by Moshe Ben-Or
But instead you squandered nine million troops, elite forces you should have saved for the Haven Campaign. You spilled needless blood and you wasted vital time. And you did this solely because a mere female had insulted you, because a female had dared to defeat you, had dared to possess weapons and means that you yourself did not possess. You flew into a rage, and you ordered another invasion, and another, and you would have ordered a fourth, also, had the third not succeeded.
“And at the Battle of the Normann Belt, when a swarm of hastily-armed civilian in-system craft had charged suddenly out of the belters’ habitats and plastered your advance guard with rockets at point-blank range, you again lost your cool. Defeated infidel cattle are supposed to abjectly beg for your mercy, not fight on to the last, regardless of circumstances. Racing shells, passenger pinnaces and civilian shuttles are supposed to flee and hide, not charge enemy warships in an awe-inspiring display of suicidal mass heroism.
“You did not know at the time that the mess of freighters you were trying to chase down was filled not with troops or war matériel, but with the wives and children of the very volunteers who had thrown away their lives in that forlorn charge. You did not know that their suicidal courage was utterly explicable, even to be expected, in light of the thing they were protecting. All this you would learn later.
“At the time, you simply couldn’t understand it. The madness of the racers and taxi drivers whose flimsy vessels had disintegrated from the launch shock of their own ordnance. The insanity of the cargo shuttle and passenger pinnace pilots who had tried to push their ungainly tubs into torch attacks after the last rocket had been expended. The lunacy of the traffic control technicians who had stayed to the last in their utterly defenseless, static direction centers, broadcasting targeting data in the clear over civilian navigation channels to supplement the utterly inadequate sensors and onboard computers of what, after all, were nothing but taxis and buses and delivery trucks and sports racers hastily fitted with rocket pods and bare-bones targeting software.
“They had surprised you, they had shown courage unbecoming their station, and they had inflicted embarrassing losses to boot. And the blood had rushed to your head and you had roared madly for vengeance. You gave up your momentum. You squandered your initiative. Instead of sensibly leaving a subsidiary task force to mop up the system and using your main force to pursue your retreating opponent, you spent nigh-on the next forty-eight hours turning every tin can and beach ball in the Normann Belt into a cloud of floating debris, and smashing every underwater dome you could find on Bretogne to splinters. You gave us those forty-eight hours gratis, to come to our senses, recover our balance and concentrate our forces. Later you would pay for them tenfold, in blood and in time.
“And at Haven, too, you overreacted. When the Rabbinate had unleashed its Charioteers, you again saw an enemy who dared to surprise you. An infidel who dared to be braver than you, for all your boasting about your love of death for the sake of your god’s holy mission. And you stupidly threw your entire light combatant screen at the enemy in front of you, where it was promptly tied up in a close-range fight, and a surprise second task force of suicide attackers came out of nowhere and got right among your capital ships.
“Never mind the thirteen-hundred-odd light combatants you pointlessly pissed away. You lost nigh-on a quarter of your main force for no damned reason. Hundreds of capital ships ripped apart by three-hundred-megaton Havenite warheads, hundreds of thousands of well-trained spacemen lost, simply because you saw red, and charged like a bull at a matador’s cape.”
Admiral Freeman set aside his emptied plate. A wave of his hand brought forth a holographic star map. The intricate array of tiny star-globes and shaded jump radii rotated and zoomed on command, obediently populating with notes and icons. Arrows blossomed and simulated task forces moved at the admiral’s will. And, at the center of it all, a single, red-shaded system began to glow.
The plan was audacious, even for Shimon. The risk was enormous, but then so was the reward. There was little time, and much work remained to be done. All in complete secrecy, right here on Delta Triangulae, without even a whisper of a rumor leaking out into the Fleet, where the enemy’s electronic eavesdroppers might somehow pick it up.
So much work, indeed, that the Admiral of the Fleet, the Chief of Operations and Plans and the Chief of Intelligence had all been forced to temporarily hand oversight of routine daily matters over to deputies and plunge wholly into overseeing the development of this one operation. Dozens of officers had been shunted over from regular duties, and an entire separate detachment of Fleet Intelligence was wholly consumed with gathering the necessary data.
As a young cadet, Reginald Freeman had amused himself by hustling chess. His playing style had become infamous at the Academy, a combination of thorough planning and complexity that bordered on the sleight of hand, utterly opaque and incomprehensible until suddenly the trap closed upon his opponent, and piece after piece after piece fell all at once.
Today, as an admiral, he was playing chess once again. Except that the pieces were real ships and real men, and it wasn’t a case of brandy but the fate of a nation that hung in the balance. He, and the men of the General Staff, had to turn into complex reality the outrageously bold idea their Chief had thrown out, casually, as he was wont to do, last week, over breakfast.
And they would succeed, thought Admiral Freeman. They would succeed because they, together, made a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. Because it would take Shimon's near-magical intuition, and Eli's quick brilliance, and his own obsessive eye for detail, and the thankless toil of dozens upon dozens of nameless staff officers cranking out twenty-hour days in order to perfectly polish every little detail of a plan that would certainly not survive its first contact with the enemy, but that nonetheless had to be as flawless as anything man-made could possibly be. They would succeed because here, in this headquarters, no one man planned alone. What one man’s eye had missed, another man’s eye would catch. They were the League Combined General Staff, ever-victorious since its founding, undefeated for two centuries. They were the Dream Team, and they would win.
“We shall make you angry, Sayf al-Masrikh,” thought the League's Chief of Operations and Plans with a grin that would do a grizzly bear proud. “We shall make you very angry, and your rage shall serve you ill indeed. And then you shall pay for what you did to us.
“I may not sit besieged in a half-ruined fortress with a handful of cannon and a few hundred men-at-arms, but my ten-times-great grandfather’s answer to his mighty enemy still fits the day to a T.
“You may stand poised to smash my nation. We may be so desperate for crew that we are inducting sixteen-year-old girls into the Navy and calling up retirees to replace our losses. But still I give you, Sayf al-Masrikh, and your Ahmirr, the same answer my ancestor, Duke Horatio Freeman, gave to the usurper Ivan Petrenko from the walls of the Citadel at Akotiki:
“Your knights will yet eat their own horses, asshole. I will yet dance upon your grave.
“General Plan Violet will be perfect. And it will seal your fate.
“Butler!” exclaimed Duke Freeman imperiously as he plunged once again into the intricate ballet of tasks and schedules, “Helligoland coffee from my personal stash! Extra strong!”
* * *
Yosi woke in darkness. His face was wet. A woman was kissing him.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Miri, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
The poncho shelter was soundproof, but the pre-dawn darkness made you want to whisper. It seemed a shame to disturb the cool, fragrant stillness, somehow. The shelter roots were sunk deep into the soil. It cooled itself so well that it seemed almost as if it wasn’t there at all. As if it was just them, and the stars, and the gentle rustle of leaves in the night breeze. A pleasant camping trip in the Dourados, far away from any rumor of war.
“It’s all right,” he whispered back. “It’s almost dawn, anyway. Have to get up and s
ay the Shema, before I go check the sentries.”
“It’s Shabbat. Leo checks them this morning. We can stay here a little longer.”
So it was, thought Yosi. He’d forgotten. He must have disturbed her sleep again. Damned nightmares.
Strange, he remembered no nightmare. She made the nightmares go away. They were getting rarer and rarer. She wasn’t just a girl. She was a living talisman. A magic creature from some fairy tale. Her mere presence healed him.
“I had a weird dream,” said Miri. “There was a house. My house, in Torremolinos, at first. It looked like my house. All my furniture was there. My mother was. My sister. But then the floor tiles turned a dark, deep blue, like an alien sea, and the whitewash on the walls had a different tint. Blue tile grew out from the white, all around me, like the house was coming to life. It made strange patterns. Thatchwork and trees and vines and stars of David...
“The sunlight was orange, all of a sudden. A deep, reddish-orange. There was a huge alien sun on the horizon. And outside was sand. A vast, orange desert.
“I saw my mother, far away, walking across the dunes. I ran toward her, but then she turned, and it wasn’t my mother at all. It was a strange woman in foreign clothes. Young. Dark, like you, with black hair. She was pregnant. And there was music. A strange, mournful music. Just one single note, rising and falling. A bassoon, I think, or maybe a cello… It made me cry. It was so terribly sad.
“I woke up, and you were crying, too, in your sleep...”
“The sand sings, sometimes, back Home,” answered Yosi. “I saw your mother, and your house, too. And then it all turned into Home.”
“I thought that Sparta was your home now,” whispered Miri.
“No. Sparta can’t be Home. I tried to pretend that it was, but it can’t be. Home is Efrat. It’s a tiny little speck on the map in the Southern Hemisphere, halfway up to the equator. Population nine hundred or so, and about twice that many camel goats and chickens. I was only eight when I left, and I’ve never been back since, but it’s still Home.
“The sand sings, in the summer. And in autumn the dew comes. The trickle at the bottom of the wadi turns into a river. Needlegrass and goatgrass shoot up along the banks. And dune grass, further out. And wildflowers. A riot of color, like a carpet. The cacti sprout flowers, too. Purple, orange, red, yellow, white. It’s beautiful, like you wouldn’t believe.
“The thorn trees put out new shoots. The acacias grow leaves. They flower gold and silver, like some fairy king’s treasure chest.
“The sand algae blooms and the desert turns green, overnight. A brilliant, deep green, like emeralds. Everywhere, as far as the eye can see. We harvest the algae from the sand, for food and for animal feed. Even if you have no machines at all, you can just drop the sand into water, and the algae floats up, to be skimmed off the top.
“The sand cows come up from the pole. They go north with the dew. Huge, shaggy, lumbering things, with massive flapping ears, like elephants. On a quiet night, you can hear them huffing and flapping those ears a kilometer away. That’s how they cool themselves without using up water. They can go without water for months. Camel goats can go for about six months without drinking, if they get lots of succulent thorns and agave and cacti and whatnot, but the sand cows got them beat.
“The cows eat the algae. They have this huge mustache, like a giant comb. They push it through the sand as they walk. The algae sticks to it, but the sand doesn’t. Then, every once in a while, they stop and suck their mustache clean.
“We don’t eat them. The meat isn’t kosher. But we herd them anyway. They’re hugely important to the ecosystem. They fertilize the sand. It’s funny to watch, kind of. They’re such weird beasts. They don’t poop and pee. They fart powder. Fine, like dust. They walk through, and the sand is orange behind them. But the next week it’s greener than ever, and the farmers come out with their harvesters.
“The sand crocs wake up when the dew comes. They hibernate through the summer. The females lay eggs, and they hatch right away. The hatchlings fight. The strong ones eat the weak ones, until there are only a few tough crocklets left for the cow croc to feed. Young bull crocs go walkabout, looking for a female to breed with and a patch of sand to claim as their own.
“They’re dangerous as heck, the sand crocs are. They hide in the sand where there’s lots of algae and thorns and whatnot, or in tall grass near water, and try to snatch whatever comes along. Iguanas and chameleons, mostly, and the occasional wild camel goat. The wildcats are mostly smart enough to figure out where the crocs are. The dingoes, foxes and jackals can smell ‘em. But the lizards and the camel goats are stupid, so they get eaten.
“Sand crocs can’t take a full-grown sand cow, but they can snatch the calves. They’d kill a lot of calves, if we didn’t shoot so many crocs. As far as they’re concerned, anything smaller than a full-grown cow is fair game. The young ones that don’t know any better bite jeeps and agricultural bots all the time. If it moves, they’ll bite it to see how it tastes. Their jaws are tough, they do lots of damage. They try to snatch people and pets, too. Someone gets bit every winter. Once the dew comes, we don’t let little babies and dogs out of the yard, and no one goes out past the house wall alone, or without a laser and a first aid kit.
“In the spring, just before the dew dries up, the crocs get real aggressive. There are a lot fewer of them, but they’re bigger then, and they’re smarter. The stupid ones all got killed already, and the small ones all got eaten by the big ones. The survivors are real hungry then. It’s their last chance to bulk up before they go to sleep for the summer. There’s less dew, and less stuff to eat, so the crocs all expand their territories and fight among themselves. The losers go wandering in toward the streams and the farms, where there are no other crocs, but lots of living things moving about. It’s their instinct. That’s when we get the real big bull crocs coming around, and even some cow crocs, the ones that got pushed out of a harem by the other cows, and ended up wandering around, looking for a place to nest. The cow crocs are the hungriest of all. They have all those eggs growing inside them. They need every calorie they can get.
“There’s a wall all around the town proper, so the townies are all right, but out on the farms we’re on our own.
“That was my first-ever job as a boy. Sitting up in a watchtower with a hunting laser, watching for sand crocs. There are bots, on the big sand farms, but bots cost money. Lots of small farmers can’t afford fancy robotics. That’s why school’s out in the winter.
“Kids with guns are a lot cheaper than bots. Parents supply the guns and the binos, and the occasional UAV. The farmer just buys the cartridges, and pays the kids by the croc, minus the cost of expended ammunition. It’s not real money, but it’s great wealth for a kid.
“The first time the farmer pays you, you just swell up with pride. It’s your own coin. You earned it all by yourself, like a real grown-up. You go get dates and halva from the town store. Maybe a bit of cactus juice. If you’re twelve or thirteen and you still don’t have a real winter job, the storekeeper ’ll sell you a can or two of cactus beer. Or, if you’re smart, you save it. Buy yourself something nice before you go back to school in the spring. I bought a real nice bike just before Rosh HaShanah. First ever thing I earned with my own two hands.
“Shooting crocs off the farm perimeter is good for you in other ways, too. Teaches patience, good marksmanship. Small-town southern kids make the best snipers.
“The neighbors’ girl, Rivkah, was my partner. I was seven and she was six and a half. She’d spot for a while, and I’d hold the laser. After half an hour or so, we’d switch. Once, we got four in one day. I got my first-ever kiss from a girl that day, when I bagged the fourth croc. Nailed him right through the eye. Farmers pay extra if you don’t mess up the skin.”
“The woman I saw in the dream,” said Miri, “that was your mother, wasn’t it? She had your eyes, and your nose.”
“Yeah,” sighed Yosi, “I look a lot like my mom.
All gone now...”
“Not gone,” whispered Mirabelle. “Your home is still there. Some day all this will end, and you’ll go back.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” answered Yoseph, stroking her hair. She had no place to go back to, did she?
“I do have a place.” said Miri, snuggling closer.
There was an intensity in her now. A desperation. It had been building and building, for weeks. It burned inside him, too, like a fire. He knew exactly what she wanted.
“I never belonged here, Yosi,” whispered Mirabelle. “This place was never my Home. They wouldn’t let me belong.
“I was born here. My ancestors were born here. We’ve lived on this planet for five hundred and eighty years. But it’s still not my home.
“We pretended. We haven’t been slaves, officially, for two centuries. There was a constitution. There were equal rights, on paper. But it was all just pretend. And now it’s gone. And the illusion is gone. There’s no pretend, anymore. I’ve never belonged here. None of us have ever belonged here at all.
“You’re my Home, Yosi. Where you are, that’s where I belong. Where you go, I will go. Where you live, I will live. Where you die, I will die. Where you’re buried, I’ll be buried. Your people are my people. Your God is my God.
“We share everything. Food. Water. This shelter. Even dreams. We dream together, Yosi. We finish each other’s sentences. We finish each other’s thoughts.
“We can’t lie to each other. I don’t think it’s even physically possible anymore. I love you. You know that I love you. I know that you love me.
“Just take me, Yosi. Take me. I know that you want to. Everyone out there thinks that you have me anyway, even Leo. I’m The Commander’s Woman.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” answered Yosi. “You’re not my wife. I can’t just take you, no matter how much I want.”
“I can’t be your wife, but you can take me as a concubine. I say the berachot with you. I say the Shema. The bathing pool you built is a kosher mikvah. The only thing that’s missing are three Jewish men to serve as a court. You can marry me later.”