Out of the Dark (55 page)

He woke slowly, floating up from the depths like someone else’s ghost. He woke to darkness, to pain, and to a swirling tide-race of dizziness, confusion, and fractured memory.

He blinked—slowly, blindly, trying to understand. He’d been wounded more times than he liked to think about, but it had never been like this. The pain had never run everywhere under his skin, as if it were racing about on the power of his own heartbeat. And yet, even though he knew he had never suffered such pain in his life, it was curiously . . . distant. A part of him, yes, but walled off by the dizziness. Held one imagined half step away.

“You are awake, my Stephen.”

It was a statement, he realized, not a question. As if the voice behind it were trying to reassure him of that.

He turned his head, and it was as if it belonged to someone else. It seemed to take him forever, but at last Mircea Basarab’s face swam into his field of vision.

He blinked again, trying to focus, but he couldn’t. He lay in a cave somewhere, looking out into a mountain night, and there was something wrong with his eyes. Everything seemed oddly out of phase, and the night kept flashing, as if it were alive with heat lightning.

“Mircea.”

He didn’t recognize his own voice. It was faint, thready.

“Yes,” Basarab agreed. “It is a good sign that you are awake again. I know you may not believe it at this moment, but you will recover.”

“Take . . . your word . . . for it.”

“Very wise of you.”

Buchevsky didn’t have to be able to focus his eyes to see Basarab’s fleeting smile, and he felt his own mouth twitch in reply. But then a new and different sort of pain ripped through him.

“I . . . fucked up.” He swallowed painfully. “Sorry . . . so sorry. The kids . . .”

His eyes burned as a tear forced itself from under his lids, and Basarab gripped his right hand. The Romanian raised it, pressed it against his own chest, and his face came closer as he leaned over Buchevsky.

“No, my Stephen,” he said slowly, each word distinctly formed, as if to be certain Buchevsky understood him. “It was not
you
who failed; it was I. This is
my
fault, my friend.”

“No.” Buchevsky shook his head weakly. “No. Couldn’t have . . . stopped it even if . . . you’d been here.”

“You think not?” It was Basarab’s turn to shake his head. “You think wrongly. These creatures—these
Shongairi
—would never have touched my people if I had remembered. If I had not held my hand, decided to stand upon the defensive to avoid provoking them instead of seeking them out. Instead of teaching them the error of their ways, warning them in ways even
they
could not have mistaken to stay far from my mountains. If I had not spent so long hiding, trying to be someone I am not. Trying to forget. You shame me, my Stephen. You, who fell in my place, doing my duty, paying in blood for
my
failure.”

Buchevsky frowned. His swirling brain tried to make some sort of sense out of Basarab’s words, but he couldn’t. Which probably shouldn’t have been too surprising, he decided, given how horrendously bad he felt.

“How many—?” he asked.

“Only a very few, I fear,” Basarab said quietly. “Your Gunny Meyers is here, although he was more badly wounded even than you. I am not surprised the vermin left both of you for dead. And Jasmine, and Private Lopez. The others were . . . gone before Take and I could return.”

Buchevsky’s stomach clenched as Basarab confirmed what he’d already known.

“And . . . the villagers?”

“Sergeant Jonescu got perhaps a dozen children to safety,” Basarab said. “He and most of his men died holding the trail while the children and their mothers fled. The other villages have already offered them shelter, taken them in. The others—”

He shrugged, looking away, then looked back at Buchevsky.

“They are not here, Stephen. For whatever reason, the vermin have taken them, and I do not think either of us would like that reason if we knew it.”

“God.”
Buchevsky closed his eyes again. “Sorry. My fault,” he said once more.

“Do not repeat that foolishness again, or you will make me angry,” Basarab said sternly. “And do not abandon hope for them. It is in my mind that this entire attack was designed to secure prisoners, not simply to destroy a handful of villages in the remote mountains. If all they wished was to kill, then the others’ bodies would be here as well. And, having taken prisoners, surely they will transport them back to their main base in the lowlands. That means we know where to find them, and they are
my
people. I swore to protect them, and I do not let my word be proven false.”

Buchevsky’s world was spinning away again, yet he opened his eyes, looked up in disbelief. His vision cleared, if only for a moment, and as he saw Mircea Basarab’s face he felt the disbelief flow out of him.

It was still preposterous, of course. He knew that. Only, somehow, as he looked up into that granite expression, it didn’t matter what he knew. All that mattered was what he
felt
. . . and as he fell back into the bottomless darkness, what the fading sliver of his awareness felt was almost sorry for the Shongairi.

•  •  •  •  •

Private Kumayr felt his head beginning to nod forward and stiffened his spine, snapping back upright in his chair. His damnably
comfortable
chair, which wasn’t exactly what someone needed to keep him awake and alert in the middle of the night.

He shook himself.

None of Ground Base Seven’s officers were particularly cheerful at the moment. It wasn’t quite as bad as it had been immediately after Regiment Commander Harah’s return, three days ago, but it was bad enough to be going on with. The regiment commander’s casualties and equipment losses had been at least as bad—probably worse, actually, Kumayr suspected—than anything the brigade’s other two regiments might have suffered in North America. His unhappiness was obvious, and his junior officers reflected his unhappiness. They weren’t being outstandingly patient and understanding these days, especially with garrision troopers who hadn’t been in the field with the regiment. In fact, Kumayr decided, if he didn’t want one of those junior officers to come along and rip his head off for dozing on duty, he’d better find something to do.

Something that looked industrious and conscientious.

His ears twitched in amusement at the thought, and he punched up a
standard diagnostic of the perimeter security systems. Not that he expected to find any problems. The entire base had completed a wall-to-wall readiness exercise only two days before Regiment Commander Harah had departed to collect Ground Base Commander Shairez’s specimens. All of his systems had passed their checks with flying colors then, and he hadn’t had a single fault warning since. Still, running the diagnostic would look good on the log sheets . . . and save his ears if Squad Commander Reymahk or one of the others happened along.

Kumayr hummed softly as the computers looked over one another’s shoulders, reporting back to him. He paid particular attention to the systems in the laboratory area. Now that they had test subjects, the labs would be getting a serious workout after all. When that happened—

His humming stopped, and his ears pricked as a red icon appeared on his display. That couldn’t be right . . . could it?

He keyed another, more tightly focused diagnostic program, and his pricked ears flattened as more icons began to blink. He stared at them, then slammed his hand on the transmit key.

“Perimeter One!” he snapped. “Perimeter One, Central. Report status!”

There was no response, and something with hundreds of small, icy feet started to scuttle up and down his spine.

“Perimeter Two!” he barked, trying another circuit. “Perimeter Two—report status!”

Still
no response, and that was impossible. There were
fifty troopers
in each of those positions—one of them had to have heard him!

“All perimeter stations!” He heard the desperation in his voice, tried to squeeze it back out again while he held down the all-units key. “All perimeter stations, this is a red alert!”

Still there was nothing, and he stabbed more controls, bringing up the monitors. The displays came alive . . . and he froze.

Not possible
, a small, still voice said in the back of his brain as he stared at the images of carnage. At the troopers with their throats ripped out, at the Shongair blood soaking into the thirsty soil of an alien world. Heads turned backward on snapped necks, and dismembered body parts scattered like some lunatic’s bloody handiwork.

Not possible, not without at least
one
alarm sounding. Not
—

He heard a tiny sound, and his right hand flashed towards his sidearm, but even as he touched it, the door of the control room flew open and darkness crashed over him.

“What?”

Fleet Commander Thikair looked up at Ship Commander Ahzmer in astonishment so deep it was sheer incomprehension.

“I’m . . . I’m sorry, Sir.” The flagship’s CO sounded like someone trapped in an amazingly bad dream, Thikair thought distantly. “The report just came in. I’m . . . afraid it’s confirmed, Sir.”

“
All
of them?” Thikair shook himself. “
Everyone
assigned to the base? Even Shairez?”

“All of them,” Ahzmer confirmed heavily. “And all of the Ground Base Commander’s specimens have disappeared, as well.”

“Dainthar,”
Thikair half whispered. He stared at the ship commander, then shook himself again, harder.

“How did they do it?”

“Sir, I don’t know.
No one
knows. For that matter, it doesn’t . . . Well, it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen the humans do before.”

“What are you talking about?” Thikair’s voice was harder, impatient. He knew much of his irritation was the product of his own shock, but that didn’t change the fact that what Ahzmer had just said made no sense.

“It doesn’t look like whoever it was used
weapons
at all, Fleet Commander.” Ahzmer didn’t sound as if he expected Thikair to believe him, but the ship commander went on doggedly. “It’s more like some sort of wild beasts got through every security system without sounding a single alarm. Not one, Sir. But there are no bullet wounds, no knife wounds, no sign of
any
kind of weapon. Our people were just . . . torn apart.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Thikair protested.

“No, Sir. It doesn’t. But it’s what
happened
.”

The two of them stared at one another. Then Thikair drew a deep breath.

“Senior officers conference in one day-twelfth,” he said flatly.

•  •  •  •  •

“The ground patrols have confirmed it, Fleet Commander,” Ground Force Commander Thairys said heavily. “There are no Shongair survivors. None. And”—he inhaled heavily, someone about to say something he really didn’t want to—“we found exactly eleven expended rifle cartridges.
Eleven
. Aside from that, there’s no evidence a single one of our troopers so much as fired a shot in his own defense. Most of them died in their beds, obviously without ever waking up at all. And as for the duty sections . . . It’s as if they never saw, never heard, a
thing
. As if they all just . . .
sat
there without even
noticing
that someone—or some
thing
—was about to tear them apart.”

“Calm down, Thairys.” Thikair put both sternness and sympathy into his tone. “We’re going to have panicky rumors enough when the
troops
hear about this. Let’s not begin believing in night terrors before the rumor mill even gets started!”

The other officers gathered around the table looked distinctly uneasy, and Thikair flicked his ears in an impatient shrug.

“I have no more idea than you do about how they did it,” Thikair replied. “Not
yet,
at any rate. On the other hand, we’ve encountered one surprise after another ever since we entered the star system. So far, we’ve survived all of them, however painful some of them have been. And we’ve always managed to unravel what happened—and how—eventually. How they managed
this
one is more than I can say at this time, of course. If no weapons were used, perhaps what we’re looking at is the use of some sort of trained animals! I know that sounds absurd, but these creatures have done nothing
but
come up with one absurd, preposterous tactic or weapon after another. For that matter, it’s not as if we haven’t seen other primitives use war animals. Remember those trained cat-apes on Bashtu? They got those past all of our precautions because the troops thought they’d make such marvelous ‘pets’! Or what about those poisonous crawlers the Rashinti managed to introduce into our garrisons’ food supplies? No one saw that one coming, either, did they? Oh, and let’s not forget the bigger ones they used to fire at us with their Dainthar-cursed catapults!” His ears wagged emphatic negation. “I’m certainly not prepared to rule out the possibility that these damned humans have done something of the same sort!”

Thairys looked at him for a moment, then managed a chuckle that was only slightly hollow.

“You’re right, of course, Sir. And your point about how they got the cat-apes and the poison crawlers into our ground bases is well taken. It’s just
that . . . Well, it’s just that I’ve never seen anything like this. And I’ve checked the database. As nearly as I can tell, no one in the entire
Hegemony
has ever seen anything like this.”