And what happens when the shock begins to dissipate? he wondered. What happens when we find out exactly the same thing happened everywhere else? And what happens when the bastards who did this finally communicate and tell us what the hell it is they want?
“I guess the good news is that they don’t simply want to go ahead and kill us all off . . . yet, at least,” he said out loud. Wilson looked at him, and he shrugged. “If that was what they wanted to do, I figure they’d still be dropping rocks,” he pointed out.
“Nothing to say they can’t go ahead and start doing it again anytime they want to,” Wilson responded, and he nodded.
“Absolutely. But you know, whoever these bastards are, they aren’t Superman. Hell, they’re not even Clark Kent! Look what the Air Force did to those transports, or shuttles, or whatever. Their technology’s obviously better than ours, or they wouldn’t be here, but how much better is it? Judging by Robinson’s YouTube post, we’re at least in shouting range.”
“Except for the fact that they can drop those fucking rocks on our heads and we can’t drop rocks on theirs,” Wilson growled.
“Agreed. But I’ve got to wonder what their logistics look like.” Both of Wilson’s eyebrows rose, and Dvorak snorted. “Hey, you were the Marine, so think about it. Is this Eisenhower getting ready to invade Normandy? Or Holland Smith and Marc Mitscher invading Iwo Jima? Or is it just Cortés going after the Aztecs on a frigging shoestring? From what we’re seeing over the Internet, they seem to be landing in a fairly small number of spots, and they have to have lost a bunch of people and equipment when all those transports went down. How much manpower can they actually have if they’ve come all the way from another star system? Do they have millions of troops stacked up in cryogenic sleep like cordwood? Or do they have only a few hundred thousand? Maybe even less?”
“However many they’ve got, they’ve still got the rock-droppers, too,” Wilson said.
“Agreed,” Dvorak repeated with a nod. “I’m only saying that if their technology isn’t that much better than ours, and if they don’t have one hell of a lot of manpower up there in orbit, then they’re probably going to find out that an entire planet’s a damned big mouthful.”
There was an ugly light in his eyes, and Sharon looked up quickly.
“David Dvorak—!” she began.
“Oh, don’t worry, honey.” He patted her on the shoulder. “Rob and I didn’t put all that time into Operation Hidey Hole just so we could do something stupid. We’re not going to forget about the kids, either.” He shrugged. “For that matter, we’re probably about as thoroughly out of their way as anybody could get right at the moment. And if it’s all the same with you, I think we’ll just stay there.”
“Damned right it’s ‘all the same’ to me!”
“I know. But I’m willing to bet you it’s not going to be very long at all before these people—or whatever they are—run into somebody who is prepared to do something stupid. Somebody who just doesn’t care anymore, for example. And when that happens, I don’t think they’ll enjoy the experience.”
. XIV .
Stephen Buchevsky stood by the road and wondered—again—just what the hell to do next.
Their pilot hadn’t managed to find any friendly airfields, after all. He’d done his best, but all but out of fuel, with his communications out and high-kiloton-range explosions dotting the face of Europe (and after dodging warning shots from an ancient Yugoslav Air Force MIG-21 which seemed convinced his aircraft had had something to do with the general mayhem), his options had been limited. He’d tried to make it into Romanian airspace—he’d actually managed to establish contact with the Romanian Air Force helicopter base at Caransebes and been cleared for approach—but he’d run out of time and gas. Despite the unpromising terrain over which he’d found himself when the tanks finally ran dry, he’d managed to find a stretch of road that would almost do, and he’d set the big plane down with his last few gallons of fuel.
The C-17 had been designed for rough-field landings, but its designers hadn’t had anything quite that rough in mind. Worse, The Book called for a minimum thirty-five-hundred-foot runway, and he hadn’t had anywhere near that much space to work with. At least the aircraft had been about as light as it was going to get, having burned off so much fuel, and he’d thrown all four F117-PW-100 turbofans into full reverse thrust. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been enough. Buchevsky thought it might still have worked if the road hadn’t crossed a culvert the pilot hadn’t been able to see from the air. He’d lost both main gear when it collapsed under the plane’s hundred-and-forty-ton weight. Worse, he hadn’t lost the gear simultaneously, and the sudden, asymmetrical drag had thrown the aircraft totally out of control. It had crashed down on its belly, then spun madly as it left the road and plowed into heavy tree cover like some sort of demented Frisbee. When it had finally stopped careening through the trees, both wings were gone and the entire forward third of its fuselage had been crushed and tangled wreckage.
At least it hadn’t burned or exploded, but neither pilot had survived, and the only other two officers aboard were among the six passengers who’d been killed, which left Buchevsky the ranking member of their small group. Two more passengers were brutally injured, and he’d gotten them out of the wreckage into the best shelter he could contrive, but they didn’t have anything resembling a doctor.
Nor did they have much in the way of equipment. Buchevsky had his personal weapons, as did six of the others, but that was it, and none of them had very much ammunition. Not surprisingly, he supposed, since they weren’t supposed to have had any onboard the aircraft. Fortunately (in this case, at least) it was extraordinarily difficult to separate troops returning from a combat zone from at least some ammo.
There were also at least some first-aid supplies—enough to set the broken arms three of the passengers had suffered and make at least a token attempt at patching up the worst injured. But that was about it, and he really, really wished he could at least talk to somebody higher up the command hierarchy than he was. Unfortunately, he was it.
Which, he thought mordantly, at least gives me something to keep me busy.
And it also gave him something besides Washington to worry about. He’d argued with Trish when she decided to take Shania and Yvonne to live with her mother, but that had been because of the crime rate and the cost of living in DC. Well, that and how far it was from his parents. He’d never, ever worried about—
He touched his chest, feeling the silver cross against his skin, under his tee-shirt. The cross a proud Shania had given him last Christmas, engraved with his initials plus her own and her younger sister’s. She’d bought it with her very own money (though he suspected his father, who’d helped her find it, had understated the price to her just a bit when he placed the order for her and arranged the engraving), and she’d solemnly promised him that it would keep him safe and bring him back to them.
Safe. She’d wanted to keep him safe, but when she’d really needed him, when it had been his job to keep her safe—
He pushed that thought aside yet again, just as he pushed aside thoughts of a small Methodist rectory in South Carolina, fleeing almost gratefully back to the contemplation of the cluster-fuck he had to deal with somehow.
Gunnery Sergeant Calvin Meyers was their group’s second-ranking member, which made him Buchevsky’s XO . . . to the obvious disgruntlement of Sergeant Francisco Ramirez, the senior Army noncom. But if Ramirez resented the fact that they’d just become a Marine-run show, he was keeping his mouth shut. Probably because he recognized what an unmitigated pain in the ass Buchevsky’s job had just become.
They had a limited quantity of food, courtesy of the aircraft’s over-water survival package, but none of them had any idea of their position. Or, rather, they knew exactly where they were, thanks to his Marine-issue DAGR handheld GPS—they just didn’t have any idea of what that meant in terms of the local geography.
Or in terms of the local population . . .
if any.
Their latitude and longitude put them just on the Serbian side of the Romanian border, and a bit over ten miles southwest of the Danube. The area was mountainous and heavily forested, although the road threaded through occasional cleared sections—like this one—where farmland stretched for a hundred yards or so on either side. But either there weren’t very many civilians in the area or else the locals had decided that with nuclear weapons dropping all over the landscape it might be wiser to keep their heads down and stay away from any crashed aircraft.
There were two farmhouses within five miles of their location, but there’d been no sign of any inhabitants when Meyers took a two-man team to look for help for their injured. Buchevsky suspected the farm families had taken themselves elsewhere when obviously foreign military personnel arrived on their doorsteps. Given what had just happened, he couldn’t really blame them. In fact, he’d just about come to the conclusion that avoiding contact with the locals would probably be a pretty good idea from his perspective, as well. At least until things had settled down and he—and, hopefully, they—had been able to figure out what the hell was happening.
People in this neck of the woods probably aren’t feeling all that friendly towards the good old United States of America, anyway, in light of little things like their relations with Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republic of Croatia, he reflected. And even if they were, they’d have to be suspicious as hell if foreigners come waltzing onto their land at a moment like this. Not to mention the fact that the first thing that’s going to occur to a lot of them is that they’re likely to be inundated by hungry people. The notion of having hungry soldiers—especially hungry foreign soldiers—“requisitioning” what they have isn’t going to appeal to them, and they might just figure that shooting first and using their visitors for really good fertilizer later would be the best way to avoid any unpleasantness.
But even assuming that kind of caution might be a good idea, what did it mean for his two really badly injured survivors? One thing they couldn’t do was move them—not without a medevac, and the chance of getting a helicopter in here to pick them up was nonexistent. If they could find someone who could call them an ambulance, or at least provide some sort of vehicle, or just call the local country doctor, it might mean those people would survive after all. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t, either. Buchevsky had seen a lot of badly wounded people over the years, and neither of their seriously injured people looked like they were going to make it. One of them had a brutal head injury—the entire right side of her skull was depressed and . . . spongy feeling—while the other obviously had major internal bleeding. Neither of them was conscious, for which Buchevsky could only be grateful, given the nature of their injuries.
In the meantime, he had to decide what to do in light of the fact that not one of them spoke Serbian, they were totally out of communication with anyone, and the last they’d heard, the entire planet seemed to be succumbing to spontaneous insanity.
So where’s the problem? he asked himself sardonically. Hell, it ought to be a piece of cake for a hardened senior Marine noncom such as yourself! Of course—
“I think you’d better listen to this, Top,” a voice said, and Buchevsky turned towards the speaker.
“Listen to what, Gunny?”
“We’re getting something really weird on the radio, Top.”
Buchevsky’s eyes narrowed. He’d never actually met Meyers before this flight, but the sandy-haired, compact, strongly built, slow-talking Marine from the Appalachian coalfields had struck him as a solid, unflappable sort. At the moment, however, Meyers was pasty-pale, and his hands shook as he extended the emergency radio they’d recovered from the wrecked fuselage.
Meyers turned the volume back up, and Buchevsky’s eyes narrowed even farther. The voice coming from the radio sounded . . . mechanical. Artificial. It carried absolutely no emotions or tonal emphasis.
That was the first thing that struck him. Then he jerked back half a step, as if he’d just been punched, as what the voice was saying registered.
“—am Fleet Commander Thikair of the Shongair Empire, and I am addressing your entire planet on all frequencies. Your world lies helpless before us. Our kinetic energy weapons have destroyed your major national capitals, your military bases, and your warships. We can, and will, conduct additional kinetic strikes wherever necessary. You will now submit and become productive and obedient subjects of the Empire, or you will be destroyed, as your governments and military forces have already been destroyed.”
Buchevsky stared at the radio, his mind cowering back from the black, bottomless pit which yawned suddenly where his family once had been as the mechanical voice confirmed what he’d desperately told himself was no more than a rumor. His intellect had known better, yet his emotions had refused to accept that Washington was truly gone. But now—
Trish . . . despite the divorce, she’d still been an almost physical part of him. And Shania . . . Yvonne. . . . Shannie was only eight, for God’s sake! Yvonne was only five! It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t!
The mechanical-sounding English ceased. There was a brief surge of something that sounded like Chinese, and then it switched to Spanish.
“It’s saying the same thing it just said in English,” Sergeant Ramirez said flatly, and Buchevsky shook himself. He realized his hand was pressed almost convulsively against his chest, against Shania’s cross, and he closed his eyes tightly, squeezing them against the tears he would not—could not—shed. That dreadful abyss yawned inside him, trying to suck him under, and part of him wanted nothing else in the world but to let the undertow take him. Yet he couldn’t. He had responsibilities. The job.
“Do you believe this shit, Top?” Meyers asked hoarsely.
“I don’t know.” Buchevsky’s own voice came out sounding broken and rusty, and he made himself lower his hand, opened his eyes upon a suddenly hateful world. Then he cleared his throat harshly. “I don’t know,” he managed in a more normal-sounding tone. “Or, at least, I know I don’t want to believe it, Gunny.”
“Me neither,” another voice said. This one was a soprano, and it belonged to Staff Sergeant Michelle Truman, the Air Force’s senior surviving representative. Buchevsky raised an eyebrow at her, grateful for the additional distraction from the pain trying to tear the heart right out of him, and the auburn-haired staff sergeant grimaced.
“I don’t want to believe it, Top,” she said, “but think about it. We already knew somebody seems to’ve been blowing the shit out of just about everybody, and who the hell had that many nukes? Or enough delivery vehicles to hit that many targets?” She shook her head. “I’m no expert on kinetic weapons, either, but I’ve read a little science fiction, and I’d say an orbital kinetic strike would probably look just like a nuke to the naked eye. So, yeah, probably if this bastard is telling the truth, nukes are exactly what any survivors would’ve been reporting.”
“Oh, shit,” Meyers muttered, then looked back at Buchevsky. He didn’t say another word, but he didn’t have to, and Buchevsky drew a deep breath.
“I don’t know, Gunny,” he said again. “I just don’t know.”
• • • • •
He still didn’t know—not really—the next morning, but one thing they couldn’t do was simply huddle here. They’d seen no sign of traffic along the road the C-17 had destroyed, and so far as they could tell, neither of the local farm families had returned home overnight. Roads normally went somewhere, though, so if they followed this one long enough, “somewhere” was where they’d eventually wind up. On the other hand, there was that little uncertainty factor where getting embroiled with the local civilians was concerned.
At least his decision tree had been rather brutally simplified in one respect when both the badly injured passengers died during the night. He’d tried hard not to feel grateful for that, but he was guiltily aware that it would have been dishonest of him, even if he’d managed to succeed.
Come on. You’re not grateful they’re dead, Stevie, he told himself grimly. You’re just grateful they won’t be slowing the rest of you down. There’s a difference.
He even knew it was true . . . which didn’t make him feel any better. And neither did the fact that he’d put his wife’s and daughters’ faces into a small mental box, along with his desperate worry about his parents, and locked them away, buried the pain deep enough to let him deal with his responsibilities to the living. Someday, he knew, he would have to reopen that box. Endure the pain, admit the loss. But this wasn’t someday. Not yet. For now he could tell himself others depended upon him, that he had to put aside his own pain while he dealt with their needs, and he wondered if that made him a coward.
In the meantime, he’d simply dug two more graves and recited as much of the funeral service as he could remember.
Now he stood in the coolness just before dawn, rifle slung, ruck adjusted, the dog tags of all their dead in his pocket, looking at the sky as it turned pale above the forested, sixteen-hundred-foot ridge east of the road.
Another thing the overnight deaths had done for him was obviate the necessity of finding medical assistance. Which meant he could afford to stay away from population centers, at least for a while. He’d sent Meyers, Ramirez, and Lance Corporal Ignacio Gutierrez back to the closer farmhouse, to gather up as much canned goods as they could comfortably carry. He’d felt bad about that—the farmers were going to need food soon enough themselves—but at least they had their crops already in and growing, and he’d told Meyers he could take no more than half of whatever the farmhouse pantry held. They’d also stacked all of the currency any of them had on the kitchen table. God only knew if it was ever going to be worth anything again, but if it was, it ought to be ample compensation for the value of the food.
Yeah, sure. You go right on thinking that, a little corner of his mind told him. You know damned well how the people that food belonged to are going to react when they find out you guys have already started looting. Or are you going to call it “living off the land”?