Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Strange. Still, it would explain much if they turned out to be another relic of the Golden Age. A lot of genetic experimentation was done back then, before the End Time War set everything on fire.

  Then, seeing naught but Patty, curled up about herself on the other side of the tiny shelter, Yosi closed his eyes once more.

  The girl’s dreams were troubled too. Probably his fault, with all the damned nightmares. He could just imagine what kind of stuff he’d been pumping out.

  Back home, Duke Reginald had him sleeping in the old, pre-renaissance keep, where the sliding doors were solid steel and the granite walls were lined with copper sheeting underneath the upholstery. Otherwise, he’d have kept half the staff up on tenterhooks in the early years, before the sleep inducers had started working.

  Yosi tried his best to project what little calm and peace he could muster and the tightly coiled body relaxed just a tiny bit.

  That was the best he could do. The only thing he could do right now.

  The effort exhausted him quickly, as he had known it would. Now his sleep would be deep enough. Hopefully, when he awoke, the dreams would not remain.

  * 7 *

  “We have to split up,” sighed Yosi, leaning back against a convenient pine tree as he scooped the last little bits of soup out of the mini-kettle.

  “The aliens won’t be satisfied with the mess I made of the crash site. They’ll want to track down whomever killed their people.”

  “They can want ‘till the end of the universe,” replied Leo soberly, “there’s no way they can find us now.”

  He didn’t like where this was going one bit. The air between them crackled with the tension of things left unsaid.

  “Hyperaggressive Survivor Syndrome,” Mother called it. She would know. It was her job to know all the different ways to be crazy. The Hope Incident had produced almost seventy cases. Yosi’s was, apparently, “really interesting.”

  He had to confront them. He had to kill them. Reliably, efficiently, again and again until they weren’t scary anymore. Until he was confident in his ability to kill them, as confident as he was in his ability to kill every other big, dangerous thing that had ever had the temerity to attack or even threaten him, or those whom he loved. He might even eat some of them, the way he used to eat the boars’, wolves’ and mountain lions’ hearts in the old days, before he’d gone climbing up the northern slope of San Sebastian in the middle of winter in order to find the Allmother, and found the Jewish God of Abraham instead.

  It wasn’t a rational thing. But he’d make up some rational excuse, however thin. Yosi was perversely good at rationalizing his behavior. The more lunatic the thing he wanted to do, the better he was at making up the rational excuse to go do it.

  “I’d hoped for that, but now I know that it’s not true,” replied Yosi.

  “This girl we’ve picked up is a damned walking target. She leaves sign I could follow blindfolded, even when she’s stealthed up.

  “If they don’t find a clear trail to follow out of the crash site, they’ll start doing concentric search patterns outward ‘till they find something. And then we’re all toast.”

  Patty glanced warily from Yosi to Leo and back again. She didn’t speak Hebrew, at least that she would admit; but it seemed that she could tell, merely from his tone of voice, whom it was that they were speaking about. And she could feel the tension. You’d have to be blind, deaf and stupid not to feel it, thought Leo. You could cut it with a knife.

  “All that trouble for one dead spaceplane crew? No way!

  “Heck, they haven’t even found the crash site yet.

  “Let’s stick together. Go up into the mountains and hide out for a few weeks. Wait for the Shock Corps to start landing.”

  “In the worst case,” replied Yosi, “they will do it.

  “There wasn’t any resistance worth speaking about down here. They’ll be bored. Eager for a fight. Eager for something to do.

  “I am your bodyguard. I’m not risking your life on a maybe.”

  “Oh get off it, Yosi. You are my bodyguard because the very thought of you guarding me sent dad into a tailspin the likes of which no one had ever seen. Grandpa would have made you a family rytsar sooner if he’d known what his son’s reaction would be.”

  Yoseph smiled.

  They both agreed, Nikolai Freeman was a world-class prick. Duke Reginald had gone as far as to name Leo the official successor, after that last spat with his son over Yosi’s continued residence in the castle. Well, the thing had started with Yosi, anyway…

  “It doesn’t matter why I am your bodyguard. I still am.”

  “I’ll carry her on my back for the next two days if I have to!” replied Leo pleadingly.

  “Don’t do this!”

  Yosi’s smile turned sad all of a sudden, yet somehow proud. The admiration in it made the Spartan squirm uncomfortably.

  “We’ll toss for it,” he said, reaching into his breast pocket.

  “I’m heads.”

  The Mirandan half-mark flipped silently through the morning breeze. Time seemed to pool and flow around it like honey. The tiny data crystals embedded in the silvery edges sparkled, diamond-like, as the coin turned end-over-end with impossible slowness, climbing up into the azure sky.

  Leo’s hand snatched the half-mark out of the air in mid-flight, shattering the glass-like tension.

  That coin had two heads.

  A reminder of how useful Yosi’s particular form of madness could be. And where one Leonidas Nikolayevich Freeman would be without it.

  Yosi’s reasoning was sound, thought the Spartan. His plan was insane, but the reasoning was sound.

  But there could be no other plan.

  And so, the closest thing in the world he had to a brother would now go and play tag with the Grim Reaper. One man against an army. For his sake. Again.

  “You are The Prince Freeman,” shrugged Yosi at the mute rebuke in his friend’s eyes. “My blood for yours.”

  “Allmother be good, how I hate all that shit!” growled Leo quietly, almost in a whisper.

  “Because you hate it is precisely why you must be Duke. You and not your father or your cousin Mark,” answered Leo’s friend, meeting his resentful gaze with an impossibly cool, calm stare.

  “I’ll meet you here.”

  Yosi pointed to the holographic relief map spread out on the ground between them. The map obediently zoomed in and displayed the coordinates and distance from present location.

  “Vicinity AC491283. That’s where I went on my walkabout. There is a dry cave system here, right next to the creek.

  “After you get there, wait fourteen days. If I’m more than a day late, change location. Try to make sense of the aliens’ armor while I’m gone.

  “Here.”

  Now there was a sense of embarrassment in Yosi’s voice. He placed an object the size of a matchbox on top of the map.

  “My lucky interface cracker. It’ll make sense of their access codes or nothing will. Something to remember me by if…”

  “Shut up,” growled the Spartan.

  “Bad luck to say it.”

  “I’ve packed everything I’ll need already,” replied Yosi, patting the pockets of his poncho.

  “I know.”

  Leo hugged his friend, hard enough that Yoseph felt his ribs give a little.

  “Heaven’s favor be with you.”

  “Don’t worry,” grinned Yosi, “Bli neder, I’ll bring back a nice, warm fur coat or three, in case we have to hide up here all winter.”

  As he was about to start down the slope, he turned and asked, quietly: “Hire someone to say Kaddish for me. If anything…”

  Leo nodded, his lips moving in silent prayer to the Allmother.

  * 8 *

  Yosi opened his eyes. Slowly, carefully, listening, tasting, smelling, absorbing the world through his skin. Feeling it. It was alive. It spoke to him and he spoke back. It was his friend. It hid him, clothed him, fed him… Withou
t it, without the trees around him and the earth beneath him, he would be nothing. Less than nothing.

  Here, embedded within the living fabric of this world, he could feel again, ever so faintly, the thing that Leo’s people called Gaia Allmother. A gentle, wordless whisper in the back of his mind. In reality, but a pale echo of the universe-filling, inaudible Voice that King David had sung about in the nineteenth psalm; a thunder made soft by distance.

  Once, he had doubted. The stern, awesome God of Abraham, Yitzhak and Yaakov had seemed but a pretty story invented in a desperate effort to endow with meaning a meaningless dance of uncaring atoms; a childish fairy-tale, made up by bronze-age nomads.

  But then, for a single, fleeting yet endless moment, he had heard the awesome power of the Voice, had felt the enormous, shattering Presence that went with it. And from that moment forth, all his doubts were forever gone.

  The Creator was here. The Creator was everywhere. He watched him, and He loved him, and He had personally intervened again and again to save him. And there was a Plan. Of these things Yoseph Weismann was certain.

  A Bussard tree climber undulated its way past him, a patch of spotted green reptilian skin and six clawed legs. He killed and ate it without breaking his concentration, washing it down with a swig of water and a vitamin pill.

  Vitamins, he thought as he spat out the two hard nodules in which, as a Golden Age fellow named Mr. Bussard had decided, the tree climber locked away all those pesky, poisonous heavy metals. Vitamins were the pitfall on this planet.

  Originally, the name “Paradise” had been given as a bitter joke. The place should have been a poisonous hell through and through today, too, even to a heavyworlder. Except that a Golden Age Terraformer had turned it livable. But in order to make it livable, it had had to dip into its store of truly obscure designs, and even hobbyist exotica, and integrate it all, ever so skillfully, with the original, native single-celled life.

  When the Terraformer was finished, you could eat the critters, sometimes; and you could drink the water, sometimes; and humans could farm, some places. In all of known space, nothing was as weird biologically. Not even Alperson’s World, where almost every multi-celled creature was designed to be venomous.

  And then the machine went away. But life moved on, and mutated on its own. Some died out. Some interbred. Some expanded to new niches. And things got weirder still.

  Today, the subtle differences between Paradisian and original Terran biochemistry dictated that, every once in a while, one had to eat something of real Earth stock, or else find something from the Terraformer’s Human Sustenance Package. But, except for a few plants like pine and eucalyptus, half a dozen animals in one or two climatic zones and a couple of species of fish, real Terran life hadn’t gotten much of a foothold on this planet. And the high-altitude Human Sustenance Package critters and plants had, sadly, mostly died out after the Terraformer had left.

  The highland blueberry could, in theory, provide most of the vitamins a man needed. It was one of the few plants up here that had non-toxic fruit. But the endangered bushes were few and far between, and this late in the season critters had long ago picked most of them bare. Nor would steeping pine needles for tea get him the vitamins he needed. Not unless he went down to where the poisons were well and truly locked away far under the ground and there was established agriculture. Up here in the mountains, that pine needle tea would mix his vitamin C with enough lead to stop his kidneys cold.

  Which meant that he had to venture toward a populated area sooner or later. The only real alternative was to live primarily on beaver meat and spend all of his time either hunting or looking for the little caches where kangaroo chipmunks stored their dried fruit and nuts for the winter.

  Besides, he needed to do a recon, regardless. How long could he possibly hide up in the hills with no information?

  Better if his tracks disappeared near a populated area, anyway. Once he killed the aliens who came looking for the fighter, there was going to be hell to pay. Let the follow-on force chase his trail well down into the lowlands, and lose it on the outskirts of a city. That way, they for sure wouldn’t turn back up into the national park and find Leo, even by accident. Who knew, he might even find some help down there.

  San Angelo, a mid-sized city by Paradisian standards, lay only a few days’ walk away. Its casinos had advertised heavily in the League these past several years. On any given day, at least half of the tourists in the city would have come from somewhere back home. The touristy parts of San Angelo and San Cristobal were the only places on this planet where an armed League Citizen walking down the street would not attract apprehensive glances. Surely, if an armed resistance could be expected to spring up anywhere on Paradise, it would be in San Angelo.

  * 9 *

  Yosi paused, sniffing the air. He had expected his Talent to sharpen. It always did, in the wilderness and in response to danger. But the past three days had exceeded his wildest expectations. Never before in his life had such marvelous range been accompanied by such crystal clarity.

  He could feel his pursuers behind him, only a few hundred meters away. He could almost see them. Sparkles in the darkness. As if the world were glass, and their minds – candles. He could feel their excitement; the bloodlust of their hunt.

  They were a heavily armed recon team. Five men, or cats as the case may be, and they thought they had him.

  But he was through playing harmless target. A little stream had intersected his path and he’d used it to double back on his trail.

  Over the past few days he’d worked hard to give them the impression that they were chasing some poor, hapless fellow who had ridden passenger in the aircar brought down by the alien fighter, shot the crew and was now blindly fleeing away from the crash site, unable to even hide his trail properly.

  Blowing up the fighter with its own ordnance had turned out to be a great idea. The aliens seemed to completely discount the possibility that he’d gotten arms from the crew. At least if you judged by the utter contempt with which they treated the potential threat that he represented. He had even “lost” his pistol where they were sure to find it, a few minutes ago. Just to encourage over-excitement.

  “It’s been fun, guys,” thought Yosi, grinning.

  They were close…

  There!

  Five cats came running past him in a rather approximate wedge. Definitely no caution there. His ploy had worked perfectly. One of them had his pistol tucked into a loop extruded by his poncho.

  The cats hadn’t even turned on their camo. They were expecting a defenseless Outsider clad in civvies, not an armed and camouflaged League warrior.

  His enemies stopped in the middle of the stream, looking for his exit trail. Doubt was beginning to edge into their thoughts. There was fear. One of them turned around...

  They smelled a rat!

  Too late.

  Four of the five were inside the inner circle of the sight. At this range, neither armor nor camo nor reflexes would save them.

  Tracking the chevron across the targets, Yosi eased back on the trigger, smooth as butter…

  And let loose thirty rounds in a single second.

  Only one burst came back – a wild one, showering him with bark, yellow pine needles and small, dry branches.

  Suddenly, without thinking, he rolled. Just in time.

  A tri-burst sent splinters, sharp as needles, biting into his back.

  That one had been aimed and aimed well. Despite his best effort, there was still one live, pissed-off, overgrown tomcat out there. And now it was under no delusions regarding his capabilities.

  For the moment, they seemed to be out of each other’s sight.

  Yoseph took a deep breath to calm his heart and concentrated.

  Something was rustling its way through the grass off to his left, where the alien’s mind glowed angry-scared against the dark forest background. It sounded faint and flat, even with the poncho doing its best to amplify it.

  Noise d
ampers did that, if you moved too quickly.

  Too bad he couldn’t aim by Talent alone. But Talent and sound together…

  Damn! Big trees in the way. No good.

  Needed to switch positions first, anyway. His enemy had too good of an idea of where he was right now. No need to give the bastard muzzle report to aim at, too.

  The alien was trying to circle around his left side.

  Smart kitty. Figured out he was left-handed, did he?

  One long burst. By surprise, through the brush. That brush, right there.

  He had to get this over with before this guy got help…

  * 10 *

  Yosi walked toward San Angelo. His confident, springy step ate up the kilometers almost effortlessly.

  You had to give the aliens credit, he thought. Arrogant bastards or not, they’d packed for a serious fight. Every rifleman had brought twelve full magazines, and six grenades. The machinegunner had schlepped along eight full drums, weight be damned. No grenades for him, though. And they’d only brought six ration bars apiece. So, they had limits, and the limits weren’t very different from his own. This was good to know.

  Their commanders reacted pretty quickly, too, all things considered. It wasn’t even an hour before the reaction force had shown up. Four helicopters full of infantry, and a pair of gunships for escort. Without Leo’s little poncho rafting program, there would have been no way to get the scouts’ gear out in time.

  Between the fighter and the scouts, someone, somewhere, must have gotten royally ticked off.

  The aliens beat brush for nigh-on a week before they gave up. Helicopters, infantry patrols, drones, the works. Almost forced him to abandon the extra gear and bug out a couple of times. The whole bit kind of reminded him of the Omicronians on Hope Colony. The Aryans were more methodical and disciplined, but these kitties sure turned into one determined bunch of buggers, once you got their goat.

  But all their determination had gotten them precisely bupkess.