Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Krista Jarvinen, an Inactive Reserve Civil Defense Corps supply clerk in her mid-forties, and her ten-year-old son Luukas, had never in their lives been outside their native duchy. Were it not for the passable Suomi Yosi had picked up on Leo’s frequent trips to visit his relatives up in the North, he wouldn’t have been able to comprehend a single word those two said.

  The family had reacted to Yosi and Miri with guarded wariness bordering on outright hostility, but a few words in their native tongue from their liege lord’s great-nephew and an offer of fresh bread had set them grinning in relief.

  The war had caught the Jarvinens in a cheap hostel on the outskirts of San Angelo, the only place they could afford on the combined dream vacation savings of a muravik keeper who hired on as a pine plantation robotics operator during harvest seasons, and a dairy maid who sold traditional handmade quilts on the side. True to his northern backwoodsman’s instincts, Juho Jarvinen had scooped up his kinfolk and headed straight for the hills at the first invasion news bulletin.

  The lot of them had been close-lipped about the rest, and Yosi didn’t pry too deeply. Clearly, the pair of high-quality hunting lasers in their possession hadn’t come with them from Duchy Ahonen along with their cheap pistols and the bedraggled quilt that doubled as Luukas’ day-to-day wrap; nor were they camp-made, like the family’s fur blankets and deerskin clothes.

  Whatever the Jarvinens had survived the winter on, it hadn’t been the algae paste leavened with pine nuts and muravik caterpillars that had formed the backbone of their diet back home. They sure as heck hadn’t planted any potatoes or found any cows to milk, either. And Juho certainly hadn’t gotten the fine collection of knife scars that decorated his face and arms from a confrontation with an overly-aggressive deer.

  Marco and Helena, a young couple whose female half talked even less than the Jarvinens, were the other set of new recruits in Yosi’s embryonic army.

  On Invasion Day, Marco Cortes had been a brand new forester six months out of community college, the most junior member of the staff at the Ministry of the Ecology biosphere management station just outside his native Matorralia.

  While the other three men in the break room were still standing around the suddenly-dead view cube, debating what to do, Marco went straight to the basement. Grabbing the megawatt laser normally used to dispose of rabid leopards, crazed horn’s lizards, and similar friendly, even-tempered creatures, he’d stuffed a few boxes of power cartridges into his pockets, jumped into the station’s old army surplus air jeep, and taken off for town.

  Arriving at Matorralia’s sole high school, the young forester had dragged his estranged seventeen-year-old ex-girlfriend Helena Menendez out of the building by her hair, in the process shooting dead two of the girl’s male classmates. A gym teacher who’d also tried to intervene had ended up helping Marco to demonstrate that the gun’s sturdy buttstock could be used to cave in a man’s face with a single blow.

  Throwing the screaming girl into the jeep alongside his bloodied weapon, Marco had taken off again, heading for the depths of the Paso Chungara National Park at the maximum speed the jeep’s tired old engines could manage.

  When the nuclear shockwave from Matorralia had slammed the jeep down into the tree line, Helena Menendez-Cortes permanently quit contradicting her new husband. Or daring to as much as take a stray breath without his permission, for that matter.

  On the flip side, thought Yosi, Helena’s man did genuinely seem to love her.

  The two had been hiding in one of the garages Leo, Shin and Patty had investigated.

  When Marco had taken his elephant gun off safe, the laser had let out a tiny burst of radio-spectrum static.

  Luckily for Marco and Helena, Leo was not the type to chuck a grenade based solely upon a warning from the Zin helmet he wore with his poncho. Even more fortunately for the two Paradisians, Patty had been on hand to translate. Neither the man nor his wife spoke a single word of any foreign language.

  With the new additions, the Free Paradise Army had its first squad. Not much to start with, but Yosi had cobbled together a little something to even up the odds.

  The tiny microjump drive on Leclerk’s pod was designed for only a couple of dozen jumps, just enough to get itself away from the main zone of combat and, maybe, into the vicinity of some place to hide. Under normal circumstances, no one would think of that drive as a weapon. But these weren’t normal circumstances.

  It took the pod AI quite some time to figure out what was being asked of it and how to accomplish it, but it had provided approximate instructions. The pod’s emergency tool kit even had the right tools for the job.

  Yosi had ripped the two hundred megajoule laser initiator out of the igniter housing and adjusted the governor to produce a peak discharge power of fifty megajoules.

  Since the fusion coil now had to deal with only a quarter of the original power requirement, much of its original shielding was rendered superfluous.

  The elaborate cooling system with its own heat sink surrounded by a maze of pipes, coolant pumps and control electronics could, in an environment where convection worked, be replaced by a simple water-filled cooling jacket.

  The sophisticated control electronics designed to compute the precise ignition pulse sequence and power for the next jump were also unnecessary in the laser’s new incarnation.

  The shielding materials around the igniter housing would have been nice to keep, but they were too heavy.

  The tripod Yoseph had made himself.

  The resultant monster, in its disassembled form, weighed two hundred kilos. It took four men to carry. Or one well-muscled heavyworlder. Two more men had to lug along the eighty liters of water that would fill the cooling jacket and heat exchanger. Anyone firing the damned thing would show up on sensor screens for kilometers around. In a real firefight, those puny eighty liters of water would boil off within seconds. And it was a laser, with all that that implied when going up against modern ablative armor.

  But the monster’s pulse train packed oomph enough that none of this mattered. It hit like an autocannon. There was no recoil. After a few test shots to get poncho and body armor AIs used to the system, only a truly talented professional klutz could possibly manage to miss the typical military vehicle at any reasonable range. Menachem would’ve been proud.

  There was a road about a hundred meters downhill, across a little ravine with a stream on the bottom. On the other side of the road rose a nice, steep, bramble-covered slope. The angle was almost forty-five degrees, not something you could climb quickly even unencumbered, much less in armor.

  Every week, regular as clockwork, a convoy came down that road. A platoon of mechanized infantry in four IFVs would escort a big eight-wheeled military logistical truck. Most of the time, a bunch of civilian trucks that belonged to the collaborationist government would tag along with the Zin. Usually it would be four or five prison trucks filled with humans and a couple-three trucks piled with boxes. Sometimes there was even a truckfull of sheep, of all things. Every once in a while, there would be a police armored car.

  Each prison truck had a barbed wire cage over the bed and two guards with rifles but no body armor or camo sitting on an improvised roof platform on top of the cab, watching the cargo to prevent escapes. Or at least pretending to do so in between smoking and drinking liquor.

  The lead two trucks would normally have human drivers. The rest looked like they were slaved to follow the leader.

  The IFVs were the typical thing one would expect. Four-man crew. Gunner and driver side-by-side down in the hull, commander behind them, up in the turret. Troop compartment in back. That’s where the bot operator sat. The things had twin missile launchers for long-range combat and an autocannon with a coaxial machinegun for close-range work. There was a point defense system with four lasers and four swivel guns evenly spaced around the turret. A heavy machinegun overhead weapons station was mounted at the commander’s hatch.

  The commanders would generally ride
head-and-shoulders out of the turret. Apparently, the enemy liked the fresh spring air. Or maybe they had a penchant for anachronism.

  Each IFV held between eight and twelve infantry. The numbers seemed to vary week to week, with no particular pattern. In a fight, they would probably come out over the rear ramp, but there were clamshell hatches in the roof of the troop compartment, too. Often these were left open for ventilation, tied down flat to the outside, so they wouldn’t flop around. Theoretically, this also made it possible that some of the infantry would stand up and shoot from their seats instead of bothering to exit the vehicle. Yosi hoped that they would be that stupid. It would make things much easier.

  There were also six-legged infantry support bots with heavy machineguns and missile launchers. These rode on three of the four IFVs, one to a side, latched to the sloping armor. But they were never powered up. Sometimes they would even be covered by storage cowlings, as if the vehicles were sitting in some motor pool and not traveling through potentially hostile territory.

  The platoon commander’s vehicle was always third in the order of march. Both of the armed UAVs it carried instead of the infantry bots always remained in their launch cradles.

  Try as they could, and they had tried very hard, neither Yosi nor Leo could ever detect any kind of aerial escort overhead the convoy, not even with the aid of the big passive sky scan package from Leclerk’s pod.

  They couldn’t possibly risk active scans, so in theory something might be hiding out there somewhere, but Yoseph was willing to bet that nothing was. In fact, he thought with grim amusement, he was about to bet his life.

  In a word, the bastards were sloppy. Sloppy, complacent and ill-disciplined. Hopefully ill-trained, too. This was very good. If they weren’t, he’d stand no chance of pulling this off.

  Yosi could see the convoy forming now, in the one-every-four-seconds snapshots being sent by the first of the two little robotic hummingbirds he’d taken from the Zin commandos all the way back in the fall.

  The prison trucks were pulling out of the labor camp, splattering mud and dirty water as they joined the pair of cargo trucks that had sat on the side of the road for the better part of the past hour. The Zin logistical truck had unloaded all the usual supplies, and was stowing its robotic arm. As soon as the thing rolled through the gate to join the IFVs waiting outside, the collaborationist trucks would fall in behind it, and the move would be on.

  The other UAV, like the first perched stealthily on a convenient tree branch within line of sight of the temporary antenna that snaked from Yosi’s poncho and up into the canopy overhead, showed no unusual activity whatsoever. The troops at the next Zin firebase down the road were simply going about another ordinary, boring day, waiting for their weekly scheduled logistical package.

  Yoseph flipped the power switch. He felt a faint vibration as the coil powered up. Now he would know, he thought with gallows humor, if he had left enough shielding around the thing or not.

  * 49 *

  The Zin lieutenant had a feeling. He couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was, but something felt wrong.

  They were about midway between firebases One and Eight. If ambush were to come here, he thought, help would take the longest to arrive.

  Of course, he reassured himself, there could be no ambush. Nothing within two hundred kilometers could take out an armored vehicle, except for the weapons carried by his platoon.

  Where the hell would the natives get antitank rockets, anyway? Most of them didn’t even have hunting lasers.

  Of course, a little voice of doubt told him, there were always mines. The locals could improvise mines, at least in theory. His vehicles had sensors to detect those, but still…

  Perhaps he should give the order to stop and boot the bots. Maybe even launch a UAV. Send a bot patrol forward with some dismounts and clear the bushes on both sides of the choke point.

  But if nothing happened, the men would grumble about the extra work and his stupid paranoia behind his back. And the company commander would yell at him about the convoy being late. The other lieutenants would make fun of him again. Mr. Schoolhouse Akhmed, the paranoid nerd who couldn’t just relax and figure out that this place was prime cut duty far away from the real war.

  Besides, it was just a feeling. How many times had he driven past these same bushes, the same hillside and ravine, the same big old metal tree?

  Yosi aimed at the last IFV in the convoy, silently counting to himself. Marco was supposed to start the ambush by arming the mine. A modified motion detector would set it off precisely when the lead vehicle crossed the point of aim. Four hundred and sixty kilos of blasting gelatin packed into a custom-made plascrete tube, behind a sheet of copper alloy bent into a ninety degree cone. They had had to scavenge copper scrap, melt it, cast it and press it themselves. There just wasn’t any single piece of copper sheet to be found that was big enough.

  Right now, the contraption sat in the bushes at the base of a truly enormous shelleaf trunk. The only way to hide the damned thing had been to carefully peel off the bark, hollow out a cavity a meter in diameter in the ancient tree, place the bomb inside and glue the outermost layer of foil-like bark back in place with the tree’s own sticky sap. After it launched the copper jet, the bomb would topple the trunk onto the road, hopefully on top of the disabled lead vehicle. In theory, this should stop the convoy.

  Then it would be his turn.

  They had some improvised anti-armor rockets, but Yosi didn’t put much stock in them. He trusted that the shaped charges and rocket motors would work just fine. He’d personally made every single one. The two test shots flew straight and gave decent penetration into rock face.

  But there was no way the IFVs’ point defense systems would not shoot them down. He couldn’t give them the necessary ablative coatings, or make them maneuver like the real thing would, or go fast enough. And nobody, no matter how stupid and complacent, would actually travel down a strange road in occupied country with the active protection system turned off.

  Realistically, the laser was it. Well, almost it. There were also the other bombs and, if things got truly desperate, the two satchel charges.

  If more than one vehicle succeeded in unloading its troops, the game would turn chancy. If a single vehicle survived the first thirty seconds, they were all dead. If even two or three of the six infantry bots booted and deployed before the vehicles all died, he wouldn’t give anyone on the whole team more than a ten percent chance of survival, including himself. The ambush would be an insane gamble, if it weren’t for the payoff.

  “And after all, there are four and a half adult Citizens here,” thought Yosi, “A match for at least forty-five Outsiders.”

  Staff sergeant Kharrbass had been nodding off in the commander’s hatch as usual.

  Back in the day, when a young corporal Kharrbass had proudly worn the crimson epaulet tabs of the Guards Armored Corps, he would not have even dreamt of sleeping on duty. But that was then, before the stupid bet about stealing the colonel’s aircar.

  Twenty-five years later, it didn’t really matter anymore. He would never get to a higher rank. His file assured it. He would never serve in a real unit again. His file assured that, too.

  So now he was stuck in yet another piece of crap outfit, with yet another piece of crap lieutenant who didn’t even have the backbone to stand up to the average private, much less enforce the proper discipline. This one, at least, knew what right theoretically looked like. That was more than could be said of most so-called officers in this so-called armored division.

  But hey, who cared? It’s not like the lieutenant would ever grow the balls to enforce it. If he did, the other so-called NCOs would complain and the captain would come down on the lieutenant for “screwing with morale.” And if the officers didn’t give a crap, why should staff sergeants?

  Nobody in the Slack Forty-Fourth was under any delusions about ever being assigned a real mission, anyway. They were a damned dumping ground. The most dangerous thi
ng on this current assignment was probably getting bad diarrhea from eating a particularly dirty human. So why bother booting the bots, or staying awake? What was he, special?

  Yosi shifted minutely, tracking the trail IFV. Almost there now…

  Three.

  Two.

  One…

  Dammit was there something wrong?

  BOOM!

  The lead IFV disappeared in a cloud of smoke and a spew of metal fragments. The ancient shelleaf that had held the mine smashed down on top of the vehicle, pinning the wrecked machine like a bug and completely blocking the road.

  Yosi thumbed the trigger as the mine went off.

  The last IFV in the convoy shuddered like a living thing, shrouded in a cloud of ablative vapor and metal-ceramic dust. The armor failed within half a second. A column of fire shot straight up through the commander’s hatch as everything inside, rubber, plastic and flesh alike, erupted into flame.

  The trucks that had followed the lead IFV were braking desperately. Their large, foam-filled tires skidded on the muddy, indifferently-graveled surface. A fusillade of small arms fire washed over the cabs and guard platforms, killing most of the occupants before they even had time to realize what was happening. The Zin logistical truck was still moving at a good twenty kilometers an hour when it struck the shelleaf trunk propped up on the carcass of the forward IFV. The lead government cargo truck crashed into it from behind. The second cargo truck skidded off the road and into the left-side ditch.

  The platoon commander’s IFV had its turret traversed left. The turret spun right with the inhumanly fast, precise motion that bespoke an AI executing an auto-pointing function in response to threat.

  The IFV’s moronic driver was swinging the hull the other way, angling to pass the fellow platoon member in front of him and go hide behind the truck pileup.

  The commander’s faceplate jerked right. The machinegun slaved to it pointed, it seemed, straight at Yosi’s laser.

  Terror ran down Yoseph’s spine like an electric shock. But the alien slumped suddenly in the hatch, the victim of a flechette, whether stray or well-aimed, Yosi would never know.