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The Grapple

Page 21

by Moshe Ben-Or


  “The connection is established, my lord” said the commo chief.

  Duke Reginald felt his muscles quiver imperceptibly as breath slid shakily in and out of his lungs. All around him, men knelt by their control pods, transfixed by awe and terror united in one. The air of the battle bridge pulsed with tension.

  He had given every Spartan captain in the Fleet his choice, when it came to this moment. The Belters had their own ritual. But as for themselves…

  Not one had refused. Not today; though they knew full well before Whom they would kneel, and Whom it was that they would dare to address directly, alongside His Firstborn.

  In this very moment, even in the midst of total war, all of Sparta was coming to a halt, as it had for three centuries. Exactly half a standard hour from now, at the stroke of an atomic clock, the cannon would fire and the brass trumps would blow, and the entire planet, child to elder, king to lowest commoner, would kneel in unison and prostrate itself, as priests cried out in forty-five languages for the merciful intercession of the Allmother.

  It had always been known, from the hoary days of Matthaios the Blessed, that there was a Day wherein the Allfather sat in awesome Judgment over the entirety of His Creation, and another, ten days later, when His Verdict for the coming year was forever sealed.

  As his very first official act in office, His Majesty Hector III, by the Grace of Heaven Caesar of All Sparta, Commander of the Armies and Protector of the Faith, had dispatched the Royal Society expedition that would observe wavefronts from the End Time War, and finally put an end to all disagreement regarding the exact date, and method of calculation. Upon his expedition’s return, Hector the Builder would proclaim his Edict, and commission the atomic clocks.

  Even through the greatest catastrophe Mankind had ever known, the Jews’ calendar had remained uninterrupted. Today, without any shadow of a doubt, was the awesome and terrible Day of Judgment, when even the Heavenly Hosts themselves stood still, and all Creation lay balanced upon the scale.

  This day they would know how His balance weighed for Sparta. They would know by late afternoon.

  The ansible feed came to life. Ancient words filled the cramped compartment and flew past, echoing down the empty corridors.

  Comms had arranged for synchronous AI subtitles, for those few who might require them to understand the archaic phrasing of His Given Word in its original Holy Tongue. But Reginald Freeman had no need of such things. He understood well enough.

  ...When you go forth to battle against your enemies and you see horse and chariot – a people more numerous than you – be not afraid of them, for the Lord your God is with you...

  Over by the starboard wall, a rating drew his vibro.

  “Minä maksan,” read the admiral from silently moving lips as the man drew a bloody line from temple to corner of mouth. Once. Again. “Minä maksan!”

  Duke Reginald’s hand reached for the weapon at his belt as, all across the bridge, man after man repeated the gesture.

  “Grant us victory this day, Almighty Father,” he prayed silently as the razor-sharp blade scored a bone-deep groove across his thumb, “Grant us victory, and I will pay. Me and mine, whatever your price!”

  The blood trickled wetly down his skin. In the graveyard silence of the bridge, the fearless ansible addressed out loud, Him to Whom the people of Sparta never dared raise voice.

  * * *

  “No!” whispered Maria. “No! Please, no!”

  He was in her mouth again. She could taste it. Her own blood. Her own shit. She could feel the tears and bloody snot, running down her face.

  “Mercy!” she whispered, “Please! Mercy!”

  Hernan Pillár had no mercy. No mercy for anyone.

  “It’s a dream,” thought Maria. “A dream! Just a dream! I’ll wake up! I always wake up!”

  She couldn’t. She wouldn’t wake up.

  His hand was on the back of her head. She gagged as he forced her forward.

  Suck it, bitch! Suck it good! You gonna clean up your shit!

  “Stop!” begged Maria.

  “Stop?” asked a Voice. “Stop? Is that the best you can do?

  “Who’ll make him stop?

  “You think you’re his first? You think he’s the only one? You think you’re the only one?”

  She wasn’t. He wasn’t. She could see them. All of them.

  ...Miguel leered as his hand squeezed his pet A-tabber’s bottom.

  I’m her first, every way. Cooks, cleans, does what she’s told, like a good girl. That’s why I’m Pinning her. No grass on the lawn, no trash in the head. A-tabbers ‘re the best. Ain’t that right, honey?

  These? Her friends. Still looking.

  ...A faceless mob flinched away from the propwash as the aircar came in for a landing just north of the railhead. The guards swung their batons, driving the crowd forward through the razor wire gate.

  What’re you goggling at? First time off campus?

  Labor sweep, señorita. That dam ain’t gonna build itself.

  ...“Please señores,” begged the ragged woman, “spare some change? Anything, please! Please, just a peseta. A bit of algae paste. A crust of bread. Anything! I got a daughter...

  “You can have her! Anything you want!”

  Sun’s up, there’s four of us, we’re University and we’ve got guns. As long as we stay on the main drag, we’re ok. Stick close to us, or they’ll cut your throat for the change in your pockets.

  What, those? They’re for sale. Everything’s for sale here. Girls, boys, whatever you want. They don’t have rations from the Dean, dearie.

  Come on, you said you wanted some nice soap.

  ...Yellow Rats dragged a screaming girl into an alley as Maria turned away from the minibus window.

  They’re gonna search her real close, you bet. She’s a suspect. Might be a bomb between them legs.

  ...Lorenzo’s eyes went all narrow and cold as she pushed him away.

  You think you’re fucking royalty, don’t you? Too good for anyone, is that it? We’re all beneath you?

  Lorenzo was the one who’d transferred her to Heavy Industry. He was the Senior Accountant. It had to be him.

  “Word is, Marty Milena saw a photo. Now she’s all sad about poor little you,” stage-whispered the Voice, dripping with acid. “Maybe they’ll transfer you to her office, now that you’re back at Agriculture. Mama Marty’s gonna keep you all safe from that horrible beast Hernan Pillár.

  “What’re you gonna do, tell her to stop?”

  There was a hand between her legs. A woman’s hand, slim and soft and long-fingered.

  A woman’s hand didn’t go with that Voice.

  Sharp nails pinched her clitoris and squeezed.

  “Stop them!” wept Maria, gasping from the pain. “You can stop them!”

  “Can I?” asked the Voice.

  “Yes! Yes, you can!” answered Maria. “I know you can! Stop them!”

  “And what will you do? Stand and watch? You’re good at that, aren’t you? Standing and watching? Letting others do your fighting for you?

  “Maria Cardozo, the girl who just stands there and watches!”

  ...A bloody cloud exploded from Tomás’ chest just as Dani smashed the Looter’s arm with her chair leg. The laser pistol fell to the ground.

  Too late, always too late.

  Maria tried to scream, but she couldn’t. Frozen then, frozen now. Always frozen.

  Don’t just stand there! Help me!

  ...Red spread across white fabric as nurses carried Dani away from the Wall. A lifeless hand escaped from beneath the sheet to drip ruby droplets off the stretcher.

  Bad place, Sector Three. Bad place. Those apartment buildings ’re too close. Looters can see the whole campus from the rooftops. They say moat’s gone shallow from the corpses.

  Someone’s organizing them up there. Some military officer. Almost broke through last night. Took the Vixens by surprise. Armagnier threw ‘em back.

  Dean should
n’t have put the Vixens up in Sector Three in the first place. Shouldn’t have put them anywhere. Girls don’t belong up on the Wall.

  What? Don’t give me that look. You know it’s true. Dame Lora says…

  Stop arguing, you two. No girls left up there, anyway.

  Don’t worry, our boys ’ll hold. Looters ’re starving over there. They’ve got cholera. Metal poisoning. They’ll be eating each other soon. Every day we get stronger and they get weaker. We just gotta hold on.

  CA Battalion gonna take Sector Three. Look, there’s Remarque! What I wouldn’t give for a night with him!

  Hey, watch it with that ladle! What’s wrong with you, girl?

  Her girlfriend was up there. Ladies’ Crew.

  Boyfriend? Yeah, she had one of those, too. Looter shot ‘im. First night.

  We don’t want her ladling stew right now. Come on Maria, help me with the bayonets.

  “I can help! I’ll help!” begged Maria. “Please, I’ll help!”

  “Help how?” asked the Voice. “What’re you good for?”

  “Anything! Anything you want! Tell me and I’ll do it! Just stop them! Please, stop them!”

  “You’ll help?”

  “I will. Whatever I can! Whatever you tell me! Please!”

  “Go here,” answered the Voice, showing her the way. “Tomorrow night, two-thirty past midnight. First left, second right, third left.

  “Take a bit of paper. Fold it, like this. Hold it between your fingers, like this. Raise your hand, like this.

  “This is your sign. This is how you’ll know the others.”

  Maria’s eyelids sprang open like spring-loaded shutters. She couldn’t move. Her muscles were stone; her bones – lead.

  “Am I still dreaming?” she wondered, feeling herself sit up.

  She was trapped behind glass, staring out through a stranger’s eyes.

  On its own, her body stood upright.

  On their own, her feet took a step.

  On their own her hands reached out to tear a scrap from the notebook atop her desk.

  She stared out through a stranger’s eyes as hands folded paper into a tiny triangle.

  The desk drawer opened. A neck that was not her own bent her gaze downward.

  A flood of freezing sweat washed the lead from her limbs. Gone. As if it had never been.

  She was alone in the room.

  The door was closed, the deadbolt still in place. The windows were still barred from the inside.

  There was no one here. There couldn’t be anyone here. Not unless he could walk through walls.

  At the bottom of the drawer, atop her broken tablet, between the ration book and the bottle of pills she’d gotten from the campus clinic, right next to the spare room key and the jade necklace Dani had given her last year for her birthday, there lay a tiny, black squeeze light.

  Maria’s knees buckled, and she found herself suddenly on the floor, curled into a fetal position in a puddle of her own making, shaking like a leaf.

  * * *

  The air blowing from the control pod’s vent felt like a furnace blast. The walls rang again and again with the tolling of guns. Virtual reality flickered madly as the ship’s overtaxed power and cooling systems struggled to keep up with demand. The microjump drive howled desperately up and down the scale.

  The Hector fought for her life. The Fleet fought for its life alongside her. Task Force Eighteen was down to six capital ships now, and that number was looking to drop again.

  “Third, raid on attached vectors,” commanded Baron Papadakis, drawing lines against the advancing wall of red icons on his COP. “First, set your spacing to one and a half. Don’t let them past.”

  His pod automedic pinged a dehydration warning. There was a hot trickle into his arm as it stepped up the pump rate on the IV.

  “It’s worse for the cats,” thought the commander of Task Force Eighteen, gasping for breath as overheated air scorched his lungs. “They’ve got fur, the bastards.”

  Horns blew staccato, muffled by distance.

  The heatsinks were full, then. The ship’s engineer was buying the captain time by pulsing the steam valves. Flash-cooling the ship. That couldn’t go on for long.

  They had to outlast, thought the baron. The Fleet had to outlast the Zin. Don’t let them break away, don’t let them rest, don’t let them deploy their radiators. Stand, fight, and outlast. Keep up the battle, no matter what. That was all there was to it.

  Big Boss’ plan depended upon three intangibles, and one unchangeable, cast-iron physical law. The intangibles came first. The iron discipline of the Fleet. The skill of its gunners and its helmsmen. And Head Cat’s irrational, boiling rage. Whatever else happened, they had to keep the enemy’s tunnel vision focused right here, upon this slowly-crumbling blue wall.

  It’s not like they had a choice, anymore. Out of the ecliptic now, twelve light-hours away from the star. There were no viable jump zones here. The Fleet had nowhere to go. Either the Plan worked, or they would all die.

  Virtual reality disappeared in a sudden blast of static.

  Another burn-through, thought the admiral. Aft lower quarter again, where that torpedo penetrator had grazed the hull.

  There was a sting and a hiss of hypo against his neck. VR reappeared. His total dose alarm was blinking orange.

  That was the fourth and final safe injection of rad-hard. The fifth he would only get if the alarm turned red.

  Stand and fight.

  Where the hell were those clippers?

  On the situation display, light-minutes behind the Fleet, in the cold interstellar blackness where no ship had any reasonable right to be, a swarm of blue icons flashed into existence.

  “Fleet, commence Phase Three,” came a cold, calm voice on the ansible.

  “How the heck can he manage to stay that calm in all this?” thought the admiral. They didn’t call him Chess Master just because he’d spent his Academy days hustling chess. Duke Reginald Freeman had nerves of steel, and ice water running through his veins. Once the battle was joined, nothing existed for that man, but for the COP, his Plan and elusive Victory. Fear and doubt were for lesser beings. Like one Anastasios Papadakis, for instance.

  “Eighteen, Battle Drill Nine,” ordered the baron, grinning with the relief of a death row convict pardoned upon the platform of a gallows.

  Resupply in contact. The toughest of all the drills in the book, but his task force would carry it out just fine. They’d done it countless times before.

  The intangibles had done their job, thought the commander of Task Force Eighteen. They had lasted, despite all. Just barely, but they’d lasted long enough.

  The men didn’t know. No one aboard this ship but him had known about the clippers.

  The commander sent to wait out in the blackness with his light cruiser detachment didn’t know. Not until he was in position, and opened his sealed packet, did he understand why his pack of ansible-equipped ships had to sit all the way out there and wait, while the rest of the Fleet fought to the last ship and the last shell, with the nation’s very life at stake.

  Even task force commanders and their deputies hadn’t known until the last minute. Only the night before, had Admiral Bar-El sent pinnaces to take them all to the David for an in-person briefing.

  The risk had simply been too great. A single inadvertent word, a single commo intercept, and the entire nation would be doomed.

  But the men had done their duty anyway. They’d trusted in the General Staff, they’d trusted in their officers, and they’d done their duty to the last.

  “Now cometh the Mighty Law of the Creator,” quoted Baron Papadakis as his hand grasped the Allmother crystal around his neck, “before Whom all must bow!”

  On the COP display, the crumbling blue wall of the Fleet threw a spray of icons backward as every fifth capital ship broke formation and fled toward the life-saving swarm of clippers, trailing puffs of escaping steam.

  * * *

  “Watch you
r approach, Betsalel,” warned Commodore Tellman, “you’re drifting too far left.

  “Avi, forward chute collars are icing up.”

  The Dalia was flying through a snowstorm. Literally, a snowstorm, thought Moshe. Puffy flakes were sticking to the hull, and turning to ice.

  A snowstorm, in space. Now, he’d seen everything.

  The Hector had her steam valves wide open. One and a quarter kilotons of superheated coolant, fountaining out into the vacuum. Gouts of snow washed over Commodore Tellman’s clipper as she drifted slowly into position.

  Out on the flat ventral surface of the Dalia’s primary hull, maintenance bots flared plasma torches to clear icy crust away from cargo chute docking collars.

  The battleship looked a fright, thought Moshe Tellman. Ablation scars and fresh welds everywhere. White patches of self-repair foam where focused beams of hard radiation had burned right through the hull. Something had gouged a whole chunk out of the Hector, aft low and off to port. A little bit over, and it would’ve taken the whole mast clean off. Had to be a torpedo hit. Nothing else could do such damage.

  She belonged at dock. But she was going right back out there anyway, as soon as the Dalia gave her what she needed.

  “Her Number Six coolant chute’s busted,” remarked Shimon tensely over the distant roar of firing attitude thrusters, “We’re gonna have to redirect.”

  “No, they’ve got it,” answered Avi.

  A torch flared blue on the battleship’s surface as the chute began to extend. A pair of bots perched on the end were welding the docking collar back together on the fly as it unreeled outward.

  Attitude thrusters pulsed again. The Dalia’s torch roared briefly as the clipper came to rest with respect to the Hector.

  There was a distant banging as docking collars came together. Seconds later, transfer pumps and impellers began to hum.

  “Mascal!” Goldeh’s voice cut through the tense silence of the virtual bridge “All hands on deck!”

  Well, no surprises there, thought Moshe Tellman as his control pod’s lid slid open. He would’ve been surprised if there weren’t mass casualties to deal with, even before he’d laid eyes on the Hector’s hull.

 

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