by Moshe Ben-Or
“You were just finished with a stock reshuffle. Optimizing the warehouse for the next shipment. You thought that there might be something wrong with the conveyor belt. A stuck roller, perhaps. You gave it a whirl to check it out.
“Your good friend the inventory manager heard a rumor that the next convoy was due early, day after tomorrow. You always make up the list for the next shipment in advance, and keep it separate from the warehouse books. An obsessive warehouse tech’s harmless habit.
“Peace and Blessings, ladies. The Goddess walk with you and yours.”
The stranger dropped the tiny tube into Alice’s trembling hand. A single step, and he dissolved into darkness.
Like a ghost, thought Maria. As if he never existed. When she glanced again at the conveyor belt, the squarish bundles were gone.
* * *
Yoseph Weismann walks the corridors of Monteforte.
Strong Mountain, he thinks. An excellent name for this place. Patty Sleager made it up. She is good at this stuff, making up romantic, stirring names to fire the Paradisians’ imaginations. There is some historical association with that name, some ancient legend she is exploiting, a grand old story from their childhoods, brought suddenly to life. The Hebrew-speakers call it Har Maoz.
It truly is a fortress mountain, purpose-built, buried deep beneath the rock. Overhead, tower the mighty peaks of the Montes Dourados. An untrampled, toxic wilderness extends for hundreds of kilometers all around. Stealthy ventilation shafts and camouflaged corridors lead to the surface. A whole distributed network of custom-built machinery provides air and light.
There was already an ancient cave system here, extending deep into the limestone. The rest is no improvisation hacked together hastily by Leo and himself, like the FPA’s first, original camp, with nothing but their own skills and a poncho AI’s help in establishing rules of thumb. Har Maoz is product of a real architect’s work. Proud labor of a real-life mining engineer, and real-life, experienced construction foremen.
The customer’s requirements had seemed odd and new to those men. The available tools few, and strangely different from what they were used to. The highly-motivated workforce surprisingly large, ridiculously young, almost entirely unskilled, and in need of unusually close supervision.
The trip here had confused and disoriented them. They’d understood that it was meant to. They’d trudged for days with one hand holding on to a guide rope, stealthed up amid the howling wilderness, wearing ponchos specially programmed to let them see nothing but monotone, able to discern not a single landmark, but only the ground immediately beneath their feet. Walking in circles, though they’d known it not, until not a single one of them had any earthly idea where he was anymore. But once they’d gotten here, to the limestone caves beneath this unremarkable mountain, they had done a remarkable job. The one thing they did not lack, besides skill at their jobs, was will to triumph.
The Paradisians are not a stupid people, thinks Yosi, malicious blabber by idiots to the contrary notwithstanding. Their world is what it is, not because of any lack of intelligence on their part, but because of the things they’d been taught as children, and wholeheartedly come to believe.
Miri is talking to some kid around the corner. Some bawling girl who sounds somewhere between seven and eight.
“Sergeant Lara yelled at me! She threw me out! She hates me! I can do nothing right!”
“Sergeant Lara doesn’t hate you, sweetie. She wants you to get better. You were doing the incision wrong, that’s all.”
“But I was trying!”
“It’s not enough to try, honey. If you don’t get it right, the man you treat will die before he makes it to the aid station. Either his airway will collapse and he will suffocate, or he will bleed to death, or you will choke him with the tube. You have to get the emergency tracheotomy right, every time, and you have to do it fast. Remember, there might be shooting going on. Men might be maneuvering all around you. You have to keep calm, no matter what, you have to do the job right, and you have to evacuate your casualty.
“Sergeant Lara screams at everyone, for effect. She screamed at me, too. Very loud.
“Lieutenant Rivkeh will scream at you, also, at the final exam. And curse and stomp her feet, and throw chairs, and bang pots and pans all over the place.
“When they did their finals in high school, they shot guns, right next to them in the room. They had simulated mortar bombs going off and full-fidelity VR flechettes whizzing right over their heads. If we had the facilities, we’d do that here, too.
“Come on, I’ll show the procedure to you again, and then we’ll practice until you have it. That’s why you’re here.”
Six, decides Yosi. Straight-up six. Not even an Israeli eight-year-old would act that immature.
The girl isn’t six, of course. Yosi can see her now, off in the side room as he comes down the hall, still sniffling as she kneels over the practice dummy. Fourteen, if not sixteen. Tits like melons. Grown-ass woman, ready to wed. Acting like a goddamned six-year-old.
Children, thinks Yosi. Strange, foreign children in grown-up bodies. That’s what they’d been treated as, their whole entire lives, that’s what they think themselves to be, and that’s what they act as. Try as he might, he would never understand it.
“Child of thirteen.” What utter oxymoron! Sometimes, the damned Zin are less alien than these people.
Har Maoz is full of kids like that girl. It seems like every second new recruit is under eighteen. Farm boys, townies, street toughs from all the way out in San Angelo, a whole gaggle of girls from the Sisters’ Orphanage over in Layos… Even a few orphan hacendados’ kids, here and there, ones who’d managed to make it out and over to the neighbors’, somehow, when cannibals had overrun their home.
He would’ve thought that it should be otherwise. Candidates are plentiful as dust. But Patty wants them young, out here in the Field Force. Less bullshit to sweep away, that’s the way she’d put it.
The clutch of hacendado kids are surprisingly good leader material, actually. A little snobbish and lazy, at first, but they’d all stuck together, and buckled down fast. Determined to prove their worth to Señora Morales’ alien military specialists. Real concerned not to show weakness in front of the hoi polloi.
They know they belong out front. It’s in their damned blood. The hoi polloi know it, too. They don’t always like it, but they know it. There’s a certain way this planet has always run. There’s a certain way it always will.
Pretty much every one of those kids will end up with NCO stripes at least, when the train-up is over. There should be wash-outs, in the normal course of things, but there are almost none. Maybe it’s the way Patty had picked them out. She seems to know them all from before the War, or at least their older brothers and sisters.
It’s her world, supposes Yosi. She knows best.
The kids were working out better than their elders in training, just the way she’d said they would. That’s why he’d let her keep them in separate units and bring them here, to Har Maoz, away from the so-called “adults”, like she’d wanted to from the beginning. Two whole battalions with no one over twenty, save a few Leaguer officers, and the occasional Imperial.
That’s why he’d let her do all the other stuff she’d wanted done, too. All this crazy shit that no one would have ever permitted, back Home.
Take this business with embedding female teams into male units, so-called “insurance” and co-ed bunks all over the bloody place. It should have caused all kinds of trouble. Back Home, it would be grounds for men killing each other, and outfits simply falling apart. But, somehow, it just didn’t happen that way, here.
And this weird new Goddess of hers, with the strange, loopy cross that he’d never before either seen or heard of. That seemed to be related.
Simply alien psychology. People were just different in this place, and it went more than skin deep. Skin was nothing. Culture, culture was everything.
Patty wasn’t out to sim
ply destroy one culture. She was out to build another. Or, perhaps, rebuild it. He couldn’t tell if she was simply improvising based on something, or if she was outright copying. Perhaps a bit of both. Her idea of some very old thing.
He’d thought that this Goddess of hers was the Spartans’ Allmother, at first, or some weird version of the Gaians’ Eternal Spirit, but She wasn’t. She kind of claimed to be, but She had her own, entirely separate Creed, complete with hallowed ritual and ancient Holy Book. The Living Goddess of Many Names, She Who is Found Within.
The kids all seemed to know who She was, though. Patty hadn’t just made Her up on the spot, the way she’d made up the mysterious Señora Eva Morales.
It was weird. It was like they’d expected to hear Her Word from Patty’s lips, especially the blancos. Like it just fit, to see a white, blond girl in camouflage in the middle of these woods, in a place called Monteforte, with a rifle slung over her back and fire in her eyes, preaching the gospel of the loopy cross as she rallied them against the alien invaders. As if they had always known, but had simply forgotten. As if they were waking from some long, enfeebling dream, and shaking off the lethargy of slumber.
Some of them had known the hymns and blessings, from the beginning. Only a few, but a surprisingly numerous few. Even hacendado kids. To some of those, it had felt like a pretense, at first. Just a childhood game, played again. But there’d been others. There’d been some who’d already believed. Mostly girls, surprisingly enough. The Goddess promised something special, to them. Some great, mysterious, subtle power.
It was like they’d been afraid to show it, forced to hide it all their lives. The ones who’d known were just plain on fire, now.
Patty Sleager’s Goddess of the loopy cross had a history, it seemed, upon this world. A fierce history. A romantic past that the kids all wanted to embrace, because they thought that it would make them fierce, too. An ancient legacy, full of martial glory, that Patty knew like the back of her hand, and was milking for all it was worth.
That woman was something else entirely. Who would have thought, when they’d first met?
Well, her approach was odd but it was working. So who was he, to look a gift camel in the mouth? He needed an army, and that’s exactly what he was about to get. This god or that god, what did it matter? These people were aliens. It’s not like he expected them all to turn around and make giyur all of a sudden.
Shimshon seemed to know who this Goddess was, too. When he saw the copper loopy cross dangling from its string around Patty’s neck, he didn’t even blink twice. He’d extended peace and blessings in the weirdest-accented Standard Yosi had ever heard, and asked for the favor of the Learned Sister’s name. Didn’t seem to believe her when she’d called herself “Patty Sleager,” or denied the title, either. But he’d hidden it well, and changed the subject right away.
Shimshon is another useful new mystery ‘round these parts. Damned near the only one of the two thousand, nine hundred and sixty-seven survivors to have needed neither doctor nor shrink, when he’d walked off the transport from Hope Colony. Walked off one shuttle in July 3756, with nothing to report and a clean bill of health, turned right around and walked onto another with the regular draft from Timon in September.
Nothing happened, you see. Just hid in the woods for two years. Shot a couple-three bleach-outs from ambush, when they got too close, but nothing serious. Article 12 says to resist, not to commit suicide. What was one man supposed to do, against a whole damned bleach-out army? No, never linked up with anyone else. Out hiking in the woods, and the whole damned town gets slimed with nanites and sytoxin. The heck was he supposed to do? Give him a uniform and a unit, all he wanted was a good, clean fight. Let him kill some more bleach-outs. A billion or ten would be nice.
Shrinks had misgivings. He was too damned normal, for what he’d been through. Knew that he was lying through his teeth, but there was nothing to hang a hat on. He’d passed all the psych tests. The brain scans and the med exams all came back copacetic. What were they supposed to do? He was a League Minor, he had his Common Code rights.
So they gave him his unit. He’d tested out right at the top. But they wouldn’t send him to fight the bleach-outs. Too much baggage there, for their comfort. Afraid he’d go psycho, or something.
7869th Separate Shock Battalion, XXXVIIIth Spaceborne Corps. Corps Reconnaissance, out on the Imperial border.
They’d met before, at Castle Saar, just about eleven years ago, now.
Nothing much had happened out with the Lightning Corps, either, if you asked Shimshon. Just a trifle of a snag, out on Chiang Mai. A few flechettes exchanged with the slant-eyes during the Incident, no big deal. Spartan mech company from Seventy-Seventh Division got into a spot of trouble. Had to go get ‘em. Got a little warm. Took some artillery, slant-eyes caught up. LT got pinned by a bit of rock on the way out.
Well, the rock was kinda heavy. That’s why they called him Shimshon now. Yeah, they gave him a medal. Yes, yes, the Ot HaKavod, he didn’t like to wear it. Really shouldn’t have. Like he said, it was no great shakes. But it was nice of the LT’s family to go to all this trouble on his behalf.
Same exact Shimshon now as then. Lying through his damned teeth, the whole way.
Just showed up out of the blue in Arani, while Leo was busy sorting out that mess of a dispute between the village patriarch and Señor Desousa. Simply walked in, as if the security perimeter didn’t exist. Past two observation posts and a roving patrol, and the village sentries and the moat-and-wall, and Señor Desousa’s merry bunch of cutthroats. Not a single soul had seen him, until he’d popped out of thin air right in front of Leo, and said hello.
He’s just up ahead, now. Leo is telling the story with the rock again, to the Havenite doctor waiting out in the hallway. The couple of Paradisian girls Doc Reuven has for medics are eavesdropping with their mouths open. From their expressions, muses Yosi, you’d think that they’d both jump into Shimshon’s bunk tonight, if he let them, and cause all kinds of trouble. But they won’t. Not just because Shimshon won’t let them, but because they’re insured with someone else before the Goddess, whatever the heck that means. They both have a man’s bunk to sleep in, tonight and every other night, and that’s exactly where they’ll go.
Sometimes, that “insurance” stuff seems a lot like marriage. Except when it doesn’t.
“No, it was not a five-hundred-kilo rock,” says Shimshon as Yosi walks up. “His cousin Esko likes to exaggerate. It was maybe two hundred kilos, tops, and that was before I cut the top off with my vibro. All I had to do was tilt it a bit after that. It only needed to come up a few centimeters to free the LT’s legs. Chiang Mai surface gravity is lower even than here. Besides, I was highly motivated. Those samurai were lighting us up like you wouldn’t believe. Sons of bitches had us dead to rights. No offense, Shin.”
“None taken,” smiles Shin Takawa, “I am glad my countrymen’s marksmanship wasn’t quite up to par, in your case.”
Shimshon is very hard to dislike, thinks Yosi, when he wants to pour on the charm. Which doesn’t make him any less of a self-effacing, lying no-goodnik. The more he hangs around this man, the less Yosi believes that he’d just hidden in the woods for two years, out on Hope Colony.
There’s a thing about Shimshon. Some strangeness he can feel, behind those cold, lethal steel-gray eyes with the unblinking cobra stare. An alienness, somehow, though he can’t quite put his finger on it.
Something happened to this man, out on Hope. Something that he’s never talked about and never will. Something that had changed him forever. Something he would take with him to his grave. Whatever that something was, it was still with him, right there behind those unblinking, steel-gray eyes, and it always would be.
And that whole story about just hanging around down by the coast for twelve months until he’d heard a rumor that some fine Señora had hired a Spartan prince to set up an army for her up in Angeles Province was nothing but a bunch of pure, bald-faced bull.
Just started walking up from San Cristobal Province sometime at the beginning of November, with winter coming on early, the leaves already off the trees all over the fucking place up at altitude, rain pouring cats and dogs, and all the passes but the Chungara snowed two meters under. Never mind bandits, Yellow Rats, Zin patrols and Heaven knows what the fuck else. Took less than a month. Only a small spot of trouble on the way. Picked up some useful souvenirs, though.
Sure thing, bud. And pigs can fly. There’s some overhead right now. Don’t you hear the oinking?
Shimshon Ben-Yehudah is a lying, two-faced no-goodnik. And if he had another dozen like him in the Free Paradise Army, he could waltz into the Oasis tomorrow, kill Prince Khharq in his bed, and bring the bastard’s furry hide back for a throw rug, with nary a shot fired.
“So how did you get out of active reserve duty?” asks Leo. “I never did find out.”
“Your mother’s illustrious relatives helped. Crown University Trade School, all-expense, and then an Itinerant Small Business license. Shimshon’s Drive and Space Systems Engineering, Avigdor Ben-Yehudah, sole proprietor. Turns out I’m quite good at fixing jump drives, and all kinds of other things.”
“Freight out to Tròido, then?”
“Oh, well past that. I’ve gone all the way out to the edge of the Gray, a couple-three times. Nonaligned Worlds, far side of the Empire, Fringe… It’s a great, big, hairy universe out there, full of all kinds of strange and wondrous things for a skilled man to profit from.”
“Gentlemen,” remarks Yosi, walking up, “are we all ready to proceed?”
“Just about,” answers Shimshon nonchalantly, as he turns toward the far end of the hallway. “Should be quite the show. This man’s grandfather doesn’t do anything by halves.”
The suddenly-grim Havenite doctor rounds up his two charges on his way back in the opposite direction. They aren’t here to watch Shimshon’s amazing show. They are here in case Shimshon’s amazing show should go horribly wrong. So is the focused Paradisian fellow behind the plasma generator, and the double-squad of suddenly-nervous kids with EMP guns lining up across the hallway at his shouted command. Great wonders can be dangerous. This one, most certainly is.