Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  The rest of the hacienda might be a ruined mess, but some improbable twist of fate had left here, on the inner side of the southwestern part of the main mansion, a whole row of empty, completely untouched apartments.

  A single flight of stairs below, torn-up corpses sprawled untidily behind piles of smashed-up furniture and ichor-soaked rugs squished revoltingly underfoot.

  A single flight of stairs above, shafts of moonlight shone through gaping holes in walls and ceilings, and rubble blanketed the shattered floors.

  Around the corner behind him, where half a dozen of Diaz’s men had made a desperate last stand while trying to protect their families, splattered guts decorated the walls and dead mothers curled protectively around the cooling bodies of their children.

  But here, in this improbable oasis of normality, nightlamps glowed softly through open doorways and unmade beds still waited forlornly for sleepers who would never return.

  Somehow, it felt almost sacrilegious to break the graveyard silence of this strange place with the thunder of clumsy, staggering footfalls.

  Two sacrosanct absolutes had collided within the young prince’s soul, and with every passing moment the nausea of the collision threatened to overwhelm him.

  With every step he took, the calm, cold voice of Reason repeated its arguments from its seat within the core of his brain. And with every step he took, the other voice, the one that had taken refuge somewhere in the pit of his stomach after brutal Reason had chased it savagely out of his skull, answered back with another wave of queasiness.

  Reason could cause a man to understand. But reason could not force a man to accept.

  He understood the necessity of bayoneting the enemy’s wounded. They couldn’t be taken away and imprisoned for the duration. There wasn’t manpower enough to carry them, and there was nowhere to keep them.

  He understood the need to make an example of Diaz.

  The hacendado’s sons were bound by honor to avenge their father’s death. Children or not, they couldn’t be left alive.

  Nor could the Diaz womenfolk, who would not only seek revenge in the future but were old enough to immediately inherit the mantle of leadership from the dead hacendado.

  He understood, also, that some seventy people thirsting for revenge couldn’t be permitted to wander off into the countryside, to settle potentially Heaven knew where in surrounding towns, or to find shelter with friends on a nearby hacienda, there to inform eagerly on behalf of the Sanchez government and the Zin. Nor could such people be taken forcibly up into the hills. Only the old vet, Lorenzo, could be permitted to buy his own life and the lives of his family with useful skills and medical supplies and the promise of good behavior.

  Four people surrounded by a whole company of guerrillas in the midst of a mountain camp could be watched closely enough to ensure no surprises. Four, but not six dozen.

  And so he understood also why the surviving women and children from among the defenders’ families had been led to believe that the bitterness of death was past, and locked away in the emptied storage rooms of the basement. And he understood why the hacienda’s twin-coil fusion generator had already been brought up to maximum power. He understood why Yosi had set the charges on the magnet housings, and he understood exactly why the charges had been positioned as they were. He understood, even, that the prisoners wouldn’t have time to feel any pain, that they would never notice anything amiss.

  When the timers ran out and the coils were suddenly breached, the heart of a tiny man-made sun would instantly fill the basement of the hacienda, and a split-second later the artificially-induced criticality would blow the whole building to smithereens.

  He understood all this. He understood. But he could not accept.

  And in vain did Reason argue that this is what civil wars were like. And in vain did it remind him that the siege of Akotiki had ended with the Massacre At The Citadel, and that only the Day Of Rolling Heads could have put a decisive end to the Ledonian Insurrection.

  In vain, in vain, in vain. For the still little voice squeaking feebly from its pathetic hiding place down in the pit of his stomach would not accept. And neither reason nor vodka could silence it.

  Leo took another gulp as he walked.

  His oh-so-romantic twelve-times-great grandfather. Horatio Freeman, the very first Duke to bear that name. He had never before seriously thought about that man, had he? No, not really.

  The first warrior to scale the walls of Akotiki must also have been among the first to storm into the citadel. Among the first of King Hector’s soldiers, surely, to fight his way into the inner rooms...

  He had never before thought about that.

  How he envied Yosi! How convenient it would be, thought Leo, to have an invisible mental switch within one’s head that, once flipped, reduced the entire universe, chess-like, to abstract Objects To Be Protected, Objects To Be Ignored, Objects To Be Used and Objects To Be Destroyed.

  To have the capacity to order the hanging of a pair of prepubescent children, and to personally arrange for the deaths of two dozen more, and then to calmly direct the looting of their ruined home as if nothing was amiss. To stride energetically from room to room, snapping orders and casually kicking severed body parts out of the way, ignoring the stench of death and the sprawling corpses.

  He had known, ever since Miranda, that his adopted brother was capable of truly monstrous savagery when the circumstances called for it. And he had been aware, intellectually, that such savagery would likely be necessary here. He could even accept Yosi, horrible monster that he could be, because, in the final appraisal, Yosi was, as Mother put it, only conditionally sane.

  And perhaps, also, because Yosi was a man. Men were beasts at heart. He accepted that.

  But Patty was a different story altogether.

  What awful taste, really, he had in women! What was wrong with him?

  He could have had any girl on Sparta. A commoner if he’d wanted to be scandalous. A High Noble’s offspring if he’d wanted to be reasonable. Even a princess of the royal blood, if he’d really wanted one.

  But none of them had been good enough for His Excellency Prince Leonidas Freeman! No, out of all the women in the whole damned universe, His Excellency had to go and fall in love with Isabella of Miranda!

  And now he’d gone and done it again!

  Yosi hadn’t yet decided to slaughter the Diaz family. Who knew what had been going through that crazy head of his as he’d watched Maria Diaz crawling on her knees? Only minutes before, he’d still been trying to get the hacendado to surrender.

  But Patty had demanded it. Had demanded it with the kind of vicious, wolfish bloodthirst that he had heard only once before. With the kind of savagery that simply did not belong, that simply did not go with a female voice.

  She had been the one who had tipped the scales. She had moved the entire surviving population of the Diaz hacienda decisively into the category of Objects To Be Destroyed.

  The vodka burned leadenly in his churning guts. The sight of tiny feet twitching at the end of a rope kept playing, over and over again, in an endless loop at the back of his skull.

  She was right up ahead. That’s what his operational display said, anyway. And now that he’d found her, he was going to let her know exactly what he thought of her!

  It was over, dammit! He was not going to share his bed with a monster. He was not going to love such a woman! Never again!

  Leo took another swig to steady his nerves, and stepped around the corner.

  Patty stood, slumped dejectedly, half in and half out of a bedroom doorway. As if the load of the rifle slung over her back was suddenly too much. As if the weight of the helmet dangling loosely at her hip might topple her over at any moment, were it not for the bent arm she’d used to prop herself up on the doorpost. Tears were rolling, unheeded, down her face. Pooling on her chin and dripping onto the floor with tiny thumps that seemed suddenly loud as gunshots in the grave-like silence.

  Everything
he’d been about to say evaporated, instantly, into the looming blackness outside the windows.

  Leo walked up beside her. Without a word, he passed over the bottle. Just as silently, without even a glance at the contents, Patty lifted it to her lips.

  It was a young woman’s bedroom. Tasteful, ivory-colored wallpaper with a subdued maroon print to match the flowery bedspread. A hand-painted, oil-on-canvas landscape on the wall, done in the style of the ancient impressionists. This very house, minus the moat, the berm and the wall. Looking from the wooded hill over to the north, where Yosi had put Shin Takawa and the two unarmored platoons.

  Soft yellow rays from the lamp up on the nightstand mingled seamlessly with the golden moonlight streaming in through the half-open courtyard window. The neck of a guitar poked out from beneath a pile of dresses stacked up on a chair over by the Tailor. A faint scent of rose perfume wafted through the air. There was a bouquet of them sitting on the windowsill. Freshly cut, probably just this morning. A delicate little porcelain vase, so thin it looked almost translucent.

  “Maria’s room,” muttered Patty sadly, handing back the bottle.

  Leo had a sudden feeling of unreality.

  They didn’t belong here. Invading this tiny, perfumed fragment of the dead world-that-was. Crowding in with armored bodies. Trampling the rose perfume beneath the stench of rancid sweat and stale woodsmoke. They did not fit into this room. No thing of war did.

  A hollow crash came from below, where Yosi directed the scavengers. Broken glass tinkled in accompaniment to the crackle of splintering wood.

  Patty tugged on the headstock, gently freeing the guitar from the pile of feminine clothing. It was a beautiful, antique flamenco instrument, resplendent in dark rosewood and lacquer.

  Leo’s lover plopped exhaustedly onto the bed, guitar cradled tenderly against her bosom.

  “She was my friend,” said Patty softly, stroking the strings with gauntleted fingertips.

  “We danced together.

  “This time last year, for summer break, I was a guest in this house.

  “We went camping. I played tag with the boys.”

  Patty rocked back and forth. The guitar wept wormwood and blood in her hands, and Leo felt tears welling up from his heart in response.

  With a stringy crash, the rosewood splintered against the broken Tailor. Patty collapsed, weeping, into Leo’s arms.

  “War’s a bitch, love,” he breathed, by way of scant comfort, as he embraced her.

  * 54 *

  On the very outskirts of the system, where a lifeless, worthless chunk of dirty ice about a thousand kilometers in diameter made its slow, patient way around the central star, reality shifted. Suddenly there was a ship where none had been before.

  The universe voiced its outrage in waves of gravitons, photons and particle radiation. The jump signature.

  Groggy with jump sickness, exhausted after six translations in as many hours, the scoutship pilot pushed his tiny vessel to the limits of her construction in a desperate rush to make his circuit among Paradise’s outer planetoids and out to the exit jump point. His life depended entirely upon speed and piloting skill.

  Here and there, almost inevitably near a small body likely to be too unimportant to be mapped out for change detection, a puff of gas or an uncoiling spring ejected a cluster of probes from the body of the scout. The fist-sized black cylinders buried themselves in the dirty snowballs or drifted in orbit around them, spiraling down to make gentler landings. A few, pre-cooled exactly to the temperature of the space outside the scout’s hull and coated with special materials, drifted freely in space.

  A Zin destroyer on patrol among the outer planets detected the scout’s signature about a minute later, and hurried to investigate. But he hunted to no avail. The tiny ship’s specially-made microjump drive was too fast, the contact too late. The scout escaped whence he came before the destroyer had even a shadow of a chance to come into weapons range.

  But the battle did not end there.

  The Kuiper Belt planetoids were numerous. The scout had made many microjumps. A cluster of probes could theoretically have been ejected at any one of them, the jump signature masking the puff of gas and the spray of little black darts. Even fake puffs of gas were occasionally provided, the better to fool the probe hunters. And, of course, there were the spring-ejected probes, too.

  The destroyer summoned a frigate and a pair of specially-equipped gunboats. After a four-day game of cat-and-mouse, they found seventy-eight probes, gave up, sent a report to their squadron headquarters, and went on with their patrol routes.

  Like mice emerging from their burrows, Probes Six, Seventy-Nine and Eight slowly snuck out of their hiding places, sniffing carefully for any shadow of danger.

  Six, programmed to be adventurous, took a running leap off its planetoid and drifted freely in solar orbit.

  The cautious Seventy-Nine carefully built a camouflaged shelter into the side of a likely crater, where a serendipitously positioned set of old impact cracks would serve its purposes.

  Eight took advantage of the convenient roll possessed by its planetoid, assuming synchronous orbit but keeping a hair-thin anchor with which to pull itself quickly back into its burrow in the event of danger.

  Flower-like, gossamer sensor nets unfolded from the probes’ bodies, extending for kilometers in giant spider webs.

  The probes drifted in silence. Watching. Listening. Waiting.

  * 55 *

  Yom Kippur was coming. Fifteen minutes to sunset. Almost a full year in this place, fighting this war.

  The Free Paradise Army had come a long way since that first ambush, last year in the bush. He had a squad then, thought Yosi. Today he had a battalion. Five hundred and sixty-nine men and a few women. Reasonably well-armed and decently-trained, given the circumstances.

  He had controlled nothing but a cave back then. Today, he de-facto ruled Chungara District. Neighboring Guararema and Paraibuna districts hung by a thread, with the Sanchez police hunkering down in their fortified camps around the district centers, afraid to step foot outside.

  And yet, this was not enough. Not nearly enough. He needed regiments, brigades, divisions. An army. A real, honest-to-goodness army, able to take not just districts but whole provinces, able to confront not just Sanchez’s hapless collaborators, but the alien occupiers themselves.

  Yet he couldn’t have one.

  It wasn’t for lack of recruits. There were millions out there, aching for a chance to strike at the Zin or the hated Sanchez regime in any way possible. He’d had to turn men away this year, to train men and then return them to their homes, to plant roadside bombs and to wait for his call.

  It wasn’t lack of will or lack of food that constrained him; it was the merciless yoke of logistics.

  He needed equipment. Body armor, sensors, small arms, man-portable antiarmor systems, automortars, anti-nanite and electronic warfare gear, radios. Ammunition above all else. All the things that had been so plentiful on Hope, with her prepositioned caches of warfighting supplies.

  But this was not Hope, nor any other League planet. Here, all that he used he had to make himself, or take from the enemy.

  But there were limits to both.

  He could make primitive explosives. TNT, HMX, RDX, PETN, blasting gelatin, all these were easy to manufacture, if not particularly powerful. Ammonium nitrate was even easier – fertilizer was stockpiled by the ton on every hacienda. Aluminum powder and other fuels weren’t hard to get hold of, either. Cooperative hacendados eagerly supplied all the precursors he needed, writing them off as storage losses or else claiming that they had been used up in the course of business.

  Much could be accomplished with homemade bombs and rockets, but there came a point at which things got ridiculous.

  He needed to pile up nearly a ton of ammonium nitrate aluminum mixture in order to destroy a Zin tank. And the damned thing had to drive over the main charge, no less. In the entire year, his people had managed to
do that precisely once.

  Sensing and communications gear could be improvised out of commercial products and off-the-shelf parts. It wasn’t as stealthy or as effective as military equipment, but it would do. But how in the Lord’s most holy Name was he supposed to get his hands on rifle ammunition, for example?

  He couldn’t make it. He didn’t have the equipment. He couldn’t take it from the enemy, either. Not enough of it to keep an army supplied, anyway. His pet hacendados could only write off so many flechettes as having been used up in target practice or in firefights with “bandits,” and every single one of those had to be laboriously scrubbed of embedded tracking data, a logistical bottleneck in and of itself.

  Lately he’d come to rely almost exclusively on traps and IEDs. Autumn was beginning to rob his people of concealment, and that was bad enough. Worse was the fact that the Zin were now taking him seriously. Even direct fire contact with Sanchez’s Yellow Rats had become a dicey proposition. Any longer than thirty minutes, and the Zin would show up to rescue their precious puppets.

  Once that happened, the fight was over. Zin armor and aircraft were all but invulnerable as far as his fledgling army was concerned. He had one re-purposed agricultural bot armed with an unwieldy improvised laser cannon, and three more armed with Zin heavy machineguns. He also had four beat-up Zin infantry bots, and sometimes he even managed to get a rocket or two for them. To use this tiny arsenal against a Zin rescue party meant to lose it instantly. The cats never came with small forces, and they always had orbital cover.

  Over half his people were armed with nothing but civvie-grade lasers and improvised rockets. Even when pitted against basic Zin light infantry piling out of a helicopter, the only thing they could do was run and hide.