Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  Which, he thought mordantly, at least it gives me something to keep me busy.

  And it also gave him something besides Washington to worry about. He’d argued with Trish when his ex decided to take Shania and Yvonne to live with her mother, but that had been because of the crime rate and cost of living in D.C. He’d never, ever, worried about—

  He pushed that thought aside, again, fleeing almost gratefully back to the contemplation of the clusterfuck he had to deal with somehow.

  Gunnery Sergeant Calvin Meyers was their group’s second-ranking member, which made him Buchevsky’s XO ... to the obvious disgruntlement of Sergeant Francisco Ramirez, the senior Army noncom. But if Ramirez resented the fact that they’d just become a Marine-run show, he was keeping his mouth shut. Probably because he recognized what an unmitigated pain in the ass Buchevsky’s job had just become.

  They had a limited quantity of food, courtesy of the aircraft’s overwater survival package, but none of them had any idea of their exact position, no one spoke Serbian (assuming they werein Serbia), they had no maps, they were totally out of communication, and the last they’d heard, the entire planet seemed to be succumbing to spontaneous insanity.

  Aside from that, it ought to be a piece of cake, he reflected sardonically. Of course—

  “I think you’d better listen to this, Top,” a voice said, and Buchevsky turned toward the speaker.

  “Listen to what, Gunny?”

  “We’re getting something really weird on the radio, Top.”

  Buchevsky’s eyes narrowed. He’d never actually met Meyers before this flight, but the compact, strongly built, slow-talking Marine from the Appalachian coal fields had struck him as a solid, unflappable sort. At the moment, however, Meyers was pasty-pale, and his hands shook as he extended the emergency radio they’d recovered from the wrecked fuselage.

  Meyers turned the volume back up, and Buchevsky’s eyes narrowed even further. The voice coming from the radio sounded...mechanical. Artificial. It carried absolutely no emotions or tonal emphasis.

  That was the first thing that struck him. Then he jerked back half a step, as if he’d just been punched, as what the voice was saying registered.

  “—am Fleet Commander Thikair of the Shongari Empire, and I am addressing your entire planet on all frequencies. Your world lies helpless before us. Our kinetic energy weapons have destroyed your major national capitals, your military bases, your warships. We can, and will, conduct additional kinetic strikes wherever necessary. You will submit and become productive and obedient subjects of the Empire, or you will be destroyed, as your governments and military forces have already been destroyed.”

  Buchevsky stared at the radio, his mind cowering back from the black, bottomless pit that yawned suddenly where his family once had been. Trish....Despite the divorce, shed still been an almost physical part of him. And Shania...Yvonne....Shannie was only six, for God’s sake! Yvonne was even younger. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t!

  The mechanical-sounding English ceased. There was a brief surge of something that sounded like Chinese, and then it switched to Spanish.

  “It’s saying the same thing it just said in English,” Sergeant Ramirez said flatly, and Buchevsky shook himself. He closed his eyes tightly, squeezing them against the tears he would not—could not—shed. That dreadful abyss loomed inside him, trying to suck him under, and part of him wanted nothing else in the world but to let the undertow take him. But he couldn’t. He had responsibilities. The job.

  “Do you believe this shit, Top?” Meyers said hoarsely.

  “I don’t know,” Buchevsky admitted. His own voice came out sounding broken and rusty, and he cleared his throat harshly. “I don’t know,” he managed in a more normal-sounding tone. “Or, at least, I know I don’t want to believe it, Gunny.”

  “Me neither,” another voice said. This one was a soprano, and it belonged to Staff Sergeant Michelle Truman, the Air Force’s senior surviving representative. Buchevsky raised an eyebrow at her, grateful for the additional distraction from the pain trying to tear the heart right out of him, and the auburn-haired staff sergeant grimaced.

  “I don’t want to believe it,” she said, “but think about it. We already knew somebody’s seemed to’ve been blowing the shit out of just about everybody. And who the hell had that many nukes?” She shook her head. “I’m no expert on kinetic weapons, but I’ve read a little science fiction, and I’d say an orbital kinetic strike would probably look just like a nuke to the naked eye. So, yeah, probably if this bastard is telling the truth, nukes are exactly what any survivors would’ve been reporting.”

  “Oh, shit,” Meyers muttered, then looked back at Buchevsky. He didn’t say another word, but he didn’t have to, and Buchevsky drew a deep breath.

  “I don’t know, Gunny,” he said again. “I just don’t know.”

  * * * *

  He still didn’t know—not really—the next morning, but one thing they couldn’t do was simply huddle here. They’d seen no sign of any traffic along the road the C-17 had destroyed. Roads normally went somewhere, though, so if they followed this one long enough, “somewhere” was where they’d eventually wind up—hopefully before they ran out of food. And at least his decision trees had been rather brutally simplified when the last two badly injured passengers died during the night.

  He tried hard not to feel grateful for that, but he was guiltily aware that it would have been dishonest, even if he’d managed to succeed.

  Come on. You’re not grateful they’re dead, Stevie, he told himself grimly. You’re just grateful they won’t be slowing the rest of you down. There’s a difference.

  He even knew it was true...which didn’t make him feel any better. And neither did the fact that he’d put his wife’s and daughters’ faces into a small mental box and locked them away, buried the pain deep enough to let him deal with his responsibilities to the living. Someday, he knew, he would have to reopen that box. Endure the pain, admit the loss. But not now. Not yet. For now he could tell himself others depended upon him, that he had to put aside his own pain while he dealt withtheir needs, and he wondered if that made him a coward.

  “Ready to move out, Top,” Meyers’s voice said behind him, and he looked over his shoulder.

  “All right,” he said out loud, trying hard to radiate the confidence he was far from feeling. “In that case, I guess we should be going.”

  Now if I only had some damned idea where we’re going.

  * * * *

  VI

  Platoon Commander Yirku stood in the open hatch of his command ground effect vehicle as his armored platoon sped down the long, broad roadway that stabbed straight through the mountains. The bridges that crossed the main roadbed at intervals, especially as the platoon approached what were (or had been) towns or cities, forced his column to squeeze in on itself, but overall, Yirku was delighted. His tanks’ grav-cushions couldn’t care less what surface lay under them, but that didn’t protect their crews from seasickness if they had to move rapidly across rough ground, and he’d studied the survey reports with care. He’d rather glumly anticipated operating across wilderness terrain that might be crossed here and there by “roads” which were little more than random animal tracks.

  Despite his relief at avoiding that unpleasantness, Yirku admitted (very privately) that he found these “humans’“ infrastructure...unsettling. There was so much of it, especially in areas that had belonged to nations, like this “United States.” And, crude though its construction might appear, most of it was well laid out. The fact that they’d managed to construct so much of it, so well suited to their current technology level’s requirements, was sobering, too, and—

  Platoon Leader Yirku’s thoughts broke off abruptly as he emerged from under the latest bridge and the fifteen-pound round from the M-136 light anti-armor weapon struck the side of his vehicle’s turret at a velocity of 360 feet per second. Its HEAT warhead produced a hyper-velocity gas je
t that carved through the GEV’s light armor like an incandescent dagger, and the resultant internal explosion disemboweled the tank effortlessly.

  Ten more rockets stabbed down into the embankment-enclosed cut of Interstate 81 almost simultaneously, and eight of them found their targets, exploding like thunderbolts. Each of them killed another GEV, and the humans who’d launched them had deliberately concentrated on the front and back edges of the platoon’s neat road column. Despite their grav-cushions, the four survivors of Yirku’s platoon were temporarily trapped behind the blazing, exploding carcasses of their fellows. They were still there when the next quartet of rockets came sizzling in.

  The ambushers—a scratch-built pickup team of Tennessee National Guardsmen, all of them veterans of deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan— were on the move, filtering back into the trees almost before the final Shongari tank had exploded.

  * * * *

  Company Commander Kirtha’s column of transports rumbled along in a hanging cloud of dust, which made him grateful his GEV command vehicle was hermetically sealed. Now if only he’d been assigned to one of the major bases on the continent called “America,” or at least the western fringes of this one!

  It wouldn’t be so bad if they were allgrav-cushion, he told himself, watching the wheeled vehicles through the smothering fog of dust. But GEVs were expensive, and the counter-grav generators used up precious internal volume not even troop carriers could afford to give away. Imperial wheeled vehicles had excellent off-road capability, but even a miserable so-called road like this one allowed them to move much more efficiently.

  And at least we’re out in the middle of nice, flat ground as far as the eye can see, Kirtha reminded himself. He didn’t like the rumors about ambushes on isolated detachments. That wasn’t supposed to happen, especially from someone as effortlessly and utterly defeated as these “humans” had been. And even if it did happen, it wasn’t supposed to be effective. And the ones responsible for it were supposed to be destroyed.

  Which, if the rumors were accurate, wasn’t happening the way it was supposed to. Some of the attackers were being spotted and destroyed, but with Hegemony technology,all of them should have been wiped out, and they weren’t being. Still, there were no convenient mountainsides or thick belts of forest to hide attackers out here in the midst of these endless, flat fields of grain, and—

  Captain Pieter Stefanovich Ushakov of the Ukrainian Army watched through his binoculars with pitiless satisfaction as the entire alien convoy and its escort of tanks disappeared in a fiery wave of destruction two kilometers long. The scores of 120 mm mortar rounds buried in the road as his own version of the “improvised explosive devices,” which had given the Americans such grief in Iraq, had proved quite successful, he thought coldly.

  Now, he thought, to see exactly how these weasels respond.

  He was fully aware of the risks in remaining in the vicinity, but he needed some understanding of the aliens’ capabilities and doctrine, and the only way to get that was to see what they did. He was confident he’d piled enough earth on top of his position to conceal any thermal signature, and he was completely unarmed, with no ferrous metal on his person, which would hopefully defeat any magnetic detectors. So unless they used some sort of deep-scan radar, he ought to be relatively safe from detection.

  And even if it turned out he wasn’t, his entire family had been in Kiev when the kinetic strikes hit.

  * * * *

  Colonel Nicolae Basescu sat in the commander’s hatch of his T-72M1, his mind wrapped around a curiously empty, singing silence, and waited.

  The first prototype of his tank—the export model of the Russian T-72A—had been completed in 1970, four years before Basescu’s own birth, and it had become sadly outclassed by more modern, more deadly designs. It was still superior to the Romanian Army’s home-built TR-85s, based on the even more venerable T-55, but that wasn’t saying much compared with designs like the Russians’ T-80s andT-90s, or the Americans’ M1A2.

  And it’s certainly not saying much compared with aliens who can actually travel between the stars, Basescu thought.

  Unfortunately, it was all he had. Now if he only knew what he was supposed to be doing with the seven tanks of his scraped-up command.

  Stop that, he told himself sternly. You’re an officer of the Romanian Army. You know exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

  He gazed through the opening a few minutes’ work with an ax had created. His tanks were as carefully concealed as he could manage inside the industrial buildings across the frontage road from the hundred-meter-wide Mureş River. The two lanes of the E-81 highway crossed the river on a double-span cantilever bridge, flanked on the east by a rail bridge, two kilometers southwest of Alba judeţ, the capital of Alba judeţ. The city of eighty thousand—the city where Michael the Brave had achieved the first union of the three great provinces of Romania in 1599—was two-thirds empty, and Basescu didn’t like to think about what those fleeing civilians were going to do when they started running out of whatever supplies they’d managed to snatch up in their flight. But he didn’t blame them for running. Not when their city was barely 270 kilometers northwest of where Bucharest had been four and a half days ago.

  He wished he dared to use his radios, but the broadcasts from the alien commander suggested that any transmissions would be unwise. Fortunately, at least some of the land lines were still up. He doubted they would be for much longer, but enough remained for him to know about the alien column speeding up the highway toward him...and Alba iulia.

  * * * *

  Company Commander Barmit punched up his navigation systems, but they were being cantankerous again, and he muttered a quiet yet heartfelt curse as he jabbed at the control panel a second time.

  As far as he was concerned, the town ahead of him was scarcely large enough to merit the attention of two entire companies of infantry, even if Base Commander Shairez’s pre-bombardment analysis had identified it as some sort of administrative subcenter. Its proximity to what had been a national capital suggested to Barmit’s superiors that it had probably been sufficiently important to prove useful as a headquarters for the local occupation forces. Personally, Barmit suspected the reverse was more likely true. An administrative center this close to something the size of that other city— “Bucharest,” or something equally outlandish—was more likely to be lost in the capital’s shadow than functioning as any sort of important secondary brain.

  Too bad Ground Force Commander Thairys didn’t ask for my opinion, he thought dryly, still jabbing at the recalcitrant display.

  The imagery finally came up and stabilized, and his ears flicked in a grimace as it confirmed his memory. He keyed his com.

  “All right,” he said. “We’re coming up on another river, and our objective’s just beyond that. We’ll take the bridge in a standard road column, but let’s not take chances. Red Section, you spread left. White section, we’ll spread right.”

  Acknowledgments came back, and he reconfigured the display from navigation to tactical.

  * * * *

  Colonel Basescu twitched upright as the alien vehicles came into sight. He focused his binoculars, snapping the approaching vehicles into much sharper clarity, and a part of him was almost disappointed by how unremarkable they appeared. How...mundane.

  Most of them were some sort of wheeled transport vehicles, with a boxy sort of look that made him think of armored personnel carriers. There were around thirty of those, and it was obvious they were being escorted by five other vehicles.

  He shifted his attention to those escorts and stiffened as he realized just how un-mundane they were. They sped along, sleek-looking and dark, hovering perhaps a meter or two above the ground, and some sort of long, slender gunbarrels projected from their boxy-looking turrets.

  The approaching formation slowed as the things that were probably APCs began forming into a column of twos under the watchful eye of the things that were probably tanks, and he lowered the bin
oculars and picked up the handset for the field telephone he’d had strung between the tanks once they’d maneuvered into their hides.

  “Mihai,” he told his second section commander, “we’ll take the tanks. Radu, I want you and Matthius to concentrate on the transports. Don’t fire until Mihai and I do—then try to jam them up on the bridge.”

  * * * *

  Barmit felt his ears relaxing in satisfaction as the wheeled vehicles settled into column and his GEVs headed across the river, watching its flanks. The drop from the roadbed to the surface of the water had provided the usual “stomach left behind” sensation, but once they were actually out over the water, its motion became glassy-smooth as he led White Section’s other two GEVs between the small islands in the center of the river, idling along to keep pace with the transports.