Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  For the hundredth time Isabella thanked whatever deities there might be for the hand they had dealt her when they had made this world.

  The Golden Age Terraformer had found a rocky-cored dirty snowball devoid of any life, orbiting its parent star just on the edge of the extended liquid water zone.

  A series of antimatter charges reignited the geothermal cycle and spun up the newly re-energized core. Suddenly-active volcanoes belched forth lava and greenhouse gases, melting the icy crust that had imprisoned the rock beneath. A rain of comets from the outer system added more methane, ammonia and carbon dioxide, along with a massive amount of water vapor. Plasma charges pummeled the atmosphere, making oxygen and basic nutrients. A sprinkling of seed probes brought life. Microbial at first, and then ever more complex in series until, less than a hundred years later, the frozen, lifeless snowball was gone, replaced by a precious blue marble spinning in the silent darkness; a precious blue marble teeming with glorious, wonderful, priceless life.

  A stable biosphere. Perhaps the most stable of all the new biospheres created by the great terraforming push that had preceded the Götterdämmerungskrieg. A vast blue ocean, in some places more than twenty-five kilometers deep, dotted here and there with sprinklings of volcanic islands. And a single continent running north to south. A slim, snake-like emerald crescent with a sharp, mountainous spine.

  When men came to this world at last, they came not in the orderly caravan envisioned by the Terraformer’s creators, but in swarm after chaotic swarm of desperate refugees fleeing the fires of a war vast beyond all imagining. A war that had torn whole worlds asunder and ignited stars by the dozen. A war in which there could never have been any victors, but a war that had started anyway, and then had continued, despite all reason, long past the point of any sane return.

  In that fiery maelstrom of ruin, the half-finished, half-terraformed, uninhabited worlds of what was now Human Space had beckoned to all who could reach them. And none had beckoned like Miranda.

  Miranda was not Haven, a desolate backwater sitting in a highly eccentric, retrograde orbit that left it alternately frozen solid and baked to a crisp, churned by tidal forces at perihelion until half the planet was blanketed by drifts of pumice and volcanic ash, its surface populated by naught more sophisticated than seasonal swarms of multilegged vermin and fields of hardy lichens clinging stubbornly to rocks amid the acid rain. Miranda was not New Israel, a burning desert where water boiled at the equator and a cold polar summer meant thirty-five degrees in the shade by noon. Miranda was not flare-scarred Xing, nor tidally locked Bretogne, nor meteor-pocked New Helena. Miranda was not Sparta, with its demented climate born of an unpredictable, metastable orbit. Miranda was not Alperson’s World, filled with the deadly playthings of perverse genius. Miranda was not Paradise, with its tricky, half-toxic, half-alien ecology, nor Novaya Zemlya, with its deadly nine-hundred-kilometer-per-hour seasonal winds. Miranda was not frozen Icehole, nor radioactive Dove, nor any of the dozens of other worlds left sitting at the distant edges of what had then been the human universe; all of them left uninhabited by the Ancients primarily because each had remained, despite the terraforming, in some unique way unsuited to civilized life.

  Miranda was without flaw. And with its wondrous jump point array, formed by a pair of co-orbiting gas giants, there was no almanac that had lacked a General Solution for it, nor, it seemed, a ship so battered or so low on jump fuel that it couldn’t make it.

  The refugees came, and came, and came. From every corner of settled space. From every side, whether ostensibly combatant or ostensibly neutral at the outset. From every world in the human universe. An endless rain of the wounded and the broken and the desperate. More people than this world could ever possibly support, no matter how fine and robust its vaunted ecosystem might have been.

  And so they had fought.

  The victors would eat the losers. Literally eat them, more often than not, not even bothering with the nicety of recycling corpses through waste processors and algae tanks.

  Those who landed first built strongholds, and those who landed later stormed them, to win, or else die to a man of starvation and disease. And to defend in turn what they had won, against those who came later still.

  And on, and on, and on, for over a century and a half.

  Until, finally, the strongest emerged from the ashes, to reign among the rubble of a shattered world. They who had planned in advance, long before the Götterdämmerungskrieg had began. They who had waited in safety among the Faerie, while all their enemies fought each other to exhaustion. They who had landed together, and signed the Compact, and unleashed their Treasures. And brought order to a world in chaos.

  They had divided this world they had conquered, those first High Junkers. Divided it among themselves, according to their power. And they had set the strongest among them as Baron over themselves, to reign and to judge between them, and to defend this world with them, against all comers. But not to dominate them.

  And so, on Miranda, there were no paved highways. Amid the hills and forests of the sole continent there rose scattered, largely self-sufficient villages and towns, connected to the outside world primarily by air and by sea. The stereotypical Mirandan highway, if such a lofty term could be applied, consisted of a rutted, potholed, unimproved dirt track scarcely wider than a goat trail. Sometimes, and a rare thing it was indeed, a particularly important “highway” might, here and there, in its roughest spots, be indifferently graveled. But never more than that, for every town and every clutch of tiny villages was jealously guarded by the local High Junker in his fortified stronghold, and the needs of the feudal lord’s defense had ever outweighed the needs of his subjects’ commerce.

  Whatever forces the Zin landed were at the mercy of the geography. Until the great fortresses of Miranda were finally subdued, resupply could only be sporadic and logistical lines could only run, precariously and inefficiently, from intermittently-shelled bridgehead to the front line, cross-country or on hastily bulldozed dirt tracks.

  In the villages and woods, the Volkswehr and the Junkers’ men at arms, backed by carefully positioned Army detachments, made stand after stand, falling back onto pre-positioned supply caches, sucking the enemy again and again into precisely the kind of war he didn’t want to fight. Not the swift battle of maneuver, where his superior mechanized firepower and orbital superiority would give him the advantage, but the vicious, slow grind of door-to-door, tree-to-tree struggle of infantry versus infantry. Grappling over corpse-laced, blood-spattered rubble, amid clouds of nanites and chemicals, friendlies intermixed with hostiles beyond all hope of coherent orbital targeting, or even reliable close air support. A god-awful bloody mess of a ponderous meat grinder, punctuated here and there by a flurry of vicious, snapping raids that together almost, but never quite, amounted to a large-scale Mirandan counterattack. The Zin were not having an easy time of it.

  Yes, for every soldier the Zin lost, the Mirandans lost four Volunteers and a man-at-arms, but the Army and the Planetary Response Force were surviving relatively intact so far.

  The Zin would, eventually, prevail. But the question of what, exactly, it would cost to subdue this world must already be rising in their commander’s mind. After today, thought Isabella, that question would rise much more sharply. And it would likely be pondered by a replacement commander.

  In this second week of ground fighting, the Zin invasion force had come to resemble a two-headed snake almost sixteen hundred kilometers long, stretched along the inner surface of the great crescent that was Miranda’s sole continent, with its middle centered just outside the partially-melted ruins of what had once been Eindhoven.

  Despite its best efforts, the northern head of the snake was being well and truly sucked into the black hole of Zeelundburg, where the Raucherfjellen marched down to meet the Rondebucht, and the narrow corridor between the smoking volcanic cones that formed the continent’s spine and the plunging granite cliffs that marked its edge was crammed
chock-full of high-rise buildings.

  The snake’s southern head poked tentatively around the swampy outskirts of New Amsterdam, where the geography didn’t look much more promising.

  In between, forming the body of the serpent, ran the embankment of the Zeelundburg – Eindhoven – New Amsterdam Baronial Maglev Line, the closest thing to a decent highway on the planet. Along the embankment, crammed between the pine-covered mountain slopes and the sea, squatted a string of Zin garrisons and the flak batteries they guarded, product of the enemy’s effort to keep the two snakeheads supplied, despite the constant missile attacks and raids by Miranda’s defenders.

  There were also the capsule drops from orbit directly to the spearheads, of course. But that manner of resupply had its limits. Just yesterday, the anti-space batteries of Sassnitz had bagged their twelfth Zin destroyer during an emergency capsule drop.

  Now that the Zin commando divisions had finally managed to overwhelm the garrison of Diederhoff and the few surviving defenders of Eindhoven were reduced to a handful of man-portable antiaircraft missiles and a pair of bot-mounted mobile lasers, the enemy was landing cargo shuttles on an improvised field just west of the ruined city and running most of his supplies along the maglev line.

  Vulnerable though it looked on a map, the Zin behemoth was, in reality, extremely dangerous. With over three million well-trained troops, able to call upon the full resources of a massive war fleet in orbit, unquestionably in control of the air and able to temporarily suppress Mirandan air defenses at will in any given local sector, the Zin invasion force was, though badly bloodied, clearly on its way to victory.

  With such a beast, thought Isabella, one did not merely butt heads. No, if one were to fell the creature, it would be with guile and courage and not an inconsiderable degree of luck. Not the boxing match that so many of her more foolish officers desired, but a corrida would slay the alien monster.

  Father had loved the corrida. He had been obsessed with all things Paradisian. The spicy and the exotic and, of course, the cruel and the bloody, to thrill his addled senses. He had even imported toreadors from Paradise, and himself had practiced as a picador.

  Oh yes he did…

  Isabella rubbed her shoulders to banish the sudden chill and the twinges that came with it.

  He did indeed practice.

  It was to that obsession with Paradise, thought Isabella, that she owed her strikingly un-Mirandan olive skin and black hair.

  The toreadors had gone with the Mad Baron. But his daughter still understood the corrida.

  First came the darts of the picadors, to enrage and weaken the bull.

  “Green Rocket! Green Rocket! Green Rocket!” came the signal, and the board of the situation display lit up with hundreds of emerald dots.

  Just on time. Precisely on time, thought Isabella.

  Zeelundburg, New Amsterdam, Almere, Dronten, Apeldoom and the entire chain of the Raucherfjellen, all were suddenly swarming with little green fireflies. They flashed but for a moment and were again gone, each replaced by a tiny green-bordered diamond. Quickly, the diamonds melted and consolidated, turning chaos into an orderly array of brigades. An entire army group. Almost every piece of artillery on Miranda. Each battery had reported only once, and then immediately displaced after launch.

  It was not really necessary to show the raw data and reduce it to visible order at her level of command. The fusion process, especially the fusion process for friendly forces, ran much faster than the human mind could perceive, even in VR. But, mused the Baroness of Miranda, it made for a pretty light show. Propaganda needed pretty light shows. This virtual one, carefully edited to remove the pieces that must remain secret, would supplement what the painstakingly positioned combat camera detachments were even now capturing in the real world.

  In the moonless sky above the battlefield, hypersonic cruise missiles raced in their thousands, each hugging the ground, maneuvering with a speed and violence that would reduce any human pilot to raspberry-colored goop as its guiding AI relentlessly sought a suitable target within its assigned zone.

  And again the battle command display lit up, this time with swarms of red dots and pink shadows. Zin flak batteries sweeping the sky with their sensors, firing their lasers again and again in an effort to blot the wildly maneuvering missiles out of the sky.

  As the data fusion process of the battle command system again transformed chaos into order for the benefit of future VR viewers, there came the second signal.

  “Red Rocket! Red Rocket! Red Rocket!”

  The matador’s cape. To draw the bull’s attention away from the sword.

  Once again the situation display lit up. More green fireflies, more red flashes. But now also raised banners, one after another, streaming from the two great cities and from the small towns in between, and among the pine-covered hills at the foot of the mountains.

  Little triangular field-gray guidons edged with friendly green for the Volkswehr detachments. Big, square green banners bearing House crests for the Junkers and their men-at-arms. Here and there, the rifle-green shield bearing the golden wreath and crown and crossed swords of the Army. And, in the midst of it all, the massed mailed-fist-and-lightning-bolt flags of the Planetary Response Force. A deadly spear aimed from the mountains straight at Eindhoven, threatening to cut the Zin snake in half.

  The biggest counterattack of the campaign to date. Millions of men massed in secret, using the maze of tunnels and bunkers and secret passages that riddled Miranda. Some went back six hundred years, to the very first crash-landings. And every Baron, Junker and chartered smallholder since had added to them. Even the indentured serfs and poachers up in the hills had their secret fortified lairs and covered ways, the better to settle their own disputes and the better to hide from their masters. Or even to kill their masters, when the opportunity arose.

  Not a century passed on Miranda without a major serf insurrection. Not a single Baron or Baroness had ever managed to fully subdue the unruly mountain Volk. And now, with the Volkswehr offering the status of a free burgher to any who enlisted, coupled with Her Ladyship’s promise of knighthood for valor, even the humblest of the peasant hideouts were being pressed into service.

  As she watched the display, Isabella knew, with a certainty born of generational experience, that some of the boldest attacks of the night were being made neither by the massed armor of the Response Force, nor by the Army’s elite commando detachments, nor by her Junkers’ proud household troops, but by small groups of Volunteers erupting suddenly from underfoot, swarming over the surprised enemy with grenades flying and submachineguns blazing.

  Many a skilled poacher, wily peasant and bloodthirsty bandit strove tonight to grasp the brass ring she had dangled before them. Most would die trying. But a few would succeed. And though the Old Nobility would raise its noses at the upstarts, mused Isabella, this was how Junkers were made. The fittest survived, and thus the fittest came to rule. Indeed, the strongest deserved to rule, and the weakest deserved to perish. That was the one immutable law of Miranda.

  It was time for some new blood among the Low Junker anyway. This war would leave plenty of empty boots to fill.

  And now the bull charged the swirling cape. After all, was this not the great pitched battle the Zin had craved? Was this not what they had prayed for all along?

  You could see their exuberance as they rose to the bait. The battle command display veritably bloomed with it. Warships charging recklessly past the Jump Barrier, heedless of her missiles and lasers in their eagerness to answer excited calls from the planet below; aircraft scrambling en masse; overexcited enemy artillery batteries staying in place for two, sometimes even three or four volleys at a time…

  Within half an hour, damned near every Zin aircraft in theater was up in the air. Soon, every major unit was reporting heavy contact, as Zin operational reserves swung into action to parry the Mirandan attack.

  The situation display pulsed with reports. Mirandan flak batteries struggl
ing to disrupt the enemy’s air attacks. Her few remaining atmospheric fighters making their desperate sallies. Vicious clashes of artillery, sharp and sudden as thunderstorms in summer, counterbattery fire flashing back and forth as fast as computers could calculate solutions. The vast, confused armored maelstrom around Eindhoven.

  The Zin were taking casualties. Heavy casualties. But they were already winning.

  The mistress of Miranda crossed her hands casually as she leaned over the battle command display. Hidden by her left palm, the fingers of her right hand paled as she grasped the armrest of her chair. Her eyes were frozen on the slowly ticking battle damage estimates, and the creeping line that represented local dawn across the planet.

  Though there was no sound, in her mind the line of dawn seemed to tick as it crawled slowly along. The creeping, ticking doom. Clockwork death, coming inexorably forward to claim everything she had left in the world. Everything she cared about.

  Beneath the icy mask of cold confidence that transfixed her face, Isabella’s tongue itched with the desire to give the final orders.

  She could not afford such losses. Not if this went on for much longer. Not if the slowly creeping dawn caught her precious armor out in the open.

  She couldn’t afford it.

  Could not.

  Could not!

  “Dammit!” fumed the Baroness in the silent privacy of her mind, fighting the urge to slam her fist against the armrest, “Dammit, you bastards, you arrogant, furry schweinekatzen!”

  And then it happened. Just as Otto had said it would.

  “Capsules, Your Ladyship,” grinned the detachment commander as he pointed out the obvious for the benefit of future viewers, “Capsules and assault shuttles. They have committed their strategic reserve to Eindhoven.”

  Along the upper edge of the battle command display, where a glowing orange line marked the unbreachable boundary of Einsteinian space, little red icons shaped like the assault transports they represented danced about unpredictably, scattering swarms of tiny red cones and rectangles. A fresh volley of missiles rose to meet them from the planet below. The laser batteries opened up a split-second later.