Out of the Dark

by David Weber

  He’d wrapped his arms around her, holding her close, feeling her nestle under his chin and press against him almost as if she wanted to crawl inside his skin with him and become one being. And he’d discovered that he had to remind those arms of his that her ribs were breakable.

  The weather had already been turning bad, but one good thing about fanatic deer hunters—they had the foul weather gear to stay at least moderately comfortable even in a downpour. And, frankly, Dvorak had wished the afternoon and evening would be ripped by tornadoes and pumpkin-sized hail, battered by lightning and blizzards—hell, invaded by frigging clouds of giant locusts! Anything to keep any rapid-response Shongair shuttles thoroughly grounded.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. He’d lost his Google weather bug along with the rest of the Internet, yet he hadn’t really needed the Internet or the now defunct National Weather Service to tell him the day was going to be thoroughly miserable but nowhere near as miserable as he wished it would.

  Just have to make do as best we can with what we get, he’d told himself, relaxing his embrace at last and standing back from his wife, cupping her cheeks in his hands, tilting her head back so he could gaze down into her eyes and drink up every square inch of that beloved face.

  She’d been making preparations of her own—preparations both of them hoped fervently would never be needed—and her weapon of choice lay on the kitchen table: a PSN90, the civilian semiauto version of the fully automatic P90. Developed by FN Herstal of Belgium around its proprietary 5.7-millimeter cartridge, the bullpup-configured weapon really defied traditional definitions. The manufacturer had referred to it, at least initially, as a submachine gun, intended to provide serious emergency firepower for vehicle crews and other military personnel who weren’t normally supposed to need conventional rifles. Eventually, it had come to be referred to as a “personal defense weapon,” which made a certain degree of sense given its designed function. Yet the majority of militaries which used it actually employed it as an assault rifle, instead, and although the PSN90 had been limited to a civilian-legal thirty-round magazine, it could also use the fifty-round magazine of the military and law enforcement version of the weapon.

  There were lots of things to like about the weapon, in Dvorak’s opinion, although he generally preferred his guns a little bigger, more comfortably suited to his large frame, and he didn’t much care for the ejection port’s location. Sure, putting it on the bottom simplified the design of a truly ambidextrous weapon, but he didn’t like lying in his own spent brass firing from a prone position. He had some doubts about the round’s stopping power, too, although it certainly had excellent penetration! And he had to admit Sharon was deadly accurate with it. In fact, she’d always been a good shot—the first real gift he’d bought her, when they’d both been in college (she at Furman, he at Clemson, which had offered altogether too many opportunities for mutual verbal sniping) had been a Taurus PT-92 automatic. He’d given it to her as a Valentine’s Day present, which hadn’t really been as weird as it sounded. (All right, some weird. He’d give it that much. But not as weird as some people might have argued. He’d given guns to quite a few women over the years, on the basis that if Colonel Colt had made all men equal, he could damned well make women equal, too.) Nonetheless, there’d been some truth to Sharon’s boast that he’d bought it for her because he’d be damned if he’d let her go on outshooting him with his own handguns after he’d taught her how to shoot in the first place!

  Despite all that, the real reason she’d wanted a P90 was because she’d been a devotee of the series Stargate. She had the entire series—all three iterations, although she still liked the original best—on DVD, and she’d thought the fearless team of adventurers’ P90s had been “so cute.” Dvorak had winced a lot whenever she’d said that. Then she’d discovered that not only was a civilian version of the P90 available, but so was the FN Five-seveN pistol, firing the same round from a twenty-round magazine, and she’d just had to have one of both. Nor had it done Dvorak any good at all to point out that the pistol’s name was obviously an example of cutesy marketing gone berserk, which had no place in the serious world of firearms. Especially not when she’d been prepared to smile sweetly and point out that even though the PSN90 was a bit pricey, it cost a lot less than certain firearms from a company named “Barrett” she could have mentioned. If, of course, she’d been the sort to bring up past conspicuous expenditures. And, of course, her brother (who’d still been in law enforcement at the time and had bought himself an all-up P90 of his own just because he’d thought it would be cool to play with) had been only too willing to share his perfectly legal (or, at least, legally purchased) fifty-round mags with her.

  At that moment, however, as he’d held her in his arms and looked over her head at the weapon on their kitchen table, he’d felt absolutely no desire to tease her about her “cute little gun” the way he usually did.

  He’d experimented with the captured Shongair weapons and body armor, although he’d discovered that weapons designed around the aliens’ six-fingered hands and proportionately longer, double-jointed arms were very poorly proportioned for human use. The iron sights were a pain, too, and he’d come to the conclusion that there had to be some fairly significant differences between human and Shongair eyes. Nonetheless, he’d been able to test them from his Ransom Rest on the outdoor range below the cabin, and he was confident about the overall accuracy of his evaluation.

  Bullet diameters didn’t match perfectly with any human measurement system, which had hardly surprised him. His calipers made it about 7.54 millimeters for the assault rifle, though, with a bullet weight of approximately a hundred and thirty grains, and his chronograph indicated an average muzzle velocity of about two thousand feet per second. That worked out to a muzzle energy of a shade over eleven hundred foot-pounds, which was within about two hundred foot-pounds of the smaller (but also much faster) 5.56 NATO from the M16A4. On the other hand, it was less than half the standard 7.62 NATO’s 2,470 foot-pounds, far less the 2,700 foot-pounds of the heavier 168-grain round launched from Rob Wilson’s M1A. Of course, it didn’t even compare to the 11,000-plus foot-pounds of his own Barrett’s mammoth 647-grain bullets (or the even heavier 660-grain bullet for the same weapon), but that was a specialist’s weapon, not to mention a heavy son-of-a-bitch. Definitely not the kind of gun someone wanted to schlep around in the field on any kind of regular basis.

  That information had been fascinating to the gun nut in him, but the discovery that Shongair body armor was even more inferior to its human counterparts than he’d thought was of far more practical value.

  Made of some sort of advanced composite, it was lightweight, well articulated, and undoubtedly more comfortable than most military-issue human body armor. Those were its good points.

  Its bad point—its really bad point, actually—was that while it would stop medium-caliber pistol fire with a fair degree of reliability at ranges over twenty-five yards or so, virtually every rifle round he’d tested against it blew straight through. Sharon’s P90 certainly did, even firing civilian-legal loads. And the higher velocity steel penetrators of the SS190 law enforcement loads Rob Wilson had left lying carelessly about penetrated both front and back plates at ranges out to two hundred yards, almost three times the weapon’s official effective range.

  Which might turn out to be of vital importance if things went as badly that evening as they had the potential to go.

  “I hate this,” he’d said softly. “Especially leaving you and the kids behind without me. And I know it scares them whenever I’m gone.”

  “Of course it does,” she’d said, reaching up and touching the side of his face. “They’re smart kids, despite their father’s genetic contribution. But Nimue’s about ready to drop those pups of hers, which should help distract them at least a little this time.”

  “Good.” He’d smiled down at her, but then his smile had faded and he’d shaken his head. “Good,” he’d repeated more softly. “
But if something goes wrong, I ought to be here, taking care of them—and you—not gallivanting around off in the rain somewhere!”

  “Nobody’s ever managed to be in two places at once,” she’d replied. “And you told Sam and Dennis you’d be there, not here. Alec and Ronnie and Jessica and I will be waiting for you—with the kids—when you get back. For that matter,” she’d managed a smile, “I’ll even have hot soup for you. I’m sure Ronnie and Jessica can manage that if I stay out of their way in the kitchen.”

  “You’re sure about this?” he’d asked quietly, looking deep into her eyes once again. “I already found out it’s not like shooting deer. It’s not as bad as I’d always thought it might be, maybe because of everything I know they’ve already done, and maybe because I still don’t really think of them as ‘people.’ But it was bad enough. Are you ready for that if it comes down to it?”

  “If those long-eared freaks ever get this close, my kids—our kids—are going to be hiding inside that cave, scared out of their minds,” she’d said, looking back unflinchingly. “Those kids are our lives, Dave. They’re our future. Hell,” Sharon Dvorak, unlike her brother, almost never swore, but she did this time, and her eyes gleamed with unshed tears, “they’re our hearts and souls, and you damned well know it! And if anything happens to you, I’ll see you in their faces, hear the echo of you in their voices. Nothing is going to take that away from me. Nothing on God’s green earth—and I don’t care how it got here!—is getting past me to hurt those kids! Don’t you worry about what I’m ready for, David Dvorak. Not when our kids are involved!”

  And so, now, he sat in the rain with his brother-in-law, waiting. Hoping they wouldn’t be needed. Praying that if they were, nothing they or anyone else did would lead the Shongairi to that cabin and the cave beyond it.

  “Backstop, Front Door,” a voice said suddenly from the handheld radio Wilson carried. “Nanny’s here.”

  “Front Door, Backstop copies,” Wilson replied softly into the radio, then looked across at Dvorak. “And about damned time, too!” he muttered. “They’re two frigging hours late as it is!”

  Dvorak nodded in heartfelt agreement and relief, although using radios made him acutely unhappy. Still, they had to be able to communicate somehow, and the handheld, encrypyted units the North Carolina SBI had somehow misplaced had an effective range of less than ten miles even under optimum conditions, which these weren’t. That should make them hard for any direction finders to pick up, especially in these mountains and with everyone limiting himself to the absolutely shortest transmissions possible. And if Dennis Vardry’s contacts were right, the Shongairi weren’t very good at hunting for them, anyway.

  Of course, if Dennis is frigging wrong. . . .

  Dvorak shoved that thought aside, as well. Besides, Dennis probably wasn’t wrong. Over the last month or so, a lot of information about the Shongairi had started filtering down through the network of law enforcement personnel still managing to maintain something like order throughout the state. And so far almost everything they’d been able to test had checked out as accurate.

  It was pretty obvious North Carolina was immensely better off than most of the country. Governor Howell could take a lot of the credit for that, as could people like Dennis Vardry and the sheriff’s deputies and the state highway troopers who’d stayed put and fought the good fight. All the same, and much though it irked Dvorak to admit it, their success probably owed at least as much to the fact that the Shongairi had established that base of theirs near Greensboro, too. The aliens had made the state one of their occupation zones, and they’d concentrated enough manpower—and enough of their damned shuttles—to be pretty confident no one was going to argue with them very strongly.

  There were undoubtedly those who were going to accuse Howell of selling out to the enemy. Dave Dvorak wasn’t one of them, though, since he didn’t see where Howell had had any particular choice when the Shongair base commander—Teraik, or whatever his name was—gave him his options: “submit” and cooperate, or see his capital and every other town and city in North Carolina go the same way as Charlotte.

  Nope, Dvorak thought now, not a lot of wiggle room in that.

  Apparently, however, the Shongairi were better at making people agree to cooperate than they were at enforcing actual obedience, and there was a lot of passive resistance going on. Not just spontaneously, either. Superiors—from the governor’s own office on down, as far as Dvorak could tell—were actually directing subordinates to creatively “assist” their Shongair “guests” into . . . less than fully successful outcomes. No one was stupid enough to put anything into writing (e-mail didn’t come into it, since the Shongairi had flatly refused to allow the Internet back up even among humans who’d “submitted”), but it didn’t seem to have occurred to the Shongairi that bugging “their” humans’ communications might be a good idea. In fact, the aliens seemed blissfully unaware of the human tendency to do end-runs around superiors they didn’t much care for.

  When Dvorak was a boy, his father had introduced him to an English translation of the Czech author Jaroslav Hašsek’s illustrated novel The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War. Švejk had been a complete idiot . . . or he’d been highly skilled at sabotaging his superior officers and the war effort in general by doing exactly what he’d been ordered to do rather than what they’d intended him to do. Dvorak had always liked that book. And from what he’d been able to pick up from Dennis and Mitchell, the entire state of North Carolina seemed to have become suddenly filled with Czech expatriates, all resolutely following the exact letter of their orders and not one of them able to find his own posterior with both hands and a flashlight if it involved doing something he thought was a Bad Idea.

  The Shongairi didn’t appear to have caught on yet, either. It was possible they realized what was going on and simply hadn’t chosen to do anything about it, but Dvorak was damned if he could come up with any logical explanation for why they might have done something like that. Ridiculous as it might be on the face of it, it actually seemed more likely to him that they really and truly hadn’t realized the humans whose world they’d invaded would promise faithfully to do one thing and then do something entirely different, all the while swearing it was what they thought they’d been supposed to do all along.

  They also seemed unaware that huge quantities of information about their operational patterns, their plans, and their capabilities were hemorrhaging from their “submissive” human minions to the “wild humans” who had no intention of submitting. It didn’t seem to have occurred to them, for example, that they couldn’t coordinate with human agencies without at least partially briefing in the human agencies involved . . . and that some of the humans working for those agencies would then immediately make it their business to pass those briefings on to others.

  Despite the ongoing passive (and not so passive) resistance, it had all made for an enormous easing of tension, of course, and Dvorak wasn’t going to pretend he wasn’t grateful. Governor Howell’s government had somehow managed to keep essential services at least minimally online throughout most of the state and provided an interface between the invaders and the humans, as well. Quite aside from any successes in sabotaging Shongair activities, it was in a position to at least mitigate the worst conditions and to represent humans’ desires and needs to the aliens. In fact, it had occurred to Dvorak that if the Shongairi had only been smart enough—or, at least, understood humans well enough—to have offered the same sort of arrangement to the world in general when they first arrived, things might have been very different.

  Starting right out by killing a couple of billion people before you even announce your presence, though, he reflected now. I don’t know, but somehow I think that’s likely to get you off on the wrong foot with their surviving brothers, sisters, cousins, fathers, mothers, and aunts and uncles.

  The thought flickered below the surface of his mind as he checked his weapon. He’d gone ahead an
d brought the Barrett, even though in this miserable weather any kind of really long-range shooting was out of the question. He simply couldn’t see far enough through such heavy rain to make any really long shots. On the other hand, the rifle still offered all of its stopping power, and he’d had ample proof it was as capable of knocking out Shongair vehicles—and recon drones—as it was of knocking out human vehicles.

  Which hopefully, he thought in a distinctly prayerful tone, isn’t going to matter one way or the other.

  “Jesus, I hate this frigging weather,” Wilson muttered, and Dvorak snorted.

  “Don’t much like it myself,” he acknowledged. “On the other hand, if Dennis and Sam are right, it’s going to do a lot to knock back their thermal detectors. And I don’t think their optical and low-light equipment is even as good as ours is.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Wilson grumbled. “Yada, yada, yada.” He turned his head and grimaced at his brother-in-law. “Sorry,” he said a bit contritely. “I know you really get into that kind of stuff. And I guess it’s good to know. But I keep thinking about kids whistling in graveyards, know what I mean?”

  “Damn straight I do,” Dvorak muttered back. “And you’re right. I sure as hell do want to believe that’s the way it is. But it’s not just wishful thinking, you know.”

  Wilson’s eyes were back on the junction where Hannah Ford Road ran into US-64, but he nodded. Somehow, without their ever intending to do anything of the sort, the two of them had become a kind of clearinghouse for information. No more than thirty or forty people outside their immediate family knew about the cabin (or its exact location, anyway), but those thirty or forty people knew an amazing number of other people who were engaged in things of which the Shongairi no doubt would have disapproved. And the other people they knew, knew still other people, who knew still other people. Their web of direct and indirect contacts spread throughout the western portions of both Carolinas and well into eastern Tennessee, now, and quite a few people had figured out that if they dropped a word to the Dvoraks and Wilsons about a problem or a question, somehow that word would eventually reach the person they needed it to reach and answers would come back to them the same way.