Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Senior Lieutenant Prince Leonidas Freeman had, before his unscheduled promotion and abrupt transfer to a Corps Staff position, briefly commanded a four-ship flight with sixteen bots and twelve men, of whom three had been lieutenants and another four had been warrant officers.

  Reserve Master Bosun Juho Jarvinen could readily direct a six-man section as it went about repairing, maintaining and using the missiles and launchers on a Gremuchiy-class corvette. But his knowledge of ground combat was limited to what little he could still remember from high school.

  His wife, a once-upon-a-time Assistant Technician with a grand total of two years’ civil defense experience twenty-six years ago, remembered even less from high school than her man. For all the supposedly extensive medical training Krista Jarvinen had gone through way back then, from day one Miri had proven to be far better at caring for the wounded.

  As best Yosi could figure it out, only the uniforms-and-salutes charade and their own complete ignorance of matters military kept the Paradisians from figuring out that the Leaguers were making the whole thing up as they went along. That, and the League Mystique. Raised on a steady diet of oversimplified history mixed with over-the-top VR, these people really did believe that the Delta Triangulae League was a hyper-militarized armed camp full of deadly super-warriors, a place where every schoolgirl was a trained commando.

  Well, almost all of them did, at any rate. He was certain that one did not. As certain as war, death and taxes, for all of her pretensions to the contrary. But she was working, with ridiculous effectiveness, to embellish the mystique for all the others.

  He couldn’t quite be sure, but Yosi would lay pretty good odds that it was Patty who had started the rumor about Colonel Weismann having been involved in every clash of arms between the League and its enemies since the commando raids of the Second Omicronian War. The idea that a Spartan prince preparing for the Royal General Staff Academy entrance exam would arrange for such a man to serve as his tutor even sounded eerily plausible at first blush.

  There was a heck of a lot more to Patricia Sleager than a pretty face, a huge pair of boobs, and the ability to make Leo happy in the sack.

  That woman knew things. She understood things. Far many more things than she let on with that dumb blonde act of hers. More importantly, she knew people. Not on-line or by reputation or second-hand. Face to face. Every hacendado in Angeles Province, it seemed; or at least their college-aged children.

  She could rattle it all off instantly. Who had owned what, who had been married to whom, who had whom for a cousin or an in-law, who had liked whom and who had been feuding with whom and what political parties they had all supported. Off the top of her head, without the benefit of a pair of net glasses, a friend list, or a link diagram. In a couple of weeks, once he’d given her a map to work with and explained what he wanted, she’d managed to produce a province-wide social intelligence overlay on par with the best products to come out of Duke Reginald’s personal intelligence section. The last time he’d underestimated a pretty face that badly, it had almost cost him and Leo their lives.

  Perhaps it was because of her utility that he’d acquiesced to this stunt of hers. It wasn’t going to work. Señor Diaz had refused two offers already. But she’d all but broken down and cried. And it didn’t really matter, anyway.

  The Diaz hacienda had been built five centuries ago, in the tough, lawless times right after the First Landing. Well built, in the traditional Casaforte style that could now be found only in pale, touristy imitations and genuine historical landmarks.

  The first hacienda on the wild northern edge of the Angeleno Plateau. A squat, sturdy rectangle two stories tall, sitting atop the tallest hill to be found within the nearest five hundred meters.

  Underneath the red tile gabled roof and the whitewashed plaster, the big house had exterior walls three meters thick. Traditional Paradisian compressed earth block sheathed in mass concrete inside and out.

  A picturesque, shady garden hid in the safety of the inner courtyard. Narrow, slit-like windows peered grimly outward, at the dangerous outside world.

  The third story, thin plascrete borne upon steel beams, had been added about two centuries later, after the Monarchy’s power had been firmly established, the blancos and other Second Landers had finally been crushed beneath the herdeiro boot, and the Refuge Compact had stopped being honored primarily in the breach. For tradition’s sake it retained the embrasure-like outer windows, but at least its walls weren’t completely immune to anything short of field artillery.

  About a century after the Señor Diaz who’d added the third story, another Señor Diaz had finally decided to get rid of the half-fallen, mostly-overgrown six-meter-thick perimeter wall and the dry moat that had come with it. The wall had been pulled down, its berm leveled, and the moat filled up. But the mass-concrete foundation it had rested upon had remained, safe and sound in the ground, serving now to bear the pleasantly tree-shaded flagstone promenade that had replaced the outer defenses.

  When the old world had come crashing down, the current Señor Diaz had simply ordered that the trees be chopped down, and the wall rebuilt.

  As an unrepentant, hidebound Palmerist with a highly-illegal arsenal of small arms in his basement, a nearly self-sufficient old-school manorial mini-economy, and a couple of bunker silos full of grain under his windows, he’d been well positioned to survive the Collapse. And the three hundred or so refugees-turned-slaves he had herded into a shantytown at the bottom of the hill and surrounded with guard towers and razor wire had accomplished the task of raising a new compressed earth block wall with dispatch, waterproofing it with layers of locally-improvised lime plaster and a thick coat of whitewash. In the process, they’d re-excavated the moat.

  The fate of the police stations at Casabuenos and Layos should have served as warning, thought Yosi. But the Sanchez government had given Señor Diaz another three hundred slaves, four dozen rifles, and a hundred or so of the high power lasers its Ministry of Infrastructure had now put into mass production.

  As far as Señor Diaz was concerned, this made him the rightful ruler of all of Chungara District. In his mind, his expertise at bouncing dissidents off walls and enslaving starving refugees amply qualified him to take on any conceivable opposition. Including League Shock Corps colonels.

  The garrison of Casabuenos had been falling down drunk to a man, and the so-called cops in Layos had gone to sleep with naught but three sentries to guard them. No such serendipities were available here.

  Yosi trusted in his own ability to quietly take down one or two guards, tall wall or no tall wall. Leo could be counted on for at least a couple more, in a pinch. And, honestly, given the advantages afforded by a poncho and a bit of practice, Shin Takawa could probably account for another. But with over a dozen armed men up on the walls day and night, and Heaven only knew how many posted at the ready inside the buildings, the idea of simply walking into Castle Diaz under cover of darkness and massacring the garrison in its beds was a non-starter. This was the real world, not an action-adventure immersie.

  On the flip side, once he’d made an example of the Diaz hacienda, thought Yosi, all the other hacendados in the district should see the light of reason. Only Diaz had had the temerity to refuse cooperation outright.

  At any rate, his men were now in position. It was time for Patty’s final appeal. Who knew? Perhaps it might work after all. There was no loss in trying.

  Yosi keyed up Patty’s icon on the commo board projected onto his helmet’s visor.

  “Go ahead and speak,” he said.

  “Señor Diaz!” rang the girl’s amplified voice.

  She really did sound close to tears, thought Yosi.

  “You are surrounded!

  “I implore you, please do not drive Colonel Weismann to extremes! You have his word as an officer and a gentleman that if you cooperate, neither you nor your staff will come to any harm!

  “Please, Señor, I beg you, listen to reason! Once the first shot
s are fired, it will be too late!”

  The hacendado’s response didn’t take long. Yosi had known what it would be fifteen minutes ago, when the two cops left alive from the garrison of Layos had been sent scurrying toward the hacienda, carrying the same message.

  In the video feeds from his pocket UAVs, the guards’ barracks and the big house kept boiling more men out onto the wall. Most of the newcomers, at least, were generally dressed. Here and there, a few were still rearranging buttons or messing with a buckle.

  Pretty much the entire garrison was up on the walls now. Mostly on the northern wall, staring in the direction Patty’s voice was coming from.

  A few men had remained, milling about in the courtyard. Yosi wasn’t sure if they were just confused, or if this pathetic clutch constituted Diaz’s idea of an interior reaction force.

  At any rate, the hacendado seemed to have pretty much no one left inside the buildings. Which was exactly what Yosi had wanted.

  His UAVs’ sensors were picking up transmissions from the hacienda’s radio tower now. In addition to the high power lasers, the Sanchez Ministry of Infrastructure had set its pets up with shortwave transceivers.

  From the translator AI’s gist of the conversation, Señor Diaz was trying to get a supremely lethargic watch officer about a hundred kilometers away to send help, call the Zin, or at least wake up a superior at two o’clock in the morning. Given that he had a three-hundred-watt transmitter, the whole province was probably listening in. And not a damned thing was being done.

  Yosi grinned to himself.

  Like taking candy from a baby. He didn’t need the tactical expertise of a real Shock Corps colonel to take down the likes of Major of National Security Diaz, would-be feudal lord of Chungara District. Basic infantry skills, a bit of real military camo and some decent firepower would do.

  “Señor Diaz!...”

  Patty’s voice cut off in mid-sentence.

  From his position on the western edge of the hacienda’s perimeter, Yosi could just make out the puffs of dust erupting from the earth block as the troopers he’d hidden on the southern edge of the woods returned fire at the fellows up on the wall.

  The couple-three shots from the wall fired in the general direction of Patty’s voice had quickly exploded into a lively little firefight. His armor AI was rendering the electromagnetic signatures as muzzle flashes. Blue for guns, red for lasers. His own men were limited by the order to conserve ammunition, but Diaz’s were blazing away as if they had crates upon crates stacked down in the basement. Which they probably did.

  Shin Takawa’s two platoons were sitting in full-profile foxholes hidden in the woods, and the hacendado’s men had the parapet’s merlons to protect them. With three hundred meters between Shin’s hilltop and Diaz’s, the atrocious marksmanship on both sides pretty much guaranteed that casualties would occur primarily by accident.

  Diaz probably expected him to send men charging across those three hundred meters of waist-tall August wheat, like Royal Guards Fusiliers from Sparta’s Wars of Unification.

  Double-time in line abreast; fixed bayonets, colors flying and bugles blaring. Or some other stupid thing along those lines that goons like him had done thirty-six years ago, when bullying helpless unarmed civilians for a living had counted as a prestigious, well-paid career on this planet.

  “Leka! Leka! Leka!” commanded Yosi.

  On a tall hill just a bit over seven hundred meters away to the west of the hacienda, overlooking the entire northern and western sides of Diaz’s perimeter and a goodly part of the southern, sat Juho Jarvinen with an improvised laser cannon and a pair of Zin heavy machineguns. A sledgehammer indeed. He even had a UAV video feed all to himself. Just in case his gunners’ helmet sensors somehow weren’t good enough at picking out the glowing body heat of completely uncamouflaged targets through the crystal-clear country air. Both Melaina and Daphne were up and full. For anyone with as much as a poncho, never mind a body armor helmet, it might as well be high noon.

  The radio tower fell. For an instant, the crescendo of screams almost drowned out the crash of exploding earth block and shattering plaster. The entire top of the northern wall was a single billowing cloud of plaster dust and bloody mist, spitting bits of earth block, severed limbs and gobs of pulverized flesh. Another burst, and the cloud covered the western wall, also.

  “Follow me! Let’s go!” shouted Yosi, snatching up his end of the assault bridge.

  In front of him, the two captured Zin infantry bots padded silently forward at a fluid, six-legged trot.

  It wasn’t far. Less than fifty meters.

  By themselves, he and Leo could have snuck up all the way to the edge of the moat, but with a platoonfull of newbies who barely knew how to use a poncho, he hadn’t wanted to risk it.

  Ahead of him, the lead bot had leapt right across the moat from a running start, and was already climbing straight up the wall, powerful clawed feet biting into the plaster-covered earth block as if it were wood.

  Its partner sat back on its haunches, turret swiveling back and forth as it looked for targets up on top of the wall.

  “On three!” shouted Yosi as he counted steps remaining to the edge of the moat.

  At the count of three, the bridge went flying forward. Even before it was fully settled, the two men with the assault ladder were pounding their way across, hurrying to make a way up the wall for everyone else.

  Yosi had considered simply jumping down into the moat and free-climbing up the walls. Body armor could certainly produce the necessary crampons and hand-claws to enable it. But after a few trial runs on earth-block buildings, he’d abandoned the idea as impractical. He could do it, Leo could do it, and so could Shin Takawa. Everybody else needed a ladder in order to climb quickly.

  Castle Diaz would fall to an old-fashioned escalade. Wooden ladders, even. But for the unfamiliar weapons and body armor, Leo’s twelve-times-great grandfather would have felt right at home leading this charge.

  The laser cannon fired another burst. Chunks of earth block bounced off Yosi’s helmet as he climbed.

  So far, not a single shot had been fired at the assault group. Between the full-stealth ponchos and the murderous fire from Juho Jarvinen’s heavy weapons platoon, it was probable they hadn’t even been noticed.

  The last three rungs of the ladder loomed ahead of him.

  “Blue Three, shift fire!” commanded Yosi, gathering himself for the upward leap.

  The laser cannon worked the hacienda’s flimsy third floor over, end-to-end, with a single continuous burst.

  The laser’s COP icon flipped over to standby.

  No more laser for a bit. Bosun Jarvinen was refiling the cooling jacket.

  “No big deal,” thought Yosi. The two heavy machinegun crews were still watching over the assault element.

  Yosi took the last three ladder rungs in a single fluid motion, springing up onto the wall like a demented jack-in-the-box, leveled rifle looking for targets.

  A foot splashed down into a near-hemispherical hole filled with some dark, mysterious liquid. Glowing droplets splattered in all directions.

  In an instant, he could smell what it was.

  Still warm. That’s why it glowed in the infrared.

  He had nothing to shoot at. Amid craters gouged out by fifty-megajoule laser discharges and impacting five-millimeter flechettes, there was nothing left but pools of blood and piles of fresh hamburger.

  Yosi lowered his rifle.

  In the snapshots sent by Leo from what was left of the southwestern tower, the two dozen men Diaz had assigned to guarding the southern wall and the slave camp at the bottom of the hill were fleeing across the wheatfields with the alacrity of a pack of jackrabbits.

  A machinegun burst lashed at them from the top of the tower. Four fell.

  “Blue One-Two, Blue One,” ordered Yosi, “Don’t waste ammo. Let them go. Emplace the gun and come on back.

  “Blue Three, aimed fire only.

  “Blue Two
, bring up your men.”

  The hacienda wasn’t truly surrounded. With only a hundred and twenty-seven men under his command, Yosi simply didn’t have the manpower to spare. Cornered rats fought harder, anyway. Only when Takawa’s two platoons came up would the trap truly spring shut. In the meantime, he had his secure flank.

  There was a sudden series of red flashes from a second-story window of the guards’ barracks, and a half-shattered merlon to Yosi’s right erupted in showers of compacted dirt.

  Somebody coming up the assault ladder behind him went flying backwards into the darkness with a startled yelp.

  A giant fist smashed Yoseph in the shoulder, and the ground of the courtyard rushed up suddenly to meet him.

  Above the star-studded blackness that had erupted behind his eyelids, he could hear the bot’s machinegun rattling off a series of short bursts.

  “Dammit, the blood,” thought Yosi.

  The splatter had given him away, if only for a moment. And he’d been too consumed with giving orders to pay attention to his own position.

  Which made him an idiot. But a lucky idiot, it seemed. Thank God for body armor.

  “Yosi, you all right?” came Leo’s worried voice over the radio.

  “Fucking lasers!” cursed Yoseph by way of reply.

  There was blood in his mouth. He’d bitten his lip when he’d plowed face down off the wall and into the dirt.

  Clearly, not all the rats were interested in fleeing the sinking ship after all.

  Yosi sprung up from the ground in a single, smooth motion, raising and firing his rifle at the source of the laser fire as he rushed toward the guards’ barracks.

  Around him, men were jumping off the wall into the courtyard. A few landed on their feet and buttstocks, rolling properly to absorb the shock. Most just plopped awkwardly down and plowed the ground with their faces, or landed on their rear ends. A few lost their rifles and had to scramble for them in the dirt as they staggered to their feet. Their body armor, thankfully, prevented serious injuries to anything save pride.