Out of the Dark (23 page)

Truth to tell, the road was better than he’d expected in such a sparsely populated region, although with so much traffic spread out on either side of it the dust was a literally choking fog. Fortunately, his command vehicle was hermetically sealed, yet he still had to open the hatch occasionally, and every time he did more of the infernal dust filtered inside. And, inevitably, into the electronics’ Cainharn-taken cooling fans.

The better part of a thousand standard years since we got into space, and we
still
can’t design dust filters that work!
His ears waggled in a grimace of disgust.
Or, at least, none of our vaunted researchers can tear himself away from the Fleet’s precious needs long enough to run down that particular prey for us poor grunts in the field.
They
get new sensor suites every forty years or so, and
we
can’t even get something to keep dust out of the . . . less than capable systems we’ve already got! Why am I not surprised?

Still and all, he had to admit he’d faced worse conditions on more than one world in the Emperor’s service. And it was a good (if unaccustomed) feeling to have his entire brigade assembled in one place for a change, instead
of parceled out into tiny company- or platoon-sized—or even
squad
-sized—packets, each squatting somewhere in a firebase keeping an eye on the local primitives. Brigade commanders—for that matter,
regiment
commanders—tended to become administrators, more than anything else, in a typical colonizing expedition, and it was nice to be a hands-on commander for a change.

Even if his present orders did strike him as a bit foolish.

He knew about the disaster which had overtaken the shuttles transporting Ground Base Two’s lead echelon, and he’d heard other reports about APCs and even a few GEVs being ambushed. Obviously certain commanders hadn’t been paying enough attention if they’d let themselves be surprised that way. And he supposed that, to give Cainharn his due, these “humans’” weapons might be somewhat more effective than their prelanding intelligence had projected. But even so, allowing an entire brigade—an armored regiment with no fewer than twelve twelves of GEVs and two full regiments of infantry, plus support echelons—to be diverted into the arid, Dainthar-forsaken mountains towards which he was headed seemed . . . excessive. The kinetic bombardment had taken out every known military base in the areas the locals called Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. Certainly he’d personally confirmed that every single base in Iran had been blasted into rubble, and whatever might have happened to Ground Base Two, the shuttles which had landed his own forces had encountered no resistance worth mentioning. Surely the same thing had happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Fleet Command had decided it was imperative to make sure of that.

Harshair had been given his orders directly by Ground Force Commander Thairys, so there was no doubt they came from the very top. Thairys hadn’t explained the thinking behind those orders, yet it sounded to Harshair that his superiors had been badly surprised—even frightened—by what had happened to the Starlanders transporting Ground Base Two. They wanted to make certain
all
of the military forces of the “United States” were thoroughly neutralized, and Harshair was supposed to do just that by tidying up any pieces the KEWs might have somehow miraculously missed in Afghanistan. He supposed other ground forces were going to find themselves tasked with similarly ridiculous objectives, since if he remembered correctly from the briefings, the United States had maintained bases in a great many parts of this world.

Well,
he thought, studying the panoramic view provided by the three reconnaissance and communication drones heading the column,
at least it
shouldn’t take too long. And don’t turn up your nose at the opportunity to play with your entire command, Harshair! It hasn’t come your way very often, now has it?

•  •  •  •  •

Alastair Sanders sat very still, feeling the sweat under his headset. It was unnaturally dark inside the command vehicle, with all of its displays down. He especially missed the “Blue Tracker” map displays of his JBCP (the Joint Battle Command Platform system which had succeeded the original FBCB2), which normally showed him the exact positions of his individual units. Without them, he felt as if ninety percent of his situational awareness had disappeared, but JBCP relied on a unit’s individual satellite uplink to locate it, and he wasn’t going to give any orbiting recon platform that kind of a beacon. In fact, he wasn’t allowing
any
emissions—not even his command track’s engine was running at the moment—as he sat leaning back, eyes closed, listening to the very young-sounding voice coming over the headset via the optical fiber cable. His signals platoon had set up two alternate, well-separated remote transmitters against the moment when he finally had to begin using radio to control his units, but for now he was relying solely on the landline network those units had established over the last twenty hours.

It’s like going back to the Dark Age days of field telephones, plotting board overlays, and grease pencils,
a corner of his hindbrain whispered.
Next thing you know, you’ll be using carrier pigeons!

At the moment, all of his subunit commanders were listening to the feed from one of his advanced reconnaissance troops right along with him. He wanted to be absolutely certain every one of them knew everything
he
knew when the moment came. Smart officers who were kept in the loop and encouraged to exercise initiative had always been the true secret to success, that same corner of his mind reflected.

“. . . another two klicks or so,” the voice to which the rest of his mind listened was saying. “We’re picking up pretty broadband transmissions. They don’t seem to be encrypted. And there’s some kind of really weird . . . vibration, or sound, or
something
.”

“Raven One, Five Actual,” Sanders said. “Can you expand on that last? What kind of ‘something’?”

“Five, Raven One,” the junior noncom monitoring the remotes replied, “negative. Not really, Sir. It’s almost like we’re
hearing
something, but we aren’t.”

“Do you have any idea of what’s producing it, Raven One?”

“We can’t be certain, Five, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s coming from those UAVs or whatever they’re using. It seems to get . . . louder when one of them comes our way, and when one of them passed overhead a few minutes ago it really set our teeth on edge. I know that doesn’t really
explain
anything, Sir, but it’s the best I can do. And we’re getting some really weird emissions from them, in addition to a lot of recognizable radio transmissions. Maybe it’s whatever’s holding them up. We got a good visual on one of them, and there’s no sign of propellers or turbines, anyway. They do show really high-temperature signatures on the thermals, though.”

“Okay, Raven One. Thanks.”

Sanders glanced at his watch. Another kilometer, the scout had said. At thirty miles an hour, they’d be covering a kilometer every forty-eight seconds or so, which meant—

“All units, Five Actual,” he said clearly over the hardwired communications net. “Start engines. Archer Five, your Avengers are cleared to take down any aircraft or drones as soon as Hammer engages.”

•  •  •  •  •

Captain Emiliano Gutierrez’s massive M1A2—named “Peggy” in his wife’s honor—shuddered as the fifteen-hundred-horsepower Honeywell AGT turbine snarled angrily to life. His sixty-eight-ton tank (about the size of—and immeasurably more lethal than—the dreaded World War II Royal Tiger tank) was carefully hidden, turret-down, in the bed of the Harirud between the river’s lowered water and a steep ridge. The A77 roadbed made a sharp hairpin bend directly west of his position, hugging the crest of the ten-meter ridge to keep it safely above water level when the river flooded. The slope up to the road was covered in low-growing trees and shrubbery, brown-edged and tired-looking from the drought, and east of the river lay the startling green of irrigated, cultivated fields.

The other eleven tanks of his own Delta Company and the twelve M2A3 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles of Captain Aldo Altabani’s Alpha Company were spread along the foot of that slope, noses angled up towards its top, hidden under tarps, nettings, and cut branches and bundles of standing wheat harvested from the farmland behind them.

Gutierrez was uncomfortably aware that the traditional U.S. ability to call on superior air assets was on the other side this time around. That had implications he’d spent quite a bit of time trying not to think about too hard. He also knew the other side’s reconnaissance assets had to be a lot better than the battalion’s, too, but he could at least hope the Old Man had
gotten them under cover in time. And at least his vehicles—unlike those of Captain Adamakos’ Force Anvil—hadn’t ended up covered in dirt!

Now displays flickered as Peggy’s systems came online. They were comfortingly familiar, yet he knew this was going to be the strangest engagement he’d ever heard of, and not just because they were going up against bug-eyed aliens from another star system. The intricate electronic web which normally bound the battalion’s units together into a single whole was down. Aside from Colonel Sanders himself, they were all on radio silence until and unless he told them differently. The JBCP links which let unit commanders plot their individual tracks’ positions were also down. Even the tanks’ Quick Kill active missile defense system’s scanning radar was down. Nobody was radiating anything they didn’t absolutely have to. In fact, that was the reason their engines had been down. Sure, it had saved fuel, but it also turned each vehicle into an inert hunk of metal. They could probably be picked up by magnetometers, or spotted by ground-mapping radar, but be damned if they were going to give away any more signature than they absolutely had to!

Even Alpha Company’s three attached M106A4 self-propelled mortars, dug in five hundred meters behind the rest of his vehicles, were in receive-only mode, which meant they couldn’t take full advantage of their digitalized mortar fire control system. The MFCS’
full
capabilities required GPS input, and as part of their EMCON procedures, Colonel Sanders had ordered all GPS transmissions disabled. Still, the commander’s interface functioned just fine as a ballistic computer in stand-alone mode, and they’d put out the old-fashioned aiming posts. They were receiving download from the UAVs for the fire support platoon’s plotting boards, as well, and Gutierrez figured the track-mounted 120-millimeter mortars would probably give a good account of themselves . . . as long as they lasted, at any rate.

Still, it would be nice to have the displays up,
he thought, gluing his eyes to his commander’s passive sighting system. He had it in low-light imaging, and at the moment all it showed him were stubby trees, bushes, and tranquil, cobalt-black night sky, touched with pearl behind him to the east as the moon began to rise. Of course, that was going to change.

He felt or heard or . . . sensed the odd vibration or sound Raven One had tried to describe to Lieutenant Colonel Sanders. It was very faint—apparently Peggy’s armor was sufficient to damp it, and he’d probably never have noticed it if he hadn’t been waiting for it—but it was still the most peculiar
sensation he’d ever felt. On the other hand, he was far too keyed up to worry about that at the moment.

•  •  •  •  •

Brigade Commander Harshair frowned thoughtfully, studying the display from his lead RC drone. One of the Empire’s greatest advantages had always been its night-vision equipment. Quite a few of the savages he’d helped pacify in the Emperor’s service had come to the conclusion that the Shongairi must all be wizards who could see in total blackness. That was why he’d timed his penetration of these mountains for the hours of darkness.

Still, the imagery wasn’t as clear as it might have been in daylight, even with the out-sized local moon beginning to rise, and he grimaced and leaned forward, using the heel of one six-fingered hand to wipe dust off the flat screen display. He’d thought for years that they ought to provide at least higher-level commanders with holographic displays that would give them a better feel for the actual terrain elevations, but he didn’t expect to see it anytime soon. That would have
cost
more than the flat displays, after all, and squeezing the imager in might have been a problem, but still. . . .

Easy enough for those idiots sitting safe at home to think in terms of cost instead of effectiveness,
he reflected grumpily.
After all,
they
aren’t out here hunting abos all over Cainharn’s backyard! Do them good to spend a year or two on the ground with the rest of us, damned if it wouldn’t. But
—

He paused in mid-thought. That was odd. Why hadn’t he noticed that angular shape before? Of course, it was probably only a trick of the shadows cast by the rising moon, but still. . . .

“Switch RC Two to thermal,” he directed.

•  •  •  •  •

“Hammer Five, Five Actual,” Alastair Sanders said crisply, simultaneously nodding to the noncom who commanded his M2 command track to bring up the single display linked to the take from the UAV circling steadily above the enemy column. “Engage.”

“Five Actual, Hammer Five. Wilco. All Hammers, Five. Advance and engage!”

•  •  •  •  •

Brigade Commander Harshair’s eyes flew wide in astonishment as the display he’d been watching shifted over to thermal mode and bright, glaring beacons of heat appeared on it.

Impossible! Those had to be high-output internal combustion engines! Where in Cainharn’s hells had they
been
until this moment? Why hadn’t
any of the fleet’s reconnaissance officers mentioned them to him?!
And what were they?!