Out of the Dark

by David Weber

  That much was clear enough. Among the many things that weren’t clear was how well the aliens’ sensors could track humans moving through rough terrain under heavy tree cover. He hoped the answer to that question was “not very,” but he couldn’t rely on that.

  “Start them moving,” he told Elizabeth Cantacuzène. “These people are headed straight for the villages. I think we’d better be somewhere else when they get here.”

  “Yes, Stephen.” The teacher sounded far calmer than Buchevsky felt, and she nodded, then disappeared to pass his instructions to the waiting runners. Within moments, he knew, the orders would have gone out and their people would be falling back to the position he’d allowed Ramirez to christen “Bastogne.”

  It was an Army dance the first time around, he thought, and it came out pretty well that time. I guess it’s time to see how well the Green Machine makes out.

  • • • • •

  Regiment Commander Harah swore as the icons on his plot shifted.

  It appears we weren’t close enough behind the drones after all, he thought grumpily.

  HQ had been forced to factor the humans’ bizarre ability to sense RC drones from beyond visual range into its thinking, and his operations plan had made what ought to have been ample allowance for it, based on intelligence reports from higher up. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been, and he was already losing sensor resolution as they went scurrying through those accursed trees.

  That was the bad news. The good news was that his northern group of GEVs had secured the shore of the lake without difficulty. This far from any major population center, the chance of there being any of those pestiferous shoulder-launched SAMs down there was effectively nil. They’d all learned painful lessons about making assumptions where humans were concerned, however, and he watched approvingly as the point GEVs moved far enough inland to secure the shuttle landing zones. There wouldn’t be any SAMs bringing down his APCs while they were helpless in their shuttle bays, by Dainthar!

  “They’re moving along the ridge,” he said over the regimental net. “They’re headed west—towards those higher peaks. Second Battalion, get those APCs ashore and swing farther up the lake before you cut inland. Try to come in on their flank. First Battalion, get moving up that valley now.”

  • • • • •

  Buchevsky muttered another curse as the drones’ unpleasant vibration kept pace with him. Clearly, the damn things could track through tree cover better than he’d hoped. On the other hand, they seemed to be coming in close, above the treetops, and if they were—

  • • • • •

  “Cainharn seize them! Let them rot uneaten like the vermin they are!”

  A quartet of dirty fireballs trickled down the sky, and four of Harah’s drones went off the air simultaneously. Which pointedly contradicted at least one part of his pre-attack enemy forces estimate.

  Damn it! What in Cainharn’s Third Hell are villagers up in these damned mountains doing with SAMs?!

  • • • • •

  Buchevsky bared his teeth in a panting, running grin as Macomb’s air-defense teams took out the nearest drones. He still felt vibrations from other drones, farther away, but if the bastards kept them high enough to avoid the Gremlins, it might make their sensor resolution crappier, too.

  • • • • •

  Harah tried to master his anger, but he was sick unto death of how these damned humans insisted on screwing up even the simplest operation. Dainthar be praised he’d established a safe shuttle zone anyway, but that had been simple auto-reflex by now. He wasn’t supposed to have to do that kind of crap, because there weren’t supposed to be any SAMs or heavy weapons up here in the first place! That was one of the main reasons they’d come clear out here looking for Ground Base Commander Shairez’s specimens. Only the humans still refused to cooperate! It was as if the accursed creatures had known he was coming!

  He considered reporting to headquarters. Given the expedition’s already astronomical equipment losses, HQ was unlikely to thank him if he lost still more of it chasing after what were supposed to be unarmed villagers cowering in their mountain hideouts. But they had to secure specimens somewhere, and he had these humans more or less in his sights.

  Besides, he admitted harshly to himself, I will be damned if I turn around and back off again. This time, I’m going to drive right through these creatures and show them why they should never have refused to submit!

  “We’re not going to be able to bring the drones in as close as planned,” he grated to his battalion commanders. “It’s up to our scouts. Tell them to keep their damn eyes open.”

  Fresh acknowledgments came in. He heard his own anger, his own frustration, in those responses, and he watched his own icons closing in on the abruptly amorphous shaded area representing the drones’ best guess of the humans’ location.

  We may not be able to see them clearly, he thought angrily, but even if we can’t, there aren’t that many places they can go, now are there?

  • • • • •

  Buchevsky was profoundly grateful for the way hard work had toughened the lowland refugees. They were managing to keep up with the villagers, despite the elevation and despite the steepness of the terrain, which they never would’ve been able to do without that toughening. Several smaller children (not all of them lowland-born) were beginning to flag anyway, of course, and his heart ached at the ruthless demands being placed on them. But the bigger kids were managing to keep up with the adults, and there were enough grown-ups to take turns carrying the littlest ones.

  The unhealed wound where Shania and Yvonne had been cried out for him to scoop up one of those tiny human beings, carry someone’s child to the safety he’d been unable to offer his own children.

  But that wasn’t his job, and he turned his attention to what was.

  He slid to a halt on the narrow trail, breathing heavily, watching the last few villagers stream past. The perimeter guards came next, and then, last of all, the scouts who’d been on listening watch. One of them was Robert Szu.

  “It’s . . . pretty much like . . . you and Mircea figured it . . . Top,” the private panted. He paused for a moment, gathering his breath, then nodded sharply. “They’re coming up the firebreak roads on both sides of the ridge. I figure their points are halfway up by now.”

  “Good,” Buchevsky said.

  • • • • •

  “Farkalash!”

  regiment commander harah’s driver looked back over his shoulder at the horrendous oath until harah’s bared-canines snarl turned him hastily back around to his controls. the regiment commander only wished he could dispose of the dainthar-damned humans as easily!

  I shouldn’t have sent the vehicles in that close, he told himself through a boil of blood-red fury. I should’ve dismounted the infantry farther out. Of course it was as obvious to the humans as it was to me that there were only a handful of routes vehicles could use!

  He growled at himself, but he knew why he’d made the error. The humans were moving faster than he’d estimated they could, and he’d wanted to use his vehicles’ speed advantage. Which was why the humans had just been able to destroy six more irreplaceable GEVs and eleven more APCs . . . not to mention something like half the hundred and thirty-two troopers who’d been aboard the troop carriers.

  And let’s not forget the APC drivers and gunners while we’re at it, Harah! he thought viciously. And there’s no telling how many more little surprises they may have planted along any openings wide enough for vehicles.

  “Dismount the infantry,” he said flatly over the command net. “Scout formation. Vehicles are not to advance until the engineers have checked the trails for more explosives.”

  • • • • •

  Buchevsky grimaced sourly. From the smoke billowing up through the treetops, his handful of scavenged mines and jury-rigged IEDs had gotten at least several of their vehicles. Unfortunately, he couldn’t know how many.

  However many, they’re go
ing to take the hint and come in on foot from here . . . unless they’re complete and utter idiots. And somehow, I don’t think they are. Damn it.

  Well, at least he’d slowed them up. That was going to buy the civilians a little breathing space.

  Now it was time to buy them a little more.

  • • • • •

  Harah’s ears flattened, but at least it wasn’t a surprise this time. The small-arms fire rattling out of the trees had become inevitable the moment he’d ordered his own infantry to go in on foot.

  • • • • •

  Automatic weapons barked and snarled, crackling in a score of small, vicious, isolated engagements scattered across the heavily forested mountainside, and Buchevsky wished they hadn’t been forced to deep-six their radios. His people knew the terrain intimately, knew the best defensive positions, the possible approach lines, but the Shongairi had heavier support weapons, and their communications were vastly better than his. Their inherent ability to maneuver far exceeded his own as a consequence of their ability to remain in constant, instant contact with one another. And adding insult to injury, some of their infantry were using captured human rocket and grenade launchers to thicken their own firepower.

  The situation’s bitter irony wasn’t lost upon him. This time, his forces were on the short end of the “asymmetrical warfare” stick, and it sucked. On the other hand, he’d had painful personal experience of just how effective guerrillas could be in this sort of terrain.

  • • • • •

  There was more satisfaction to accompany the frustration in Harah’s growl as he looked at the plot’s latest update.

  The advance had been enormously slower than he’d ever contemplated, and morning had become afternoon, but the humans appeared to be running out of SAMs at last. That meant he could get his handful of surviving drones in close enough to see what the hell was happening, and his momentum was building.

  Which was a damned good thing, since he’d already lost over twenty percent of his troops. He was sure he could rely on Ground Base Commander Shairez to take his part and support him when he had to face his superiors and explain that, but he was also unfortunately certain how unhappy that kind of loss rate was going to make Ground Force Commander Thairys. Particularly in light of the notion that this was supposed to be a low-casualty operation.

  Well, maybe I have gotten hammered, he thought harshly, but I’m hardly the only commander that’s happened to since we got here! And I’ve cost them, too, by Dainthar’s Gleaming Fangs!

  Real-time estimates of enemy losses were notoriously unreliable, but even by his most pessimistic estimates, the humans had lost over forty fighters so far, and from the size of the thermal signatures the fleet had plotted from orbit, they couldn’t have had all that many of them to begin with.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that they appeared to be remarkably well equipped with infantry weapons for a batch of primitive, backward, uneducated mountain villagers, and their commander was fighting as smart as any human Harah had ever heard of. His forces were hugely outnumbered and outgunned, but he was hitting back hard—in fact, Harah’s casualties, despite his GEVs and his mortars, were at least six or seven times the humans’. The other side was intimately familiar with the terrain and taking ruthless advantage of it, and his infantry had run into enough more concealed explosives to make anyone cautious.

  Whatever we’ve run our snouts into, and whatever the satellites might have said, he reflected, these damned well aren’t just a bunch of villagers. Somebody’s spent a lot of time training them—and reconnoitering these mountains, too. They’re fighting from positions that were preselected for their fields of fire. And those explosives . . . someone picked the spots for them pretty damned carefully. Whoever it was knew what he was doing, and he must have been preparing his positions almost since the day we first landed.

  Despite himself, he felt a flicker of respect for his human opponent. Not that it was going to make any difference in the end. The take from his drones was still far less detailed than he could wish, but it was clear the fleeing villagers were running into what amounted to a cul-de-sac.

  • • • • •

  Buchevsky felt the momentum shifting.

  He’d started the morning with a hundred “regulars” and another hundred and fifty “militia” from the villages. He didn’t have that many anymore. He knew everyone tended to overestimate his own losses in a fight like this, especially in this sort of terrain and without reliable communications between his positions, but he’d be surprised if he hadn’t lost at least a quarter of his people by now.

  That was bad enough, but there was worse coming.

  The Bastogne position had never been intended to stand off a full-bore Shongair assault. It had really been designed as a place to retreat in the face of attack by human adversaries trying to pillage the villages’ winter supplies. That meant Bastogne, despite its name, was more of a fortified warehouse than some sort of final redoubt. He’d made its defenses as tough as he could, yet he’d never contemplated trying to hold it against hundreds of Shongair infantry supported by tanks and mortars.

  Stop kicking yourself, an inner voice growled. There was never any point trying to build a position you could’ve held against that kind of assault. So what if you’d held them off for a while? They’d only have called in one of their damned kinetic strikes in the end, anyway.

  He knew that was true, but what was also true was that the only paths of retreat were so steep as to be almost impassable. Bastogne was supposed to hold against any likely human attack, and without its stockpiled supplies, the chance that their civilians could have survived the approaching winter would have been minimal at best. So he and Mircea had staked everything on making the position tough enough to stand against anything less than an all-out Shongair assault . . . and now it was a trap too many of their people couldn’t get out of.

  He looked out through the smoky, autumn-bright forest, watching the westering sun paint the smoke the color of blood, and knew his people were out of places to run. They were on the final perimeter now, and it took every ounce of discipline he’d learned in his life to fight down his despair.

  I’m sorry, Mircea, he thought grimly. I fucked up. Now we’re all screwed. I guess I’m just as glad you didn’t make it back in time after all.

  His jaw muscles tightened, and he reached out and grabbed Maria Averescu, one of his runners.

  “I need you to find Gunny Meyers,” he said in the Romanian he’d finally begun to master.

  “He’s dead, Top,” the teenaged girl replied harshly, and his belly clenched.

  “Sergeant Ramirez?”

  “Him, too, I think. I know he took a hit here.” Averescu thumped the center of her own chest, just below the bosom which was never going to have time to fully develop after all.

  “Then find Sergeant Jonescu. Tell him—”

  Buchevsky drew a deep breath. Jonescu commanded his entire reserve, the only people he’d have available to plug any Shongair breakthroughs on the final perimeter. If he sent Jonescu off. . . .

  “Tell him I want him and his people to get as many kids out as they can,” he said harshly. “Tell him the rest of us will buy him as much time as we can. Got that?”

  “Yes, Top!” Averescu’s grimy face was pale, but she nodded hard.

  “Good. Now go!”

  He released the young woman’s shoulder. She shot off through the smoke, and he turned in the opposite direction and headed for the perimeter command post.

  • • • • •

  The Shongair scouts realized the humans’ retreat had slowed still further. Painful experience made them wary of changes, and they felt their way cautiously forward.

  They were right to be cautious.

  • • • • •

  Bastogne had been built around a deep cavern that offered protected, easily camouflaged storage for winter foodstuffs and fodder for the villages’ animals. Concealment was not its on
ly defense, however.

  • • • • •

  Buchevsky bared his teeth savagely as he heard the explosions.

  In a lot of ways, he still wished he’d been able to get his hands on US mines, since that was what he’d been trained with. On the other hand, Basarab had managed to lay his hands on an amazing quantity of Soviet-style ordnance. Some of it had been sadly obsolete, packed in crates that looked like they’d probably been tucked away in the bottom of a warehouse somewhere since World War II and old enough he’d had serious doubts abouts its reliability or even safety. But most of it had consisted of much more modern equipment, and no one had ever accused the Ruskies of being slouches when it came to mine warfare.

  The bulk of the antipersonnel mines had been the Russian MON-50, a directional mine which was basically a copy of the US-designed M18 Claymore with a few uniquely Russian refinements, including a peep sight to replace the original’s simpler open sight when it was being “aimed” on initial emplacement. Tactically, there was nothing to choose between the two, though: a rectangular, slightly concave plastic body containing a shaped charge of plastic explosives designed to throw a hurricane of lethal fragments in a fan-shaped pattern fifty yards or so deep. The variant Basarab had been able to provide threw five hundred and forty steel balls as opposed to the seven hundred slightly smaller balls of the Claymore.

  In addition, there’d been several crates of the more powerful MON-100, a circular sheet metal mine shaped like a large bowl and designed to throw four hundred and fifty steel rod fragments to a lethal range of over a hundred yards. There’d even been a couple of dozen MON-200s—much bigger and heavier (over fifty pounds) siblings of the MON-100, powerful enough to be effective against light-skinned vehicles and helicopters, as well as personnel. He’d used most of those up booby-trapping the fire roads, though. It looked like they’d been at least reasonably effective against the Shongair APCs, but he found himself wishing he had more of them left now.