Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Well, it didn’t. Leo loved the air. Leo loved to fly fighters. And Leo was damned good at it. Almost as good as he was at the other thing he’d obsessively practiced since anyone could remember.

  As far as Yosi was concerned, the whole affair simply proved once again that even very smart people could be very stupid when faced with things that they didn’t want to see or hear. And that included one Leo Freeman.

  Because the fact was that Leo Freeman wasn’t just some upper-crust Spartan kid who’d wanted to fly atmospheric fighters since he was eight and was finally able to live his childhood dream. Leo Freeman was the only son of Prince Nikolai Freeman, and the sole living grandson of Duke Reginald Freeman. And, regardless of what he wanted or dreamed of, nobody was going to let Prince Leonidas Nikolayevich Freeman risk getting himself turned into a shower of burnt sausage meat liberally seasoned with metal fragments just so he could act out the dreams of his childhood.

  Leo may have been the best pilot in his squadron, if not his whole regiment, but when the balloon went up and the orders were being cut for Nalus, Senior Lieutenant Freeman got a sudden ahead-of-schedule promotion and a forcible transfer to the staff of XXXth Corps, all the way out on the uncharacteristically quiet border with the Archduchy. There, despite his incessant wailing and gnashing of teeth, His Excellency Captain Prince Leonidas Freeman had been condemned to fly a desk for the rest of his mandatory service obligation.

  To this insulting conspiracy he’d reacted, in typical Leo fashion, by mustering out into the reserves at the end of his mandatory active duty stint. Which was an exercise in futility since it did nothing to restore him to active flight status, and only succeeded in sidetracking a potentially promising career in the Shock Corps.

  Having cut off his nose to spite his face, Leo went back to the sole thing he loved besides flying. This year, his post-muster “free year” without the annual, three-month-long call-up he would now face for a decade and a half as a Category One reservist, was Leo’s comeback year as a Freestyle fighter. And it had been, without doubt, a spectacular year. But Freestyle was no more of an acceptable long-term career for a future Duke Freeman than flying combat spaceplanes.

  “You know I’ll back you no matter what you do, Leo,” said Yosi to his friend, “but the longer you refuse to feed the crocodiles, the hungrier the crocodiles will become.”

  “Bah!” laughed the Spartan, “Let them drool a bit longer!

  “Did you know that Vera Lederman’s uncle emailed her the other day? Apparently every other twelve-year-old back home wants a dagger like mine for his thirteenth birthday. Look-alike replicas are flying off the shelves. He was wondering if she could talk me into lending her the real thing for a bit so it could be measured properly for a truly faithful copy, down to the metallurgy and balance of the original. He’s got ample expertise in working with museum pieces, apparently. Guarantees the original won’t be harmed in any way by the tests.”

  Yosi raised an ironic eyebrow.

  “You gonna lend it to her?”

  “Heck, no!”

  “What if she asks nicely? I mean really nicely?”

  “Oh, heck, then definitely no! Imagine what’ll happen afterwards. She’s deadly with that rapier of hers.”

  “Could be worth it,” smiled Yosi.

  “It’ll only hurt for a little bit when she skewers you through the heart.”

  “It’s not my heart I’m worried about her skewering!” replied Leo with a mock cringe.

  “But what about all your teenage fans? If you mollify them with a faithful reproduction of your famous dagger, surely you will win their undying loyalty and devotion. At least for the next fifteen minutes, until something else comes along.”

  “Oh, yeah,” grinned Leo, “that’s it! I’ve got what I’m gonna do with my life! I’m gonna raise my legion of loyal teenage fans in revolt against the Established Order of Things! We’ll use our Damascus steel daggers to overthrow the boring modern world in the name of romance and bring the old ways back to life! Quick, call Vera!”

  “I’m your faithful servant to the bitter end, my lord!” exclaimed Yosi laughingly as the waiter appeared with his breakfast. “We shall devour our foes!

  “Um… Breakfast first, though. Can’t overthrow the universe on an empty stomach.”

  * 2 *

  “So what do you want to do, now that you’re done pounding everyone into a bloody pulp in the ring?” remarked Yosi by way of conversation as he sipped the remarkably good organic Earl Grey the waiter had brought in response to his general request for tea. Even as far as luxury hotels went, this place was in a league of its own. The only two better kitchens he could think of both belonged to royalty.

  Now that the training regimen had been relaxed, Leo apparently felt free to indulge his carnivorous instincts to the hilt. The second helping of lamb he was polishing off made for about a kilo of meat altogether. Not a bad breakfast, if you were, say, a mountain leopard. He’d even loosened the sash a bit, to make room for it all.

  “Hm!”

  With his right hand and right shoulder ensconced in regen shells and the whole arm in between immobilized by medical braces, the Spartan couldn’t meet his usual standard of flamboyancy. Gesturing with the left hand just didn’t feel the same. Served him right for being caught napping. Four smashed-up metacarpals and a broken clavicle Takawa had dealt him. Fitting punishment for forgetting how ridiculously fast that man was with his hands.

  “All this stuff,” Leo tapped the bulge where the regen shell around his hand hid under the navy blue coat, “is coming off in three days. Until then, I plan to cheer on Vera and her gang as they hand it to the Imperials. There’s no way we’re losing the gold in the heptathlon.”

  “I don’t know,” replied Yosi, considering.

  “I’ll grant you, the rapier, the rifle and the pistol are ours. But the Empire’s got some good runners and swimmers on their team. They’ll make up points there. The judo event is a tossup. And they’ve got a shot in the dagger fight, too. That Zhu Min girl is scary fast with a knife. I wouldn’t count them out.”

  “Bah!” said Leo good-naturedly, “There you go being all analytical again, you stick-in-the-mud, you! Where’s your team spirit? We’ll whip those stuck-up bastards like we always do, you mark my words.”

  “All right, we’ll see,” replied Yoseph with a grin.

  “Either way, it’s going to be fun to watch. And after that? Do you want to hang around here a while, or do you want me to book us passage home?”

  “Oh, screw going home! I’m in no hurry. The Games aren’t going to be over for another three weeks, and that’s all the excuse I need to stay right here.

  “We’re on Paradise, for Heaven’s sake! This place is warm, sunny and full of skimpily-dressed, beautiful women with loose morals, not to mention all kinds of other fascinating wildlife. Back home it’s forty below right now. Everything that’s not dead is hibernating. Yesterday, Mother sent me a homey picture of the castle buried under two meters of snow. Snapped it out the window of her aircar just before she landed, and the latest blizzard set in. Best available forecast says we’re in for another four months of that kind of thing, at least, before we get a chance at some kind of spring. Brr!”

  “Well,” remarked Leo’s companion, “at least the skiing is good over there. You have to admit, the forest doesn’t look half bad under all that snow when you’re doing a few clicks cross-country.”

  “That gives me an idea,” replied the Spartan. “How about we go camping? You know, a nice walk in the woods, communion with nature, fresh air… Nothing but the clothes on our backs.”

  “Sure. We start at dawn on Wednesday, walk into the Gran Marquès shopping mall and try to survive for a week. Nothing but our expense accounts.”

  “Yosi!”

  His grin suddenly resembling something entirely carnivorous, Yoseph Weismann leaned forward, transfixing his companion’s gaze with his own. Jumping china rang counterpoint to every word as he rappe
d on the linen-covered tabletop.

  “The reason I am sitting right now at this table, on the ninetieth-floor luxury terrace of the most expensive hotel on Paradise, is that I happen to be sworn to your grandfather’s service. If the sole heir to the Freeman throne breaks his neck climbing a cliff and I have no regen shell to put on it and no radio to call for help, the Duke will have my head stuffed and mounted over the fireplace in the Great Hall. Right next to that prize boar from last year.

  “Of course, your aunt Lena might beat him to the punch. In that case my skull will enjoy a long and glorious career as Lady Grafineva’s silver-chased ceremonial ale cup.

  “Finally, I may decline to wait for the tender mercies of your illustrious relatives and just kill myself like a good rytsar, so that my blood may wash away the stain of shame upon my forsworn honor.

  “And don’t you start with how we’ve got the Paradisian Ministry of the Ecology watching us the whole time anyway, so we don’t need anything else. We pack so we can live out there for two weeks, no matter what happens. But we don’t touch a thing unless it’s a real emergency. Agreed?”

  “Yes, mommy!” laughed the Spartan, “Don’t break the china!”

  “Hey!” Leo’s attention suddenly switched to a table across the terrace on which the hotel staff had set up the open-air half of the restaurant, “There’s the jackass I bounced around the hallway the other night.”

  Sure enough, an older, hook-nosed fellow in semi-formal Jagobaran dress was busily ordering breakfast just a few meters away. The neat black lines above the man’s left eyebrow and just below his left eyesocket, and the swollen green-and-yellow cheek that went with them, severely marred his puffed-up dignity. Net glass frames did that, when an angry heavyworlder’s fist tapped a fellow in the eye by way of expressing stern disapproval of his actions. It hadn’t, really, been a serious punch. Otherwise, the fool would still be in the hospital with a shattered cheekbone, a concussion and probably a splattered eyeball. But the glasses did snap with a very satisfying crack.

  The rest of the bruises weren’t visible. But you could infer them from the stiffness of certain movements.

  “And now to add insult to injury,” thought Yosi while pretending to admire the superb vista beyond the balcony’s guardrail. Not that he had any sympathy, under the circumstances.

  “Waiter!”

  Leo wasted no time.

  A waiter was instantly there. According to its net site, El Hotel Edèn was renowned throughout known space for prompt and courteous service. After a week in this place, Yosi was inclined to believe the advertising. The whole staff acted as if they’d been hard-wired into the building AI.

  “Señor?”

  The maitre was hard pressed to keep his phony facade of absolute imperturbability intact. Even with the strictness of the pre-competition training regimen to occupy his time, Leo had managed to gain quite a reputation in only a few short days.

  “See that gentleman over there? Send him one of those Nosey the Newsman dolls, with a note reading: ‘Keep your nose trimmed. It might get stuck in a keyhole.’”

  “Si, señor.”

  The corners of the waiter’s mouth twitched in a herculean effort to suppress a grin. News traveled fast around here.

  Momentarily, the Jagobaran threw down his utensils, cast an extremely volatile glare in their direction and withdrew from the scene, leaving behind a trail of scorching expletive in six languages.

  Paradise being, for the most part, a relatively prim-and-proper place, and the hotel being what it is, few guests were likely to have encountered the more choice expressions crackling along in the man’s wake. Yosi had.

  His pistol was halfway out of its holster by reflex action at the mere sound of Aryc. Just in time he caught himself and slammed the weapon back down.

  The holster’s retention system clicked inaudibly under his hand as the pistol returned where it belonged. Suddenly, his tunic was soaked through with cold sweat under the armpits, and the body armor underneath slid slickly over his skin on a thin layer of lubricant.

  Leo’s hand jumped across the table, encircling his own in a bone-crushing grip.

  Grinding his teeth with the effort to return the memories back to the recesses of his mind, where they belonged, Yoseph forced himself to the here-and-now.

  The deadly rage passed as suddenly it came. Weismann-the-killer reflected in Leo’s eyes faded inward, leaving behind Yosi-the-ordinary-guy. The fingers of his right hand tingled as Leo let go. His left came back up off the grip of the pistol and latched onto the teacup to give itself something to do.

  A large swallow of the bitter, scalding brew slid down Yosi’s throat. A sheepish smile appeared on his face as he exhaled the tension. Just his dumb luck that the stupid pervert would curse in Aryc.

  His Spartan friend laughed and punched him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Easy there, stud. He’s just some idiot who sells Tailors for a living and likes to plant video spyware in pretty girls’ dresses.”

  “Yeah, I suppose shooting him would be overkill,” breathed Yosi, watching another entry trail draw itself across the city sky.

  His heart slowed a bit with each passing second, almost in tune with the lengthening white line. Sixty-five beats per minute, that was the ticket. Nice and easy.

  “It was a pity, though.”

  Leo had produced a pair of high-resolution binoculars and was intently studying something below.

  “The girl was very cute. What do you think the two of them were after?”

  “Just kicks,” Yosi remarked, syncing up one eye of his net glasses to the binoculars’ digital feed.

  “Nosey wanted to get his rocks off to a live video of the girlfriend getting boned by the famous Prince of Freestyle.”

  “You asked, huh?”

  “Yup.

  “Had some words with the girl while you were busy playing basketball with Nosey. They were too damned clumsy to be pros, but I wanted to cover the bases anyway, just for due diligence.”

  Leo chuckled.

  “I bet you were very persuasive. Spilled her guts the moment you gave her the look, didn’t she?”

  “I was a perfect gentleman. Never even raised my voice,” agreed Yosi nonchalantly, flicking his glance at the “Go” button on the virtual menu projected by the glasses.

  “Poor thing peed herself,” he said as the binoculars instantly fed him what Leo was looking at, in living color.

  “How do you find this stuff? There are what, a thousand square clicks down there?”

  “I have a nose for it.”

  The divine brunette in the Spartan’s sights wrinkled her nose at the mirror. With a flick of her wrist, the offending blue tunic pooled at her feet, revealing a heart-shaped strip of pubic hair dusted with purple glitter and a bust that would have made Aphrodite herself blush with envy.

  The girl pouted. The tunic slithered obediently into the fabric recycling slot. Clearly, the Tailor AI was not her friend today. Or, probably, any other day.

  Just the kind of thing Leo would want for a couple of weeks’ mindless amusement, thought Yosi. Pretty airhead with big boobs who spends two hours every morning torturing her Tailor, her whole life consumed with imitating some celebrity she would never meet and wouldn’t recognize out of makeup, chasing that dimwitted schoolgirl’s fantasy of a triumphal ride across the universe upon the chariot of her own body. Too dumb to be happy simply being just another ordinary girl living an ordinary life. Completely unaware of just how fragile that ordinary life really was, and how precious.

  A wink, a nod, perhaps an inkling that the handsome foreigner with the bulging muscles really is a prince, and she is ever so ready to be swept off her feet. In the morning, the grim retainer gets to walk her to the cab, all bubbling over with excitement, and maybe clutching some bauble.

  It would go on for a bit. Then, one evening, there would be a bouquet of thirteen yellow tulips. And a polite note.

  And the ninny would have the gall t
o be upset, to call and cry and leave videomails on that special account Leo starts just for the likes of her and never checks afterward.

  As if princes marry cinderellas in real life. As if she would qualify as Leo’s Cinderella, even if they did.

  “I’d rather think it was, er, another organ.”

  “Runs in the family,” commented the Spartan as the girl opaqued her window.

  “That’s not fair! I wasn’t finished watching!”

  “You’re despicable,” grinned Yoseph, un-syncing the glasses.

  “Tell me if you find something else.”

  Leo grunted something incoherent.

  Yosi was on the verge of syncing the spectacles back up when a lithe young man wearing an Imperial team jacket emerged onto the veranda, yawning and absentmindedly running a comb through his close-cropped hair.

  You had to admit, thought Yoseph, the Imperials’ new jackets were simply works of art. The holographically-rendered golden dragon strained to break free of the crimson background and fly off with every ripple of the wind.

  It was a very telling thing, he chuckled silently to himself, that the Empire always had the fancy togs, but the League always won the medal counts.

  Despite his impressive size, there was a fluid, almost catlike quality to the Imperial’s movements. Whereas Leo was a bear, deceptively slow and clumsy-looking, his great rival in the ring was a tiger, graceful and lethal at first glance.

  They had met in battle, now, three times. And every meeting had been spectacular to behold. Last night’s performance was already being billed as the greatest seven minutes in the history of the sport.

  “Hey, Leo! There’s Takawa!” commented Yosi, as the subject of his scrutiny melted into a chair at an empty table not twenty meters away.

  The four broken ribs and punctured lung of last night seemed to bother him not at all. The lacerated heart they’d glued back together, right there in the ring, after the fight had ended. The Imperials’ best ultra-heavyweight Freestyle fighter was even able to stand for the medal ceremony, after a fashion, though he’d needed help getting on and off the podium.