Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Isabella took stock as she looked around.

  Comms and Sensors and Point Defense were gone. No replacements in evidence.

  The helmsman was gone also. So were the chief engineer and the detachment commander.

  The young lieutenant in command of the boat was still there, but his image flickered in and out.

  His pod’s connection to the boat’s internal network was probably unstable. Either that, or he was fading in and out of consciousness.

  There were still two ratings at the weapons console. Their faces hung slack with shock.

  Everyone was bleeding. Broken noses and scalp wounds for the ratings. Maybe a few missing teeth for the one on the right, to go with the split lip and the dark purple bruise that covered half his face, from ear to jaw. The lieutenant looked considerably worse than that.

  “We must launch Brunhilde, or it’s all for naught.”

  “Your Ladyship?” coughed one of the surviving ratings.

  She must have spoken out loud.

  “We must launch our weapon,” repeated Isabella, hauling herself out of her chair.

  Virtual reality or not, the movement felt sluggish. Her whole body hurt.

  Instinctively, she tried to wipe off the blood dripping from her nose. Her right arm answered with a dull stab of pain.

  Right. That arm was no good.

  The rating was staring at her, slack-jawed.

  Isabella swiped at her nose with her left palm.

  She was the sole rightful heir of Pieter van der Rijn, the first Baron of Miranda, and she’d be damned if she’d give up just because some flea-bitten, overgrown housecat had thrown a little kinetic at her.

  “You!” she snapped at the slack-jawed rating, “Can you steer?”

  “W…What?” he muttered.

  “Can you steer this boat?”

  “I… I qualified in Basic, I suppose…”

  “Good enough. Take helm.”

  “Now!” she roared as the rating blinked at her in incomprehension.

  The boy flickered out and rematerialized at the helmsman’s console.

  “There’s no power, Your Ladyship,” he reported.

  “I can fix that,” came hoarsely from the engineering console.

  The lieutenant was with her already, unstable connection be damned.

  From his gurgling breath, he was bleeding into his lungs. But he, at least, was doing his duty without prompting.

  Fishing village overseer’s son or not, noble blood told, thought Isabella. Commoners you had to prod. A Junker did his duty regardless, to the end, and needed no carrots or sticks to drive him along like a cow.

  “You!” turned Isabella to the other weapons rating, “Is Bay One intact and armed?”

  “Yes, Your Ladyship.”

  A quick glance at the detachment battle command and boat commander’s nav displays.

  Out of date. But their last known position was still short of the launch zone.

  “Lieutenant, fix our navigation display,” ordered Isabella as the engines sputtered to life.

  “I don’t care if you can’t fix the rest of Comms, but get me my position relative to the launch zone.”

  “Yes, Your Ladyship.”

  The gurgle was getting worse. The man’s pod automedic was clearly not coping.

  Isabella hoped that the lieutenant wouldn’t die or pass out before Brunhilde was launched. He could die later. She didn’t much care, though he seemed a capable enough young man. But not right now, please.

  The baroness sank into the boat captain’s chair as the nav display reset itself. There was no sign of their wingman.

  No matter. This attack couldn’t be repeated anyway. Not enough boats left.

  “AI, what heading do we need to get to the release zone?”

  “Heading three-one-one will bring this vessel to the special weapon release zone,” answered the tinny voice of the ship’s AI.

  “Helm, set heading three-one-one,” ordered Isabella, voice brimming with a steely confidence she did not at all feel, “All ahead flank.”

  “H-heading three-one-one, a-all ahead flank, aye,” stuttered the helmsman.

  The engines coughed and sputtered. Jerky acceleration pushed Isabella back into the captain’s chair. Pain stabbed dully into her with every jolt.

  “Smoothly, Nagel, smoothly,” coughed the lieutenant, “Hasn’t been that long since Basic for you. You can do it.”

  “Aye, sir,” responded the boy.

  He didn’t sound confident, not quite, but his betters had a plan and he had orders to carry out. This clearly steadied his nerves.

  “As it should,” thought the mistress of Miranda.

  The noble commanded. The commoner obeyed. That was the natural Way of the World.

  The helmsman’s accelerometer read two gee, slowly edging up toward three. Flank it was not, but it would have to do.

  The spreading cloud from the kinetic impact would give them some concealment, at least for a bit. The Zin up in orbit still had their radars, but at least in the visual and in the infrared they were blind. Hopefully that would be enough for a little while. Just for a few moments more.

  Hopefully.

  It wasn’t far now.

  The boat bounced off a couple of wavetops like a rock skipping off the surface of a lake, and finally lurched up into the air, engines whining in protest.

  There was a bone-jarring rattle as they broke Mach.

  The vibrations built and built, until it felt like the whole boat might fall apart at any moment.

  The helmsman eased off the throttle, and the boat steadied out.

  The airspeed indicator read Mach 1.22. Clearly, this was as fast as they could go.

  Barrakuda had charged an arm and a leg, thought the Baroness of Miranda. The bean counters had wanted to go with the bid from Xing, but she’d overruled them. Say what you will of the Leaguers, but they built the best war gear. They had no choice. An Imperial Sea Dragon wouldn’t even be in one piece at this point, much less breaking Mach.

  How hard had that kinetic hit? Ten kilotons? Twenty? Maybe more. Right next to the boat. Damn.

  You got what you paid for, you did.

  “Can you give us more speed, lieutenant?” asked Isabella.

  “No, Your Ladyship,” came the half-whisper, half-gurgle from the chief engineer’s console, “If we go any faster we’ll either burn out the port engine or lose the whole wing.”

  Isabella had no time to study the lieutenant’s medical readout, but the VR simulation of the man’s voice made that unnecessary anyhow. She could almost hear the life draining out of him.

  There was an insistent beeping from the sensor fusion console.

  “Air warning,” droned the AI, “Heading one-niner-five, altitude two-zero. Range one-five. Velocity Mach one-seven. Two bogies.”

  “Fuck!” coughed the lieutenant.

  There was a series of loud bangs as the bots raked them with their lasers.

  “Weapons!” barked Isabella.

  “I have no missiles!” cried the rating at the weapons console, “Lasers are gone!”

  “Port point defense gun still works, Soltz,” gurgled the lieutenant wetly.

  “Sensor cluster’s busted. No time to fix it. You’ll have to aim manually.

  “Don’t need to hit ‘em. Just make ‘em dodge. Keep ‘em from pecking us apart before we launch the weapon.”

  Soltz obediently materialized at the point defense console. The gun began to rattle away a moment later.

  “AI,” coughed the lieutenant, “auto-launch Bay One the moment we cross into the launch zone.”

  “Auto-launch Bay One weapon on entry into Special Weapon Launch Zone, aye,” replied the boat’s tinny voice.

  “I need a working laser,” said the mistress of Miranda, “Those bots cannot be permitted to bring the weapon down on launch.”

  A fresh series of watery gouts rose around the boat, accompanied by more bangs. The vessel staggered and wobbled as the he
lmsman tried desperately to avoid crashing back down into the ocean.

  The point defense gun chattered ineffectually in return.

  “Working on it,” answered the lieutenant haltingly.

  “You’ll have one shot, Soltz. Number Two Secondary.”

  “Aye, sir,” replied the rating at the point defense console.

  Part of the weapons console suddenly disappeared, re-materializing at Point Defense.

  “Not good enough,” snapped Isabella.

  “We only have enough power to trickle-charge the capacitor bank, Your Ladyship,” apologized the lieutenant, “All the rest is needed for the engines.”

  “Once the weapon is launched,” answered Isabella coldly, “we’ll have no further need of engines.”

  Where were they going to run, limping as they were at barely over Mach? If she was going to die anyway, she’d rather die fighting.

  “But we’ll be a sitting duck!” cried Nagel from the helmsman’s seat.

  “Then you’ll have a steady platform from which to aim,” drawled the baroness in a voice as sharp and steely as the blade of a sword.

  “Don’t miss, boy. The weapon must not be intercepted at launch.”

  “We will do our duty, Your Ladyship,” replied the lieutenant, his gurgling half-whisper suddenly full of the resolve that comes with accepting the certainty of imminent death.

  “As we have sworn,” he growled at the ratings in response to Nagel’s frightened sob.

  There were more bangs. This time, Isabella could actually see pieces of the boat falling off and hitting the water. It was a miracle they were still in the air.

  “Worth every pfennig,” she thought with grim amusement.

  If this boat was going to be her coffin, then it was a worthwhile coffin indeed.

  But she wasn’t done yet. Not yet. Not like this. That was not her destiny.

  The missile boat shuddered violently as a sleek black cylinder erupted from Bay One, almost instantly turning into a bright blue fireball as it cleared the hull. It sped off to the west so fast that even the VR-enhanced eye struggled to follow it. Almost simultaneously, the world blinked black for a moment as the Number Two Secondary Laser fired at the bots.

  “Special weapon launch successful,” droned the emotionless, tinny voice of the onboard AI.

  The boat shook in a semi-controlled glide as the engines cut off. The AI was flying now, trying to bring them down to a hard landing and not an all-out crash.

  The lasers fired again and again as the boat skipped off the wavetops.

  The lieutenant had outdone himself, thought Isabella. Even the primary battery was back on line, though only at half-power and quarter-cycle. Their battered reactor couldn’t provide power enough for anything more, even if the electric lines and capacitors were sound enough to cope with a full power load. Which they weren’t. Nor were the mirrors, for that matter. The kinetic had knocked everything out of alignment, even where it hadn’t simply smashed things outright. There was only so much a single repair bot could do to help the boat’s nanite-level self-healing mechanisms, and those mechanisms were themselves being pushed far beyond the limits of their design. Despite the best efforts of the lieutenant and the boat AI, each laser only had a single turret to work with. But there were almost three hundred and sixty degrees of coverage between the three of them.

  There were three bogies now. The enemy’s sole surviving manned fighter was back, and for a little while he’d had a third bot slaved to him as a wingman. They’d tried to chase Brunhilde for a moment, but Soltz had splashed the manned fighter’s slaved bot, and had forced the rest to dodge back down toward the wavetops. Now Brunhilde was going way too fast for them to catch up.

  As the boat skidded to a halt, geysers of foaming water rose all around them, so thick that they resembled the massed fountains of the Grand Cascade in front of the Summer Palace.

  With an enormous crash, the entire forward quarter of the boat broke free, the nose sticking up vertically amid the waves as it began to sink.

  There was a distant sound of rushing water. No simulation, that. Isabella could feel the vibration of it through the walls of her control pod.

  “Abandon ship,” commanded the queen of Miranda as she pulled the virtual lever that would release her pod from the ruined vessel.

  Eight kilometers beneath the waves, the dubious safety of the ocean’s muddy floor awaited the survivors.

  She’d done her part, thought Isabella as the inky blackness of the deep pressed against the walls of her capsule. The rest was up to Fate. And Brunhilde.

  * 41 *

  Yosi started dying toward dawn, around five or six in the morning.

  For three days after he’d taken a turn for the worse again, Miri had hoped that he’d pull through this time around, too, the way he’d done the other two times. But on the fourth day she began to truly fear the worst.

  He had lost consciousness the night before and, no matter what they tried, his fever kept spiking out of control. When his body temperature reached forty-three degrees despite the maximum safe dose of antipyretic, Yosi began to hallucinate.

  He laughed and cried, shivering and thrashing about, calling to friends and enemies long dead in a mixture of oddly-accented Hebrew and Spartan, and sometimes in French, and even in Standard, and in strange languages Miri couldn’t even begin to recognize, much less understand. He was reliving over, it seemed, his entire life. Eloquent speech interspersed with incoherent babble as Yosi’s heart beat madly against his ribs, so fast that, Miri thought, it would surely explode at any moment. And then, when she had thought that things couldn’t get any scarier, his fever broke.

  As Yosi’s temperature plunged out of control and his heart rate spiraled downward, he relaxed and smiled, muttering softly about the warm clouds that would carry him home. There were tears dripping slowly from the corners of his closed eyes, but to Mirabelle they didn’t seem to be tears of sadness.

  Yosi was happy. He knew that he was dying, and he was happy.

  He kept talking, softly and lovingly, to somebody named Liza; telling her that he was sorry and that he was coming, and that they’d be together soon.

  It seemed to Miri that it was not a one-sided conversation. It seemed to her as if she could only hear one side of it here, in the world of the living; but there, on the other side of that great curtain, where Yosi now had considerably more than one foot, or even one leg, Liza was answering back. And it was at that point that she couldn’t take it anymore.

  Dropping Yosi’s hand, she burst into tears, and ran out of the cave.

  Outside it was cold, and wet, and rainy. The gray, watery dawn had broken out at last and the leaden clouds up in the wintry sky looked like they couldn’t quite make up their minds whether today it would be rain, slush, outright snow, or some combination of all of the above.

  Miri ran pell-mell down to the creek.

  The icy crust that lined the banks broke under her knees as she crashed downward onto the mud, bawling completely out of control.

  Looking up at the slightly-brighter part of the sky where, perhaps, the sun might be hiding behind the funereal clouds, she tried to recall something; some remnant, some shard of the right thing to say that might have lodged somehow in the brain of little Mirabelle Legraf from the three or four times in her life when Mom had, solely for the sake of propriety, dragged the unwilling family en masse to church.

  The antiquated, half-dead tongue of liturgy clattered woodenly about inside her head, so different from normal Paradisian that she’d always needed to repeat things to herself, slowly, a few times over, in order to puzzle out the meaning. None of it had stuck, not really.

  Clumsily crossing herself, she muttered haltingly, through half-stifled sobs:

  “Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia, el Señor es contigo...”

  And burst into tears again as she realized that she didn’t remember the rest of the words.

  “Mercy!” she pleaded as she wept.r />
  “Mercy, Holy Mother! Please have mercy! Intercede. Spare him! Don’t let him die! Not now, not like this! Please! Please!”

  Icy, yellowed grass crunched under heavy feet behind her. Leo’s hand descended upon her shoulder.

  “You have to go back,” said the Spartan.

  “No,” she sobbed, “I can’t. I can’t watch him die.”

  “Then you must make him live.”

  “I can’t!” cried Miri.

  “Nothing is working anymore,” she sniffled helplessly.

  “He is dying. And he is happy. He is going to his Liza. He is already talking to her. He wants to go.”

  “Wants to go? You stupid ninny!” exploded Leo, hauling her up out of the mud with a single jerk of his massive arm and swinging her about by the scruff of her neck, like a wayward puppy.

  “Why do you think we’ve been treating him with homebrew witch potions for a month and a half?

  “We’ve got access to an escape pod autodoctor capable of directly synthesizing damned near every pharmaceutical known to man!

  “If he had some kind of staphylococcus, streptococcus, enterococcus, pseudomonas, candida, saccaromyces, any normal Terran pathogen, I don’t care what, even if it had caused acute bacteremia, viremia or fungemia, we would have knocked it flat in twenty-four hours, tops!

  “But he’s got wounds infected with mutant Crystallosporarum janusarii! The only standard prescribed treatment for infection by Crystallosporarae is direct attack by phage nanites! And phage nanites are one thing we’re plumb out of!

  “Just Yosi’s dumb luck, it really is!

  “There is only one Allfather-cursed genus of native Paradisian life able to pose any danger whatsoever to Terran mammals. And among this genus, there is only one thrice-accursed species capable of causing anything more serious than a mild skin rash in humans. So, of course, he just happens to get that one damned pseudobacterium into his damned wounds!

  “But you know what? If it wasn’t for you, he’d still be all right!

  “If he’d just let you die instead of rescuing you and nursing you back to health and carrying you around on his back for nigh-on three Allfather-damned weeks, he’d have hoofed it right back up to me at the double-quick the moment he realized that his wounds were infected and the antibiotics weren’t working, and the single box of phage nanites we’d packed would have been enough!