Out of the Dark

  Whatever the reason, he had no option but to deal with the current batch of flop-eared bastards to catch up with them, and with Cantacuzène’s assistance, he’d interrogated every single person who’d seen the Shongairi in action, hunting information on the aliens’ tactics and doctrine.

  It was obvious they were sudden death on large bodies of troops or units equipped with heavy weapons. Some of that was probably because crewmen inside tanks couldn’t “hear” approaching recon drones the way infantry in the open could, he thought. It might also be an indication that the aliens’ sensors were better designed to detect mechanized forces, or at least units with heavy emission signatures, which was one reason he’d gotten rid of all of his radios. He’d dumped his GPS, as well—although not without severe regrets—for the same reason, which hadn’t helped his sense of isolation one bit. At least he’d been able to come up with some Romanian road maps, which helped, but he felt one hell of a long way from home whenever he looked at the Romanian legends printed on them.

  From both his questioning and his own observations, it appeared the infantry patrols had less sensor coverage than those floating tanks or their road convoys. And in the handful of additional brushes he’d had with their infantry, it had become evident that the invaders weren’t in any sort of free-flow communications net that extended beyond their immediate unit. If they had been, he felt sure, by now one of the patrols they’d attacked would have managed to call in one of their kinetic strikes, or at least an air attack.

  Which is why we’ve got to hit them fast, make sure we take out their vehicles with the first strike . . . and that nobody who might be packing a personal radio lives long enough to use it.

  It looked like they were beginning to settle down. Obviously, they had no idea Buchevsky or his people were out here, which suited him just fine.

  Go ahead, he thought grimly. Get comfortable. Drop off. I’ve got your sleeping pill right here. In about another five—

  “Excuse me, Sergeant, but is this really wise?”

  Stephen Buchevsky twitched as if someone had just applied a high-voltage charge to a particularly sensitive portion of his anatomy, and his head whipped around towards the whispered question.

  The question which had just been asked in his very ear in almost unaccented English . . . by a voice he’d never heard in his life.

  • • • • •

  “Now suppose you just tell me who you are and where the hell you came from?” Buchevsky demanded ten minutes later.

  He stood facing a perfect stranger, two hundred meters from the Shongair bivouac, and he wished the light were better. Not that he was even tempted to strike a match.

  The stranger looked like he was about five-nine or maybe five-ten—slightly above average height for a Romanian, anyway, although still well short of Buchevsky’s towering inches. He had a sharp-prowed nose, large, deep-set green eyes, and dark hair. That was about all Buchevsky could tell, aside from the fact that his smile seemed faintly amused.

  “Excuse me,” the other man said. “I had no desire to . . . startle you, Sergeant. However, I knew something which you do not. There is a second patrol just under a kilometer away in that direction.”

  He pointed back up the narrow road along which the Shongairi had approached, and an icy finger stroked suddenly down Buchevsky’s spine.

  “How do you know that?”

  “My men and I have been watching them,” the stranger said. “And it is a formation we have seen before—one they have adopted in the last few days. I believe they are experimenting with new tactics, sending out pairs of infantry teams in support of one another.”

  “Damn. I was hoping they’d take longer to think of that,” Buchevsky muttered. “Looks like they may be smarter than I’d assumed from their original tactics.”

  “I do not know how intelligent they may be, Sergeant. But I do suspect that if you were to attack this patrol, the other one would probably call up heavy support quickly.”

  “That’s exactly what they’d do,” Buchevsky agreed, then frowned.

  “Not that I’m not grateful for the warning, or anything,” he said, “but you still haven’t told me who you are, where you came from, or how you got here.”

  “Surely”—this time the amusement in the Romanian’s voice was unmistakable—“those would be more reasonable questions for me to be asking of an American Marine here in the heart of Wallachia?”

  Buchevsky’s jaw clenched, but the other man chuckled and shook his head.

  “Forgive me, Sergeant. I have been told I have a questionable sense of humor. My name is Basarab, Mircea Basarab. And my men and I have been doing much what I suspect you have—attempting to protect my people from these ‘Shongair’ butchers.” He grimaced. “Protecting civilians from invaders is, alas, something of a national pastime in these parts. It would appear that the only thing which truly changes are the names and motives of the invaders.” He shrugged, then twitched his head in a generally northerly direction. “As for where I have come from, the villages my men and I have taken under our protection are up near Lake Vidraru, fifty or sixty kilometers north of here.”

  “I see. . . .” Buchevsky said slowly, and white teeth glinted at him in the dimness.

  “I believe you do, Sergeant. And, yes, I also believe our villagers could absorb the civilians you have been protecting. These are typical mountain villages, largely self-sufficient, with few ‘modern amenities,’ of course. They grow their own food, and feeding this many additional mouths will strain their resources severely. I doubt anyone will grow fat over the winter! But they will do their best, and the additional hands will be welcome as they prepare for the snows. And from what I have seen of you and your band, you would be a most welcome addition to their defenses.”

  Buchevsky cocked his head, straining to see the other’s expression. It was all coming at him far too quickly. He knew he ought to be standing back, considering the stranger’s offer coldly and rationally. Yet what he actually felt was a wave of unspeakable relief as the men, women, and children—always the children—for whom he’d become responsible were offered at least a reprieve from starvation and frostbite.

  “And how would we get there with these puppies sitting in our lap?” he asked.

  “Obviously, Sergeant, we must first remove them from ‘our lap.’ Since my men are already in position to deal with the second patrol, and yours are already in position to deal with this patrol, I would suggest we both get back to work. I presume you intended to use that grenade to signal the start of your own attack?”

  Buchevsky nodded, and Basarab shrugged.

  “I see no reason why you should change your plans in that regard. Allow me fifteen minutes—no, perhaps twenty would be better—to return to my own men and tell them to listen for your attack. After that”—those white teeth glittered again, and this time, Buchevsky knew, that smile was cold and cruel—“feel free to announce your presence to these vermin. Loudly.”

  . XXII .

  “Longbow” Torino crouched in the heavy woods where Interstate 89 crossed the power right-of-way, five miles to the west of what had once been Concord, New Hampshire.

  He wasn’t sure what had happened to Concord—or, rather, he wasn’t sure why it happened. What had happened had been painfully clear when he and his gaunt, grim-faced band of orphaned military personnel, equally orphaned survivors of half a dozen police and sheriffs departments (they even had one somewhat battered FBI agent who’d turned up from somewhere), and armed civilians reached the outskirts of the devastated city. The most logical explanation was that it had been taken out by the Shongairi on the very first day because of its status as New Hampshire’s capital. On the other hand, Concord’s population had been under forty-five thousand. State capital or no, that seemed like a small target for the aliens to have taken out that early.

  Another possibility was that something unpleasant had happened to the Shongairi in the vicinity. In fact, he thought that was a much more likely
explanation. From what he’d seen of the surviving New Hampshirites he’d met so far, John Stark’s inheritors seemed inclined to take their state motto of “Live Free or Die” as seriously as he had, and it had cost them in Shongair retaliations.

  Well, at least that’s not going to happen tonight, he thought grimly. There’s nothing left around here big enough to retaliate against. Those fucking floppy-eared bastards’ve seen to that!

  He looked around, considering his men’s (and women’s) positions, and tried to remember how he’d gotten here. Maybe someday, if there ever was a “someday,” he could sort it out. For now, it was a blur.

  He could remember Admiral Robinson ordering him to abandon his F-22s at Plattsburgh and get out using ground transport. He could remember wanting to argue about that, too, but the admiral had been right. Without the wherewithal to rearm and support his aircraft, the expensive, highly capable fighters were useless, and it could only be a matter of time before the Shongairi managed to figure out where they’d come from or—even worse—where they’d gone again.

  On the other hand, as he’d pointed out to Robinson, if they left the aircraft where they were it would inevitably invite a kinetic strike on Plattsburgh. So he and his pilots had refueled, taken off again, programmed their fighters to head straight east across the Atlantic Ocean, then punched out over New Hampshire.

  The ejection seat’s reality had been worse than anything he’d experienced in training, even though he’d been traveling at a relatively low speed (well, low for an F-22, anyway), but he and his pilots had reached the ground more or less uninjured. From there, they’d headed south.

  He’d lost “Killer” Cunningham a week or so after that, when his quartet of Air Force officers joined a hodgepodge of New York and New Hampshire National Guardsmen, the members of two local police forces, and four regular Army noncoms who’d turned up out of nowhere in an attack on a Shongair troop convoy. They’d taken out the floating “tanks” at the head of the column with M136s, then shot up the unarmored trucks behind it. They’d missed spotting a pair of armed APCs, unfortunately, and one of them had blown Cunningham apart, along with the rest of the six-man section he’d been leading. One of the Army types had gotten the APC a fraction of a second later, and the other APC had been destroyed, as well, but they’d lost almost a quarter of their own force in the attack.

  Torino had learned from that. He’d learned that stand-up fights against the aliens were a bad idea. He’d learned they were perfectly willing to use their kinetic bombardment capability against even relatively small targets—and perfectly happy to resort to reprisals against civilians—when they’d gotten a quarter of his surviving men while they tried to get out of the area. The Shongairi had used what had to have been blind fire that time, saturating the area from which they’d attacked with KEWs, and then destroyed three small towns within a couple of miles of the attack itself for good measure. He’d learned the advantage of being able to get the hell out of Dodge in a hurry from that experience, and in subsequent raids he’d learned that the aliens’ hovering remotes had to be taken out early in any engagement. The learning curve had been steep and littered with human bodies, but by God, he’d learned!

  All of which explained why he’d chosen his present position.

  According to the scattered bands of survivors he’d encountered on his way towards Concord, the Shongairi were using I-89 heavily. He’d been surprised at first that an interstellar invasion force was so roadbound, but he was perfectly happy to take advantage of it, so he’d gotten out his road maps and started looking for a suitable spot.

  The fact that the Shongairi had already destroyed Concord was a factor in his planning. He’d made it a point since his second raid to conduct operations as far away as possible from any city or town in order to deprive the Shongairi of a handy target for retaliation. He’d had passing contact with three other groups of guerrillas, and from the limited accounts he’d been able to compare, it sounded like the Shongair policy was to destroy any human town within three or four miles of an attack. Beyond that, they seemed to ignore the local population . . . so far, at least. Torino had decided to take four miles as his minimum limit whenever possible, but that was sometimes surprisingly difficult to manage, despite the rural nature of so much of upper New York and New England.

  That wasn’t a problem in this case, though, since the aliens had already taken Concord out and every nearby town had promptly emptied in the aftermath. On the other hand, he’d scouted the ruins on the fringe of the onetime state capital and found a deep basement sublevel under what was left of one of Concord Hospital’s main buildings. The hospital had been outside the primary zone of destruction, but not by far, and it had taken massive blast and fire damage. Some of its bigger, more substantial buildings were still at least partially intact, however, and there were still intact abandoned vehicles in several of the parking lots which had been in those buildings’ blast shadows, as well. He’d picked up half a dozen additional vans and SUVs from those parking lots. More to the point, if he and his raiders could get to the hospital quickly enough after their strike—it was barely four miles from his current location—they could hide their vehicles in the lower story of a more or less intact parking garage and themselves in the basement.

  It all depended on how quickly they could get there, and he figured the odds were probably in their favor . . . assuming they could take out any of those damned drones quickly enough. And that the Shongairi still hadn’t figured out how to reduce the lag in their response loop. He didn’t understand why the aliens hadn’t adapted that way already, but it was evident from their response patterns that their various forces had nowhere near the degree of netcentric awareness the US military had developed. They were slow. In fact, it seemed to Torino that their units weren’t routinely in communication with higher echelons. If they had been, then surely they could have gotten air support to the units he’d attacked far more quickly than they had. From the way the convoys and detachments he’d hit had reacted, they seemed to have pretty good intra-unit communications, but it was almost as if higher command wasn’t keeping an eye on them at all. And they didn’t seem to call their situation in very quickly, either. Except that once . . . the time they’d missed the recon drone. That time he’d lost almost thirty men and women to the ground-attack aircraft—or more probably shuttles, he’d decided—that had come screaming in out of the night.

  In fact, he’d come to suspect that the “recon” drones he’d been downing were actually the Shongairi’s primary communications platforms. That they carried Shongair ground units’ uplinks to their communications net as well as served as reconnaissance platforms. In some ways, that might actually make sense, although putting so many eggs into a single basket that way seemed a questionable decision to him.

  Of course, a lot probably depended on the threat environments they’d faced before. He could think of a few situations in which it might have made reasonably good sense to combine platforms that way. For one thing, it would have reduced the amount of equipment they had to schlep around—and service—in the field. It might let them economize on specialist personnel, as well, by putting the same . . . people in charge of both functions. So if they thought those platforms were safe from enemy action, then, yeah, it wouldn’t have been totally insane for them to piggyback functions that way.

  But even if the Shongairi had made the decision for reasons that made sense at the time, they had to be dumber than rocks not to have . . . revisited their choice in light of what had been happening to them since arriving on Earth. Or not to have figured out how to reduce their vulnerabilities, at least! Although the drones were relatively fast and surprisingly maneuverable, they made no use of that maneuverability. They simply parked themselves above the unit to which they were assigned and moved steadily along at that unit’s pace. Even in a combat situation, instead of dodging or taking any sort of evasive action, they only sat there, looking down. The closest he’d seen any of them come to tryi
ng to avoid ground fire had been to ascend to around five hundred feet and hover there.

  That was high enough to make them extremely difficult targets for most riflemen, but they were sitting ducks for the FIM-92 Stingers he’d been able to salvage from a New York National Guard Armory. The Stinger had a maximum range of over five thousand yards and—even more importantly—could reach a maximum altitude of over twelve thousand feet. Of course, he was starting to run low on Stingers, and God only knew where he was going to lay hands on more of them, but it still seemed incredibly stupid to operate what were apparently such vital links in their communications system in such a vulnerable fashion. Especially when it was painfully evident they didn’t have to do it.

  Not that he intended to complain, and he had three of his remaining dozen or so Stingers deployed in the woods on the north side of the interstate. Unless this was a much larger convoy than he expected, it would have only two of the drones deployed above it, and they’d be easy kills for the Stingers.

  As soon as the drones went down, his infantry—also deployed in the trees north of the highway—would open up with M136s to kill the APCs at either end of the convoy while his three machine guns ripped hell out of the unarmored trucks themselves. He had a total of forty riflemen, as well, all with M16s, and a dozen of them had under-barrel 40-millimeter grenade launchers. They wouldn’t have a lot of time to work with—he’d impressed on all of them that they had thirty seconds, max, from the time the first APC blew up until they boogied for the vehicles waiting on State Road 202 to take them straight to the hospital. They needed to get out and get hidden quickly—preferably before any of those orbital sensors he was sure were up there, however inefficiently they might seem to be used, got the word to start tracking vehicles fleeing the area.