haven had continuously maintained and improved its Charioteer Corps.

  That was what had sowed the first trickle of doubt. The understanding of whom they were facing.

  To have fought past that horror, to have breached the wall of fire that was Haven’s integrated orbital defense system, to have finally, by dint of incredible effort and at unspeakable cost, established viable bridgeheads, only to find that beneath the frozen surface of that volcano-strewn hell there lurked a superbly-trained and outstandingly-equipped army of one and a half billion determined to fight to the death for every pebble and every shard of ice...

  A force whose size they had underestimated by a full order of magnitude.

  That, thought the Baroness of Miranda, is what had turned the initial trickle of doubt into a torrent of fear. The full realization of the depth of their intelligence failure.

  It was no wonder that the threat of transfer to Haven had become Governor Ziad’s most effective means of spurring on his soldiers in the face of endless attacks by Mirandan guerrillas and Leaguer raiders.

  Over the course of the past two months, the Leaguers had become particularly active. Not contenting themselves with striking at the outer system and among the Faerie, small groups of fast craft, more often than not missile corvettes and gunboats, would occasionally break away from the main raiding party, launching a run deep into the inner system, seemingly seeking to strike targets among the Spirits, in orbit of Prospero, or around Ariel, with missile fire from extreme range.

  Given the great haste of their passage and the attention paid to such deep raiders by the Zin defenders, the missile fire was largely ineffective. In plain terms, they couldn’t hope to hit the broad side of a barn from that range to begin with, and they were too busy dodging to aim properly to boot. Much of the time, the firing solutions were so poor that the missiles flew right past their presumed intended targets, self-destructing in deep space. Occasionally, some would pointlessly crash into Ferdinand, or even into the surface of Miranda. When, by sheer dumb luck, a missile AI was actually given enough targeting data to be useful, the extreme ranges involved gave the Zin fighters based on Iris, Juno and Ariel plenty of time to effect an intercept. The whole futile exercise was, all in all, very unlike the Leaguers’ normal military perfectionism.

  Intercepted enemy communications indicated that, after much head-scratching, the Zin had finally attributed their enemy’s unusual behavior to a desire to shake down newly-formed crews, perhaps coupled with a political gesture of support for the Mirandans. Isabella had encouraged the latter guess, making several speeches in which she urged the League to strike at the occupiers in the inner system and to flatten the Zin contingent on Miranda “with merciless bombardment.”

  At first, the Zin had assiduously worked to intercept every fired missile, and their Weapons Intelligence Teams had responded immediately to any impact on the surface of Miranda. But, after two months of this nonsense, they had finally stopped bothering. If it wasn’t aimed to hit anything they cared about, they just let it fly past and fall harmlessly into the ocean. The WIT, when it deigned to show up at all, would take days to get around to it.

  More fools them.

  Forward and off to port, on the very edge of Isabella’s parka-enhanced night vision, there suddenly rose a column of dark seawater. Seconds later, a gust of wind brought the sound of the splash.

  The first mate’s inflatable boat raced off into the darkness before the sound had fully died down.

  Another splash, off to starboard this time, sent the bosun’s boat racing as well.

  Off in the distance, the first mate’s boat was already turning around. Behind it, at the very limit of available image enhancement, Isabella could just barely make out the black cylinder of the cargo capsule.

  She had made the effort. And now she received the reward.

  In the League’s darkest hour, when every lathe, every fabricator, every bulk printer, every nanocooker and every plasma welder was worth far more than its weight in gold, at a time when the League’s own people needed every weapon and every spare part produced by their industries the way they needed water and air, she, Isabella van der Rijn of Miranda, was important enough, worthy enough, strategic enough, to receive from the League’s rulers all that she had asked for. Microcontrollers and precision-crafted nozzles, power supplies and frequency generators, hostile-environment nanites and precision ball bearings... And also spores and seeds.

  When she had asked for crops able to cope with the suddenly-weak sunlight and the newly-unpredictable climate, the agronomy department of Sparta’s Northern Research Institute had formed a special Miranda Team just to meet her request. Now, with the arrival of this first batch of capsules, countless villages scattered across Isabella’s world would receive the packet marked with Her Ladyship’s personal seal that would make the difference between life and death in the coming year. And in remote jungle hideouts, in secret mountain caves, in domes deep beneath the ocean and in tiny island grottoes, countless hidden workshops would receive, by special Baronial courier, the one critical crate of supplies that would make the difference between staying in business and ceasing production.

  Miranda would persevere regardless. Miranda would fight on regardless. But millions who would otherwise have died would now live. Because she had won not just the League’s sympathy and admiration, but also the League’s respect.

  But above and beyond even this...

  “We have them
, Your Ladyship.”

  The voice of her fleet commander, piped to her parka across the intra-ship datalink, interrupted Isabella’s reverie.

  “All personnel and equipment accounted for. Colonel Alon and his leadership team await your pleasure in the wardroom.”

  Above and beyond even the what, it was the whom that she could now ask for. And receive.

  Isabella glided into the missile boat’s tiny wardroom as if it were the throne room of the Purple Palace, sending the occupants snapping involuntarily to attention. Her guardsman’s bellowed announcement was still ringing off the walls as she sank into the captain’s chair at the head of the conference table.

  It wasn’t, quite, the Gothic Throne. But it would have to do. At any rate, the mottled Volunteer uniform with the red collar tabs that had become Her Ladyship’s everyday costume in these trying times was well suited to the military-utilitarian decor.

  “You may be seated,” said Isabella graciously, “And welcome to Miranda.

  “Colonel Alon, we congratulate you on your promotion. It is a pleasure to meet you again, although we would wish for less regrettable circumstances.”

  It was indeed a pleasure, noted Isabella with some interest. Perhaps it was because of his association with the one man in the universe whom she had ever truly loved.

  “The pleasure is all mine, Your Ladyship,” bowed the whip-lean, muscular warrior at the other end of the table.

  The severe cut of the khaki dress uniform with the three circled stars of a full colonel did him justice, thought Isabella. As usual, he had chosen not to wear his medals.