Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  The impact hit the weapon like a ton of bricks, pushing it out of the way.

  Leo squeezed the trigger, but the shot went wide.

  By the Allmother, these things could move!

  T’rrek hissed in frustration.

  This thing was tougher by far than the one Akhnookh had killed in a single leap. Even good as he was, and T’rrek was among the best hunters in the fleet, he could say so without boasting, he had failed to surprise his quarry. It got out of the way of his first leap and damned near shot him before he’d even fully landed! Completely unexpected!

  Ha, but it was too slow after all!

  T’rrek’s claws connected solidly, tearing his opponent’s arm to shreds. Blood gushed out in a spurting red stream. He must have hit a major artery.

  Leo cried out in pain as claws tore through his muscles and the pistol fell from his suddenly-lifeless hand.

  He punched his opponent left-handed, putting all the strength of a hundred and fifty kilos of heavyworlder muscle and bone into the blow.

  The fist smacked solidly into the cat’s lower ribs. Something snapped in that fellinoid body, loudly enough to echo through the trees.

  The alien went flying into the air, writhing in pain and surprise…

  …There was a sound/motion warning on the heads-up display. The poncho thought that there was a hungry leopard in the bushes over to the right. Of course it did.

  Yosi’s yell cut off before it started. Something jumped out of the bushes, aiming for Leo. Dammit, the Spartan’s body was blocking the shot! There was a blur of motion. Leo screamed. Something broke with a loud crack. The alien went flying into the air. Yosi pulled the trigger…

  …T’rrek felt the blow more as an explosion than as pain. Last time he’d been hit that hard was when he got careless on a buffalo hunt and a full-grown bull had kicked him in the ribs. He felt that same sickening crack of snapping bone, the lurch as his body was lifted off the ground by the force of the blow...

  There was a gunshot. Something grazed his stomach, buzzing like a killer bee.

  The fighter was right there!

  He landed awkwardly, and tried to leap for the cockpit…

  …Yoseph fired again.

  The alien’s head exploded like an overripe watermelon, bits of brain and skull flying in all directions. The body landed in the fighter’s cockpit, thumping heavily onto the front seat. The clawed limbs beat a short death rattle on the dashboard and went still.

  Leo desperately groped about his wound, trying to find the artery and pinch it shut before he bled to death.

  There wasn’t enough intact limb above the wound for a tourniquet.

  The poncho tried to make a compression bandage, but that wasn’t enough. In the moment it took the poncho sleeve to push his fingers out of the way and go from tattered rag to tight ring of cotton-like gauze, all the grass at his feet was painted red with blood. It soaked right through the fabric and ran in a rivulet down his arm. On the other end it was leaking through the bandage into his armpit and running down the side of his body. The poncho was piling on the gauze and pressing down for all it was worth, but the blood was soaking through as fast as it built the layers. He realized that he wouldn’t make it…

  Yosi ran up with a pocket-sized can of blood clotter, cursing all the way. The poncho was about to get some help. If the blood didn’t wash out all the gel, he might actually live through this. Big if, that.

  “You damned idiot! How many times did I tell you to stealth up and slow the fuck down? Were you fucking trying to get yourself killed?

  “Don’t you dare go into shock on me! Talk, you bloody bastard!”

  “Sorry… I… That girl, screaming like that…”

  “Yeah, yeah. You and your damned chivalry. That’s how you almost got yourself killed on Miranda, too, you stupid fool.

  “Damned blood is washing out the damned clotter.

  “Get over here, you stupid gauze, get into that hole, damn you!”

  “Ouch! Hey, watch it.”

  “You wanna bleed to death? Poncho needs to pack the holes so the clotter stays the heck in.

  “Now stop wriggling and take it like a man. You just wait ’till the endorphin high wears off. Then you’ll really start singing.”

  Leo felt about ready to pass out, adrenaline high or no. The edges of his field of view were growing dark.

  “Clot already, damn you. Please, Hashem, make it clot,” he heard faintly through the gathering darkness.

  Something hissed against his neck. He heard a slap and realized that Yosi was hitting him. It sounded like it came through a wall of cotton, muted and soft.

  “Come on! I am not lugging your ass up this mountain!”

  “Gee, Yosi, thanks. Nice to know you care. It’s really comforting.”

  Whatever the drug was that his friend had injected him with, Leo was beginning to feel much better.

  The cotton walls around him receded. Everything looked sharp. A little too sharp even, maybe.

  “You’re the one who let that overgrown housecat scratch you.

  “We’re out of here as soon as I patch you up. There are thirty straight-line clicks for us to cover before dawn tomorrow. I need you awake and functional.”

  Leo definitely felt much better now. In fact, his shoulder didn’t hurt at all. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it had seemed at first glance.

  “Save the regen shell. The EMP only left us the five G-models.”

  “And you are getting one. If you don’t, you’ll never be able to use your right arm again.

  “That damned cat tore the living shit out of you. Your deltoid is hamburger. Your bicep is attached by a single flap of skin. The brachial artery is severed entirely, as are almost all the major nerves and veins. The freaking thing even chipped a chunk off the bone.

  “Now shut up while I stick the damned shell on you.”

  “Doctor, I compliment you on your bedside manner,” winced the Spartan as the nanite-injecting claws of the regen shell bit into his flesh and a familiar tingling numbness spread through his right shoulder.

  “You’re a pain in the butt when you’re scared, you know that?”

  “So are you, you macho idiot,” answered Yosi.

  “Now let’s get you over by that tree over there. I’m going to pump you full of vampire soup. You’ve lost entirely too much blood for my liking.”

  At this point, Leo, awake though a little light-headed, was given pause to consider while Yosi pulled a liter-sized combo packet of freeze-dried blood substitute and saline solution out of his aid bag.

  The little chemomech nanites in the blood substitute were theoretically two-thirds as efficient as red blood cells, but Yosi always figured the blood transfer math as if they were only half as efficient. Besides pre-charged hemoglobin, the carrier nanites came loaded with a bunch of nutrients and vitamins. With the serious cases you just kept pumping the stuff in until the patient’s urine turned bright purple. As long as you had enough, that is.

  “Why don’t you take care of the girl, before she catches an infection? Hell only knows what those aliens could have carried.”

  “Sheket! First I finish patching you up.”

  A ghostly smile touched Yoseph’s lips as he pulled the tab to reconstitute the blood substitute. “Home, sweet home. No matter where the road takes you, in the end you always circle back. And all shall be as it was…“ he muttered under his breath.

  * 4 *

  Leo sat under a pseudooak, a regen shell covering his right shoulder and upper arm. The IV pump strapped to his chest hissed quietly to itself as it transferred a liter of artificial blood into the Spartan’s veins.

  Yosi had cut apart an ethylvine, washing out the girl’s scratches with its near-pure-ethanol juice. None of them were very serious.

  “Why aren’t you using regen patches?” she had asked between sobs.

  “Have to conserve them. Blood clotter and antibiotics, too. Emergency expenditure only.”

  “What
’s your name?” asked Leo kindly; probably simply making conversation to keep the girl’s mind off the stinging alcohol that sent her wincing with every splash.

  And the floodgates opened.

  Her name was Patty. Patricia Sleager. She spilled her guts to Leo between sobs and sniffles, semi-ramblingly pouring out her entire life story to a complete stranger in the flawless, round-voweled Standard they taught in Paradise’s most exclusive boarding schools. As if the mere telling of it would, somehow, bring her back to the safe, familiar world that had been so suddenly and irrevocably shattered before her very eyes.

  Yosi half-listened with one ear, semi-interestedly, trying not to glance too often at the big, round breasts that hung free of the tattered remnants of what had once been a fashionably revealing blouse, and quivered fascinatingly with every wracking, theatrical sob.

  Busying himself instead with a thorough but quick examination the aliens, with noting the size and sharpness of claws and teeth, the length of tails and limbs and bodies, with carefully assessing the size and shape and heft of each corpse, with hastily cutting one apart in order to find and fix in his mind the positions of the vital nerves and organs. Even sniffing, carefully, at the blood that covered his hands, and suppressing the sudden impulse to taste it.

  Inside him, with every passing moment, was rising, blossoming, unfolding like a rose fashioned out of razor blades, the cold, brutal, calculating other he so carefully kept in check while in polite company. The ruthless, merciless, meticulously efficient killer who derived an icy, all but emotionless yet somehow nearly sensual satisfaction from the pitiless slaughter of things that dared to threaten those whom he loved.

  That other Yosi, the dagger-like civilized savage who had sat patiently, quietly waiting out the years in the specially-allotted, carefully-bounded corner of his master’s mind until the inevitable day when he would once again be needed, wanted now to feel these aliens out, to begin the process of learning, fundamentally, in his guts, the nature and limits of their physical capabilities. He wanted to understand this new enemy. For understanding, above all else, was power. For with understanding enough, he could surely kill them all.

  The striped, lean, muscular, hundred-kilo beast that had almost ripped out Leo’s throat with a single swipe of its razor-sharp claws had jumped, from a low, feline crouch, a distance of almost six and a half meters. Impressive, even in this weak gravity. But not necessarily the limit of performance for his kind. The stupid poncho AI was no good at it, but Yosi was forcing it, despite all protests, to build a crude physiokinetic model of the average alien based on the three samples before him. To tell him, by comparison with similar creatures the AI already knew about, what kinds of things these aliens might be capable, and, just as importantly, not capable, of doing in a fight.

  The pilot of the sporty red aircar had been one Roger van Pieterzonn. A son, apparently, of the penniless Mirandan refugee who had founded, in a rundown, rented basement, a little processor shop he’d somewhat unimaginatively called “Microcomp Limited.” The man who had come, a mere forty years later, to own half of Paradise.

  A bit of a disappointment to his family was Roger, to hear Patty tell of it. Mildly put, not the brightest crayon in the box. Handsome, and good at squeezing the last meter per second out of his semi-illegally modified custom aircar, but not at much else.

  But he was going to make one hell of a meal ticket for the financially imperiled daughter of an up-jumped ne’er-do-well risen meteorically far above his station neither by virtue of superior will nor by dint of native ability, but by a simple twist of sheer dumb luck.

  She’d described that, too, in stunningly simple, yet elegant prose, that somehow managed to jam-pack a lifetime of bitter disappointment into a handful of flawlessly cultured, amazingly expressive sentences.

  The early childhood spent aboard grubby rustbucket tramp freighters that shuttled among the flotsam and jetsam of tiny settlements on the periphery of known space, picking up jobs and cargoes too small, too unimportant, too dirty, too unprofitable and too dangerous to attract the attention of the big interstellar corporate carriers. The dim memory of a kind mother whom she’d never really known, who one day just disappeared out of the family cabin and never, for some unknown reason, returned. The indifferent father, first a navigator, then a first mate, and finally an independent captain in charge of a four-man crew, who paid far less attention to his daughter than he did to the bottomless bottle of high-proof rotgut in his bunk’s cargo net and the endless games of cabakk going in the saloons and lounges of whatever run-down space station he’d berthed at in search of his next barely-break-even job.

  And then the miracle. The gift of Heaven that had changed everything overnight. Patty’s voice still trembled with the dim reflection of the sudden rush of excitement that had come with the discovery of the indescribable treasure. An entire Golden Age settlement somehow left untouched and undiscovered for six centuries in the empty depths on the very edge of the Dead Zone.

  Then came the shock of Paradise, so big and bright, and airy, and terrifyingly exciting after a lifetime spent in tiny, grimy cabins and dimly lit, winding shipboard corridors barely wide enough for two men to pass one another sideways, amid the locker room stench of always-dirty secondhand air filters and walls dripping endlessly with condensation and rust. And the next shock, only a few months later. The cold, stunningly beautiful, avaricious Paradisian stepmother barely a decade older than her new charge, who took all of three weeks to pack her embarrassingly light-skinned, blond-haired stepdaughter off to an overpriced, prestigious boarding school on the opposite side of the planet.

  And so the ten-year-old girl’s excitement faded, replaced mercilessly by the empty, lonely dozen years spent watching, powerlessly, on ever-rarer visits to a ridiculously expensive San Cristobal mansion where she was never truly welcome, as the tidy little fortune that was her rightful heritage slowly dissipated into drug smoke and fashionable fripperies, and illegal VR, and unlucky hands of cabakk.

  And finally came the utter terror of the sobering reality. The awful realization that the rising tide of William Sleager’s debt was truly unsustainable. That the day would soon come when the creditors could no longer be put off, and the appearances could no longer be maintained, and young Patricia Sleager would be dumped, without warning, out into the cold, hard, real world from which her father was supposed to have guaranteed her an ironclad escape all those many years ago. A real world in which Patricia Sleager, with her imminently pending four-year degree in Golden Age Philosophy from the wonderfully exclusive highballs-and-yachting club laughably termed La Universidad de San Luis, was woefully unprepared to survive.

  Enter Roger van Pieterzonn. Embarrassingly white and light-haired, like herself, however officially unimportant that sort of thing theoretically was in the enlightened, progressive herdeiro circles where Patty hung out. The crowd among whom the presence of a token blanco or two proved the liberalism and open-mindedness of everyone else in the room, no matter what jokes and snide remarks were made by the enlightened señoras y señores behind said blanco’s back.

  Roger van Pieterzonn, a young man in search of a girl to keep himself amused. Eye candy and arm ornament to show off at parties, willing toy to use as he wanted in the bedroom, appreciative audience to laugh at his boneheaded jokes; and someone to squeal, in a terrified yet excited high-pitched voice, when he pushed his modified aircar into an illegal, Mach-breaking dive as he buzzed the canyons and foothills west and south of San Cristobal. A young man whose enormous fortune could never, under any imaginable circumstances, run out.

  She was planning, Yosi gathered, in some way to get pregnant by him. Convince him, coerce him, trick him, somehow, she didn’t care how. Deliberately damage her contraceptive implant if she had to, for all that such a thing could land her in prison for twenty-five years if she got caught. Anything to ensure that, when Roger finally got bored and left, his money would stay. At least some of it.

  But now, that
would never happen.

  They had been watching the cube at around nine in the morning, when the broadcast was interrupted by an emergency bulletin. The main jump points were under attack by alien forces, follow the instructions of the authorities, and so on and so forth. Only there were no instructions from the authorities, beyond “stay in your homes, do not panic.”

  Sometime around eleven, Roger decided they had listened to the authorities long enough, expressed his utmost trust in the various Imperial and League naval squadrons currently enforcing Paradise’s status as a Demilitarized Zone, and resolved to take his car and go to Station G, on the grounds that it was too fine a day to waste sitting at home watching the boringly repetitive news bulletins his girlfriend suddenly wanted to be glued to for hours on end. He’d rather go skiing.

  Halfway there he changed his mind and returned to San Cristobal. Upon return they packed “supplies” into the trunk, “just in case,” and went to Station G again.

  They never saw the flashes or felt the blast waves, but, as the custom car snapped up out of yet another one of Roger’s Mach-breaking dives in a snowy mountain canyon somewhere near the Paso Chungara, along the northernmost edge of the Highway One Air Corridor, the mushroom clouds rising from San Cristobal had loomed suddenly over the mountains off to starboard.

  For the first time since she had gotten into the aircar that morning, Patty had screamed for real.

  Roger had been flying on backup controls for a while, something to do with the main onboard computer failing and his custom-imported, semi-illegal racing aircar parts switching to weird anti-failure modes he was unfamiliar with. Patty had lost the network connection on her glasses all of a sudden, right around the time when Roger had cursed and the aircar had lurched about briefly as the backup control system took over from the suddenly-dead primary. A bit later she had been puzzled when her blouse wouldn’t morph or obey commands in response to her decision that she was a bit chilly, and wanted long sleeves, and fluffier fabric.