You’ve made me vulnerable again, little one, he thought now, looking down into Zinaida’s face. You’re my Achilles’ heel . . . my Achilles’ heart. I can’t afford that weakness, and I know it, but I can’t—won’t—give you up, either. I never had the chance to save my own babies, but perhaps I can save you, and as God is my witness, I will. Somehow, I will. And that’s what makes you my weakness. Because with you and your mother and your brothers inside my heart, it’s not enough just to kill Shongairi anymore. Not now.
“Fetyukov’s bunker, you said, Vanya?” he said out loud, and used the tip of his free hand’s index finger to brush a tear from Zinaida’s cheek.
• • • • •
“Pieter Ushakov?”
Ushakov couldn’t see the speaker very clearly. It was too dark in the tangled, shadowed woods beyond the camouflaged bunker. That didn’t disturb him all that much, in itself. What did disturb him more than a little was that the stranger had somehow reached this point without a single one of the sentinels Ushakov had deployed challenging him.
Not good, Pieter, a corner of his mind thought. Your people are supposed to be better than that! In fact, they are. Or they’d damned well better be if any of you want to be alive this time next week, anyway!
“Yes,” he said out loud. “And your name is—?”
“My name is less important than why I wanted to speak with you,” the stranger replied in only slightly accented Ukrainian. He spoke the language remarkably well for a nonnative speaker, Ushakov thought, but his accent was odd. One he couldn’t quite place. It certainly wasn’t Russian, at any rate, and eyes narrowed.
“And what do you want to talk about?” he asked, more than a little irked by the stranger’s avoidance of his question and letting an edge of suspicion sharpen his tone in response.
“Because I understand you have been attacking the aliens’ convoys and working parties around this base of theirs for some time,” the other man replied. “This is correct, no?”
“I think if you know enough to ask for me by name, you already know that, too,” Ushakov replied tartly.
“I think so, too,” the stranger agreed. He sounded amused by Ushakov’s tone, yet rather to the Ukrainian’s surprise, the amusement didn’t irritate him. Perhaps because it wasn’t a dismissive or denigrating amusement. Indeed, it seemed to invite him to share its joviality in a way that was almost . . . soothing.
“So suppose you tell me the reason you wanted to speak with me,” he said.
“Very well. I intend to attack and destroy that base, and I seek information about the vermin who garrison it. About their movements and their numbers.” Ushakov had the strong impression of a smile, although he couldn’t see it in the darkness. “It will not matter all that much in the end in most ways, I suppose. But a wise commander, as I am sure you yourself have learned, scouts the terrain before an attack.”
“You think you can destroy their base?” He couldn’t quite keep the incredulity out of the question. “I’ve been attacking them, hurting them every way I could, for three months now, and you think you can walk right through their defenses? Past the automated gun emplacements? Through the sensors they’ve set up on every approach?”
“Yes, I think I can, my troops and I. And we will.”
Ushakov had never heard such iron certainty in a human voice. The man behind that voice might be—probably was—mad, but there was no doubt in him.
“Then I want to go with you,” he heard his own voice say.
“No, you do not,” the stranger replied, almost gently.
“I do.” The echo of that same steely certitude sounded in his own voice, and he realized why. It wasn’t just his thirst for vengeance anymore, either. It was more than that—a way to neutralize the threat looming over the human beings he’d been foolish enough to allow himself to love once more.
“I’ll help you, tell you what I know. And no one alive knows the approaches to that base the way I do. I’ll guide you in. But only if I go with you.”
“You do not realize what you are asking me for,” the stranger said.
“Then tell me.”
• • • • •
“I almost wish something else would happen,” Ground Base Commander Fursa said. He and Ground Base Commander Barak were conferring via communicator, and Barak frowned at him.
“I want to figure out what’s going on—and who’s doing this to us—as badly as you do, Fursa. And I suppose for us to do that, ‘something else’ is going to have to happen. For that matter, I even agree with the Fleet Commander that we should be looking upon this as an opportunity to bait a trap for our enemies. But while you’re wishing, just remember, you’re the next closest base.”
“I know.” Fursa grimaced. “That’s my point. We’re feeling just a bit exposed out here.” His ears wiggled sourly. “It’s been bad enough with the attacks on my supply columns and patrols. To be honest, my troopers would like an opportunity to get our claws into more than a human raider here, or another one over there. Dealing with an enemy who actually stands up—who attacks where we can get at him for a change, instead of just disappearing again afterward, like smoke—would make us all feel better.”
Barak felt his own ears perk in understanding. Outside of North America, Ground Base Six’s ZOR had been the most lively—and the most costly—of them all. The local human resistance leader had demonstrated an infuriating ability to plan and execute attacks with lethal precision, and he’d cost Fursa heavily. That was one reason Ground Base Seven had been so lightly garrisoned at the time it was attacked; most of Ground Base Commander Shairez’s deployable combat forces had been on loan to Fursa. So, yes, Barak understood, even sympathized, but still. . . .
“I’m inclined to suspect that the anticipation is at least as bad as beating off an actual attack would be,” Fursa continued. “In fact, my warriors are getting more than a little edgy because things have been quieter than usual the last couple of days.” The ears moved grumpily again. “You know how the common troopers are! The rumor mill’s been busy ever since our local pests stopped buzzing quite so furiously around our ears. It’s all part of whatever happened to Ground Base Seven, you know. The ominous forces which destroyed it so mysteriously are gathering about us now, and their very presence is frightening the local humans into hiding, like garish trying to hide themselves from a thunderstorm.”
The irony in Fursa’s voice was withering. In fact, it was so withering Barak found himself wondering if at least part of its scorn for the “common troopers’” rumormongering wasn’t an effort to conceal—perhaps even from Fursa himself—the depth of the ground base commander’s own anxiety.
Well, if it was, the other ground base commander had a certain justification, Barak supposed. Unlike Fursa’s, his own base sat in the middle of what had once been called “Iowa,” which put an entire ocean between him and whatever had happened to Shairez. Of course, on the debit side of that particular account, it put him right in the very midst of the maddeningly inventive and endlessly destructive “Americans.” His own losses had been significant, especially when he’d begun extending his ZOR eastward into the states of Wisconsin and Illinois. Missouri hadn’t been any great prize, either, although at least he hadn’t had to resort to the sort of general bombardment which had reduced most of Pennsylvania and New York to wastelands. According to the fleet’s orbiting sensors, there were actually quite a few starving, ragged humans still creeping about in the wreckage over there, but there was very little left worth the Shongairi’s time or attention.
And there aren’t going to be any humans left creeping around anywhere much longer, he told himself.
Of course, the loss of Ground Base Seven had put a crimp into those plans, as well. Shairez had been Fleet Commander Thikair’s favorite ground base commander for a lot of reasons, and Barak suspected the fleet commander had regarded her as a potential future mate, whether he’d ever realized that himself or not. But even if that were the case, it had been
only a single factor in his reliance upon her, and the raw ability she’d brought to almost any task had been a much greater factor. Deservedly so, too. Picking someone to replace her in charge of the bioweapon project hadn’t been easy. In the end, however, the fleet commander had decided to return it to Ground Base Two Alpha, as originally planned. Given the difficulty getting convoys of specimens through to the base, though, Thikair had also decided to use Starlanders to shuttle them in, instead. That would both avoid the maddeningly effective raiders who seemed to swarm around Ground Base Two Alpha’s outer perimeter like goading insects and let him collect them from farther away, as well.
Like Barak’s ZOR, for example.
Which means a third of my troopers are out crawling through the ruins around what used to be Chicago hunting for humans to bring back alive, and isn’t that fun? Cainharn! I think every human still out there has at least two guns!
The good news was that the fleet technicians had finally come up with a capture gas which worked pretty well. They hadn’t had one of those before—only lethal agents, tailored on the basis of the original Survey physiological reports. Now they were busy manufacturing the capture gas in quantity. He ought to be receiving the first mortar shells loaded with it within a few days, and after that supplying Ground Base Commander Teraik with his specimens should be a far simpler task.
And it better be, too. Almost three local weeks had passed since Ground Base Seven’s destruction. That was a lot of time, yet no one in the entire expedition had been able to come up with a workable explanation for what had happened. Personally, Barak was inclined to think Fleet Commander Thikair was on to something when it came to analyzing who might be behind it, but he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was more to it. Or perhaps less. Try though he had, he’d been unable to come up with a better way to describe his . . . amorphous sense of dread even to himself, and he wondered if perhaps he, too, was subject to some of the same unformed fears that drove the rumor mill Fursa had been talking about. But still. . . .
“You may have a point,” he said now. “And, yes, trust me—my rumor mill over here is as . . . fertile as yours is over there. But if I’m going to be honest about it, I can’t say I’m really looking forward to the other side’s next move. In fact, if I had my way”—his voice lowered—“I’d already be cutting my losses. This planet’s been nothing but one enormous pain in the ass, and when you come down to it, it’s not even that pleasant a place to live. If we’re going to kill all the humans off in the end, we might as well just pick a nice empty planet that doesn’t have anyone living on it in the first place and take the expedition over there. In the meantime, where this world’s concerned, I say take all our people off and level the place. See how whoever attacked Ground Base Seven likes that!”
The base commanders’ gazes met, and Barak saw the agreement hidden in Fursa’s eyes. Any one of Fleet Commander Thikair’s dreadnoughts was capable of sterilizing any planet . . . or of reducing it to drifting rubble, for that matter. Of course, actually doing that would raise more than a few eyebrows among the Hegemony’s member races. The sort of scrutiny it would draw upon the Empire might well have disastrous consequences, and if Thikair’s suspicion that one of the Hegemony’s member races was deliberately manipulating the situation, providing their unidentified enemy with that kind of ammunition would probably be a mistake. On the other hand. . . .
“Somehow I don’t think that particular solution’s going to be very high on the Fleet Commander’s list,” Fursa said carefully.
“No, and it probably shouldn’t be,” Barak agreed. “But I’m willing to bet it’s running through the back of his mind already, and you know it.”
• • • • •
“Time check,” brigade Commander Caranth announced. “Check in.”
“Perimeter One, secure.”
“Perimeter Two, secure.”
“Perimeter Three, secure.”
“Perimeter Four, secure.”
The acknowledgments came in steadily, and Caranth’s ears twitched in satisfaction with each of them . . . until the sequence paused.
The brigade commander didn’t worry for a moment, but then he stiffened in his chair.
“Perimeter Five, report,” he said.
Only silence answered.
“Perimeter Five!” he snapped . . . and that was when the firing began.
Caranth lunged upright and raced to the command bunker’s armored observation slit while his staff started going berserk behind him. He stared out into the night, his body rigid in disbelief as the stroboscopic fury of muzzle flashes ripped the darkness apart. He could see nothing—nothing at all!—but the flickering lightning of automatic weapons . . . and neither could his sensors. Yet he had infantry out there shooting at something, and as he watched one of his fixed heavy weapons posts opened fire, as well.
“We’re under attack!” someone screamed over the net. “Perimeter Three—we’re under attack! They’re coming through the—”
The voice chopped off, and then, horribly, Caranth heard other voices yelling in alarm, screaming in panic, cutting off in mid-syllable. It was as if some invisible, unstoppable whirlwind was sweeping through his perimeter, and strain his eyes though he might, he couldn’t even see it!
The voices began to dwindle, fading in a diminuendo that was even more terrifying than the initial thunder of gunfire, the explosion of artillery rounds landing on something no one could see. The firing died. The last scream bubbled into silence, and Caranth felt his heart trying to freeze in his chest.
The only sound was that of his staff, trying desperately to contact Ground Base Commander Fursa’s command room or even one of the perimeter security points.
There was no answer, only silence. And then—
“What’s that?” someone blurted, and Caranth turned to see something flowing from the overhead louvers of the bunker’s ventilation system.
Gas! he thought. Is that how they’ve been doing it? But it’s a sealed system. How could they—?
His brain was still trying to formulate the question when the flowing gas seemed suddenly to solidify and darkness crashed down on him like a hammer.
. XXXVIII .
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Abu Bakr el-Hiri said, shaking his head as he looked across the garage at Dan Torino. Torino looked back, and el-Hiri grimaced.
“Are you listening to this shit you’re spouting?” he demanded. “I mean suicide truck bombs? If I’m remembering correctly, that method of attack wasn’t exactly high on you folks’ list of acceptable tactics!”
“Mainly because we had other means of delivery,” Torino replied. “And because we liked ones that killed a few less innocent bystanders, if I want to get nasty about it. But we don’t have those other means of delivery anymore, do we? And as for killing innocent bystanders—”
He shrugged. Not happily—because if there was one thing he wasn’t, it was happy about proposing such an attack—but without much hesitation, either.
They hadn’t been able to absolutely confirm it—they hadn’t had any handy Shongair prisoners to interrogate lately—but all the evidence suggested Ground Base Commander Teraik was about to start up his little biological warfare lab after all. They’d managed to put a severe crimp in the Shongairi’s ability to transport in his “specimens” by road, but the aliens appeared to have found a solution to that one. They were flying in their hapless research subjects by shuttle now, and security in the ground base’s immediate vicinity was too tight for anyone to have a hope of smuggling in a Stinger to take down one of the shuttles on approach. And, as an added benefit from the aliens’ perspective, the fact that they were capturing their “specimens” from other Shongair bases’ operating zones meant the humans being captured hadn’t even received the warning Dave Dvorak and Rob Wilson had transmitted through their net of contacts.
“We don’t know how much longer it’s going to take them to start churning out their bugs or their poisons or w
hatever it is they’re going to use,” Torino said now. “I don’t think we can afford to assume it’s going to take them all that long, though. And then there’s the question of what’s happening to the people they’ve dragged in there.” He showed his teeth in a snarl. “I don’t know, but I don’t think being the subject of a research project looking for the most efficient way to kill everybody on the frigging planet is likely to be a very enjoyable experience.”
“Longbow,” el-Hiri said in a much quieter voice, “I’m not arguing with you about that. Nobody is. But face it, man. Even if we stop them here, what’s going to stop them from doing the same thing somewhere else? I’m not ready to give up on Allah yet, but I have to admit, it’s getting harder to believe.” He shook his head, his eyes dark. “It’s pretty clear from the ones we’ve questioned that we’ve hurt them a hell of a lot worse than anyone else ever did, but the writing’s on the wall. In fact, I’ve been thinking maybe the best thing we could do is ask Governor Howell to negotiate our surrender.”
“What?” Torino looked at him, unable to believe he’d heard him correctly.
“I’m talking about us—you and me, not the whole planet,” el-Hiri said. “I’ve been with you every step of the way. I still am, even if you are one of those crusader bastards Allah’s going to burn in hell forever. But the truth is, I’ve been thinking about something you said a long time ago. About that chart or graph you were thinking about. Maybe it’s time for us to see what kind of terms we can buy for everybody else if we’re willing to hand ourselves over to them.”
Torino started a quick reply, then stopped. He looked into el-Hiri’s eyes and realized that the other man, the Muslim extremist, had become his friend. More than his friend, almost his brother. And as he realized that, he also realized el-Hiri was serious. For that matter, the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him el-Hiri might actually have a point.