Out of the Dark (53 page)

That was the bad news. The good news was that his northern group of
GEVs had secured the shore of the lake without difficulty. This far from any major population center, the chance of there being any of those pestiferous shoulder-launched SAMs down there was effectively nil. They’d all learned painful lessons about making assumptions where humans were concerned, however, and he watched approvingly as the point GEVs moved far enough inland to secure the shuttle landing zones. There wouldn’t be any SAMs bringing down
his
APCs while they were helpless in their shuttle bays, by Dainthar!

“They’re moving along the ridge,” he said over the regimental net. “They’re headed west—towards those higher peaks. Second Battalion, get those APCs ashore and swing farther up the lake before you cut inland. Try to come in on their flank. First Battalion, get moving up that valley
now
.”

•  •  •  •  •

Buchevsky muttered another curse as the drones’ unpleasant vibration kept pace with him. Clearly, the damn things could track through tree cover better than he’d hoped. On the other hand, they seemed to be coming in close, above the treetops, and if they were—

•  •  •  •  •

“Cainharn seize them! Let them rot uneaten like the vermin they are!”

A quartet of dirty fireballs trickled down the sky, and four of Harah’s drones went off the air simultaneously. Which pointedly contradicted at least
one
part of his pre-attack enemy forces estimate.

Damn it! What in Cainharn’s Third Hell are villagers up in these damned mountains doing with
SAMs
?!

•  •  •  •  •

Buchevsky bared his teeth in a panting, running grin as Macomb’s air-defense teams took out the nearest drones. He still felt vibrations from other drones, farther away, but if the bastards kept them high enough to avoid the Gremlins, it might make their sensor resolution crappier, too.

•  •  •  •  •

Harah tried to master his anger, but he was sick unto death of how these damned humans insisted on screwing up even the simplest operation. Dainthar be praised he’d established a safe shuttle zone anyway, but that had been simple auto-reflex by now. He wasn’t supposed to
have
to do that kind of crap, because there weren’t supposed to be any SAMs or heavy weapons up here in the first place! That was one of the main reasons they’d come clear out here looking for Ground Base Commander Shairez’s specimens.
Only the humans
still
refused to cooperate! It was as if the accursed creatures had known he was coming!

He considered reporting to headquarters. Given the expedition’s already astronomical equipment losses, HQ was unlikely to thank him if he lost still more of it chasing after what were supposed to be unarmed villagers cowering in their mountain hideouts. But they had to secure specimens
somewhere,
and he had
these
humans more or less in his sights.

Besides,
he admitted harshly to himself,
I will be
damned
if I turn around and back off again. This time, I’m going to drive right through these creatures and show them why they should
never
have refused to submit!

“We’re not going to be able to bring the drones in as close as planned,” he grated to his battalion commanders. “It’s up to our scouts. Tell them to keep their damn eyes open.”

Fresh acknowledgments came in. He heard his own anger, his own frustration, in those responses, and he watched his own icons closing in on the abruptly amorphous shaded area representing the drones’ best guess of the humans’ location.

We may not be able to see them clearly,
he thought angrily,
but even if we can’t, there aren’t that many places they can
go,
now are there?

•  •  •  •  •

Buchevsky was profoundly grateful for the way hard work had toughened the lowland refugees. They were managing to keep up with the villagers, despite the elevation and despite the steepness of the terrain, which they never would’ve been able to do without that toughening. Several smaller children (not all of them lowland-born) were beginning to flag anyway, of course, and his heart ached at the ruthless demands being placed on them. But the bigger kids were managing to keep up with the adults, and there were enough grown-ups to take turns carrying the littlest ones.

The unhealed wound where Shania and Yvonne had been cried out for
him
to scoop up one of those tiny human beings, carry
someone’s
child to the safety he’d been unable to offer his own children.

But that wasn’t his job, and he turned his attention to what was.

He slid to a halt on the narrow trail, breathing heavily, watching the last few villagers stream past. The perimeter guards came next, and then, last of all, the scouts who’d been on listening watch. One of them was Robert Szu.

“It’s . . . pretty much like . . . you and Mircea figured it . . . Top,” the private panted. He paused for a moment, gathering his breath, then nodded
sharply. “They’re coming up the firebreak roads on both sides of the ridge. I figure their points are halfway up by now.”

“Good,” Buchevsky said.

•  •  •  •  •

“Farkalash!”

regiment commander harah’s driver looked back over his shoulder at the horrendous oath until harah’s bared-canines snarl turned him hastily back around to his controls. the regiment commander only wished he could dispose of the dainthar-damned humans as easily!

I shouldn’t have sent the vehicles in that close,
he told himself through a boil of blood-red fury.
I should’ve dismounted the infantry farther out.
Of course
it was as obvious to the humans as it was to me that there were only a handful of routes vehicles could use!

He growled at himself, but he knew why he’d made the error. The humans were moving faster than he’d estimated they could, and he’d wanted to use his vehicles’ speed advantage. Which was why the humans had just been able to destroy six more irreplaceable GEVs and
eleven
more APCs . . . not to mention something like half the hundred and thirty-two troopers who’d been
aboard
the troop carriers.

And let’s not forget the APC drivers and gunners while we’re at it, Harah!
he thought viciously.
And there’s no telling how many
more
little surprises they may have planted along any openings wide enough for vehicles
.

“Dismount the infantry,” he said flatly over the command net. “Scout formation. Vehicles are not to advance until the engineers have checked the trails for more explosives.”

•  •  •  •  •

Buchevsky grimaced sourly. From the smoke billowing up through the treetops, his handful of scavenged mines and jury-rigged IEDs had gotten at least several of their vehicles. Unfortunately, he couldn’t know how many.

However many, they’re going to take the hint and come in on foot from here . . . unless they’re complete and utter idiots. And somehow, I don’t think they are. Damn it
.

Well, at least he’d slowed them up. That was going to buy the civilians a little breathing space.

Now it was time to buy them a little more.

•  •  •  •  •

Harah’s ears flattened, but at least it wasn’t a surprise this time. The small-arms fire rattling out of the trees had become inevitable the moment he’d ordered his own infantry to go in on foot.

•  •  •  •  •

Automatic weapons barked and snarled, crackling in a score of small, vicious, isolated engagements scattered across the heavily forested mountainside, and Buchevsky
wished
they hadn’t been forced to deep-six their radios. His people knew the terrain intimately, knew the best defensive positions, the possible approach lines, but the Shongairi had heavier support weapons, and their communications were vastly better than his. Their inherent ability to maneuver far exceeded his own as a consequence of their ability to remain in constant, instant contact with one another. And adding insult to injury, some of their infantry were using captured human rocket and grenade launchers to thicken their own firepower.

The situation’s bitter irony wasn’t lost upon him. This time,
his
forces were on the short end of the “asymmetrical warfare” stick, and it sucked. On the other hand, he’d had painful personal experience of just how effective guerrillas could be in this sort of terrain.

•  •  •  •  •

There was more satisfaction to accompany the frustration in Harah’s growl as he looked at the plot’s latest update.

The advance had been enormously slower than he’d ever contemplated, and morning had become afternoon, but the humans appeared to be running out of SAMs at last. That meant he could get his handful of surviving drones in close enough to see what the hell was happening, and his momentum was building.

Which was a damned good thing, since he’d already lost over twenty percent of his troops. He was sure he could rely on Ground Base Commander Shairez to take his part and support him when he had to face his superiors and explain that, but he was also unfortunately certain how unhappy that kind of loss rate was going to make Ground Force Commander Thairys. Particularly in light of the notion that this was supposed to be a
low
-casualty operation.

Well, maybe I
have
gotten hammered,
he thought harshly,
but I’m hardly the only commander
that’s
happened to since we got here! And I’ve cost them, too, by Dainthar’s Gleaming Fangs!

Real-time estimates of enemy losses were notoriously unreliable, but
even by his most pessimistic estimates, the humans had lost over forty fighters so far, and from the size of the thermal signatures the fleet had plotted from orbit, they couldn’t have had all that many of them to begin with.

That was the good news. The bad news was that they appeared to be remarkably well equipped with infantry weapons for a batch of primitive, backward, uneducated mountain villagers, and their commander was fighting as smart as any human Harah had ever heard of. His forces were hugely outnumbered and outgunned, but he was hitting back hard—in fact, Harah’s casualties, despite his GEVs and his mortars, were at least six or seven times the humans’. The other side was intimately familiar with the terrain and taking ruthless advantage of it, and his infantry had run into enough more concealed explosives to make anyone cautious.

Whatever we’ve run our snouts into, and whatever the satellites might have said,
he reflected,
these damned well
aren’t
just a bunch of villagers. Somebody’s spent a lot of time training them—and reconnoitering these mountains, too. They’re fighting from positions that were preselected for their fields of fire. And those explosives . . . someone picked the spots for
them
pretty damned carefully. Whoever it was knew what he was doing, and he must have been preparing his positions almost since the day we first landed
.

Despite himself, he felt a flicker of respect for his human opponent. Not that it was going to make any difference in the end. The take from his drones was still far less detailed than he could wish, but it was clear the fleeing villagers were running into what amounted to a cul-de-sac.

•  •  •  •  •

Buchevsky felt the momentum shifting.

He’d started the morning with a hundred “regulars” and another hundred and fifty “militia” from the villages. He didn’t have that many anymore. He knew everyone tended to overestimate his own losses in a fight like this, especially in this sort of terrain and without reliable communications between his positions, but he’d be surprised if he hadn’t lost at least a quarter of his people by now.

That was bad enough, but there was worse coming.

The Bastogne position had never been intended to stand off a full-bore Shongair assault. It had really been designed as a place to retreat in the face of attack by
human
adversaries trying to pillage the villages’ winter supplies. That meant Bastogne, despite its name, was more of a fortified warehouse than some sort of final redoubt. He’d made its defenses as tough as
he could, yet he’d never contemplated trying to hold it against hundreds of Shongair infantry supported by tanks and mortars.

Stop kicking yourself,
an inner voice growled.
There was never any point
trying
to build a position you could’ve held against that kind of assault. So what if you’d held them off for a while? They’d only have called in one of their damned kinetic strikes in the end, anyway
.

He knew that was true, but what was
also
true was that the only paths of retreat were so steep as to be almost impassable. Bastogne
was
supposed to hold against any likely human attack, and without its stockpiled supplies, the chance that their civilians could have survived the approaching winter would have been minimal at best. So he and Mircea had staked everything on making the position tough enough to stand against anything
less
than an all-out Shongair assault . . . and now it was a trap too many of their people couldn’t get out of.

He looked out through the smoky, autumn-bright forest, watching the westering sun paint the smoke the color of blood, and knew his people were out of places to run. They were on the final perimeter now, and it took every ounce of discipline he’d learned in his life to fight down his despair.

I’m sorry, Mircea,
he thought grimly.
I fucked up. Now we’re all screwed. I guess I’m just as glad you didn’t make it back in time after all
.