by David Weber
Not that he supposed the Shongairi were going to complain.
The outer mine belt wasn’t as deep as he would have liked, but the Shongairi obviously hadn’t realized what they were walking into. Their infantry advance had come to a sudden stop as his forward troops set off the command-detonated mines, and he listened with bloodthirsty satisfaction to alien shrieks as solid walls of shrapnel scythed off limbs and shredded torsos.
He didn’t expect the delay to last very long, but he’d take what he could get. Besides, the inner mine belt was considerably deeper, with tripwire mines placed to thicken the command-detonated ones.
I may not stop them, but I can damned well make them pay cash. And maybe—just maybe—Jonescu will get some of the kids out after all.
He didn’t let himself think about the struggle to survive those kids would face over the coming winter with no roof, no food. He couldn’t.
“Runner!”
“Yes, Top!”
“Find Corporal Gutierrez,” Buchevsky told the young man. “Tell him it’s time to dance.”
• • • • •
The Shongairi stalled along the edge of the minefield cowered even closer to the ground as the pair of 120-millimeter mortars Basarab had scrounged up along with the mines started dropping lethal fire in on them. Even now, few of Harah’s troops had actually encountered human artillery, and the thirty-five-pound HE bombs were a devastating experience for troopers whose ranks had already been riven by the blast zones of Stephen Buchevsky’s land mines.
• • • • •
Regiment Commander Harah winced as the communications net was flooded by sudden reports of heavy fire. Even after the unpleasant surprise of the infantry-portable SAMs, he hadn’t anticipated this.
His lead infantry companies’ already heavy loss rates soared, and he snarled over the net at his own support weapons commander.
“Find those damned mortars and get fire on them—now!”
• • • • •
Harah’s infantry recoiled as rifle fire from concealed pits and camouflaged, log-reinforced bunkers added to the carnage of mortar bombs and minefields. But they were survivors who’d learned their lessons in a hard school, and their junior officer started probing forward, looking for openings.
Three heavy mortars, mounted on unarmored transports, had managed to struggle up the narrow trail behind them. Now they tried to locate the human mortars, but the dense tree cover and rugged terrain made it impossible. The Shongairi had never provided their artillerists with the specialized radar human artillery used to track incoming fire back to its source. After all, there’d never been any reason for them to develop the capability before they ran into the infernally inventive humans. Instead, they’d always relied upon their RC drones to overfly the local primitives’ positions and direct their fire while they themselves stayed safely out of range and shelled the enemy with impunity. When they tried that in this case, however, they discovered that the humans weren’t entirely out of Gremlins after all. And even if that hadn’t been the case, Gutierrez’s weapons had been dug-in and camouflaged with extraordinary care.
Finally, unable to actually find the corporal’s mortar pits, the Shongairi resorted to blind suppressive fire. Their mortars were more powerful than their human counterparts, and white-hot flashes began to walk across the area behind Buchevsky’s forward positions.
One of his forward bunkers took a direct hit and exploded, and another Shongair mortar round stripped the camouflage from a second bunker. Three captured human antitank weapons slammed into it, and he heard screams ripping out of some wounded human’s throat from the ruins.
He heard screams rising from behind him, as well, but the Shongairi 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 preplotted just about every possible firing position along the trail. As soon as the Shongairi opened fire, Gutierrez knew where they had to be, and both of his mortars retargeted immediately. They fired more rapidly than the heavier Shongair weapons, and their bombs fell around the Shongair 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 twelve more mortar-carriers . . . all of them still far 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 specimens 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. No. If this bunch of primitives was so incredibly stupid, so lost to all rationality and basic decency that they wanted to die fighting rather than submit honorably even now, then he would damned well oblige them. And when he was done, he’d drag the specimens they were trying to protect from him back to Ground Base Commander Shairez as payment for every one of his own losses.
He looked up through a break in the tree cover. The light was fading quickly, and despite their night-vision equipment, the Shongairi had discovered that fighting humans in the dark was a losing proposition. But there was still time. His infantry had managed to blow at least one gap through the humans’ well-concealed, well-dug-in infantry. There was an opening, and they could still break through before darkness fell if—
He started snapping orders.
• • • • •
Stephen Buchevsky sensed it coming. He couldn’t have explained how, but he knew. He could actually feel the Shongairi 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, settled into position behind the KPV heavy machine gun, and swung it to cover the gap where his bunker line had been at least partially breached.
There were a dozen tripod-mounted PKMS 7.62-millimeter medium machine guns dug in in the bunkers and individual strongpoints 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, but it was one hell of a heavy, Buchevsky thought. Bulky and undeniably awkward—the thing was six and a half feet long (which made it twenty percent longer than even the US M2A .50 heavy MG Buchevsky was used to), and mounted on a two-wheeled cart—it looked more like some kind of fieldpiece than any machine gun Buchevsky had ever used. As far as he knew, the infantry version had been withdrawn from Soviet service in the 1960s, and the obsolescent weapon looked like a refugee from World War II, but at this time, in this place, he wasn’t about to complain, and the spade grips felt solid and welcome in his hands.
The Shongairi started forward behind a hurricane of rifle fire and grenades. The second mine belt staggered them, disordered them. For a moment, it stopped them completely while their wounded shrieked and writhed in mangled agony. But there simply weren’t enough mines, and they came on again. In fact, their rate of advance increased as they realized they’d gotten too close to the defenders for the single remaining mortar to engage.
Then the medium machine guns opened up.
More Shongairi shrieked, tumbled aside, disappeared in sprays of blood and tissue, but a pair of wheeled APCs 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, blood, and terror. Another human
bunker exploded, and two of the machine guns suddenly stopped firing.
But Stephen Buchevsky knew where that lightning bolt had come from, and the Soviet army had developed the KPV around the 14.5-millimeter 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 tungsten-cored bullet weighed almost a thousand grains . . . and developed twenty-four thousand foot-pounds of muzzle energy.
He laid his sights on the vehicle which had just fired and sent six hundred rounds per minute shrieking into it.
The APC staggered as the tungsten-cored, armor-piercing, incendiary bullets slammed into it at better than thirty-two hundred feet per second, capable of penetrating almost an inch and a half of rolled homogenous armor at five hundred and fifty yards. The APC’s light armor had been reinforced by the external appliqués Shongair maintenance techs had fitted to every one of Harah’s vehicles, and it had shrugged off human small arms fire all day long.
It never had a chance against that torrent of destruction, and the vehicle vomited smoke and flame.
Its companion turned towards the source of its destruction, and Alice Macomb stood up in her 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 of rifle fire killed her where she stood.
Buchevsky swung the KPV’s flaming muzzle, sweeping his fire along the Shongair front as the aliens’ point drove forward, pouring his hate, his fury, his desperate need to protect the children behind him, into his enemies.
He was still firing when the Shongair grenade silenced his machine gun forever.
. XXXV .
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. 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. “It is a good sign that you are awake again. 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 Basarab gripped 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, each word distinctly formed, as if to be certain Buchevsky understood him. “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 Shongairi—would never have touched my people if I had remembered. If I had not held my hand, decided to stand upon the defensive to avoid provoking them instead of seeking them out. Instead of teaching them the error of their ways, warning them in ways even they could not have mistaken to stay far from my mountains. If I had not spent so long hiding, 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 tried to make some sort of sense out of Basarab’s words, but 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 other villages have already offered them shelter, taken them in. 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 I do not think either of us would like that reason if we knew it.”
“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. It is in my mind that this entire attack was designed to secure prisoners, not simply to destroy a handful of villages in the remote mountains. If all they wished was to kill, then the others’ bodies would be here as well. And, having taken prisoners, surely they will transport them back to their main base in the lowlands. That means we know where to find them, and they are my people. I swore to protect them, and I do not let my word be proven 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 he felt . . . and as he fell back into the bottomless darkness, what the fading sliver of his awareness felt was almost sorry for the Shongairi.
• • • • •
Private Kumayr felt his head beginning to nod forward and stiffened his spine, snapping back upright 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.
None of Ground Base Seven’s officers were particularly cheerful at the moment. It wasn’t quite as bad as it had been immediately after Regiment Commander Harah’s return, three days ago, but it was bad enough to be going on with. The regiment commander’s casualties and equipment losses had been at least as bad—probably worse, actually, Kumayr suspected—than anything the brigade’s other two regiments might have suffered in North America. His unhappiness was obvious, and his junior officers reflected his unhappiness. They weren’t being outstandingly patient and understanding these days, especially with garrision troopers who hadn’t been in the field with the regiment. In fact, Kumayr decided, if he didn’t want one of those junior officers to come along and rip his head off for dozing on duty, he’d better find something to do.
Something that looked industrious and conscientious.
His ears twitched i
n amusement at the thought, and he punched up a standard diagnostic of the perimeter security systems. Not that he expected to find any problems. The entire base had completed a wall-to-wall readiness exercise only two days before Regiment Commander Harah had departed to collect Ground Base Commander Shairez’s specimens. All of his systems had passed their checks with flying colors then, and he hadn’t had a single fault warning since. Still, running the diagnostic would look good on the log sheets . . . and save his ears if Squad Commander Reymahk or one of the others happened along.
Kumayr 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 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!”
