Out of the Dark Read online

  Rayzhar had lost two litter-brothers in the ambush of Company Commander Barmit’s column. Litter-brothers who’d been shot down like weed-eaters for the pot, as if they’d been the inferiors. That was something Rayzhar had no intention of forgetting—or forgiving—until he’d collected enough “humans’” souls to serve both of them in Dainthar’s realm for all eternity.

  He really had no business making this attack, but the RC drone slaved to his command transport had shown him the ragged band cowering in the mountainside cul-de-sac. There were no more than fifty or sixty of them, but half a dozen wore the same uniforms as the humans who’d massacred his litter-brothers. That was enough for him. Besides, HQ would never see the take from the drone—he’d make sure of that before he reactivated its transmitter—and he expected no questions when he reported he’d taken fire from the humans and simply responded to it.

  He looked up from the holographic display board linked to the drone and barked an order at Gersa, the commander of his second squad.

  “Swing right! Get around their flank!”

  Gersa acknowledged, and Rayzhar bared his canines again—this time in satisfaction—as two of the renegade human warriors were cut down. A mortar round from one of the transports exploded farther up the cul-de-sac, among the humans cowering in the trees, and a savage sense of pleasure filled him as he listened to their shrieks of agony.

  • • • • •

  Buchevsky found himself on the ridgeline, looking down into a scene straight out of hell. More than fifty civilians, over half of them children, were hunkered down in the fragile cover of evergreens and hardwoods while a handful of Romanian soldiers tried frantically to protect them from at least twenty-five or thirty of the aliens. There were also three wheeled vehicles on the road below, and one of them mounted a turret with some sort of mortarlike support weapon. Even as Buchevsky watched, it fired, and an eye-tearing burst of brilliance erupted near the top of the cul-de-sac. He heard the shrieks of seared, dying children, and below the surface of his racing thoughts, he realized what had really happened. Why he’d changed his plans completely—put all the people he was responsible for at risk instead of simply lying low.

  Civilians. Children. They were what he was supposed to protect, and deep at the heart of him was the bleeding wound of his own daughters, the children he would never see again. The Shongairi had taken his girls from him, and he would rip out their throats with his teeth, strangle them with his bare hands, drown them in his own life’s blood, before he let them take another single child.

  “Gunny, get the vehicles!” he snapped, his curt voice showing no sign of his own self-recognition.

  “On it, Top!” Meyers acknowledged, and waved to Gutierrez and Robert Szu, one of their army privates. Gutierrez and Szu—like Meyers—carried RBR-M60s. The Romanian single-shot antiarmor weapons had been derived from the US M72 LAW, which obviated any problems Meyers and the others might have experienced figuring out how the things operated. They also had a theoretical range of over a thousand meters and the power to take out most older main battle tanks, and Meyers, Gutierrez, and Szu went skittering through the woods towards the road with them.

  Buchevsky left that in the gunny’s competent hands as he reached out and grabbed Corporal Macomb by the shoulder. She carried one of the salvaged SAM launchers, and Buchevsky jabbed a nod at the drone hovering motionless overhead, watching the massacre unfold.

  “When the Gunny fires, take that damned thing out,” he said flatly.

  “Right, Top.” Macomb’s voice was higher-pitched than usual, her expression frightened, but her hands were steady as she lifted the SAM’s tube to her shoulder.

  “The rest of you, with me!” Buchevsky barked. It wasn’t much in the way of detailed instructions, but four of the eight people still with him were Marines, and three of the others were Army riflemen. Eleven Bravo was pretty much the same MOS for Army pukes and the Green Machine alike, when you came down to it.

  Besides, the tactical situation was brutally simple.

  • • • • •

  Rayzhar saw another uniformed human die. Then he snarled in fury as one of his own troopers screamed, rose on his toes, and went down in a spray of blood. The Shongairi were unaccustomed to facing enemies whose missile weapons could penetrate their body armor. In fact, Rayzhar had never actually seen that happen before—not straight through the armor, instead of simply hitting something it didn’t cover—and he felt a chill spike of fear even through his rage. But he wasn’t about to let it stop him. Their superiors had warned them these creatures’ infantry weapons were more powerful than the muscle-powered bows, or even the crossbows, the Shongairi had faced in their previous conquests. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t realized—intellectually, at least—that it could happen. Of course he hadn’t expected it, not really, whatever he might have thought he was prepared for, but there were only three armed humans left. Only three, and then—

  • • • • •

  Buchevsky heard the explosions as the alien vehicles vomited flame and smoke. At almost the same instant the SA-14 streaked towards the rock-steady alien drone, trailing a tail of fire, and two things became clear. One, whatever held the drones up, they radiated enough heat signature for the Gremlin to see them. Two, whatever the drones were made of, it wasn’t tough enough to survive the one-kilo warhead’s impact.

  He laid the glowing dot of his rifle sight on the weird, slender, doglike alien whose waving hands suggested he was in command and squeezed the trigger.

  • • • • •

  A three-round burst of 5.56-millimeter slugs punched through the back of Rayzhar’s body armor. They kept right on going until they punched out his breastplate in a spray of red, as well, and the squad commander heard someone’s gurgling scream. He realized vaguely that it was his own, and then he crashed facedown into the dirt of an alien planet.

  He wasn’t alone. There were only nine riflemen up on his flank, but all of them were combat veterans, they had perfect fields of fire, and every single one of them had heard Fleet Commander Thikair’s broadcast. They knew why Rayzhar and his troopers had come to their world, what had happened to their cities and homes. There was no mercy in them, and their fire was deadly accurate.

  The Shongairi recoiled in shock as more of them died or collapsed in agony—shock that became terror as they realized their vehicles had just been destroyed behind them, as well. They had no idea how many attackers they faced, but they recognized defeat when they saw it, and they turned towards the new attack, raising their weapons over their heads in surrender, flattening their ears in token of honorable submission.

  • • • • •

  Stephen Buchevsky saw the aliens turning towards his people, raising their weapons to charge up the ridge, and behind his granite eyes he saw the children they had just killed and maimed . . . and his daughters.

  “Kill them!” he rasped.

  . XIX .

  “I want an explanation.”

  Fleet Commander Thikair glowered around the conference table. None of his senior officers needed to ask what it was he wanted explained, and more than one set of eyes slid sideways to Ground Force Commander Thairys. His casualty rate to date was over—well over—ten times his most pessimistic prelanding estimate . . . and climbing.

  “I have no excuse, Fleet Commander.”

  Thairys flattened his ears in submission to Thikair’s authority, and there was silence for a second or two. But then Ground Base Commander Shairez raised one diffident hand.

  “If I may, Fleet Commander?”

  Thikair turned his attention to her. Up until a day-twelfth or so ago, Shairez had been down on the accursed planet, supervising the construction of Ground Base Seven in the flat, fertile farmland on the western side of what the humans called the Black Sea. He had no idea why they called it “black,” but he was coming to the conclusion that the only thing he could logically expect out of these creatures was illogic.

  Shairez looked as tired
as he could remember ever having seen her. She’d originally been supposed to command Ground Base Two, and it was only by the grace of Dainthar he hadn’t lost her when those accursed humans massacred forty percent of Ground Base Two’s personnel—and destroyed thirty percent of the base’s infrastructure and all of its construction personnel—on the very first day. That had been a devastating blow, but it was far from the only one Thikair’s fleet had suffered. In fact, the reason Shairez was now in command of Ground Base Seven was that Ground Base Commander Ermath, who’d been supposed to command that base, had gotten too close to a human with a ground-launched antiaircraft rocket of some sort in the nation-state of “Turkey.” It probably spoke well of Ermath that he’d wanted a firsthand look at the opposition his troopers were facing, but the confirmation that the humans actually had individual human-portable weapons capable of knocking down even Deathwing assault shuttles had been an unpleasant shock.

  And speaking of “unpleasant shocks,” there was always what had happened to Brigade Commander Harshair, wasn’t there?

  Thikair knew Shairez had been continuing her analysis of the masses of data she’d pulled from the humans’ Internet even as she oversaw her new base’s completion. She’d not only managed to get Ground Base Seven’s construction back on schedule while simultaneously supervising her analysis teams, but actually moved the base ahead of schedule, despite all the fleet’s unanticipated casualties and logistic headaches.

  No wonder she looked fatigued.

  “If you have any explanation, Base Commander,” he told her, his voice losing some of its flat anger, “I would be delighted to hear it.”

  “I doubt there is any single explanation, Sir.” Her ears were half lowered in respect, although not so flat to her head as Thairys’, and her tone was calm. “Instead, I think we’re looking at a combination of factors.”

  “Which are?” Thikair leaned back, his immediate ire further dampened by her demeanor.

  “The first, Sir, is simply that this is the first Level Two culture we’ve ever—that anyone has ever—attempted to subdue. We knew that going in, but I’m afraid we have to face the fact that we made insufficient allowance for what that meant. While their technology is inherently inferior to our own, it’s far less relatively inferior than anything we’ve ever encountered. Worse, although our base technology is superior, they’ve done a better job than we have of applying the capabilities they have to their weaponry.

  “As a case in point, our troopers have never before confronted any primitive species which possessed armored fighting vehicles, cartridge-firing firearms, or combat aircraft. None of our models took that sort of capability into consideration, and because we’ve never fought any nonprimitive species with such capabilities we failed—I, for one, failed badly—when it came to evaluating the lethality of the humans’ equipment. In addition, we’ve never before—the entire Hegemony has never before—encountered a species which had attained this level of technology without effectively creating a single worldwide state.” She flipped her ears in a shrug. “There have been other species which failed to do so, but none of them survived to attain hyper-travel and thus qualify for membership in the Hegemony. And, of course, the entire Hegemony’s interaction with such . . . divided societies at this level is nonexistent because of their protected status once they attain Level Two technology. All of that means we had no comparable civilizations to use as measuring sticks when we began evaluating this one’s threat potential.

  “It’s become painfully evident, however, that no doubt as a consequence of this species’ history, because of the ongoing competition between their nation-states, their weaponry is actually considerably more advanced than our own was at a comparable level of technology. Their armored vehicles, for example, while much slower, clumsier, shorter-legged, and tactically cumbersome than ours, mount weapons capable of destroying our heaviest units and are actually better protected than our own. Indeed, from the fragmentary data we’ve recovered from Brigade Commander Harshair’s units, some of their main battle tanks are even capable of sustaining direct hits from our GEVs’ main weapons, as long as our fire impacts on their frontal armor, and remaining in action. Worse, even their infantry have weapons—individually portable weapons, not simply crew-served ones—capable of destroying our most heavily armored vehicles. We could have produced equally capable or even more capable weapons—for example, I suspect it would prove fairly straightforward to build a vehicle-mounted railgun with performance better even than their ‘tanks’ ’main weapons—but it never occurred to us to do so because we’ve never needed them. That means that, despite the basic tech imbalance, the weapons they have are actually superior to the ones our troopers have, and that’s skewed Ground Force Commander Thairys’ original calculations badly.”

  Thikair bared one canine in frustration, but she had a point. In fact, it was one he ought to have borne in mind and insisted be far more thoroughly factored into the prelanding planning.

  But that’s not really totally fair, he told himself after a moment. You did allow for a much higher than usual level of capability on their part—that’s why you and Thairys planned such an extensive bombardment. Why you destroyed every major human army and navy. Why you hit them hard enough that any species would have to recognize how massively superior your capabilities were and submit. And even if they have the ability to hurt us, they do have to recognize they can’t ultimately win, so why haven’t they submitted?

  “A second factor,” Shairez continued, “may be that our initial bombardment was too successful. Although their Internet continues to operate, it’s evident that there’s enormous confusion on their part. There are no clear messages from their authorities at anything except a very local level. I believe we may have so thoroughly disrupted their national governments’ communications and command structures that there may be no way for individual units to be ordered to stand down.”

  “‘Stand down’?” Squadron Commander Jainfar repeated incredulously. “They’re defeated, Base Commander! I don’t care if they’ve managed to hurt us here and there, nothing is going to change that. And I don’t care how stupid they are, or how disrupted their ‘command structures’ may be, either! As you say, they’re still communicating with one another over their ‘Internet,’ so they have to know that!”

  “Perhaps so, Squadron Commander.” Shairez faced the old space dog squarely. “Unfortunately, as yet we know very little about this species’ psychology. We do know there’s something significantly different about them, given their incredible rate of advancement, but that’s really all we know. It could be that they simply don’t care that we’ve defeated them.”

  Jainfar started to say something else, but then visibly restrained himself. It was obvious he couldn’t imagine any nominally intelligent species thinking in such a bizarre fashion, but Shairez was the expedition’s expert on non-Shongairi sapients.

  “Even if that’s true, Ground Base Commander,” Thikair’s tone was closer to normal, “it doesn’t change our problem.” He looked at Thairys. “What sort of loss rates are we looking at, assuming these creatures’ behavior doesn’t change?”

  “Potentially disastrous ones, Sir,” Thairys acknowledged grimly. “We’ve already written off over eleven percent of our armored vehicles. Worse, we never expected to need that many GEVs in the first place against the opposition we anticipated, which means we have nowhere near the vehicles and crews it looks like we’re going to need. We’ve actually lost a higher absolute number of troop and cargo transports, but we had many times as many of those to begin with. Infantry losses are another matter, and I’m not at all sure our present casualty rates are sustainable. And I must point out that we have barely eight local days of ground combat experience. It’s entirely possible for projections based on what we’ve seen so far to be almost as badly flawed as our initial estimates.”

  The ground force commander clearly didn’t like adding that caveat. Which was fair enough. Thikair didn’t much like
hearing it.

  “I believe the Ground Force Commander may be unduly pessimistic, Sir.” All eyes switched to Shairez once more, and the ground base commander flicked her ears in a shrug. “I realize that may sound odd after what I just said, yet I believe it may be true nonetheless. My own analysis suggests we’re looking at two basic types of incidents, both of which appear to be the work of scattered, usually relatively small units acting independently of any higher command or coordination.

  “On one hand, we have units making use of the humans’ heavy weapons and employing what I suspect is their standard doctrine. Examples of this would be what happened to Brigade Commander Harshair or the destruction of Company Commander Barmit’s command in my own ground base’s area of responsibility. On the other, we have what seem to be primarily infantry forces equipped with light weapons or using what appear to be improvised explosives and weapons.

  “In the case of the former, they’ve frequently inflicted severe losses—again as in Harshair’s and, to a lesser degree, Barmit’s cases. In fact, more often than not, they’ve inflicted grossly disproportionate casualties. However, in those instances, our space-to-surface interdiction systems are normally able to locate and destroy them. In short, humans who attack us in that fashion seldom survive to attack a second time, and they already have few heavy weapons left. Logically, losses to that sort of attack should begin to taper off quite rapidly. Indeed, from the most recent combat reports I’ve viewed that would appear to be happening already.

  “In the case of the second type of attack, however, the attackers have proved far more elusive. Our orbital reconnaissance systems are all biased towards locating heavier, more technologically advanced weapons. In fact, they’re really oriented primarily for fleet combat, not for planetary operations at all. Our air-breathing reconnaissance systems, on the other hand, while specifically designed for planetary operations, are all oriented towards locating and tracking primitive opponents with no understanding of their capabilities. Our orbital systems look for electronic emissions, the sort of high-intensity thermal signatures we might find from operating power plants, and things of that nature. As far as the ability to track the natives is concerned, they’re at least reasonably well suited to locating and following large thermal signatures—the sort associated with cities or towns, or with organized bodies of troops in the field. They’re far less well equipped to pick out individual humans or small groups of individuals, however. We’ve always relied upon our air-breathing systems to provide our ground commanders with that sort of short-range tactical information.