by Moshe Ben-Or
“As soon as I see my wounded settled, Sister, I’ll be happy to share some of your famous tea with you. We’ll appreciate use of your gym for the night, also, like last time.”
“You need new fighters, then Colonel,” interrupted a high soprano voice, “to replace the ones you lost?”
It was the girl who’d opened the gate for the trucks, noticed Yosi.
Young, but tall for her age. Almost as tall as his shoulder. She’d like to call herself a herdeira, no doubt, but the people who owned the haciendas would laugh. A lot more cafe in that skin than leite. If it wasn’t for her color and that oddly prominent nose, her face would look reasonably at home on Tròido. Somewhere in Jagobar’s western hemisphere would fit even better.
Misto. That’s what they called her kind here. Most of her ancestors were Second Landers, refugees from some place where the sun had burned hot and hard, the way it did back Home, and the people had squinted at it through narrow, slanted eyes.
Bottommost lower-class accent, despite the nuns’ efforts. Definitely not local. He had a fair Paradisian now, but he still needed his poncho’s help to make out what she said.
Strangely built. Two girls in one, as if someone had pasted her together out of leftover parts.
Muscular up top, despite the hunger, in a lean, she-wolf sort of way. Tiny breasts. Almost no fat at all. A tomboy’s body. But a different girl below. Wide, curvy hips and big, round buttocks, the kind that went with a plow horse farm girl’s melon breasts and meaty thighs. And then back to the tomboy again. The muscular calves were lean, and almost fat-free. None of it fit with each other.
Short black hair held back by a kerchief, so it wouldn’t get in the way. Hard face, like flint. Cold, almond-shaped eyes. Black like the night sky. You could barely tell where the iris ended and the pupil began.
Cold on the inside, too. He could feel it. Ice cold, and full of hate. Not a milligram of childhood left.
A dark nicitating membrane flicked across the girl’s eyes as she walked up.
That third eyelid had to be encoded in dominant genes, thought Yosi, to survive across the mixed generations here. Her ancestors had been desert people. Still within the Interbreeding Range, but well-bioformed to their world.
That’s what the weird fat was for. She stored her water, like a camel goat. Lots of water. Liters and liters of it, all concentrated down low around her pelvis, where it wouldn’t get in the way.
She brought her own sunglasses and dust goggles wherever she went, too. He’d bet she could stare downrange without blinking for a long time, if she had to. That could come in handy.
She looked like she’d rather be wearing pants. That’s why she’d cut her skirt until the hem hung just below the knee, the highest the Sisters would allow it. Easier to run that way. There was a hunting laser slung behind her back, and a kitchen knife at her waist. The sheath was cloth and wood. That’s where the bottom part of her skirt had gone.
The Sisters of Mercy would never touch a weapon, even now, but their Oath did not apply to their charges. Sister Sophia’s first official act as prioress had been to make it quite clear to the rest of the surviving Sisters that they’d taken an Oath of Peace, not an Oath of Suicide.
“Colonel Weismann doesn’t need children, Yati,” opined Sister Sophia.
Yati? Odd name. With that face, he’d almost expected Abha or Indira, or maybe Bian. He’d have to ask Patty and Miri about Paradisian minorities, when he had the chance.
“How old are you, girl?” asked Yosi.
“Sixteen.”
“Shame on you!” retorted Sister Sophia. “She just turned fourteen last week, Colonel.”
“Then she is no child,” replied Colonel Weismann. “She’s been a grown woman for a year and a week.
“Why do you want to volunteer, Yati?”
“Because I want to fight! You fight the men who...”
The girl’s voice trailed off with a glance at Sister Sophia’s bulging belly.
After he was done shooting the groundskeeper and his sons, thought Yosi, the Sanchez-appointed so-called “mayor” of Layos had found an entirely predictable use for this convent and orphan girls’ school. When the previous prioress had objected, he’d shot her too, and then all the nuns who didn’t look young enough for his taste, to keep her company in Heaven. Then he’d forced the town doctor to yank the contraceptive implants from the rest. It was his own private little joke, apparently. A cathouse run by pregnant nuns. What a riot!
Those savages had reigned here for seven months. The Sisters’ famous teas didn’t interest them in the least. The Sisters’ famous apple brandy had been a different matter.
Drunken impunity had fueled drunken depravity. It had become an organized thing within days. As far as “mayor” Ilario and his “officers” were concerned, a bitch was a thing with three holes and only one use. If the bitch thought otherwise, it was because she needed breakin’ in.
They’d moved down the classes systematically, from the twelfth all the way to the first. A program of “practical education”. Not a single girl had been spared. They’d hunted them across the grounds and shot the ones trying to escape. The pleas, screams, tears and blood had amused them. If bitches croaked, it was ‘cause they’d been no good in the first place. A good bitch could take all the cock she was given. And anything else that was stuck inside her. A dead bitch wan’t no loss, anyway. There wuz plenty left. Broken in all nice and knowin’ they place, now that they’d made some ‘xamples of the ones who’d given lip instead of head.
They’d had competitions. Then, one day, they’d yanked all the implants. The ultimate competition of all.
The youngest surviving rape victim here had just barely turned six. The youngest pregnant girl was eleven. If Yosi could, he’d bring Ilario and his bastards back from the dead a good couple of dozen times, just so he could slit all of their throats again. Awake and aware, this time around. Let the Sisters’ girls themselves do it. With spoons.
“I can shoot,” said Yati. “I used to go hunting with my brothers.”
Yosi’s eyes narrowed in calculation. Under normal circumstances…
But then again, there were no normal circumstances here, anymore than there’d been any normal circumstances back on Hope Colony. That’s why they had an Education Law, back Home. Because things had a nasty habit of getting not normal, without warning.
“Grab my arm,” he said. “Both hands.
“Now pull. Hard as you can.”
It wasn’t too bad, he thought as he told her to stop. Motivation she certainly had.
Casevac had been a major problem at Castle Diaz. Communications had been, too. And ammo resupply. Every man he could free up from any of the three was another man who could keep fighting, instead.
“You’re going to sprint from here to the gate and back. Fast as you can, until I tell you to stop.”
The girl nodded.
“Ready! Go!”
Not bad there, either, thought Yosi as he watched her run.
Now what he needed was an average infantryman, with a typical fighting load of ammunition. It would’ve been nice to have him wear body armor, but there was no helping it in this case. There might be eyes overhead, all the way up to orbit, and an alien finger on a button.
Guns were common in the countryside. The Palmer-era arms he’d liberated from Castle Diaz would look no different, to orbital surveillance, from any other bunch of hacienda rifles. Pretty much every surviving hacendado in this neck of the woods had turned out to have a highly illegal stash of these, to supplement their collection of pre-Palmer Royal Army surplus quite reversibly repurposed as hunting lasers. That’s why they’d survived in the first place.
Zin body armor was a different business altogether. Poncho or no poncho, kinematics analysis would reveal its presence quickly enough. When he was driving around in trucks out in the open, instead of sneaking about on foot under forest canopy, the risk was simply too great.
Most of the men this
girl would be called upon to rescue wouldn’t be wearing body armor anyway. They’d be lucky to have a poncho. Which would make the contents of her aid bag even more vital than they would be normally.
“Mateo! Come here!”
“Sir!” answered Yosi’s driver, running up. His hand twitched reflexively, before he remembered the no-salutes rule.
The girl was just about back from her second pass.
Just another reminder of the not normal, thought Yosi. Grown men struggling to remember the no-salutes rule, as if they were first-graders.
“Lie on the ground,” ordered Colonel Weismann. “For the purpose of this exercise, you’ve been shot in the leg.”
“Stop!” yelled Yosi to the gasping girl as she’d run back a third time. “This man is wounded. Grab him up under the armpits and drag him to that truck, fast as you can! Come on, they’re shooting at you!”
“Is this really necessary, Colonel?” asked Sister Sophia as the girl pulled Mateo up to the truck and bent over, gasping for air. “You could simply tell her ‘No’.”
“It was necessary, Sister,” answered Yosi. “She passed.”
“But Colonel...” pleaded the nun. Her eyes were suddenly huge, and full of shock.
“Times have changed, Sister,” replied Colonel Weismann. “The whole world has changed.
“A dispatch runner doesn’t need a grown man’s strength. He just needs to be fast on his feet. A scout doesn’t need brute strength either. He is best served by wit, and the ability to blend into his environment. An IED doesn’t care whether the hand that holds the shovel is large or small, as long as it does the job. And a wounded man doesn’t care for the size of the hand that slaps the tourniquet on him either, as long as the tourniquet arrives in time, and the hand drags him to safety.
“The he can just as readily be a she, push come to shove. It’s not preferable, but it is acceptable at need. She is a grown woman, she wants to fight, and she can fight. If there aren’t enough men to replace her, and her arms and equipment are lacking, then that is the fault of those who permitted this planet to be conquered with nary a shot fired in the first place. Maybe a few of them will be ashamed enough of themselves to step forward, when they see her in the ranks.
“In fact, I’ll speak to your whole student body tonight, at dinner. Everyone over thirteen will be there to listen.
“Come here, Yati!” continued the colonel, raising his voice. “Congratulations, you pass.”
* * *
Colonel Leah Brocha Tellman leaned on the edge of the map table, watching the little blue icons creep into place among the graphics. Her scalp was itching under the snood. Nerves, she thought. It had itched the same way before her wedding. Scratching would only make it itch worse. She used to scratch herself bloody before finals and midterms, as a little girl.
The colonel wiped her sweaty palms stealthily inside the concealed pockets of her floor-length skirt. The girls around her didn’t need to see Grandma Leah fidget. If they thought that Grandma Leah was nervous, they’d get nervous. More nervous. She didn’t need them more nervous. They had work to do, and so did she.
The paperwork had finally come through the other day. It was officially her regiment now, and she had her third star. She’d always expected to inherit the standard from great-aunt Fruma, may the Almighty avenge her blood, but she would have rather it did not come like this.
Aunt Fruma wasn’t the only one who needed avenging. Of her own sons, Shmulik had probably gone first. Her youngest. Her baby. The son of her old age. Her most beloved of all. Her cleverest. Her wildest.
She’d so feared that he would turn out a black sheep, when he’d up and gone off to study at the Technion, instead of getting sensibly married, like every normal boy. But he’d just come back with an Israeli wife to go with his doctorate, and built himself a wild, nomadic business selling custom machinery all over Known Space.
Shmulik would always send mama crazy snapshots of his adventures. Hanging in a safety harness off the outer skin of a Tiantiju cloudscraper, four thousand stories above the ground. Pretending to drink tritiated heavy water from a Tròidoese cave spring. Standing atop a pyramid of palladium bars stacked amid the glittering vastness of a Bertenese bank vault...
Shmuel Reuven ben Leah Brocha Tellman was still missing, officially, along with his wife, his daughter and four of his six sons. The last-ever snapshot he’d sent to mama had him pretending to balance on a reinforcing beam while his daughter Rochel, seemingly hanging in midair atop the optically-transparent floor of the Vitoria Bridge observation deck, laughingly made as if to push him off.
They’d gone early, to beat the tourist rush. A passing freighter awaiting cargo from Baia de Calma had uploaded the snapshot within seconds of it being taken, as part of its regularly-contracted postal sync. Four and a half hours later, Zin bombs would fall on San Cristobal.
Betsalel would be next. Lieutenant Commander Betsalel Aaron Tellman’s light cruiser would be lost with all hands on the fourth day of the war, fighting along the Great Highway, between Paradise and Miranda.
Meir would die defending Bretogne.
Yehudah’s corvette detachment would be cut to pieces covering the retreat to Hadassah.
Malka would go with great-aunt Fruma, when the Zin kinetic hit the Regiment’s command post.
Rivkeh had died last week. She’d volunteered for a stretcher party, somewhere beneath the ruins of Kiryas Yoel. She didn’t have to. Captain Rivkeh Tellman could have remained at the aid station. She was, after all, the senior nurse. But she’d volunteered anyway. That’s the way she’d always been, even as a little girl. She’d covered the boy on the stretcher with her body, when the Zin automortars opened up.
Of the twenty grandchildren the Zin had killed, Matti had been the unkindest cut of all. Little Motek. The gentlest, sweetest little boy. He could quote half of Shas from memory, by the time he’d turned bar mitzvah. The whole mishpocha had celebrated when he’d won his blue pin, and an all-expense merit scholarship to the Mir. The Av Himself had turned up for the ceremony.
Matti would have been a great Torah Scholar one day. A posek, without doubt. One of the gedolim. Rav Matityahu Yisroel ben Rivkeh Shterna Tellman.
Would have been...
Matti had accepted the congratulations, and gone off to study at his ancient and great yeshiva. Blue pins came with an automatic exemption from the draft. He wasn’t supposed to have a unit. But he did. He’d volunteered. And told no one. That’s how his outfit worked.
Matti’s unit was the 72nd Charioteer Regiment. He’d taken an enemy battleship with him, when his turn came to leave this world. And for his blood, too, the Zin would pay the full and rightful measure.
They would pay. For the ruined cities. For the shattered families. For the wrecked lives. For entire mishpachot wiped out of existence. For the one and a quarter billion Mattis and Shmulis and Rivkehs and Malkas and Yehudahs and Betsalels who’d already died defending this world, and for the countless others who would die kicking them off it. They would pay for all. They would drain the cup of vengeance to the dregs. Beginning today.
Third Battalion was almost in position. Those girls had the farthest to sneak. Almost to the line of contact, right behind the rear echelons of infantry. Old lasers out of storage. Coilguns instead of missile launchers. The crews’ grandmothers were still in diapers, when those guns had been made.
But no matter. What mattered was that the 11795th Orbital Defense Regiment of the Haven Civil Defense Corps was again at 125% rated strength. What mattered was that the enemy’s main fleet had left. What mattered was that Joint System Headquarters had finally ordered a counterattack. What mattered was that, when the clock finished ticking down and Colonel Leah Tellman gave the order, plasma torches would burn holes in the ice above, and gigawatt lasers would discharge, and surface to space missiles would streak upward.
“Third Battalion reports in position, commander,” said the girl at the data fusion console. She was barely past ba
t mitzvah, noted the colonel. But she would do the job just fine. She wasn’t the only one, by a longshot.
It was their men, out there in the tunnels. Their brothers, their fathers, their uncles and cousins. Their flesh and blood. Their childhood playmates. Their intended. Their beloved. Their mishpocha.
Brigadier General Mordechai Tellman wouldn’t hide in the rear. He’d be forward as always, co-located with his lead battalion’s forward command post. Behind his armored spearhead would come militia regiments packed full of teenage boys. Some of the corporals waiting to lead fire teams onto the snowy surface above were fifteen and sixteen. The youngest of the boys clutching rifles in the tunnels behind them had just turned thirteen.
It didn’t matter that half the troops in the Regiment should by rights be worrying about high school exams, giggling over boys and picking out wedding dresses, not manning anti-space lasers and missile launchers. They would not let their men down. She would not let her husband down. They would all do their duty to the last, this day and every other. When the Zin piled into the supposed gaps she’d left in her coverage, the girls of the Third and Fifth Battalions would show them exactly what their old guns could do.
“This is our world, you furry bastards,” thought the colonel as she glowered at the little red icons winking in and out of existence above the map table. “This is our world! We have no other. This is our land. We will not give it up.
“It doesn’t matter that you’ve killed every seventh of us. It doesn’t matter if you kill every fourth, or every third. Haven will fight on, you furry scum. Mishpocha Tellman will fight on. We have nowhere to run, and we wouldn’t anyway, even if we did. We will fight for our homes! We will never surrender to the likes of you! And if the last boy should fall in battle tomorrow, the last girl will pick up his rifle and stand in his place!”
“Regiment, eyes on targets!” commanded the colonel. The red icons hopping among the Target Area of Interest boxes above the map table grew crosshairs and bits of text as relays and fiberoptic lines buried deep beneath the ice carried target allocations back from the battalion fusion centers.