All right, it had been wasteful. He admitted it. And apparently these “humans” really didn’t understand that any honorable hunters ate their kill—that it would have been an insult to the prey if they hadn’t eaten it! They’d certainly carried on hysterically enough about it, anyway. He still didn’t think he’d been all that far out of line, and he suspected his immediate superiors hadn’t thought so, either. They would have reprimanded him a lot more firmly if they had.
Still, they’d been firm enough to satisfy their own superiors. And they’d also pointed out that Ground Base Commander Teraik, commanding the rather jury-rigged Ground Base Two Alpha being built just outside the human city of “Greensboro” as a make-do substitute for the original, destroyed Ground Base Two, would really prefer to convince the local humans to submit without killing them all off in the process. So he was prepared to give this human the benefit of the doubt and assume it was capable of at least the rudiments of honorable behavior.
For now, at least; he could always change his mind if he decided to.
• • • • •
“Shit,” Rob Wilson muttered softly but intensely as two of the aliens started trotting towards the rear of Mitchell’s truck. The minute they looked in there, they were going to know exactly what they were seeing. At which point, things were going to get ugly.
“Still got a shot?” he whispered, his own eyes on Mitchell as he settled more firmly into position behind his fiberglass-stocked Springfield Armory MA9827 M1A.
Unlike his wife and his sister, who were perfectly happy with the 5.56- and 5.7-millimeter rounds, respectively, in a rifle, Wilson had enormous faith in the stopping power of the .308 Winchester (also known, in certain quarters, as the 7.62 NATO). He’d been a squad-designated marksman in his time, using a specially modified and accurized version of the old M14, the original of his present M1A. That weapon had always been his first and greatest love (well, where firearms were concerned, anyway), and he’d been less surprised than many when the M4’s shorter effective range turned around and bit US troops in the ass in longer-ranged engagements in the mountains of Afghanistan. The M16A4, which retained the barrel of the old A2, had better range than the shorter-barreled M4, but even it came up short at extended ranges, and the Springfield’s custom stock felt like an extension of his own body as he nestled into it.
He wasn’t his brother-in-law’s equal for the really long-range shot, but he came damned close, and he knew he was actually better than Dvorak at laying down long-range rapid fire. For which, of course, the .308 was vastly superior to any wimpy souped-up .22, whatever his loving wife or sister might have to say. It was a simple matter of ballistics, really. The 147-grain bullet of the standard NATO load weighed better than twice as much as the 5.65’s 62-grain slug, and at extended range it transferred three times the energy—the real measure of a bullet’s power—to the target. And, of course, he wasn’t limited to military specs. His M1A launched a substantially heavier round than the standard NATO load at a slightly higher velocity . . . and delivered twenty-four percent more energy than even the 7.62 at five hundred yards.
So what if he couldn’t carry as many rounds for the same weight? So what if the weapon weighed ten pounds unloaded? When he needed to reach out and touch someone, none of that mattered to him at all. Besides, as he’d pointed out rather complacently to Veronica on more than one occasion, if you hit what you were aiming at in the first place, especially with a bullet that was all grown up, how many rounds did you need?
Of course, Veronica had whacked him on more than one of those occasions, as well.
“The son-of-a-bitch’s just sitting there,” Dvorak muttered back. “Of course I’ve got a shot! Didn’t these dumb bastards ever hear of ‘evasive action’?”
“Don’t complain.” Wilson laid the glowing dot of his sight on the back of the alien commander’s neck, below the bottom rim of his helmet, and took up the slack on the national-match-grade two-stage trigger. “You just take it down the instant I fire. Got it?”
“Got it,” Dvorak confirmed tautly.
• • • • •
Mitchell made himself stand very still, outwardly relaxed. He knew approximately where Rob Wilson was, and he also knew exactly what Wilson was going to do. Mitchell might have worried about someone else’s having decided to bug out when the bad guys turned up, but not Wilson. Or Dvorak, for that matter. And because he knew where Wilson was, he knew he was out of the ex-Marine’s line of fire to the Shongair CO. That being the case, he also knew who Wilson’s first target would be, and he gazed at the other dismounted infantry from the corner of one eye, thinking about his own target selection.
• • • • •
Gunshail turned his head, glancing at the troopers Brasik had picked to check the back of the human’s vehicle. Given the fact that the human in question was standing there perfectly calmly, it was extraordinarily unlikely they were going to find anything incriminating or dangerous. Which was just as well with Gunshail. If he got back to base in time, he could still get in on the chranshar game his litter-brother Gunshara had organized, and—
The 168-grain .308 round, traveling at just over twenty-seven hundred feet per second, delivered 1.3 foot-tons of energy to a point one half inch behind the left eye on the profile the squad commander had just obligingly presented to Rob Wilson. It drilled straight through the brain the Shongairi kept in approximately the same place humans did, hit the inner liner of his helmet, and blew it off the ruins of his head in a grisly spray of red and gray.
• • • • •
Dvorak twitched as Wilson opened fire, but only internally. His sight picture never even wavered, and he squeezed his own trigger.
The muzzle blast from a muzzle brake–equipped .50-caliber rifle was almost impossible to describe adequately. So was the recoil. But any concerns he might have had about the toughness of the Shongair remote disappeared as the 647-grain bullet punched entirely through it. There was no spectacular explosion, no streamer of smoke, no sudden flash of flame—nothing except for a sudden twitch . . . and the equally sudden disappearance of that teeth-grating “vibration.” The remote dropped straight down, crashing through tree branches as it thudded to the ground, but Dvorak had already switched targets, and the second shot from his ten-round magazine punched effortlessly through the body armor of the gunner on the lead cargo vehicle. The Shongair’s torso literally disintegrated in a spray of crimson, and Dvorak’s third shot sprayed the same truck’s driver over the cab’s interior.
He heard—and felt—more shots from Wilson and at least two other rifles from other spots on the hillside, but that wasn’t his affair. He had his own job to do, and he traversed smoothly to the second truck, whose gunner was just starting to react, swinging his ring-mounted automatic weapon wildly around towards the hillside from which the totally unexpected rifle fire was coming.
Before the alien ever found his assailants, Dave Dvorak came on target again, and his finger squeezed.
• • • • •
Sam Mitchell saw the talkative Shongair’s head disintegrate.
Unlike the members of Gunshail’s patrol, he’d been actively expecting exactly what had just happened. And, also unlike the members of Gunshail’s patrol, he knew about the small-of-the-back holster under his light civilian jacket and the Para-Ordnance P14 .45 APC semiauto in it.
Mitchell had been a qualified concealed-carry instructor for over fifteen years. Over those years, and during his career as a police officer, he’d spent literally uncounted hours on tactical shooting ranges, and he’d given as much attention to the best way to get a concealed-carry handgun into action as he had to doing the same thing with an open-carry service holster.
His right hand swept back, with an odd little muscle-memory quarter-turn of the wrist that used the side of his palm to lift the jacket away from his side and out of its way. It kept going, settling on the pistol’s grip even as he threw himself to his left, towards the front end of his truck.
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The Shongair infantry were still turning towards their crumpling officer as his weapon cleared the holster. The 1911-style safety came off under his right thumb just as Wilson’s second shot drilled straight through Section Commander Brasik’s backplate and the Shongair dropped without a word. An instant later, the second thunderous report from Dvorak’s .50 caliber roared, and other rifles opened up from the concealing tree trunks upslope from the road.
Mitchell’s pistol came up automatically, without conscious thought. The sight picture leapt into focus, and a Shongair trooper’s head exploded as a 200-grain jacketed hollow point +P .45-caliber round punched into its forehead at a thousand feet per second. Sam Mitchell had won a lot of pizza on his friends’ shooting range; the stakes were rather more important at the moment, however, and his brown eyes were merciless as he took down his second target.
• • • • •
Dvorak killed the driver of the second vehicle, and the other Shongair who’d been in the cab with him. That left him with four rounds in the magazine, and he rather suspected that anything he might contribute to the firefight would be superfluous. That being the case, he transferred his attention to the instrument panels of the two trucks, punching two rounds diagonally through each of them in hopes of taking out any radios they might contain.
There was no way for him to realize that Squad Commander Gunshail’s sole communications link to his headquarters had been through the overhead remote he’d already killed. But even if he’d known, he would have shot up the trucks anyway, just to make sure.
• • • • •
The Shongairi still in the second truck never had a chance.
Mitchell was now completely shielded from them by his own vehicle, and they had three invisible riflemen on the hill behind them. That would have been bad enough, but the fourth man behind them was bellied down behind an M249 PIP. The product-improved variant of the standard light machine gun of the US military fired the same 5.56-millimeter round as the M16A4 and its shorter, lighter sibling the M4, but unlike the rifles (which were limited to three-round bursts of automatic fire), it fired full auto at a maximum rate of almost a thousand rounds per minute. And unlike the riflemen, the machine gunner didn’t have to worry about Mitchell’s being in his line of fire. He also had a two-hundred-round belt clipped to the underside of his weapon in a plastic box, and five seconds after he squeezed the trigger, every Shongairi in the back of that vehicle was dead or dying.
• • • • •
Mitchell had never consciously realized he was crouching until the shooting stopped and he felt himself coming fully back upright.
Two of the dismounted Shongairi were still moving, and his expression never flinched as he finished them off. He heard three spaced, careful rifle shots almost simultaneously and knew Wilson was doing the same thing to any survivors from the second truck.
He stepped around the front of the deuce-and-a-half into the middle of the road, ejected the partially used magazine, and replaced it with a fully loaded one, all on autopilot. Then he reset the safety, reached back to tuck the pistol back into its holster, and looked up, faintly surprised to discover his hands weren’t shaking, as Wilson and Dvorak came down the slope towards him.
“Christ, what a cluster-fuck!” Wilson said. Mitchell’s ears weren’t working all that well in the wake of so much gunfire, but he heard the ex-Marine clearly enough. Besides, he would’ve known what Wilson was saying even if he’d been totally deaf.
Dvorak, on the other hand, had actually worn ear protectors. Mitchell knew how mercilessly Wilson had ribbed his brother-in-law over those in the past when he wore them on deer hunts, but Dvorak had always pointed out that the sensitivity of the electronic shooting muffs he favored could actually be turned up to improve his hearing while still being available to protect his hearing. And given the cannon he’d decided to bring with him, Mitchell wasn’t at all surprised to see them this time.
“I’ve gotta get me a pair of those,” he told Dvorak now, digging the tip of one index finger into a loudly ringing ear.
“I’ve got an extra pair you can have, assuming we get out of this in one piece,” Dvorak said tartly.
“I’ll drink to that,” Mitchell agreed, turning around as the other men who’d been scattered around the hillside came slithering down towards them.
He took a quick look at his own truck, which appeared undamaged, then turned back to the others.
“Either these bastards’ HQ already knows what happened, or else nobody’s going to get nervous until they don’t turn up on schedule,” he said then. “In either case, we’ve got to make tracks. The question is, who wants to ride back to Rosman with me and who wants to travel on foot? If they do know what happened, they’re going to have someone else on the way pretty damn quick, and a moving truck isn’t going to be hard for them to spot. On the other hand, if they don’t already know, it’ll get us all back to town and out of the area quicker. And we don’t know how good those damned flying eyes of theirs are at spotting the thermal signatures of individual people or something like that through tree cover, for that matter.”
Wilson and Dvorak looked at each other. They’d discovered on the way out that the vertical nature of much of the local terrain added quite a bit to the straight-line distance they’d had to travel, and neither of them was getting any younger. Besides, Mitchell was right about their ignorance of the aliens’ UAVs’ sensor capabilities.
“I think this is a time for speed, not pooping and snooping in the woods,” Wilson said, and Dvorak nodded. The county deputy looked as if he was tempted to dispute that, but he didn’t, and Mitchell tossed his head at the truck.
“Let’s get saddled up, then,” he said.
“Just a sec,” Dvorak responded, and passed the Barrett to his brother-in-law. He stepped over to the dead Shongairi and quickly collected Gunshail’s sidearm and a couple of the Shongair rifles, along with one dead trooper’s combat harness and clamshell upper-body armor. He peeled off and tossed away anything that looked remotely electronic but kept the ammo pouches. He’d been wanting to get some kind of feel for these critters’ individual weapons and equipment, and he wasn’t passing up the chance now.
“Let’s go,” he said.
. XXI .
An insect scuttled across the back of Stephen Buchevsky’s sweating neck. He ignored it, keeping his eyes on the aliens as they set about bivouacking.
The insect on his neck went elsewhere, and he checked the RDG-5 hand grenade. He wouldn’t have dared to use a radio, even if he’d had one, but the grenade’s detonation would work just fine as an attack signal.
He really would have preferred leaving this patrol alone, but he couldn’t. He had no idea what they were doing in the area, and it really didn’t matter. Whatever else they might do, every Shongair unit appeared to be on its own permanent seek-and-destroy mission, and he couldn’t allow that when the civilians he and his people had become responsible for were in this patrol’s way.
His reaction to the Shongairi’s attack on the Romanian civilians had landed him with yet another mission—one he would vastly have preferred to avoid. Or that was what he told himself, anyway. The rest of his people—with the possible exception of Ramirez—seemed to cherish none of the reservations he himself felt. In fact, he often thought the only reason he felt them was because he was in command. It was his job to feel them. But however it happened, he and his marooned Americans had become the protectors of a slowly but steadily growing band of Romanians.
Fortunately, one of the Romanians in question—Elizabeth Cantacuzène—had been a university teacher. Her English was heavily accented, but her grammar (and, Buchevsky suspected, her vocabulary) was considerably better than his, and just acquiring a local translator had been worth almost all of the headaches which come with it. Several of the others spoke at least passable English—a hell of a lot better than his Romanian, anyway!—as well.
By now, he had just under sixty armed men and women
under his command. His Americans formed the core of his force, but their numbers were almost equaled by a handful of Romanian soldiers and the much larger number of civilians who were in the process of receiving a crash course in military survival from him, Gunny Meyers, and Sergeant Alexander Jonescu of the Romanian Army. He’d organized them into four roughly equal-sized “squads”: one commanded by Meyers, one by Ramirez, one by Jonescu, and one by Alice Macomb. Michelle Truman was senior to Macomb, but she and Sherman were still too valuable as his “brain trust” for him to “waste her” in a shooter’s slot. Besides, she was learning Romanian from Cantacuzène.
Fortunately, Sergeant Jonescu already spoke English (British style, not real English, but beggars couldn’t be choosers), and Buchevsky had managed to get at least one English speaker into each of his squads. It was clumsy, but it worked, and they’d spent hours in camp each night drilling on hand signals that required no spoken language. And at least the parameters of their situation were painfully clear to everyone.
Evade. Hide. Do whatever it took to keep the civilians—now close to two hundred of them—safe. Stay on the move. Avoid roads and towns. Look out constantly for any source of food. It turned out Calvin Meyers was an accomplished deer hunter, and he and two like-minded souls who had been members of the Romanian forestry service were contributing significantly to keeping their people fed. Still, summer was sliding slowly but steadily towards fall, and all too soon cold and starvation would become deadly threats.
But for that to happen, first we have to survive the summer, don’t we? he thought harshly. Which means these bastards have to be stopped before they figure out the civilians are out here to be killed. And we’ve got to do it without their getting a message back to base.
He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. But he didn’t see any choice, either. These aliens couldn’t possibly have enough troops down here to be sending entire squads of them rummaging around every patch of woods on the damned planet, yet for some frigging reason they seemed determined to use however many of them it took to run down his own band of refugees. He was beginning to think they must have killed the wrong guy’s brother or some damned thing!