by Moshe Ben-Or
The countdown clock blinked zeros.
“First, Second, Fourth, Sixth battalions, at my command – volley… Fire!”
* * *
X cleared his desk of reports with a swipe of his arm. Things were not, he thought, going too badly at all. Ten months after the Zin had occupied his homeland, the planetwide Resistance was pretty much where he’d expected the planetwide Resistance to be. A kaleidoscopic array of tiny bands and disjointed, spontaneously-emergent cells spread across all four continents, from one pole to the other. For the most part, the would-be resisters got caught and killed immediately. The few who didn’t mostly managed to get nowhere. But already there were exceptions.
There was the businessman down in Mato Grosso, Señor Madeira, for example. His company used to make fancy sports aircars, before the war. Great organizer. His people were disciplined and well-motivated, and he’d figured out how to make his own explosives. His roadside bombs were becoming a real nuisance.
And there was the lady up in Aguiaima, Doña Fresca. No way that was her real name. A housewife, of all things, or so they said. Heaven only knew where she’d learned what to do, but she was building a textbook network of urban three-man cells. Every time the Yellow Rats grabbed one of her people, they got nowhere fast. They really didn’t know anyone except their sole contact, and sometimes not even that. The woman’s outfit had anonymous recruiters, cut-outs and dead drops all over the place.
Just the other day she’d taken a personal bow at the provincial governor’s birthday party, at least assuming that the kindly little old lady who’d been running the governor’s kitchen for the past six months was indeed Doña Fresca herself.
At a time when most of his subjects would be glad of an extra handful of unflavored algae paste, the governor of Aguiaima had rung his birthday in in grand style. The menu had been downright mouthwatering. Mushroom salgados and lamb-stuffed arepas, sarapatel with pulao, very berry birthday cake and, of course, plentiful beer, grappa and tequila.
For those too young or prevented by duty from drinking the hard stuff, there had been delicious herbal tea. The little old lady who ran the kitchen had even made sure that those who couldn’t join the celebration inside the governor’s mansion got a little something to keep up their spirits on a chilly September evening. She’d sent waitstaff carrying platters full of tea glasses, bits of appetizer and generous slices of birthday cake all around the security perimeter. Everybody got a little something from the governor’s table.
Truly, it had been a party to die for. Just ask the governor, the provincial chief of police and forty-three of the province’s top government officials. Not to mention their assorted friends, relatives, women, children, servants, guards and pets.
The toxicologist’s report was finally in as of this morning. The mouthwatering salgados had been stuffed with delicious sautéed deathcaps. The finger-lickin’ good spicy lamb filling inside each arepa contained enough rat poison to kill a horse. The grappa was fifty-five percent methanol by volume, the tequila was forty-two percent methanol, and the beer was full of insecticide. The secret ingredient in the sarapatel was more rat poison, mixed lovingly into the sauce to give it that extra-special shade of bloody red. The yummy belladonna berries in the very berry cake and the tasty angel’s trumpet tea had really livened up the party. The wildly hallucinating perimeter guards had shot up the mansion, each other and the whole damned neighborhood before they’d finally dropped dead or ran out of ammunition.
The kicker in the footage was the little old lady emerging from a closet at around four in the morning to take her farewell spin through the grand ballroom, fastidiously stepping around sprawling corpses and pools of bloody vomit, before waltzing her way calmly out the charnel house front door.
For a sweet little old lady, Doña Fresca could be one hell of an ice-cold, ruthless bitch.
It would be a pleasure to meet her some day, thought X, after this was all over. The woman had style. Just look at the way her attendants had opened the doors on the way out! Those heel-clicking bows! He hadn’t seen that in real life for eighty-three years. Perhaps she really was a Dame of the Court.
The thought gave X pause. Doña Fresca. Not señora, but doña. Certainly a monarchist, from the azalea she’d dropped atop the governor’s body.
She looked about his own age, didn’t she? Perhaps a couple-three decades younger. A teenager at the time of the Coup.
Pitalito would have been a good place to hide from Palmer’s death squads. All the way up in the godforsaken northern wilderness, but still a provincial capital, big enough to get lost in.
False documents… A cheap little flat in some suburb… Four decades of hiding in fear of her life.
She could never have married. Never had a close friend. Too dangerous. They had never stopped hunting her kind. Not until Palmer’s dying day. One wrong word, one wrong syllable said with the wrong accent, and she’d be done for.
And then, after forty-six years of non-life in hiding, not the hoped-for Restoration but a Revolution.
Lowborn scum unworthy to even kiss her slippers disposing of her birthright. Equal rights for minorities. A blanco de-facto running the planet. The Committee for National Reform confirming Palmer’s abolition of noble honors and titles. A republican constitution. Elections.
And there she was, a middle-aged spinster left behind by history, sitting friendless and alone in a cheap little apartment with nothing but her hatred for company. All that pent-up hatred...
Come to think of it, he didn’t want to meet the mysterious Doña Fresca after all. To put it mildly, their politics wouldn’t match. It might even get downright dangerous.
Unlike Doña Fresca, there was nothing mysterious about the bunch of kids in Juarez who called themselves the Hand of Vengeance, mused X. Juvenile delinquents, not a one older than nineteen. Mostly car thieves and burglars before the war, with a couple-three hardcore armed robbers thrown in for leavening.
Cocky as hell. Great fans of the direct approach. They’d shot nine cops over the past month, and stabbed four.
Normally, the likes of them had a life expectancy measurable in hours, but this bunch was different. They knew the mean streets of Juarez like the backs of their hands. They’d all grown up there. The barrio had been their classroom. Juvenile hall had given them their matriculation exams. Prison had been their university. They’d all graduated magna cum laude.
Behind the cocky direct tactics there was smart, thorough planning, and plentiful clever trickery. They understood how the city street camera network functioned, they understood disguise and misdirection, and they knew how to gimmick captured police firearms. The Hand of Vengeance had potential.
But it was here in scenic Angeles Province that he had true paydirt on his hands. Almost within walking distance of where he was sitting, up in the toxic wilderness of the Paso Chungara National Park, there was a real, honest-to-goodness League Shock Corps colonel running around with a whole little embryonic army. That’s what they even called themselves. The Free Paradise Army.
They’d blown up a whole Zin mechanized infantry platoon and lured the rescue force that had come looking for it into a series of lethal traps. They’d slaughtered every cop in Chungara District and leveled nigh-on the best-defended collaborationist hacienda in the province. And they were just getting warmed up.
Never mind gimmicked police firearms and homebrew hand grenades. Never mind explosively formed penetrators and shaped charges and a whole slew of sophisticated triggers the likes of which Hesus Madeira could only dream of. All that stuff was child’s play to Colonel Weismann’s bunch.
These guys had improvised laser cannon. They routinely used homemade anti-armor rockets. Last week they’d sent a barrage of rocket-propelled propane tanks filled with homebrew dynamite showering over the police garrison in Brianorte in the middle of the night, leaving craters almost a meter deep and three wide, blowing over two cottages as if they were cardboard and turning the northern wing of the hea
dquarters building into a pile of debris.
Half a dozen men had died instantly. Eighteen wounded were pulled from the rubble. The cops got so spooked they’d upped stakes and ran the very next day, mostly south to Paraibuna. Maybe a third of them made it.
If the survivors of Brianorte were to be believed, the roads were all mined up there, and the FPA was everywhere. No way were they going back up north. No way.
The police platoon next door in Guaicui had surrendered yesterday. The anonymous woman who’d addressed the garrison had them quivering in their boots by her third sentence. The Señora didn’t threaten. She promised.
There was a partial recording available. The things she’d said in that calm, flawlessly upper-crust, steely contralto voice of hers were enough to give him goosebumps, and he was sitting safely in an office three hundred kilometers away in San Angelo, not cowering in a perimeter tower at the edge of her woods at sunset.
It was the voice of a woman born to rule, a woman whose ancestors had owned haciendas and factories and banks, sat in judgment and made laws, commanded armies and reigned over the peasants since the days when the signature timestamps on the Refuge Compact were mere seconds old.
Voiceprint analysis said that she’d used something; perhaps a military poncho. Her real voice was considerably higher pitched. But the men inside the perimeter didn’t know that, and it didn’t really matter after what had happened at Layos and Casabuenos and Brianorte and at the Diaz hacienda, and after what they themselves had faced over the past few weeks.
The matriarchal alpha lioness growl had been pure overkill. She could have gone with her natural mezzo pitch. Those peons would have pissed themselves regardless.
Their whole lives had conditioned the kinds of men President Sanchez hired to fear and obey voices like that woman’s. Sanchez had given them uniforms and guns, and they’d gone crazy, but in the depths of their hearts they themselves had always known that the guns weren’t rightfully theirs to use and the only kind of uniform they properly belonged in came in white, with a big black number front and back, day-glo orange stripes for color and an RF tracking collar for a fashion accessory. Now reality had reasserted itself, the real owner of the house was home to rein in the kids, and they had a choice to make.
As an additional stimulus to deep, existential thought, the mysterious Señora had left a continuous loop of the cops’ erstwhile comrades’ screams and pleas running on the loudspeakers all night long. In case anybody inside that perimeter still had doubts regarding her credibility after listening to that for a few hours, there was also the noseless, earless wreck in a tattered police uniform her men had sent shambling toward the defenders’ lines, with a bundle of freshly-severed heads in his hand and a string of bloody penises draped around his neck.
What that woman’s approach had lacked in subtlety, it had more than made up in effectiveness. The Guaicui cops had massacred their officers by morning, and walked out the front gate at dawn, waving a white flag.
Outside the district capital itself, Paraibuna District now belonged to the FPA. Guararema was clearly next. Police morale in northern Angeles Province was dropping like a lead balloon. Barring Zin intervention from their garrisons along Highway One, Colonel Weismann was going to be de-facto master of three provincial districts by the onset of winter rains.
The man was apparently a cavalier of the Silver Circle and a veteran of damned near every clash of arms his people had been involved in since the Second Omicronian War. And even that experience didn’t fully explain his expertise, truth be told.
The League Shock Corps was a regular military organization, a marine corps built around spaceborne armor and mechanized infantry. Its special forces were a reconnaissance and raiding force. Building guerrilla armies from scratch wasn’t part of their mission set.
An ordinary Shock Corps officer wouldn’t know the things Colonel Weismann knew. At best, he would know some theory. But it was clear as day that Colonel Weismann’s knowledge of guerrilla warfare didn’t end with the theoretical. He’d done this before, and probably more than once. Which meant that even the wildest rumors had to be short of the truth.
There was one organization that did fit Colonel Weismann’s obvious expertise. An organization whose existence was probably the worst-kept secret in the history of the League. The outfit that one had to be invited to join.
Sayeret Aman recruited from the Shock Corps. Its people wore Shock Corps uniforms and held Shock Corps rank. Colonel Weismann had to be Sayeret Aman. Nothing else could possibly explain what was going on.
Imagine the stroke of luck, thought X. A man spends probably a good century fighting the League’s shadow wars, doing things that never happened in places no one will ever know about. Gets tired of it or gets shot up one time too many, or whatever. Probably both. They don’t give out Silver Circles for having pretty eyes.
So the ex-commando takes up a position as military tutor in the household of a Spartan duke. The young man he is to teach just happens to be the grandson of a famous admiral, the son of a universally known medical luminary, and heir to the second most important ducal throne on Sparta.
Great retirement plan, by the way. Probably beats a military pension hands down.
The prince is a bit of a flake, frankly. Perhaps too much pressure to follow in the footsteps of father and grandfather, perhaps something else. Instead of buckling down and studying for the Academy like he’s supposed to, the young fellow takes up semi-pro freestyle fighting and full-time womanizing. Goes to compete in the Paradise Games. Takes his tutor with him. And boom! The Zin up and invade.
And Paradise gets one of the League’s extra-special masters of mayhem organizing a guerrilla army within walking distance of the planetary capital.
Pretty much everywhere else on the planet, it was amateur hour. But here in scenic Angeles Province, land of nature lovers, ski bums and lunatic extreme sports enthusiasts, amateur hour was over before it began. What were the odds?
At any rate, thought X, these first tender shoots of progress were enough to work with. They were strong enough now, and capable enough, that his interventions could be disguised as natural developments of existing trends.
Señor Madeira’s IEDs were getting more sophisticated by the week. A sudden jump in quality would appear disconcerting, but not necessarily unnatural. And sooner or later an intelligent, technically-oriented man like Señor Madeira was bound to come across someone able to render a police rifle suitable for civilian use. That, too, would not look unnatural now.
He had just the textbook for Señor Madeira. Delivery would be a bit difficult, but he did have some old union firebreather friends down in Campo Verde and Nova Mutum who’d managed to survive the Collapse. Left anonymously on their doorsteps, the mad bomber’s manual should reach Señor Madeira’s business associates soon enough.
Doña Fresca too, could use a bit of guidance. Now that there wasn’t a single hospital on the planet capable of printing an emergency room liver, much less cloning a long-term one, orally administered amatoxin was an outstanding poison. But a realistic dose would take days, even weeks, to kill. The victim wouldn’t even show effects for six to twenty-four hours. With all the quick-acting toxins Doña Fresca had packed into the governor’s birthday feast, both the effort spent to gather the deathcaps and the risk of handling them had been in vain. The tropanes in her berry cake and her herbal tea had counteracted the effects of the insecticide in her beer, and vice versa. And the ethanol in the beer had acted as an antidote to the methanol in the liquor. Fortunately, most of the senior officials had ingested a lot more of the latter than of the former. Ultimately, only the highly concentrated rat poison she’d packed into the meat dishes had operated unopposed.
The good lady needed a cookbook. Nicely tailored specifically to Aguiaima Province and the surrounding region, as if it had come from an expert cell within the Fresca Organization itself. Lots of fun and useful recipes for the practical housewife, with copious notes on which dish
es went together nicely in a meal.
The natural bounty of Doña Fresca’s chilly northern clime might not be as rich as that of places farther south, but it still had a whole lot more to offer than deathcaps and nightshade. And there was the whole wonderful world of home chemistry to explore, also. Somebody after all, had distilled the methanol for the little old lady’s Pitalito coming-out party, and concentrated the rat poison.
Doña Fresca’s people were already up on the restored planetwide net, so delivery wouldn’t be a problem. In fact, their anonymous dead drops were much too easily discovered. Any day now, her organization would attract the attention of Zin counterintelligence. This opponent, they would find far more dangerous than Sanchez’s hapless Yellow Rat blunderers. So perhaps a simple primer on cybersecurity, also. Sophisticated enough to be very useful to her people, but not so sophisticated that it could not have, conceivably, been developed in-house.
Sadly, great difficulties were about to develop with the Ministry of Infrastructure’s effort to fulfill the new Aguiaima provincial governor’s urgent request for spectrometry-enabled net glasses. Even bigger problems would develop, without doubt, with the delivered glasses’ hardware, software and spectrographic libraries.
Quality control continued to be a great problem across the restored industrial sector. The Ministry was making every effort. Ho-hum.
The Hand of Vengeance was a bit of a problem, really. He had no good way to contact them, and manuals wouldn’t help, anyway. Those kids weren’t the reading type. Although a comic book… He would have to think about that.
In the meantime, Juarez PD was about to experience a whole set of intermittently recurring network problems, with major data loss. Especially the just-restored city camera system. And all kinds of songs about the Hand of Vengeance were about to crop up all over Juarez. Some nice jokes, too, about the stupid cops who couldn’t catch them.