Out of the Dark (43 page)

So far, it hadn’t actually been needed in that role, and he hoped things would stay that way.

Despite Lake Vidraru’s relative proximity to Pitesti, few survivors from the kinetic strike which had destroyed the city had headed up into the lake’s vicinity. There hadn’t been much farmland to attract hungry survivors, and Buchevsky supposed the mountains and heavy forest had been too forbidding to appeal to urban dwellers. On the other hand, the reasons might have been far simpler and grimmer than any of that. There didn’t seem to have
been
all that many Pitesti survivors, after all.

Another factor was probably the fact that there were so few roads into the area to begin with, despite its recreational potential, and the DN-7C roadway followed the
eastern
shore of the lake. There were scarcely even any forest tracks leading to Basarab’s villages, which were like isolated throwbacks to another age, tucked away in the midst of heavy woodland and mountain ridgelines
west
of the reservoir. Although they were within a few miles of the lake, just
finding
them would have been extraordinarily difficult without a guide, and actually walking into one of them was like stepping into a time machine. In fact, they reminded Buchevsky rather strongly of the village in the musical
Brigadoon
.

Which isn’t such a bad thing, under the circumstances,
he reflected, looking into the candle on the rough table between him and Basarab and thinking about the total blackness wrapped around the cabin, undisturbed by anything so decadently modern as incandescent lighting.
There sits Lake Vidraru, with its hydroelectric generators, and these people don’t even have electricity! Which means they aren’t radiating any emissions the Shongairi are likely to pick up on
.

Over the last couple of months, he, his Americans, and their Romanians had been welcomed by the villagers and—as Basarab had warned—been put to work preparing for the onset of winter. One reason his supper’s salad had tasted so good was because he knew he wouldn’t be having them for much longer. It wasn’t as if there’d be fresh produce coming in from California or Florida
this
winter. Which was rather the point of the matter under discussion, when he came down to it.

Damn. No matter how he tried to avoid it, his brain insisted on coming back to Basarab’s proposal.

He sighed, sipping beer, brown eyes hooded in the candlelight.

“Whether we like it or not, my Stephen,” Basarab said now, “it must be considered. And it must be resolved now, while all concerned are still relatively well provided for. While we can make our arrangements in good faith and amity, without the natural . . . narrowness of perspective, let us say, which starving men bring to such discussions.”

“Mircea, I don’t see any reason why I
should
like it. After all, I haven’t liked one goddamned thing that’s happened since those bastards started dropping their fucking rocks on us!”

Basarab arched one eyebrow, and Buchevsky was a little surprised himself by the jagged edge of hatred which had roughened his voice. It took him unawares, sometimes, that hate. When the memory of Trish and the girls came looming up out of the depths once again, fangs bared, to remind him of the loss and the pain and the anguish.

Isn’t it one
hell
of a note when the best thing I can think of is that the people I loved most in all the world probably died without knowing a thing about it?
he thought.

“They have not endeared themselves to me, either,” Basarab said after a moment. “Indeed, is that not rather the point? It has been . . . difficult to remember that we dare not take the fight to them. By the same token, however, if starvation and desperation drive others into actions which draw the aliens’ attention to our area, then having swallowed our pride and hidden will have been for naught in the end.”

Buchevsky nodded in understanding. Basarab had made it clear from the beginning that avoiding contact with the enemy, lying low, was the best way to protect the civilians for whom they were responsible, and he was right. They might have demonstrated their ability to punish individual patrols, to inflict loss and pain on the Shongairi, but that very experience had made it abundantly clear they dared not openly confront and challenge the
invaders. In the final analysis, no matter how much damage they managed to inflict first, anyone who could destroy entire cities with kinetic strikes could certainly destroy three isolated villages in the mountains of Wallachia.

He and Basarab both knew that, but that didn’t change the fact that Basarab’s natural orientation—like Buchevsky’s own—was towards taking the offensive. Towards seeking out and destroying the enemy, not hiding from him.

Buchevsky had always recognized that tendency in himself, and the years he’d spent imbibing the United States Marine Corps’ philosophy and doctrine had only intensified it. Yet he suspected that the drive to find and crush anyone or anything which threatened those under his protection might be even stronger in Basarab than it was in him. There were times when he could almost physically taste the other man’s burning desire to take the war to the Shongairi, when those green eyes were cold and hungry, filled with hate for his country’s rapists. When the fact that Basarab so clearly understood why he dared not feed that hunger, that need to strike back, only made the Romanian’s self-control even more impressive.

And he was right. Giving in to that hunger would have come under the heading of a Really Bad Idea.

Basarab’s runners had made contact with several other small enclaves across central and southern Romania—even a couple in northern Bulgaria, a hundred and fifty miles to the south—and by now those enclaves were becoming as concerned with defending themselves against other humans as fending off the Shongairi. After the initial bombardments and confused combat of the first several weeks, the invaders had apparently decided to pull back from the unfriendly terrain of the mountains and settle for occupying more open areas. It was hard to be certain of that—or if it represented anything other than a purely local situation—with the collapse of the planetary communications net, but it seemed reasonable. As Buchevsky’s brain trust of Truman and Sherman had pointed out, troop lift would almost certainly be a limiting factor for any interstellar expedition, so it would make sense to avoid stretching it any further than necessary by doing things like going up into the hills after dirt-poor, hardscrabble mountain villages.

According to Vasile Costantinescu, the leader of another enclave six or seven miles away, at the northeastern end of the lake, the Shongairi had established an outpost—hell, it sounded like a damned forward operating base to Buchevsky!—near the town of Viziru in Br
ila
jude
. To Buchevsky, that
was only a dot a hundred and fifty-odd miles to the east on an increasingly worn-out Romanian road map, but Basarab had explained that it lay in the flat, fertile farmland west of the Black Sea. It certainly sounded like terrain which would be far easier to control than rugged, forested mountainsides, but from the sound of things, the Shongairi were being surprisingly passive.

Costantinescu had family in the area, and according to the reports he’d received from them, the aliens had chosen to restrict their presence to an area no more than sixty or seventy miles across, centered on their well-defended, strongly fortified base. Within that area, they reacted quickly (and, it sounded to Buchevsky, far more effectively than they had against him and Basarab during their trek to Lake Vidraru) to any armed resistance. Beyond that, they seemed content to let the surviving Romanians stew in their own juices.

Letting them sit there in lordly disdain for the mere humans about them set Buchevsky’s teeth on edge, but that was a purely emotional—and, in his own opinion, remarkably stupid—reaction. Whatever his emotions might think, his intellect knew damned well that the farther away from his people they stayed, and the more passive they were, the better.

Human refugees were an entirely different threat, and one Buchevsky was happy they hadn’t had to deal with . . . yet. Starvation, exposure, and disease had probably killed at least half the civilians who’d fled their homes after the initial attacks, and those who remained were becoming increasingly desperate as winter approached. Some of the other enclaves had already been forced to fight, often ruthlessly, against their own kind to preserve the resources their own people were going to need to survive.

In many ways, it was the fact that the aliens’ actions had forced humans to kill
each other
in the name of simple survival that fueled Stephen Buchevsky’s deepest rage. Which was probably the reason he didn’t really want to think too much about Basarab’s proposal.

But he’s right,
the American admitted with a mental sigh.
And even if he weren’t, he’s the boss
.

“All right, Mircea,” he said. “You’re right. We do have to come to an understanding with the other enclaves, at least the local ones, and that probably does mean sharing what we have if some of the others are flat up against starvation. So, yeah, I can see why it makes sense for us to share inventories with each other. And it makes sense for us to agree to help each other out if looters or raiders come after them. I understand that. I’ll admit I hate the thought of planning to help other people kill human beings
when there are Shongairi around to kill, instead, but I’m not an idiot, and it’s not as if I haven’t had to shoot at the occasional other human being over the past couple of decades. In fact, I guess the real problem is that there’s a part of me that hates letting
anyone
know what we’ve got tucked away in the larder, because people are still people. If their kids start starving, then any parent worth a single solitary damn is going to do anything it takes to feed them. I understand that, and I’ll give
any
kid the last slice of bread I’ve got. But if any of those other enclaves out there decide to sell us out, or throw us to the wolves to save their own asses by pointing somebody who comes after what
they’ve
got in our direction—or if they’re stupid enough to try and use your agreement just to get close enough to us to hit us themselves—then I’m going to be really, really unhappy, you understand. And they won’t like me when I’m unhappy. Hell,
I
don’t like me when I’m unhappy!”

He shrugged, and Basarab nodded. Then the Romanian chuckled softly.

“What?” Buchevsky raised an eyebrow at him.

“It is just that we are so much alike, you and I.” Basarab shook his head. “Deny it as you will, my Stephen, but there is a Slav inside you!”

“Inside
me?
” Buchevsky laughed, looking down at the back of one very black hand. “Hey, I already told you! If any of my ancestors were ever in Europe, they got there from Africa, not the steppes!”

“Ah!” Basarab waved a finger under his nose, green eyes gleaming with unusual warmth in the candlelight. “So you have said, but I know better! What, ‘Buchevsky’? This is an
African
name?”

“Nope. Probably just somebody who owned one of my great-great-granddaddies or grandmamas.”

“Nonsense! Slavs in nineteenth-century America were too poor to own anyone! No, no. Trust me—it is in the blood. Somewhere in your ancestry there is—how do you Americans say it?—a Slav in the straw pile!”

Buchevsky laughed again. He was actually learning to do that once more—sometimes, at least—and they’d had this conversation before. Besides, Basarab was the only man in any of the villages under his protection who’d ever been to America. It was obvious he’d enjoyed the visit, but it was equally obvious he hadn’t got all of the slang quite correct. His most recent sally had been considerably less mangled than most, as a matter of fact.