Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  And, honestly, at least one of the foreigners wasn’t so strange anymore, thought Mirabelle as she arranged wood in the improvised stove. At least not to her.

  Yosi was healing. The red streaks on his back were mostly gone, and the wounds were slowly closing.

  Perhaps it was the vendoo root, or perhaps his body had finally figured out how to fight off the invaders. Probably a bit of both, she thought. Either way, the alien bacteria were giving up the battle.

  With the fire started, Miri filled the spare pot with grain and pulled out her vibro.

  She was quite proud of the grain splitter preset she’d created for it. After a bit of experimentation using handfuls of wheat and pieces of soda can, not only had she gotten the vibro nanites to discriminate between grain and aluminum based on hardness and conductivity, but she had also forced them to act as a macro-scale power tool. The crisscross blades studding the business end of her grain splitter would extend to a maximum length of thirty centimeters, instantly cutting apart any wheat grains that got in the way, but leaving the bottom of the pot unscathed. Then they’d shrink back down to two centimeters again, and repeat the transformation cycle.

  She could process kilos and kilos of wheat this way without as much as breaking a sweat. Even Leo had been impressed. His own device for processing the grain had been to cut two pieces of granite into shape with his vibro, and make a hand mill.

  Not everything that she’d learned before the invasion, thought Miri, had turned out to be useless after all.

  Corazon had all but laughed at her when she’d announced that she was signing up to take geeky, un-girly micromachine programming. Even Mom had been surprised.

  And yet, of all things, it was micromachine programming that had turned out to be useful, all of a sudden. Who would have thought?

  And where was Corazon now?

  Dead, probably, thought Mirabelle. Everyone she’d ever known was probably dead. Starved to death, or murdered and processed into meat. Or eaten alive by giant alien cats, the way Patty had almost been. She’d be dead, too, if it hadn’t been for Yosi.

  “A prutah for your thoughts?” came suddenly from behind her, “Or should it be a peseta, given the circumstances?”

  Miri almost jumped through the roof of the cave. The hissing and crackling made by the splitting grain had masked the sounds of Yosi waking up.

  “God, Yosi,” she said as she turned, “you scared me half to death. And what are you doing half-naked? Get your top on before you freeze!”

  “I’m not cold,” shrugged her companion.

  “I don’t care if you’re cold or not!” snapped Mirabelle as she ordered his poncho to cover Yosi’s upper body, checking his body temperature log while she was at it.

  There was no downward trend, she noted with relief. A steady thirty-eight and a half for the past four hours, and a slow climb from about thirty-seven for two hours before that. This record she could live with, considering.

  “Who am I?” she continued dubiously, “Where are you?”

  There was no guarantee that he wasn’t hallucinating again. Reflexively, she checked to make sure that all the weapons were still sitting well out of Yosi’s reach, hidden behind the grain storage bin.

  The first time he’d fever-walked, he’d almost ended up shooting at ghost Omicronians in the shadows. Luckily, Leo had been there to disarm him. But the second time, the Spartan hadn’t been around, and Yosi had ended up almost breaking his knuckles as he tried to punch a stalagmite into submission, while the two terrified women in the cave huddled in a corner, fully stealthed up, and tried to figure out how to get past him and summon help without being killed. It had taken the serendipitous arrival of Shin Takawa and several minutes of intense wrestling to subdue the raging lunatic, and, for all his enormous strength and extensive training, Shin had ended up with a bloody nose in the process.

  “Stop it, Miri,” replied Yosi, “I’m not hallucinating.”

  “Where are we then?” answered Miri, unconvinced.

  Covertly she called up the straitjacket preset she’d arranged in Yosi’s poncho configuration library. It would take but a blink from her to activate it. As long as he didn’t unslave his poncho from hers and she managed to remain in contact with him, that is.

  “We’re on Paradise. In a cave up above the Angeleno Plateau, about two hundred and fifty kilometers northwest of San Angelo. It’s January of 3772 by the Universal Standard Calendar, my body is infected with native Paradisian bacteria and a bunch of overgrown alien housecats have taken over the planet. Satisfied?”

  Now that she was paying attention to it, Mirabelle could feel her companion’s clearheaded annoyance through the strange link they shared. The moment she became aware of it, he met her eyes. And the annoyance disappeared.

  It was two-way again, thought Miri. He could feel what she felt.

  “I’ve been pretty bad, huh?” he said, sighing. “I must have been, to scare the daylights out of you like this.”

  “Yeah,” answered Miri, relaxing, “You’ve been pretty bad.

  “Besides sending your homeostasis into tailspins, the vendoo extract gives you fever dreams. It was scary enough when you were too weak to do anything more than thrash about, but now you’re strong enough to walk, and sometimes you try to kill things.

  “Last week, you thought that the stalagmite over there was an Omicronian soldier. You tried to punch it into a parallel universe, and then, when Shin had finally wrestled you down, you had a seizure and went into cardiac arrest.”

  “Well, that explains why I feel like I’ve been worked over with rubber hoses and my weapons are nowhere to be found.

  “Is that why you’ve been impersonating Liza? Trying to get me to calm down?”

  “I haven’t...”

  At Yosi’s deadpan stare, the words died in Miri’s throat, unsaid.

  There was no sense in lying to him. It wouldn’t work, anyway.

  “I don’t want you to go to her,” she blurted. “I want you to stay right here with me. No matter what.”

  It was the truth. She wanted him to stay. Of her own accord, not just because Leo had promised to strangle her if he died. So why did she feel so nervous admitting it? Mirabelle suppressed a sudden urge to fidget, forcing herself to meet her companion’s strangely disconcerting gaze.

  “Well, she doesn’t want me to go to her either,” replied Yosi, “so you two are in agreement. Besides, I promised not to leave you. I’m a man of my word.”

  It was scary, the way his feelings jumped to her, thought Miri. She could almost feel an icy presence in the cave, as if the two of them weren’t alone here after all.

  Miri shivered. Surely she, too, did not believe in the reality of Yosi’s ghosts?

  “Who was she?” she asked by way of distraction.

  “Is she real, you mean?” answered Yosi.

  “I don’t know. If anyone I’ve ever known was clever enough to figure out a way from Over There back to the world of the living, it would be her.”

  This was possibly the oddest thing about him, thought Mirabelle. The way he thought about women. The last thing on the mind of any Paradisian boy she’d ever met was a girl’s intelligence. Did the Leaguers all think this way, or was it just him?

  Miri had never thought of herself as pretty. Now, after two hungry months of living in a cave, she had to look an absolute fright. Her hair felt like a giant rat’s nest. Bits kept escaping and sticking out in every direction despite all her efforts to keep it in a ponytail. She hadn’t had a real bath since November. And her shapeless poncho, with its environmentally-evolved static camouflage pattern, surely didn’t help. Even the Baroness of Miranda, thought Mirabelle, would have trouble looking good in a baggy, mottled, gaze-shedding mess of gray, green and dirty white. Although at least it helped to hide how damnably thin and dirty she was.

  But the way Yosi looked at her...

  Leo didn’t look that way at Patty, for all that he slept with her pretty much every night. An
d Patty was pretty in an exotic kind of way, even despite the dirt and the hunger. Like a Mirandan refugee character from some soap opera set during the Palmer Dictatorship.

  Was it because Patty played dumb so much?

  She wasn’t really dumb, thought Miri, and Leo could tell that she wasn’t. But she kept slipping into the pretense, as if she couldn’t shake the habit. Leo didn’t like it, but he never told her to cut it out, either...

  Mirabelle swallowed. Her mouth was dry all of a sudden. To give herself something to do, she slid over to the stove and started stirring the porridge. There were still bits of ice in it, but it wasn’t solid anymore.

  “After breakfast,” she said by way of changing the subject, “I need to wash out your wounds with iodine again. But no vendoo root today. The autodoc says that your heart needs rest.”

  “You’re good at this, you know that?” replied her companion.

  “Good at what?”

  “Caring for the sick. It’s a gift. And a rare gift, at that.”

  “I just follow the autodoc’s instructions,” blushed Miri.

  A squirm-inducing little trickle of warmth mixed with embarrassment welled up from the pit of her stomach. It made her want to giggle.

  “Patty couldn’t do it,” replied Yosi.

  “Why do you think Leo picked you to care for me, and not her? He’s very good at figuring out the best person for any task at hand. Runs in his family.

  “Here, I’ll stir the porridge,” he continued, “You go split more grain.”

  “No,” answered Miri.

  “I don’t want you any closer to the soot from this stove than you have to be. The less zirconium those Paradisian bacteria get, the sooner they’ll all die.”

  “Zirconium, huh?”

  Yosi raised an ironic eyebrow.

  Mirabelle didn’t know why, but she positively wanted to chortle with pride all of a sudden.

  She knew something he didn’t! She really did! And it was useful!

  “Don’t look at me like that!” said Miri slyly, grinning ear-to-ear despite herself.

  “The little nasties can survive inside the low-cadmium environment of your body because they don’t use cadmium at all.

  “Unlike almost all of their fellow Paradisian lifeforms, C. janusarii use a combination of titanium, zirconium and iron to help store their energy. They’ve even figured out how to release potassium hydroxide out of their energy storage pathway, just so they can use it to dissolve Terran tissue.

  “The vendoo extract hits them where it hurts by interfering with their uptake of potassium. It also messes up their zirconium cycle. They respond by trying to gobble up more potassium and zirconium when the extract concentrations drop.

  “I can’t do anything about the potassium. You need potassium. But, by golly, I can keep as much zirconium out of your system as possible! I’ve forced the ponchos to filter it out of your water, and I don’t let that stove ash anywhere near you. I’d even filter the zirconium out of your polywheat, if I could figure out how.”

  “You see,” remarked Yosi as he pulled over the grain pot, “and you were selling yourself short.”

  “It’s just basic chemistry,” smiled Miri.

  “The autodoc showed me the equations. Anyone could have taken it from there.”

  She found herself liking the happy little trickle welling up inside her at Yosi’s answering grin. And the way he was looking at her all of a sudden. But it was hard not to giggle as she stirred the porridge.

  * 44 *

  The man was old. He sat at his office desk in Government House, perusing yet another batch of reports.

  The Zin were moving a new battalion up into the hills around the city. Their liaison officer had handed over a list of haciendas they would use as bases, ones relatively untouched by the disorders that had followed the invasion. He wanted repairs made to most of them, and extra construction at a few.

  The conquerors liked their comforts. Haciendas had large workers’ barracks, easily converted to enlisted quarters, and equally large mansions, to house the officers. The human staff, if still present, could readily provide properly submissive and terrified servants and orderlies to serve the conquerors’ physical needs while stroking their swollen egos. Taking over haciendas beat putting up prefab huts, hands down.

  The man would encourage them in the practice. Every hacienda they took over would need some alterations. He would get reports.

  Once away from the flagpole at central headquarters, emplaced units would seek to improve their lot. As soon as they could, commanders would arrange for periodic delivery of livestock.

  The Zin liked their fresh meat. Most of them had never tasted the real thing. Now that they had a chance to get their paws on it, they couldn’t eat enough.

  Their morale and welfare fund would requisition livestock via the Sanchez government. Sanchez’s people would seek to confiscate animals from surviving hacendados. In theory, the officials were supposed to do this while minimizing the damage to the already-wrecked organic foods sector. In practice, they simply tried to maximize their kickbacks. The tangle of corruption would generate reams of official and back-channel correspondence, most of it subject to his monitoring.

  Once the animals were secured, the collaborators would have to ship them in accordance with the conquerors’ demands, generating yet more official forms and unofficial back-and-forth.

  He would get the numbers. And his precise share of the kickbacks. Every company, every platoon location would be revealed to him. With a little observation and some number-crunching, he would know the end strength of every Zin unit, down to the last soldier.

  The collaborationist government’s authority remained tenuous at best. There were security problems everywhere, especially outside the major cities. Random bandits, mostly, but also, it seemed, would-be guerrillas. While most League tourists caught on the planet when the war began had perished in the initial nuclear strikes and the chaos of the Collapse, the presence of numerous Leaguer survivors made the northern districts of Angeleno Province and the western-southwestern parts of San Cristobal Province particularly dangerous to any traveler lacking armored vehicles and high-density firepower.

  Zin bases, whether commandeered haciendas or not, were not self-sufficient. The little extras arranged for the conquerors would move with their regular supply convoys, for protection. He would receive schedules.

  The Zin would not allow the government to produce any police bots. So the government was recruiting more policemen. New police stations were being opened, more police stations than Paradise had ever had, even under the Palmer Regime. Every single building involved would, at the very least, need alterations. He would get the estimates, and the plans.

  The new policemen needed weapons. The Zin would transfer some; the government would make the rest. He would get reports.

  Numbers, numbers, numbers. Rifles, bedsheets, sheep, cases of wine. Trucks, uniforms, factories, armored cars. It all passed his desk. The reports were thorough. The reports were accurate. The terrifying Doctor Weinberger had made sure of that. The Ministry of Infrastructure was a model of efficiency in a government otherwise so mired in waste and corruption that it could barely function. Not since General Palmer’s heyday had information management been given so much detailed personal attention by a government minister. Not since the worst days of the Palmerist Terror had a minister wielded such absolute authority, or inspired such boundless dread.

  The numbers were his weapon. With the numbers he would fight his war.

  He was X. The ghost in the machine. He would fire no rifle. He would plant no bomb. Yet they would feel his blows. Of one thing he was certain. No one would ever know his name. Not until he wanted them to.

  X leaned back in his swivel chair, carefully studying the numbers that marched endlessly across the ergonomically-canted, privacy-screened surface of his oversized, executive-grade desk.

  It was a pity, he thought, that Ricardo Sanchez feared and mistrust
ed the Minister of Infrastructure in direct proportion to his government’s dependence upon said worthy’s considerable managerial skills. The ridiculously competent and astonishingly honest Yellow Rats stationed at the ministry gates routinely scanned everyone, even the minister himself, from net glasses down to underwear, in an effort to maintain information security. But, unlike most everyone else around him, X did not see such things as an obstacle. Electronic media were, as far as he was concerned, naught but a dangerous crutch to the true professional.

  On the office wall, beneath the obligatory portrait of President Sanchez, the clock ticked off silent seconds.

  * 45 *

  Isabella stood and watched the tiny blue stars flash and disappear in the moonless nighttime southern sky. Each flared but for a split second, then faded forever into the darkness. Poof! And gone. As if it had never existed at all. Like all the affairs of Man.

  Another League raid in the outer system. The fighting never really died down out there.

  The Zin had tried to end it, thought Isabella. Flush with the success of finally conquering Miranda’s jump points, they had massed almost a thousand capital ships, and set forth for Volantis. But the Ahmirrat’s mighty blow had landed upon thin air; a mailed fist trying to punch a swarm of hornets.

  They had come for a decisive pitched battle. But they got none of that. Their enemy would meet them gladly, again and again and again. But he simply refused to play by their rules.

  Swarms of mines and drones had driven their mighty armada to distraction. Vicious ambushes had stripped it, slowly but surely, of its light escort and reconnaissance units, leaving the alien monster to stagger about like a blind giant in the cold darkness. A series of sharp, indecisive, small-scale fleet actions had served only to drain the Zin main force of supplies and munitions that, once expended, simply could not be replenished, for no supply convoy full of helpless, lumbering freighters could possibly get past the League’s teeming myriad of fleet-footed frigates and corvettes.