  Studies of the growth of cosmic perturbations are typically focused on
galactic scales and above. In this paper we investigate the evolution of
perturbations in baryons, photons, and dark matter for masses below 10^6
M_\odot (or wavenumbers above 100 Mpc^-1). Fluctuations on these scales are of
interest and importance because they grow to become the earliest collapsed
objects and provide the first light sources in the so called dark ages. We
investigate both the linear evolution and the second-order nonlinear effects
arising from the coupling of large-scale velocity fields to small-scale
perturbations in the baryon density and the electron ionization fraction. We
find that this second order nonlinear coupling dominates the growth of
perturbations with masses \la 10^3 M_\odot immediately after recombination,
enhancing the baryon fluctuation amplitudes by a factor of ~ 5, but the
nonlinear effect does not persist at late times.
