Out of the Dark

by David Weber

  “Any sign of them yet?” he panted, flopping down in the sodden leaves, and Dvorak shook his head without looking away from the road. He had his big rifle’s bipod firmly settled, and he’d laid out his extra magazines.

  “Nope,” he said now. “I expect they’ll be along any minute, though. Question is, what do we do about them?”

  “If they’re willing to leave us alone, then I move we leave them alone,” Wilson replied, wiggling into a comfortable firing position of his own. “I think Sam’s got a pretty good head start. If they aren’t coming pretty fast, I doubt they’ll spot any of his vehicles. And once he gets off 64 onto 215, he’ll have that ridge between him and the highway.”

  “Agreed,” Dvorak said, and looked at him. Neither of them wanted to admit the fear they felt. The new route Wilson had just sent Mitchell along ran within less than eight miles of the cabin and their family. If the Shongairi did spot the escaping convoy and went in pursuit. . . .

  Would it be better to go ahead and ambush them here? Dvorak wondered tensely. We’re five miles from Sam’s turnoff. If we were to nail them here, would it keep them from following him up, closer to the cabin? But on the other hand, we don’t have a clue how many of the bastards there are. For that matter, if they never even notice us, if they just drive on by, then. . . .

  • • • • •

  The patrol’s vehicles had closed up nicely again, Senior Squad Commander Laifayr decided, watching the headlights of the other two vehicles in the mirror. Another day-twelfth or so, and they could turn around and head back towards their home base at the human town of Old Fort . . . not that he was looking forward to that horrible stretch of the humans’ “interstate” between there and Black Mountain. The only good thing about Old Fort Mountain was that they’d be going down it this time, although that had its own drawbacks in weather like this.

  Cainharn, this whole damned planet has its drawbacks! he grumbled to himself.

  • • • • •

  His name was Jamison Snelgrove. He was a thirty-six-year-old lawyer who’d enjoyed a promising career before the Shongairi arrived, and his wife Melanie was pregnant with their second child.

  Neither of them had wanted the nightmare which had enveloped their world over the last three and a half months, and they’d done their best to ride out the storm at Melanie’s folks’ North Carolina farm. They’d been making out fairly well—not everybody was well fed, and none of them were looking forward to the coming winter, but they’d been making it.

  Until Melanie went into premature labor, anyway.

  The phones were down, of course, and the nearest doctor they knew about was in Brevard, so that left only one thing to do. Fortunately, they’d been hoarding gasoline against exactly this sort of an emergency.

  Which is how Jamison and Melanie Snelgrove came out of Hannah Ford Road onto US-64 barely three minutes behind the convoy of refugees and just as Senior Squad Commander Laifayr’s patrol came down it from Brevard, headed south in the northbound lane.

  • • • • •

  “Shit!” Rob Wilson hissed as the pickup truck came hurtling out of Hannah Ford so fast it fishtailed on the wet pavement when the driver turned north.

  “Take it easy!” Dvorak responded. He’d flipped up the lens covers on his rifle sight and was peering through it towards the headlights which had just appeared to the north of their position. “May be the best thing that could’ve happened. If the patrol stops these folks and they’ve got a legitimate reason to be out here, it’ll delay the puppies long enough for Sam to get his people completely out of sight.”

  “Yeah, we can hope,” Wilson muttered.

  • • • • •

  Senior Squad Commander Laifayr blinked as he saw the headlights appear suddenly in front of him. They were headed directly towards him, and they had that peculiar blue-white intensity only humans’ headlights had. It was the first time he’d seen a human vehicle on his patrol route in the last five days, though, and he felt himself perking with curiosity.

  Probably one of the local government’s official vehicles, he thought. No one else would have the fuel to be out here.

  • • • • •

  “Jimmy!” Melanie Snelgrove screamed as she saw the trio of headlights suddenly coming directly towards them on their side of the road. The color didn’t look right to her, and then her eyes went even wider as she made out the poorly seen silhouettes behind them. She’d never seen anything quite like them, and she knew—without question or doubt—that those weren’t human-designed trucks.

  Jamison saw them, too. He stared at them for half a heartbeat, then wrenched his head around towards his wife. Melanie was white-faced with fear, hands clutching her abdomen as another of those terrifying, premature contractions ran through her.

  Half a hundred chaotic thought fragments flashed through Jamison’s brain. There wasn’t time for any of them to truly register, be completely thought out. They were bits and pieces. His terrified wife. Their unborn child. Rain beating on the pickup’s windshield and side windows. The uncertainty of how the aliens would react. Hum of hot air through the defroster vents. Fear for what might happen to Melanie. Fear that even if the aliens had no hostile intent, they would delay him, keep him from reaching the doctor in time. Clicking sound of windshield wipers. Reports and rumors about clashes with the Shongairi. Pickup tires hissing on wet pavement as they carried him towards the alien vehicles. . . .

  All of that flashed and chattered and yammered in his brain, and his hands acted without command. He slammed the wheel hard around to the left, stamped on the gas pedal, and accelerated desperately south, away from the oncoming patrol.

  • • • • •

  Laifayr shot bolt upright in his seat as the human vehicle suddenly turned away. It accelerated with amazing speed, rocketing away from him like a Deathwing with its tail on fire. He’d heard that the absurdly overpowered human vehicles had better acceleration rates than anything except a GEV, but this was the first time he’d actually seen it demonstrated. Still. . . .

  “After them!” he snapped at his driver.

  • • • • •

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Wilson snarled as the pickup truck abruptly whirled around.

  He had no idea why the driver of that vehicle had decided to run for it. Maybe the idiot had a perfectly good reason—a reason even Rob Wilson would have approved of, or at least sympathized with, if he’d only known what it was. But at this moment, the only thing Wilson could think of was that fleeing pickup truck leading the Shongair patrol straight towards Sam Mitchell’s convoy.

  “Wh—?” he began, but the deafening blast of his brother-in-law’s rifle answered the question before he ever got it asked.

  • • • • •

  Dave Dvorak had spent hours studying diagrams and sketches—even a few digital photos—of Shongair vehicles. Most of the photos only showed the vehicles driving by, and even the ones that showed them parked and motionless were usually taken from far enough away to show considerably less detail than he would have preferred. The diagrams had helped a lot, though, and between them he’d established clearly in his mind where the driver of any given vehicle was likely to be. More than that, one of the diagrams Sam Mitchell had brought him had given him a detailed feel for where the Shongairi kept the radios, and the range was barely a hundred and fifty yards.

  A corner of his brain had already noted that these trucks seemed to be covered in something he hadn’t seen before. Probably it was the improvised armor Mitchell and Vardry had described to him. If so, it wasn’t likely to stop one of the Barrett’s big slugs, but it might pose a problem for Wilson’s lighter .308s.

  Deal with that when you get there, that same corner of his brain told him. The open front lens cover gave his sight some protection from the rain. The fact that the rain was coming from his right rear, rather than directly towards him, helped even more. He could just make out a shadowy, blurred, indistinct form through the windshield where the
diagrams told him the driver ought to be, and the recoil of the big, bellowing rifle came as a surprise to him, exactly the way it was supposed to.

  • • • • •

  Laifayr’s “APC” was just beginning to accelerate when the 647-grain bullet blew a head-sized chunk of the windshield into fragments and the rest into a crazy-quilt web of cracks, then struck his driver just below the center of his chest.

  The sheer concussion of being that close to a bullet that big traveling that fast when it struck something solid would have been bad enough. The finely divided spray of blood and tissue that blasted out behind it was even worse.

  The senior squad commander’s eyes went huge in shocked disbelief as about half his driver’s total blood supply exploded across him, and that shock turned rapidly into something far worse as the vehicle swerved wildly. The bullet’s impact had half-disintegrated the upper portion of the driver’s torso, and the improvised “APC” responded by going completely out of control and turning sharply to its left.

  The good news was that the driver’s sudden and violent demise had thrown his entire body back, away from the Shongair equivalent of the gas pedal, as well as the steering. The sudden swerve, coupled with the abrupt disappearance of any pressure on its accelerator, told the truck’s onboard computer something had gone wrong. It was a simpleminded device, but it knew what to do in that case. It applied the brakes automatically, and the armored truck began slowing rapidly before it could hurtle completely off the highway and into a rain-soaked patch of trees east of the road.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that the flesh-and-blood driver of the patrol’s second vehicle didn’t have time to react before it plowed broadside into Laifayr’s. The impact drove the lead vehicle the rest of the way off the road and into the trees after all. It also locked both of them together, and the senior squad commander heard shouts of panic—and pain—from the troopers huddled together for warmth under the cargo bed’s fabric cover.

  The worse news was that whoever had just killed his driver was still shooting from a bunch of trees three hundred urma to the south and on the west side of the highway.

  • • • • •

  Dvorak watched the two lead trucks run into each other and slide off the road. From the screeching sound—funny, a part of him noted even now, how Shongair brakes and human brakes sounded exactly the same in a situation like this—and then the echoing sound of impact, they’d hit at a high enough rate of speed he could pretty much ignore the two of them for the moment.

  He switched his point of aim to his left and, sure enough, the third truck’s driver decided to come around the collision on that side, where the highway’s median and southbound lanes offered him more clearance.

  Idiot, the human thought coldly. Last thing he needs to be doing is charging straight into my sights!

  His finger stroked the trigger again.

  • • • • •

  In fairness to the third driver, he had no idea what was going on. All he knew was that both of the vehicles in front of him had abruptly accelerated and then, for reasons unknown, the two of them had collided. Dvorak’s position was completely invisible from his position at the rear of the short column, and it never occurred to him that the “accident” might have been the result of hostile action.

  It might well have occurred to him a second or two later, but he was too busy avoiding the two trucks in front of him to think about it at the moment. And, unfortunately, the unanticipated arrival of Dvorak’s second shot meant it never would occur to him, after all.

  • • • • •

  Rob Wilson was less confused than the unfortunate Shongair driver. As a consequence, he knew exactly what he should be doing. Like Dvorak, however, he’d realized what the peculiar slab-sided layers of material on the Shongair trucks had to be and, also like Dvorak, he had no idea whether or not his fire would penetrate it.

  One way to find out, he told himself philosophically, and opened a rapid, aimed fire. From over a hundred yards away, in the rain, he couldn’t tell whether or not his rounds were penetrating, but at least he didn’t see any of those dramatic, sparkling ricochets the movies had always loved.

  • • • • •

  Dvorak switched back to the first truck, putting a round through the area where the radio was supposed to be. He was shooting blind this time, because the vehicle had turned partly away from him with the impact, presenting him with a three-quarter view of the solid rear of the cab. On the other hand, there wasn’t much question about whether or not his fire was getting through. Even in the poor light and the rain, his telescopic sight clearly showed him a sudden hand-sized patch of bare alloy or composite where whatever the Shongairi used for paint had been literally blasted away by the bullet’s impact. There was a dark hole in the center of that bare patch, and he moved his point of aim to the second truck, punching bullets through its cab.

  • • • • •

  Senior Squad Commander Laifayr crouched as low as he could, sandwiched between the mangled bodies of his driver and his communications tech. If anyone had told him someone was shooting at him with a mere rifle, he would never have believed it. And, in fact, the bullets coming at him from Dave Dvorak’s rifle were actually larger than the high-explosive shells of the ten-millimeter cannon on the roof of his “APC.”

  But what they were being launched from was far less important to Laifayr at that moment than the consequences of their arrival.

  Panic yammered at the back of his brain. Without an RC drone, and with his communications tech dead (not to mention the shattered hole the bullet which killed him had punched through the com unit itself) there was no way to summon assistance. None of their personal units had the range or the power for that kind of work, anyway. He could only hope one of the other vehicles had managed to get off a message, and whether it had or not, no help was going to get here in time to save any of them unless they did it on their own.

  He crawled and squirmed across the seat, kicking and pummeling the driver’s mangled corpse out of his way, and managed to open the door on the far side from whoever was shooting at them. Thoughts of the auto-cannon did flicker through his mind as he rolled out into the painful scratchy embrace of the tree limbs, but he brushed them aside quickly. He’d left his own rifle in the cab, and his sidearm couldn’t possibly reach whoever was shooting at him. A little voice suggested he should go back and get it, but he brushed that voice aside even more quickly than he had the thought of the cannon.

  It wasn’t his responsibility to get tied down in a firefight, he told himself. No, it was his responsibility to impose some sort of order on this ravening chaos. And if that just happened to keep him out of the direct line of fire of whatever demon had torn apart the other two troopers in the cab with him, so much the better.

  He fought his way through the clinging branches of the scrubby trees which had enfolded the “APC,” then reached up and pounded on the improvised armor of the cargo bed and started bellowing orders at the troopers he hoped were still alive inside it.

  • • • • •

  The second “APC’s” commander—braver (or stupider) than Laifayr—did force his way up through the access trunk and grabbed the firing grips of his auto-cannon. Unfortunately, his movements attracted Dave Dvorak’s eye. A moment later, the commander himself attracted another of Dvorak’s bullets.

  Rifle barrels were beginning to thrust out of some of the firing ports cut through the vehicles’ “armor.” The Shongairi behind those rifles had strictly limited fields of view. One or two of them, though, had seen the impressive flash from Dvorak’s muzzle brake in the gathering darkness, and their fire started sizzling back towards the two humans belly down in the sodden woods.

  • • • • •

  Jesus, there’s A bunch of them! Rob Wilson thought as Shongair muzzles began to flash.

  He didn’t know whether or not the Shongairi had gotten off a contact report. If the information they’d been provided by the
state troopers who’d had more contact with them was correct, their communications weren’t very good without those drones of theirs, and he’d neither seen (nor heard) one of them. It looked like Dvorak had ripped hell out of the trucks’ cabs, too. It seemed unlikely there was anyone alive in there, anymore, and if there were, it struck him as a pretty fair bet Dvorak had taken out their internal radios.

  Which, unfortunately, left what looked and sounded like thirty or forty really pissed-off Shongairi inside the trucks’ cargo compartments.

  “Hey!” he shouted at his brother-in-law. “I don’t know if I’m even getting through! Start ripping up the truck beds—I’ll handle any runners!”

  • • • • •

  Sweet Dainthar! Laifayr thought as he heard the bloodcurdling shriek and saw one of Dvorak’s slugs punch right through the far side of the truck’s “armor.”

  He could hear the steady, measured reports of the human’s monster rifle now, and his spirit quailed at the thought of facing that sort of destructive power. Another round slammed into the troop compartment. At least this one didn’t come all the way out the other side, but more screams told him it had found a target anyway.

  “Out of the trucks!” he heard himself shouting. “Out of the trucks! Don’t just sit there—we’ve got to go after them!”

  • • • • •

  Dvorak and Wilson saw the Shongairi come boiling out of the tangle of vehicles. It didn’t look as if most of the aliens had a very clear fix on their enemies’ positions, but they obviously had at least a general notion of where the fire was coming from. Some of them clearly did know where to look—probably from Dvorak’s muzzle flashes—and they’d obviously figured out that sitting in place wasn’t going to work for them.

  Now thirty-seven Shongair troopers started towards the two humans, a football field and a half away, firing their weapons as they came.

  • • • • •

  Shit, Wilson thought. I feel like fucking Butch and Sundance in Bolivia!

  Shongair bullets began to whine and crackle entirely too close for comfort. He made himself ignore the sound, concentrating on servicing targets and wishing for the first time that his rifle had a full-auto setting.