The Grapple

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Everyone knew Patty Sleager, or at least knew of her. But where did Patty Sleager’s money come from? How could her blanco father afford all those fancy boarding schools? How could he afford tuition, room and board at San Luis, and all the expensive stuff Patty Sleager had always had to hand? Why did Patty Sleager always spend her summers hopping about from friend’s house to friend’s house, instead of going home to San Cristobal?

  She’d never talked about that. And now all the old records were gone, thanks to the Zin and their EMP.

  There’d been rumors already. There was an official story. You could find it with a bit of research, on the nets. But how plausible was that story? How often had a tramp fringe runner struck it rich? How many abandoned Golden Age outposts had remained untouched and unlooted for six centuries? How easy was it all to believe?

  There was another story. A plausible story. A story everyone had seen before, a good hundred thousand times. That story was easy to believe. That story was a damned cliché.

  How many Paradisian men could keep their one-eyed snake pointed solely at their Lawfully Wedded Wife? How many wouldn’t use any bit of power they might have over a woman to get what every man always wanted? Power was a lever. Levers pried open things that were closed, and granted access to fruit otherwise forbidden. That’s what levers were for.

  What Señor didn’t have mistresses among the household staff? What Señora didn’t have to quietly put up with it? What pretty governess didn’t get told to bend over at some point in her career? What teenage servants’ daughter didn’t get told to stay out of The Señor’s way? How many didn’t listen? And how many of the ones who did found The Señor cornering them anyway, in some out-of-the-way guest room?

  What household girl would say no to The Señor, when he could throw her out onto the street without a recommendation? What servants’ daughter would resist the hand sliding up her skirt, when the owner of said hand could render her family homeless and penniless overnight? Behind the literary clichés, there was a reality.

  How many blanca governesses had gotten bent over study desks across the centuries? How many accountants’ and property managers’ teenage daughters? How many household doctors or family lawyers or ambitious bookkeepers had started up an affair with The Señor, or simply let it happen? How many times had it gotten serious, and The Señor had dropped the right sums into the right sets of hands, and an implant got quietly yanked, and nine months later out came a mista?

  None of it was just a literary cliché. Last summer, at the Diaz hacienda, the Diaz boys weren’t the only ones she’d played tag with. She’d played tag with Rodrigo Diaz, too. He wasn’t the only classmate’s father, uncle or older brother, but he’d been her Plan A. It had been getting serious for five years, ever since she’d turned legal. Last August, she’d outright asked him. He didn’t say no, but he didn’t say yes, either. The week after, she’d met Roger van Pieterzonn. It had started as a way to make Rodrigo jealous.

  And how many times had the other cliché come true? How many times had the sneaky blanco set up the virtuous Señor? How many times had the girl turned out to be not sixteen but fifteen?

  And sometimes The Señor wasn’t so virtuous. And sometimes the girl wasn’t fifteen, but twelve, or eight, or nine. Or ten. Manuel Ortiz certainly didn’t bother waiting for her sixteenth birthday, the way Rodrigo Diaz had. Eleven had been good enough for him. It had only taken her a couple of days’ effort to end up naked and on her knees in that Señor’s study.

  She’d had high hopes for Manuel Ortiz once, before she’d figured out about her white skin and the way Paradise worked, and the reason he’d only do some things with her, but not others. Manuel Ortiz hadn’t been the only one of her boarding school friends’ fathers and uncles, either. She’d been spending her school breaks friend-hopping long before she’d turned sixteen.

  All the clichés ended up the same way, in the end. If The Señor’s one-eyed snake had gotten The Señor into a bind, then The Señor’s money would go to work to get him out. And The Señora would know. The Señora always knew. That’s how all the soap operas went, because that’s how it mostly went in real life.

  Nor were those the only clichés, thought Patty. Possession of a one-eyed snake was no ironclad requirement. The Señora could have gotten herself into a bind all on her own. Or not.

  The old records were gone. She’d said nothing before in the name of privacy, and she’d say nothing now in the name of wartime secrecy. They’d ask their daughters and their sons, and they’d learn nothing they didn’t already know. The more they came up blank, the more they would guess. The more they guessed, the more they’d look. The less they found, the more they’d believe. And the more real The Señora would become.

  A poncho. Armor. Masks. Shaded-face video. Audio recordings. Written appeals.

  It didn’t matter that the voice was disguised. Who would expect The Señora to use her real, undisguised voice? It didn’t matter that there was no face. Who would expect The Señora to show her face?

  There was a war on. There was an alien occupation. The Señora wasn’t stupid.

  And if some voiceprint analyst did come up pointing at Patty Sleager’s voice, who would believe him? Seriously, if the Sanchez people announced a thing like that, who would believe?

  Some twenty-three-year-old blanca? Some brainless dancing fucktoy with big boobs who’d gone from hacienda to hacienda and school to school for twelve years, looking for a bigger dick to fill her holes? That was the source of the fine speeches? That was the source of the stirring appeals? That was the Power behind Colonel Weismann? That was the Leader of the Movement which had given birth to the FPA?! Patricia Sleager?!!!

  Preposterous! Utterly preposterous! That analyst would get laughed right out of the room. No one would ever believe such an announcement, even if he didn’t. Things simply didn’t work like that.

  Patty grinned.

  “Just a dumb blonde, am I?” she thought, chuckling. “Just a worthless fucktoy? That’s what you bastards always thought of me.

  “Well, watch me lead the lot of you motherfuckers right around by your fucking noses! By the time I’m done with you, you will all be licking my boots. You’ll still hate my guts, and you’ll still think that my sole purpose in life is to warm a Spartan prince’s bed, but you’ll lick my boots anyway. Because the Spartan prince is a foreign expert hired to bash in recalcitrant heads just like yours, and he and his tutor the Israeli colonel have lots and lots of very scary, angry men with guns who really enjoy making examples out of bastards like you.

  “And I’m the big-boobed blonde who came gratis with the Spartan prince’s contract. The blanca fucktoy talking parrot for the lady who hired him and his Israeli butcher to bash heads on her behalf. I carry water for Señora Engreída Sangreazul, the Force behind the Movement who has the real Power, whose people have ruled this planet since the day when the first shuttles splashed down and the Refuge Compact got signed. The likes of me always have.”

  Patty’s chuckle became a sudden gale of laughter. The more she thought of this, the more she liked it. She could pull this off. She would. She had no choice. Her life depended on it. Hers and Leo’s, and everyone else’s.

  The greatest role of her career. The ultimate live theater. The ultimate stakes. And she would show them all. Patty Sleager was never a stupid fucktoy. Patty Sleager just played one on the cube. Had played one entirely too well, and had come to believe the role.

  She’d tried so hard to fit in that she would do anything. Think like them, talk like them, walk like them, forget who she really was. Until she’d knelt before their contemptible corpse-on-a-stick, though within her lived the True Goddess. Until the thought of kids with guns had scared her, even though she herself had learned to shoot a laser at six. Until the Leaguers had seemed barbaric, even though she’d grown up on the Fringe. Until she was ready to slit her own veins because her skin was the wrong color. Until she’d believed that she was nothing but a worthless fucktoy, be
cause it had been the only way to fit in.

  She would play that role still, sometimes. But she would never believe it again. She loved a man who didn’t buy it, and who would never let her convince herself again.

  For the first time since she’d been ripped away from Kang Jian, she had someone to love who loved her right back. He wanted Patricia Sleager to play a role worthy of her real self. And Patricia Sleager would play that role. For him. And for herself. The greatest role of her life, with her very life at stake.

  She would create the faceless Señora. Engreída Sangreazul, the stereotype they all wanted, the woman they expected to find in the shadows, standing behind Colonel Weismann’s army, pulling the puppet strings. She would play that role perfectly. That woman would come to life. None would doubt her existence. They would come to dread, and respect, her name.

  And Señora Sangreazul’s name would be…

  “What should it be?” thought Patty.

  Something nice and proper. A fine, fancy name for a fine, middle-aged herdeira with a fine string of ancestors stretching back six hundred years to decorate her hacienda walls. A name that might well be a pseudonym, and probably was, but whose every syllable still sounded like half her ancestors had signed the Compact at First Landing.

  Actually, there was a woman who’d signed the Refuge Compact in her own right, remembered Patty. A captain. The only female one among the bunch. That woman’s name had been Eva Morales.

  A fine herdeiro name.

  * * *

  The control pod’s walls vibrated with basso notes as the helmsman pitted his skills against the prowess of enemy gunners. The Hector’s return fire tolled volleys of church bells. Updates flashed and scrolled in a continuous stream, ansible messages, radio packets and laser flash stepping on each other so fast that any real-world presentation would have long ago become an incomprehensible stream of light and a roar of white noise. Even virtual reality augmented senses could barely keep up.

  The reward for a job well done is another job, thought Baron Papadakis. And one hell of a job this was. Head Cat was setting no transit records to Hadassah, this time ‘round. Big Boss wanted the furry bastard to fight for it, every step of the way. Problem was, fucker had an Allfather-damned armada.

  Face off against the largest fucking single force the Fleet has ever confronted. Probably the largest fucking single force amassed anywhere in Known Space since the opening battles of the End Time War. Do it continuously, day in and day out. And don’t lose ships!

  One hell of a job.

  “ATTENTION!” ansibled the Arizal, “Absolute fix on Target Nine. Parameters attached.”

  “First, focus fire!” ordered the main effort commander.

  The walls of the admiral’s control pod rang a multi-throated basso gong as the Hector’s guns volleyed against Arizal’s target-velocity model.

  “Shield matter in the Number Four Gun!” yelled the gunnery chief. “Good fix!”

  The same breach in spacetime that took the shell to its target also took a bit of the target back to the gun. Like blood in the water to sharks, shield matter in the chamber gave absolute position to gunners.

  Cathedral bells tolled a mad cacophony as guns rapid-fired at will, fast as robotic arms could load shells, hurrying to pour on the damage before the enemy could flee. On the COP display, Target Nine disappeared in a dazzle of multi-colored splashes, trailing a comet tail of lost shield matter, shards of spalled-off ceramic and clouds of ablated metal.

  He couldn’t escape, thought the baron. The detachment’s joint position-velocity model was too accurate now, and his damaged drive couldn’t vary the pattern fast enough.

  A shroud of false-color blue haze enveloped the icon. Presentation code for water. North of eight hundred tons and counting. Steam from venting heatsinks.

  There was a white flash of escaping jump fuel. Another. And another.

  “First, seek new targets!”

  There was a final stutter of late splashes. The enemy battleship was almost a hemisphere now. Breached jump fuel tanks had turned at least a third of its hull into atomic soup. The rest was tumbling out of control, in at least three slowly-separating pieces.

  He’d opened his steam vents too late, thought the baron, and then a unidirectional shell had breached a jump fuel tank. The blowout panels on the nearest heatsinks got flash-welded in place by radiation. The superheated coolant had nowhere to go. And everything simply exploded.

  Quite the rare spectacle. Nice to look at, when it was the enemy and not one of your own.

  This made two enemy capital ships lost, and four more nicely bloodied. Not bad, for a quick little dust-up. Of course, the cats hadn’t exactly been throwing flowers and kisses back, either.

  Novomorsk had lost a fifth of her coolant from not one but three heatsink breaches, Gat had a damaged microjump drive, Nekamah had a reactor scram, Patras and Etz Hayim were both down two guns and red on main caliber ammo, his missile detachments were calling Empty Quiver across the board and his far screen was reporting a six-squadron mailed fist barreling toward him from the enemy’s main formation, as if what he was trading shells with now wasn’t fucking enough as it is.

  The virtual reality of the battle bridge buzzed with bursts of static. An enemy battleship had the Hector bracketed.

  “Eighteen, retreat to Rally Point Three,” commanded the baron.

  Furry bastards wouldn’t catch him napping, thought Rear Admiral Papadakis as enemy pursuers fell behind and pre-jump sparkles filled the virtual bridge.

  Big Boss would’ve kept Task Force 18 in being regardless, after Loki. That much was obvious, with 20/20 hindsight. But who would command that task force in Count Orloff’s place, that was another matter altogether. Reginald Freeman had hand-picked Anastasios Papadakis for the job, same as he’d hand-picked every other senior officer in the Fleet Task Force he’d sent to slow Head Cat on his climb back up the gradient to Hadassah, from the commanding three-star on down.

  That was his reward for losing only a fifth of his force at Loki, and for coming back with radiation sickness that didn’t require long-term hospitalization. A second star on his epaulets, a second flag officer’s stripe on his cuffs, reinforcements to replace his losses, and a better chance to get himself killed.

  Under different circumstances, he would’ve been sent packing off to his estate for six to twelve months of convalescent leave, whether he bloody liked it or not. Under different circumstances, truth be told, he would’ve been glad to take it. The cloned bone marrow was working out well, but anemia was still with him. The bloody diarrhea had gone away quickly, thank the Allmother, and his hair was growing back. But the new beard was coming in speckled with gray, and his stomach still got upset at anything more difficult than boiled algae paste and soggy noodles in broth.

  Whomever the Zin had put in command of that picket…

  Well, that furball wouldn’t be back. Her Mercy be praised.

  Jump sickness was worse ever since Loki, too. Doc said that his body would never be the same. Not that he was complaining. Plenty had come back from that mess far worse than he. Plenty hadn’t come back at all.

  Whatever it was that Chess Master, Big Boss and Sly had planned for Head Cat’s Allfather-damned armada, thought the admiral, this job was absolutely vital to it. He’d be damned if he’d let them down. He just hoped their Big Plan would work out. Because if it didn’t…

  * * *

  Commodore Moshe Tellman leaned back in the helmsman’s chair. All the readouts looked good. Nothing had changed for days. Another boring, uneventful bridge shift. Just the way he liked ‘em.

  Hummm, went the drive.

  The clipper skipped forward another light-second.

  Commodores didn’t pilot their own ships over in Big Navy, thought Moshe. But here, things were different. War or peace, a clipper was a clipper. He didn’t have fifteen hundred men aboard, to spit-shine his decks and deliver his meals. He had sixteen, cooped up together in this spatula-shaped
tin can. Twelve Tellmans, four mission crew. Six men, ten women.

  Here in the clipper fleet, admirals and commodores sat helm shifts, same as everyone else. And scrubbed toilets and swabbed decks, if it was their turn. War or peace, the job was the same job. When the red rocket went up, the cargo got different, and you got to shoot the guns lots more often than before, but the basic routine was still the same old routine, more or less.

  He’d always preferred to do without fancy titles, truth be told. “Moshe” had worked just fine, for ninety-eight years and through two prior wars. “Uncle Moshe” for the past forty or so, at least as far as every snot-nosed kid from Mishpocha Tellman was concerned. The fellow who ran the family’s clippers was always “uncle” to everyone younger than him. And that was fanciness enough for his taste.

  He’d grown up aboard a Tellman clipper. Served his active-duty Navy stint aboard a clipper, too, hauling supplies for a Long Range Action Squadron. Married another clipper brat, just like himself. Spent most of his adult life right here aboard the Dalia. Had children here. Went to war. Hauled cargo in peacetime. Never wanted any other life. Couldn’t even imagine one, truth be told.

  Hummm, went the drive.

  The Dalia skipped forward again.

  All indicators normal. All systems copacetic.

  He missed the kids. It felt strange to have no children aboard. The youngest crewman he had was fourteen. Goddamned war.

  Well, at least Leah and Mordy were safe. He’d worried about shipping them off to New Israel when the red rocket had gone up this time around, but war was war. Either the children stayed at Ninth Support Flotilla’s mobilization point on New Helena, or they went off to cousin Mendy’s, in Tel Aviv.

  The Mishpocha’s Tel Aviv compound was a decent enough place. He’d rather have the kids living with Mendy than hosted by strangers. Turned out for the best, anyway. Of all his children, Leah and Mordy were the ones he needed to worry about least. Mendy and his wife were going slightly nuts, what with eight out of ten staff mobilized and a hundred and fifty preteen clipper brats turning Tellman House upside-down on a daily basis, but the greatest hazard over there was getting caught in the crossfire of a water balloon fight out in the yard.