Out of the Dark (58 page)

“Is he looking for
me,
me, or is he looking for ‘the rebel commander’ me?”

“He asked for you by name.”

Kolesnikov didn’t seem to be getting any happier, and Ushakov didn’t blame him.

“Where is he now?”

“He says he’ll be back at Fetyukov’s in a couple of hours. He wants you to meet him there.”

“Don’t go, Pieter!
Please!
” a voice said, and Ushakov turned his head and looked at the child sitting on the other side of the table from him.

Her name was Zinaida, and she was seven years old. A heartbreakingly wise and frightened seven years old.

He reached out a hand, and she took it, squeezing his thumb in one small, tight fist and his little finger in the other. His Daria had held his hand that way, before she became “a big girl,” he remembered, and smiled at her.

“I’m not going anywhere right this minute,” he promised her in Russian.

“But you
are
going,” she said, tears welling in her blue eyes. “I know you are!”

“Perhaps I am,” he agreed, then cocked his head. “But if I do, what did you promise me?”

“That I’d let you,” she said in a tiny voice.

“Yes,” he agreed. “And that you would take care of your mother and Boris and Kondratii. That’s what big girls do.”

She nodded mutely, still staring up into his face through a blur of tears, and he felt the heart he’d thought had died in Kiev melt inside him.

Stupid
, he thought again.
Stupid! What in God’s name are you
thinking,
you lunatic? You’ve been on borrowed time for months now, and you know it
.

Yes, he was, and he did. But when he looked into those eyes, he couldn’t help himself.

And so he had done the unforgivable. He’d let himself start
feeling
again, even if it was the worst thing he could possibly do.

His mind went back to the day they’d met, when Zinaida had clung to him so desperately while the explosion sealed the water main behind them. It turned out they
had
been deep enough to survive the kinetic bombardment which had turned the woods through which they’d run into a cratered, seared wasteland almost exactly on schedule. The “tunnel” had run far enough to get them safely out of the immediate area, as well, and he’d used the same tactic twice more since then. Of course, one couldn’t always find a convenient water main when one needed one, but he and Kolesnikov had trained their Russian recruits into competent combat engineers in their own right. And along the way they’d taught them that there was nothing magic about kinetic bombardments. Explosions were explosions, and a deep enough hole far enough away from the point of impact was what made explosions survivable.

But what had changed for Pieter Ushakov on that day was the way in which the aching hole in his heart had suddenly found something to fill it. A frightened, half-starved little girl. Her younger brother, who never spoke anymore, except in whispers to their mother. Her baby brother, born after the Shongairi’s arrival. And the courageous young woman who had managed, against unimaginable odds, to keep both of her older children alive while she found enough sustenance, somehow, to produce the breast milk her baby needed.

Larissa Karpovna didn’t talk about that very much. In fact, she said little more than her son Boris, but she’d attached herself to Ushakov. It wasn’t a romantic attachment. He didn’t think he’d have another one of those—not like the one he’d had with Vladislava, at any rate. No man was blessed
enough by God to have two loves like that. And he didn’t think Larissa really thought of him as a
man
—not in any sexual sense, at any rate. He was . . . he was her
rock,
he thought. He was the solidity she clung to, the only faint promise of safety for her children in a world gone far worse than simply insane.

He respected her deeply. In fact, he’d been a bit surprised when he realized just how much he did respect her and her accomplishment in preserving her children as long as she had. And he’d found that he did love her, but it was as if she were Zinaida’s older sister, not someone old enough, if barely, to have been his own wife. All four of them had somehow become his children, and that was a terrible thing, because it gave him something to
live
for.

You’ve made me vulnerable again, little one,
he thought now, looking down into Zinaida’s face.
You’re my Achilles’ heel . . . my Achilles’ heart. I can’t
afford
that weakness, and I know it, but I can’t
—won’t—
give you up, either. I never had the chance to save my own babies, but perhaps I
can
save you, and as God is my witness, I will. Somehow, I
will.
And that’s what makes you my weakness. Because with you and your mother and your brothers inside my heart, it’s not enough just to kill Shongairi anymore. Not now
.

“Fetyukov’s bunker, you said, Vanya?” he said out loud, and used the tip of his free hand’s index finger to brush a tear from Zinaida’s cheek.

•  •  •  •  •

“Pieter Ushakov?”

Ushakov couldn’t see the speaker very clearly. It was too dark in the tangled, shadowed woods beyond the camouflaged bunker. That didn’t disturb him all that much, in itself. What did disturb him more than a little was that the stranger had somehow reached this point without a single one of the sentinels Ushakov had deployed challenging him.

Not good, Pieter
, a corner of his mind thought.
Your people are supposed to be better than that! In fact, they are. Or they’d damned well
better
be if any of you want to be alive this time next week, anyway!

“Yes,” he said out loud. “And your name is—?”

“My name is less important than why I wanted to speak with you,” the stranger replied in only slightly accented Ukrainian. He spoke the language remarkably well for a nonnative speaker, Ushakov thought, but his accent was odd. One he couldn’t quite place. It certainly wasn’t Russian, at any rate, and eyes narrowed.

“And what do you want to talk about?” he asked, more than a little irked
by the stranger’s avoidance of his question and letting an edge of suspicion sharpen his tone in response.

“Because I understand you have been attacking the aliens’ convoys and working parties around this base of theirs for some time,” the other man replied. “This is correct, no?”

“I think if you know enough to ask for me by name, you already know that, too,” Ushakov replied tartly.

“I think so, too,” the stranger agreed. He sounded amused by Ushakov’s tone, yet rather to the Ukrainian’s surprise, the amusement didn’t irritate him. Perhaps because it wasn’t a dismissive or denigrating amusement. Indeed, it seemed to invite him to share its joviality in a way that was almost . . . soothing.

“So suppose you tell me the reason you wanted to speak with me,” he said.

“Very well. I intend to attack and destroy that base, and I seek information about the vermin who garrison it. About their movements and their numbers.” Ushakov had the strong impression of a smile, although he couldn’t see it in the darkness. “It will not matter all that much in the end in most ways, I suppose. But a wise commander, as I am sure you yourself have learned, scouts the terrain before an attack.”

“You think you can
destroy
their base?” He couldn’t quite keep the incredulity out of the question. “I’ve been attacking them, hurting them every way I could, for three months now, and you think you can walk right through their defenses? Past the automated gun emplacements? Through the sensors they’ve set up on every approach?”

“Yes, I think I can, my troops and I. And we will.”

Ushakov had never heard such iron certainty in a human voice. The man behind that voice might be—probably was—mad, but there was no doubt in him.

“Then I want to go with you,” he heard his own voice say.

“No, you do not,” the stranger replied, almost gently.

“I do.” The echo of that same steely certitude sounded in his own voice, and he realized why. It wasn’t just his thirst for vengeance anymore, either. It was more than that—a way to neutralize the threat looming over the human beings he’d been foolish enough to allow himself to love once more.

“I’ll help you, tell you what I know. And no one alive knows the approaches to that base the way I do. I’ll guide you in. But only if I go with you.”

“You do not realize what you are asking me for,” the stranger said.

“Then tell me.”

•  •  •  •  •

“I almost wish something else would happen,” Ground Base Commander Fursa said. He and Ground Base Commander Barak were conferring via communicator, and Barak frowned at him.

“I want to figure out what’s going on—and who’s doing this to us—as badly as you do, Fursa. And I suppose for us to do that, ‘something else’
is
going to have to happen. For that matter, I even agree with the Fleet Commander that we should be looking upon this as an opportunity to bait a trap for our enemies. But while you’re wishing, just remember,
you’re
the next closest base.”

“I know.” Fursa grimaced. “That’s my point. We’re feeling just a
bit
exposed out here.” His ears wiggled sourly. “It’s been bad enough with the attacks on my supply columns and patrols. To be honest, my troopers would like an opportunity to get our claws into more than a human raider here, or another one over there. Dealing with an enemy who actually stands up—who attacks where we can get
at
him for a change, instead of just disappearing again afterward, like smoke—would make us all feel better.”

Barak felt his own ears perk in understanding. Outside of North America, Ground Base Six’s ZOR had been the most lively—and the most costly—of them all. The local human resistance leader had demonstrated an infuriating ability to plan and execute attacks with lethal precision, and he’d cost Fursa heavily. That was one reason Ground Base Seven had been so lightly garrisoned at the time it was attacked; most of Ground Base Commander Shairez’s deployable combat forces had been on loan to Fursa. So, yes, Barak understood, even sympathized, but still. . . .

“I’m inclined to suspect that the anticipation is at least as bad as beating off an actual attack would be,” Fursa continued. “In fact, my warriors are getting more than a little edgy because things have been quieter than usual the last couple of days.” The ears moved grumpily again. “You know how the common troopers are! The rumor mill’s been busy ever since our local pests stopped buzzing quite so furiously around our ears. It’s all part of whatever happened to Ground Base Seven, you know. The ominous forces which destroyed it so mysteriously are gathering about us now, and their very presence is frightening the
local
humans into hiding, like
garish
trying to hide themselves from a thunderstorm.”

The irony in Fursa’s voice was withering. In fact, it was so withering
Barak found himself wondering if at least part of its scorn for the “common troopers’” rumormongering wasn’t an effort to conceal—perhaps even from Fursa himself—the depth of the ground base commander’s own anxiety.

Well, if it was, the other ground base commander had a certain justification, Barak supposed. Unlike Fursa’s, his own base sat in the middle of what had once been called “Iowa,” which put an entire ocean between him and whatever had happened to Shairez. Of course, on the debit side of that particular account, it put him right in the very midst of the maddeningly inventive and endlessly destructive “Americans.” His own losses had been significant, especially when he’d begun extending his ZOR eastward into the states of Wisconsin and Illinois. Missouri hadn’t been any great prize, either, although at least he hadn’t had to resort to the sort of general bombardment which had reduced most of Pennsylvania and New York to wastelands. According to the fleet’s orbiting sensors, there were actually quite a few starving, ragged humans still creeping about in the wreckage over there, but there was very little left worth the Shongairi’s time or attention.

And there aren’t going to be any humans left creeping around
anywhere
much longer,
he told himself.

Of course, the loss of Ground Base Seven had put a crimp into those plans, as well. Shairez had been Fleet Commander Thikair’s favorite ground base commander for a lot of reasons, and Barak suspected the fleet commander had regarded her as a potential future mate, whether he’d ever realized that himself or not. But even if that were the case, it had been only a single factor in his reliance upon her, and the raw ability she’d brought to almost any task had been a much greater factor. Deservedly so, too. Picking someone to replace her in charge of the bioweapon project hadn’t been easy. In the end, however, the fleet commander had decided to return it to Ground Base Two Alpha, as originally planned. Given the difficulty getting convoys of specimens through to the base, though, Thikair had also decided to use Starlanders to shuttle them in, instead. That would both avoid the maddeningly effective raiders who seemed to swarm around Ground Base Two Alpha’s outer perimeter like goading insects and let him collect them from farther away, as well.

Like Barak’s ZOR, for example.

Which means a third of my troopers are out crawling through the ruins around what used to be Chicago hunting for humans to bring back alive, and
isn’t
that
fun? Cainharn! I think every human still out there has at least two guns!