Out of the Dark (17 page)

Nevertheless, after what had happened to the 9th Transport Group, she’d undertaken a priority search for any references to the “F-22s” which the human Internet reports credited with its destruction. She’d copied the pertinent information to Thikair, and despite himself, he’d been shaken by some of the implications as he’d studied the aircraft’s claimed capabilities. He wasn’t certain he believed some of them even now. What had happened to his shuttles suggested he should take it seriously, however, and that was an . . . unpleasant possibility to contemplate. It was one thing to know the humans were effectively a Class Two civilization. It was quite another thing, he’d discovered, to recognize some of the nastier possibilities that raised.

The truth is,
he thought,
we’ve never fought anyone with a Class Two tech base. Not even amongst ourselves, before we joined the Hegemony. We were only a Class Three—well, maybe a Class 3.5—by the time we unified the planet under Emperor Ramarth. And all of our research since we joined the Hegemony has really been centered on
naval
weaponry. After all, once you control a planet’s orbitals, who cares what they’ve got on the dirt below you? Either the planetary government surrenders, or you drop KEWs on it until it does. That’s the way it has to be, right?

That had always been the assumption, at any rate. And not just for the Shongairi. The Garm and the Howsanth, two of the Hegemony’s more belligerent omnivores, had fought three wars over the past four thousand standard years, and that was the way it had always worked out for them, as well. Certainly no one had wasted any time and effort designing heavy combat equipment to use at the bottom of a gravity well!

But when you and all of your opponents are trapped at the bottom of that same gravity well, you don’t have a lot of choice, do you?
he reflected.
So it’s probably no wonder these creatures’ military technology is better than any other Class Two civilization we’ve ever encountered. It’s still not good enough—it can’t be, in the long run—but they
have
demonstrated that under exactly the wrong circumstances, they can hurt us badly
.

He managed not to grimace at the thought, but it wasn’t easy. When his brilliant notion occurred to him, he hadn’t fully digested just how big and thoroughly inhabited this planet, this . . . “Earth” truly was. Again, it was a factor of technology. None of the other planets the Empire had assimilated had possessed the technological capability to simply
feed
this many people. Nor, for that matter, the medical technology to keep them alive in such preposterous numbers. The most densely populated planet previously conquered by the Shongairi had boasted no more than five hundred million sentients, which was barely forty percent more than the population of this world’s “United States” alone . . . and less than half the
individual
populations of the nation-states of “India” and “China.” The notion that there really were
billions
of them down there was something he’d discovered he hadn’t truly grasped even while he threw it around in planning sessions with his staff. Nor had he really considered the difficulty in getting the local authorities to submit in some sort of timely fashion when there were so Dainthar-damned many different nation-states and each of them had its own government!

He wondered now if he hadn’t allowed himself to 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 than you’d figured on. And so you’ve already killed—what? Two billion of them, wasn’t it? And given the fact that their technology seems to have been a little better than you allowed for, you may well end up having to kill a few more of them, as well. So what’s the problem? There’re plenty more where
they
came from—according to their own statistics, they breed like damned
garshu
! 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 doubt 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 Force Commander Thairys,” he told Ship Commander Ahzmer quietly, never taking his eyes from those glowing icons. “Expedite his landings. I want his troops on the ground as quickly as possible, especially around the ground base sites. And make sure they have all the fire support they need.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And tell Ground Base Commander Shairez I want her to pull together a more complete précis on the military technology of this ‘United States.’ I know she’s buried under a mountain of data at the moment, but if what happened to the Ninth Transport Group is any indication, we may have to pay a little more attention to making certain that particular
hasthar
’s completely dead before we move on to other priorities.”

•  •  •  •  •

“So what do you make of it?” Dave Dvorak asked quietly, looking over his brother-in-law’s shoulder.

The two of them stood behind Sharon Dvorak’s chair as she sat at her computer keyboard, and all three of them were watching the YouTube video streaming on her flat screen. It had been posted by someone who claimed to be a US Navy rear admiral, and it was pretty spectacular stuff, a skillfully edited montage of footage from orbital surveillance systems and the gun cameras (or whatever the hell they were called these days) of US Air Force fighters.

“Looks to me like this squid—Robinson—is right,” Rob Wilson said grimly. “Trust me, those fuckers”—a blunt index finger tapped the image of a flaming Starlander shuttle—“didn’t come out of any air force
I
ever heard of! Just look at the size of the bastards—they’re big as goddamned
missile cruisers
!” He shook his head. “Uh-uh. I think he’s right. They’ve gotta come from someplace else, and I don’t have any better idea about ‘someplace else’ than he’s serving up.”

“I think he’s right, Dave,” Sharon said quietly, and managed to give her husband a grin when she looked up over her shoulder at him. “Besides, you’re the big science-fiction reader. You ought to be jumping right on top of this!”

“Somebody once said that an ‘adventure’ was someone
else
being cold, hungry, tired, and scared far, far away from
you,
” Dvorak replied wryly. “At the moment, I’m feeling a little too close to this to be very adventurous. In fact,” he met her eyes levelly, then looked at his brother-in-law, “I’m scared to death.”

“You think maybe the rest of us aren’t?” Sharon asked gently, reaching one hand up to him. He caught it and held it, then looked back at the flat screen as the video played itself out again.

There was plenty of panicky confusion, desperation, and (inevitably) conspiracy-mongering paranoia on the net, but there was a lot of what looked like solid information still coming in, as well, and he was glad Sharon was monitoring it. On the other hand, he had to wonder just how thoroughly the Internet had been penetrated. It would have been the best way to keep track of what humanity was telling itself . . . and to insert things Earth’s attackers
wanted
humanity to know or believe were true. That kind of information warfare would have been his very first priority if
he’d
been setting out to invade a planet, and he had to assume the other side was at least as smart as he was. In fact, he’d damned well better assume they were a hell of a lot
smarter
than he was!

The good news was that, for the moment at least, his family was probably as safe as anyone on the entire globe. The sprawling old cabin on the back side of Cold Mountain, above the headwaters of Little Green Creek in Jackson County, North Carolina, was in the Nantahala National Forest. It had been built (and then added onto . . . repeatedly) in the 1890s by one of Sharon and Rob’s more peculiar—and reclusive—great-great-granduncles, and it had remained in the family ever since. It was less than a mile from the nearest road (although, in Dvorak’s opinion, calling Cold Mountain Road a “road” was a bit of a stretch), but its mile and a half or so of twisting “driveway” was hardly inviting—a narrow ribbon of dirt with occasional patches of gravel and other patches of bare bedrock that threaded its way under the interlaced branches of overhanging trees while it climbed over sixteen hundred feet to cross the saddle between Cold Mountain and Panthertail Mountain. Even knowing exactly where it was, he’d never been able to find it on Google Earth even at maximum zoom, and the cabin itself was almost equally invisible.

The family had been coming up to the cabin summers ever since Rob and Sharon had been teenagers, although no one had actually lived in it year round for at least fifty years. Describing its amenities as “primitive” would have constituted aggravated assault on a perfectly serviceable adjective, but that hadn’t been a problem, since the family expeditions had been more in the nature of camping trips than anything else.

There’d always been a risk of vandalism, of course, but there was little traffic in that particular part of the national forest, aside from a handful of
hard-core hikers, and most hikers and hunters were actually pretty considerate of other people’s property. More recently, one of the Wilsons’ cousins who was a National Park Service ranger had accrued enough seniority to request—and get—assignment to the Highlands Ranger District a few years back. He’d kept an eye on the place for them since then . . . and especially over the last three years.

That was when Dvorak and Wilson (who, according to at least some of their friends, were both politically somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, although
possibly
still to the left of Genghis Khan) had decided to take Homeland Security’s advice to organize their own plan in case of a national disaster or major terrorist incident. The Chicago subway attack, which had killed three of Dvorak’s cousins, had helped the notion gel.

So they’d decided to turn the cabin into their bolthole. It was certainly big enough, since Old Mountain Man Wilson had been the father of a sizable brood. In fact, there were proud-of-his-oddities-though-we’d-never-admit-it family rumors that one reason he’d lived so far back in the hills was to avoid neighbors who might have figured out he was a bigamist . . . and that most of the add-ons to the original structure had been for additional wives. Of course, there had been that lack of amenities and modern conveniences, but they’d been talking about remodeling the cabin to modernize it and make it more comfortable for over ten years. Once they finally decided to think in terms of refuges rather than vacations, that talk had turned into action. In fact, Dvorak had to admit, the two of them had gotten carried away and put far more effort (and money) into the “renovations” than they’d ever really intended to.

His loving wife
had
occasionally accused him of being OCD. At times, he was forced to concede she might actually have a point.

The old stone-and-log cabin had been completely reroofed (and
that
had been a nightmare project for just the two of them and Alec), thoroughly weatherproofed, insulated, and sheetrocked. They’d also considered other requirements, like water and electricity. Fortunately, the headwaters of Little Green Creek lay on the cabin property, so (with Alec once more “volunteered” to assist), they’d built themselves a solid masonry dam to impound a reservoir that was over twelve feet deep at the deepest point. Designing a dam that ambitious had turned out to be more than either of them could handle, but they’d discussed the problem with a friend of theirs who happened to be a licensed (although retired) civil engineer. He’d very carefully failed to ask them about little things like permits, and they hadn’t
officially paid him a thing for his “suggestions” (accompanied by detailed blueprints) . . . although he’d wound up, somehow, with a life membership and free shooting privileges in the indoor range.

There hadn’t been any tearing rush to fill their new holding pond overnight, so they’d installed a base-mounted sluice in the form of four large-diameter, independently valved pipes. The stream’s normal outflow would have driven three of those pipes at full capacity; at high levels after heavy rains, all four of them together couldn’t have carried the full flow, of course, which was why their engineer friend had also included a standard overflow sluice plus a “hundred-year storm” emergency sluice. But leaving two pipes open and two pipes closed had allowed them to gradually fill their reservoir without seriously impacting the stream’s flow to join the Tuckasegee River roughly one mile downstream.

By that time, they’d been seriously bitten by the “Gee! Wonder how we can make it even better?” bug, and their various children had been urging them on gleefully, since they regarded the entire pond as their own personal, private (and very,
very
cold) swimming hole. So they’d installed two separate but parallel PVC penstocks to deliver water to a pair of in-line Francis turbines, each coupled to an independent generator. The creek fell over six hundred feet in its run to the Tuckasegee, and the penstocks extended in a straight line for almost five hundred feet down its steep bed from their intakes, two feet below the top of the dam. That gave them a total vertical fall of just over eighty feet to the powerhouse, where each seven-horsepower turbine drove a separate micro-generator before the water was returned to the streambed. Water flow in the stream was generally constant and reliable, and each generator produced around a hundred and twenty kilowatt hours daily. Even one of them would have been a pretty serious case of overkill for a single household, but that only meant they could let one generator stand idle at any given moment. Besides, it was always better to realize you had more power than you
wanted
rather than discovering you had less power than you
needed,
and both of them figured redundancy was a beautiful thing.