Out of the Dark

by David Weber

  “You’ve got a point,” Dvorak agreed. “On the other hand, my impression’s been that these critters don’t have anything like a solid handle on human psychology. They keep talking about ‘submitting’ like it’s the only reasonable thing for us to do. And”—he shook his head—“from a purely logical perspective, they’re probably right. They’ve sure as hell proved they can hammer the shit out of any target they want to once they find it! And”—he shook his head again, his expression going grimmer—“they’ve probably already killed a third or so of the human race. That doesn’t even count the number of people who haven’t starved yet but will, either. Or the number of people who’re going to get killed by other humans trying to protect their own food supplies and housing.”

  There was a moment of silence as they looked down at their breakfast plates. They’d established a tight series of meal plans as one of their very first priorities, stretching food carefully. Yet they also knew they had a year’s worth of canned and preserved supplies, plus the garden they’d put in right after arriving and a huge supply of home-canning equipment. That garden (planted with heritage seeds, despite the higher yield and greater disease resistance of genetically modified seeds) had been carefully located to conceal the traffic marks they hadn’t been able to avoid leaving behind when they’d moved all of their more recent supplies—and firearms—into the cave. Disguising the area where they’d flattened the mountain grasses and pounded down the dead leaves had seemed like a good idea at the time, and putting in the garden had given them the perfect “obvious reason” to till up all that evidence.

  And now that the exodus from America’s cities had been given time to sweep out over the countryside, it seemed like a really good idea.

  For the first time in modern history, starvation was a serious threat—indeed, a grim certainty—for large percentages of the American population. Flight from the remaining urban centers had redoubled when the Shongairi started simply destroying towns and cities—like Charlotte—where their ground forces met serious resistance. Chicago had probably been the real motivator, though, Dvorak thought grimly. Charlotte had been bad enough, but people outside the Carolinas hadn’t really thought of Charlotte as a “big” city. Chicago, though . . . that had been seen as a major hit, and Fleet Commander Thikair’s message—posted, of course, on the Internet immediately after Chicago’s destruction—that other cities would receive the same treatment if his troops were fired on in them had only accelerated the process.

  Which was leading inevitably to the disintegration of the country’s social and technical infrastructures. Which, in turn, might well be exactly what the Shongairi had wanted.

  Frankly, Dvorak was astonished the transportation system and power grid had remained operational—to some extent, at least—as long as they had. It helped a lot, locally anyway, that North and South Carolina had both been home to numerous nuclear power plants. At least interruptions in fuel deliveries hadn’t automatically shut them down. Of course, the Shongairi had taken out both of the McGwire reactors when they destroyed Charlotte, and the Summer plant in South Carolina had shut down when Columbia was destroyed. As far as Dvorak could make out from the fragmentary reports which had come over the Internet, that reactor hadn’t actually been destroyed when the state capital was, but it was still off-line. Possibly because of shock damage. More probably because the people who would have been operating it were either dead or fled after the Columbia strike.

  How much longer any of those generating stations were going to stay up was problematical, of course. Local government was doing its best to protect them, along with other critical services, but throughout much of the country those authorities were being steadily overwhelmed by the influx of desperate, hungry refugees. Dvorak knew damned well that he would have done anything it took to keep his kids fed. He couldn’t blame other parents for feeling exactly the same way, and that didn’t even consider what people would do to keep their own bellies filled. So he wasn’t surprised “looting” and other crimes of violence—and reactive vigilantism—had become commonplace. By the same token, he wasn’t about to let anyone take away what he and his family had built for themselves against this very day.

  He wasn’t too concerned about being inundated by refugees. Although they were less than five miles west of NC-281, that was scarcely a major interstate, and the intervening distance was all trees and mountains. US-64, which looped as near as three and a half miles to the south, was both closer and more likely to see heavy refugee traffic, but the terrain between them and the highway was just as bad—or worse—and no side roads split off from it in their direction. There were a few homes scattered through the area, but it wasn’t farm country, and it wasn’t going to look very appealing to city folks who didn’t have a clue about how to survive in the woods. Anybody who got far enough out into the boonies to actually spot the point at which their “driveway” left Cold Mountain Road (and it was pretty damned unlikely any refugees would get that far) might notice there’d been a fair amount of traffic up it. It was unlikely, though, since they’d spent several hours spreading dead leaves and pine needles—collected from much higher up the mountain—over the first couple of hundred yards of the roadbed. Alec had waxed especially artistic and dragged down a couple of dead hemlocks and arranged them in what Dvorak had to admit was a realistic-looking snag of naturally fallen deadwood across the roadbed. All in all, that driveway looked as if no one had driven up it in years, so as long as no one happened along when they were actually using it. . . .

  What he was considerably more concerned about was the possibility that one of those local government entities, trying desperately to feed its own citizens—and whatever refugees had been dumped upon it—might decide to take it upon itself to collect supplies from “hoarders” for redistribution. Which was one reason the garden was where it was. If someone with official—or even quasi-official—status turned up, they’d find a substantial but not enormous store of canned and preserved foods in the cabin pantry, and they’d find a garden large enough to provide a fairly comfortable cushion for a family of ten. What they wouldn’t find, and what none of his family was going to point out to them, was what was tucked away in the cave.

  “Like I say,” he continued out loud, “they really don’t seem to understand the way humans tick. Of course the only reasonable thing to do is give up, but we aren’t always all that reasonable a bunch. And while I’m sure there’s a heap of people who’re prepared to do just that anyway—who’d love to surrender—if the Shongairi would only feed them and their kids, they aren’t offering to do that, are they?” He shook his head. “Seems like the only thing they understand is the stick. Apparently nobody’s told them that if you want humans to cooperate, you’ve got to use a carrot, too. And they don’t seem to understand that pushing people into a corner where they figure they haven’t got anything left to lose is only going to make them even more likely to fight back. Or, for that matter, just how bloody-minded, ornery, and stubborn humans can be when you really piss them off by doing little things like, oh, blowing up the occasional city with a couple of million people living in it.”

  “Are they just too stupid to figure that out?” Sharon Dvorak wondered out loud. “Or is it something about the way they think? Are they being blinded by, I don’t know . . . by their own preconceptions or assumptions, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” her husband admitted. “On the one hand, God knows there’ve been plenty of humans who did really stupid things even without the excuse of being an entirely separate species, or even a separate country or culture. Heck, for that matter, we’ve seen U.S. politicians do that often enough! I don’t suppose you want me to catalog them for you?”

  He grinned as he asked the question, and the others around the table laughed when Sharon shook her head vigorously. Dave Dvorak had originally intended to teach college-level history, and his love for the subject had never abated. Asking him anything that could lead to historical examples was a risky
proposition.

  “All right, be that way,” he said. “The point stands, though. And, on the other hand, I could also—if I were permitted to—give you an even longer list of historical examples of human beings screwing up because they totally misread a different human culture. That stupid ‘Everyone must be just like me’ blindness has bitten people on the butt more times than I could count. I’d think any bunch of successful interstellar conquerors would have to learn to take that into consideration, but that could very well be my own cultural and ‘humanocentric’ biases talking.” He shrugged. “Whether it’s because they’re stupid or some other reason, though, the outcome’s going to be pretty much the same. Except, of course, that if it’s because of ‘some other reason’ rather than inherent stupidity, they may eventually figure out which way is up after all.”

  “Well, they’re taking their own fucking time about it,” Wilson growled.

  “Rob,” his sister said in a level, ominous tone, cutting her eyes towards the four children sitting around the other breakfast table a few feet away. He looked at her, opened his mouth, noted the subtle but pronounced hardening of her blue eyes, thought about it for a moment, then visibly changed his mind about what he’d been about to say.

  “Sorry,” he said instead, then gave himself a little shake. “What I was going to say,” he continued, “was that they’re taking their . . . sweet time about figuring out how humans work. They should’ve been feeding us what they wanted us to see over the net. And they should’ve been encouraging us to use it to talk with each other as a way to figure out what we’re up to.”

  “You’re right.” Dvorak nodded. “But nobody who was going to be able to put anything effective together in the first place was very likely to talk about it openly on the net, anyway.”

  “Especially after what happened to Robinson,” Sharon said sadly.

  “We still don’t know that they got him when they took out Dahlgren,” Dvorak replied.

  His tone, however, said clearly that he doubted the admiral who’d organized the destruction of the Shongair shuttles had gotten out before his command post was destroyed from orbit. Obviously the aliens had figured out how to find that, at any rate. And while the people sitting around Dvorak’s table knew the F-22s which had carried out the attack had made it back to base, that was all they knew about them. On the other hand, according to Robinson’s postings, those pilots had been operating from improvised facilities at a dispersed location. Even assuming the aliens hadn’t been able to track them back to base and take them out on the ground, the aircrew had to realize they couldn’t continue to mount successful sorties without Robinson’s target guidance and someone to resupply them with ammunition. So the only sane thing for them to have done would have been to abandon their aircraft, get the hell out of Dodge, and maybe see if they couldn’t find some other way to make the Shongairi miserable.

  I sure as hell hope that’s what they did, anyway. We need people like that. And anybody with the sheer balls to do what they did deserves a hell of a lot better than getting swatted out of the air while they grope around for targets without ground control. And he for damn sure deserves better than just going up in a fireball along with his air base when he can’t even fight back!

  Which brought him to another consideration, and he glanced across the table at his brother-in-law, wondering if Wilson was thinking the same thing he was. When he looked back at his wife, he knew Sharon was.

  “Kids,” he said, turning his head to address the youngsters over his shoulder, “why don’t you guys go ahead and get the tomatoes and squash weeded while it’s still cool and shady? If you can get done with your chores before lunch, your moms will take you over to the dam this afternoon and let you swim for an hour or so. Okay?”

  Youthful faces turned to him with predictable “why do you expect such slave labor out of us” expressions, but they were all good kids. They always had been. And even if they didn’t understand everything that was going on, they understood enough to be growing up heartbreakingly quickly. In fact, there weren’t even token protests. He was a bit surprised by that, until they’d disappeared out the door and Sharon snorted.

  “You do realize you just let them out of washing the morning’s dishes, don’t you, Einstein?”

  “Oops.” He grinned at her, then shrugged. “Sorry about that.”

  “Not as sorry as you’re going to be,” she assured him. “Ronnie and I will wash, but guess who’s drying?”

  “Fair enough, I guess,” he acknowledged, standing and carrying his own plate towards the sink. “In fact, why don’t we go ahead and get started on that while we talk.”

  “What’s to talk about?” Sharon’s tone was considerably grimmer than it had been. “You two told Sam you’d meet him. There’s no way you can tell him you won’t be there at this late date.”

  “I know.” She’d carried her own plate across to the sink while she was talking, and he wrapped an arm around her and gave her an apologetic hug. “We wouldn’t have gotten involved if we didn’t think it was important, though, honey.”

  “Oh, yes, you would have,” she retorted. “You and Rob both.” She shook her head. “I know how it sticks in your craw to be hiding out up here in the hills instead of fighting back . . . even if you are smart enough to realize you can’t shoot down starships with rifles, however good your scope is! You’d be dancing like a little boy who needs to pee if Ronnie and I had told you you couldn’t go.”

  “Not Rob,” Ronnie disagreed, carrying two of the kids’ plates over to them. Sharon looked at her, and her sister-in-law shrugged. “He wouldn’t be dancing anywhere . . . because I’d have had to hit him over the head with a hammer to keep him from going!”

  “Probably true, in his case,” Dvorak allowed reflectively. “Once that Marine stuff gets into your DNA some of your mental circuitry just seems to shut down.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t the one who let him put that stuff in the bunker!” Wilson retorted. Dvorak gave him a very level look, and he shrugged. “Okay, so I would’ve let him. Only I didn’t have to, because you opened your mouth and agreed before I could. So there.”

  Which, Dvorak reflected, was true enough.

  He took his niece’s breakfast plate from Veronica and began scraping it into the compost bag, then paused as a cold, damp nose pressed against his leg and whuffled. He looked down and saw Nimue sitting neatly beside him, head cocked and eyes hopeful.

  “David Dvorak—!” Sharon said warningly, and he looked back up at her. “Don’t you dare give her table scraps,” his wife told him in an ominous tone. “It’s hard enough keeping the kids from sneaking her things without you getting started!”

  Dvorak looked back down at the big dog. Sharon was right that the rule had always been no scraps for the dogs, but it was also true that their supply of dried dog food wasn’t going to last forever, too. And Nimue and Merlin had obviously decided little things like alien invasions shouldn’t interfere with their love life. By Dvorak’s estimate, Nimue was a couple of weeks into her two-month gestation period, and her scrounging instincts seemed to have kicked up another notch or three.

  “She’s eating for five or six now, you know,” he said wheedlingly to his wife.

  “And doing just fine on dry food, as long as we’ve got it,” Sharon replied uncompromisingly, and he shrugged.

  “You’re right, of course, honey,” he said, turning back to the compost bag. He scraped carefully, and—

  “Oops!”

  Nimue pounced on the piece of biscuit and the half sausage Keelan had left behind almost before they hit the floor. Her tongue flashed, and the scraps disappeared in a single swipe.

  “David!” Sharon exploded.

  “It was an accident, honey,” he said, looking at her with guileless brown eyes. “Honest! You don’t think I would have done that on purpose, do you?”

  “Oh, no!” she agreed with awful irony. “Not any more than you and Rob would’ve let somebody stash all those guns and
things in your precious cave! You are just so lucky none of the kids were here to see you do that.”

  He chuckled and shook his head at her, then finished scraping the plate and stacked it in the sink with the others, and his memory replayed the conversation with “Big Sam” Mitchell.

  He still didn’t have all the details, but Mitchell’s military police unit had indeed been called up under the Homeland Security “training exercise.” Which meant it had been at Fort Jackson when the huge base was completely obliterated from orbit. Mitchell hadn’t been there at that deadly moment, however, although exactly how he’d come to be part of the detail moving two trucks loaded with military ordnance still wasn’t entirely clear. Apparently, however, Mitchell hadn’t been able to find anyone left in South Carolina after the initial attack with the authority to tell him what to do with his cargo, so he’d had to make up his mind on his own.

  Personally, Dvorak was a little surprised he hadn’t simply driven up to North Carolina, where the state government had taken a far less severe beating, and handed his trucks over to whatever was left of the North Carolina National Guard. He didn’t know how much of the North Carolina Guard was left, of course, since it, too, had been called up as part of the Homeland Security exercise, and the major bases in North Carolina—from Fort Bragg’s enormous reservation to Cherry Point—had been just as thoroughly destroyed. But Mitchell hadn’t been thinking that way. In fact, he’d already been thinking in terms of long-term guerrilla resistance, since he hadn’t seen any way the invasion itself could be defeated. What he wanted was to distribute his weapons and ammunition into separate, well-concealed caches where it would be available after the invasion.

  “If it’s good enough for the jihadies, it’s damned well good enough for me,” he’d said harshly. “And these bastards may’ve taken out the main bases, but there’s a lot more hardware lying around in depots and National Guard armories than they probably realize. Once they start pulling up inventories, though, they’re going to figure that out. So I wanna get this stuff—and anything else I can scrounge up—distributed out, first.”