He shook his head, and his expression saddened as he gazed at the impaled alien bodies.
“I suppose there have been many like me. Men who have been so angered, so hurt, by what was done to them or those they loved that they became monsters themselves. I think, though, that I became . . . more of the monster than many of them. I am not proud of all in my past, my Stephen, but neither am I mad any longer. I have been more fortunate than some of those others, because I have had time to wrestle with my inner demon. I have even been able to travel, to see other lands, visit other places not so soaked in memories of blood and violence. To let some of the voices screaming in my head fall silent, soothed by peace. I remember a doctor I spoke to once—in Austria I think it was. . . .”
His voice trailed off, and his eyes grew distant as he gazed at the impaled bodies. Then they refocused on the present, and he looked back at Buchevsky.
“Even so, I fear it took too many years—years that demanded too high a price from those for whom I cared, and those who cared for me—before I realized at last that all the cruelty in the universe cannot avenge a broken childhood or appease an orphaned young man’s rage at what was done to him and to those he loved.”
He glanced at the bodies again, then shook himself once more—this time with a brisker, more businesslike expression—and turned his back on them, as if he were turning his back upon that broken childhood, as well.
“But this, my Stephen, has nothing to do with the darkness inside me,” he said.
“No?” Buchevsky raised an eyebrow.
“No. It is obvious these vermin will persist in pursuing us. So we will give them something to fix their attention upon—something to make any creature, even one of these, hot with hate. And then we will give them someone besides your civilians to pursue. Take and most of my men will head south, leaving a trail so obvious that even these”—he twitched his head at the slaughtered patrol without looking away from the towering Marine—“could scarcely miss it. He will lead them aside until they are dozens of kilometers away. Then he will slip away and return to us.”
“Without their being able to follow him?”
“Do not be so skeptical, my friend!” Basarab chuckled and squeezed Buchevsky’s shoulder. “I did not pick these men at random! There are no more skilled woodsmen in all of Romania. Have no fear that they will lead our enemies to us.”
“I hope you’re right,” Buchevsky said, looking back at the impaled bodies and thinking about how he would have reacted in the aliens’ place. “I hope you’re right.”
. XXIV .
Water sloshed around Pieter Ushakov’s legs as the raft grounded and he waded the last few meters to the eastern bank of the Voronezh River.
He tried not to think too hard about the nature of some of the flotsam and jetsam they’d encountered on the way across. It helped—some—that he’d seen so much carnage by now that he’d been largely anesthetized, but there were still moments. Especially when the bodies were so small they reminded him of—
He chopped that thought off before it could fully form and looked around warily, AK-74 ready. He’d needed it once already today, but no immediate threat presented itself, and he relaxed . . . slightly.
The city of Voronezh, capital of the Russian oblast of the same name, had been the site of savage combat during World War II’s Stalingrad campaign. It had been rebuilt after the war, recovering to a population of over eight hundred thousand by 2010. Home to Voronezh State University, it had been one of Russia’s more cosmopolitan cities, although the locals sometimes wished it hadn’t. Foreign students attending universities in Russia usually went to Voronezh State University for a year first to hone their Russian language skills, and there’d been occasional clashes—some of them nasty—between the native Russians and the influx of foreigners.
That wasn’t going to happen anymore, he thought grimly, climbing to the stub of the more southern of the two highway bridges which had once crossed the river and gazing back into the west while he waited for the rest of his men to join him. The destruction the Nazis had visited on Voronezh in the 1940s was nothing compared to the total devastation the Shongairi had inflicted.
He and his thirty-five-man company of partisans were lucky they’d made it across the river alive. Despite the totality with which three-quarters of the city had been literally obliterated, there were still ruins around the periphery, and those ruins were inhabited. If “inhabited” was the right word for half-starved bands of looters fighting over whatever food or other supplies might still be available in the wreckage, at any rate. Thirty-five well-fed (relatively speaking, at least) men with obviously hefty knapsacks had presented a tempting target for ambushes, even if they were all armed. Fortunately, only one band of marauders had been foolish or desperate enough to actually try an attack . . . which had resulted in the elimination of the band in question.
Of course, we haven’t made it all the way across yet, have we, Pieter? he reminded himself sourly.
They’d crossed the worst of the devastation—and most of what had been the city—but the hinterland in front of them might be even worse. It had been devastated by blast and fire, especially along its western edge, along the river, and from here it looked as if there’d been at least one additional kinetic impact to the northeast, but it had been outside the primary impact zone. The majority of its structures were still more or less standing, and the burned-out sea of shattered walls, roofless ruins, and battered industrial buildings offered all manner of unpleasant possibilities. That was one reason he’d chosen to cross this stretch in daylight, when they’d have a better chance of seeing trouble coming.
Ushakov turned his head as Lieutenant Ivan Anatoliavitch Kolesnikov climbed up the bridge ramp to join him. Kolesnikov had been the senior platoon commander in his own company; now he and Ushakov were the only surviving officers of their entire engineering battalion. For that matter, as far as Ushakov knew, he, Kolesnikov, and Sergeant Fyodor Ivanovich Belov were the battalion’s only survivors—period.
“Well, that looks unpleasant,” Kolesnikov said, turning to survey the wasteland east of them. “Stinks, too.”
Ushakov nodded. Murdered cities, he’d discovered, had a charnel reek all their own—one that persisted well after the people who lived in them had been slaughtered. The heat didn’t help, either. He figured it had to be at least fifty degrees—what he supposed he would have had to get used to calling ninety degrees if he’d ever gotten around to taking Aldokim’s offer and gone to work somewhere they used the Fahrenheit system. That was pretty damned hot for Voronezh, even at this time of year, and the temperature and humidity combined to produce a sauna.
And to enhance the stench.
“I won’t be sorry to get back out into the open countryside myself,” Ushakov said now. “And not just because of the stink.”
“I know what you mean.” Kolesnikov grimaced. “You know, if I’d lived here I’d have moved out by now. All the farmland around here, you’d think at least some of these people would be considering the possibility of turning farmer before they starve!”
Ushakov nodded again. The farmland around Voronezh was rich and fertile, even by Ukrainian standards. And Kolesnikov was right—if the people hunkering down in the city’s ruins had only been willing to divert their efforts to farming they’d have found themselves far better off in a few months’ time, when today’s heat would be only a bitterly missed memory.
They’re going to starve . . . if they don’t freeze to death first, he thought from behind blue eyes which had died with his family. God only knows what winter’s going to be like, but I’d be surprised if twenty-five percent of the preinvasion population survives till spring. Assuming the fucking Shongairi let anyone survive.
He was fairly confident it was going to be a moot point in his own case. And even though he’d never admitted it aloud to anyone—not even Kolesnikov—the aching void inside him was glad it would be so. He’d keep as many of his men alive as long as he c
ould, but when the time came for the pain to finally end. . . .
He wiped sweat from his forehead, turning to watch the rest of his men wade ashore from the raft they’d constructed.
One good thing about engineers, he thought mordantly. We’re good at improvising river crossings.
They were good at blowing things up, too, he reflected, and that was what they’d been doing for the last five ugly weeks. Or until they’d started running out of targets, at least.
For a while, he’d been able to keep track—generally, at least—of what was happening elsewhere over the Internet. Then, two and a half weeks ago, the Internet had suddenly stopped working. There appeared to be a handful of nodes still in operation, but that handful was shrinking steadily, which suggested that either the Shongairi were systematically destroying them as they found them, or else the power net was finally going completely down.
Either of those was a bad sign. Not that there’d been any good signs lately.
The American Admiral Robinson’s posting of the destruction of twenty or thirty Shongair landing shuttles had done more than Ushakov would have believed possible for his own morale when he finally viewed it on his Army-issue laptop. It had obviously encouraged quite a few other people with the realization that the aliens weren’t truly invincible, as well. A French antiaircraft battery had taken down three more shuttles—the smaller, faster ones the Shongairi apparently used for air-mobile infantry operations—as well, and there were rumors the Shongairi had been savagely bloodied by an American armored battalion the prelanding bombardment had somehow overlooked in Afghanistan.
Aside from that, though, the news had been an unending succession of reports of Shongair landings, devastated cities, collapsing public services, and the onset of disease and starvation as transportation nets and public hygiene began to fail.
Ushakov estimated that he and his “company”—although it would barely have qualified as a platoon before the Shongairi had arrived—had killed well over a thousand of the aliens so far. For that matter, his initial IED attack might have killed that many all by itself. He’d never been able to get a body count on that one, though, since the Shongairi had airlifted out all their dead before he’d ever left his camouflaged hide, so he hadn’t added them to his official tally. He was certain they’d gotten at least that many since then, though. The fact that the aliens were astonishingly short on airlift for an interstellar invasion force helped a lot in that respect. They made heavy use of human road networks in their operational areas, and that concentrated targets where humans could get at them. Assuming, of course, that the human attackers knew which roads the targets were using at any given moment.
At first, there’d been quite a few of those targets close to home. Now, though, Shongair convoys were getting thin on the ground. From the last few hints he’d gotten before the Internet went down, Ushakov suspected the Shongairi had realized their initial deployment pattern had been . . . overly ambitious. They’d apparently thought they could use relatively small, widely separated forces to secure control of vast areas of the planet, which seemed uncommonly stupid to Ushakov. Surely they should have realized there were enough human beings and enough guns lying around Earth to turn squad-level detachments into targets too tempting to pass up!
From the sound of things that realization had finally percolated through whatever they used for brains, however. If he was right, they were pulling their forces in, concentrating them in smaller geographical areas in the first step of initiating some sort of pacification program.
Well, “pacification” worked wonderfully as hell for us when the fucking Soviets dragged us into Afghanistan, didn’t it? he thought sourly, remembering Vladislava’s uncles and his own father’s cousin Ilarion. Admittedly, the Americans and their allies had a lot better luck there than we did, but even they found the mujahedin—I’m sorry, the Taliban, as if there were a frigging difference!—a royal pain in the ass. And they had at least some notion about how to convince the locals they were the good fellows and the other side were the bad fellows, which this Thikair obviously doesn’t. Well, the Soviets never quite got the hang of that when it was our turn in Afghanistan, but even they came closer to it than this! So unless he miraculously gets some notion, I don’t imagine friend Thikair’s long-eared bastards are going to find it a whole lot easier than we did.
For the moment, though, the Shongairi appeared to be concentrating on North America and letting Europe and the rest of the world stew in its own juices. After all, starvation and disease would do most of their job for them if they were only patient. Ushakov didn’t know how badly Asia and China had been hit, but the estimates he’d heard over the Internet were that India alone had probably suffered close to four hundred million dead in just the initial strikes. Other reports suggested China had gotten hammered even harder than that after the Central Committee (or something calling itself that, at any rate) had called for simultaneous uprisings in all of their major cities. He’d never been particularly fond of the Chinese—that much of the old Soviet tradition and its prejudices had carried over—but his stomach tightened every time he thought of what had probably happened to any city which had obeyed that order.
There wasn’t anything he could do about that, however. In fact, if he was going to be realistic there wasn’t anything he could do effectively about much of anything. But there had to be a limit to the Shongairi’s resources somewhere. Somewhere, at some point, the bastards had to simply run out of manpower. Maybe humanity couldn’t kill enough of them to reach that point, but Pieter Ushakov damned well meant to try.
Which was why he and his company were trekking steadily eastward.
The Shongairi had apparently reduced their presence—outside North America, at least—to a series of zones, each no more than two or three hundred kilometers across and centered on the ground bases they’d established immediately after the bombardment. There didn’t appear to be any of those bases in what had been Ukraine, but there was supposed to be one near the town of Inzhavino in Tambov oblast, five hundred–odd kilometers southeast of the ruins of Moscow. That was close to eight hundred kilometers from what was left of Kiev, but he was almost halfway there.
Another week to Inzhavino, he thought. Maybe more like ten days, under the circumstances. But we’ve only got another hundred kilometers or so to go before we get into their “occupation zone,” and we’ll start finding targets pretty quickly then.
He didn’t know if it was going to do any good at all in the long run. For his planet and his species, at any rate. But that didn’t really matter to him, and it didn’t really matter to any of the men with him, either. Because one way or the other, it was going to do one hell of a lot of good for the vengeful hunger blazing inside all of them.
We may not last long, he thought with bleak, bitter satisfaction, but these fuckers are damned well going to know we were here.
“Come on, Vanya!” he said, slapping Kolesnikov on the shoulder. “If we get a move on, we can be clear of all this wreckage by sunset and find a nice secure spot to bivouac for the night.”
. XXV .
Fleet Commander Thikair pressed the admittance stud on his chair arm when the signal chimed, and the briefing-room door hissed open. Ground Base Commander Shairez entered the compartment, crossed to the conference table, and lowered her ears in salute.
“You wished to see me, Fleet Commander?” Shairez said respectfully, and Thikair’s ears flicked assent.
“I did, Ground Base Commander,” he replied, and gestured at one of the chairs on the far side of the briefing-room table. Ground Force Commander Thairys sat to Thikair’s left and Squadron Commander Jainfar sat to his right. Now Shairez sat, facing all three of her superiors calmly, and Thikair leaned forward, folding his six-fingered hands on the table before him.
“We’ve been engaged on KU-197-20 for one standard month, tomorrow,” he said. “That is approximately two and a half local months, better than a double-twelfth of one of their years, and I
think that makes this a reasonable time for us to assess our current situation. I wished you to attend this meeting so that you might hear Ground Force Commander Thairys’ and Squadron Commander Jainfar’s reports and so they might hear yours.”
“Of course, Fleet Commander.”
“Very well.” Thikair turned his head to the left, looking at Thairys. “Ground Force Commander?” he invited.
“The situation remains far from satisfactory, Fleet Commander,” Thairys said without flinching. “There have been improvements in some respects; in others, the situation has actually worsened. Our vehicular losses remain painfully high. Although we’ve had no more fiascoes like Harshair’s, we continue to lose them in twelves and double-twelves—two or three here, another two over there, three more trucks and an APC over here. And occasionally, unfortunately, the humans get lucky and take out an entire convoy of as many as a double-twelve or more trucks in a single raid.”
His ears shrugged unhappily.
“Infantry losses also remain high, but it’s the loss of vehicles which causes me the greatest concern. We have only limited shuttle-lift capability—or, rather, only limited tactical troop lift capability. While the humans’ supply of what they call ‘SAMs’ appears to be gradually depleting itself, they retain far too many of them for me to be comfortable operating Starlanders anywhere near an actual scene of combat. We’ve lost even Deathwings to them, which is bad enough, but at least a Deathwing carries no more than a single platoon of infantry at a time.
“The consequence of restricting Starlander operation only to rear area movements is to severely cramp our tactical flexibility. We simply dare not move our forces around as swiftly and aggressively as our normal doctrine requires. In addition, the need to continually replenish personnel and material in an effort to keep pace with losses, coupled with the destruction of an entire heavy transport group on the very first day of landing operations, means the Starlanders we do have are heavily tasked with ‘normal’ space-to-surface landing operations. Which, of course, means they are unavailable for rear area logistic requirements, throwing an even greater burden upon our wheeled transport, which we’ve been losing in significant numbers from the very beginning. That’s forced us to even further restrict our operations in the secondary and tertiary occupation zones in order to concentrate on the primary zones on the continent of North America.