Out of the Dark (37 page)

He was fairly confident it was going to be a moot point in his own case. And even though he’d never admitted it aloud to anyone—not even Kolesnikov—the aching void inside him was glad it would be so. He’d keep as many of his men alive as long as he could, but when the time came for the pain to finally end. . . .

He wiped sweat from his forehead, turning to watch the rest of his men wade ashore from the raft they’d constructed.

One good thing about engineers,
he thought mordantly.
We’re good at improvising river crossings
.

They were good at blowing things up, too, he reflected, and that was what they’d been doing for the last five ugly weeks. Or until they’d started running out of targets, at least.

For a while, he’d been able to keep track—generally, at least—of what was happening elsewhere over the Internet. Then, two and a half weeks ago, the Internet had suddenly stopped working. There appeared to be a handful of nodes still in operation, but that handful was shrinking steadily, which suggested that either the Shongairi were systematically destroying them as they found them, or else the power net was finally going completely down.

Either of those was a bad sign. Not that there’d been any
good
signs lately.

The American Admiral Robinson’s posting of the destruction of twenty or thirty Shongair landing shuttles had done more than Ushakov would
have believed possible for his own morale when he finally viewed it on his Army-issue laptop. It had obviously encouraged quite a few other people with the realization that the aliens weren’t truly invincible, as well. A French antiaircraft battery had taken down three more shuttles—the smaller, faster ones the Shongairi apparently used for air-mobile infantry operations—as well, and there were rumors the Shongairi had been savagely bloodied by an American armored battalion the prelanding bombardment had somehow overlooked in Afghanistan.

Aside from that, though, the news had been an unending succession of reports of Shongair landings, devastated cities, collapsing public services, and the onset of disease and starvation as transportation nets and public hygiene began to fail.

Ushakov estimated that he and his “company”—although it would barely have qualified as a platoon before the Shongairi had arrived—had killed well over a thousand of the aliens so far. For that matter, his initial IED attack might have killed that many all by itself. He’d never been able to get a body count on that one, though, since the Shongairi had airlifted out all their dead before he’d ever left his camouflaged hide, so he hadn’t added them to his official tally. He was certain they’d gotten at least that many since then, though. The fact that the aliens were astonishingly short on airlift for an interstellar invasion force helped a lot in that respect. They made heavy use of human road networks in their operational areas, and that concentrated targets where humans could get at them. Assuming, of course, that the human attackers knew which roads the targets were using at any given moment.

At first, there’d been quite a few of those targets close to home. Now, though, Shongair convoys were getting thin on the ground. From the last few hints he’d gotten before the Internet went down, Ushakov suspected the Shongairi had realized their initial deployment pattern had been . . . overly ambitious. They’d apparently thought they could use relatively small, widely separated forces to secure control of vast areas of the planet, which seemed uncommonly stupid to Ushakov. Surely they should have realized there were enough human beings and enough guns lying around Earth to turn squad-level detachments into targets too tempting to pass up!

From the sound of things that realization had finally percolated through whatever they used for brains, however. If he was right, they were pulling their forces in, concentrating them in smaller geographical areas in the first step of initiating some sort of pacification program.

Well, “pacification” worked wonderfully as hell for
us
when the fucking Soviets dragged us into Afghanistan, didn’t it?
he thought sourly, remembering Vladislava’s uncles and his own father’s cousin Ilarion.
Admittedly, the Americans and their allies had a lot better luck there than we did, but even they found the
mujahedin—
I’m sorry, the
Taliban,
as if there were a frigging difference!—a royal pain in the ass. And they had at least some notion about how to convince the locals they were the good fellows and the other side were the bad fellows, which this Thikair obviously doesn’t. Well, the Soviets never quite got the hang of that when it was our turn in Afghanistan, but even
they
came closer to it than this! So unless he miraculously
gets
some notion, I don’t imagine friend Thikair’s long-eared bastards are going to find it a whole lot easier than
we
did
.

For the moment, though, the Shongairi appeared to be concentrating on North America and letting Europe and the rest of the world stew in its own juices. After all, starvation and disease would do most of their job for them if they were only patient. Ushakov didn’t know how badly Asia and China had been hit, but the estimates he’d heard over the Internet were that India alone had probably suffered close to four hundred million dead in just the initial strikes. Other reports suggested China had gotten hammered even harder than that after the Central Committee (or something calling itself that, at any rate) had called for simultaneous uprisings in all of their major cities. He’d never been particularly fond of the Chinese—that much of the old Soviet tradition and its prejudices had carried over—but his stomach tightened every time he thought of what had probably happened to any city which had obeyed
that
order.

There wasn’t anything he could do about that, however. In fact, if he was going to be realistic there wasn’t anything he could do
effectively
about much of anything. But there had to be a limit to the Shongairi’s resources somewhere. Somewhere, at some point, the bastards had to simply run out of manpower. Maybe humanity couldn’t kill enough of them to reach that point, but Pieter Ushakov damned well meant to try.

Which was why he and his company were trekking steadily eastward.

The Shongairi had apparently reduced their presence—outside North America, at least—to a series of zones, each no more than two or three hundred kilometers across and centered on the ground bases they’d established immediately after the bombardment. There didn’t appear to be any of those bases in what had been Ukraine, but there was supposed to be one near the town of Inzhavino in Tambov oblast, five hundred–odd kilometers
southeast of the ruins of Moscow. That was close to eight hundred kilometers from what was left of Kiev, but he was almost halfway there.

Another week to Inzhavino,
he thought.
Maybe more like ten days, under the circumstances. But we’ve only got another hundred kilometers or so to go before we get into their “occupation zone,” and we’ll start finding targets pretty quickly then
.

He didn’t know if it was going to do any good at all in the long run. For his planet and his species, at any rate. But that didn’t really matter to him, and it didn’t really matter to any of the men with him, either. Because one way or the other, it was going to do one hell of a lot of good for the vengeful hunger blazing inside all of them.

We may not last long,
he thought with bleak, bitter satisfaction,
but these fuckers are
damned
well going to know we were here
.

“Come on, Vanya!” he said, slapping Kolesnikov on the shoulder. “If we get a move on, we can be clear of all this wreckage by sunset and find a nice secure spot to bivouac for the night.”

Fleet Commander Thikair pressed the admittance stud on his chair arm when the signal chimed, and the briefing-room door hissed open. Ground Base Commander Shairez entered the compartment, crossed to the conference table, and lowered her ears in salute.

“You wished to see me, Fleet Commander?” Shairez said respectfully, and Thikair’s ears flicked assent.

“I did, Ground Base Commander,” he replied, and gestured at one of the chairs on the far side of the briefing-room table. Ground Force Commander Thairys sat to Thikair’s left and Squadron Commander Jainfar sat to his right. Now Shairez sat, facing all three of her superiors calmly, and Thikair leaned forward, folding his six-fingered hands on the table before him.

“We’ve been engaged on KU-197-20 for one standard month, tomorrow,” he said. “That is approximately two and a half local months, better than a double-twelfth of one of their years, and I think that makes this a reasonable time for us to assess our current situation. I wished you to attend this meeting so that you might hear Ground Force Commander Thairys’ and Squadron Commander Jainfar’s reports and so they might hear yours.”

“Of course, Fleet Commander.”

“Very well.” Thikair turned his head to the left, looking at Thairys. “Ground Force Commander?” he invited.

“The situation remains far from satisfactory, Fleet Commander,” Thairys said without flinching. “There have been improvements in some respects; in others, the situation has actually worsened. Our vehicular losses remain painfully high. Although we’ve had no more fiascoes like Harshair’s, we continue to lose them in twelves and double-twelves—two or three here, another two over there, three more trucks and an APC over here. And occasionally, unfortunately, the humans get lucky and take out an entire convoy of as many as a double-twelve or more trucks in a single raid.”

His ears shrugged unhappily.

“Infantry losses also remain high, but it’s the loss of vehicles which causes me the greatest concern. We have only limited shuttle-lift capability—or, rather, only limited tactical
troop
lift capability. While the humans’ supply of what they call ‘SAMs’ appears to be gradually depleting itself, they retain far too many of them for me to be comfortable operating Starlanders anywhere near an actual scene of combat. We’ve lost even Deathwings to them, which is bad enough, but at least a Deathwing carries no more than a single platoon of infantry at a time.

“The consequence of restricting Starlander operation only to rear area movements is to severely cramp our tactical flexibility. We simply dare not move our forces around as swiftly and aggressively as our normal doctrine requires. In addition, the need to continually replenish personnel and material in an effort to keep pace with losses, coupled with the destruction of an entire heavy transport group on the very first day of landing operations, means the Starlanders we do have are heavily tasked with ‘normal’ space-to-surface landing operations. Which, of course, means they are unavailable for rear area logistic requirements, throwing an even greater burden upon our wheeled transport, which we’ve been losing in significant numbers from the very beginning. That’s forced us to even further restrict our operations in the secondary and tertiary occupation zones in order to concentrate on the primary zones on the continent of North America.

“We’ve attempted to make up some of our transport deficiencies by impressing human equipment. Unfortunately, our people are significantly shorter than humans, and human heavy transport equipment is considerably more primitive than our own. The interiors of human vehicles are not sized for us, and most of their heavy vehicles use something they call ‘manual transmissions.’ In general, our people find it very difficult to develop any proficiency in operating them. We’ve resorted to attempting to hire or impress humans to operate that equipment for us, but with only limited success. Many humans simply refuse, even when threatened with reprisals. Others agree, then vanish—despite having honorably submitted, I might add—as soon as our backs are turned. Still others agree, then actually abscond with their cargoes at the first opportunity! Some of my field maintenance units are attempting to convert human vehicles to meet our needs, but the operational pace and the depletion of our own vehicle pool confronts them with monumental internal maintenance requirements. Frankly, Fleet Commander, despite the huge number of human vehicles on the continent, it
would require some time—possibly as much as a standard year—to make worthwhile progress in providing our transport needs out of human-built equipment.”

“I see.” Thikair’s ears nodded. “And the operations themselves?”

“We’re making some progress.” It seemed to Shairez that Thairys was choosing his words with some care. “Our primary operating zones in North America are expanding steadily. Unfortunately, the price in casualties remains high. Even human hunting and recreational weapons are, frankly, frighteningly effective against our infantry, and it would appear that on this continent, and particularly in the United States nation-state, there were more guns than there were
inhabitants
prior to our arrival! Most of those weapons now seem to be being employed against us.

“The good news is that our field grade and junior officers are making progress in adapting to this novel threat environment. I fear we still have quite some way to go before fully adjusting, but I see steady improvement in that regard. The other good news is that the frequency of attacks does seem to be declining, at least somewhat, and as Ground Base Commander Shairez suggested would be the case, we’re seeing virtually no heavy weapons at this time. I believe I can confidently report that effectively all of their aircraft, armored units, and field artillery have been destroyed, although we continue to confront their human-portable antiarmor and antiair missiles and mortars.”

“I see,” Thikair said, and turned his gaze to Jainfar.