by George R. R.
“Sir,” she continued, “I’ve administered all the standard psychological exams. As you directed, I’ve also experimented to determine how applicable our existing direct neural education techniques are to humans, and I can report that they work quite well. But my opinion, based on the admittedly imperfect psychological profile I’ve been able to construct, suggests to me that it would be the height of folly to use humans as a client race.
“They will never understand the natural submission of the weaker to the stronger. Instead, they will work unceasingly to become the stronger, and not for the purpose of assuming leadership of the pack. Some of them, yes, will react very like Shongari might. Others may even approach weed-eater behavior patterns. But most will see the function of strength as the protection of their primary loyalty group. They will focus their energy on destroying any and all threats to it, even when attempting to destroy the threat in itself risks destruction of the group, and they will never forget or forgive a threat to that which they protect. We might be able to enforce temporary obedience, and it’s possible we could actually convince many of them to accept us as their natural masters. But we will never convince all of them of that, and so, eventually, we will find our ‘clients’ turning upon us with all the inventiveness and ferocity we’ve observed out of them here, but with all our own technological capabilities ... as a starting point.”
* * * *
“It would appear,” Thikair told his senior officers, “that my approach to this planet was not the most brilliant accomplishment of my career.”
They looked back at him, most still obviously bemused by Shairez’s report. None of them, he reflected, had reacted to it any better than he had.
“Obviously,” he continued, “it’s necessary to reevaluate our policy—my policy—in light of the Base Commander’s discoveries. And, frankly, in light of our already severe operational losses.
“Our efforts to date to compel the humans to submit have killed over half the original planetary population and cost us massive losses of our own. Ground Force Commander Thairys’s current estimate is that if we continue operations for one local year, we will have lost three-quarters of his personnel. In that same time period, we will have killed half the remaining humans. Clearly, even if Ground Base Commander Shairez’s model is in error, we cannot sustain losses at that level. Nor would we dare risk providing such a...recalcitrant species with access to modern technology after killing three-quarters of them first.”
There was silence in the conference room as he surveyed their faces.
“The time has come to cut our losses,” he said flatly. “I am not prepared to give up this planet, not after the price we’ve already paid for it. But at the same time, I have concluded that humans are too dangerous. Indeed, faced with what we’ve discovered here, I believe many of the Hegemony’s other races would share that conclusion!
“I’ve already instructed Base Commander Shairez to implement our backup strategy and develop a targeted bio-weapon. This constitutes a significant shift in her priorities, and it will be necessary to establish proper facilities for her work and to provide her with appropriate test subjects.
“I had considered moving her and her research staff to one of the existing ground bases. Unfortunately, the intensity of the operations required to establish those bases means the human populations in their vicinities have become rather...sparse. I have therefore decided to establish a new base facility in a rural area of the planet, where we haven’t conducted such intense operations and reasonable numbers of test subjects will be readily available to her. Ground Force Commander Thairys will be responsible for providing security to the base during its construction...and with securing test subjects for her once construction is complete.”
* * * *
XII
“So, my Stephen. What do you make of this?”
Buchevsky finished his salad and took a long swallow of beer. His grand-mama had always urged him to eat his vegetables, yet he was still a bit bemused by how sinfully luxurious fresh salad tasted after weeks of scrounging whatever he and his people could.
Which, unfortunately, wasn’t what Basarab was asking him about.
“I really don’t know, Mircea,” he said with a frown. “We haven’t been doing anything differently. Not that I know of, at any rate.”
“Nor that I know of,” Basarab agreed thoughtfully, gazing down at the handwritten note on the table.
The days were noticeably cooler outside the log-walled cabin, and autumn color was creeping across the mountainsides above the Arges River and the enormous blue gem of Lake Vidaru. The lake lay less than seventy kilometers north of the ruins of Pitesti, the capital of the Arges judeţ, or county, but it was in the heart of a wilderness preserve, and the cabin had been built by the forestry service, rather than as part of any of the three villages Basarab had organized into his own little kingdom.
Despite Lake Vidaru’s relative proximity to Pitesti, few of the kinetic strike’s survivors had headed up into its vicinity. Buchevsky supposed the mountains and heavy forest had been too forbidding to appeal to urban dwellers. There were almost no roads into the area, and Basarab’s villages were like isolated throwbacks to another age. In fact, they reminded Buchevsky rather strongly of the village in the musicalBrigadoon.
Which isn’t a bad thing, he reflected. There sits Lake Vidaru, with its hydroelectric generators, and these people didn’t even have electricity! Which means they aren’t radiating any emissions the Shongari are likely to pick up on.
Over the last couple of months, he, his Americans, and their Romanians had been welcomed by the villagers and—as Basarab had warned— been put to work preparing for the onset of winter. One reason his lunch salad had tasted so good was because he wouldn’t be having salads much longer. It wasn’t as if there’d be fresh produce coming in from California.
“There must be some reason for it, my Stephen,” Basarab said now. “And I fear it is not one either of us would like.”
“Mircea, I haven’t liked a single goddammed thing those bastards have done from day one.”
Basarab arched one eyebrow, and Buchevsky was a little surprised himself by the jagged edge of hatred that had roughened his voice. It took him unawares, sometimes, that hate. When the memory of Trish and the girls came looming up out of the depths once again, fangs bared, to remind him of the loss and the pain and anguish.
Isn’t it one hell of a note when the best thing I can think of is that the people I loved probably died without knowing a thing about it?
“They have not endeared themselves to me, either,” Basarab said after a moment. “Indeed, it has been...difficult to remember that we dare not take the fight to them.”
Buchevsky nodded in understanding. Basarab had made it clear from the beginning that avoiding contact with the enemy, lying low, was the best way to protect the civilians for whom they were responsible, and he was right. Yet that didn’t change his basic personality’s natural orientation—like Buchevsky’s own—toward taking the offensive. Toward seeking out and destroying the enemy, not hiding from him.
But that would have come under the heading of Bad Ideas. Basarab’s runners had made contact with several other small enclaves across southern Romania and northern Bulgaria, and by now, those enclaves were as concerned with defending themselves against other humans as against Shongari. After the initial bombardments and confused combat of the first couple of weeks, the invaders had apparently decided to pull back from the Balkans’ unfriendly terrain and settle for occupying more open areas of the planet. It was hard to be certain of that, with the collapse of the planetary communications net, but it seemed reasonable. As his brain trust of Truman and Sherman had pointed out, troop lift would almost certainly be limited for any interstellar expedition, so it would make sense to avoid stretching it any further than necessary by going up into the hills after dirt-poor, hardscrabble mountain villages.
Human refugees were an entirely different threat, and one Buch
evsky was happy they hadn’t had to deal with...yet. Starvation, exposure, and disease had probably killed at least half the civilians who’d fled their homes, and those who remained were becoming increasingly desperate as winter approached. Some of the other enclaves had already been forced to fight, often ruthlessly, against their own kind to preserve the resources their own people needed to survive.
In many ways, it was the fact that the aliens’ actions had forced humans to kill each other in the name of simple survival that fueled Stephen Buchevsky’s deepest rage.
“Nothing would make me happier than to go kick their scrawny asses,” he said now, in response to Basarab’s comment. “But unless they poke their snouts into our area—”
He shrugged, and Basarab nodded. Then he chuckled softly.
“What?” Buchevsky raised an eyebrow at him.
“It is just that we are so much alike, you and I.” Basarab shook his head. “Deny it as you will, my Stephen, but there is Slav inside you!”
“Inside me?” Buchevsky laughed, looking down at the back of one very black hand. “Hey, I already told you! If any of my ancestors were ever in Europe, they got there from Africa, not the steppes!”
“Ah!” Basarab waved a finger under his nose. “So you’ve said, but I know better! What, ‘Buchevsky’? This is an African name?”
“Nope, probably just somebody who owned one of my great-great-granddaddies or -grandmamas.”
“Nonsense! Slavs in nineteenth-century America were too poor to own anyone! No, no. Trust me—it is in the blood. Somewhere in your ancestry there is—how do you Americans say it?—a Slav in the straw pile!”
Buchevsky laughed again. He was actually learning to do that again— sometimes, at least—and he and Basarab had had this conversation before. But then the Romanian’s expression sobered, and he reached across the table to lay one hand on Buchevsky’s forearm.
“Whatever you may have been born, my Stephen,” he said quietly, “you are a Slav now. A Wallachian. You have earned that.”
Buchevsky waved dismissively, but he couldn’t deny the warmth he felt inside. He knew Basarab meant every word of it, just as he knew he’d earned his place as the Romanian’s second-in-command through the training and discipline he’d brought the villagers. Basarab had somehow managed to stockpile impressive quantities of small arms and infantry support weapons, but however fearsome Take Bratianu and the rest of Basarab’s original group might have been as individuals, it was obvious none of them had really understood how to train civilians. Steven Buchevsky, on the other hand, had spent years turning pampered American civilians into U.S. Marines. Compared with that, training tough, mountain-hardened Romanian villagers was a piece of cake.
I just hope none of them are ever going to needthat training, he reflected, his mood turning grim once again.
Which brought him back to the subject of this conversation.
“I don’t like it, Mircea,” he said. “There’s no reason for them to put a base way up here in the frigging mountains. Not unless something’s happened that you and I don’t know about.”
“Agreed, agreed.” Basarab nodded, playing with the written note again, then shrugged. “Sooner or later, unless they simply intend to kill all of us, there must be some form of accommodation.”
His sour expression showed his opinion of his own analysis, but he continued unflinchingly.
“The people of this land have survived conquest before. No doubt they can do it again, and if these Shongari had intended simple butchery rather than conquest, then they would have begun by destroying all our cities and towns from space. But I will not subject my people to them without holding out for the very best terms we can obtain. And if they prove me in error—if they demonstrate that they are, indeed, prepared to settle for butchery rather than conquest—they will pay a higher price than they can possibly imagine before they rule these mountains.”
He sat for a moment in cold, dangerous silence. Then he shook himself.
“Well, there seems little point in speculating when we have no firsthand information. So I suppose we must take a closer look at this new base, see what it may be they have in mind.” He tapped the note. “According to this, they had almost finished it before Iliescu noticed it was there. So perhaps it would be best if Take and I go examine it in person.”
Buchevsky opened his mouth to protest, but then he closed it again. He’d discovered that he was always uncomfortable when Basarab went wandering around the mountains out from under his own eye. And a part of him resented the fact that Basarab hadn’t even considered inviting him along on this little jaunt. But the truth, however little he wanted to admit it, was that he would probably have been more of a hindrance than a help.
Basarab and Take Bratianu both seemed to be able to see like cats and move like drifting leaves. He couldn’t even come close to matching them when it came to sneaking through the woods at night, and he knew it. . .however little he liked admitting that there wasanything someone could do better than he could.
“We will go tonight,” Basarab decided. “And while I am away, you will keep an eye on things for me, my African Slav, yes?”
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Buchevsky agreed.
* * * *
XIII
Regiment Commander Harah didn’t like trees.
He hadn’t always felt that way. In fact, he’d actually liked trees until the Empire invaded this never-to-be-sufficiently-damned planet. Now he vastly preferred long, flat, empty spaces—preferably of bare, pounded earth where not even a garish or one of the human “rabbits” could have hidden. Any other sort of terrain seemed to spontaneously spawn humans ... all of whom appeared to have guns.
He hadn’t needed Base Commander Shairez to tell him humans were all lunatics! It was nice to have confirmation, of course, and he was simply delighted that the Base Commander’s conclusions had led Fleet Commander Thikair to change his plans. Once every last accursed human had been expunged from it, this planet would probably be a perfectly nice place to live.
He grimaced at his own thoughts as he sat gazing at the holographic plot in his GEV command vehicle.
Actually, Harah, part of you admires these creatures, doesn’t it? he thought. After all, we’ve killed thousands of them for every Shongari we’ve lost, and they still have the guts—the absolutely insane, utterly irrational, mind-numbingly stupid guts—to come right at us. If they only had half as much brains, they would’ve acknowledged our superiority and submitted months ago. But, no! They couldn’t do that, could they?
He growled, remembering the 35 percent of his original regiment he’d lost subduing what had once been the city of Cincinnati. Division Commander Tesuk had gone in with three regiments; he’d come out with less than one, and they’d still ended up taking out over half the city from orbit. Particularly in the nation the humans had called the “United States,” there’d seemed to be more guns than there were people!
At least the experience had taught the expedition’s senior officers to settle for occupying open terrain, where surveillance could be maintained effectively, and simply calling in kinetic strikes on anything resembling organized resistance in more constricted terrain.
Despite that, no one relished the thought of acquiring Shairez’s test subjects anyplace where there’d been sustained contact with the humans. First, because there weren’t many humansleft in places like that, and the ones who hadn’t already been killed had become fiendishly clever at hiding. Just finding them would have been hard enough even without the second consideration...which was that those same survivors were also uncommonly good at ambushing anyone who went looking for them.
Of course, there weren’t many places where there’d been no combat, given humans’ insane stubbornness. Still, the mountainous portions of the area the humans called “the Balkans” had seen far less than most, mainly because the population was so sparse and the terrain was so accursedly bad, HQ had decided to let the humans there stew in their own juices rather
than invest the effort to go in after them.
And, he reflected moodily, the other reason HQ made that little decision was the fact that we kept getting our asses kicked every time we did send someone in on the ground, didn’t we?
In fairness, they’d taken the worst of their losses in the first few weeks, before they’d really begun to appreciate just what a losing proposition it was to go after humans on ground of their own choosing.
That’s what the gods made fire support for, Harah thought grimly.
Well, he reminded himself as his GEVs and transports approached their jumpoff positions, at least the satellites have told us exactly where these humans are. And they’ve been left alone, too. Their herd hasn’t been culled yet. And not only should they be fat, happy, and stupid compared with the miserable jermahk we’ve been trying to dig out of the woodwork back home, but we’ve learned a lot over the last few months.