The Grapple

by Moshe Ben-Or

  It was controlled chaos out in the clipper’s central hallway. No surprises there, either. Goldeh had drilled the whole crew mercilessly, again and again, until they were all as perfect at it as any creature alive could get, short of dealing with the real thing.

  No one had minded in the least. Especially those old enough to have seen the real thing before, up close and personal. Moshe Tellman’s first mascal had come at Volantis, during the Second Imperial War. He dreamt it still, sometimes. He would never forget it, ‘till his dying day.

  All the decks had been retracted. The Dalia’s core was one long canyon, bow to stern. Crewmen and bots were towing stretchers every which way. Sickbay; second OR; autodoc bay; just pull into a human support compartment, snap to a wall and hook into the nearest rebreather port. It all depended on what the triage tag said.

  A pack of mechanical spiders came flying right past the commodore’s face, towing bundles marked with white circle and red Magen David. Compressed-air attitude jets puffed from three-fingered metallic claws as they aimed for a landing at the nearest outgoing transfer chute.

  “Heads up, uncle!” yelled Shimon, deflecting a stretcher as it came shooting out the lock.

  Huge red diamond tag with a giant white three.

  Critical, Complexity Three. Surgical. Those went to the autodoc bay.

  Moshe grabbed the stretcher and pushed off the wall, towing the thing aft, where the Mission Crew surgical team they’d picked up on New Israel had filled a bay with a whole battery of mechanical doctors.

  The buck spaceman on the stretcher had been peppered by shrapnel and flayed by superheated steam from thigh to ankle. A bursting coolant pipe. He had category two radiation burns from the waist down to go with it. Burn-through, probably. That’s what had burst the pipe, and breached his control pod.

  He was still conscious. Poor devil.

  The wounded man’s mouth was open. Through his ship suit glove, Moshe could feel the stretcher’s transparent air canopy vibrating as he screamed in pain. Either the Hector’s doctors had run out of nanomorph, or he couldn’t have any for some reason. Nothing but morphine delivered by nanite straight to the brain would help the poor boy, given the injuries he had.

  The human body is an incredible machine, thought the Dalia’s captain as he pulled the stretcher forward through the series of smart tarps that made up the improvised surgical bay’s quick-transit membrane airlock. Sometimes, that wasn’t a good thing.

  The stretcher’s canopy retracted automatically as its AI detected a breathable atmosphere.

  “A-A-A-I-I-I!” howled the teenage spaceman on the stretcher, clutching at the Allmother crystal around his neck, “Ma-a-a-ma-a-a!!!”

  No telling if he was calling for his mother, or for his deity, thought Moshe Tellman. Probably both. No shame in that. No shame in that at all.

  “Shush, honey, shush!” answered the surgical nurse as she pulled her new patient toward the nearest free autodoc, “Mama’s here. Mama’s gotcha. You’re gonna be just fine.”

  * * *

  “I have you now!” gasped Sayf al-Masrikh, panting from the heat. “I have you! Filth! Scum! You’re finished! You’ll not get away from me again!”

  They had nowhere to go. He’d already killed over half of them. They would all die here. All of them! He would crush the Jews, right here at Hadassah! He would crush their evil, once and for all!

  The Baibars’ guns tolled another volley. There was a distant blowing of horns as the ship’s engineer pulsed the steam valves.

  “No matter,” resolved Sayf al-Masrikh. The enemy’s ships were puffing coolant, too. They would break first, not him! He had more ships! He had the throw weight of shell! He had backed them right out into interstellar space, away from any possible jump point. The sons of apes and pigs would all die here! It would not be long now!

  On the COP display, a good fifth of the enemy’s crumbling force broke formation, fleeing pell-mell into the blackness of interstellar space.

  “They panic, saydikh!” exulted his first officer. “The cowards flee before you!”

  It would not help them. They would not escape! They had nowhere to escape to!

  “Fleet, ahead flank!” ordered the Zin admiral.

  The infidel blue wall before him reeled back, desperately spitting shells and missiles.

  Keeping just on the edge of maximum gun range. That wouldn’t help them either. The enemy simply prolonged the inevitable.

  They would not surrender. He wouldn’t take a surrender, anyway, even if they tried. The faithful of Allakh had no mercy for the minions of Shaitan! There were no gharqad trees out here in space!

  “Die, apes!” hissed Sayf al-Masrikh as the Baibars’ guns loosed volley after volley against the enemy, “Die, you Satanic filth!”

  Virtual reality broke up in bursts of static.

  “Saydikh...” began the first officer as the Baibars skipped out of the enemy battleship’s beaten zone.

  The COP updated itself as the Fleet’s fusion centers processed arriving wavefronts.

  Behind the enemy’s fleet, where no unknown ship had any right to be, there floated a cloud of the strange things the kuffar called “clippers.” Odd, uneconomical crosses between warship and cargo ship. No good at either role, really. Too fragile in the first. Too expensive in the second. All they were actually good for was going fast with some two thousand standard container equivalent units; about forty-six kilotons’ worth of cargo, when you subtracted mass of tare.

  “More,” realized Sayf al-Masrikh in a jolt of pure horror.

  More, this time. It wouldn’t be containerized. That’s what the strange, flattened-diamond hull was for. All those expensive, smart-material bay partitions. All that internal handling equipment. All those transfer chutes. Dozens of them, dorsal and ventral. More cargo chutes than any normal freighter had any business needing. Everything multipurpose. Everything reconfigurable. Liquids or solids; standard containers, pallets or loose bulk; it didn’t matter.

  Because the reference design cargo was not containerized goods. Because the reference design cargo had to be transferred fast.

  Hundreds of them. Megatons of ammunition, shield matter, jump fuel and fresh coolant. Above all else, fresh coolant!

  On the COP display, another fifth of the enemy broke formation and fled. But other icons were taking their place. Old icons. The AI knew these signatures. The ones who had fled before, were now coming back.

  “Their skins, saydikh!” the first officer called out in terror.

  The returning enemy ships were cold. Ice-cold. Heatsinks full of fresh, clean coolant, chilled down to forty below.

  How?!! How, in the name of Allakh?!

  No fleet of cargo ships had preceded the enemy into this system. No fleet of enemy cargo ships had entered any Hadassah jump zone at any time, much less fled outward to this place, impossibly far from any jump zone. His scouts had detected no wavefronts. Old probes, sown long before he’d first set out up the gradient from Haven, had shown nothing of the sort.

  PGS jump…

  Impossible! They would have had to have known months in advance!

  Magic. Dark sorcery. The work of Shaitan Himself!

  It didn’t matter how. He couldn’t break through the enemy’s wall. Not in time, not in force. Not with his capital ships, and not with his escorts. His light units were reporting out of missiles left and right.

  He couldn’t chase down those clippers, even if he did break through with his capital ships. They would simply jump away. They were built to go fast. Fast as a frigate...

  It was too late anyway. While the wavefronts had been traveling toward him, the enemy had already resupplied a fifth of his force. Another fifth was being resupplied right now. By the time any effort of his broke through...

  The Baibars’ steam valves blew a desperate, long blast. The furnace-like air scorched the Zin admiral’s lungs.

  They were coming, thought Sayf al-Masrikh. The Jews were coming. With their magazin
es and shield matter tanks topped off. With jump fuel replenished. With heatsinks full of ice-cold coolant.

  They would fire. And the Fleet would fire back. And hull radiators could not be deployed, for the moment the fragile panels unreeled, bursting shells would tear them to shreds, and precious coolant would spill out, irretrievably, into the void. And his ships’ internal temperature would rise. And rise. And rise...

  “BREAK CONTACT!!!” roared Sayf al-Masrikh as he beheld the face of his death. “The Fleet will break contact!”

  * * *

  “First left, second right, third left,” muttered Maria, like a mantra. “First left, second right, third left. First left, second right, third left...”

  She didn’t know why she was doing this. The little paper triangle was burning a hole in her pocket.

  “First left, second right, third left...”

  The dark mass of Zoares Hall loomed before her in the darkness. There was no one on this part of campus this time of night. No one up to any good. Zoares Hall had been abandoned during the Siege. Gutted for parts by Facilities, and never restored. The new campus didn’t need swimming pools, or entertainment centers.

  “First left, second right, third left,” muttered Maria as she sprinted her way up the stairs to the front door. Her intestines churned with premonition.

  “First left, second right, third left,” she whispered endlessly, pattering her way down to the basement.

  The trapdoor was exactly where the dream had said it would be. In the beam of her squeeze light, the handle stuck up, slightly askew.

  It was free of dust.

  Her knees were shaking.

  “Should I go back?” she thought. She could still go back.

  Something compelled her forward. She couldn’t really tell what it was. Hope? Determination? Fear? What did she fear more, going forward or going back?

  The handle was free of dust.

  In the darkness, she felt invisible eyes.

  Watching. Something was watching, in the darkness. Someone was judging her. Judging her worth.

  Maria yanked up on the trapdoor. It lifted silently. Someone had oiled the hinges.

  The ladder was shiny aluminum. Beneath, loomed the darkness of the tunnel.

  She clipped the tiny squeeze light to her lapel and stepped onto the ladder. The trapdoor came back down over her head. For some reason she eased it down softly, without letting it make a thump. It didn’t feel right to make loud noises.

  The squeeze light swayed wildly on its hinge as she climbed down. Shadows danced on the walls.

  At the bottom, there was only one way to go. The tunnel sloped sharply downward.

  These utility tunnels had sat abandoned, thought Maria, since the beginning of the war. Even before then, how often did anyone come here?

  There had been no dust on the ladder. There was no dust on the floor.

  Maria’s teeth chattered full blast as she rushed down the tunnel. The squeeze light beam bounced around in time with her steps, revealing endless rows of bunched-up cables and snaking pipes.

  First left.

  Was it really the first? Or did she miss one before it?

  No, it was the first. Going forward, the tunnel floor was covered in dust. But not going left. Someone hadn’t wanted her to get lost.

  Second right.

  Third left.

  There was a light at the end of the tunnel. A cul-de-sac. A single bare bulb dangled from the ceiling. Someone was standing on the far side of its circle, by the dead-end wall.

  A girl. Blond ponytail.

  She turned at the sound of Maria’s steps.

  Tiny. A meter fifty, maybe less. Waif-like, delicate build. Not forty kilos soaking wet. Pale, almost translucent skin. The three thick horizontal silver stripes above her lapel tabs blended in seamlessly with the medium-width diagonal stripe across them.

  Azure tabs. Same color as her eyes. Engineer. Master’s student. Owned by a Senior Lecturer from her own school.

  “Blow at her and she’ll float away, like a dandelion wisp,” thought Maria.

  A fragile, elfin hand held up a little paper triangle. Her nails were pink. An impossible, natural pink, all their own. Like tiny rose petals.

  “So it wasn’t a dream,” said the girl.

  “No,” answered Maria, holding up her own little triangle. “No, it wasn’t a dream.”

  “How did it all happen?” asked the blond girl forlornly, waving about her hand. “All this?”

  The hand ended resting on her three horizontal stripes.

  “It was inevitable,” answered Maria. “Too many girls. You didn’t notice. I didn’t notice, either. Engineering was what, eighty percent male? Business was sixty-forty, and it was small. Poly was never a real business school, outside Accounting.

  “Science was ninety-five percent male. Medicine – seventy-five. That’s the half of campus where we hung out.

  “But there were all those girls from the nursing school. And H&SS. Do you remember the girls’ formations at last year’s First Assembly? A whole sea of red tabs… And then there was CA. Almost no boys at all.

  “There were as many of us as there were of them, before the Siege. Maybe more.”

  “No,” answered the blond girl. “That’s not it. Not by itself.

  “They changed. The men changed.”

  She ran her fingers across the three horizontal stripes on her lapel, as if trying to erase them.

  “Before all this... Martín… He was helpful. Kind. Always smiled at me. I always went to his office hours. He explained so carefully...

  “They were all nice,” sniffled the blond girl. “They’d hold the door for you. Help you carry things. Give you their notes from class...

  “I never felt in the least bit threatened. Not once. And then...”

  “Then the bombs fell,” interrupted Maria. “And we both had the gall to be surprised.”

  “The nurses knew,” said the blond girl. “Somehow, they knew.”

  “Instinct,” replied Maria. “They are trained to feel. But most of us saw it happening. We just didn’t pay attention.

  “What did you do during the Siege?”

  “Made things,” answered the blond girl. “Guns. Lots of guns. Helped with the cartridge line. And the line that packed shot and powder for the cannon. Whatever needed doing.

  “The charges had to be exact. The early guns were so fragile… Polymer barrels. That’s all the fabricator could make, when we started. High-strength polymer pipes. Reinforced with tape. Lots and lots of monofilament tape.

  “There was a bit of sheet metal at Facilities, but we didn’t have any working welders or laser cutters. We cut it by hand, and bent it into the first bayonets.

  “We took sheet metal to CA, and used the globe from the sculpture out front to press the metal into mirrors for limelights. Felíz broke up their statues, and burned the marble in a kiln to make lime. CA girls polished the mirrors with their blouses.

  “There wasn’t enough steel, before we’d fixed the power coils and built the smelter. Not in the right shapes and sizes.

  “The shot wasn’t real shot. It was just bolts and nuts, and scrap, even rocks. The fabricator could cut some of it into proper-sized pieces, but not all. We sorted it as best we could, packed it into buckets... Rolled the musket cartridges by hand, using scraps of fabric.

  “There was no room for error with the charges. None at all.

  “We worked twenty hours a day. Slept on the floor, under the tables. Peed into buckets right there. Felíz needed the urine to make saltpeter.

  “Martín organized us. He was tireless. He was everywhere. Helping, measuring, calibrating, encouraging us. We wouldn’t have made it without him. Him and Pillár, and Felíz, and Barboza, and Romeiro, and Jamesson.

  “Martín and Barboza fixed the big power coil for Pillár, you know that? I was there. I helped Martín.

  “Then Pillár made the smelter. We wouldn’t be here without that smelter. And the hammer
mill. He built that, too. I helped with the calculations.

  “It got better, slowly. Felíz figured out the saltpeter, so we didn’t need the pee buckets. Jamesson made the fabricator work with metal, properly. Pillár’s smelter started working. Facilities brought him steel. Rebar, some kind of stairs, heaven knows what else. Pieces of girder. Romeiro had them dismantling buildings.

  “We got proper lead shot. Paper for cartridges. Jamesson and Martín made cartridge-rolling machines. I helped with the designs.

  “We made better bayonets. Then sabers for the officers, and then for the gunners. Then Pillár made the giant dipper for the steel, and Jamesson finally fixed the other fabricator, the big industrial one. They dug out trenches next to the smelter, for molds... We cheered when we saw the first steel cannon roll out.

  “Our powder charges got bigger and bigger. The guns didn’t burst anymore, up on the Wall. They had real range now. Real power.

  “Then we made rifle-muskets, with real steel barrels. Minié balls. Felíz made potassium chlorate. We made percussion caps. No more flintlocks and slowmatch, and the cartridges were wax paper now. The men could volley reliably, even in the worst rain.

  “Then Felíz gave us dynamite and phosphorus, and we made grenades. Lots and lots of grenades.

  “We knew the fighting was ebbing. We could hear it. There was less and less demand for powder and shot. We could sleep more. We made a compressed earth block machine for Romeiro...”

  “Ever go up on the Wall?” interrupted Maria.

  “Once,” shuddered the blond girl, involuntarily hugging herself. “Early on.

  “They ran out of ammo up in Sector Three, right next to us. The Looters had assault bridges and polymer bundles. They were organized already by then, more or less. They were about to bridge the moat. If they took the battlement, the campus would fall.

  “We grabbed shot and powder off the line, and ran up there. Measured it out on the spot, best we could, gave it to the gunners...

  “I saw the cannon volley at the Looters, point-blank. I saw the one at the end burst. Regina’s cannon. She’d mismeasured the powder, and it killed her. Or maybe the barrel simply failed, who knows. And I saw the bayonet charge, after. Remarque’s Charge.