Out of the Dark (20 page)

“I don’t know.” Buchevsky’s own voice came out sounding broken and rusty, and he made himself lower his hand, opened his eyes upon a suddenly hateful world. Then 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, Top,” she said, “but think about it. We already knew somebody seems to’ve been blowing the shit out of just about everybody, and who the hell had that many nukes? Or enough delivery vehicles to hit that many targets?” She shook her head. “I’m no expert on kinetic weapons, either, 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 traffic along the road the C-17 had destroyed, and so far as they could tell, neither of the local farm families had returned home overnight. Roads normally went somewhere, though, so if they followed this one long enough, “somewhere” was where they’d eventually wind up. On the other hand, there was that little uncertainty factor where getting embroiled with the local civilians was concerned.

At least his decision tree had been rather brutally simplified in one respect when both the badly injured passengers died during the night. He’d tried hard not to feel grateful for that, but he was guiltily aware that it would have been dishonest of him, 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, along with his desperate worry about his parents, 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 this wasn’t someday. 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.

In the meantime, he’d simply dug two more graves and recited as much of the funeral service as he could remember.

Now he stood in the coolness just before dawn, rifle slung, ruck adjusted, the dog tags of all their dead in his pocket, looking at the sky as it turned pale above the forested, sixteen-hundred-foot ridge east of the road.

Another thing the overnight deaths had done for him was obviate the necessity of finding medical assistance. Which meant he could afford to stay away from population centers, at least for a while. He’d sent Meyers,
Ramirez, and Lance Corporal Ignacio Gutierrez back to the closer farmhouse, to gather up as much canned goods as they could comfortably carry. He’d felt bad about that—the farmers were going to need food soon enough themselves—but at least they had their crops already in and growing, and he’d told Meyers he could take no more than half of whatever the farmhouse pantry held. They’d also stacked all of the currency any of them had on the kitchen table. God only knew if it was ever going to be worth anything again, but if it was, it ought to be ample compensation for the value of the food.

Yeah, sure. You go right on thinking that
, a little corner of his mind told him.
You know damned well how the people that food belonged to are going to react when they find out you guys have already started looting. Or are you going to call it “living off the land”?

Shut up,
the rest of his mind told that little corner.

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

“All right,” he said out loud, trying hard to radiate a confidence he was far from feeling, and waved one arm in the general direction of Romania. “In that case, I guess we should be going.”

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

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 which 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 could 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 this was his second “colony expedition.” When they first began briefing for the mission, he’d rather glumly anticipated operating across wilderness terrain which might be crossed here and there by “roads” which were little more than random animal tracks when they first began briefing for the mission. That, after all, had been his experience last time around, and his heart had sunk as he’d studied the initial survey reports and realized what kind of mountains his platoon was going to be dropped into. But that was before they’d actually hit dirt and he’d gotten his first experience of the local road net and realized how good it actually was.

Yet despite his relief at avoiding
harku
-trails through soggy forests, Yirku admitted (very privately) that he found the humans’ infrastructure . . . unsettling. There was so
much
of it, especially in areas which had belonged to nations like this “United States.” And crude though its construction might appear—none of it used proper ceramacrete, for example, and the bridges he’d passed under probably wouldn’t last more than a local century or so without requiring replacement—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 then—his mood darkened—there were the
other
implications of this planet’s level of civilization. Having decent road networks was all very
well, and he wasn’t going to pretend he wasn’t suitably grateful, but if the rumor mill was accurate, there was a downside to the locals’ technology. He wasn’t prepared to accept the more preposterous stories, yet he was confident they wouldn’t have been so persistent or arisen so quickly if there hadn’t been at least
some
truth to them. It seemed unlikely on the face of it, of course. If these creatures had managed to knock down even a single heavy-lift shuttle, they’d already inflicted more aircraft losses than any other indigenous species the Empire had engulfed! As for the ridiculous, panic-monger rumors that they’d brought down
half a twelve
of them—!

His ears flattened in dismissal. Nonsense! Sheer hysteria, that was what it was. And he was letting himself be pushed into jumping at shadows even worrying about it. Oh, there were enough “humans” on this planet that at least some of them were probably going to fight back, at least initially, and they might land a few lucky blows in the process. But as soon as they figured out that they’d been utterly defeated, they’d see reason and submit decently. And when that happened—

Platoon Commander Yirku’s thoughts broke off abruptly as he emerged from under the latest bridge and the fifteen-pound round from the M136/AT-4 light antiarmor weapon struck the side of his vehicle’s turret at a velocity of three hundred and sixty feet per second. Its High Penetration HEAT warhead produced a hypervelocity gas jet capable of penetrating up to six hundred millimeters of rolled homogenous steel armor, and it carved through the GEV’s light armor like an incandescent dagger.

The resultant internal explosion disemboweled the tank effortlessly, killed every member of the crew, and launched the upper half of Yirku’s body in a graceful, flaming arc.

Ten more rockets stabbed down into the embankment-enclosed cut of Interstate 81 virtually 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—perfect stationary targets—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 Shongair tank had exploded.

•  •  •  •  •

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, seven 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 T-85s, based on the even more venerable T-55, but that wasn’t saying much compared to designs like the Russians’ T-80s and T-90s, the Americans’ M1A2, or the French Leclerc.

And it’s
certainly
not saying much compared to 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. And if that American Internet video is accurate, these creatures, these . . . Shongairi, aren’t really superhuman. We
can
kill them. Or
, he corrected himself,
at least the
Americans
can kill their
aircraft.
So
. . . .

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 Mures 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 two hundred and seventy kilometers northwest of where Bucharest had been three days ago.

He wished he dared to use his radios, but the broadcasts from the alien commander suggested that any transmissions would be unwise in light of the invaders’ penetration of the airwaves. Fortunately at least the landlines were still up. He doubted they would be for much longer, but for now they
sufficed for him to know about the alien column speeding up the highway towards 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 Ground Base Commander Shairez’s prebombardment 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.