Warriors

Out of the Dark

I

The attention signal whistled on Fleet Commander Thikair’s communicator.

He would always remember how prosaic and . . . normal it had sounded, but at that moment, as he looked up from yet another ream of deadly dull paperwork, when he still didn’t know, he felt an undeniable sense of relief for the distraction. Then he pressed the acceptance key, and that sense of relief vanished when he recognized his flagship’s commander’s face . . . and his worried expression.

“What is it, Ahzmer?” he asked, wasting no time on formal greetings.

“Sir, I’m afraid the scout ships have just reported a rather . . . disturbing discovery,” Ship Commander Ahzmer replied.

“Yes?” Thikair’s ears cocked inquisitively as Ahzmer paused.

“Sir, they’re picking up some fairly sophisticated transmissions.”

“Transmissions?” For a moment or two, it didn’t really register, but then Thikair’s eyes narrowed and his pelt bristled. “How sophisticated?” he demanded much more sharply.

“Very, I’m afraid, sir,” Ahzmer said unhappily. “We’re picking up digital and analog with some impressive bandwidth. It’s at least Level Three activity, sir. Possibly even—” Ahzmer’s ears flattened. “—Level Two.”

Thikair’s ears went even flatter than the ship commander’s, and he felt the tips of his canines creeping into sight. He shouldn’t have let his expression give so much away, but he and Ahzmer had known one another for decades, and it was obvious the other’s thoughts had already paralleled his own.

The fleet had reemerged into normal-space two days ago, after eight standard years, subjective, of cryogenic sleep. The flight had lasted some sixteen standard years, by the rest of the galaxy’s clocks, since the best velocity modifier even in hyper allowed a speed of no more than five or six times that of light in normal-space terms. The capital ships and transports were still a week of normal-space travel short of the objective, sliding in out of the endless dark like huge, sleek hasthar, claws and fangs still hidden, though ready. But he’d sent the much lighter scout ships, whose lower tonnages made their normal-space drives more efficient, ahead to take a closer look at their target. Now he found himself wishing he hadn’t.

Stop that, he told himself sternly. Your ignorance wouldn’t have lasted much longer, anyway. And you’d still have to decide what to do. At least this way you have some time to start thinking about it!

His mind started to work again, and he sat back, one six-fingered hand reaching down to groom his tail while he thought.

The problem was that the Hegemony Council’s authorization for this operation was based on the survey team’s report that the objective’s intelligent species had achieved only a Level Six civilization. The other two systems on Thikair’s list were both classified as Level Five civilizations, although one had crept close to the boundary between Level Five and Level Four. It had been hard to get the Council to sign off on those two. Indeed, the need to argue the Shongairi’s case so strenuously before the Council was the reason the mission had been delayed long enough to telescope into a three-system operation. But this system’s “colonization” had been authorized almost as an afterthought, the sort of mission any of the Hegemony’s members might have mounted. They’d certainly never agreed to the conquest of a Level Three, far less a Level Two! In fact, anything that had attained Level Two came under protectorate status until it attained Level One and became eligible for Hegemony membership in its own right or (as at least half of them managed) destroyed itself first.

Cowards, Thikair thought resentfully. Dirt-grubbers. Weed-eaters!

The Shongairi were the only carnivorous species to have attained hyper-capability. Almost 40 percent of the Hegemony’s other member races were grass-eaters, who regarded the Shongairi’s dietary habits as barbarous, revolting, even horrendous. And even most of the Hegemony’s omnivores were . . . uncomfortable around Thikair’s people.

Their own precious Constitution had forced them to admit the Shongairi when the Empire reached the stars, but they’d never been happy about it. In fact, Thikair had read several learned monographs arguing that his people’s existence was simply one of those incredible flukes that (unfortunately, in the obvious opinion of the authors of those monographs) had to happen occasionally. What they ought to have done, if they’d had the common decency to follow the example of other species with similarly violent, psychopathically aggressive dispositions, was blow themselves back into the Stone Age as soon as they discovered atomic fission.

Unhappily for those racist bigots, Thikair’s people hadn’t. Which didn’t prevent the Council from regarding them with scant favor. Or from attempting to deny them their legitimate prerogatives.

It’s not as if we were the only species to seek colonies. There’s the Barthon, and the Kreptu, just for starters. And what about the Liatu? They’re grass-eaters, but they’ve got over fifty colony systems!

Thikair made himself stop grooming his tail and inhale deeply. Dredging up old resentments wouldn’t solve this problem, and if he was going to be completely fair (which he really didn’t want to be, especially in the Liatu’s case), the fact that they’d been roaming the galaxy for the better part of sixty-two thousand standard years as compared to the Shongairi’s nine hundred might help to explain at least some of the imbalance.

Besides, that imbalance is going to change, he reminded himself grimly.

There was a reason the Empire had established no less than eleven colonies even before Thikair had departed, and why the Shongari Council representatives had adamantly defended their right to establish those colonies even under the Hegemony’s ridiculous restrictions.

No one could deny any race the colonization of any planet with no native sapient species. Unfortunately, there weren’t all that many habitable worlds, and they tended to be located bothersomely far apart, even for hyper-capable civilizations. Worse, a depressing number of them already had native sapients living on them. Under the Hegemony Constitution, colonizing those worlds required Council approval, which wasn’t as easy to come by as it would have been in a more reasonable universe.

Thikair was well aware that many of the Hegemony’s other member races believed the Shongairi’s “perverted” warlike nature (and even more “perverted” honor codes) explained their readiness to expand through conquest. And, to be honest, they had a point. But the real reason, which was never discussed outside the Empire’s inner councils, was that an existing infrastructure, however crude, made the development of a colony faster and easier. And, even more important, the . . . acquisition of less advanced but trainable species provided useful increases in the Empire’s labor force. A labor force that—thanks to the Constitution’s namby-pamby emphasis on members’ internal autonomy—could be kept properly in its place on any planet belonging to the Empire.

And a labor force that was building the sinews of war the Empire would require on the day it told the rest of the Hegemony what it could do with all of its demeaning restrictions.

None of which did much about his current problem.

“You say it’s possibly a Level Two,” he said. “Why do you think that?”

“Given all the EM activity and the sophistication of so many of the signals, the locals are obviously at least Level Three, sir.” Ahzmer didn’t seem to be getting any happier, Thikair observed. “In fact, preliminary analysis suggests they’ve already developed fission power—possibly even fusion. But while there are at least some fission power sources on the planet, there seem to be very few of them. In fact, most of their power generation seems to come from burning hydrocarbons! Why would any civilization that was really Level Two do anything that stupid?”

The fleet commander’s ears flattened in a frown. Like the ship commander, he found it difficult to conceive of any species stupid enough to continue consuming irreplaceable resources in hydrocarbon-based power generation if it no longer had to. Ahzmer simply didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, because if this genuinely was a Level Two civilization, it would be forever off-limits for colonization.

“Excuse me, Sir,” Ahzmer said, made bold by his own worries, “but what are we going to do?”

“I can’t answer that question just yet, Ship Commander,” Thikair replied a bit more formally than usual when it was just the two of them. “But I can tell you what we’re not going to do, and that’s let these reports panic us into any sort of premature conclusions or reactions. We’ve spent eight years, subjective, to get here, and three months reviving our personnel from cryo. We’re not going to simply cross this system off our list and move on to the next one until we’ve thoroughly considered what we’ve learned about it and evaluated all of our options. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Good. In the meantime, however, we have to assume we may well be facing surveillance systems considerably in advance of anything we’d anticipated. Under the circumstances, I want the fleet taken to a covert stance. Full-scale emissions control and soft recon mode, Ship Commander.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll pass the order immediately.”

II

Master Sergeant Stephen Buchevsky climbed out of the MRAP, stretched, collected his personal weapon, and nodded to the driver.

“Go find yourself some coffee. I don’t really expect this to take very long, but you know how good I am at predicting things like that.”

“Gotcha, Top,” the corporal behind the wheel agreed with a grin. He stepped on the gas and the MRAP (officially the Mine Resistant Ambush Protection vehicle) moved away, headed for the mess tent at the far end of the position, while Buchevsky started hiking toward the sandbagged command bunker perched on top of the sharp-edged ridge.

The morning air was thin and cold, but less than two weeks from the end of his current deployment, Buchevsky was used to that. It wasn’t exactly as if it was the first time he’d been here, either. And while many of Bravo Company’s Marines considered it the armpit of the universe, Buchevsky had seen substantially worse during the seventeen years since he’d taken a deceitfully honest-faced recruiter at his word.

“Oh, the places you’ll go—the things you’ll see!” the recruiter in question had told him enthusiastically. And Stephen Buchevsky had indeed been places and seen things since. Along the way, he’d been wounded in action no less than six times, and, at age thirty-five, his marriage had just finished coming rather messily unglued, mostly over the issue of lengthy, repeat deployments. He walked with a slight limp the therapists hadn’t been able to completely eradicate, the ache in his right hand was a faithful predictor of rain or snow, and the scar that curved up his left temple was clearly visible through his buzz-cut hair, especially against his dark skin. But while he sometimes entertained fantasies about looking up the recruiter who’d gotten him to sign on the dotted line, he’d always reupped.

Which probably says something unhealthy about my personality, he reflected as he paused to gaze down at the narrow twisting road far below.

On his first trip to sunny Afghanistan, he’d spent his time at Camp Rhine down near Kandahar. That was when he’d acquired the limp, too. For the next deployment, he’d been located up near Ghanzi, helping to keep an eye on the A01 highway from Kandahar to Kabul. That had been less . . . interesting than his time in Kandahar Province, although he’d still managed to take a rocket splinter in the ass, which had been good for another gold star on the purple heart ribbon (and unmerciful “humor” from his so-called friends). But then the Poles had taken over in Ghanzi, and so, for his third Afghanistan deployment, he and the rest of First Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, had been sent back to Kandahar, where things had been heating up again. They’d stayed there, too . . . until they’d gotten new orders, at least. The situation in Paktika Province—the one the Poles had turned down in favor of Ghanzi because Paktika was so much more lively—had also worsened, and Buchevsky and Bravo Company had been tasked as backup for the battalion of the Army’s 508th Parachute Infantry in the area while the Army tried to pry loose some of its own people for the job.

Despite all of the emphasis on “jointness,” it hadn’t made for the smoothest relationship imaginable. The fact that everyone recognized it as a stopgap and Bravo as only temporary visitors (they’d been due to deploy back to the States in less than three months when they got the call) didn’t help, either. They’d arrived without the logistic support which would normally have accompanied them, and despite the commonality of so much of their equipment, that had still put an additional strain on the 508th’s supply services. But the Army types had been glad enough to see them and they’d done their best to make the “jarheads” welcome.

The fact that the Vermont-sized province shared six hundred miles of border with Pakistan, coupled with the political changes in Pakistan and an upsurge in opium production under the Taliban’s auspices (odd how the fundamentalists’ one-time bitter opposition to the trade had vanished now that they needed cash to support their operations), had prevented Company B from feeling bored. Infiltration and stepped-up attacks on the still shaky Afghan Army units in the province hadn’t helped, although all things considered, Buchevsky preferred Paktika to his 2004 deployment to Iraq. Or his most recent trip to Kandahar, for that matter.

Now he looked down through the thin mountain air at the twisting trail Second Platoon was here to keep a close eye on. All the fancy recon assets in the world couldn’t provide the kind of constant presence and eyes-on surveillance needed to interdict traffic through a place like this. It was probably easier than the job Buchevsky’s father had faced trying to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail—at least his people could see a lot farther!—but that wasn’t saying very much, all things taken together. And he didn’t recall his dad’s mentioning anything about lunatic martyrs out to blow people up in job lots for the glory of God.

He gave himself a shake. He had a lot on his plate organizing the Company’s rotation home, and he turned back toward the command bunker to inform Gunnery Sergeant Wilson that his platoon’s Army relief would begin arriving within forty-eight hours. It was time to get the turnover organized and Second Platoon back to its FOB to participate in all the endless paperwork and equipment checks involved in any company movement.

Not that Buchevsky expected anyone to complain about this move.

III

The gathering in Star of Empire’s conference room consisted of Thikair’s three squadron commanders, his ground force commander, and Base Commander Shairez. Despite the fact that Shairez was technically junior to Ground Force Commander Thairys, she was the expedition’s senior base commander, and as such, she, too, reported directly to Thikair.

Rumors about the scout ships’ findings had spread, of course. It would have required divine intervention to prevent that! Still, if it turned out there was no landing after all, it would scarcely matter, would it?

“What is your interpretation of the scout ships’ data, Base Commander?” Thikair asked Shairez without bothering to call the meeting formally to order. Most of them seemed surprised by his disregard for protocol, and Shairez didn’t look especially pleased to be the first person called upon. But she could scarcely have been surprised by the question itself; the reason she was the expedition’s senior base commander was her expertise in dealing with other sapient species, after all.

“I’ve considered the data, including that from the stealthed orbital platforms, carefully, Fleet Commander,” she replied. “I’m afraid my analysis confirms Ship Commander Ahzmer’s original fears. I would definitely rate the local civilization at Level Two.”

Unhappy at being called upon or not, she hadn’t flinched, Thikair thought approvingly.

“Expand upon that, please,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Shairez tapped the virtual clawpad of her personal computer and her eyes unfocused slightly as she gazed at the memos projected directly upon her retinas.

“First, sir, this species has developed nuclear power. Of course, their technology is extremely primitive, and it would appear they’re only beginning to experiment with fusion, but there are significant indications that their general tech level is much more capable than we would ever anticipate out of anyone with such limited nuclear capacity. Apparently, for some reason known only to themselves, these people—I use the term loosely, of course—have chosen to cling to hydrocarbon-fueled power generation well past the point at which they could have replaced it with nuclear generation.”

“That’s absurd!” Squadron Commander Jainfar objected. The crusty old space dog was Thikair’s senior squadron commander and as bluntly uncompromising as one of his dreadnoughts’ main batteries. Now he grimaced as Thikair glanced at him, one ear cocked interrogatively.

“Apologies, Base Commander,” the squadron commander half growled. “I don’t doubt your data. I just find it impossible to believe any species that stupid could figure out how to use fire in the first place!”

“It is unique in our experience, Squadron Commander,” Shairez acknowledged. “And according to the master data banks, it’s also unique in the experience of every other member of the Hegemony. Nonetheless, they do possess virtually all of the other attributes of a Level Two culture.”

She raised one hand, ticking off points on her claws as she continued.

“They have planetwide telecommunications. Although they’ve done little to truly exploit space, they have numerous communications and navigational satellites. Their military aircraft are capable of trans-sonic flight regimes, they make abundant use of advanced—well, advanced for any pre-Hegemony culture—composites, and we’ve observed experiments with early-generation directed energy weapons, as well. Their technological capabilities are not distributed uniformly about their planet, but they’re spreading rapidly. I would be very surprised—assuming they survive—if they haven’t evolved an effectively unified planetary government within the next two or three generations. Indeed, they might manage it even sooner, if their ridiculous rate of technological advancement is any guide!”

The silence around the conference table was profound. Thikair let it linger for several moments, then leaned back in his chair.

“How would you account for the discrepancy between what we’re now observing and the initial survey report?”

“Sir, I can’t account for it,” she said frankly. “I’ve doublechecked and triple-checked the original report. There’s no question that it was accurate at the time it was made, yet now we find this. Somehow, this species has made the jump from animal transport, wind power, and crude firearms to this level more than three times as rapidly as any other species. And please note that I said ‘any other species.’ The one I had in mind were the Ugartu.”

The fleet commander saw more than one grimace at that. The Ugartu had never attained Hegemony membership . . . since they’d turned their home star system into a radioactive junkyard first. The Council of the time had breathed a quiet but very, very profound sigh of relief when it happened, too, given that the Ugartu had been advancing technologically at twice the galactic norm. Which meant these people . . .

“Is it possible the initial survey team broke procedure, sir?” Ship Commander Ahzmer asked, his expression troubled. Thikair glanced at him, and his flagship’s commander flicked both ears. “I’m just wondering if the surveyors might inadvertently have made direct contact with the locals? Accidentally given them a leg up?”

“Possible, but unlikely, Ship Commander,” Ground Force Commander Thairys said. “I wish I didn’t have to say that, since I find this insanely rapid advancement just as disturbing as you do. Unfortunately, the original survey was conducted by the Barthonii.”

Several of Thikair’s officers looked as if they’d just smelled something unpleasant. Actually, from the perspective of any self-respecting carnivore, the Barthonii smelled simply delicious, but the timid plant-eaters were one of the Shongairi’s most severe critics. And they were also heavily represented in the Hegemony’s survey forces, despite their inherent timidity, because of their fanatic support for the Council regulations limiting contact with inferior races.

“I’m afraid I agree with the Ground Force Commander,” Shairez said.

“And it wouldn’t matter if that were what had happened,” Thikair pointed out. “The Constitution doesn’t care where a species’ technology came from. What matters is the level it’s attained, however it got there”

“And the way the Council will react to it,” Jainfar said sourly, and ears moved in agreement all around the table.

“I’m afraid Squadron Commander Jainfar has a point, sir.” Thairys sighed heavily. “It was hard enough getting approval for our other objectives, and they’re far less advanced than these people have turned out to be. Or I hope to Dainthar’s Hounds they still are, at any rate!”

More ears waved agreement, Thikair’s among them. However aberrant, this species’ development clearly put it well outside the parameters of the Council’s authorization. However . . .

“I’m well aware of just how severely our discoveries have altered the circumstances envisioned by our mission orders,” he said. “On the other hand, there are a few additional points I believe bear consideration.”

Most of them looked at him with obvious surprise, but Thairys’ tail curled up over the back of his chair and his ears flattened in speculation.

“First, one of the points I noticed when I reviewed the first draft of Base Commander Shairez’s report was that these people not only have remarkably few nuclear power stations, but for a species of their level, they also have remarkably few nuclear weapons. Only their major political powers seem to have them in any quantity, and even they have very limited numbers, compared to their non-nuclear capabilities. Of course, they are omnivores, but the numbers of weapons are still strikingly low. Lower even than for many weed-eaters at a comparable level. That becomes particularly apparent given the fact that there are fairly extensive military operations under way over much of the planet. In particular, several more advanced nation-states are conducting operations against adversaries who obviously don’t even approach their own capabilities. Yet even though those advanced—I’m speaking relatively, of course—nation-states have nuclear arsenals and their opponents, who do not, would be incapable of retaliation, they’ve chosen not to employ them. Not only that, but they must have at least some ability to produce bio-weapons, yet we’ve seen no evidence of their use. For that matter, we haven’t even poison gas or neurotoxins!”

He let that settle in, then leaned forward once more to rest his folded hands on the conference table.

“This would appear to be a highly peculiar species in several respects,” he said quietly. “Their failure to utilize the most effective weapons available to them, however, suggests that they’re almost as lacking in . . . military pragmatism as many of the Hegemony’s weed-eaters. That being the case, I find myself of the opinion that they might well make a suitable . . . client species, after all.”

The silence in the conference room was absolute as the rest of Thikair’s listeners began to realize what Thairys had already guessed.

“I realize,” the Fleet Commander continued, “that to proceed with this operation would violate the spirit of the Council’s authorization. However, after careful review, I’ve discovered that it contains no specific reference to the attained level of the local sapients. In other words, the letter of the authorizing writ wouldn’t preclude our continuing. No doubt someone like the Barthonii or Liatu still might choose to make a formal stink afterwards, but consider the possible advantages.”

“Advantages, sir?” Ahzmer asked, and Thikair’s eyes gleamed.

“Oh, yes, Ship Commander,” he said softly. “This species may be bizarre in many ways, and they obviously don’t understand the realities of war, but clearly something about them has supported a phenomenal rate of advancement. I realize their actual capabilities would require a rather more . . . vigorous initial strike than we’d anticipated. And even with heavier pre-landing preparation, our casualties might well be somewhat higher than projected, but, fortunately, we have ample redundancy for dealing even with this sort of target, thanks to our follow-on objectives in Syk and Jormau. We have ample capability to conquer any planet-bound civilization, even if it has attained Level Two, and, to be honest, I think it would be very much worthwhile to concentrate on this system even if it means writing off the seizure of one—or even both—of the others.”

One or two of them looked as if they wanted to protest, but he flattened his ears, his voice even softer.

“I realize how that may sound, but think about this. Suppose we were able to integrate these people—these ‘humans’—into our labor force. Put them to work on our research projects. Suppose we were able to leverage their talent for that sort of thing to quietly push our own tech level to something significantly in advance of the rest of the Hegemony? How do you think that would ultimately affect the Emperor’s plans and schedule?”

The silence was just as complete, but it was totally different now, and he smiled thinly.

“It’s been three centuries—over five hundred of these people’s years—since the Hegemony’s first contact with them. If the Hegemony operates to its usual schedule, it will be at least two more centuries—almost four hundred local years—before any non-Shongairi observation team reaches this system again . . . and that will be counting from the point at which we return to announce our success. If we delay that return for a few decades, even as much as a century or so, it’s unlikely anyone would be particularly surprised, given that they expect us to be gathering in three entire star systems.” He snorted harshly. “In fact, it would probably amuse the weed-eaters to think we’d found the operation more difficult than anticipated! But if we chose instead to spend that time subjugating these “humans” and then educating their young to Hegemony standards, who knows what sort of R & D they might accomplish before that happens?”

“The prospect is exciting, sir,” Thairys said slowly. “Yet I fear it rests upon speculations whose accuracy can’t be tested without proceeding. If it should happen that they prove less accurate than hoped for, we would have, as you say, violated the spirit of the Council’s authorizing writ for little return. Personally, I believe you may well be correct and that the possibility should clearly be investigated. Yet if the result is less successful than we might wish, would we not risk exposing the Empire to retaliation from other members of the Hegemony?”

“A valid point,” Thikair acknowledged. “First, however, the Emperor would be able to insist—truthfully—that the decision was mine, not his, and that he never authorized anything of the sort. I believe it’s most probable the Hegemony Judiciary would settle for penalizing me, as an individual, rather than recommending retaliation against the Empire generally. Of course, it’s possible some of you, as my senior officers, might suffer, as well. On the other hand, I believe the risk would be well worth taking and would ultimately redound to the honor of our clans.

“There is, however, always another possibility. The Council won’t expect a Level Three or Level Two civilization any more than we did. If it turns out after a local century or so that these ‘humans’ aren’t working out, the simplest solution may well be to simply exterminate them and destroy enough of their cities and installations to conceal the level of technology they’d actually attained before our arrival. It would, of course, be dreadfully unfortunate if one of our carefully focused and limited bio-weapons somehow mutated into something which swept the entire surface of the planet with a lethal plague, but, as we all know,” he bared his canines in a smile, “accidents sometimes happen.”

IV

It was unfortunate international restrictions on the treatment of POWs didn’t also apply to what could be done to someone’s own personnel, Stephen Buchevsky reflected as he failed—again—to find a comfortable way to sit in the mil-spec “seat” in the big C-17 Globemaster’s Spartan belly. If he’d been a jihadi, he’d have spilled his guts within an hour if they strapped him into one of these!

Actually, he supposed a lot of the problem stemmed from his six feet and four inches of height and the fact that he was built more like an offensive lineman than like a basketball player. Nothing short of a first-class commercial seat was really going to fit someone his size, and expecting the U.S. military to fly an E-9 commercial first-class would have been about as realistic as his expecting to be drafted as a presidential nominee. Or perhaps even a bit less realistic. And, if he wanted to be honest, he should also admit that what he disliked even more was the absence of windows. There was something about spending hours sealed in an alloy tube while it vibrated its noisy way through the sky that made him feel not just enclosed, but trapped.

Well, Stevie, he told himself, if you’re that unhappy, you could always ask the pilot to let you off to swim the rest of the way!

The thought made him chuckle, and he checked his watch. Kandahar to Aviano, Italy, was roughly three thousand miles, which exceeded the C-17’s normal range by a couple of hundred miles. Fortunately—although that might not be exactly the right word for it—he’d caught a rare flight returning to the States almost empty. The Air Force needed the big bird badly somewhere, so they wanted it home in the shortest possible time, and with additional fuel and a payload of only thirty or forty people, it could make the entire Kandahar-to-Aviano leg without refueling. Which meant he could look forward to a six-hour flight, assuming they didn’t hit any unfavorable winds.

He would have preferred to make the trip with the rest of his people, but he’d ended up dealing with the final paperwork for the return of the Company’s equipment. Just another of those happy little chores that fell the way of its senior noncom. On the other hand, and despite the less-than-luxurious accommodations aboard his aerial chariot, his total transit time would be considerably shorter, thanks to this flight’s fortuitous availability. And one thing he’d learned to do during his years of service was to sleep anywhere, anytime.

Even here, he thought, squirming into what he could convince himself was a marginally more comfortable position and closing his eyes. Even here.

The sudden, violent turn to starboard yanked Buchevsky up out of his doze, and he started to shove himself upright in his uncomfortable seat as the turn became even steeper. The redoubled, rumbling whine from the big transport’s engines told him the pilot had increased power radically as well, and every one of his instincts told him he wouldn’t like the reason for all of that if he’d known what it was.

Which didn’t keep him from wanting to know anyway. In fact—

“Listen up, everybody!” A harsh, strain-flattened voice rasped over the aircraft’s intercom. “We’ve got a little problem, and we’re diverting from Aviano, ’cause Aviano isn’t there anymore.”

Buchevsky’s eyes widened. Surely whoever it was on the other end of the intercom had to be joking, his mind tried to insist. But he knew better. There was too much stark shock—and fear—in that voice.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” the pilot continued. “We’ve lost our long-ranged comms, but we’re getting reports on the civilian bands about low-yield nukes going off all over the goddamned place. From what we’re picking up, someone’s kicking the shit out of Italy, Austria, Spain, and every NATO base in the entire Med, and—”

The voice broke off for a moment, and Buchevsky heard the harsh sound of an explosively cleared throat. Then—

“And we’ve got an unconfirmed report that Washington is gone, people. Just fucking gone.”

Something kicked Buchevsky in the belly. Not Washington. Washington couldn’t be gone. Not with Trish and the girls—

“I don’t have a goddammed clue who’s doing this, or why,” the pilot said, “but we need someplace to set down, fast. We’re about eighty miles north-northwest of Podgorica, in Montenegro, so I’m diverting inland. Let’s hope to hell I can find someplace to put this bird down in one piece . . . and that nobody on the ground thinks we had anything to do with this shit!”

V

Thikair stood on Star of Empire’s flag bridge, studying the gigantic images of the planet below. Glowing icons indicated cities and major military bases his kinetic bombardment had removed from existence. There were a lot of them—more than he’d really counted on—and he clasped his hands behind him and concentrated on radiating total satisfaction.

And you damned well ought to be satisfied, Thikair. Taking down an entire Level Two civilization in less than two local days has to be some sort of galactic record!

Which, another little voice reminded him, was because doing anything of the sort directly violated the Hegemony Constitution.

He managed not to grimace, but it wasn’t easy. When this brilliant brainstorm had occurred to him, he hadn’t fully digested just how big and thoroughly inhabited this planet, this . . . “Earth” of the “humans,” truly was. He wondered now if he hadn’t let himself fully digest it because he’d known that if he had, he would have changed his mind.

Oh stop it! So there were more of them on the damned planet, and you killed—what? Two billion of them, wasn’t it? There’re plenty more where they came from—they breed like damned garshu, after all! And you told Ahzmer and the others you’re willing to kill off the entire species if it doesn’t work out. So fretting about a little extra breakage along the way is pretty pointless, wouldn’t you say?

Of course it was. In fact, he admitted, his biggest concern was how many major engineering works these humans had created. There was no question that he could exterminate them if he had to, but he was beginning to question whether it would be possible to eliminate the physical evidence of the level their culture had attained after all.

Well, we’ll just have to keep it from coming to that, won’t we?.

“Pass the word to Ground Commander Thairys,” he told Ship Commander Ahzmer quietly, never taking his eyes from those glowing icons. “I want his troops on the ground as quickly as possible. And make sure they have all the fire support they need.”

Steven Buchevsky stood by the road and wondered—again—just where the hell they were.

Their pilot hadn’t managed to find any friendly airfields, after all. He’d done his best, but all but out of fuel, with his communications out, the GPS network down, and kiloton-range explosions dotting the face of Europe, his options had been limited. He’d managed to find a stretch of two-lane road that would almost do, and he’d set the big plane down with his last few gallons of fuel.

The C-17 had been designed for rough-field landings, although its designers hadn’t had anything quite that rough in mind. Still, it would have worked if the road hadn’t crossed a culvert he hadn’t been able to see from the air. He’d lost both main gear when it collapsed under the plane’s 140-ton weight. Worse, he hadn’t lost the gear simultaneously, and the aircraft had gone totally out of control. When it stopped careening across the rough, mountainous valley, the entire forward fuselage had become crushed and tangled wreckage.

Neither pilot had survived, and the only other two officers aboard were among the six passengers who’d been killed, which left Buchevsky the ranking member of their small group. Two more passengers were brutally injured, and he’d gotten them out of the wreckage and into the best shelter he could contrive, but they didn’t have anything resembling a doctor.

Neither did they have much in the way of equipment. Buchevsky had his personal weapons, as did six of the others, but that was it, and none of them had very much ammunition. Not surprisingly, he supposed, since they weren’t supposed to have any on board. Fortunately (in this case, at least) it was extraordinarily difficult to separate troops returning from a combat zone from at least some ammo.

There were also at least some first-aid supplies—enough to set the broken arms three of the passengers suffered and make at least a token attempt at patching up the worst injured—but that was about it, and he really, really wished he could at least talk to somebody higher up the command hierarchy than he was. Unfortunately, he was it.

Which, he thought mordantly, at least it gives me something to keep me busy.

And it also gave him something besides Washington to worry about. He’d argued with Trish when his ex decided to take Shania and Yvonne to live with her mother, but that had been because of the crime rate and cost of living in D.C. He’d never, ever, worried about—

He pushed that thought aside, again, fleeing almost gratefully back to the contemplation of the clusterfuck he had to deal with somehow.

Gunnery Sergeant Calvin Meyers was their group’s second-ranking member, which made him Buchevsky’s XO . . . to the obvious disgruntlement of Sergeant Francisco Ramirez, the senior Army noncom. But if Ramirez resented the fact that they’d just become a Marine-run show, he was keeping his mouth shut. Probably because he recognized what an unmitigated pain in the ass Buchevsky’s job had just become.

They had a limited quantity of food, courtesy of the aircraft’s overwater survival package, but none of them had any idea of their exact position, no one spoke Serbian (assuming they were in Serbia), they had no maps, they were totally out of communication, and the last they’d heard, the entire planet seemed to be succumbing to spontaneous insanity.

Aside from that, it ought to be a piece of cake, he reflected sardonically. Of course—

“I think you’d better listen to this, Top,” a voice said, and Buchevsky turned toward the speaker.

“Listen to what, Gunny?”

“We’re getting something really weird on the radio, Top.”

Buchevsky’s eyes narrowed. He’d never actually met Meyers before this flight, but the compact, strongly built, slow-talking Marine from the Appalachian coal fields had struck him as a solid, unflappable sort. At the moment, however, Meyers was pasty-pale, and his hands shook as he extended the emergency radio they’d recovered from the wrecked fuselage.

Meyers turned the volume back up, and Buchevsky’s eyes narrowed even further. The voice coming from the radio sounded . . . mechanical. Artificial. It carried absolutely no emotions or tonal emphasis.

That was the first thing that struck him. Then he jerked back half a step, as if he’d just been punched, as what the voice was saying registered.

“—am Fleet Commander Thikair of the Shongairi Empire, and I am addressing your entire planet on all frequencies. Your world lies helpless before us. Our kinetic energy weapons have destroyed your major national capitals, your military bases, your warships. We can, and will, conduct additional kinetic strikes wherever necessary. You will submit and become productive and obedient subjects of the Empire, or you will be destroyed, as your governments and military forces have already been destroyed.”

Buchevsky stared at the radio, his mind cowering back from the black, bottomless pit that yawned suddenly where his family once had been. Trish. . . . Despite the divorce, she’d still been an almost physical part of him. And Shania . . . Yvonne. . . . Shannie was only six, for God’s sake! Yvonne was even younger. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t!

The mechanical-sounding English ceased. There was a brief surge of something that sounded like Chinese, and then it switched to Spanish.

“It’s saying the same thing it just said in English,” Sergeant Ramirez said flatly, and Buchevsky shook himself. He closed his eyes tightly, squeezing them against the tears he would not—could not—shed. That dreadful abyss loomed inside him, trying to suck him under, and part of him wanted nothing else in the world but to let the undertow take him. But he couldn’t. He had responsibilities. The job.

“Do you believe this shit, Top?” Meyers said hoarsely.

“I don’t know,” Buchevsky admitted. His own voice came out sounding broken and rusty, and he cleared his throat harshly. “I don’t know,” he managed in a more normal-sounding tone. “Or, at least, I know I don’t want to believe it, Gunny.”

“Me neither,” another voice said. This one was a soprano, and it belonged to Staff Sergeant Michelle Truman, the Air Force’s senior surviving representative. Buchevsky raised an eyebrow at her, grateful for the additional distraction from the pain trying to tear the heart right out of him, and the auburn-haired staff sergeant grimaced.

“I don’t want to believe it,” she said, “but think about it. We already knew somebody’s seemed to’ve been blowing the shit out of just about everybody. And who the hell had that many nukes?” She shook her head. “I’m no expert on kinetic weapons, but I’ve read a little science fiction, and I’d say an orbital kinetic strike would probably look just like a nuke to the naked eye. So, yeah, probably if this bastard is telling the truth, nukes are exactly what any survivors would’ve been reporting.”

“Oh, shit,” Meyers muttered, then looked back at Buchevsky. He didn’t say another word, but he didn’t have to, and Buchevsky drew a deep breath.

“I don’t know, Gunny,” he said again. “I just don’t know.”

He still didn’t know—not really—the next morning, but one thing they couldn’t do was simply huddle here. They’d seen no sign of any traffic along the road the C-17 had destroyed. Roads normally went somewhere, though, so if they followed this one long enough, “somewhere” was where they’d eventually wind up—hopefully before they ran out of food. And at least his decision trees had been rather brutally simplified when the last two badly injured passengers died during the night.

He tried hard not to feel grateful for that, but he was guiltily aware that it would have been dishonest, even if he’d managed to succeed.

Come on. You’re not grateful they’re dead, Stevie, he told himself grimly. You’re just grateful they won’t be slowing the rest of you down. There’s a difference.

He even knew it was true . . . which didn’t make him feel any better. And neither did the fact that he’d put his wife’s and daughters’ faces into a small mental box and locked them away, buried the pain deep enough to let him deal with his responsibilities to the living. Someday, he knew, he would have to reopen that box. Endure the pain, admit the loss. But not now. Not yet. For now he could tell himself others depended upon him, that he had to put aside his own pain while he dealt with their needs, and he wondered if that made him a coward.

“Ready to move out, Top,” Meyers’s voice said behind him, and he looked over his shoulder.

“All right,” he said out loud, trying hard to radiate the confidence he was far from feeling. “In that case, I guess we should be going.”

Now if I only had some damned idea where we’re going.

VI

Platoon Commander Yirku stood in the open hatch of his command ground effect vehicle as his armored platoon sped down the long, broad roadway that stabbed straight through the mountains. The bridges that crossed the main roadbed at intervals, especially as the platoon approached what were (or had been) towns or cities, forced his column to squeeze in on itself, but overall, Yirku was delighted. His tanks’ grav-cushions couldn’t care less what surface lay under them, but that didn’t protect their crews from seasickness if they had to move rapidly across rough ground, and he’d studied the survey reports with care. He’d rather glumly anticipated operating across wilderness terrain that might be crossed here and there by “roads” which were little more than random animal tracks.

Despite his relief at avoiding that unpleasantness, Yirku admitted (very privately) that he found these “humans’ ” infrastructure . . . unsettling. There was so much of it, especially in areas that had belonged to nations, like this “United States.” And, crude though its construction might appear, most of it was well laid out. The fact that they’d managed to construct so much of it, so well suited to their current technology level’s requirements, was sobering, too, and—

Platoon Leader Yirku’s thoughts broke off abruptly as he emerged from under the latest bridge and the fifteen-pound round from the M-136 light anti-armor weapon struck the side of his vehicle’s turret at a velocity of 360 feet per second. Its HEAT warhead produced a hyper-velocity gas jet that carved through the GEV’s light armor like an incandescent dagger, and the resultant internal explosion disemboweled the tank effortlessly.

Ten more rockets stabbed down into the embankment-enclosed cut of Interstate 81 almost simultaneously, and eight of them found their targets, exploding like thunderbolts. Each of them killed another GEV, and the humans who’d launched them had deliberately concentrated on the front and back edges of the platoon’s neat road column. Despite their grav-cushions, the four survivors of Yirku’s platoon were temporarily trapped behind the blazing, exploding carcasses of their fellows. They were still there when the next quartet of rockets came sizzling in.

The ambushers—a scratch-built pickup team of Tennessee National Guardsmen, all of them veterans of deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan—were on the move, filtering back into the trees almost before the final Shongairi tank had exploded.

Company Commander Kirtha’s column of transports rumbled along in a hanging cloud of dust, which made him grateful his GEV command vehicle was hermetically sealed. Now if only he’d been assigned to one of the major bases on the continent called “America,” or at least the western fringes of this one!

It wouldn’t be so bad if they were all grav-cushion, he told himself, watching the wheeled vehicles through the smothering fog of dust. But GEVs were expensive, and the counter-grav generators used up precious internal volume not even troop carriers could afford to give away. Imperial wheeled vehicles had excellent off-road capability, but even a miserable so-called road like this one allowed them to move much more efficiently.

And at least we’re out in the middle of nice, flat ground as far as the eye can see, Kirtha reminded himself. He didn’t like the rumors about ambushes on isolated detachments. That wasn’t supposed to happen, especially from someone as effortlessly and utterly defeated as these “humans” had been. And even if it did happen, it wasn’t supposed to be effective. And the ones responsible for it were supposed to be destroyed.

Which, if the rumors were accurate, wasn’t happening the way it was supposed to. Some of the attackers were being spotted and destroyed, but with Hegemony technology, all of them should have been wiped out, and they weren’t being. Still, there were no convenient mountainsides or thick belts of forest to hide attackers out here in the midst of these endless, flat fields of grain, and—

Captain Pieter Stefanovich Ushakov of the Ukrainian Army watched through his binoculars with pitiless satisfaction as the entire alien convoy and its escort of tanks disappeared in a fiery wave of destruction two kilometers long. The scores of 120 mm mortar rounds buried in the road as his own version of the “improvised explosive devices,” which had given the Americans such grief in Iraq, had proved quite successful, he thought coldly.

Now, he thought, to see exactly how these weasels respond.

He was fully aware of the risks in remaining in the vicinity, but he needed some understanding of the aliens’ capabilities and doctrine, and the only way to get that was to see what they did. He was confident he’d piled enough earth on top of his position to conceal any thermal signature, and he was completely unarmed, with no ferrous metal on his person, which would hopefully defeat any magnetic detectors. So unless they used some sort of deep-scan radar, he ought to be relatively safe from detection.

And even if it turned out he wasn’t, his entire family had been in Kiev when the kinetic strikes hit.

Colonel Nicolae Basescu sat in the commander’s hatch of his T-72M1, his mind wrapped around a curiously empty, singing silence, and waited.

The first prototype of his tank—the export model of the Russian T-72A—had been completed in 1970, four years before Basescu’s own birth, and it had become sadly outclassed by more modern, more deadly designs. It was still superior to the Romanian Army’s home-built TR-85s, based on the even more venerable T-55, but that wasn’t saying much compared with designs like the Russians’ T-80s and T-90s, or the Americans’ M1A2.

And it’s certainly not saying much compared with aliens who can actually travel between the stars, Basescu thought.

Unfortunately, it was all he had. Now if he only knew what he was supposed to be doing with the seven tanks of his scraped-up command.

Stop that, he told himself sternly. You’re an officer of the Romanian Army. You know exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

He gazed through the opening a few minutes’ work with an ax had created. His tanks were as carefully concealed as he could manage inside the industrial buildings across the frontage road from the hundred-meter-wide Mure River. The two lanes of the E-81 highway crossed the river on a double-span cantilever bridge, flanked on the east by a rail bridge, two kilometers southwest of Alba iulia, the capital of Alba jude. The city of eighty thousand—the city where Michael the Brave had achieved the first union of the three great provinces of Romania in 1599—was two-thirds empty, and Basescu didn’t like to think about what those fleeing civilians were going to do when they started running out of whatever supplies they’d managed to snatch up in their flight. But he didn’t blame them for running. Not when their city was barely 270 kilometers northwest of where Bucharest had been four and a half days ago.

He wished he dared to use his radios, but the broadcasts from the alien commander suggested that any transmissions would be unwise. Fortunately, at least some of the land lines were still up. He doubted they would be for much longer, but enough remained for him to know about the alien column speeding up the highway toward him . . . and Alba iulia.

Company Commander Barmit punched up his navigation systems, but they were being cantankerous again, and he muttered a quiet yet heartfelt curse as he jabbed at the control panel a second time.

As far as he was concerned, the town ahead of him was scarcely large enough to merit the attention of two entire companies of infantry, even if Base Commander Shairez’s pre-bombardment analysis had identified it as some sort of administrative subcenter. Its proximity to what had been a national capital suggested to Barmit’s superiors that it had probably been sufficiently important to prove useful as a headquarters for the local occupation forces. Personally, Barmit suspected the reverse was more likely true. An administrative center this close to something the size of that other city—“Bucharest,” or something equally outlandish—was more likely to be lost in the capital’s shadow than functioning as any sort of important secondary brain.

Too bad Ground Force Commander Thairys didn’t ask for my opinion, he thought dryly, still jabbing at the recalcitrant display.

The imagery finally came up and stabilized, and his ears flicked in a grimace as it confirmed his memory. He keyed his com.

“All right,” he said. “We’re coming up on another river, and our objective’s just beyond that. We’ll take the bridge in a standard road column, but let’s not take chances. Red Section, you spread left. White section, we’ll spread right.”

Acknowledgments came back, and he reconfigured the display from navigation to tactical.

Colonel Basescu twitched upright as the alien vehicles came into sight. He focused his binoculars, snapping the approaching vehicles into much sharper clarity, and a part of him was almost disappointed by how unremarkable they appeared. How . . . mundane.

Most of them were some sort of wheeled transport vehicles, with a boxy sort of look that made him think of armored personnel carriers. There were around thirty of those, and it was obvious they were being escorted by five other vehicles.

He shifted his attention to those escorts and stiffened as he realized just how un-mundane they were. They sped along, sleek-looking and dark, hovering perhaps a meter or two above the ground, and some sort of long, slender gunbarrels projected from their boxy-looking turrets.

The approaching formation slowed as the things that were probably APCs began forming into a column of twos under the watchful eye of the things that were probably tanks, and he lowered the binoculars and picked up the handset for the field telephone he’d had strung between the tanks once they’d maneuvered into their hides.

“Mihai,” he told his second section commander, “we’ll take the tanks. Radu, I want you and Matthius to concentrate on the transports. Don’t fire until Mihai and I do—then try to jam them up on the bridge.”

Barmit felt his ears relaxing in satisfaction as the wheeled vehicles settled into column and his GEVs headed across the river, watching its flanks. The drop from the roadbed to the surface of the water had provided the usual “stomach left behind” sensation, but once they were actually out over the water, its motion became glassy-smooth as he led White Section’s other two GEVs between the small islands in the center of the river, idling along to keep pace with the transports.

They may have magic tanks, but they don’t have very good doctrine, do they? a corner of Basescu’s brain reflected. They hadn’t so much as bothered to send any scouts across, or even to leave one of their tanks on the far bank in an overwatch position. Not that he intended to complain.

The tank turret slewed slowly to the right as his gunner tracked his chosen target, but Basescu was watching the wheeled vehicles. The entire bridge was barely 150 meters long, and he wanted all of them actually onto it, if he could arrange it.

Company Commander Barmit sighed as his GEV approached the far bank. Climbing up out of the riverbed again was going to be rather less pleasant, and he slowed deliberately, prolonging the smoothness as he watched the transports heading across the bridge.

Kind of the “humans” to build us all these nice highways, he reflected, thinking about this region’s heavily forested mountains. It would be a real pain to—

“Fire!” Nicolae Basescu barked, and Company Commander Barmit’s ruminations were terminated abruptly by the arrival of a nineteen-kilogram 3BK29 HEAT round capable of penetrating three hundred millimeters of armor at a range of two kilometers.

Basescu felt a stab of exhilaration as the tank bucked, the outer wall of its concealing building disappeared in the fierce muzzle blast of its 2A46 120 mm main gun, and his target exploded. Three of the other four escort tanks were first-round kills, as well, crashing into the river in eruptions of fire, white spray, and smoke, and the stub of the semi-combustible cartridge case ejected from the gun. The automatic loader’s carousel picked up the next round, feeding the separate projectile and cartridge into the breech, and his carefully briefed commanders were engaging targets without any additional orders from him.

The surviving alien tank swerved crazily sideways, turret swiveling madly, and then Basescu winced as it fired.

He didn’t know what it was armed with, but it wasn’t like any cannon he’d ever seen. A bar of solid light spat from the end of its “gun,” and the building concealing his number three tank exploded. But even as the alien tank fired, two more 120 mm rounds slammed into it almost simultaneously.

It died as spectacularly as its fellows had, and Radu and Matthias hadn’t exactly been sitting on their hands. They’d done exactly what he wanted, nailing both the leading and rearmost of the wheeled transports only after they were well out onto the bridge. The others were trapped there, sitting ducks, unable to maneuver, and his surviving tanks walked their fire steadily along their column.

At least some of the aliens managed to bail out of their vehicles, but it was less than three hundred meters to the far side of the river and the coaxial 7.62 mm machine guns and the heavier 12.7 mm cupola-mounted weapons at the tank commanders’ stations were waiting for them. At such short range, it was a massacre.

“Cease fire!” Basescu barked. “Fall back!”

His crews responded almost instantly, and the tanks’ powerful V-12 engines snorted black smoke as the T-72s backed out of their hiding places and sped down the highway at sixty kilometers per hour. What the aliens had already accomplished with their “kinetic weapons” suggested that staying in one place would be a very bad idea, and Basescu had picked out his next fighting position before he ever settled into this one. It would take them barely fifteen minutes to reach it, and only another fifteen to twenty minutes to maneuver the tanks back into hiding.

Precisely seventeen minutes later, incandescent streaks of light came sizzling out of the cloudless heavens to eliminate every one of Nicolae Basescu’s tanks—and half the city of Alba iulia—in a blast of fury that shook the Carpathian Mountains.

VII

Stephen Buchevsky felt his body trying to ooze out even flatter as the grinding, tooth-rattling vibration grew louder on the far side of the ridgeline. The AKM he’d acquired to replace the his M-16 still felt awkward, but it was a solidly built weapon, with all the rugged reliability of its AK-47 ancestry, ammunition for it was readily available . . . and it felt unspeakably comforting at that particular moment.

His attention remained fixed on the “sound” of the alien recon drone, but a corner of his mind went wandering back over the last three weeks.

The C-17’s pilot had gotten farther east than Buchevsky had thought. They hadn’t known they were in Romania, not Serbia, for a day or two—not until they came across the remains of a couple of platoons of Romanian infantry which had been caught in column on a road. Their uniforms and insignia had identified their nationality, and most of them had been killed by what looked like standard bullet wounds. But there’d also been a handful of craters with oddly glassy interiors from obviously heavier weapons.

The Romanians’ disaster had, however, represented unlooked-for good fortune for Buchevsky’s ill-assorted command. There’d been plenty of personal weapons to salvage, as well as hand grenades, more man-portable antitank weapons and SAMs—the SA-14 “Gremlin” variant—than they could possibly carry, even canteens and some rations. Buchevsky had hated to give up his M-16, but although Romania had joined NATO, it still used mainly Societ bloc equipment. There wouldn’t be any 5.56 mm ammunition floating around Romania, but 7.62 mm was abundantly available.

That was the good news. The bad news was that there’d clearly been a major exodus from most of the towns and cities following the aliens’ ruthless bombardment. They’d spotted several large groups—hundreds of people, in some cases. Most of them had been accompanied by at least some armed men, and they hadn’t been inclined to take chances. Probably most of them were already aware of how ugly it was going to get when their particular group of civilians’ supplies started running out, and whatever else they might have been thinking, none of them had been happy to see thirty-three strangers in desert-camo.

Foreign desert-camo.

A few warning shots had been fired, one of which had nicked PFC Lyman Curry, and Buchevsky had taken the hint. Still, he had to at least find someplace where his own people could establish a modicum of security while they went about the day-to-day business of surviving.

Which was what he’d been hunting for today, moving through the thickly wooded mountains, staying well upslope from the roads running through the valleys despite the harder going. Some of his people, including Sergeant Ramirez, had been inclined to bitch about that at first. Buchevsky didn’t really mind if they complained about it as long as they did it, however, and even the strongest objections had disappeared quickly when they realized just how important overhead concealment was.

From the behavior of the odd, dark-colored flying objects, Buchevsky figured they were something like the U.S. military’s Predators—small unmanned aircraft used for reconnaissance. What he didn’t know was whether or not they were armed. Nor did he have any idea whether or not their salvaged shoulder-fired SAMs would work against them, and he had no pressing desire to explore either possibility unless it was absolutely a matter of life or death.

Fortunately, although the odd-looking vehicles were quick and agile, they weren’t the least bit stealthily. Whatever propelled them produced a heavy, persistent, tooth-grating vibration. That wasn’t really the right word for it, and he knew it, but he couldn’t come up with another one for a sensation that was felt, not heard. And Whatever it was, it was detectable from beyond visual range.

He’d discussed it with Staff Sergeant Truman and PO/3 Jasmine Sherman, their sole Navy noncom. Truman was an electronics specialist, and Sherman wore the guided missile and electronic wave rating mark of a missile technician. Between them, they formed what Buchevsky thought of as his “brain trust,” but neither woman had a clue what the aliens used for propulsion. What they did agree on was that humans were probably more sensitive to the “vibration” it produced than the aliens were, since it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense to produce a reconnaissance platform they knew people could hear before it could see them.

Buchevsky wasn’t going to bet the farm on the belief that his people could “hear” the drones before the drones could see them, however. Which was why he’d waved his entire group to ground when the telltale vibration came burring through his fillings from the ridgeline to his immediate north. Now if only—

That was when he heard the firing and the screams.

It shouldn’t have mattered. His responsibility was to his own people. To keeping them alive until he got them home . . . assuming there was any “home” for them. But when he heard the shouts, when he heard the screams—when he recognized the shrieks of children—he found himself back on his feet. He turned his head, saw Calvin Meyers watching him, and then he swung his hand in a wide arc and pointed to the right.

A dozen of his people stayed right where they were—not out of cowardice, but because they were too confused and surprised by his sudden change of plans to realize what he was doing—and he didn’t blame them. Even as he started forward, he knew it was insane. Less than half his people had any actual combat experience, and five of them had been tankers, not infantry. No wonder they didn’t understand what he was doing!

Meyer understood, though, and so had Ramirez—even if he was an Army puke—and Lance Corporal Gutierrez, and Coporal Alice Macomb, and half a dozen others, and they followed him in a crouching run.

Squad Commander Rayzhar bared his canines as his troopers advanced up the valley. He’d been on this accursed planet for less than seven local days, and already he’d come to hate its inhabitants as he’d never hated before in his life. They had no sense of decency, no sense of honor! They’d been defeated, Dainthar take them! The Shongairi had proved they were the mightier, yet instead of submitting and acknowledging their inferiority, they persisted in their insane attacks!

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.

He really had no business making this attack, but the recon drone slaved to his command transport had shown him this ragged band cowering in the mountainside cul-de-sac. There were no more than fifty or sixty of them, but a half 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—and he expected no questions when he reported that 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.

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 under 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.

David Weber

Out of the Dark

I

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VI

VII