Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Like a fine sword, David Alon needed no adornment. Just a leathery hide permanently tanned dark brown by the rays of three dozen different suns, and the reputation that went with it.

  When she had requested the man by name as replacement for the late Colonel Skolnik, Admiral Ben-Aharon had objected that, while Lieutenant Colonel David Alon was certainly a capable soldier, his newly-awarded rank was not sufficient to appoint him as the Special Forces Advisor to Miranda.

  But Her Ladyship had insisted. And Her Ladyship always got what she insisted upon.

  “You of course remember my wife, Colonel Doctor Sarah Alon.”

  Another well-deserved unscheduled promotion, thought Isabella. Good for her.

  “Your Ladyship,” bowed the doctor.

  It was strange to see Sarah Alon in tan instead of khaki, mused the mistress of Miranda, even though intellectually she’d expected it. Perhaps it was the Civil Defense Corps uniform itself, with the weird pants designed to pass for an ankle-length skirt at first glance. But the female Colonel Alon was, theoretically, a member of New Israel’s Civil Defense Corps. And the Jews were funny about the distinction between male and female dress, even in military uniforms.

  Something else was odd about those two. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  Ah, yes, the male Alon. His pupils weren’t dilated as far as they should be. And the man’s wife was trying to hide an unusual mixture of curiosity and feminine suspicion. They must have done something to their pheromone receptors.

  “You poor thing,” smiled Isabella mentally as she returned Sarah Alon’s bow with a gracious nod, “do you really think that there is nothing more to me than pheromones?

  “At any rate, it is not your man’s amorous faculties that interest me, but his faculties of slaughter and mayhem. And your own faculties of so ably facilitating the things that he does.”

  Which brought her to the third Leaguer in the wardroom. The cadaverously pale, thin, nervous-looking fellow well past middle age who, even in the ill-fitting olive green uniform of an IDF major, couldn’t part with his favorite pair of extended-capacity net goggles.

  The mere suggestion of inviting this man to Miranda had driven her Master of Treasures to tearful apoplexy. But here, too, Her Ladyship had insisted. Even the Master of Treasures had been forced to admit between sobs that there was, really, no other way.

  “And may I present Doctor Avram Livnat, lately the Ben-Eliezer Professor of Applied Golden Age Studies at the Technion,” continued David Alon.

  “Willkommen, Herr Doktor Professor,” smiled Isabella, “I trust that you will find your visit to our humble abode worthy of the unfortunate discomforts attendant to leaving the Ivory Tower.”

  “Your Ladyship!” gushed the professor, balding brow instantly beaded with nervous sweat, “I would brave the fires of Gehinnom itself!

  “Er...” he corrected himself at David Alon’s annoyed glance, “I mean that I and my team look forward to benefiting from the expertise of your specialists and to working with your remarkable collection of Golden Age artifacts, Your Ladyship.”

  Isabella’s poncho projected a notification icon into her peripheral vision. The fleet commander wished to address his queen from his perch up on the bridge.

  “All cargo has been secured, Your Ladyship,” came the man’s voice at Isabella’s affirmative eyeblink. “We await your pleasure.”

  “Very good, Commodore,” replied the mistress of Miranda.

  “The fleet will submerge. Set course for Zuidroch.

  “We fear that there is pressing business to attend to,” she continued to her guests, rising for a regal exit.

  “The orderly will show you to your quarters. Please make yourselves comfortable. Tomorrow morning, we will have much to discuss.”

  An ever-so-slight whisper of motion trembled through the floor as the flowing hull reconfigured itself, and the missile boat slipped beneath the waves.

  * 46 *

  The Zin officer flipped up his faceplate and sniffed the air suspiciously.

  He didn’t like this planet. The occupation was going too well. Things were too easy. The forest-covered mountains that surrounded the city of San Angelo could hide an army of guerrillas. Where were they? Scuttlebutt was, the humans could be a terrifying enemy.

  He had spoken to some of the wounded on leave in the city. They had been with Task Force Kragg when it had hit the world called Haven. Their story was not pretty. The task force had been slaughtered almost to a man, with naught to show for it whatsoever. Presumed superiority of over three to one across the board at the point of attack had meant not a thing.

  Never mind that the whole planet was supposedly one giant anthill of tunnels, bunkers and arms caches, booby trapped to a fare-thee-well and with a meme dispenser hidden behind every hill. The way they’d described it, the place in itself was a species of hell they couldn’t have imagined in their worst nightmares.

  Cold so bad that the very air you exhaled would turn to little flakes of snow and fall down at your feet. Glaciers and acid seas and ice-coated rocks and bubbling volcanic cones full of molten lava. Rain as sour as lemon juice, and sometimes even worse than that, bad enough to burn when it hit your fur. Earthquakes breaking like summer storms. Explosive fungi full of foul-smelling gas erupting suddenly underfoot like landmines, sending bits of gravel flying like bullets, blowing off limbs and damaging light vehicles. Giant, foul-tempered millipedes with acid-tipped stingers that would pierce anything short of an armored boot and eat golfball-sized holes in living flesh. Tiny little bugs full of poison that would make you see visions and speak in tongues before you died, foaming at the mouth. Whole armies of vicious, hungry multilegged vermin that would swarm all over you the moment you opened a ration packet. Entire platoons swallowed in seconds by sinkholes, vehicles and all, or buried alive by sudden falls of pumice and ash, or burned up by pyroclastic flows. Soldiers parboiled by geysers of boiling water and scalding mud that erupted without warning from under apparently solid ice…

  And the humans who lived on that nightmare world were apparently more fierce in battle than a legion of demons and djinn led by Shaitan Himself. On Haven even the human cubs and females had fought. To the death, without surrender.

  Why was this place different? He’d think that the wounded had lied, but why would they? They had belonged to the Eighth Armored, the Ahmirr’s Own. Yet Haven had shocked them. There wasn’t even any of the Guards Armored Corps customary bluster. Just fear of going back.

  The lieutenant looked back at the rest of his convoy. The humans he was guarding were nothing like the Havenites, it seemed. They huddled in the open cargo beds of the trucks sandwiched between the four IFVs of his platoon. Gaunt, miserable, defeated. Just another load of fresh meat heading for the firebase.

  He ran this road every week with a cargo of humans. The human government periodically rounded some up, to serve as grunt labor on some construction project or another. They were held in the cattle pens at the firebase for a while, then shipped somewhere else. Whenever the captain allowed, especially if the supply sergeant couldn’t arrange for some sheep, a few would be taken out of the pens and eaten to break the monotony of army rations.

  It was beginning to rain again. The humans were going to get wet. They stank when they were wet. Really, humans were disgusting creatures, weak and ugly. Perhaps the wounded had exaggerated. The things the lieutenant guarded had no more fight in them than any other form of cattle.

  * 47 *

  X smiled to himself.

  There had been another escape from the work gangs at Pascadero. This time a few hundred prisoners had managed to get away. Most of them would be rounded up again, of course, but a few would not. They would bring back tales of horrid monsters eating human beings alive, evil collaborationist guards torturing and raping workers for entertainment, humans held in pens like cattle. Discontent would spread.

  There were few Zin on the planet as yet and fear of them outweighed hatred in the m
inds of most. That would change. Soon the isolated Leaguers and bandits up in the hills would be joined by new recruits. Soon the Zin would have to land more troops to keep the lid on. More troops would bring more discontent and more recruits for the resistance.

  Already there had been attacks. Only a few, small-scale and isolated, but a few more each week.

  The work gangs were his creation. He had suggested them. On the surface, they were the perfect solution to the labor shortage created by the Zin refusal to allow bots – a permanent pool of unskilled labor always on call for whatever needed doing.

  But guarding the work gangs was a boring job far away from most sources of comfort and entertainment. Police unit commanders would assign their deadbeats to the guard details to get them out from underfoot. In a police force composed mostly of former criminals, that meant the worst kind of scum got to be the labor gang guards.

  The Zin, of course, were even worse than the Yellow Rats. At least Sanchez’s thugs didn’t eat their prisoners.

  The gangs kept moving around periodically. This was easily justified. After all, the ministry had dozens of small projects going everywhere. During movement, escapes were more likely. More importantly, guerrillas were certain, eventually, to hit the convoys, liberating dozens, or even hundreds, of prisoners at a time. One had only to wait.

  Weapons were the clinch. Some were out there already and a few more would be taken from Zin and police. The police weapons would require modifications to make them usable, of course, but with some skill and the right tools it was not all that difficult.

  But stealing and capturing weapons one or two at a time was no solution. If there was to be a guerrilla movement worthy of note, a steady, high-volume source of weaponry for the guerrillas had to be assured. And on that front, too, there were grounds for cautious optimism.

  As of last week, the conquerors were suddenly running around all over the place, taking over buildings and demanding construction labor. Pretty much everything still unclaimed over in the casino district had been cordoned off overnight. It looked like they were turning the whole place into a giant hospital. All six terminals at Juan Delameda were being converted also, and still there weren’t enough beds to suit Prince Khharrq. Zin soldiers were putting up medical tents over by the spaceport. Hundreds of medical tents. A whole city. And that was just in San Angelo.

  Something, somewhere, wasn’t going well for the Ahmirrat. The who and the where didn’t really matter, thought X. The only thing that mattered was that, perhaps, human scout probes were once again floating out there in the darkness, watching and waiting.

  He needed attacks. Big ones. The kind to make whole platoons and companies of Zin disappear. Official radio could then broadcast news of glorious victories by the government forces. Letting the silent watchers out there know that there was a resistance; that it needed help.

  Help would come, maybe. If only something were to happen out there, somewhere. Something big. Something worth noting.

  X sat at his desk, waiting for the big report. The one that would change everything.

  * 48 *

  Yosi lay in the bushes and waited.

  It had taken him weeks to set up the infrastructure he would need. Thankfully, he thought, this wasn’t his first rodeo. Second time around was always easier.

  Food was the tricky part. The bunker silo full of polywheat that Leo and the gang had discovered did not satisfy him. It was an intolerable single point of failure, liable to be discovered and plundered or spoiled at any moment. Dispersing the grain would take time and manpower, both of which he didn’t have. And even dispersed, the food caches became mappable nodes, too vulnerable to traffic analysis and change detection to be trusted to supply an army of half-trained Outsiders who barely knew how to use a poncho.

  No, he would do things the right way, by the book. The dispersed grain caches would remain in emergency reserve, their locations known only to a select few. His army would depend on the Staff of Life that had fed a majority of mankind for a millennium and a half.

  Baked, boiled or fried, raw algae paste wasn’t gourmet fare. But it would do.

  Getting the materials was easy. This part of Paradise had a lot of open-air farming. Before the invasion, the organic food sector had been a pillar of the economy, a source of hard currency second only to tug and transit fees.

  Open-air farming on Paradise meant huge haciendas, with lands stretching into the hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of square kilometers. Agricultural enterprise on such scales required lots of heavy machinery, tractors and harvesters and whatnot, almost all of it fusion-powered.

  Those machines caught out in the open by the EMP barrage were dead, of course. The sensitive electronics that monitored and controlled the fusion reaction in their power coils had failed immediately. The magnetic bottles had collapsed. The plasma had escaped, melting the coils to slag.

  But the machines which had been sitting in underground garages were in far better shape. The ones the attack had caught inside signal-isolating maintenance rooms, or inside metal field sheds, were often in perfect working order.

  Waste-processing units were even easier. There were always portable ones on a Paradisian hacienda, often stored together with the tractors.

  A hacienda’s surplus processed waste was a marketable commodity, as much a part of the hacendado’s business as his crops and animals. And not even the richest hacendado would dare risk incurring the brutal fines for improper disposal of unprocessed waste routinely handed out by Paradise’s Ministry of the Ecology in response to even the most trifling of violations.

  If the waste processor’s electronics were messed up, it wasn’t such a big deal. The thing was a relatively simple beast. All it did was expose waste to superheated steam under high pressure, breaking it up into basic chemical components. With a little fiddling, an external computer could run one at about fifty to seventy percent of its rated efficiency.

  Raw plastic wasn’t a problem. One only had to find a hacienda where construction had been going on before the invasion. It wasn’t like he needed all that much.

  Filters and spores, too, could be found. A hacendado always had some sitting around. The farmhands, after all, ate algae paste. What they grew was too valuable to waste it on them.

  Putting it all together, that had been the hard part.

  It had taken two weeks to rip a fusion coil out of an old tractor and move it up to the cave. The thing was heavy as all hell. Another week to bring up a waste processor. Three days to get the thing to run properly, and about a week to hook it up to an underground aquifer, so that no watcher in the sky would notice sudden changes in the creek outside. A day to form up a tank. Six days to wire it and fill it up with distilled water. He had seeded the tank last week.

  The headquarters of the Free Paradise Army was ready to feed at least two hundred men. All that remained was the small matter of getting those men.

  While searching for all he needed to set up his headquarters, Yosi had done his utmost to keep a low profile.

  As best he could tell, somewhere between every third and every fourth Paradisian had died over the course of the past winter. Most of the time, the dying had not been quick, or easy. Those who had perished in the initial nuclear strikes of Invasion Day had surely come to be envied by millions.

  Starvation had killed the majority. Epidemics had rounded off the numbers. Cannibalism and banditry had added icing to the cake.

  Now, with the coming of spring and the exhaustion of food reserves, things seemed to have only gotten worse.

  Of the four surviving hacendados in the immediate area, three appeared content to cower inside their improvised castles and count the blessings inherent in having a functional algae tank and a tall, thick wall to hide behind. The fourth, one Señor Diaz, once upon a time a major in General Palmer’s secret police, was busy using government-provided guns to set himself up as something akin to a Mirandan junker.

  The two nearest sizable towns were firml
y under government control. That is, if one could apply the term “government” to the clutch of swaggering thugs that populated the police stations-cum-town halls, thought Yosi.

  On the plus side, the collaborationist mayors seemed to be far less energetic than Señor Diaz. Their yellow-shirted hoodlums were seldom seen more than a couple-three kilometers outside town limits, and never away from major roads.

  Alien presence seemed rarer still.

  They had a pair of firebases within three hours’ drive of this spot. Small affairs with a couple of platoons of mechanized infantry and two howitzers each. Both were located on seized haciendas. One of these had a government labor camp designed, it seemed, to function as some kind of centralized transshipment point for slave laborers. The few patrols Yosi had observed outside the firebases so far, seemed to have more in common with recreational hunting expeditions than with any form of military activity.

  In the space left uncontrolled by the hacendados, the government and the Zin, amid the burnt-out ruins, the blooming trees and the scattered bones, roved vicious nomadic gangs of starving cannibal bandits.

  In short, thought Yosi, if this immediate area was in any way representative of what was going on in the lowlands, the words “bloody lawless chaos” didn’t even begin to describe the way things functioned nowadays on Paradise. Or, more precisely, failed to function. Certainly the few radio broadcasts he’d been able to pick up so far didn’t fill him with the belief that the northernmost district of Angeles Province was in any way unique.

  Nonetheless, even while trying to keep a low profile and avoid the worst of the mess, one couldn’t help but pick up a few strays.

  The Jarvinens were a Spartan family from Duchy Ahonen.

  A bit over three decades ago, Juho Jarvinen had served as a missileer on a corvette. His annual two-week call-up as a Category Three reservist still gave him a chance to practice his rusty Zemelsky.