by George R. R.
The Shongari mortars were more powerful, and white-hot flashes began to walk across the area behind Buchevsky’s forward positions, and he heard screams rising from behind him, as well.
But the Shongari had problems of their own. Their vehicle-mounted weapons were confined to the trail while the humans’ were deeply dug-in, and Buchevsky and Ignacio Gutierrez had pre-plotted just about every possible firing position along that trail. As soon as they opened fire, Gutierrez knew where they had to be, and both of his mortars retargeted immediately. They fired more rapidly than the heavier Shongari weapons, and their bombs fell around the Shongari vehicles in a savage exchange that could not—and didn’t—last long.
Ignacio Gutierrez died, along with one entire crew. The second mortar, though, remained in action...which was more than could be said for the vehicles they’d engaged.
* * * *
Harah snarled.
He had over a dozen more mortar vehicles ... all of them miles behind the point of contact, at the far end of the choked, tortuous trails along which his infantry had pursued the humans. He could bring them up—in time—just as he could call in a kinetic strike and put an end to this entire business in minutes. But the longer he delayed, the more casualties that single remaining human mortar would inflict. And if he called in the kinetic strike, he’d kill the test subjects he’d come to capture, along with their defenders...which would make the entire operation, and all the casualties he’d already suffered, meaningless.
That wasn’t going to happen. If this bunch of primitives was so incredibly stupid, so lost to all rationality and basic decency, that they wanted to die fighting, then he would damned well oblige them.
He looked up through a break in the tree cover. The light was fading quickly, and Shongari didn’t like fighting in the dark. But there was still time. They could still break through before darkness fell if—
* * * *
Stephen Buchevsky sensed it coming. He couldn’t have explained how, but he knew. He could actually feel the Shongari gathering themselves, steeling themselves, and he knew.
“They’re coming!” he shouted, and heard his warning relayed along the horseshoe-shaped defensive line in either direction from his CP.
He set aside his own rifle and settled into position behind the KPV heavy machine gun. There were three tripod-mounted PKMS 7.62 mm medium machine guns dug in around Bastogne’s final perimeter, but even Mircea Basarab’s scrounging talents had limits. He’d managed to come up with only one heavy machine gun, and it was a bulky, awkward thing—six and a half feet long, intended as a vehicle-mounted weapon, on an improvised infantry mounting.
The Shongari started forward behind a hurricane of rifle fire and grenades. The minefield slowed them, disordered them, but they kept coming. They were too close for the single remaining mortar to engage, and the medium machine guns opened up.
Shongari screamed, tumbled aside, disappeared in sprays of blood and tissue, but then a pair of wheeled armored personnel carriers edged up the trail behind them. How they’d gotten here was more than Buchevsky could guess, but their turret-mounted light energy weapons quested back and forth, seeking targets. Then a quasi-solid bolt of lightning slammed across the chaos and the blood and terror and one of the machine guns was silenced forever.
But Stephen Buchevsky knew where that lightning bolt had come from, and the Russian Army had developed the KPV around the 14.5 mm round of its final World War II antitank rifle. The PKMS’ 185-grain bullet developed three thousand foot-pounds of muzzle energy; the KPV’s bullet weighed almost a thousand grains...and developed twenty-four thousand foot-pounds of muzzle energy.
He laid his sights on the vehicle that had fired and sent six hundred rounds per minute shrieking into it.
The APC staggered as the steel-cored, armor-piercing, incendiary bullets slammed into it at better than 3,200 feet per second. Armor intended to resist small arms fire never had a chance against that torrent of destruction, and the vehicle vomited smoke and flame.
Its companion turned toward the source of its destruction, and Alice Macomb stood up in a rifle pit. She exposed herself recklessly with an RBR-M60, and its three-and-a-half-pound rocket smashed into the APC ...just before a six-round burst killed her where she stood.
Buchevsky swung the KBV’s flaming muzzle, sweeping his fire along the Shongari line, pouring his hate, his desperate need to protect the children behind him, into his enemies.
He was still firing when the Shongari grenade silenced his machine gun forever.
* * * *
XIV
He woke slowly, floating up from the depths like someone else’s ghost. He woke to darkness, to pain, and to a swirling tide race of dizziness, confusion, and fractured memory.
He blinked, slowly, blindly, trying to understand. He’d been wounded more times than he liked to think about, but it had never been like this. The pain had never run everywhere under his skin, as if it were racing about on the power of his own heartbeat. And yet, even though he knew he had never suffered such pain in his life, it was curiously...distant. A part of him, yes, but walled off by the dizziness. Held one imagined half step away.
“You are awake, my Stephen.”
It was a statement, he realized, not a question. Almost as if the voice behind it were trying to reassure him of that.
He turned his head, and it was as if it belonged to someone else. It seemed to take him forever, but at last Mircea Basarab’s face swam into his field of vision.
He blinked again, trying to focus, but he couldn’t. He lay in a cave somewhere, looking out into a mountain night, and there was something wrong with his eyes. Everything seemed oddly out of phase, and the night kept flashing, as if it were alive with heat lightning.
“Mircea.”
He didn’t recognize his own voice. It was faint, thready.
“Yes,” Basarab agreed. “I know you may not believe it at this moment, but you will recover.”
“Take...your word...for it.”
“Very wise of you.”
Buchevsky didn’t have to be able to focus his eyes to see Basarab’s fleeting smile, and he felt his own mouth twitch in reply. But then a new and different sort of pain ripped through him.
“I...fucked up.” He swallowed painfully. “Sorry... so sorry. The kids. . .”
His eyes burned as a tear forced itself from under his lids, and he felt Basarab grip his right hand. The Romanian raised it, pressed it against his own chest, and his face came closer as he leaned over Buchevsky.
“No, my Stephen,” he said slowly. “It was not you who failed; it was I. This is my fault, my friend.”
“No.” Buchevsky shook his head weakly. “No. Couldn’t have...stopped it even if...you’d been here.”
“You think not?” It was Basarab’s turn to shake his head. “You think wrongly. These creatures—these Shongari—would never have touched my people if I had remembered. Had I not spent so long trying to be someone I am not. Trying to forget. You shame me, my Stephen. You, who fell in my place, doing my duty, paying in blood for my failure.”
Buchevsky frowned, his swirling brain trying to make some sort of sense out of Basarab’s words. He couldn’t...which probably shouldn’t have been too surprising, he decided, given how horrendously bad he felt.
“How many—?” he asked.
“Only a very few, I fear,” Basarab said quietly. “Your Gunny Meyers is here, although he was more badly wounded even than you. I am not surprised the vermin left both of you for dead. And Jasmine and Private Lopez. The others were...gone before Take and I could return.”
Buchevsky’s stomach clenched as Basarab confirmed what he’d already known.
“And...the villagers?”
“Sergeant Jonescu got perhaps a dozen children to safety,” Basarab said. “He and most of his men died holding the trail while the children and their mothers fled. The others—”
He shrugged, looking away, then looked back at Buchevsky.
; “They are not here, Stephen. For whatever reason, the vermin have taken them, and having seen this new base of theirs, I do not think either of us would like that reason.”
“God.” Buchevsky closed his eyes again. “Sorry. My fault,” he said once more.
“Do not repeat that foolishness again, or you will make me angry,” Basarab said sternly. “And do not abandon hope for them. They are my people. I swore to protect them, and I do not let my word be proved false.”
Buchevsky’s world was spinning away again, yet he opened his eyes, looked up in disbelief. His vision cleared, if only for a moment, and as he saw Mircea Basarab’s face, he felt the disbelief flow out of him.
It was still preposterous, of course. He knew that. Only, somehow, as he looked up into that granite expression, it didn’t matter what he knew. All that mattered was what hefelt...and as he fell back into the bottomless darkness, a tiny little sliver of awareness felt almost sorry for the Shongari.
* * * *
Private Kumayr felt his head beginning to nod forward and stiffened his spine, snapping back erect in his chair. His damnably comfortable chair, which wasn’t exactly what someone needed to keep him awake and alert in the middle of the night.
He shook himself and decided he’d better find something to do if he didn’t want one of the officers to come along and rip his head off for dozing on duty. Something that looked industrious and conscientious.
His ears twitched in amusement, and he punched up a standard diagnostic of the perimeter security systems. Not that he expected to find any problems. The entire base was brand new, and all of its systems had passed their final checks with flying colors less than three local days ago. Still, it would look good on the log sheets.
He hummed softly as the computers looked over one another’s shoulders, reporting back to him. He paid particular attention to the systems in the laboratory area. Now that they had test subjects, the labs would be getting a serious workout, after all. When that happened—
His humming stopped, and his ears pricked as a red icon appeared on his display. That couldn’t be right...could it?
He keyed another, more tightly focused diagnostic program, and his pricked ears flattened as more icons began to blink. He stared at them, then slammed his hand down on the transmit key.
“Perimeter One!” he snapped. “Perimeter One, Central. Report status!”
There was no response, and something with hundreds of small icy feet started to scuttle up and down his spine.
“Perimeter Two!” he barked, trying another circuit. “Perimeter Two— report status!”
Still no response, and that was impossible. There were fifty troopers in each of those positions—one of them had to have heard him!
“All perimeter stations!” He heard the desperation in his voice, tried to squeeze it back out again while he held down the all-units key. “All perimeter stations, this is a red alert!”
Still there was nothing, and he stabbed more controls, bringing up the monitors. They came alive...and he froze.
Not possible, a small, still voice said in the back of his brain as he stared at the images of carnage. At the troopers with their throats ripped out, at the Shongari blood soaking into the thirsty soil of an alien world, at heads turned backwards on snapped necks and dismembered body parts scattered like some lunatic’s bloody handiwork.
Not possible, not without at least one alarm sounding. Not— He heard a tiny sound, and his right hand flashed toward his side arm. But even as he touched it, the door of his control room flew open and darkness crashed over him.
* * * *
XV
“What?”
Fleet Commander Thikair looked at Ship Commander Ahzmer in astonishment so deep, it was sheer incomprehension.
“I’m...I’m sorry, sir.” The flagship’s CO sounded like someone trapped in an amazingly bad dream, Thikair thought distantly. “The report just came in. I’m...afraid it’s confirmed, sir.”
“All of them?” Thikair shook himself. “Everyone assigned to the base— even Shairez?”
“All of them,” Ahzmer confirmed heavily. “And all the test subjects have disappeared.”
“Dainthar;” Thikair half whispered. He stared at the ship commander, then shook himself again, harder.
“How did they do it?”
“Sir, I don’t know. No one knows. For that matter, it doesn’t...well, it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen the humans do before.”
“What are you talking about?” Thikair’s voice was harder, impatient. He knew much of his irritation was the product of his own shock, but that didn’t change the fact that what Ahzmer had just said made no sense.
“It doesn’t look like whoever it was used weapons at all, Fleet Commander.” Ahzmer didn’t sound as if he expected Thikair to believe him, but the ship commander went on doggedly. “It’s more like some sort of wild beasts got through every security system without sounding a single alarm. Not one, sir. But there are no bullet wounds, no knife wounds, no sign of any kind of weapon. Our people were just...torn apart.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Thikair protested.
“No, sir, it doesn’t. But it’s what happened.”
The two of them stared at one another; then Thikair drew a deep breath.
“Senior officers conference, two hours,” he said flatly.
* * * *
“The ground patrols have confirmed it, Fleet Commander,” Ground Force Commander Thairys said heavily. “There are no Shongari survivors. None. And—” He inhaled heavily, someone about to say something he really didn’t want to. “—there’s no evidence that a single one of our troopers so much as fired a shot in his own defense. It’s as if they all just...sat there, waiting for someone—orsomething—to tear them apart.”
“Calm down, Thairys.” Thikair put both sternness and sympathy into his tone. “We’re going to have enough panicky rumors when the troops hear about this. Let’s not begin believing in night terrors before the rumor mill even gets started!”
Thairys looked at him for a moment, then managed a chuckle that was only slightly hollow.
“You’re right, of course, sir. It’s just that....Well, it’s just that I’ve never seen anything like this. And I’ve checked the database. As nearly as I can tell, no one in the entire Hegemony has ever seen anything like this.”
“It’s a big galaxy,” Thikair pointed out. “And even the Hegemony’s explored only a very small portion of it. I don’t know what happened down there, either, but trust me—there’s a rational explanation. We just have to figure out what it is.”
“With all due respect, Fleet Commander,” Squadron Commander Jainfar said quietly, “how do we go about doing that?”
Thikair looked at him, and the squadron commander flicked his ears.
“I’ve personally reviewed the sensor recordings, sir. Until Private Kumayr began trying to contact the perimeter strong points, there was absolutely no indication of any problem. Whatever happened, it apparently managed to kill every single member of the garrison—except for Kumayr—without being detected by any heat, motion, or audio sensor. The fact of the matter is, sir, that we have no data, no information at all. Just an entire base full of dead personnel. And with no evidence, how do we figure out what happened, far less who was responsible for it?”
“One thing I think we can assume, sir.” Base Commander Barak was down on the planetary surface, attending the conference electronically, and Thikair nodded permission to speak to his comm image.
“As I say, I think we can assumeone thing,” Barak continued. “Surely if it was the humans—if humans were capable of this sort of thing—they wouldn’t have waited until we’d killed more than half of them before we found out about it! For that matter, why here? Why Shairez’s base, and not mine, or Base Commander Fursa’s? Unless we want to assume the humans somehow figured out what Shairez was going to be developing, why employ some sort of ‘secret weapon’ for the first time against a br
and-new base where nowhere near as much of the local population has been killed?”
“With all due respect, Base Commander,” Thairys said, “if it wasn’t the humans, then who do you suggest it might have been?”
“That I don’t know, sir,” Barak said respectfully. “I’m simply suggesting that, logically, if humans could do this in the first place, they’d already have done it...and on a considerably larger scale.”
“Are you suggesting that some other member of the Hegemony might be responsible?” Thikair asked slowly.
“I think that’s remotely possible...butonly remotely, sir.” Barak shrugged. “Again, I have no idea who—or what—it actually was. But I don’t really see how any other member of the Hegemony could have penetrated our security so seamlessly. Our technology is as good as anyone else’s. Probably even better, in purely military applications.”