Out of the Dark (51 page)

Which, Wilson had explained to Dvorak some years ago, while he, Alvin, and Dvorak had watched steaks turning brown on a grill, had been something of a shock to him. But despite Alvin’s defection to the Navy—and as an
officer,
at that—they’d discovered they could remain friends. As long as no one else found out about it, at least.

While his cousin had been shooting people, then getting a divinity degree and a commission, however, Hosea MacMurdo had been getting his
medical
degree. Several of them, in fact. He was the senior and founding partner in MacMurdo Orthopedic Associates and generally regarded as one of the finest orthopedic surgeons in the entire state of South Carolina, and Dvorak was far from the first recent gunshot victim to whose side Rob Wilson had chauffeured him.

“What . . . are you . . . ?” Dvorak had gotten out groggily, and MacMurdo had snorted.

“Oh,
puh-leeze!
” he’d replied, rolling his eyes. “You got shot in the shoulder, not the
head,
Dave! What d’you
think
I’m doing here?”

“When you care enough to send the very best,” another voice had said, and Dvorak had rolled his head and seen Rob and Veronica Wilson standing on the other side of the bed. His brother-in-law wore a surgical mask, as well, Dvorak’s oddly floaty brain had observed. So did Ronnie, now that he noticed, but she was wearing surgical gloves, as well.

“Spare my blushes,” MacMurdo had said dryly. “Oh, and Al sends his regards, too.”

“Thanks,” Dvorak had whispered.

“And now, despite the somewhat primitive nature of my facilities,” MacMurdo had continued, nodding to Ronnie to start the IV inserted into Dvorak’s right arm, “we’re going to do something about that shoulder of yours. So go to sleep, and let me get on with it.”

Dvorak knew how fortunate he’d been to have someone with MacMurdo’s skill and experience working on him. And he’d been almost equally fortunate in that MacMurdo and Sam Mitchell between them had been able to come up with almost enough in the way of painkillers, given that morphine and its derivatives weren’t exactly widely available anymore. Unfortunately, MacMurdo hadn’t been joking about the “primitive nature” of his facilities. There was only so much skill could do without the right kind of backup, and he’d warned Dvorak soberly that he was going to suffer serious loss of mobility in the shoulder.

“I’ve done what I can,” he’d said just before Sam Mitchell drove him the forty-odd miles home, “and as long as nothing gets infected, I don’t see anything coming up that Ronnie can’t handle. But I couldn’t begin to do all I’d like to have done.” He’d made an unhappy face. “It’s going to take you months to come back from this, Dave. I want you to take it easy along the way, too, because you may have noticed we’re just a little short on the kind of follow-up care I’d normally prescribe. I’ll be in touch with Ronnie again in a week or so, see how you’re coming along, maybe start thinking about what kind of physical therapy we can manage under the circumstances. The truth is, though, that I wasn’t able to do anything like a full rebuild on that shoulder. You were lucky in a lot of ways, but that bullet . . . well, let’s just say it didn’t do the skeletal structure of your shoulder any favors.”

“Can’t say that comes as much of a surprise,” Dvorak had replied, his voice calmer than he’d actually felt.

“I didn’t think it would, somehow.” MacMurdo had flashed a brief smile. “Anyway, what we really need is a properly equipped operating room and the time to do the job right. I could fix you up with a nice replacement shoulder joint if I had those, but I don’t. And somehow, I don’t think either of them’s going to come our way anytime soon.”

He’d smiled again, sadly, then shaken Dvorak’s good hand and departed, leaving his patient with his thoughts.

Not very happy thoughts, really.

All the same, intellectually, Dvorak had realized then—as now—that he was unbelievably lucky to be alive at all. And when he thought about the fact that he
was
alive, and that so were Sharon, Morgana, Maighread, and Malachai, little things like whether or not his left arm was ever going to work properly again quickly dropped back into their proper perspective.

None of which, he thought now, drowsily, did anything to make him any less curious about whoever was coming to visit.

•  •  •  •  •

“Are you decent, dear?” Rob Wilson called in a high-pitched falsetto from the far side of the partition of ammunition cases which had been arranged to give Dvorak his own little cubicle.

“No, but I’ve got a gun under the pillow, you dirty old man,” Dvorak replied.

“Yeah? Well, I guess the good news is that a lousy shot like you couldn’t hit anything, anyway!” Wilson retorted, poking his head around the corner. “Seriously, ready for your visitors?”

“Ready as I’m going to be, anyway,” Dvorak replied, scooting to sit up a little straighter against the pillows despite the hot throb in his shoulder.

“Good.” Wilson looked back over his shoulder and nodded to someone Dvorak couldn’t see yet. “This way, gentlemen,” he said in a considerably more businesslike voice.

Dvorak’s eyebrow arched as his brother-in-law’s tone registered, and then Wilson led three other men into his sleeping space.

Things seemed a lot more crowded all of a sudden, Dvorak noted, but his attention was on the newcomers. Sam Mitchell was no stranger, but he had no idea who the compactly built fellow with the black hair and green eyes or his taller, bearded companion might be.

“Sam,” he said, nodding in agreement to the one visitor he knew, and then looked at the others with a politely inquiring expression.

“Dave,” Mitchell said, “let me introduce our friends here. This here”—he indicated the green-eyed man—“is Dan Torino, Major Dan Torino, who goes by ‘Longbow’ for some reason. And this”—he nodded to the considerably taller and much darker-skinned stranger—“is Abu Bakr bin Muhammed el-Hiri.”

Both of Dvorak’s eyebrows rose, and the bearded man chuckled.

“Really is my name,” he assured Dvorak. “And for a hick cop, Sam didn’t do all that
bad
a job of pronouncing it!”

“Hey, six months ago I’d’ve been checking to see if the Feds had gotten
around to issuing an arrest warrant on you yet,” Mitchell retorted, grinning down at el-Hiri, who, despite his height, was still a good two inches shorter than
he
was. “And they probably would have!”

“Let’s not be bringing up the past, gentlemen,” the man named Torino said in a chiding tone, and Mitchell and el-Hiri snorted almost in unison.

“Anyway,” Mitchell said, “to complete the introductions. Major, Abu Bakr, meet Dave Dvorak.”

“Pleasure,” Dvorak said, holding out his good hand to each of them in turn.

Both of them showed signs of strain and fatigue, he thought. Most people did these days, of course. But Torino and el-Hiri had that wary look, as well. The one that combined the awareness of the hunted with the tightly leashed violence of the predator. He was pretty sure
they
hadn’t been sitting around in cabins up in the mountains for the last three or four months, he thought with something very like a sense of guilt.

“I imagine you’re wondering what brings our two visitors up to see you,” Mitchell continued, and Dvorak nodded.

“The question had crossed my mind,” he admitted.

“Well, fact is, these two are the leaders of the guerrillas Governor Howell’s been feeding info to for a while now. In fact, you may not realize it, but you’ve already met Major Torino, in a manner of speaking.”

“I have?” Dvorak thought for a moment, then shook his head. “If I have, I don’t remember it.”

“I guess I should’ve said you’ve seen him on TV,” Mitchell replied, and his voice was much more sober than it had been. “Major Torino was leading the fighters Admiral Robinson sicced on those puppy shuttles on Day One.”

Dvorak’s eyes widened, then narrowed in quick speculation as they darted back over to Torino’s face. What he was most conscious of, for a moment, was how little like a figure out of legend Torino actually looked. But then he recognized something else—the weary sorrow and loss behind the steely determination in those green eyes.

“It’s an honor,” he heard himself say quietly, and Torino shrugged. It was an uncomfortable gesture.

“We couldn’t have done it without Robinson,” he replied after a moment. “In fact, I kind of doubt people would have fought back as hard as they have anywhere without him.”

“I think you’re right,” Dvorak agreed. “Do you know if he’s still alive?”

“I’m pretty sure he’s not,” the ex–fighter pilot said heavily. “I know they took out Dahlgren, and we’ve actually managed to establish a halfway decent communications net. I’m pretty sure I’d have heard by now if he’d gotten out in time.”

“Damn,” Dvorak said softly.

“Amen, brother,” Wilson agreed in an equally quiet voice.

“Well,” Dvorak said a moment later, giving himself a shake, “I won’t embarrass you by going on about it, Major, but I will say thank you. I’m pretty sure I speak for most of the human race when I say that, too. But I’m also pretty sure you didn’t hike all the way up here into the mountains just to introduce yourself?”

“No,” Torino agreed, obviously happy to put that whole subject behind him. “As it happens, I have something else on my mind, and Mr. Mitchell here”—it was his turn to nod his head sideways at the tall ex–police officer—“tells me you and your brother-in-law are the major communications hub for the bloody-minded mountain folks here about.”

“I don’t know that I’d go that far,” Dvorak said. “I mean, we—”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Mitchell interrupted brusquely. “You know damned well you are. If anybody has somebody they’ve got to hide, they mention it to you, and you guys find somebody to do the hiding. Somebody’s looking for ammo to hit the Shongairi, they mention it to someone, and sooner or later a friend of a friend mentions it to you, and you mention it to
me
. Somebody else needs a doc, they come to you, and you guys find ’em one. Hell, you know as well as I do that you and Rob are the ones who really arranged the escape route—and found contacts in Tennessee—for those poor bastards the Major and his people busted out! And just who was it got us turned around in time to avoid running right into that frigging puppy patrol which
someone
then took out completely?”

Dvorak started to argue, then stopped.

He’s right,
he thought almost wonderingly.
Damn
.

It was odd, really, he supposed. He’d been aware that he and Rob were acting as a sort of clearinghouse, but he’d never really thought of themselves as “the” clearinghouse. Yet now that he considered it, there was actually quite a bit of truth to it. Maybe he hadn’t noticed because it had never been planned. It had just happened, and he hadn’t really realized until this moment just how heavily the people who knew where to find them had come to rely on them to pass information and help with planning. Without ever noticing, they’d become . . . facilitators, he supposed might be the best word for it.

Of course, his own “facilitating” days appeared to be over. He realized his right hand was touching the back of his left again and made himself stop.

I imagine a “communications hub” is about
all
I’m going to be good for from now on,
he reflected.

“I hadn’t really thought of us that way,” he said out loud, “but I guess Sam does have a point. So, what can we do for you?”

“We need you to pass some information for us, as widely as you can,” Torino replied, and his voice was harder, flatter.

“What sort of information?” Dvorak asked a bit cautiously, looking back and forth between their visitors.

“We took two of the puppies alive when we hit that convoy of theirs,” el-Hiri said. “Thanks to info from the Governor and his friends, we know those belt translators of theirs don’t have radio links built in. That means we don’t have to worry about their phoning home for help on them. And that we can go ahead and . . . ask them questions and
request
answers even if they can’t speak our language and we can’t speak theirs.”

There was an ugly light in his eyes. Somehow Dvorak didn’t doubt that any Shongair from whom he “requested” answers would provide them.

And it doesn’t bother me one damned bit, either,
he thought grimly.

“Should I assume you’re here about whatever they had to say?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Torino said grimly. “I don’t think either of them was supposed to know why Teraik wanted those humans they were delivering to him. One of them—the senior one—was an officer, though. About what we’d call a first lieutenant, I’d guess. He knew more than he was supposed to. He couldn’t tell us everything, but I think we’ve been able to pretty much fill in the blanks or connect the dots or whatever the hell you want to call it. And what it comes down to is that we need to get the word out that going along peacefully if the puppies come calling isn’t a very good idea anymore. They told everyone in the convoy that they’d been drafted as part of the human labor forces the Shongairi have been using to try and clean up some of the worst wreckage in their occupation zones, but that wasn’t what they really had in mind for them at all.”

Regiment Commander Harah didn’t like trees.

He hadn’t always felt that way. In fact, he’d actually
liked
trees until the Empire invaded this never-to-be-sufficiently-damned planet. Now he vastly preferred long, flat, empty spaces—preferably of bare, pounded earth where not even a
garish
or one of the humans’ “rabbits” could have hidden. Any other sort of terrain seemed to spontaneously spawn humans . . . all of whom appeared to have guns or some
other,
improvised sort of weapon none of his troopers had ever before heard of or experienced. The sheer bloodthirsty inventiveness of these creatures was simply impossible to believe without firsthand experience, and there seemed no end to their creativity.