by Moshe Ben-Or
“Dammit all to hell,” though Yosi, “I’m a complete jerk, aren’t I?”
* 18 *
“We await your pleasure, Your Ladyship,” squeaked the director.
He was the best, reflected Isabella behind her screen. Only the best would do. There wasn’t much time.
Once again she glanced at the mirror. One last check, just in case.
Yes, it was all perfect. Not a royal gown, not armor, not a dress uniform resplendent with braid, but the mottled field-gray-and-brown poncho of a common Volunteer.
An AT rocket slung behind her back. A submachinegun at her belt. Grenades. Magazines. Only the red collar tabs with golden crown and wreath to distinguish her from some common burgher’s daughter. And the Diadem of Miranda, nestled in her now shockingly short hair.
“Leonidas, my sweet,” she thought wistfully, “in just a few short weeks you taught me more than all my tutors combined.”
She reached for the mahogany box on the table. The lid rose.
Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of it. The war scepter. The Mace of Miranda.
She couldn’t breathe, as if an iron hoop had closed around her chest, squeezing the life out of her. Her heart fluttered in terror, as if it were about to burst, or jump out her throat, but couldn’t decide which it would be.
Her hands grasped the edge of the table. Her knees shook.
She had never touched it. Not even at her own coronation. Not even on the night it had fallen from Father’s nerveless hand, to rattle into the spreading pool of blood. Not even then.
She’d washed the blood off her skin, and gotten dressed, and summoned servants to take away this monstrous thing, and the remnants of another.
“I am stronger than you,” muttered Isabella as her knees threatened to buckle.
“I do not fear you. You cannot hurt me. You cannot hurt me ever again.”
The mace was just metal, she thought as she gasped silently for air. Just dead metal and shiny polished stones, she said to herself as she centered her chi just below her solar plexus, just like Aunt Matilda had taught her, and pushed it downward.
It was a thing. Just a thing, with no will, no soul, no brain, lying in a box, waiting for a hand to wield it. That was all.
The power of the universe flowed into her body through her bellybutton and outward to her heart and lungs and limbs. It banished the terror and the pain and the weakness, squeezing it out into the air, where it belonged. Away from her, until there was nothing left but the pure Will that ruled the flesh, whether the flesh liked it or not.
She was Isabella, By the Grace of Heaven Baroness of Miranda, First of Her Name, Anointed Heiress of the Founders From Whose Line the Scepter Would Not Pass! She would fear no mere metal and stone!
Isabella grasped the mace and glided, regally, around the screen, toward the little man with the twitching nose and the beady eyes of an overanxious hamster.
“Proceed, Herr Vandergriff. Let us make haste.”
“At once, Your Ladyship,” replied the nervous little creature as he scampered out of the tent, leading the way.
“We have set the static cameras up here and here, by the pines, Your Ladyship, and the hovercams are there, and over there. I sincerely hope all is to Your Ladyship’s satisfaction.”
Yes, thought Isabella, yes indeed it was. The calm, deep forest. The lasers of a flak battery for a background. The dome of the command center.
There could only be one take.
A bright blue star bloomed suddenly in the cloudless, sun-filled sky. Another. And another, and another. They flashed and died, visible only for a moment before the sun’s radiance drowned them out again.
Rennekampff. He was a clever one, that man. He wasn’t selling his life cheaply. Not cheaply at all.
White contrails drew themselves across the azure deep, so quickly that the eye could not follow. Thunder pealed in volleys.
The ground to space missile sites at Diederhoff and Gotterburg. Father’s sole sound investment.
“Ready your broadcast, Herr Vandergriff!” snapped Isabella at the gaping director. “Our time grows short.”
This was her last chance to reach them all. From the sweltering jungles of the equator to the frozen glaciers of the poles; from tiny handhelds to enormous skyscrapers turned into projection screens; from echoing hangars to crowded public shelters; from tiny alpine villages to the great cities; from the simplest hovels to the finest mansions, her presence would fill Miranda one last time.
“At once, Your Ladyship,” bowed Vandergriff, waving to his staff.
“And in three… two… one… Action!”
“Adlige und Bürgerliche, our Baroness addresses us from a secure, undisclosed location!” boomed the famous news anchor.
Isabella felt suddenly inflated, as if a pillar of smoke and fire had descended from the heavens and filled her to the brim. The director, the pines, the cameras all grew small, and far away. There was only her and it. The thing that came and made her something else, something more than mere flesh and blood; something that did not live here, in the world of men, but only sojourned here from time to time.
“People of Miranda!” thundered the voice that was not really herself at all, “We face today new enemies, but ones who come with an old purpose. They come with their ships and their soldiers to take this world from us. They think that because they are many, and we are few, that because they have great fleets and mighty armies, and we face them with only the simple weapons in our hands, that they will subdue us. They expect us to flee. They expect us to surrender. They expect to take our world without further trouble, and make us their slaves.
“Many a fool has thought thus before them! Many a fool has found different!”
The Mace suddenly felt light as a feather in Isabella’s hand as she brandished it aloft.
“We are Miranda! We do not quail before foreign conquerors! We do not flee, nor do we abandon the struggle in fear! Let them come, as others have come before them! We will fight them at the bridgeheads. We will fight them in the fields, and in the hills, in the forests and in the swamps. We will fight them in the villages. We will fight them in the streets of our great cities. We will meet them wherever they go, from the ocean’s depths to the tops of the highest mountains.
“As long as even one among us draws breath, we will fight! We will never surrender! And though we have to fight for a thousand years, still the sacred soil of our Fatherland will burn beneath their feet! As long as a Mirandan hand grasps this scepter, as long as a single foreign soldier pollutes our sacred soil, there will be no surrender, and no peace!”
She held the Mace before her now, two handed, fists clenched above the pommel and beneath the head, as if ready to smash an approaching foe. Isabella felt sharp all of a sudden, sharper and colder and more merciless than any mere thing made by the feeble hand of Man could possibly be.
“My people, We, your Baroness, do not flee off-world. We do not sit in safety and harangue you from the comfort of some faraway palace. We stand within your ranks.
“As long as We draw breath, We shall struggle against these new enemies. We shall fight from among the ranks of Our People, as Our forefathers did in days of old. And We shall not tolerate any who betrays Our sacred Fatherland.
“If there be one in Our ranks who seeks to sow fear or doubt, who advocates surrender or compromise, be he high or low, noble or commoner, young or old, he is proscribed! Show him no mercy, even if he be your brother or your father or your son, your liege lord or your bosom friend, for he is no longer of Our People. And if there be one within Our ranks who shows skill and valor above his station, then let him rise where he must, for in this hour the sword of knighthood is drawn to be grasped by any with the courage to wield it. Though he be born the lowest of the low, yet in this hour of our Fatherland’s need let valor win him lands and titles!
“Go forth now and do your duty to the Fatherland. Defend what is yours, and give the enemy no quarter, for you will
receive none. Your Baroness fights alongside you, until the bitter end, unto victory or death!”
“Cut!” yelled the director.
The Chief Guardsman was waving at her from the aircar. It was time to go. Past time.
A gust of wind rattled the pine needles. A wrathful mushroom of smoke and fire was rising to the north, where Diederhoff used to be. Another volley of contrails pierced the rising cloud. Father’s builders had wrought well. But ultimately in vain. Soon, whether from lack of missiles or from enemy action, Diederhoff and Gotterburg and all the other fortresses would fall silent, one by one. But that was just the beginning. She was not Father, to fear the common Volk more than any external enemy.
The Junkers had their Treasures, and they had their well-armed retainers. But the Volkswehrarsenaal had been… eclectic.
No more. Two hundred and sixty million submachineguns. One hundred and twenty million rifles. Three hundred and eighty million ponchos. Six hundred million rockets. Eight billion mines. Twelve billion tons of explosives. Ammunition and EFP cones without count. And that was merely what she had issued.
Eight years she had prepared for this day. For eight years, the Junkers had grumbled about the unseemly austerity of her court, about her reforms, about her taxes, about her curbs on their ancient powers and privileges. For eight years, the adoration of the Volk had grown day by day. And now came the payoff. Any Junker who betrayed her, the burghers would hang by his guts.
She had expected that it would be the Empire or the Archduchy, or maybe the League. In the end, it was none of the above. A new enemy. A mighty empire heretofore unknown and invisible, distant and alien. But no matter. Let them come. The soil of Miranda would receive them by the millions. Her Ladyship the Baroness had prepared a comfortable little piece of this world, two meters long and half a meter deep, for each and every single one of them. Or perhaps a little smaller.
A bright blue flash lit up the summer sky. The director’s hovercameras fell dead to the ground and the azure deepness blossomed with downward-pointing contrails.
* 19 *
It was so good to be warm. She hadn’t been warm for a week, at least. Not during the day, and certainly not at night. It was December now, and San Angelo wasn’t the coast. It even snowed up here, once in a while. Even with the blanket, she’d spent every night in the woods shivering. But he was warm, and he was holding her. She could feel his body enfolding hers, radiating heat into her back. She was curled up into a little ball, feet on his thighs, head tucked under his chin. He had an arm around her.
There was only a thin layer of invisibility cloak between them. It was kind of soft and fuzzy, like her flannel blanket. He had sort of merged the cloaks together into a low, invisible, tent-like thing. It was barely big enough to fit the two of them, but it was warm and dry. The cloaks had even made a thin air mattress underneath.
You didn’t know how wonderful it was to be warm and fed and dry and comfy and not in pain, until all those things went away, thought Mirabelle. It was heaven, it really was. A tiny little bit of warm, snug heaven.
She’d thought that he’d get mad after she threw up the soup, but he didn’t. He’d said that it was really his fault. That he shouldn’t have given her so much food all at once. And he took care of her. Got her warm. Gave her more medicine, and some Kool Max to drink. Fed her more soup.
Instead of walking places, like he’d planned, they went down the creek. He did it just for her. So she wouldn’t have to walk.
It turned out that the invisibility cloaks could do rafts. Weird invisible rafts with people inside, and steering paddles that grew around your hands. You just needed a special program for it. Yosi had sat her in his lap, and steered for the both of them.
That was his name. Yosi. It sounded so weird, rolling off her tongue. Yo-si. She didn’t know why it was weird, it just was.
“Maybe it’s because I’ve never known a real human named Yosi,” thought Mirabelle, “Just computer simulacra made by language tutors. If someone had told me last month, that in two weeks my life would depend on a Leaguer named Yosi…”
He’d said that she was safe. Safe with him. It was hard to believe, but there it was.
Maybe he really didn’t want anything from her. Maybe he was just being kind. Could they really be kind?
She didn’t know anything about them. Not really. Except that they were crazy. And scary. Definitely scary. Not little kid scary story kind of scary. Real-world, grown-up scary.
She remembered her first Hebrew tutor. The one that mom had downloaded. From New Israel; made for girls in elementary school.
“Sarah walks. Sarah runs. Sarah plays with the ball. Sarah jumps rope. Sarah shoots. Sarah likes shooting. Sarah shoots with Rachel. Rachel is a good shot…”
Little cartoon girls just like her. Five or six, or seven at the most. With black hair and olive skin, like her friend Corazon. In ankle-length dark blue skirts and loose white blouses and tennis shoes with white socks. With guns. Real guns, not toys. Submachineguns, the kind you sometimes saw on the news, when things got really bad and the Federales got called in.
And sometimes the little cartoon girls didn’t have skirts and blouses and tennis shoes. Sometimes they had boots and knives at their belts, and they were dressed in little green coveralls. Leaguer Cloaks, with that weird green pattern that your eyes simply couldn’t quite focus on, that blended into everything at four paces when they stood still because your glance just slipped right off, even when the cloak wasn’t really on.
Did they all have those cloaks, even the little kids? They still worked. Nothing else worked anymore, but those cloaks worked. And the knife thingies. And the guns.
What, did they have a special Leaguer packing list for going on vacation? Passport, visa, wallet, designs for the hotel Tailor, invisibility cloak, gun, weird super-sharp knife thingy? So they’d always be ready to kill? Just slip the invisibility cloak on one morning and go walking around the city, all invisible, cutting off heads?
Mom said that they never went anywhere without their guns. On their worlds it was indecent, or illegal, or something. What sense did that make? Why would any normal person, living in a normal place, need to walk around with a loaded gun all the time? Guns were for cops and soldiers and private security guards. Ordinary, peaceful people didn’t have guns.
On the beach in San Cristobal, did they go into the water with the guns attached to their bathing suits? No, they had special storage lockers, she remembered mom talking about having to get some installed at the pool in the casino.
Dad had erased that Hebrew tutor immediately, the moment he’d seen it. He’d had a fight with mom over it. It was the first time she had ever seen her parents screaming at each other.
From then on, it was always the same argument, over and over again, for years on end. Wolves, dad would call them. Wolves and tigers and sharks. Psychotic killing machines, every last one of them. Nothing in common with normal people.
He would say that they’d bullied the government into granting them extraterritoriality in the Free Trade Zone around San Cristobal, and now in Angeles Province, too. He would say that nothing good would come of it, that it was only a matter of time before one of them flew off the handle and murdered a streetfull of people.
And who knew what else they did? What girl would resist one of them, the deadly beasts? Even their teenagers had daggers! How many girls in San Cristobal had those little wolflings already raped, that the authorities just covered up, for fear of their government?
And what if they decided that they wanted this world, now that so many of them had seen it? Who would stop them?
The Archduchy was three times their size, and the Empire even bigger. But they had crushed the Archduchy in battle in four and a half weeks, last time around. Crushed it like a bug.
They blew up three quarters of the Archduke’s ships, and then their raiders had leveled cities and smashed up space stations at random, as far as Christ’s Landing on Saint Mark. And if th
at wasn’t savagery enough, they’d deliberately collapsed the ecosystems on Saint Thomas and Saint Luke and used bioweapons to wipe out two thirds of the Archduchy’s food supply.
Almost a hundred million Omicronians died in the raids. The League wouldn’t take a peace until the Archduke had offered to cede Saint Timon, and establish a neutral zone, and pay a tribute so large it almost bankrupted his kingdom.
No one knew how many people had starved to death after the peace treaty was signed. The Archduchy wouldn’t release the numbers. Rumors said it might have been more than ten billion.
And the Empire barely broke even in its last war with them. The Leaguers had destroyed four Imperial capital ships for every one they’d lost, and took two wholly settled systems by storm before the Imperial Armed Forces pushed them back to square one at such a cost to themselves that the Imperials had lifted restrictions on childbirth among the Celestial Races, and gave special payments to encourage new pregnancies.
What if next time around, when they had their next shootout with the Empire, they just up and invaded Paradise? The government had even disbanded the Army, not that the Army would have done much good against the Leaguers’ Shock Corps anyway. What if they just grabbed this world, but let the Empire keep joint control of the jump points? Offer to split the tolls fifty-fifty with the Imperials. Would the Empire really fight to eject them from Paradise? The Empire only cared about the jump points!
The best thing to do, dad had said, was to keep away from them. Give them no reason to come here, and hope they would stay busy elsewhere. The girls certainly had no business dealing with those psychopaths, ever. Dad didn’t ever want to have to bury a daughter.