Out of the Dark (19 page)

“Absolutely. But you know, whoever these bastards are, they aren’t Superman. Hell, they’re not even Clark Kent! Look what the Air Force did to those transports, or shuttles, or whatever. Their technology’s obviously better than ours, or they wouldn’t be here, but how
much
better is it? Judging by Robinson’s YouTube post, we’re at least in shouting range.”

“Except for the fact that they can drop those fucking rocks on our heads and we
can’t
drop rocks on theirs,” Wilson growled.

“Agreed. But I’ve got to wonder what their logistics look like.” Both of Wilson’s eyebrows rose, and Dvorak snorted. “Hey,
you
were the Marine, so think about it. Is this Eisenhower getting ready to invade Normandy? Or Holland Smith and Marc Mitscher invading Iwo Jima? Or is it just Cortés going after the Aztecs on a frigging shoestring? From what we’re seeing over the Internet, they seem to be landing in a fairly small number of spots, and they have to have lost a bunch of people and equipment when all those transports went down. How much manpower can they actually have if they’ve come all the way from another star system? Do they have millions of troops stacked up in cryogenic sleep like cordwood? Or do they have only a few hundred thousand? Maybe even less?”

“However many they’ve got, they’ve still got the rock-droppers, too,” Wilson said.

“Agreed,” Dvorak repeated with a nod. “I’m only saying that if their technology isn’t
that
much better than ours, and if they don’t have one hell of a lot of manpower up there in orbit, then they’re probably going to find out that an entire planet’s a damned big mouthful.”

There was an ugly light in his eyes, and Sharon looked up quickly.

“David Dvorak—!” she began.

“Oh, don’t worry, honey.” He patted her on the shoulder. “Rob and I didn’t put all that time into Operation Hidey Hole just so we could do something stupid. We’re not going to forget about the kids, either.” He shrugged.
“For that matter, we’re probably about as thoroughly out of their way as anybody could get right at the moment. And if it’s all the same with you, I think we’ll just stay there.”

“Damned right it’s ‘all the same’ to me!”

“I know. But I’m willing to bet you it’s not going to be very long at all before these people—or whatever they are—run into somebody who
is
prepared to do something stupid. Somebody who just doesn’t care anymore, for example. And when that happens, I don’t think they’ll enjoy the experience.”

Stephen Buchevsky stood by the road and wondered—again—just what the hell to do next.

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 and high-kiloton-range explosions dotting the face of Europe (and after dodging warning shots from an ancient Yugoslav Air Force MIG-21 which seemed convinced
his
aircraft had had something to do with the general mayhem), his options had been limited. He’d tried to make it into Romanian airspace—he’d actually managed to establish contact with the Romanian Air Force helicopter base at Caransebes and been cleared for approach—but he’d run out of time and gas. Despite the unpromising terrain over which he’d found himself when the tanks finally ran dry, he’d managed to find a stretch of 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, but its designers hadn’t had anything quite that rough in mind. Worse, The Book called for a minimum thirty-five-hundred-foot runway, and he hadn’t had anywhere near that much space to work with. At least the aircraft had been about as light as it was going to get, having burned off so much fuel, and he’d thrown all four F117-PW-100 turbofans into full reverse thrust. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been enough. Buchevsky thought it might still have worked if the road hadn’t crossed a culvert the pilot hadn’t been able to see from the air. He’d lost both main gear when it collapsed under the plane’s hundred-and-forty-ton weight. Worse, he hadn’t lost the gear simultaneously, and the sudden, asymmetrical drag had thrown the aircraft totally out of control. It had crashed down on its belly, then spun madly as it left the road and plowed into heavy tree cover like some sort of demented Frisbee. When it had finally stopped careening through the trees, both wings were gone and the entire forward third of its fuselage had been crushed and tangled wreckage.

At least it hadn’t burned or exploded, but 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 into the best shelter he could contrive, but they didn’t have anything resembling a doctor.

Nor 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 had
any
onboard the aircraft. 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 had 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 gives me something to keep me busy
.

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

He touched his chest, feeling the silver cross against his skin, under his tee-shirt. The cross a proud Shania had given him last Christmas, engraved with his initials plus her own and her younger sister’s. She’d bought it with her very own money (though he suspected his father, who’d helped her find it, had understated the price to her just a bit when he placed the order for her and arranged the engraving), and she’d solemnly promised him that it would keep him safe and bring him back to them.

Safe. She’d wanted to keep
him
safe, but when she’d really needed him, when it had been his job to keep
her
safe—

He pushed that thought aside yet again, just as he pushed aside thoughts of a small Methodist rectory in South Carolina, fleeing almost gratefully back to the contemplation of the cluster-fuck 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 over-water survival package, but none of them had any idea of their position. Or, rather, they knew exactly where they were, thanks to his Marine-issue DAGR handheld GPS—they just didn’t have any idea of what that meant in terms of the local geography.

Or in terms of the local population . . . if any.

Their latitude and longitude put them just on the Serbian side of the Romanian border, and a bit over ten miles southwest of the Danube. The area was mountainous and heavily forested, although the road threaded through occasional cleared sections—like this one—where farmland stretched for a hundred yards or so on either side. But either there weren’t very many civilians in the area or else the locals had decided that with nuclear weapons dropping all over the landscape it might be wiser to keep their heads down and stay away from any crashed aircraft.

There were two farmhouses within five miles of their location, but there’d been no sign of any inhabitants when Meyers took a two-man team to look for help for their injured. Buchevsky suspected the farm families had taken themselves elsewhere when obviously foreign military personnel arrived on their doorsteps. Given what had just happened, he couldn’t really blame them. In fact, he’d just about come to the conclusion that avoiding contact with the locals would probably be a pretty good idea from his perspective, as well. At least until things had settled down and he—and, hopefully, they—had been able to figure out what the hell was happening.

People in this neck of the woods probably aren’t feeling all that friendly towards the good old United States of America, anyway, in light of little things like their relations with Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republic of Croatia,
he reflected.
And even if they were, they’d have to be suspicious as hell if foreigners come waltzing onto their land at a moment like this. Not to mention the fact that the first thing that’s going to occur to a lot of them is that they’re likely to be inundated by hungry people. The notion of having hungry soldiers—especially hungry
foreign
soldiers—“requisitioning” what they have isn’t going to appeal to them, and they might just figure that shooting first and using their visitors for really good fertilizer later would be the best way to avoid any unpleasantness
.

But even assuming that kind of caution might be a good idea, what did it mean for his two really badly injured survivors? One thing they couldn’t do was move them—not without a medevac, and the chance of getting a helicopter in here to pick them up was nonexistent. If they could find someone who could call them an ambulance, or at least provide
some
sort of vehicle, or just call the local country doctor, it might mean those people would survive after all. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t, either. Buchevsky had seen a lot of badly wounded people over the years, and neither of their seriously injured people looked like they were going to make it. One of them had a brutal head injury—the entire right side of her skull was depressed and . . . spongy feeling—while the other obviously had major internal bleeding. Neither of them was conscious, for which Buchevsky could only be grateful, given the nature of their injuries.

In the meantime, he had to decide what to do in light of the fact that not one of them spoke Serbian, they were totally out of communication with anyone, and the last they’d heard, the entire planet seemed to be succumbing to spontaneous insanity.

So where’s the problem?
he asked himself sardonically.
Hell, it ought to be a piece of cake for a hardened senior Marine noncom such as yourself! Of course
—

“I think you’d better listen to this, Top,” a voice said, and Buchevsky turned towards 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 sandy-haired, compact, strongly built, slow-talking Marine from the Appalachian coalfields 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 farther. 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 Shongair 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, and your warships. We can, and will, conduct additional
kinetic strikes wherever necessary. You will now 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 which yawned suddenly where his family once had been as the mechanical voice confirmed what he’d desperately told himself was no more than a rumor. His intellect had known better, yet his emotions had refused to accept that Washington was truly gone. But now—

Trish . . . despite the divorce, she’d still been an almost physical part of him. And Shania . . . Yvonne. . . . Shannie was only eight, for God’s sake! Yvonne was only
five!
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 realized his hand was pressed almost convulsively against his chest, against Shania’s cross, and he closed his eyes tightly, squeezing them against the tears he would not—could not—shed. That dreadful abyss yawned inside him, trying to suck him under, and part of him wanted nothing else in the world but to let the undertow take him. Yet he couldn’t. He had responsibilities. The job.

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