by Moshe Ben-Or
A third, on the heels of the second. A little further away this time.
The rocket alarm wailed like a banshee.
“Day late, peso short,” thought Maria.
The fourth seemed farther away, over by the work sheds somewhere.
The fifth and the sixth were farther still.
They were using the heavy rockets again. The ones made from propane tanks, that made the huge craters.
Jose had insisted that the engineers couldn’t leave until they’d built an earth block wall around every cottage and work shed; criss-cross lay two blocks thick. The OSD had thought it excessive. The surprise drills he’d found downright abusive.
Jose had simply brushed him off. Until Chief Delavre said otherwise, First Lieutenant Jose Rios was the physical security manager. Securing the site, and everyone on it, was his business. He didn’t tell Assistant Professor Campos how to run the plant, and he’d appreciate it if the on-site director extended him the same professional courtesy.
The morning he’d laid eyes on the craters from the first rocket attack and the shards of propane tank stuck in the blast walls, Professor Campos had gathered the staff and publicly apologized to Lieutenant Rios. That was the day everyone stopped bitching about the asshole PSM. And the day when Señora Morales’ snipers killed the first man.
There was another bang. This one was close enough to set the bed jumping up and down above her head.
“Stop it!” screamed Alice. “Stop it, you bastards! Stop! We’re trying to help you!”
Firecrackers popped, off in the distance. Ripping canvass. More firecrackers. A distant bang.
Jose’s UAVs, working over the launch sites.
Maria crawled over to the other bed.
Alice was curled up into a little quivering ball in the corner, whimpering between sobs.
“Shush,” whispered Maria, curling up around her. “Shush. They don’t know. You can’t say it out loud, and they don’t know.”
There was another distant bang, and more popping firecrackers.
“Why?” sobbed Alice. “Why don’t they know?
“There are unmarked components coming in from every department. Not mismarked, not partially-marked, not mangled in production. Completely clear. Ghost components. Components that cannot be traced. Components that don’t officially exist.
“Always just a few at a time. Always, despite the cell-level and departmental QA checks. Always just below the QC reporting threshold. Even when a few are caught, they just get tagged as defective and recycled automatically by the machinery, with no one the wiser.
“Buried in the assembly instructions I’ve been given, there’s a whole second poncho. A completely different design, nothing like what the Zin have provided. Better. Faster to morph. Quicker to adapt. More power-efficient. More secure than even the Zin design would be, if all the tracers and back doors they’ve put in didn’t exist. An amazing machine. And completely untraceable. A ghost.
“We make untraceable ghost weapons for them, every day.
“There must be people all over the Ministry, working to help them. The man who designed the ghost. The man who organized all this…
“There must be dozens of people, right here at this mill. We don’t know them, they don’t know us, but there must be people, in every department.
“We live like moles. We crawl through trenches. We hide in bunkers. We cower behind blast walls.
“I haven’t seen the sun in weeks! I’d give anything just to stand up outside, just to stand on my own two feet for a single second and smell the grass, and feel the sunlight on my face, and take just one, single, solitary breath!
“We are making weapons for them, and they shoot at us! We work to help them, and they kill us!
“They kill us, Maria!” sobbed Alice. “They kill us! Every. Single. Day.”
“The message will come,” answered Maria, hugging her friend. “It must come.
“They will learn. All this can’t be for nothing. There’s been a delay, that’s all. They don’t know, because there’s been a delay. We must hold on, Alice. We’ve got to hold on, no matter what. We have a mission. Like during the Siege.
“It will pass. All will be well. We’ve just got to do our jobs, and hold on.”
The rocket alarm blew all-clear. There was a knock on the door.
“You two all right in here?” asked Dolores, poking her head into the bedroom. “I’ve got to call in the personnel report.”
The shaft of brilliant white she brought with her cut Maria’s eyes like a razor, overwhelming the dim blue of the blackout night bulb.
“We’re fine,” answered Maria, screwing her eyes shut against the pain. “Don’t turn on the lights.”
The door banged shut again.
“Come on,” said Maria, “back to bed we go.”
Alice shook her head mutely.
“Come on,” insisted Maria, pulling her roommate out from under the bed as she scooted backward across the tile, “You’ll catch your death of cold, down on that floor.
“You can sleep with me again,” she continued, pushing aside the submachinegun she kept hanging by the head of the bed as she lowered Alice onto the sheets, “I won’t tell a soul.”
It was Alice’s submachinegun, technically. Martín had given it to her, when he’d learned where she was going. He’d even made her shoot at some paper targets, down at the campus police range.
Alice had given the thing to her, the moment they’d settled down. Asked Jose to write up an Exception to Policy, as the PSM. She couldn’t imagine shooting a living creature with it. Not even to save her own life. She wouldn’t have carried her derringer and stiletto either, if her friends hadn’t insisted.
The girl turned over and buried her face in Maria’s chest. The blankets made everything warm within seconds. But Alice still shivered with her head under the covers, wet face buried between Maria’s breasts.
* * *
Reginald Freeman plopped exhaustedly onto the bed. The pinnace ride back from Eli’s hadn’t sobered him up one bit. Shekar hit hard, and went straight to the head. Wasn’t just the proof. He drank cask-strength brandy all the time. Southern New Israel’s signature hundred-and-ten-proof braincell killer had a special quality to it. Something about the dates it was distilled from, or the way it was aged with the sweet acacia, or perhaps the cayenne pepper that gave it that distinctive burn. It just seemed to flash to vapor, right on your tongue. You were a goner before you knew it.
Zahav Special Blend, Shimon’s favorite. He’d saved the bottle to celebrate victory. And now he’d ended up drinking it to his memory, instead of drinking it with him. Eli had helped, a little. But he’d never been much of a drinker. Too scrawny. Lightworlders couldn’t hold their liquor, anyway. Especially Havenites. But Eli had helped.
It was worse for Eli than for him. Eli couldn’t even mourn properly. There had simply been no time to sit on the floor for a week, and pray and weep, and receive visitors bearing condolences, and make the world go away while a man learned to live without the precious thing he’d lost.
There was strength in ritual. It gave a man’s life structure, when it was needed most. But Eli couldn’t sit shiva for his wife and daughters. There simply hadn’t been time.
The wound had never fully healed. He’d leaned on Shimon. They’d always been close as brothers, ever since they’d been thrown together by accident at Volantis, during the Second Imperial War.
And now Shimon was gone also. He’d bought them the precious thing they all needed. And he’d died in the heat of battle, without ever seeing its fruit.
They had Shimon’s victory. They had it in spades. The impossible victory from the impossible plan. Twelve separate task forces. Partial-solution jumps. Wildcatters relaying messages…
Impossible. Unworkable. Too intricate. Completely out of character, and in violation of every principle of operational art. Everything hanging by a thread, the whole time.
It shouldn’t have worked,
but it did. It did because of Shimon.
No one else had that gift. That supernatural thing he did, to step into the other guy’s mind, and know exactly what he would do. To know exactly when he would do it. Shimon had failed only once, in the beginning, because he didn’t know Sayf al-Masrikh. But once he knew…
Shimon would have known that Sayf al-Masrikh would turn about and fight, in the end. Reginald Freeman didn’t. But he’d finished the bastard off anyway, in that mess of a meeting engagement. Finished him good, once and for all. Not one single Zin capital ship had made it back up the gradient. He’d hunted down every last one.
But that wouldn’t bring Shimon back, may he rest in peace. Or Leo. Or Eli’s wife and daughters. Or Mark Levsson. Or Viktor Frolov. Or six out of every ten men in the prewar Fleet, or every sixth Havenite, or every seventh Belter…
Two and a half billion people. The entire population of Sparta. Gone. And that didn’t include Timon. Nobody knew what was going on on Timon. They’d lost all their ansibles, early.
Eli was right, they couldn’t take Paradise. The Fleet was too worn out. The Zin had lost well over half their total force, maybe close to two thirds. But they still had ships to spare.
They had a new commander up there. Some cautious old tomcat who’d generated reserves out of nowhere, and locked up the system tighter than a virgin’s cunt.
The Fleet couldn’t beat him at Paradise, the shape it was in. But the new Head Cat was in no hurry to come down off the gradient, either. The entire Zin effort was threatened. Their every front had gone unstable, all of a sudden.
The Imperials had launched their promised offensive, finally. Typical slant-eye treachery, that. Waited ‘till it was all over but the mop-up, out here. Sit in the tree and let the tigers fight. Claimed “final preparations” for months, as their excuse.
But now they were pushing hard. The threat to Tiantiju gave them motivation, and the Son of Heaven had finally chopped enough heads to elevate competent officers, and get his fleet and logistical systems into some kind of decent shape. Pressure on New Helena was slackening steadily.
The bleach-outs were doing something on their front, also. It was hard to tell precisely what, but the Imperials seemed to think it was a major effort to push the Zin back from Saint John. If there was one thing the Aryans’ chronic gender imbalance and massive populations were good for, it was absorbing casualties and pumping out new units.
New Head Cat had his hands full, and he couldn’t know how badly the Fleet was hurt. His scouts would give him an idea, given time. But by then the Fleet would be back at Hadassah.
Rebuild the defenses. Mine the jump points to a fare-thee-well. Allmother be praised, mines were one thing they wouldn’t run out of, any time soon. Stand on the defensive and let the Zin come to them.
Maybe launch some subsidiary operations toward Tienchen. Make it look like they were considering a push to link up with the Imperials. Send some raids-in-force from Tròido in the general direction of Timon, convergent with the Aryans’ probable offensive. That would give the added benefit of getting scout eyes on whatever the bleach-outs were doing. If the Zin looked to pull back from Timon, Tenth Fleet had to get there before the Omicronians.
Keep new Head Cat busy, that was the main thing. Keep him distracted while the Fleet rebuilt its strength.
It was all about logistics now. Logistics and production. Build ships. Train crews. Form squadrons. Whoever fielded new units fastest would win the game. Zin industrial capacity was intact, but they had three major fronts to deal with.
Say what you will of the Son of Heaven and his methods, but he’d finally gotten his remaining hundred and twenty billion little yellow ants organized. Hundred and twenty-three billion, as of last week. They’d finally taken Quixing and Xuifeng back, what was left of them.
Pumping out warships like there was no tomorrow. Didn’t fucking matter if Imperial frigates and light cruisers were next thing to single-use, cannon fodder with untrained crews. Didn’t fucking matter if the Imperial Navy didn’t even bother to name the bloody things anymore.
Son of Heaven had the resource base. He would crush his enemy by sheer mass, as long as his shipyards kept working and he could keep his fleets supplied. Steamroll the fuckers right back up the Great Highway to Paradise. Attrit them down to nothing, one grinding, bloody mess at a time.
The Vicar of the Aryan Christ, curse him to eternal icy hell, was following the exact same strategy. He only had twelve worlds left of his original twenty-five, but they still had almost ninety billion people between them. Aryan women calved every year, like clockwork, from the day they turned thirteen until they dropped dead at forty, and they pumped out two boys for every girl. The Fuhrer had whole fleet task forces crewed by nothing but teenage fanatics in SS uniforms, eager to throw away their lives in droves for the greater glory of the Master Race.
Every Aryan world he took back from the Zin meant more warm bodies to throw into the furnace. Primitive weapons, shitty training and lockstep tactics didn’t mean jack, when quantity had a quality all its own. After this war was over, the Archduchy would probably end up with more women than men for the first time in its entire history. And that was just fine with Fuhrer John.
Sayf al-Masrikh had stripped units from every front, then went and lost the greatest fleet in post-End Time War history out in the Badlands. Now everything was cracking up, and the whole Zin plan for this war had gone the hell out the window. The new Head Cat couldn’t concentrate all that he had left on the League. If he did, he’d lose the war in months.
The new Head Cat couldn’t concentrate on the League, but he could bet his furry ass the League would concentrate on him.
He didn’t have Shimon’s magic touch. But one thing Reginald Freeman had always been best at was organizing things.
That’s exactly what this war needed now. Organization. Get fucking methodical. Build ships. Train crews. Form groups and squadrons and task forces, and shake ‘em the hell down.
The League did not fight by attrition, or by throwing masses of half-trained cannon fodder at its enemies. The League didn’t have enough cannon fodder to throw, and never would. The two grinding steamrollers up on the Great Highway, the white one and the yellow one, would keep new Head Cat’s clawed paws full. And the League would have a strategy to buy time, and build back the quality forces that had always won its wars.
He’d sort all this out tomorrow, when he was sober again. Have a nice, long think on a clear head, hold a set of proper planning meetings, get fucking organized and figure out the right way forward from here. Now that the crisis was over, he owed the Council of Four a proposal on strategic direction for the coming standard year, and Fleet posture had to be reconfigured for defense. Thank the Allmother, Shimon had ordered a truly enormous expansion of the emergency recruiting program seven months ago. If it wasn’t for his foresight, things would really be up shit creek.
He would be the next Admiral of the Fleet. Eli was right about that one, too. Robert Bernard was a good man, a good admiral and a good XO, but Shimon had left him at Delta Triangulae to mind the store for a reason, and the Calculator was President of the Council, now. They simply couldn’t appoint a belter Admiral of the Fleet. It wouldn’t look right politically, whatever his qualifications. It was either him or Eli, and Eli didn’t want the job.
In the meantime, he should really check his personal mailbox. He hadn’t even seen a personal message in six months, never mind answer one.
“Secretary,” said Admiral Freeman, pulling himself up into a half-sitting sprawl so that the room would stop rocking and tilting, “find personal messages. Sort by priority and date.”
“One top-secret urgent message, seven hundred and fourteen unclassified urgent messages and twelve thousand, nine hundred and thirty-three other unclassified messages found,” answered the secretarial AI.
“Top-secret urgent personal message?” thought Reginald Freeman, “What in the heck...”
“Secretary,
authenticate originator of top-secret personal message.”
“Originator authenticated: Lieutenant Junior Grade Buzheslav Jaroslavovich, the Count Frolov.”
* * *
The Temple was progressing quite nicely, thought Klaus Weinberger, raising the teacup to his lips. Construction had stopped for the evening, but the site was still lit up, bright as day. The workers were lining up for the evening headcount. On the other side of the wire-topped fence, the buses had just pulled up.
The workers weren’t prisoners, exactly. Prison labor would not provide the quality of work he desired for on-campus projects, and especially for this one. Their food was ample, if monotonous, and their pay was good. They even got a small weekly ration package to take home to their families. Campus construction positions were much sought after, in the world outside the Wall. But the distinction between University and Outside remained quite sharp.
“Do you have to demolish the Salvador Chapel, Dean?” asked Penelope Cruz, hugging her master from behind. “You’ve already demolished the cathedral. Surely you can build the new office tower somewhere else.”
“It’s a waste of space,” replied Doctor Weinberger. “No one used that building before the war, and no one uses it now. Space is at a premium on this campus.”
“But it’s such a beautiful old place,” replied Penny, caressing his chest. “Perhaps it can be re-purposed? Surely the Goddess, too, needs a chapel.” Her fingers were fiddling seductively with a button.
She knew it wasn’t suitable, thought the dean. The Goddess would have her Temple, when it was complete. The idea of The Mother of All being served in the Salvador Chapel…
Lora Duarte would quite appreciate the delicious irony, smiled the dictator of Polytechnic University. King Hernan spinning in his grave every time she turned atop the predella and raised up the golden ankh.
The deity of his foremost enemies, served in the chapel whose cornerstone he had personally laid! His own Royal College of Military Engineering, taken over by devotees of the Goddess!