Out of the Dark (32 page)

Still,
he reminded himself,
don’t get too carried away. There’s only one of
it, but that
is
one of the cargo vehicles their armed forces used. And you can’t see into its cargo bed
.

On the other hand, he had two light auto-cannon covering it at the moment, not to mention two twelves of infantry. Even if there was something in there that shouldn’t be, it wasn’t going to be surprising anyone. Besides, the human he
could
see wasn’t armed, and it was regarding him with what certainly looked like proper submissiveness.

Assuming that
anything
they’ve briefed us on for this entire misbegotten planet is accurate, at any rate,
he thought grumpily, and brought his personal computer’s translating software online.

•  •  •  •  •

Sam Mitchell watched the alien carefully, wondering how the hell he was going to get out of this one.

The doglike creature paused a few yards from him, and he heard a curious, sibilant snarling sound. Then—

“What are you doing out here, human?” a mechanical voice asked from a small device on the alien’s belt.

“Waiting for a friend,” Mitchell replied after a moment, speaking slowly and carefully.

“Indeed?” It was impossible to read any emphasis or emotion from the translator’s artificial voice, and Mitchell had no idea how to interpret Shongair body language, but he wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if the question had been sarcastic. “And why would you be waiting for a friend up here in the forest, human?”

“Because we’re going hunting,” Mitchell said. “Food’s been short since you . . . people arrived. We’re hoping to get a couple of deer to feed our families.”

•  •  •  •  •

Ah! for the first time on this accursed planet, I’m dealing with something I
understand
for a change,
Gunshail thought. Indeed, he felt something almost like a surge of sympathy, possibly even companionship, for the repulsively hairless alien in front of him.

At least the creatures giving us so much grief aren’t weed-eaters,
he told himself.
That’s something, I suppose. Of course, the fact that this one
says
he’s out here to hunt doesn’t mean he really is
.

•  •  •  •  •

“Your vehicle appears somewhat large for only two hunters,” the mechanical voice observed.

“Rob doesn’t have a truck, only a car—a passenger vehicle without much cargo space, I mean,” Mitchell replied. He shrugged, deliberately overdoing the gesture in hopes the alien would recognize its meaning. “I admit this is a lot of truck to haul around just a couple of deer, but it’s what I could get my hands on. All that was available to me, I mean.”

•  •  •  •  •

That was possible, Gunshail reflected. He wasn’t exactly certain what a “deer” was, so he had no measuring stick for how large a vehicle would be required to transport the carcasses of two or three of them. And the Shongairi had already observed that these creatures appeared to have a bewildering variety of vehicles. Indeed, here in this “United States” it sometimes seemed they had more vehicles than humans! And they’d already encountered several instances of individual humans or local authorities using ex-military equipment. Still. . . .

•  •  •  •  •

“I shall have to check the vehicle,” the mechanical voice said. “Do not do anything to alarm my warriors.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Mitchell said with every ounce of sincerity he could summon.

•  •  •  •  •

Gunshail looked over at his dismounted troops, then flicked his ears in the direction of the human’s vehicle. His troopers had heard his side of the conversation in their own language, so they already knew what he wanted, and Section Commander Brasik lowered his own ears in response to the unspoken order.

Gunshail knew Brasik was one of those who had come to deeply and sincerely hate all humans for their bloody-minded perversity and lack of civilized morals. For that matter, Gunshail wasn’t all that fond of them himself. Unlike the section commander, however, who would have vastly preferred to simply shoot every human he encountered and let Dainthar and Cainharn sort out who (if anyone) got its soul, Gunshail understood that sooner or later they were going to have to start interacting with these creatures without simply killing them out of hand. That was, after all, the reason for conquering them in the first place.

His superiors had made that very point rather firmly to him after that unfortunate business with the human female and its offspring. He still thought his battalion commander had been a bit unreasonable about the whole thing. How was Gunshail supposed to know it had half a twelve of
cubs in its backseat? Or that it was unarmed? It hadn’t stopped when he’d waved its vehicle to a halt. Instead, it had actually
accelerated,
so of course his squad had opened fire on it! Anyone would have. In fact, he still wasn’t so sure his superiors’ argument that it had simply panicked and tried to flee to protect its young was accurate. Not that any of them had survived in the end anyway, of course.

All right, it had been wasteful. He admitted it. And apparently these “humans” really didn’t understand that any honorable hunters ate their kill—that it would have been an insult to the prey if they
hadn’t
eaten it! They’d certainly carried on hysterically enough about it, anyway. He still didn’t think he’d been all
that
far out of line, and he suspected his immediate superiors hadn’t thought so, either. They would have reprimanded him a lot more firmly if they had.

Still, they’d been firm enough to satisfy their own superiors. And they’d also pointed out that Ground Base Commander Teraik, commanding the rather jury-rigged Ground Base Two Alpha being built just outside the human city of “Greensboro” as a make-do substitute for the original, destroyed Ground Base Two, would really prefer to convince the local humans to submit without killing them all off in the process. So he was prepared to give
this
human the benefit of the doubt and assume it was capable of at least the rudiments of honorable behavior.

For now, at least; he could always change his mind if he decided to.

•  •  •  •  •

“Shit,”
Rob Wilson muttered softly but intensely as two of the aliens started trotting towards the rear of Mitchell’s truck. The minute they looked in there, they were going to know exactly what they were seeing. At which point, things were going to get ugly.

“Still got a shot?” he whispered, his own eyes on Mitchell as he settled more firmly into position behind his fiberglass-stocked Springfield Armory MA9827 M1A.

Unlike his wife and his sister, who were perfectly happy with the 5.56- and 5.7-millimeter rounds, respectively, in a rifle, Wilson had enormous faith in the stopping power of the .308 Winchester (also known, in certain quarters, as the 7.62 NATO). He’d been a squad-designated marksman in his time, using a specially modified and accurized version of the old M14, the original of his present M1A. That weapon had always been his first and greatest love (well, where firearms were concerned, anyway), and he’d been less surprised than many when the M4’s shorter effective range
turned around and bit US troops in the ass in longer-ranged engagements in the mountains of Afghanistan. The M16A4, which retained the barrel of the old A2, had better range than the shorter-barreled M4, but even it came up short at extended ranges, and the Springfield’s custom stock felt like an extension of his own body as he nestled into it.

He wasn’t his brother-in-law’s equal for the
really
long-range shot, but he came damned close, and he knew he was actually better than Dvorak at laying down long-range
rapid
fire. For which, of course, the .308 was vastly superior to any wimpy souped-up .22, whatever his loving wife or sister might have to say. It was a simple matter of ballistics, really. The 147-grain bullet of the standard NATO load weighed better than twice as much as the 5.65’s 62-grain slug, and at extended range it transferred three times the energy—the real measure of a bullet’s power—to the target. And, of course, he wasn’t limited to military specs. His M1A launched a substantially
heavier
round than the standard NATO load at a slightly higher velocity . . . and delivered twenty-four percent more energy than even the 7.62 at five hundred yards.

So what if he couldn’t carry as many rounds for the same weight? So what if the weapon weighed ten pounds unloaded? When he needed to reach out and touch someone, none of that mattered to him at all. Besides, as he’d pointed out rather complacently to Veronica on more than one occasion, if you hit what you were aiming at in the first place, especially with a bullet that was all grown up, how many rounds did you
need
?

Of course, Veronica had whacked him on more than one of those occasions, as well.

“The son-of-a-bitch’s just
sitting
there,” Dvorak muttered back. “Of
course
I’ve got a shot! Didn’t these dumb bastards ever hear of ‘evasive action’?”

“Don’t complain.” Wilson laid the glowing dot of his sight on the back of the alien commander’s neck, below the bottom rim of his helmet, and took up the slack on the national-match-grade two-stage trigger. “You just take it down the instant I fire. Got it?”

“Got it,” Dvorak confirmed tautly.

•  •  •  •  •

Mitchell made himself stand very still, outwardly relaxed. He knew approximately where Rob Wilson was, and he also knew exactly what Wilson was going to do. Mitchell might have worried about someone else’s having decided to bug out when the bad guys turned up, but not Wilson. Or Dvorak,
for that matter. And because he knew where Wilson was, he knew he was out of the ex-Marine’s line of fire to the Shongair CO. That being the case, he also knew who Wilson’s first target would be, and he gazed at the other dismounted infantry from the corner of one eye, thinking about his own target selection.

•  •  •  •  •

Gunshail turned his head, glancing at the troopers Brasik had picked to check the back of the human’s vehicle. Given the fact that the human in question was standing there perfectly calmly, it was extraordinarily unlikely they were going to find anything incriminating or dangerous. Which was just as well with Gunshail. If he got back to base in time, he could still get in on the
chranshar
game his litter-brother Gunshara had organized, and—

The 168-grain .308 round, traveling at just over twenty-seven hundred feet per second, delivered 1.3 foot-
tons
of energy to a point one half inch behind the left eye on the profile the squad commander had just obligingly presented to Rob Wilson. It drilled straight through the brain the Shongairi kept in approximately the same place humans did, hit the inner liner of his helmet, and blew it off the ruins of his head in a grisly spray of red and gray.

•  •  •  •  •

Dvorak twitched as Wilson opened fire, but only internally. His sight picture never even wavered, and he squeezed his own trigger.

The muzzle blast from a muzzle brake–equipped .50-caliber rifle was almost impossible to describe adequately. So was the recoil. But any concerns he might have had about the toughness of the Shongair remote disappeared as the 647-grain bullet punched entirely through it. There was no spectacular explosion, no streamer of smoke, no sudden flash of flame—nothing except for a sudden twitch . . . and the equally sudden disappearance of that teeth-grating “vibration.” The remote dropped straight down, crashing through tree branches as it thudded to the ground, but Dvorak had already switched targets, and the second shot from his ten-round magazine punched effortlessly through the body armor of the gunner on the lead cargo vehicle. The Shongair’s torso literally disintegrated in a spray of crimson, and Dvorak’s third shot sprayed the same truck’s driver over the cab’s interior.

He heard—and felt—more shots from Wilson and at least two other rifles from other spots on the hillside, but that wasn’t his affair. He had his
own job to do, and he traversed smoothly to the second truck, whose gunner was just starting to react, swinging his ring-mounted automatic weapon wildly around towards the hillside from which the totally unexpected rifle fire was coming.

Before the alien ever found his assailants, Dave Dvorak came on target again, and his finger squeezed.

•  •  •  •  •

Sam Mitchell saw the talkative Shongair’s head disintegrate.

Unlike the members of Gunshail’s patrol, he’d been actively expecting exactly what had just happened. And, also unlike the members of Gunshail’s patrol, he knew about the small-of-the-back holster under his light civilian jacket and the Para-Ordnance P14 .45 APC semiauto in it.

Mitchell had been a qualified concealed-carry instructor for over fifteen years. Over those years, and during his career as a police officer, he’d spent literally uncounted hours on tactical shooting ranges, and he’d given as much attention to the best way to get a concealed-carry handgun into action as he had to doing the same thing with an open-carry service holster.

His right hand swept back, with an odd little muscle-memory quarter-turn of the wrist that used the side of his palm to lift the jacket away from his side and out of its way. It kept going, settling on the pistol’s grip even as he threw himself to his left, towards the front end of his truck.

The Shongair infantry were still turning towards their crumpling officer as his weapon cleared the holster. The 1911-style safety came off under his right thumb just as Wilson’s second shot drilled straight through Section Commander Brasik’s backplate and the Shongair dropped without a word. An instant later, the second thunderous report from Dvorak’s .50 caliber roared, and other rifles opened up from the concealing tree trunks upslope from the road.