I’m sorry, Mircea, he thought grimly. I fucked up. Now we’re all screwed. I’m just as glad you didn’t make it back in time, after all.
His jaw muscles tightened, and he reached out and grabbed Maria Averescu, one of his runners.
“I need you to find Gunny Meyers,” he said in the Romanian he’d finally begun to master.
“He’s dead, Top,” she replied harshly, and his belly clenched.
“Sergeant Ramirez?”
“Him, too, I think. I know he took a hit here.” Averescu thumped the center of her own chest.
“Then find Sergeant Jonescu. Tell him—” Buchevsky drew a deep breath. “Tell him I want him and his people to get as many kids out as they can. Tell him the rest of us will buy him as much time as we can. Got that?”
“Yes, Top!” Averescu’s grimy face was pale, but she nodded hard.
“Good. Now go!”
He released her shoulder. She shot off through the smoke, and he headed for the perimeter command post.
The Shongairi scouts realized the humans’ retreat had slowed still further. Painful experience made them wary of changes, and they felt their way cautiously forward.
They were right to be cautious.
Bastogne had been built around a deep cavern that offered protected, easily camouflaged storage for winter foodstuffs and fodder for the villages’ animals. Concealment was not its only defense, however.
Buchevsky bared his teeth savagely as he heard the explosions. He still wished he’d had better mines to work with—he’d have given his left arm for a couple of crates of claymores—but the Romanian anti-personnel mines Basarab had managed to scrounge up were one hell of a lot better than nothing. The mine belt wasn’t so deep as he would have liked, but the Shongairi obviously hadn’t realized what they were walking into, and he listened with bloodthirsty satisfaction to their shrieks.
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 halted along the edge of the minefield cowered close against the ground as the pair of 120 mm mortars Basarab had scrounged up along with the mines started dropping their lethal fire on them. Even now, few of them had actually encountered human artillery, and the 35-pound HE bombs were a devastating experience.
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 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 officers started probing forward, looking for openings.
Three heavy mortars, mounted on unarmored transports, had managed to struggle up the narrow trail behind them and tried to locate human mortars. But the dense tree cover and rugged terrain made it impossible to get a solid radar track on the incoming fire. Finally, unable to actually find the mortar pits, they began blind suppressive fire.
The Shongairi mortars were more powerful, and white-hot flashes began to walk across the area behind Buchevsky’s forward positions, and 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 pre-plotted just about every possible firing position along that trail. As soon as they opened fire, Gutierrez knew where they had to be, and both of his mortars retargeted immediately. They fired more rapidly than the heavier Shongairi weapons, and their bombs fell around the Shongairi 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 dozen more mortar vehicles . . . all of them miles 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 test subjects 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. If this bunch of primitives was so incredibly stupid, so lost to all rationality and basic decency, that they wanted to die fighting, then he would damned well oblige them.
He looked up through a break in the tree cover. The light was fading quickly, and Shongairi didn’t like fighting in the dark. But there was still time. They could still break through before darkness fell if—
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 and settled into position behind the KPV heavy machine gun. There were three tripod-mounted PKMS 7.62 mm medium machine guns dug in 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, and it was a bulky, awkward thing—six and a half feet long, intended as a vehicle-mounted weapon, on an improvised infantry mounting.
The Shongairi started forward behind a hurricane of rifle fire and grenades. The minefield slowed them, disordered them, but they kept coming. They were too close for the single remaining mortar to engage, and the medium machine guns opened up.
Shongairi screamed, tumbled aside, disappeared in sprays of blood and tissue, but then a pair of wheeled armored personnel carriers 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 and the blood and terror and one of the machine guns was silenced forever.
But Stephen Buchevsky knew where that lightning bolt had come from, and the Russian Army had developed the KPV around the 14.5 mm 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 bullet weighed almost a thousand grains . . . and developed twenty-four thousand foot-pounds of muzzle energy.
He laid his sights on the vehicle that had fired and sent six hundred rounds per minute shrieking into it.
The APC staggered as the steel-cored, armor-piercing, incendiary bullets slammed into it at better than 3,200 feet per second. Armor intended to resist small arms fire never had a chance against that torrent of destruction, and the vehicle vomited smoke and flame.
Its companion turned toward the source of its destruction, and Alice Macomb stood up in a rifle pit. She exposed herself recklessly with an RBRM60, and its three-and-a-half-pound rocket smashed into the APC . . . just before a six-round burst killed her where she stood.
Buchevsky swung the KBV’s flaming muzzle, sweeping his fire along the Shongairi line, pouring his hate, his desperate need to protect the children behind him, into his enemies.
He was still firing when the Shongairi grenade silenced his machine gun forever.
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. Almost 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. “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 he felt Basarab grip 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. “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. Had I not spent so long 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 trying to make some sort of sense out of Basarab’s words. 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 others—”
He shrugged, looking away, then looked back at Buchevsky.
“They are not here, Stephen. For Whatever reason, the vermin have taken them, and having seen this new base of theirs, I do not think either of us would like that reason.”
“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. They are my people. I swore to protect them, and I do not let my word be proved 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, a tiny little sliver of awareness felt almost sorry for the Shongairi.
Private Kumayr felt his head beginning to nod forward and stiffened his spine, snapping back erect 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 and decided he’d better find something to do if he didn’t want one of the officers to come along and rip his head off for dozing on duty. Something that looked industrious and conscientious.
His ears twitched in amusement, and he punched up a standard diagnostic of the perimeter security systems. Not that he expected to find any problems. The entire base was brand new, and all of its systems had passed their final checks with flying colors less than three local days ago. Still, it would look good on the log sheets.
He 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 down 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!”
Still there was nothing, and he stabbed more controls, bringing up the monitors. They came alive . . . and he froze.
Not possible, a small, still voice said in the back of his brain as he stared at the images of carnage. At the troopers with their throats ripped out, at the Shongairi blood soaking into the thirsty soil of an alien world, at heads turned backwards on snapped necks and dismembered body parts scattered like some lunatic’s bloody handiwork.
Not possible, not without at least one alarm sounding. Not—
He heard a tiny sound, and his right hand flashed toward his side arm. But even as he touched it, the door of his control room flew open and darkness crashed over him.
“What?”
Fleet Commander Thikair looked at Ship Commander Ahzmer in astonishment so deep, it was sheer incomprehension.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry, sir.” The flagship’s CO sounded like someone trapped in an amazingly bad dream, Thikair thought distantly. “The report just came in. I’m . . . afraid it’s confirmed, sir.”
“All of them?” Thikair shook himself. “Everyone assigned to the base—even Shairez?”
“All of them,” Ahzmer confirmed heavily. “And all the test subjects have disappeared.”
“Dainthar,” Thikair half whispered. He stared at the ship commander, then shook himself again, harder.
“How did they do it?”
“Sir, I don’t know. No one knows. For that matter, it doesn’t . . . well, it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen the humans do before.”
“What are you talking about?” Thikair’s voice was harder, impatient. He knew much of his irritation was the product of his own shock, but that didn’t change the fact that what Ahzmer had just said made no sense.
“It doesn’t look like whoever it was used weapons at all, Fleet Commander.” Ahzmer didn’t sound as if he expected Thikair to believe him, but the ship commander went on doggedly. “It’s more like some sort of wild beasts got through every security system without sounding a single alarm. Not one, sir. But there are no bullet wounds, no knife wounds, no sign of any kind of weapon. Our people were just . . . torn apart.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Thikair protested.
“No, sir, it doesn’t. But it’s what happened.”
The two of them stared at one another; then Thikair drew a deep breath.
“Senior officers conference, two hours,” he said flatly.
“The ground patrols have confirmed it, Fleet Commander,” Ground Force Commander Thairys said heavily. “There are no Shongairi survivors. None. And—” He inhaled heavily, someone about to say something he really didn’t want to. “—there’s no evidence that a single one of our troopers so much as fired a shot in his own defense. It’s as if they all just . . . sat there, waiting for someone—or something—to tear them apart.”
“Calm down, Thairys.” Thikair put both sternness and sympathy into his tone. “We’re going to have enough panicky rumors when the troops hear about this. Let’s not begin believing in night terrors before the rumor mill even gets started!”
Thairys looked at him for a moment, then managed a chuckle that was only slightly hollow.
“You’re right, of course, sir. It’s just that. . . . Well, it’s just that I’ve never seen anything like this. And I’ve checked the database. As nearly as I can tell, no one in the entire Hegemony has ever seen anything like this.”
“It’s a big galaxy,” Thikair pointed out. “And even the Hegemony’s explored only a very small portion of it. I don’t know what happened down there, either, but trust me—there’s a rational explanation. We just have to figure out what it is.”
“With all due respect, Fleet Commander,” Squadron Commander Jainfar said quietly, “how do we go about doing that?”
Thikair looked at him, and the squadron commander flicked his ears.
“I’ve personally reviewed the sensor recordings, sir. Until Private Kumayr began trying to contact the perimeter strong points, there was absolutely no indication of any problem. Whatever happened, it apparently managed to kill every single member of the garrison—except for Kumayr—without being detected by any heat, motion, or audio sensor. The fact of the matter is, sir, that we have no data, no information at all. Just an entire base full of dead personnel. And with no evidence, how do we figure out what happened, far less who was responsible for it?”
“One thing I think we can assume, sir.” Base Commander Barak was down on the planetary surface, attending the conference electronically, and Thikair nodded permission to speak to his comm image.
“As I say, I think we can assume one thing,” Barak continued. “Surely if it was the humans—if humans were capable of this sort of thing—they wouldn’t have waited until we’d killed more than half of them before we found out about it! For that matter, why here? Why Shairez’s base, and not mine, or Base Commander Fursa’s? Unless we want to assume the humans somehow figured out what Shairez was going to be developing, why employ some sort of ‘secret weapon’ for the first time against a brand-new base where nowhere near as much of the local population has been killed?”
“With all due respect, Base Commander,” Thairys said, “if it wasn’t the humans, then who do you suggest it might have been?”
“That I don’t know, sir,” Barak said respectfully. “I’m simply suggesting that, logically, if humans could do this in the first place, they’d already have done it . . . and on a considerably larger scale.”
“Are you suggesting that some other member of the Hegemony might be responsible?” Thikair asked slowly.
“I think that’s remotely possible . . . but only remotely, sir.” Barak shrugged. “Again, I have no idea who—or what—it actually was. But I don’t really see how any other member of the Hegemony could have penetrated our security so seamlessly. Our technology is as good as anyone else’s. Probably even better, in purely military applications.”
“Wonderful.” Jainfar grimaced. “So all any of us have been able to contribute so far is that we don’t have a clue who did it, or how, or even why! Assuming, of course, that it wasn’t the humans . . . whom we’ve all now agreed don’t have the capability to do it in the first place!”
“I think we’ve wandered about as far afield speculatively as we profitably can,” Thikair said firmly. “I see no point in our helping one another panic from the depths of our current ignorance.”
His subordinates all looked at him, most at least a little sheepishly, and he bared his canines in a frosty smile.
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m as . . . anxious about this as anyone else. But let’s look at it. So far, we’ve lost one base and its personnel. All right, we’ve been hurt—badly. But Whatever happened, it obviously took Shairez’s entire base completely by surprise, and we know the sensor net didn’t pick anything up. So, I think, the first thing to do is to put all our bases and personnel on maximum alert. Second, we emphasize that whoever was responsible may have some form of advanced stealth technology. Since we apparently can’t rely on our sensors to detect it, we’re going to have to rely on our own physical senses. I want all of our units to establish real-time, free-flow communications nets. All checkpoints will be manned, not left to the automatics, and all detachments will check in regularly with their central HQs. Even if we can’t detect these people—whoever they are—on their way in, we can at least be certain we know when they’ve arrived. And I don’t care how good their ‘stealth technology’ is. If we know they’re there, we have enough troopers, enough guns, and enough heavy weapons on that planet to kill anything.”
“Yes, Thairys?” Thikair said.
The ground force commander had lingered as the other senior officers filed out. Now he looked at the fleet commander, his ears half-folded and his eyes somber. “There were two small points I . . . chose not to mention in front of the others, sir,” he said quietly.
“Oh?” Thikair managed to keep his voice level, despite the sudden cold tingle dancing down his nerves.
“Yes, sir. First, I’m afraid the preliminary medical exams indicate Base Commander Shairez was killed several hours after the rest of her personnel. And there are indications that she was . . . interrogated before her neck was broken.”
“I see.” Thikair looked at his subordinate for a moment, then cleared his throat. “And the second point?”
“And the second point is that two of the base’s neural education units are missing, sir. Whoever attacked Shairez’s facility must have taken them with him. And if he knows how to operate them . . .”
The ground force commander’s voice trailed off. There was, after all, no need for him to complete the sentence, since each of the education units contained the basic knowledge platform of the entire Hegemony.
“I almost wish something else would happen,” Base Commander Fursa said. He and Base Commander Barak were conferring via communicator, and Barak frowned at him.
“I want to figure out what’s going on as badly as you do, Fursa. And I suppose for us to do that, ‘something else’ is going to have to happen. But while you’re wishing, just remember, you’re the next closest major base.”
“I know.” Fursa grimaced. “That’s my point. We’re feeling just a bit exposed out here. I’m inclined to suspect that the anticipation is at least as bad as beating off an actual attack would be.”
Barak grunted. His own base sat in the middle of a place that had once been called “Kansas,” which put an entire ocean between him and Whatever had happened to Shairez. Fursa’s base, on the other hand, was located just outside the ruins of the human city of Moscow.
Still, almost two local weeks had passed. That was a lot of time, when no one in the entire expedition had been able to come up with a workable explanation for what had happened. A lot of time for nerves to tighten, for the ‘anticipation’ Fursa had just mentioned to work on all of them.
And a lot of time for whoever had attacked Shairez’s base to move his operations somewhere else entirely.
“You may have a point,” he said finally, “but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. In fact, if I had my way”—his voice lowered—”I’d already be cutting my losses. This planet’s been nothing but one enormous pain in the ass. I say take all our people off and level the place.”
The base commanders’ gazes met, and Barak saw the agreement hidden in Fursa’s eyes. Any one of Fleet Commander Thikair’s dreadnoughts was capable of sterilizing any planet. Of course, actually doing that would raise more than a few eyebrows among the Hegemony’s member races. The sort of scrutiny it would draw down upon the Empire might well have disastrous consequences. But even so . . .
“Somehow, I don’t think that particular solution’s going to be very high on the Fleet Commander’s list,” Fursa said carefully.
“No, and it probably shouldn’t be,” Barak agreed. “But I’m willing to bet it’s running through the back of his mind already, and you know it.”
“Time check,” Brigade Commander Caranth announced. “Check in.”
“Perimeter One, secure.”
“Perimeter Two, secure.”
“Perimeter Three, secure.”
“Perimeter Four, secure.”
The acknowledgments came in steadily, and Caranth’s ears twitched in satisfaction with each of them . . . until the sequence paused.
The brigade commander didn’t worry for a moment, but then he stiffened in his chair.
“Perimeter Five, report,” he said.
Only silence answered.
“Perimeter Five!” he snapped . . . and that was when the firing began.
Caranth lunged upright and raced to the command bunker’s armored observation slit while his staff started going berserk behind him. He stared out into the night, his body rigid in disbelief as the stroboscopic fury of muzzle flashes ripped the darkness apart. He couldn’t see anything but the flickering lightning of automatic weapons . . . and neither could his sensors. Yet he had infantry out there shooting at something, and as he watched, one of his heavy weapons posts opened fire, as well.
“We’re under attack!” someone screamed over the net. “Perimeter Three—we’re under attack! They’re coming through the—”
The voice chopped off, and then, horribly, Caranth heard other voices yelling in alarm, screaming in panic, chopping off in mid-syllable. It was as if some invisible, unstoppable whirlwind was sweeping through his perimeter, and strain his eyes though he might, he couldn’t even see it!
The voices began to dwindle, fading in a diminuendo that was even more terrifying than the gunfire, the explosion of artillery rounds landing on something no one could see. The firing died. The last scream bubbled into silence, and Caranth felt his heart trying to freeze in his chest.
The only sound was his staff, trying desperately to contact even one of the perimeter security points.
There was no answer, only silence. And then—
“What’s that?” someone blurted, and Caranth turned to see something flowing from the overhead louvers of the bunker’s ventilation system. There was no time even to begin to recognize what it was before the darkness crashed down on him like a hammer.
Fleet Commander Thikair felt a thousand years old as he sat in the silence of his stateroom, cursing the day he’d ever had his brilliant idea about using this planet and its eternally damned humans for the Empire’s benefit.
It seemed so simple, he thought almost numbly. Like such a reasonable risk. But then it all went so horribly wrong, from the moment our troopers landed. And now this.
Base Commander Fursa’s entire command was gone, wiped out in a single night. And in the space of less than eight hours, two infantry brigades and an entire armored regiment had been just as utterly destroyed.
And they still had absolutely no idea how it had happened.
They’d received a single report, from a platoon commander, claiming that he was under attack by humans. Humans who completely ignored the assault rifles firing into them. Humans who registered on no thermal sensor, no motion sensor. Humans who could not be there.
Maybe it isn’t possible. Or maybe it’s just one more lunacy about this entire insane planet. But Whatever it is, it’s enough. It’s more than enough.
He punched a button on his communicator.
“Yes, Fleet Commander?” Ahzmer’s voice responded quietly.
“Bring them up,” Thikair said with a terrible, flat emphasis. “I want every single trooper off that planet within twelve hours. And then we’ll let Jainfar’s dreadnoughts use the Dainthar-cursed place for target practice.”
It wasn’t quite that simple, of course.
organizing the emergency withdrawal of an entire planetary assault force was even more complicated than landing it had been. But at least the required troop lift had been rather drastically reduced, Thikair reflected bitterly. Over half his entire ground force had been wiped out. However small his absolute losses might have been compared with those of the humans, it was still a staggering defeat for the Empire, and it was all his responsibility.
He would already have killed himself, except that no honorable suicide could possibly expunge the stain he’d brought to the honor of his entire clan. No, that would require the atonement of formal execution . . . and even that might not prove enough.
But before I go home to face His Majesty, there’s one last thing I need to do.
“Are we ready, Ahzmer?”
“We are according to my readouts,” the ship commander replied. But there was something peculiar about his tone, and Thikair looked at him.
“Meaning what?” he asked impatiently.
“Meaning that according to my readouts, all shuttles have returned and docked, but neither Stellar Dawn nor Imperial Sword have confirmed recovery of their small craft. All the other transports have checked in, but they haven’t yet.”
“What?”
Thikair’s one-word question quivered with sudden, ice-cold fury. It was as if all his anxiety, all his fear, guilt, and shame suddenly had someone else to focus upon, and he showed all of his canines in a ferocious snarl.
“Get their commanders on the comm now,” he snapped. “Find out what in Dainthar’s Second Hell they think they’re doing! And then get me Jainfar!”
“At once, sir! I—”
Ahzmer’s voice chopped off, and Thikair’s eyes narrowed.
“Ahzmer?” he said.
“Sir, the plot . . .”
Thikair turned to the master display, and it was his turn to freeze.
Six of the expedition’s seven dreadnoughts were heading steadily away from the planet.
“What are they—?” he began, then gasped as two of the dreadnoughts suddenly opened fire. Not on the planet, but on their own escorts!
Nothing in the galaxy could stand up to the energy-range fire of a dreadnought. Certainly no mere scout ship, destroyer, or cruiser could.
It took less than forty-five seconds for every one of Thikair’s screening warships to die, and three-quarters of his transport ships went with them.
“Get Jainfar!” he shouted at Ahzmer. “Find out what—”
“Sir, there’s no response from Squadron Commander Jainfar’s ship!” Ahzmer’s communications officer blurted. “There’s no response from any of the other dreadnoughts!”
“What?” Thikair stared at him in disbelief, and then alarms began to warble. First one, then another, and another.
He whipped back around to the master control screen, and ice smoked through his veins as crimson lights glared on the readiness boards. Engineering went down, then the Combat Information Center. Master Fire Control went offline, and so did Tracking, Missile Defense, and Astrogation.
And then the flag bridge itself lost power. Main lighting failed, plunging it into darkness, and Thikair heard someone gobbling a prayer as the emergency lighting clicked on.
“Sir?”
Ahzmer’s voice was fragile, and Thikair looked at him. But he couldn’t find his own voice. He could only stand there, paralyzed, unable to cope with the impossible events.
And then the command deck’s armored doors slid open, and Thikair’s eyes went wide as a human walked through them.
Every officer on that bridge was armed, and Thikair’s hearing cringed as a dozen sidearms opened fire at once. Scores of bullets slammed into the human intruder . . . with absolutely no effect.
No, that wasn’t quite correct, some numb corner of Thikair’s brain insisted. The bullets went straight through him, whining and ricocheting off the bulkheads behind him, but he didn’t even seem to notice. There were no wounds, no sprays of blood. It was as if his body were made of smoke, offering no resistance, suffering no damage.
He only stood there, looking at them, and then, suddenly, there were more humans. Four of them. Only four . . . but it was enough.
Thikair’s mind gibbered, too overwhelmed even to truly panic as the four newcomers seemed to blur. It was as if they were half-transformed into vapor that poured itself through the command deck’s air with impossible speed. They flowed across the bridge, enveloping his officers, and he heard screams. Screams of raw panic that rose in pitch as the Shongairi behind them saw the smoke flowing in their direction . . . and died in hideous, gurgling silence as it engulfed them.
And then Thikair was the only Shongair still standing.
His body insisted that he had to collapse, but somehow his knees refused to unlock. Collapsing would have required him to move . . . and something reached out from the first human’s green eyes and forbade that.
The green-eyed human walked out into the body-strewn command and stopped, facing Thikair, his hands clasped behind him.
“You have much for which to answer, Fleet Commander Thikair,” he said quietly, softly . . . in perfect Shongairi.
Thikair only stared at him, unable—not allowed—even to speak, and the human smiled. There was something terrifying about that smile . . . and something wrong, as well. The teeth, Thikair realized. The ridiculous little human canines had lengthened, sharpened, and in that moment Thikair understood exactly how thousands upon thousands of years of prey animals had looked upon his own people’s smiles.
“You call yourselves ‘predators.’ ” The human’s upper lip curled. “Trust me, Fleet Commander—your people know nothing about predators. But they will.”
Something whimpered in Thikair’s throat, and the green eyes glowed with a terrifying internal fire.
“I had forgotten,” the human said. “I had turned away from my own past. Even when you came to my world, even when you murdered billions of humans, I had forgotten. But now, thanks to you, Fleet Commander, I remember. I remember the obligations of honor. I remember a Prince of Wallachia’s responsibilities. And I remember—oh, how I remember—the taste of vengeance. And that is what I find most impossible to forgive, Fleet Commander Thikair. I spent five hundred years learning to forget that taste, and you’ve filled my mouth with it again.”
Thikair would have sold his soul to look away from those blazing emerald eyes, but even that was denied him.
“For an entire century, I hid even from myself, hid under my murdered brother’s name, but now, Fleet Commander, I take back my own name. I am Vlad Drakula—Vlad, Son of the Dragon, Prince of Wallachia—and you have dared to shed the blood of those under my protection.”
The paralysis left Thikair’s voice—released, he was certain, by the human-shaped monster in front of him—and he swallowed hard.
“Wh—What do you—?” he managed to get out, but then his freed voice failed him, and Vlad smiled cruelly.
“I couldn’t have acted when you first came even if I’d been prepared—willing—to go back to what once I was,” he said. “There was only myself and my handful of closest followers. We would have been far too few. But then you showed me I truly had no choice. When you established your base to build the weapon to destroy every living human, you made my options very simple. I could not permit that—I would not. And so I had no alternative but to create more of my own kind. To create an army—not large, as armies go, but an army still—to deal with you.
“I was more cautious than in my . . . impetuous youth. The vampires I chose to make this time were better men and women than I was when I was yet breathing. I pray for my own sake that they will balance the hunger you’ve awakened in me once again, but do not expect them to feel any kindness where you and your kind are concerned.
“They are all much younger than I, new come to their abilities, not yet strong enough to endure the touch of the sun. But, like me, they are no longer breathing. Like me, they could ride the exterior of your shuttles when you were kind enough to return them to your transports . . . and your dreadnoughts. And like me, they have used your neural educators, learned how to control your vessels, how to use your technology.
“I will leave your neural educators here on Earth to give every single breathing human a complete Hegemony-level education. And, as you may have noticed, we were very careful not to destroy your industrial ships. What do you think a planet of humans will be able to accomplish over the next few centuries, even after all you’ve done to them, from that starting point? Do you think your Hegemony Council will be pleased?”
Thikair swallowed again, choking on a thick bolus of fear, and the human cocked his head to one side.
“I doubt the Council will be very happy with you, Fleet Commander, but I promise you their anger will have no effect upon your Empire. After all, each of these dreadnoughts can sterilize a planet, can it not? And which of your imperial worlds will dream, even for a moment, that one of your own capital ships might pose any threat to it at all?”
“No,” Thikair managed to whimper, his eyes darting to the plot where the green icons of his other dreadnoughts continued to move away from the planet. “No, please . . .”
“How many human fathers and mothers would have said exactly the same thing to you as their children died before them?” the human replied coldly, and Thikair sobbed.
The human watched him mercilessly, but then he looked away. The deadly green glow left his eyes, and they seemed to soften as they gazed up at the taller human beside him.
“Keep me as human as you can, my Stephen,” he said softly in English. “Remind me of why I tried so hard to forget.”
The dark-skinned human looked back down at him and nodded, and then the green eyes moved back to Thikair.
“I believe you have unfinished business with this one, my Stephen,” he said, and it was the bigger, taller, darker, and infinitely less terrifying human’s turn to smile.
“Yes, I do,” his deep voice rumbled, and Thikair squealed like a small trapped animal as the powerful, dark hands reached for him.
“This is for my daughters,” Stephen Buchevsky said.