Into the Light

by David Weber

  “And you’re here because—?”

  “I bear a message for you from my superior,” Ushakov replied.

  “And who might that be and why might I want to hear whatever he has to say?” Lutosławski asked unpleasantly.

  “There are several reasons you should want to hear what he has to say,” Ushakov said calmly. “The best reason is that he wants to offer you assistance, under certain conditions.”

  “What sort of ‘assistance’?” Suspicion edged Lutosławski’s tone. “Everyone else who’s offered to ‘assist’ me had no intention of doing anything of the sort. Which is why most of them are dead now,” he added warningly.

  “I’m here on behalf of Governor Judson Howell,” Ushakov said, apparently oblivious to the not-so-veiled threat. “He’s in a position to offer medical assistance and at least limited assistance with food and other logistic issues. Assuming you’re able and willing to meet those conditions I mentioned.”

  “Howell?” Lutosławski repeated the name. His expression was puzzled for a moment, but then his eyes narrowed. “Howell! The asshole who was collaborating with the Puppies?!”

  “That’s how the Puppies described it,” Ushakov acknowledged. Howell’s “cooperation” with the Shongairi had figured prominently in some of the aliens’ broadcasts. “Actually, he was outsmarting them ‘three ways to Sunday,’ as an American friend of mine would put it.” The big Ukrainian smiled thinly. “They didn’t like what happened when he was finished outsmarting them very much, either.”

  “Sure they didn’t, and I can believe however much of that I want,” Lutosławski growled suspiciously. He glowered at his uninvited visitor. “Even assuming there’s a word of truth in that, are you seriously suggesting an American, on the other side of the world, could help us here even if he wanted to?”

  “In fact, North Carolina, Governor Howell’s state, is less than seventy-five hundred kilometers from Widawa, which isn’t even a quarter of the way around the world,” Ushakov observed. “The actual distance doesn’t matter, however.” He shrugged. “I assure you, the Governor has the capability to reach you here at any time he chooses.”

  “Oh, of course he does!”

  “You might want to reflect upon the fact that I’m here,” Ushakov pointed out.

  Lutosławski started a quick reply, then paused, and Ushakov smiled ever so slightly.

  “And what would those ‘conditions’ of his be?” the Pole asked instead, after a moment.

  “The most immediate would be that you will refrain from seizing any supplies or assistance directed to you,” Ushakov said levelly. “The ruthlessness you’ve shown in forcibly confiscating food and other supplies is … understandable, under the circumstances you’ve confronted. And the Governor knows as well as you do how unlikely you are to survive the winter without losing all too many of your people to malnutrition or sickness. But if he agrees to help you, he’ll expect his assistance to be passed on through you to the communities around you. Even to Wojewoda Konarski.”

  Lutosławski’s nostrils flared and he darted a glance at Pepliński. The pułkownik’s expression was as bleak as his own, and both of them looked back at Ushakov.

  Tadeusz Konarski had declared himself governor of a territory somewhat smaller than gmina Widawa’s current size, centered on the tiny village of Zabrzezie, just over thirty-five kilometers from Widawa itself. His and Lutosławski’s foragers had clashed more than once. Indeed, they’d fought a pitched battle over a newly discovered hoard of rye only three days ago.

  Lutosławski’s people had won that one, but they’d taken losses. And they hadn’t won all of the other clashes, either.

  “That bastard’s willing to starve all of my people!” he snarled. “Why should I give him the sweat off my balls?!”

  “Because if the two of you—and the other people around you who have managed to hold on to at least a little of what passes for civilization—don’t cooperate with one another, the Governor will be unable to help any of you. More than that, he won’t even try. Believe me, he has any number of at least equally pressing emergencies much closer to home, and that means he has to prioritize ruthlessly. If he can count on local cooperation, he can make a significant difference to your chance of surviving the winter, because that cooperation will be what you might call a ‘force multiplier’ for his own resources and people. If that cooperation isn’t forthcoming here, he’ll concentrate his efforts on other places where it is.”

  “And you’re seriously suggesting someone only a quarter of the way around the world could offer assistance remotely great enough to convince that murderous bastard to ‘cooperate’ with me?”

  “You are aware Wojewoda Konarski thinks of you in much the same terms?” Ushakov asked with a crooked smile. “To be fair, I think the label applies rather better to him than to you, but you’ve both had to be fairly ‘murderous’ to survive this far, Generał Brygady. My Governor understands that. But if you wish his assistance in continuing to survive, the two of you will have to learn to work together.”

  “Assuming for the moment this American governor really could reach Poland with some sort of assistance, what’s to keep Konarski—or me—from agreeing to cooperate and then seizing all of that assistance for himself?”

  “I can think of several moral arguments which should dissuade you. However, I’m a practical man, so I’ll move straight to the most pressing reason neither of you should do anything so foolish. If you do, you’ll die.”

  Lutosławski’s eyes widened.

  “Are you threatening me?!”

  “Not unless I must,” Ushakov said in that same calm tone. “And I would prefer not to, to be honest. While I might quibble with some of your methods, you’ve done a remarkable job of maintaining order in the area under your control. We would very much prefer to work with you rather than replace you.”

  “I see.”

  Lutosławski looked at the other man for a moment. Then his right hand came out of the house coat pocket with a WIST-94 pistol. It was the 94L variant, and he showed his teeth in a humorless smile as the crimson dot of the integral laser settled on the center of Ushakov’s chest.

  “I don’t think you’re in a very strong position to be throwing around threats, Kapitan Ushakov,” he said very softly.

  “Actually, I’m in a far stronger position than you are.” Ushakov seemed remarkably unfazed. “I anticipated this situation might arise after I’d studied your methods a bit, so why don’t we go ahead and get it over with? Feel free to squeeze the trigger.”

  Lutosławski’s eyes narrowed as the lunatic smiled at him and made a small welcoming gesture with his right hand. The generał brygady’s index finger tightened on the double action trigger, a half kilogram or so from firing, but he stopped himself.

  “Don’t think I won’t,” he warned.

  “Oh, I’m quite certain you would,” Ushakov replied. “If I permitted it, that is.”

  “If you—?”

  Lutosławski stared at him in disbelief, and then the other man … blurred. That was the only description for it. The lighting was poor, but not poor enough to explain the way in which Ushakov seemed to flow suddenly through the air. The Ukrainian—if that was what he truly was—vanished, transmuted into a coil of smoke that snaked across the parlor towards him. The impossibility of it froze him for half a pulse beat … and that was long enough for the smoke to suddenly re-consolidate three feet from him and a sinewy hand to twist the pistol out of his hand with humiliating ease.

  “A fine weapon,” Ushakov observed, stepping back in a more normal fashion to stand before the parlor’s small hearth with the pistol in his own hand. “I believe I would probably prefer it to the Makarov or the FORT.” He smiled. “I like its ergonomics, and I always felt the Luger round was superior. Unfortunately, neither round is adequate for what you intended to do, Generał Brygady.”

  Lutosławski gawked at him, trying to understand how he could have moved that quickly. It wasn’t possible
! He darted a quick look at Pepliński, but his executive officer seemed as frozen as he was.

  “Pułkownik Pepliński,” Ushakov said, never looking away from Lutosławski, “would you be kind enough to ask the sentries to step into the parlor? I wouldn’t want there to be any … misunderstandings.”

  Pepliński looked at Lutosławski, and the generał brygady glared for a moment. Then he inhaled.

  “Do it, Marek,” he said.

  Pepliński nodded. He disappeared, and Lutosławski stood glowering at Ushakov until the pułkownik returned with the two men from his headquarters guard force who had the night’s sentry duty. They looked more than a little apprehensive, and their apprehension clicked up another notch as they saw the stranger standing there with their CO’s pistol in his hand.

  “Thank you, Pułkowniku,” the stranger in question said politely, and nodded to the newcomers. “I didn’t want you to feel alarmed,” he explained, then pressed the muzzle of the pistol to his temple and squeezed the trigger.

  The sudden, explosive “CRAAACK!” of the shot hit their ears like a sledgehammer in the small parlor’s confines, a plate displayed on the mantel above the hearth shattered into dozens of pieces, and every man in the room flinched, their eyes wide with horror as they realized Ushakov had just shot himself in the head in front of them! What kind of maniac—?

  But then they realized Ushakov hadn’t collapsed to the floor. In fact, he was smiling at them, the pistol still against the side of his head. For an instant, Lutosławski wondered if the deafening shot still reverberating in his bones had been some sort of illusionist’s trick. But then a large fragment of broken plate slid off the mantel and splintered on the hearth.

  And Ushakov was totally unmarked. His temple had seemed to … ripple under the force of the shot, but there wasn’t even a powder burn in its wake!

  “As you can see, Generał Brygady,” he said, lowering the pistol with a faint smile, “shooting me would accomplish very little beyond leaving holes in my uniform.” His voice sounded far away, distant beyond the ringing in Lutosławski’s ears. “It certainly couldn’t prevent me from reaching you, wherever you might be, whenever I chose.” His smile disappeared. “And before you ask, I’ve already demonstrated that fact to Wojewoda Konarski, as well.”

  “What—” Lutosławski swallowed hard. “What are you?” he asked hoarsely.

  “That really doesn’t matter at the moment,” Ushakov replied. “What matters is that I’m here, that I can do what I’ve said I can do, and that Governor Howell can—and wants to—help you and all the people under your control survive. So, what reply would you like me to take home to him?”

  . III .

  COLD MOUNTAIN,

  TRANSYLVANIA COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA,

  UNITED STATES

  A remarkably beady pair of blue eyes considered Dave Dvorak across the cheerful kitchen table, dark with distrust as he folded the phone and shoved it into his pocket.

  It wasn’t actually a “phone,” of course, although it was already obvious that was what people were going to go on calling it, just as they’d called the portable computers companies like Apple and Samsung had been selling their customers for years “phones,” despite how little they resembled the device he remembered hanging on his parents’ kitchen wall. Of course, this one went a bit farther than iPhones or Galaxies had … although, now that he thought about it, “Galaxy” might not be all that bad a name for it. While it resembled the flip phones that smart phones had long since made obsolete, the folding unit was actually only the interface for the slim two-inch-by-two-inch, wafer-thin sliver of molecular circuitry unshakably attached to his belt via a nanotech-based “sticky surface” whose physics would probably have been enough to induce massive migraines even in someone who actually understood the laws of physics.

  Or someone who understood what humanity had thought were the laws of physics six months earlier, anyway.

  The communications satellites the Shongairi had parked in geosynchronous orbits to replace the human satellites they’d exterminated once they realized the Internet was more trouble than it was worth, were still there and operating under new management. The “phone” attached to his belt could reach any other “phone” anywhere on the planet—or within several light seconds of Earth, for that matter—courtesy of that satellite net. According to Chester Gannon, a Lawrence Livermore physicist who’d happened to be visiting relatives in Kernersville when the Shongairi arrived, it could also perform somewhere around two “petaflops” worth of calculations in a second. Dvorak was a historian by inclination, and a pretty fair gunsmith, but he’d always been a bit fuzzy about the magic that went on inside even merely human computers. So he understood that a “petaflop” meant “a whole big bunch” of calculations and that packing that kind of power into a small, portable unit that ran on self-contained power was going to change the world more than iPhones and Galaxies ever had. Beyond that, it was just better magic than he’d had before … and he hoped to hell that autocorrect worked better on it than it had on his iPhone!

  And the reason you’re thinking about that is because you don’t want to think about the fact that the love of your life just heard your end of the conversation, Dave, he reflected.

  “‘Sam and Longbow and Howell are out of their damn minds if they think I’m going to agree to run for the Senate,’ I believe you said,” Sharon Dvorak quoted from memory with devastating accuracy. “‘Oh, no, you’re not getting me into Washington—or Raleigh, or wherever the hell else we put the capital once we get around to rebuilding it! I’ve got me a cabin up in the hills with a bunker, by God, and I’m a-staying in it!’” She leaned back and folded her arms. “Did I get that approximately right?”

  “Nobody said anything about the Senate,” he said in a hopeful sort of tone, and she raised one eloquent eyebrow with a magnificent snort of disdain. “Well, they didn’t!” he protested. “Not one single word!”

  “Of course they didn’t,” she retorted. “After all, you might lose an election, ‘Mister Special Advisor,’ so of course they decided to do a workaround!”

  “But, Honey,” he said reasonably, “I can’t just sit around up here in the mountains while they’re trying to put an entire world back together. You know that.”

  “No. I don’t know that.” She glowered at him. “There are a lot of other things you could be doing, including getting your sorry butt well again before you go charging off after the next windmill on your list.”

  “Hosea says I’ll be fine, and it feels a lot better already, honest!”

  He shifted his left shoulder cautiously, and it really did hurt a lot less than it had a couple of weeks ago. Which wasn’t to say it didn’t still hurt like a son-of-a-bitch if he moved it without thinking about it. On the other hand, for a joint which had been thoroughly shattered—as in “reduced to the consistency of fine gravel”—by a Shongair bullet, it was doing remarkably well. And once the rebuilding process was complete, it should be good as new. Really! Not that Sharon (and he himself, if he was going to be honest about it) hadn’t experienced the odd qualm about volunteering as the first test subject for the medical nanotech Doctor James Hosea MacMurdo and a dozen or so docs from the Duke University School of Medicine had reprogrammed to work on humans instead of Shongairi, Kreptu, Barthoni, or any of a dozen other alien species.

  The neural educators Mircea Basarab—otherwise known as Vlad Drakulya—had left in Governor Judson Howell’s care were capable of “teaching” almost anyone with incredible speed. It turned out they couldn’t teach quite everyone—about eleven percent of human brains didn’t seem to take to it—but that was still pretty damned good, and the computers aboard the fabrication ships Vlad had left behind contained pretty much the entire technical and scientific database of the Galactic Hegemony. So—theoretically—any human could learn anything in that database overnight. And MacMurdo, who’d happened to be one of the best physicians Howell had available, had been tapped to dig into the medic
al portion of that database and drag out anything that could possibly help in the face of the appalling wreckage the Shongair invasion had left in its wake.

  As it turned out, there were quite a few things in that medical portion that could help quite a lot … assuming the human physicians involved got their sums right when they reprogrammed it. The Galactic Hegemony’s practice of medicine was just a bit more advanced than Earth’s had been, including a body of knowledge literally tens of thousands of years deep which had been distilled down into techniques and custom-tailored nanotech that could be programmed to work with scores of different physiologies, as long as the people responsible for the programming knew what they were doing.

  That was where the “theoretical” bit about the neural educator learning process came into play. There was a difference between simply acquiring data and learning to use it as knowledge, and it wasn’t too surprising Sharon had nursed a few reservations about using her one and only husband (not to mention the father of her three children) as a test subject. So far, though, it seemed to be working as advertised, and he hadn’t turned green or started growing antennae at all.

  Yet, at least.

  “It may—and I stress, may—be ‘fine’ eventually,” she said now. “It isn’t yet, though, and the kids need you right here being part of the stability in their lives.”

  He sighed and sat back in his own chair, looking across the table at her in the cheerful, sunny kitchen of the cabin where they and their family had ridden out Apocalypse and, beyond all expectation, survived it. And he knew she had a point. On the other hand, so did Howell.

  “Honey, you’re right,” he said quietly and watched her eyes widen at his admission. “But there are millions—probably billions—of other kids out there in the holy, howling hell of a mess the frigging Puppies left in their wake, and they need somebody to pull them out of it. I can’t be out with the contact teams like Longbow or Pieter or even Rob and Sam. Not with this.” He tapped the sling supporting his left arm with his functional hand. “And nobody’s asking me to be out there, either. But we’ve got to build something better on the ruins, and we’ve got to build it fast. And Howell needs all the help he can get doing that.”