Out of the Dark

by David Weber

  Shut up, the rest of his mind told that little corner.

  “Ready to move out, Top,” Meyers’ voice said behind him, and he looked over his shoulder.

  “All right,” he said out loud, trying hard to radiate a confidence he was far from feeling, and waved one arm in the general direction of Romania. “In that case, I guess we should be going.”

  Now if I only had some damned idea where we’re going.

  . XV .

  Platoon Commander Yirku stood in the open hatch of his command ground effect vehicle as his armored platoon sped down the long, broad roadway that stabbed straight through the mountains. The bridges which crossed the main roadbed at intervals, especially as the platoon approached what were (or had been) towns or cities, forced his column to squeeze in on itself, but overall Yirku was delighted. His tanks’ grav-cushions could care less what surface lay under them, but that didn’t protect their crews from seasickness if they had to move rapidly across rough ground, and this was his second “colony expedition.” When they first began briefing for the mission, he’d rather glumly anticipated operating across wilderness terrain which might be crossed here and there by “roads” which were little more than random animal tracks when they first began briefing for the mission. That, after all, had been his experience last time around, and his heart had sunk as he’d studied the initial survey reports and realized what kind of mountains his platoon was going to be dropped into. But that was before they’d actually hit dirt and he’d gotten his first experience of the local road net and realized how good it actually was.

  Yet despite his relief at avoiding harku-trails through soggy forests, Yirku admitted (very privately) that he found the humans’ infrastructure . . . unsettling. There was so much of it, especially in areas which had belonged to nations like this “United States.” And crude though its construction might appear—none of it used proper ceramacrete, for example, and the bridges he’d passed under probably wouldn’t last more than a local century or so without requiring replacement—most of it was well laid out. The fact that they’d managed to construct so much of it, so well suited to their current technology level’s requirements, was sobering, too.

  And then—his mood darkened—there were the other implications of this planet’s level of civilization. Having decent road networks was all very well, and he wasn’t going to pretend he wasn’t suitably grateful, but if the rumor mill was accurate, there was a downside to the locals’ technology. He wasn’t prepared to accept the more preposterous stories, yet he was confident they wouldn’t have been so persistent or arisen so quickly if there hadn’t been at least some truth to them. It seemed unlikely on the face of it, of course. If these creatures had managed to knock down even a single heavy-lift shuttle, they’d already inflicted more aircraft losses than any other indigenous species the Empire had engulfed! As for the ridiculous, panic-monger rumors that they’d brought down half a twelve of them—!

  His ears flattened in dismissal. Nonsense! Sheer hysteria, that was what it was. And he was letting himself be pushed into jumping at shadows even worrying about it. Oh, there were enough “humans” on this planet that at least some of them were probably going to fight back, at least initially, and they might land a few lucky blows in the process. But as soon as they figured out that they’d been utterly defeated, they’d see reason and submit decently. And when that happened—

  Platoon Commander Yirku’s thoughts broke off abruptly as he emerged from under the latest bridge and the fifteen-pound round from the M136/AT-4 light antiarmor weapon struck the side of his vehicle’s turret at a velocity of three hundred and sixty feet per second. Its High Penetration HEAT warhead produced a hypervelocity gas jet capable of penetrating up to six hundred millimeters of rolled homogenous steel armor, and it carved through the GEV’s light armor like an incandescent dagger.

  The resultant internal explosion disemboweled the tank effortlessly, killed every member of the crew, and launched the upper half of Yirku’s body in a graceful, flaming arc.

  Ten more rockets stabbed down into the embankment-enclosed cut of Interstate 81 virtually simultaneously, and eight of them found their targets, exploding like thunderbolts. Each of them killed another GEV, and the humans who’d launched them had deliberately concentrated on the front and back edges of the platoon’s neat road column. Despite their grav-cushions, the four survivors of Yirku’s platoon were temporarily trapped behind the blazing, exploding carcasses of their fellows. They were still there—perfect stationary targets—when the next quartet of rockets came sizzling in.

  The ambushers—a scratch-built pickup team of Tennessee National Guardsmen, all of them veterans of deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan—were on the move, filtering back into the trees, almost before the final Shongair tank had exploded.

  • • • • •

  Colonel Nicolae Basescu sat in the commander’s hatch of his T-72M1, his mind wrapped around a curiously empty, singing silence, and waited.

  The first prototype of his tank—the export model of the Russian T-72A—had been completed in 1970, seven years before Basescu’s own birth, and it had become sadly outclassed by more modern, more deadly designs. It was still superior to the Romanian Army’s home-built T-85s, based on the even more venerable T-55, but that wasn’t saying much compared to designs like the Russians’ T-80s and T-90s, the Americans’ M1A2, or the French Leclerc.

  And it’s certainly not saying much compared to aliens who can actually travel between the stars, Basescu thought.

  Unfortunately, it was all he had. Now if he only knew what he was supposed to be doing with the seven tanks of his scraped-up command.

  Stop that, he told himself sternly. You’re an officer of the Romanian Army. You know exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. And if that American Internet video is accurate, these creatures, these . . . Shongairi, aren’t really superhuman. We can kill them. Or, he corrected himself, at least the Americans can kill their aircraft. So. . . .

  He gazed through the opening a few minutes’ work with an ax had created. His tanks were as carefully concealed as he could manage inside the industrial buildings across the frontage road from the hundred-meter-wide Mures River. The two lanes of the E-81 highway crossed the river on a double-span cantilever bridge, flanked on the east by a rail bridge, two kilometers southwest of Alba Iulia, the capital of Alba jude. The city of eighty thousand—the city where Michael the Brave had achieved the first union of the three great provinces of Romania in 1599—was two-thirds empty, and Basescu didn’t like to think about what those fleeing civilians were going to do when they started running out of whatever supplies they’d managed to snatch up in their flight. But he didn’t blame them for running. Not when their city was barely two hundred and seventy kilometers northwest of where Bucharest had been three days ago.

  He wished he dared to use his radios, but the broadcasts from the alien commander suggested that any transmissions would be unwise in light of the invaders’ penetration of the airwaves. Fortunately at least the landlines were still up. He doubted they would be for much longer, but for now they sufficed for him to know about the alien column speeding up the highway towards him . . . and Alba Iulia.

  • • • • •

  Company Commander Barmit punched up his navigation systems, but they were being cantankerous again, and he muttered a quiet yet heartfelt curse as he jabbed at the control panel a second time.

  As far as he was concerned, the town ahead of him was scarcely large enough to merit the attention of two entire companies of infantry, even if Ground Base Commander Shairez’s prebombardment analysis had identified it as some sort of administrative subcenter. Its proximity to what had been a national capital suggested to Barmit’s superiors that it had probably been sufficiently important to prove useful as a headquarters for the local occupation forces. Personally, Barmit suspected the reverse was more likely true. An administrative center this close to something the size of that other city—“Bucharest,” or somet
hing equally outlandish—was more likely to be lost in the capital’s shadow than functioning as any sort of important secondary brain.

  Too bad Ground Force Commander Thairys didn’t ask for my opinion, he thought dryly, still jabbing at the recalcitrant display.

  The imagery finally came up and stabilized, and his ears flicked in a grimace as it confirmed his memory. He keyed his com.

  “All right,” he said. “We’re coming up on another river, and our objective’s just beyond that. The column will cross the bridge in standard road formation, but let’s not take chances.”

  He started to mention the rumors about what had happened to the 9th Transport Group. His littermate Barmiat was a Navy maintenance tech aboard Star of Empire, and according to his brief e-mail, the 9th had lost at least a quarter of its shuttles to the locals’ aircraft. That level of losses struck Barmit as unlikely, to say the least, but Barmiat was usually a levelheaded sort, which suggested there might be at least something behind the story this time. On the other hand, Battalion Commander Rathia had already cautioned him against spreading “alarmist rumors.”

  “Remember that we haven’t actually seen these creatures’ weapons,” he contented himself with, instead. “Red Section, you spread left. White Section, we’ll spread right.”

  • • • • •

  Colonel basescu twitched upright as the alien vehicles came into sight. He focused his binoculars, snapping the approaching vehicles into much sharper clarity, and a part of him was almost disappointed by how unremarkable they appeared. How . . . mundane.

  Most of them were some sort of wheeled transport vehicles, with a boxy sort of look that made him think of armored personnel carriers. There were around thirty of those, and it was obvious they were being escorted by five other vehicles.

  He shifted his attention to those escorts and stiffened as he realized just how unmundane they were. They sped along, low-slung and dark, hovering perhaps a meter or two above the ground, and some sort of long, slender gun barrels projected from their squared-off, slab-sided turrets. Either they had enormous faith in the stopping ability of their armor, or else their designers hadn’t been very worried about kinetic-impact weapons, he thought.

  The approaching formation slowed as the things which were probably APCs began forming into a column of twos under the watchful eye of the things which were probably tanks, and he lowered the binoculars and picked up the handset for the field telephone he’d had strung between the tanks once they’d been maneuvered into their hides.

  “Mihai,” he told his second section commander, “we’ll take the tanks. Radu, I want you and Matthius to concentrate on the transports. Don’t fire until Mihai and I do—then try to jam them up on the bridge.”

  • • • • •

  Barmit felt his ears relaxing in satisfaction as the wheeled vehicles settled into a narrower road column in the approaches to the bridge and his GEVs headed across the river, watching its flanks. The sharp drop from the roadbed to the surface of the water provided the usual “stomach-left-behind” sensation, but once they were actually out over the water, their motion became glassy-smooth. He rotated his turret to the left, keeping an eye on the bridge as he led White Section’s other two GEVs between the small islands in the center of the river, idling along to keep pace with the transports.

  • • • • •

  They may have magic tanks, but they don’t have very good doctrine, do they? a corner of Basescu’s brain reflected. They hadn’t so much as bothered to send any scouts across, or even to leave one of their tanks on the far bank in an overwatch position. Not that he intended to complain.

  The tank turret slewed slowly to the right as his gunner tracked his assigned target, but Basescu was watching the wheeled vehicles. The entire bridge was barely a hundred and fifty meters long, and he wanted all of them actually onto it if he could arrange it.

  • • • • •

  Company Commander Barmit Sighed as his GEV approached the far bank. Climbing up out of the riverbed again was going to be rather less pleasant, and he slowed, deliberately prolonging the smoothness as he watched the transports heading across the bridge.

  Kind of the “humans” to build us all these nice highways, he reflected, thinking about this region’s heavily forested mountains. It would be a real pain to—

  • • • • •

  “Fire!” Nicolae Basescu barked, and Company Commander Barmit’s ruminations were terminated abruptly by the arrival of a nineteen-kilogram 3BK29 HEAT round capable of penetrating three hundred millimeters of armor at a range of two kilometers.

  • • • • •

  Basescu felt A stab of exhilaration as the tank bucked, the outer wall of its concealing building disappeared in the fierce muzzle blast of its 2A46 120-millimeter main gun, and his target exploded. Three of the other four escort tanks were first-round kills, as well. They crashed into the river in eruptions of orange fire, white spray, and smoke, and the stub of the semicombustible cartridge case ejected from the gun. The automatic loader’s carousel picked up the next round, feeding the separate projectile and cartridge into the breech, and his carefully briefed commanders were engaging targets without any additional orders from him.

  The surviving alien tank swerved crazily sideways, turret swiveling madly, and then Basescu winced as it fired.

  He didn’t know what it was armed with, but it wasn’t like any cannon he’d ever seen. A bar of solid light spat from the end of its “gun,” and the building concealing his number three tank exploded as the T-72’s fuel and ammunition detonated thunderously. But even as the alien tank fired, two more 120-millimeter rounds slammed into it almost simultaneously.

  It died as spectacularly as its fellows had, and Radu and Matthias hadn’t been sitting on their hands. They’d done exactly what he wanted, nailing both the leading and rearmost of the wheeled transports only after they were well out onto the bridge. The others were trapped there, sitting ducks, unable to maneuver, and his surviving tanks walked their fire steadily along their column.

  At least some of the aliens managed to bail out of their vehicles, but it was less than three hundred meters to the far side of the river, and the coaxial 7.62-millimeter machine guns and the heavier 12.7-millimeter cupola-mounted weapons at the tank commanders’ stations were waiting for them. At such short range, it was a massacre.

  • • • • •

  “Cease fire!” Basescu barked. “Fall back!”

  His crews responded almost instantly, and the tanks’ powerful V-12 engines snorted black smoke as the T-72s backed out of their hiding places and sped down the highway at sixty kilometers per hour. What the aliens had already accomplished with their “kinetic weapons” suggested that staying in one place would be a very bad idea, and Basescu had picked out his next fighting position before he ever settled into this one. It would take them barely fifteen minutes to reach it, and only another fifteen to twenty minutes to maneuver the tanks back into hiding.

  • • • • •

  Precisely seventeen minutes later, incandescent streaks of light came sizzling out of the cloudless heavens to eliminate every one of Nicolae Basescu’s tanks—and half the city of Alba Iulia—in a blast of fury that shook the Carpathian Mountains.

  • • • • •

  Company Commander Kirtha’s column of transports rumbled along steadily. The local weather had obviously been dry, and the clouds of dust his column had thrown up when they’d had to cut across country had made him grateful his GEV command vehicle was sealed against it. Now if only he’d been assigned to one of the major bases on the continent called “America.” Or at least the western fringes of this one!

  His ears flicked in derisive amusement at his own thoughts. This world had the best road net Kirtha had ever seen. Even here, it was incomparably better than anything he’d ever campaigned across before, so it was pretty silly of him to be bitching—even if only to himself—because someone else had gotten an even better road net than he
had!

  Could be game trails through triple-canopy jungle, like Rishu, he reminded himself. Or what about those miserable, endless swamps in southern Bahshi?

  Well, that was probably true. But he supposed it was simply Shongair nature to always want something a little better than one had.

  The dusty, broken pavement of the stretch of roadbed his column was currently approaching was a case in point, he decided glumly. Obviously, the “humans” had been engaged in construction or repair work—it was scarcely the first time he’d seen that since landing!—and a fresh, smothering fog of dust was already rising from the wheeled vehicles’ passage.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if they were all grav-cushion, he told himself, but GEVs were expensive, and the counter-grav generators used up precious internal volume not even troop carriers, much less freight-haulers, could afford to give away. Imperial wheeled vehicles had excellent off-road capability with their all-wheel drive and variable tire pressures, of course, so they could almost always get through, whatever the terrain. And in this instance, even a miserable road like this stretch allowed them to move much more efficiently than on the vast majority of planets the Empire had occupied.

  And at least we’re out in the middle of nice, flat ground as far as the eye can see, Kirtha reminded himself.

  He didn’t like the rumors about what had happened to some of the first-wave landing shuttles. Of course, that was the concern of the shuttle pukes, not the ground forces, but still. . . . And the even more fragmentary rumors about ambushes on isolated detachments were even more . . . bothersome. That wasn’t supposed to happen, especially from someone as effortlessly and utterly defeated as these creatures had been. And even if it did happen, it wasn’t supposed to be effective—not against armored vehicles and crack Imperial infantry! And the ones responsible for it were supposed to be destroyed.