Out of the Dark (21 page)

Too bad Ground Force Commander Thairys didn’t ask for my opinion,
he thought dryly, still jabbing at the recalcitrant display.

The imagery finally came up and stabilized, and his ears flicked in a grimace as it confirmed his memory. He keyed his com.

“All right,” he said. “We’re coming up on another river, and our objective’s just beyond that. The column will cross the bridge in standard road formation, but let’s not take chances.”

He started to mention the rumors about what had happened to the 9th Transport Group. His littermate Barmiat was a Navy maintenance tech aboard
Star of Empire,
and according to his brief e-mail, the 9th had lost at least a quarter of its shuttles to the locals’ aircraft. That level of losses struck Barmit as unlikely, to say the least, but Barmiat was usually a levelheaded sort, which suggested there might be at least something behind the story this time. On the other hand, Battalion Commander Rathia had already cautioned him against spreading “alarmist rumors.”

“Remember that we haven’t actually seen these creatures’ weapons,” he contented himself with, instead. “Red Section, you spread left. White Section, we’ll spread right.”

•  •  •  •  •

Colonel basescu twitched upright as the alien vehicles came into sight. He focused his binoculars, snapping the approaching vehicles into much
sharper clarity, and a part of him was almost disappointed by how unremarkable they appeared. How . . . mundane.

Most of them were some sort of wheeled transport vehicles, with a boxy sort of look that made him think of armored personnel carriers. There were around thirty of those, and it was obvious they were being escorted by five other vehicles.

He shifted his attention to those escorts and stiffened as he realized just how unmundane
they
were. They sped along, low-slung and dark, hovering perhaps a meter or two above the ground, and some sort of long, slender gun barrels projected from their squared-off, slab-sided turrets. Either they had enormous faith in the stopping ability of their armor, or else their designers hadn’t been very worried about kinetic-impact weapons, he thought.

The approaching formation slowed as the things which were probably APCs began forming into a column of twos under the watchful eye of the things which were probably tanks, and he lowered the binoculars and picked up the handset for the field telephone he’d had strung between the tanks once they’d been maneuvered into their hides.

“Mihai,” he told his second section commander, “we’ll take the tanks. Radu, I want you and Matthius to concentrate on the transports. Don’t fire until Mihai and I do—then try to jam them up on the bridge.”

•  •  •  •  •

Barmit felt his ears relaxing in satisfaction as the wheeled vehicles settled into a narrower road column in the approaches to the bridge and his GEVs headed across the river, watching its flanks. The sharp drop from the roadbed to the surface of the water provided the usual “stomach-left-behind” sensation, but once they were actually out over the water, their motion became glassy-smooth. He rotated his turret to the left, keeping an eye on the bridge as he led White Section’s other two GEVs between the small islands in the center of the river, idling along to keep pace with the transports.

•  •  •  •  •

They may have magic tanks, but they don’t have very good doctrine, do they?
a corner of Basescu’s brain reflected. They hadn’t so much as bothered to send any scouts across, or even to leave one of their tanks on the far bank in an overwatch position. Not that he intended to complain.

The tank turret slewed slowly to the right as his gunner tracked his assigned target, but Basescu was watching the wheeled vehicles. The entire
bridge was barely a hundred and fifty meters long, and he wanted all of them actually onto it if he could arrange it.

•  •  •  •  •

Company Commander Barmit Sighed as his GEV approached the far bank. Climbing up out of the riverbed again was going to be rather less pleasant, and he slowed, deliberately prolonging the smoothness as he watched the transports heading across the bridge.

Kind of the “humans” to build us all these nice highways,
he reflected, thinking about this region’s heavily forested mountains.
It would be a real pain to
—

•  •  •  •  •

“Fire!”
Nicolae Basescu barked, and Company Commander Barmit’s ruminations were terminated abruptly by the arrival of a nineteen-kilogram 3BK29 HEAT round capable of penetrating three hundred millimeters of armor at a range of two kilometers.

•  •  •  •  •

Basescu felt A stab of exhilaration as the tank bucked, the outer wall of its concealing building disappeared in the fierce muzzle blast of its 2A46 120-millimeter main gun, and his target exploded. Three of the other four escort tanks were first-round kills, as well. They crashed into the river in eruptions of orange fire, white spray, and smoke, and the stub of the semicombustible cartridge case ejected from the gun. The automatic loader’s carousel picked up the next round, feeding the separate projectile and cartridge into the breech, and his carefully briefed commanders were engaging targets without any additional orders from him.

The surviving alien tank swerved crazily sideways, turret swiveling madly, and then Basescu winced as it fired.

He didn’t know what it was armed with, but it wasn’t like any cannon
he’d
ever seen. A bar of solid light spat from the end of its “gun,” and the building concealing his number three tank exploded as the T-72’s fuel and ammunition detonated thunderously. But even as the alien tank fired, two more 120-millimeter rounds slammed into it almost simultaneously.

It died as spectacularly as its fellows had, and Radu and Matthias hadn’t been sitting on their hands. They’d done exactly what he wanted, nailing both the leading and rearmost of the wheeled transports only after they were well out onto the bridge. The others were trapped there, sitting ducks,
unable to maneuver, and his surviving tanks walked their fire steadily along their column.

At least some of the aliens managed to bail out of their vehicles, but it was less than three hundred meters to the far side of the river, and the coaxial 7.62-millimeter machine guns and the heavier 12.7-millimeter cupola-mounted weapons at the tank commanders’ stations were waiting for them. At such short range, it was a massacre.

•  •  •  •  •

“Cease fire!” Basescu barked. “Fall back!”

His crews responded almost instantly, and the tanks’ powerful V-12 engines snorted black smoke as the T-72s backed out of their hiding places and sped down the highway at sixty kilometers per hour. What the aliens had already accomplished with their “kinetic weapons” suggested that staying in one place would be a very bad idea, and Basescu had picked out his next fighting position before he ever settled into this one. It would take them barely fifteen minutes to reach it, and only another fifteen to twenty minutes to maneuver the tanks back into hiding.

•  •  •  •  •

Precisely seventeen minutes later, incandescent streaks of light came sizzling out of the cloudless heavens to eliminate every one of Nicolae Basescu’s tanks—and half the city of Alba Iulia—in a blast of fury that shook the Carpathian Mountains.

•  •  •  •  •

Company Commander Kirtha’s column of transports rumbled along steadily. The local weather had obviously been dry, and the clouds of dust his column had thrown up when they’d had to cut across country had made him grateful his GEV command vehicle was sealed against it. Now if only he’d been assigned to one of the major bases on the continent called “America.” Or at least the western fringes of
this
one!

His ears flicked in derisive amusement at his own thoughts. This world had the best road net Kirtha had ever seen. Even here, it was incomparably better than anything he’d ever campaigned across before, so it was pretty silly of him to be bitching—even if only to himself—because someone else had gotten an even
better
road net than he had!

Could be game trails through triple-canopy jungle, like Rishu,
he reminded himself.
Or what about those miserable, endless swamps in southern Bahshi?

Well, that was probably true. But he supposed it was simply Shongair nature to always want something a
little
better than one had.

The dusty, broken pavement of the stretch of roadbed his column was currently approaching was a case in point, he decided glumly. Obviously, the “humans” had been engaged in construction or repair work—it was scarcely the first time he’d seen
that
since landing!—and a fresh, smothering fog of dust was already rising from the wheeled vehicles’ passage.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they were all grav-cushion,
he told himself, but GEVs were expensive, and the counter-grav generators used up precious internal volume not even troop carriers, much less freight-haulers, could afford to give away. Imperial wheeled vehicles had excellent off-road capability with their all-wheel drive and variable tire pressures, of course, so they could almost always get through, whatever the terrain. And in this instance, even a miserable road like this stretch allowed them to move much more efficiently than on the vast majority of planets the Empire had occupied.

And at least we’re out in the middle of nice, flat ground as far as the eye can see,
Kirtha reminded himself.

He didn’t like the rumors about what had happened to some of the first-wave landing shuttles. Of course, that was the concern of the shuttle pukes, not the ground forces, but still. . . . And the even more fragmentary rumors about ambushes on isolated detachments were even more . . . bothersome. That wasn’t supposed to happen, especially from someone as effortlessly and utterly defeated as these creatures had been. And even if it did happen, it wasn’t supposed to be
effective
—not against armored vehicles and crack Imperial infantry! And the ones responsible for it were supposed to be destroyed.

Which, if the rumors were accurate, wasn’t happening the way it was supposed to.
Some
of the attackers were being spotted and destroyed, but with Hegemony technology,
all
of them should have been wiped out, and the rumor mill suggested some of them
weren’t
being. Still, there were no convenient mountainsides or thick belts of forest to hide attackers out here in the midst of these endless, flat fields of grain, and—

•  •  •  •  •

Captain Pieter Stefanovich Ushakov watched through his binoculars with pitiless satisfaction as the entire alien convoy and its escort of tanks disappeared in a fiery wave of destruction two kilometers long. The scores of 120-millimeter mortar rounds buried in the stretch of the M-03 motorway between Valky and Nova Vodolaga as his own version of the “improvised explosive devices” which had given the Americans such grief in Iraq and Afghanistan had proved quite successful, he thought coldly.

Now,
he thought,
to see exactly how these weasels respond
.

He was fully aware of the risks in remaining in the vicinity, but he needed some understanding of the aliens’ capabilities and doctrine, and the only way to get that was to see what they did. He was confident he’d piled enough earth on top of his position to conceal any thermal signature, and aside from the radio-controlled detonator, he was completely unarmed, with no ferrous metal on his person, which would hopefully defeat any magnetic detectors. So unless they used some sort of deep-scan radar, he ought to be
relatively
safe from detection.

And even if it turned out he wasn’t, Vladislava, Daria, Nikolai, and Grigori had been visiting his parents in Kiev when the kinetic strikes hit.

It was hot. It was also dry, and his battalion was no longer in a position to keep itself properly hydrated. “If you don’t need to piss, you aren’t drinking enough.” That was the mantra of the US forces in the Middle East, but the distribution and maintenance platoons the brigade support battalion had been supposed to detach to him had been delayed by last-minute paperwork. They hadn’t made it out of the FOB in time, the single purification plant he had with him was intended to supply only a single company, there weren’t going to be any more water trucks or trailers anytime soon, and the Harirud River’s levels were low thanks to the current drought and the water quality was . . . questionable. What each unit had already stored and what was available from the river’s meager flow and that single purification plant was all they had, and it wasn’t enough.

Which probably won’t be a problem all that much longer, if Traynor and Strang are right,
Lieutenant Colonel Alastair Sanders thought grimly.
And they probably are
.

Captain Mark Traynor was his S-2, the officer tasked with responsibility for the battalion’s intelligence and security, and Lieutenant Christine Strang was his S-5, responsible for the battalion’s signal operations. For the last couple of days, it had been their grim duty to try to make some kind of sense out of what had happened to the rest of the world.

For the first twenty-four hours or so, all they’d had was confusion, speculation, and shock. Sanders’ battalion had been in transit to Herat when the attacks came screaming in out of nowhere. He suspected that was the only thing which had saved them when the rest of the brigade was wiped out behind them, but it also meant they were completely isolated, totally out of the loop and with no support units anywhere in sight.

At first, from the garbled messages they’d gotten, they’d assumed the disaster was purely local. But then other reports had started coming in—reports of strikes on carrier groups at sea, on NATO bases scattered across
Europe, on Israel. Nor had they been limited to US allies. If the last they’d heard from national command authority was accurate, Tehran was gone, too. And so was Moscow. Beijing.