Out of the Dark

by David Weber

  “I imagine you’re wondering what brings our two visitors up to see you,” Mitchell continued, and Dvorak nodded.

  “The question had crossed my mind,” he admitted.

  “Well, fact is, these two are the leaders of the guerrillas Governor Howell’s been feeding info to for a while now. In fact, you may not realize it, but you’ve already met Major Torino, in a manner of speaking.”

  “I have?” Dvorak thought for a moment, then shook his head. “If I have, I don’t remember it.”

  “I guess I should’ve said you’ve seen him on TV,” Mitchell replied, and his voice was much more sober than it had been. “Major Torino was leading the fighters Admiral Robinson sicced on those puppy shuttles on Day One.”

  Dvorak’s eyes widened, then narrowed in quick speculation as they darted back over to Torino’s face. What he was most conscious of, for a moment, was how little like a figure out of legend Torino actually looked. But then he recognized something else—the weary sorrow and loss behind the steely determination in those green eyes.

  “It’s an honor,” he heard himself say quietly, and Torino shrugged. It was an uncomfortable gesture.

  “We couldn’t have done it without Robinson,” he replied after a moment. “In fact, I kind of doubt people would have fought back as hard as they have anywhere without him.”

  “I think you’re right,” Dvorak agreed. “Do you know if he’s still alive?”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s not,” the ex–fighter pilot said heavily. “I know they took out Dahlgren, and we’ve actually managed to establish a halfway decent communications net. I’m pretty sure I’d have heard by now if he’d gotten out in time.”

  “Damn,” Dvorak said softly.

  “Amen, brother,” Wilson agreed in an equally quiet voice.

  “Well,” Dvorak said a moment later, giving himself a shake, “I won’t embarrass you by going on about it, Major, but I will say thank you. I’m pretty sure I speak for most of the human race when I say that, too. But I’m also pretty sure you didn’t hike all the way up here into the mountains just to introduce yourself?”

  “No,” Torino agreed, obviously happy to put that whole subject behind him. “As it happens, I have something else on my mind, and Mr. Mitchell here”—it was his turn to nod his head sideways at the tall ex–police officer—“tells me you and your brother-in-law are the major communications hub for the bloody-minded mountain folks here about.”

  “I don’t know that I’d go that far,” Dvorak said. “I mean, we—”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Mitchell interrupted brusquely. “You know damned well you are. If anybody has somebody they’ve got to hide, they mention it to you, and you guys find somebody to do the hiding. Somebody’s looking for ammo to hit the Shongairi, they mention it to someone, and sooner or later a friend of a friend mentions it to you, and you mention it to me. Somebody else needs a doc, they come to you, and you guys find ’em one. Hell, you know as well as I do that you and Rob are the ones who really arranged the escape route—and found contacts in Tennessee—for those poor bastards the Major and his people busted out! And just who was it got us turned around in time to avoid running right into that frigging puppy patrol which someone then took out completely?”

  Dvorak started to argue, then stopped.

  He’s right, he thought almost wonderingly. Damn.

  It was odd, really, he supposed. He’d been aware that he and Rob were acting as a sort of clearinghouse, but he’d never really thought of themselves as “the” clearinghouse. Yet now that he considered it, there was actually quite a bit of truth to it. Maybe he hadn’t noticed because it had never been planned. It had just happened, and he hadn’t really realized until this moment just how heavily the people who knew where to find them had come to rely on them to pass information and help with planning. Without ever noticing, they’d become . . . facilitators, he supposed might be the best word for it.

  Of course, his own “facilitating” days appeared to be over. He realized his right hand was touching the back of his left again and made himself stop.

  I imagine a “communications hub” is about all I’m going to be good for from now on, he reflected.

  “I hadn’t really thought of us that way,” he said out loud, “but I guess Sam does have a point. So, what can we do for you?”

  “We need you to pass some information for us, as widely as you can,” Torino replied, and his voice was harder, flatter.

  “What sort of information?” Dvorak asked a bit cautiously, looking back and forth between their visitors.

  “We took two of the puppies alive when we hit that convoy of theirs,” el-Hiri said. “Thanks to info from the Governor and his friends, we know those belt translators of theirs don’t have radio links built in. That means we don’t have to worry about their phoning home for help on them. And that we can go ahead and . . . ask them questions and request answers even if they can’t speak our language and we can’t speak theirs.”

  There was an ugly light in his eyes. Somehow Dvorak didn’t doubt that any Shongair from whom he “requested” answers would provide them.

  And it doesn’t bother me one damned bit, either, he thought grimly.

  “Should I assume you’re here about whatever they had to say?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” Torino said grimly. “I don’t think either of them was supposed to know why Teraik wanted those humans they were delivering to him. One of them—the senior one—was an officer, though. About what we’d call a first lieutenant, I’d guess. He knew more than he was supposed to. He couldn’t tell us everything, but I think we’ve been able to pretty much fill in the blanks or connect the dots or whatever the hell you want to call it. And what it comes down to is that we need to get the word out that going along peacefully if the puppies come calling isn’t a very good idea anymore. They told everyone in the convoy that they’d been drafted as part of the human labor forces the Shongairi have been using to try and clean up some of the worst wreckage in their occupation zones, but that wasn’t what they really had in mind for them at all.”

  . XXXIV .

  Regiment Commander Harah didn’t like trees.

  He hadn’t always felt that way. In fact, he’d actually liked trees until the Empire invaded this never-to-be-sufficiently-damned planet. Now he vastly preferred long, flat, empty spaces—preferably of bare, pounded earth where not even a garish or one of the humans’ “rabbits” could have hidden. Any other sort of terrain seemed to spontaneously spawn humans . . . all of whom appeared to have guns or some other, improvised sort of weapon none of his troopers had ever before heard of or experienced. The sheer bloodthirsty inventiveness of these creatures was simply impossible to believe without firsthand experience, and there seemed no end to their creativity.

  He hadn’t needed Ground Base Commander Shairez’s psychological analysis to tell him humans were all lunatics! It was nice to have confirmation, of course, and he’d been simply delighted when the ground base commander’s conclusions led Fleet Commander Thikair to change his plans. Once every last human had been expunged from it, this would probably be a perfectly nice place to live.

  He grimaced at his own thoughts as he sat gazing at the plot in the command GEV moving steadily west above the vast lake’s broad blue waters.

  Actually, Harah, part of you admires these creatures, doesn’t it? he thought. Once you get past their total lack of any concept of honor, at least. And according to the Ground Base Commander, that’s not really their fault. He couldn’t even begin to wrap his own mind around a psychology that bizarrely twisted, but he trusted Shairez’s analysis. If you can ever accept that they truly don’t realize how completely and utterly dishonorable it is to refuse submission to a proven superior, it all looks a bit different, doesn’t it? After all, we’ve killed thousands of them for every Shongair we’ve lost, and they still have the guts—the absolutely insane, utterly irrational, totally dishonorable, mind-numbingly stupid guts—to come right at u
s. If they only had half as much brains, they would’ve acknowledged our superiority and submitted months ago, psychology or no psychology, of course. But, no! They couldn’t do that, could they? That would be the reasonable thing to do!

  He growled, remembering the forty percent of his original regiment he’d lost attempting to subdue the eastern portion of what had once been the state of Pennsylvania in the nation the humans had called the “United States.” Brigade Commander Tesuk had gone in with three regiments; he’d come out with barely one and a half, and Fleet Commander Thikair had ended up blasting every major city in Tesuk’s area of operations from orbit, anyway.

  Harah had been delighted when he was transferred to Ground Base Seven, away from that madhouse. The transfer made sense for a lot of reasons, of course. Tesuk’s brigade had initially been assigned to Ground Base Two, which was supposed to be Ground Base Commander Shairez’s command from the outset. That hadn’t worked out too well, either, as Harah recalled. Tesuk himself had been assigned to the replacement, improvised ground base—Ground Base Two Alpha, they’d decided to call it—along with both of the brigade’s other two regiments. Harah suspected that his understrength command had been chosen to replace the two regiments initially assigned to Ground Base Seven when they were transferred to North America because he’d taken heavier losses in Pennsylvania than either of his sister regiments. As such, he’d represented less of a loss of combat power.

  He’d tried to convince his warriors that the reassignment was actually a compliment and a reward. He’d pointed out that their single, depleted regiment was being tasked to perform duties which would normally have fallen to twice their number of full-strength regiments, which hardly counted as a sinecure. And he’d argued that being chosen for such an important assignment represented a recognition not simply of how disproportionately heavily the burden of fighting in North America had fallen on their shoulders, but of how well they’d done when it had.

  He didn’t think they’d believed him. In fact, he knew they hadn’t, and there’d been quite a bit of ill feeling. Resentment that they were being cast aside, relegated to a secondary theater, because they’d been incompetent enough to suffer more casualties than the other units of their brigade. It was hard for any warrior to stomach that kind of thought, and the jeers of Tesuk’s other regiments as they prepared to board shuttles for the flight here hadn’t helped.

  Harah suspected those other regiments had stopped jeering since. According to one of his litter-brothers on Ground Force Commander Thairys’ staff, their casualty rates had long since surpassed his own. In fact, Tesuk was at substantially less than half strength despite the priority which had been assigned to replacing losses among the units operating in North America. The ground force commander had even been forced to begin completely disbanding his worst-depleted units, breaking them up and using their survivors to reinforce other units which had taken lighter losses, and he still couldn’t bring Tesuk back up to strength. The thought was sobering, but it didn’t really surprise Harah very much. As far as he’d been able to tell during his own time in hell, those lunatic “Americans” actually had more guns than humans!

  At least their initial experiences had taught the expedition’s senior officers to economize on forces by occupying open terrain, where surveillance could be maintained effectively, whenever and wherever possible. The redeployment of their ground combat forces to support Fleet Commander Thikair’s revised strategy of concentrating the troop strength necessary to subdue North America first had made that necessary, not optional, for the other ground bases which had been forced to give up so many of their own troopers to make up the needed numbers, but that didn’t make it any less wise.

  And the decision to allow lower levels of command to call in kinetic strikes on organized resistance instead of kicking every request clear up to fleet command level for clearance had been another wise move. In fact, Harah had come to the conclusion that it was one the Empire should consider incorporating into permanent doctrine during the drastic revision which was inevitably going to follow this debacle. It was an improvisation which had been forced upon them, true, yet allowing an officer as far down the chain of command as a lowly regiment commander to specify his own KEW targets had enormously reduced the response time. They were actually managing to catch some of the accursed human raiders—“guerrillas” they called themselves—before they had time to scatter and start scampering out of the strike area. Which was arguably a more effective, if less satisfying, tactic than reprisal strikes against nearby towns and villages which had already been largely deserted anyway.

  Of course, the brigade commanders and division commanders will all scream at the very notion of permanently allowing mere regiments to control their own supporting fire, he thought sardonically. I wonder how they’d react if I suggested giving battalion commanders that kind of control? Dainthar! Talk about heretical notions!

  His ears twitched in amusement at the thought, although he was more than half convinced it really would be a good idea. He was sure there were others to be discovered from any systematic analysis of what had happened here on KU-197-20. There had to be hundreds—thousands!—of lessons to be found, and he supposed they owed the humans a vote of thanks, in a perverse sort of way, for how much the Empire was ultimately going to learn from them.

  Not that any of them will be around to be thanked, he reflected a bit more grimly, returning his thoughts to the task at hand.

  He found himself strongly in agreement with Ground Base Commander Shairez’s decision to collect the necessary specimens from someplace outside her core zone of responsibility. He wasn’t that worried about long-term consequences—it shouldn’t take all that long to develop the bioweapon and obviate all future consequences—but it would certainly be inconvenient in the short term if the humans in Ground Base Seven’s ZOR started turning as restive as those in, say, North America. Or in Ground Base Six’s zone, to the northeast. Harah simply didn’t have the personnel to deal with that sort of unrest without either substantial reinforcements or calling in a lot of KEWs. Unfortunately, the reinforcements didn’t exist, thanks to their casualties, and that sort of bombardment would be . . . a bad idea. Ultimately, it wasn’t going to make much difference to the local humans whether they were vaporized by kinetic impact or died later of whatever plague Shairez developed, but Shairez had briefed him (partially, at least) on Fleet Commander Thikair’s ultimate strategy.

  We shouldn’t have to skulk around and go to such ridiculous lengths just to disguise a simple matter of pest control, he thought grumpily. Anybody who ever met a human would understand the galaxy could only be an enormously better place without any of them in it. But, of course, those sanctimonious, bleating, bigoted weed-eaters on the Council will never admit that! And you can be damned sure the hypocritical bastards would jump on any excuse to criticize us like a hasthar on a garish! So instead we have to bend ourselves all out of shape arranging a suitably deniable “accident” to accomplish something every sane sentient ought to fall at our feet thanking us for!

  Well, no one ever said the galaxy overflows with justice, he reminded himself as both prongs of his attack force approached their jump-off positions. And at least the satellites’ thermal imagery’s told us exactly where these humans are. They’ve been left completely alone, too. Their herd hasn’t been culled yet, and we haven’t picked up any electronic emissions from them at all, not even a miserable little auxiliary generator, so probably they were never even connected to the humans’ “Internet” in the first place.

  His lips wrinkled back, exposing his canines in a hunter’s anticipatory smile, as he remembered the backward parochialism still to be found in similarly remote villages even back on Shongair Prime itself. Given the humans’ uneven distribution of technology, even before the expedition had arrived, his targets’ situation had to be even worse.

  Isolated this far up in the hills, they may not even realize what’s been going on! And even if they’d heard rumors
about the invasion, they should still be fat, happy, and stupid, compared to the miserable jermahk we’ve been trying to dig out of the woodwork elsewhere on this continent. Not to mention having a lot less guns than those crazy “Americans”! And—his ears flattened more grimly—if they do want to fight, we’ve learned a lot ourselves since we first started running our snouts into them.

  • • • • •

  Stephen Buchevsky swore with silent, bitter venom.

  The sun was barely above the eastern horizon, shining into his eyes as he studied the Shongairi through the binoculars and wondered what the hell they were after. After staying clear of the mountains for so long, what could have inspired them to come straight at the villages this way?

  And why the hell do they have to be doing it while Mircea’s still away discussing his glorious vision of cooperation with the others? a corner of his mind demanded.

  It was at least fortunate the listening posts had detected the approaching drones so early, given how close behind them the aliens had been this time. There’d been time—barely—to crank up the old-fashioned hand-powered warning sirens, and at least the terrain was too heavily forested for any sort of airborne op. If the Shongairi wanted them, they’d have to come in on the ground . . . which was exactly what they seemed to have in mind. A large number of APCs and a handful of GEVs were assembling on the low ground at the southern end of the lake, about a kilometer below the dam, while a smaller force of GEVs came in across the lake itself, followed at a cautious interval by over a dozen of their huge orbital shuttles—the ones which could carry a dozen of their APCs apiece—and he didn’t like that one bit.

  The villages were scattered along the rugged flanks of a mountain spine running east to west on the lake’s southeastern shore. The ridgeline towered over thirty-two hundred feet above sea level in places, with the villages tucked away in dense tree cover above the eighteen-hundred-foot level. He’d thought they were well concealed, but the Shongairi clearly knew where they were. Not only that, they were coming in in a pincer movement which obviously intended to squeeze the villagers between the force coming in over the lake and the second force, hooking up from below the dam along the deep valley between the villages’ ridge and the even taller one to the valley’s west, where his forestry service cabin lookout post was located. If their maneuvers succeeded, they’d bag every human being in all three of the villages.