Watch on the Rhine

Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 1 January 2008

“Oh, God, I’ll never drink schnapps again,” moaned Mueller from underneath bloodshot eyes.

“Stop making so much damned noise, Johann,” insisted Prael. “We’re all as hung over as you.”

“Franz and I are not,” insisted Schlüssel. “Neither is Herr Henschel. With age comes a certain wisdom and restraint, after all.”

“My little round ass,” answered Breitenbach, blearily. “You three packed it away as well as any of us. You have just had more years to get in training.”

The combat compartment of the tank grew silent with that, largely out of deference to the “dying.”

For ten days Prael had run the crew through drill after drill, simulated engagement after simulated engagement. Occasionally, when circumstances seemed right, they had taken a potshot at an unwary Posleen vessel passing overhead. Already Schlüssel had painted six kill markers around the lower part of the railguns rail, mute but eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the railgun, even against Posleen ships in orbit.

Ten days and six kills. It would have been an utterly and futilely short period of training but for two factors. The first of these was the tank’s AI; which had both reduced the need for training and made whatever training was given precisely appropriate need.

But the second factor was within the purview of the more subtle part of training: building comradeship. And years of working together, designing and building the two versions of Tiger, had long since welded the men, and one woman, who crewed Brünnhilde into a team. They knew each other, had eaten and drank together. They knew each other’s families, and hopes and dreams. They cared.

Though they didn’t talk much about dreams.

Though he liked these humans, especially the one with the funny bumps, so reminiscent of Brünnhilde’s armored front, who usually made them their food, Rinteel did not feel a part of the team, not even as the token Nibelung, whatever a Nibelung was.

Not that he was useless, far from it. Unlike Indowy machines this one had awesome defects to it; awesome at least for one born into a civilization where perfection was the minimum standard for tools and machines. The little bat-faced sentient spent full and busy days helping to fix one crisis fault after another. He had a genuine knack for it, even with, to him, alien machinery.

But, useful or not, well treated and respected or not, he simply lacked the sense of ‘Kameradshaft’[41] these humans felt for each other. Perhaps it was that he could not imbibe these things the Germans called “Schnapps” or “Bier.” Kameradeschaft certainly seemed to grow by bounds when the humans had a few each of those.

Though singing seemed a big part of it too.

Rinteel had a hopeless singing voice, where human song was concerned. He started contemplating where aboard Brünnhilde he might build a synthesizer to create the sole Indowy intoxicant, med.

47^th Field Hospital, Potsdam, Germany, 2 January 2008

Drugged unconscious, in the Korps field hospital, a dark place and soundless except for the plaintive, unconscious cry of some lonely, wounded soldier, Hans dreamt.

Though she had never turned to fat, Anna’s hair had grayed, her skin had browned and wrinkled under the harsh sun of Israel.

Still, after more than forty years, Hans found her lovely beyond measure. Only the obscenity growing in her body, wracking her with agony the drugs could never quite overcome, detracted from the beauty of her body, mind and soul; that obscene cancer, and the horrid mechanical sounds of the machines keeping her alive.

By her bedside Hans sat, as he sat every moment he was allowed. Often enough, tears poured from his face. At those moments, Anna often turned her face away. That was not how she wished to remember him, in the hereafter.

It was near the end; they both knew it. She was calm and content. He was desolated. Hans had only the thought, It won’t be so long that I will have to be apart from her, to console himself.

“We have had a good life, Hansi, isn’t that so?” Anna asked.

Wiping his eyes, he answered, “Where you were was paradise for me, Anna. Where you were not was hell… even before we met.”

She gave him a soft smile, and answered, as softly, “It was the same for me, Hansi. But Hansi, what will you do?” she fretted.

“I do not know, Anna. There will be nothing left here for me, once…” And he fell into a fresh wave of tears.

“Hush, hush,” she said, reaching out a weak, skeletal hand to pat his arm. “It will only be for a while… only for a while.”

She pressed, “What will you do?”

Hans forced the tears away, forced calm to his voice. “Perhaps I will return to Berlin. I have no more friends here, since Sol passed away, no relatives either. I still have some there, though I do not know them.”

She digested that thought for a while, came upon another. “Hansi, I never asked. Neither of us wanted to talk about it. But, talked about or not, I always knew. Why did you never forgive yourself? I forgave you long ago, that first night in your hut. But you never did. Why?”

This was not something Hans really wanted to talk about… and yet… and yet it was time. Slowly, deliberately, he answered, “There were three kinds of Germans, Anna, in those days. There were those who didn’t know… about what was done to the Jews and the others in the camps, I mean. A majority, that was, I think, though many more might have suspected. They have no sin, except perhaps one of omission.

“And then there were the other Germans, the ones who did know, reveled in the knowing, and thought it all to be proper and right. They can answer to God or the Devil — and I have strong suspicions who it will be that they finally talk to, with a straight face and a clear eye… at least until the fire reaches them.” Hans sniffed with disdain.

The last part came harder; a mirror is often the most difficult kind of glass to look into.

Yet Hans was a brave man, had faced fire bravely in more places than he cared to think about. He could be brave this once more, for his wife. “The last group were the worst and I was in that group. We were the ones who knew, knew that it was wrong, evil, and even knowing this, turned our faces from it, instead of fighting it; turned our faces and ran.

“This kind of German, my kind of German, will face God or the Devil, too. What we will be able to say in our defense before the fire reaches us?”

Anna nodded, understanding, though even that little effort was a strain. She was growing weaker by the minute. In a breathless voice she said, “I understand, my Hansi. You are afraid, perhaps, that we will not be together in the future. Well, let me tell you, speaking as a Jew to a German… you are a good man, Hansi. You have done no wrong… and you always did your best.” She reached up to stroke his cheek, as old as hers and even more weathered, and finished, the sound fading even as she spoke, “God does not expect perfection in his creations, and we will be together again, I promise you…”

Alone in his bed, a sleeping old man in a twenty-year-old body wept for an old woman remembered as a young woman. In his heart and his mind she was remembered as fresh… and as freshly remembered as the last spring. Though his hospital robe had no breast pocket still, unconsciously, his hand stroked for a little packet usually found there.

47^th Field Hospital, Potsdam, Germany, 2 January 2008

On the street outside the hospital a column of gray-clad, determined-looking Schwabian infantry marched past on their way to the front, their boots ringing on the cobblestones below. The Schwabians sang as they marched:

Ignoring the music, Mühlenkampf reached out an arm to shake awake Hans Brasche, ignoring the latter’s splinted arm and well-wrapped head. “Get up, Hansi, I need you.”

Slowly and groggily, Hans did awaken. And immediately reached for the bucket near his bed.

Mühlenkampf turned his head away. “Never mind that,” he insisted. “We’ve both been concussed before. Puking afterwards is just another part of it.”

Hans ignored his commander, finishing his business with the bucket before looking upwards. “And how may I assist you, Herr General?” he asked, with polite disinterest, after emptying his stomach.

“You can get back on your feet! You can take over command again of that fucking, falling-apart rabble we call the 501^st Schwere Panzer. You can get back to the fucking war.”

Mühlenkampf relented. “I am sorry, Hansi, I truly am. The eastern front has collapsed. Oh, many of the troops will get away but they are a mess. I am throwing the 47^th Korps, including the 501^st, and two infantry Korps to try to hold it while we reorganize the survivors.

“And, Hansi, I can’t even put you in ‘the tank’ for a Galactic tech repair. The only one near here was taken out by an alien kinetic energy strike from space.”

“Where is the rest of Army Group Reserve going?” Brasche asked.

“There is a spot of trouble in the west. The defenses are still holding but the enemy is acting… funny. Almost clever. Clever aliens worry me, Hans.”

Hans nodded solemnly, then immediately had to reach for his bucket again. Even such a little movement was… difficult.

“Hans, I would not ask if I didn’t need you.”

“I understand,” Brasche said. Rising, unsteadily, he continued, “I will leave tonight.”

“That’s my Hansi,” said Mühlenkampf. “After the east is stabilized, and a certain bridge in the west retaken, we will assemble, likely around Hanau. In the interim, I am heading west.”

Mainz, Germany, 4 January 2008

In this ancient city just west of the Rhein, Isabelle and her two children had finally settled into something resembling normalcy.

There was a tremendous housing shortage of course, so much so that the French civilians who had escaped to Germany were forced to live in, in Isabelle’s case, a large indoor gymnasium. But blankets had been hung near the walls, separate living spaces arranged, a modicum of privacy granted.

Isabelle had never been fond of German food. Now, though, she wished she could have twice as much of it, more especially for her boys than for herself. But food, like living space, was in short supply.

There was a bustle of murmuring coming from the mess, the central common area of the gymnasium. This low bee-like hum grew until it was loud enough to attract Isabelle’s interest. Leaving the boys behind, she twisted her way through other cloth cubicles and the long benches at which many of the French refugees sat, dawdling over the meager and bland lunch repast.

A man, in gray uniform, was addressing the people while standing a top one of the benches. Isabelle took a second look to confirm that it was the same Captain Hennessey who had earlier led her and the boys to safety. It took two looks because the captain had turned from tall and robust to the very essence of exhaustion, with deep, dust-filled lines engraved on his face, sunken eyes and the slouch of bone-weariness.

She could not hear what Hennessey was saying from this distance. She approached closer, using her imposing height and personal vigor to force her way through the throng.

She was soon close enough to hear the captain’s words. “We need more men,” he said, as loudly as able. “Division Charlemagne started this fight with over twenty-eight thousand men before we covered your retreat. One in twenty combat soldiers crossed to safety. We are the last French formation in this war and, if we are to have any bargaining power with the Boche, we must grow again.” The captain then said something too softly to be heard, but Isabelle thought she could make out the words on his lips, “We need to grow again if any of our people are to deserve to live.”

An adolescent voice rang out from just behind her, and Isabelle cringed. “How old must a man be to volunteer?” asked her son, Thomas, in a clear, ringing voice.

“Fifteen,” answered Hennessey, perhaps slightly less wearily than he had spoken before.

“I am fifteen. I will go.”

But, NO! Isabelle wished to scream. Not my baby! He is only fourteen, she wanted to lie. She turned pleading eyes to the boy, Oh, please do not, my son. You will be killed and what will your poor mother do then?

Mother, I am old enough to be eaten. I am old enough to fight. And I am French, too, the boy answered, soundlessly.

Hanging her head to let her hair hide her tears, Isabelle gave a shuddering nod. Then go, damn you, and take your mother’s heart with you.

Behind Hennessey a little pool of willing humanity, and not all of it of the male persuasion, began to grow.

Tiger Anna, Niesse River, South of Frankfurt am Oder, Germany, 8 January 2008

On the eastern bank, now the enemy bank, of the river, the Posleen horde had been growing all day. Hans had counted each day they had not crossed previously as a special blessing since he and his brigade had arrived here.

His return had been a joyous one, despite his injuries. The men of his own Tiger had clustered around, overjoyed to see their commander again. They had feared the worst.

They had all been overjoyed except for Krueger, the unrepentant Nazi, that is. He made a polite showing of face, but retired immediately to his driving station, thinking all the while dark thoughts about pseudo-Nazis and Jew lovers.

Hans’ lighter panzers and panzer grenadiers, plus three other Tigers and Anna, he had placed into the line after using them as a field gendarmerie to round up stragglers. The twenty-five remaining Tigers — yes one had been recovered — he had stretched along the river to lend their fire to the defense and cover the recongealing defenders from any of the alien ships that might lift to join the attack.

The winter had been relatively mild so far. Thus, the enemy was presented not with seemingly crossable ice, but apparently impassable water. The Posleen were nonswimmers to a being, heavier than water, and if they were immune to any known poisons they still needed oxygen to survive.

In short, they drowned easily, and fear of being drowned had kept them to their side of the river… for a while.

Hans didn’t know how they had discovered that this part of the Niesse was easily fordable. Perhaps it was nothing more than a normal who had gotten lost and returned to gesture and point. On such chances hung the fates of peoples and empires, at times.

There was no doubt they knew know, however. The horde, literally tens of millions of ravenous, hexapodal aliens, massing opposite told that surely, they knew their way was not barred by water.

But the precious time gained by alien ignorance had been put to good use. Other liquids besides water could choke off oxygen from alien lungs.

There was a communal snarl from the other side. To Hans it sounded not too different from a Russian mass infantry assault from the early days of World War Two. Not that the languages bore any similarity, indeed the Posleen normals didn’t really have a language. But eloquent language, in a charge like this, was irrelevant anyway. Russian, Posleen… German for all that, the message was the same. “We are here and we’re coming to kill you.”

“Not just yet, you won’t, you bastards; not just yet,” Hans muttered, under his breath.

“Sir?” asked Schultz.

“Never mind, Dieter. Just prepare to use canister at the preselected targets. It’s beginning.”

Not as one, that was not the People’s way, but in fits and starts at first, the number of normals entering the icy water grew. Soon it was a solid mass of yellow flesh crawling to gain the other side and rend the hated threshkreen.

Oolt’ondai Borominskar urged his People forward with words exalting ancient days and heroes. The God King wondered, absently, at the lack of enemy resistance. Here and there a junior Kessentai, living the tales of his ancestors, danced his tenar ahead of the horde, baiting the threshkreen. The problem was that the threshkreen often enough took the bait and send the tenar into a sphere of actinic light. That, or simply blasted the daring God King’s chest or head to ruin.

Onward, onward, the tide of the People surged against the foul-smelling stream of the river. Soon they were more than halfway across and the threshkreen began to play their machine guns against the host. At least, the oolt’ondai thought they were machine guns. The absence of the burning lines from what the thresh called “tracers” puzzled him slightly.

No matter. The People were in full attack mode, pressing on heedless of loss. But damn the threshkreen for hiding behind thick earthen berms, seeking safety in their cowardly way from the railguns of the People.

Hans peered out from Anna’s turret hatch past the berm that had been hastily thrown up for added defense against the enemy’s HVMs and Plasma cannon. Anna could take a few hits. But it was better if she could take a few dozen.

In Hans’ earpiece the 1c said, “Projections say it is time, sir.”

“Very well, release the gasoline.”

The few days’ respite had been very well spent. Pumps on the western bank began to spill gasoline onto the river’s surface at a furious rate.

Borominskar’s olfactory organs barely sensed the new smell over the river’s, thresh-made, pollution. In a few minutes, though, as the flowing waters spread some new fluid out across the stream’s surface, the odor became too strong to ignore. The artificial intelligence on the oolt’ondai’s tenar beeped once, twice, then issued a warning.

“That fluid is highly volatile, highly flammable, Kessentai. I believe it to be a trick of the threshkreen.”

Though not a genius among the People, Borominskar was also no ninny. He saw immediately what his AI meant, saw in his mind’s eye the People burning and gasping for something breathable before succumbing in a horrible, shameful death.

He began to shout, “Turn around, go back.” He began to, then realized that there was no retreat, that the shortest way to safety was ahead. So instead of ordering a retreat he ordered the charge to speed up.

Alas, too late, he thought as he saw the beginnings of flames appear on the far side.

The sound now coming from the alien mass was anything but the confident cry of expectant victory and resulting massacre and feast. Instead, the panicked aliens cried out in obvious pain and even more obvious fear.

Somewhere in your ancestry, you have some forebears who knew and feared fire, didn’t you, boys? thought Hans.

Alien arms waved frantically, desperately within the hellish flames. The sound was that of an infinity of kittens being burned and suffocated. Hans noted with interest that few of those mewing aliens’ arms retained weapons. The God Kings’ tenar fluttered above the conflagration, seemingly helpless to stop or end the suffering of their “wives” and children below. Shots rang out from the western bank, emptying the occasional tenar. In time, shots rang down too, as Kessentai did what they could to end the agony of their roasting and suffocating people.

So you are capable of pity, too, are you? How very interesting. So are we; but not for you. For you, this memory will keep you from crossing for several more days, I suspect.

Borominskar retreated to the eastern bank, shocked to his being at such wanton, cruel and vicious destruction. There were none of the People still in the flame-covered water. All trapped had succumbed and only a few had escaped the trap. Some of these had made it to the far side, only to be cut down by the threshkreen. A few of the late crosses had likewise managed to reach dry land before being encoiled in the thresh’s demon-spawned trick.

Settling his tenar to the ground, Borominskar saw that the People, Normals and God Kings both, had pulled as far from the flaming wall as possible. Bunching up, shocked and terrorized, they presented an enviable target for the threshkreen’s artillery and heavy fighting machines.

The oolt’ondai’s tenar beeped again. “Emanations from four enemy major fighting machines, Lord. Incoming artillery; uncountable rounds but not less than three thousand.”

Mainz, Germany, 10 Jnuary 2008

Isabelle’s head ached and her inner body rippled with the shock of masses of incoming alien kinetic energy weapons. Within and around the city and to the southwest, these landed, raising clouds of dirt and dust into the sullen sky. Artillery lent its own measure to the frightful din.

There were few streaks of silver lighting coming from the ground to answer the invader’s fire, however. The news was clear that the enemy had hurt the Planetary Defense Batteries badly.

Somehow, she suspected that that artillery — and luck in avoiding the incoming KE weapons — might be all that stood between her boy, Thomas, and death.

She had seen her elder boy, once, briefly, since he had joined what she insisted on thinking of as “The Army.” She could not even bring herself to say that he was a member of the Boche army. As to the branch? The insignia glittering on his collar had been almost impossible to ignore. She had put on the best face she could, even so.

Now, he was in danger. And she knew the boy was hardly trained for war. She could only hope for the best as she, her remaining boy, and millions of people, German and French both, prepared for the long trudge to safety, could it but be found, far to the north.

Reports from the front were uniformly bad. The Siegfried line was going to fall and soon. Only this knowledge gave serious impetus to those previously fleeing and about-to-become refugees’ preparations for their flight.

Placing her pack upon her back, taking her remaining son by the hand, Isabelle took a glance backwards in the direction of where she presumed her Thomas was. Then, forcing herself to an unnatural strength, she joined the column of refugees heading to the north.

Siegfried Line, Southwest of Mainz, 11 January 2008

Of formal training there had been precious little. The week Thomas had spent in Charlemagne had proven just enough to teach him what little need be known to fire a military rifle from a concrete bunker, that, and to issue him a minimum of uniforms and equipment.

And minimum, when a young slender boy had to make a home in an icy concrete bunker, was little indeed. Thomas found himself shivering more or less constantly. Though some of this shivering was caused by reasons other than cold.

He had previously been spared personal sight of the enemy, except for what the television had shown of them. The reality was frightful beyond words; a mindless horde that charged forward heedless of loss so long as they might take one human down with them.

The boy’s leader, Sergeant Gribeauval, seemed to have taken an interest in his survival. At least, the good sergeant spent a fair amount of time on his training, whenever the enemy didn’t press the attack too closely. This absence of pressure was so rare, however, that the sergeant’s help consisted mostly of little pointers and tips, and an occasional fatherly pat on the shoulder. Perhaps this was so because Thomas was the youngest member of the platoon by at least a year.

He had lost count of the number of attacks that Charlemagne had repelled so far. The pile of dead enemy to the front grew and grew. Even the wire was, by now, covered with their bodies.

This was, Thomas knew, a very bad sign. Though behind the wire, between him and the aliens, a thin minefield gave some additional protection. He had helped reinforce the minefield, one day, with Sergeant Gribeauval and two others. The sergeant had often muttered about the scarcity of mines; that, and incomprehensible words about “silly royal English adulteresses.”

There was a rustle of fallen leaves from behind the boy; booted feet entering the bunker.

“Young De Gaullejac?”

“Oui, mon sergeant,” the boy answered. His breath formed a misty frost over the plastic rifle stock to which he kept his beardless cheek pressed.

“Pack your things, son, while keeping as good a watch to your front as you can. We have orders to pull back to the next position. Soon. It isn’t as good as this one but the enemy hasn’t penetrated it yet. The artillery is going to plaster the hell out of this place to cover our retreat.”

Army Group Reserve Headquarter, Wiesbaden, Germany, 13 January 2008

Retreat was the only option Mühlenkampf could see. The Siegfried line and the Rheinland were lost, that much was clear. The enemy had finally gotten their act together and found the answer to the previously formidable defenses. It seemed the Germans had managed to do what they had done before, even with the Russians: teach an enemy to fight as a combined arms team.

“Scheisse,” he cursed, without enthusiasm. “Scheisse to have to go through this a third time in one lifetime.”

The rear area was a scene of terror and misery. Masses of people were evacuating to the north and west. Some of these, it was hoped, would make it to the underground cities constructed in Scandinavia. Others could seek shelter in the Alps; the Swiss had made that clear enough.

But they had to retreat, now, to shelter behind the Rhein. Even with the threatening breach presented by the enemy presence on their captured bridge, it was the last defensible obstacle the Fatherland owned, excepting only the easily turned Elbe.

Mühlenkampf knew that the Elbe was a place for enemy armies to meet, not for friendly ones to defend from.

If only he had a prayer of retaking the bridgehead. But without the 47^th Korps, and Brasche’s 501^st Brigade, he knew he hadn’t any chance of doing so any more. He had tried.

It wasn’t that the Bundeswehr were bad troops, anymore. The last two campaigns for the defense of Germany had seen them make vast strides. The real swine in the army, officer or enlisted, were in penal battalions. Executing or, minimally, defanging those civilians who had interfered with the army’s training and morale had also helped. But the 47^th Korps had started with a bigger cadre, of generally rougher, tougher, more combat-experienced men. And that made all the difference.

He thought he had a prayer of containing the bridgehead, if only the armies in the Rheinland could be withdrawn to the safety of the Rhine’s eastern bank. Reluctantly, fearfully, by no means certain he was right, Mühlenkampf ordered his operations officer, “Call off the attack to the bridge. Leave the infantry and penal korps behind to contain the enemy, along with one panzer and one panzer grenadier division detached from the army heavy Korps. Take the rest of the Army Group — Bah! Army Group? We have about a single army left under our control — north to the other bridges. Cross them over and have them help the troops in the Rheinland to disengage and withdraw.

“And get me the Kanzler. I need to ask for permission to use a few of the neutron weapons.”

Tiger Brünnhilde, Grosslanghaim, Franconia, Germany, 13 January 2008

The crew of the tank, not least Prael, were sweating profusely, though the carefully controlled internal climate was not the cause of the sweat. Instead, it was the repeated near misses from Posleen space-borne weapons that had the crew in sweat-soaked clothing.

Brünnhilde had more elevation that the earlier model Tigers. These latter were used in mass, and so could generally count on the dead space above the turret being covered by another tank, standing off at a distance. Brünnhilde, however, fought alone and so had to be able to cover more of her own dead space. Moreover, while Anna’s more or less conventional, albeit highly souped up, twelve-inch gun had a mighty recoil, and could not be elevated too much without having made the model too high for more usual engagements, Brunhilde’s railgun had comparatively little recoil. Thus, she could elevate to eighty degrees above the horizontal.

She needed every bit of that… and more.

“Johann, halt, facing left,” ordered Prael. Mueller quickly slewed the tank to a full stop while twisting her ninety degrees to the left.

Even while Mueller was slowing, then stopping the tank, Prael was setting his own aiming instrument on a Posleen ship, thirty miles away. When he had found the target on the commander’s sight on he ordered the tank to lock on. Brunhilde’s AI dutifully did so, then reported the fact.

Nervously, Prael waited while the railgun gave off three distinct thrums, each about twelve seconds apart. Finally, Schlüssel announced, “Hit.”

Prael immediately commanded, “Reinhard, target, B-Dec, nine o’clock, very high.”

Schlüssel, acting much like an automaton, pressed the button for the gunner to take over the commander’s selected target. He announced, “Got it,” then began to lead the Posleen ship.

Prael began to search the database for the next best target; began and stopped when he saw something incoming that was moving too fast and in the wrong direction to be a target.

“Scheisse,” he said. “Incoming! Johann back us up… fast!”

Mueller, understanding the note of desperation in Prael’s voice, immediately threw the tank into reverse. Though the tank’s superb suspension and almost incredible mass sheltered the other crew from any real feeling for the destruction, Mueller’s sensitive and knowing hands on the controls felt every crumbled building and even the pulverization of the town’s simple and thoughtful monument to her Great War and World War Two dead.

There was little left of the center of the tiny, picturesque farming town of Grosslangheim once Brünnhilde had backed through. The shock of the impacting KE projectile shook the rest of the town to its foundations.

Rinteel, too, was shaken and sweat-soaked. He had been somewhat untroubled by the occasional sniping Brünnhilde had done early on. He simply did not consider, would not let himself consider, the sentient beings on the receiving end. Brunhilde’s railgun simply launched projectiles into space or sky and that was the end of it, as far as the Indowy’s mind would permit.

The material coming back, “incoming” as the human crew said, was another matter entirely. Brünnhilde picked up, but deamplified, the thunderous crashing. So too, she gave the crew, at reduced sound levels, the sense of impact when a KE projectile hit. The tank could do nothing to reduce the shaking and rocking of the tank from a near miss; the Indowy found himself tossed and bruised by the ill-fitting straps of his battle station.

“I’ve got a hydraulic leak in right track section three,” Mueller announced. “Not bad but increasing. Inboard.”

“Rinteel, see to it. Schmidt, go with him and assist.”

Ignoring the two-being human and Indowy team unbuckling themselves and crawling along the floor of the tank to an access panel that led below, Prael asked, “Reinhard, have you got target on that fucker yet?”

“Just a second… coming… almost… AHA!” Brünnhilde shuddered again with the release of another KE round. Instantly the hydraulic elevator and rammer fed another round to the railgun’s launch rack. Schlüssel waited for the fiery bloom that confirmed a hit before firing another round.

Already Prael was searching the sky for another target for his gunner.

Below the tank, the cobblestone streets of Grosslangheim cracked and splintered.

Mainz, Germany, 15 January 2008

Roman soldiers and citizens had once walked the city’s streets. Feudal knights had held tourneys for her folks’ entertainment. Gutenberg, of movable type fame, had been born and raised there. Smashed in the Second World War, modern Mainz, still retaining much of its medieval charm, had arisen, phoenixlike, from its ruins.

Mainz would never rise again. Blasted by everything from space-borne kinetic energy weapons, to ground-mounted and carried arms, to human artillery fired in support of its recent defenders, the city was nothing more than a ruin of ruins. Soon enough, the Posleen harvesting machine would erase even those. Gutenberg’s ghost would wander in vain looking for a landmark. Roman soldiers and feudal knights, peasants and burghers, artists and artisans; no trace would remain, all would be forgotten.

Through the streets, dodging and flowing around the chunks of ruined buildings littering them, the Posleen horde marched like a flood. Above, silently, the tenar of their God Kings hovered, ever alert for threshkreen holdouts. There were a few of these, men deliberately left behind or detached from their units and lost amongst the ruins. But so few remained that each shot was met with a torrent of fire; plasma cannon, railgun, even high-velocity missile.

From time to time a storm of shells would fall upon the remnants of a major intersection to splash some small part of the Posleen river like a creek struck with a rock. But, as with water, the Posleen always closed up and continued their flow. There might be thresh ahead, after all.

Mainz — ancient Mainz, human Mainz — was fast disappearing under the yellow tide.

Wiesbaden, Germany, 15 January 2008

What might have been an easy half day’s march, Mainz to Wiesbaden, for seasoned infantry in good order, with an open road, had been a nightmare trudge lasting the better part of five days for the masses of panic-stricken civilians, mostly Germans mixed with lesser numbers of French.

Each night Isabelle and her remaining son had gone to sleep — such miserable, fitful, half-frozen sleep — wherever fate had brought them to that point. Only mutual body heat and the thick blankets Isabelle had ported had kept them alive. Of food there had been none after the bits Isabelle had carried, long since exhausted. Of water there had been little beyond chewed dirty snow and the occasional muddy, chemical-tasting pool or crater. Even Germans required time to plan such a move, she thought, not without a sense of bitter vindication.

But that sense of vindication could not last, not faced with the generosity of the Wiesbadeners who opened their hearts, their homes, and — best of all — their food lockers to the passing refugees. With a belly full, her youngest baby cradled in her arms, in a warm bed in a heated home, with the Rhine River and an army between her and the aliens, Isabelle felt safe for the first time since leaving Hackenberg.

Only recurring nightmares about her other son disturbed her sleep.

Closer to his mother than either of them would have believed possible, Volunteer De Gaullejac, his sergeant, and the battered remnants of their platoon kept watch from a stout stone building looking over the bridge crossing the Rhein. Young Thomas had never imagined such a sea of humanity as he had seen crossing the bridge.

The platoon’s job, as part of the company, was to ensure that the bridge did not fall into alien hands. None spoke of it, yet each man knew what it meant. If the aliens showed up it did not matter who was on the bridge — French, German or the Papal Guard, it must be dropped.

Thomas was not sure he could. After all, his mother and little brother might be among those thronging to safety.

A flight of half a dozen tenar, the aliens’ flying machines, appeared over the water heading for the friendly side of the bridge.

“They must have slipped around the defenders on the far side,” muttered Gribeauval.

The aliens stopped over the river, open targets for all to see and all within range to engage, and turned their weapons on the thronging masses of noncombatants on the bridge.

“Don’t shoot boys,” Gribeauval ordered. “Let the others handle it. Those aliens are trying to get us to open up. If they do, they’ll swarm us, most likely, and the bridge won’t be dropped.”

Even as the sergeant spoke, from his peephole Thomas saw one of the aliens thrown from his flying sled to fall, arms and legs waving frantically, to the cold waters below. The remainder of the aliens continued to rake the refugees with railgun fire.

Even at this distance, Thomas could faintly make out the shrieks and cries of terror of the civilians under attack. He saw more bodies, human ones, fall to the water. Some, so it seemed from the way they clawed at air on the way down, jumped to certain death rather than stand one more minute helpless under Posleen fire.

The boy prayed that his mother and little brother had already passed safely.

Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse line, 16 January 2008

A few refugees, slow but lucky, still managed to worm their way through Posleen lines and make their stumbling passage across the charred-body choked cookhouse that was the Niesse River. Hans had, for a while, sent patrols across to meet and guide any that could be found to safety on the western bank. Casualties among the patrols, however, had been fierce. Within days he had had to order the practice stopped. Any civilians that could find their way across would be welcome. But he would risk no more men on such a fruitless task.

The most recent group, some seven half-starved and completely terrified refugees, were Poles. They were being fed, at Hans’ order, under Anna’s shelter and from the tank’s own stores. A small fire had been built under the tank, as much for morale as for warmth. There was something about a fire, something ancient and beyond words. Hans had one built whenever the tactical situation permitted. The crew would often gather there, to warm their hands by the flickering light. The Poles, too, gathered by it.

Only one spoke any German, and that little he spoke very badly. The man seemed quite frantic to Hans, pointing and gesturing at some new threat, real or imagined, coming from the other side.

Reluctantly, after the Poles had been fed, Hans directed Harz to guide them to the rear. Maybe they did have useful information, maybe they didn’t. If so, only one of the interpreters in the rear could hope to ferret it out.

Still, Hans had to credit the intensity of the Pole’s frantic and failed attempts at communication. He resolved to order an increased alert level as soon as he returned to Anna’s warm hold.

Though the night was cold, Borominskar, standing by and facing a fire, and with a patchwork blanket made of carefully chewed and sewn thresh-pelt, was warm enough. A cosslain had summoned forth the needed skills to make the blanket from his internal store. Going from feed lot to feed lot he had selected the best of the thresh, those with the longest, finest, brightest hair to make this offering to his God. Carefully trimming and cleaning the freshly gathered pelts, the cosslain had chewed them gently for days to make them change from putrescible flesh to soft, long haired, impervious suede.

The fire was warm, pleasingly so. Its random flashes, the sparks and flickering shadows it cast, brought to the Posleen’s mind a sense of peace; of relaxation, quiet and ease. Equally comforting, the blanket was bright and fluffy, the thresh would have called its fibers “blonde.” It insulated the God King well from the frozen wind, coming unbroken off of the steppes to the east.

The God King found stroking the long, thick fibers of the blanket to be strangely pleasant, almost as pleasant as contemplation of revenge upon the cowardly, never to be sufficiently dammed thresh who had half broken his host.

And the day of that revenge was near at hand.

Borominskar had had a terrible time keeping his Kessentai and their oolt’os under discipline. Hungry, the people were; hungry, frightened and furious at the cowardly thresh’s use of floating fire to defeat the last attack. They were also terrified, at some deep inner level, of facing such a death as had befallen their brethren.

The memory of all those oolt’os burning and suffocating in flame, their piteous cries breaking the sky, still made Borominskar shudder, his flesh crawl.

Still, a few more days and the gathering parties, hungry as they were, would have gathered enough living thresh to make Borominskar’s plan work. The thresh had shown no pity for his people. They might have some for their own.

Tiger Brünnhilde, Kitzingen, Germany, 17 January 2008

“The pity of it is,” said a sleepy Mueller to an exhausted Schlüssel, “with just two of these, we would be three times more effective. With a half a dozen, the enemy could be hunted as if by a wolf pack, and destroyed before they could mass effective return fire. A half dozen like our ‘girl’ here, and the Posleen could not live over Germany.”

“Yes,” agreed Schlüssel. “And then our cities would not be smashed from the air, our fortifications would have held longer, maybe indefinitely, and the poor bastards on the ground would have a better chance.”

“Is there any chance of getting at least a second Model B Tiger?”

“No, Johann,” Prael interrupted. “The information is on the Net for download; the factory and most of the raw material are being moved to one of the SubUrbs in Switzerland. But that process is going to take months to complete the move and prepare for manufacture. No telling how long before they begin to produce.”

“The Swedes?” Mueller asked.

“They have the plans” answered Prael. “They have the raw materials. They even have some railguns we shipped to them and all of the plans for Tiger A and B, both. But, again, more months, perhaps as long as a year, until the first model rolls off.”

“We do not have a year,” Henschel observed from the little cocoon of blankets he had rolled himself into to seek a few moments’ rest.

Each day in the Tiger seemed like a year of normal time to Rinteel. Besides the constant work, work, work keeping the beast running, work which, because of his dexterity, skill and instincts fell more and more upon the Indowy’s broad shoulders, there was the ever present danger, the psychic torment whenever he let it get through to him that this tank, this crew, were gleefully slaughtering sentient beings.

At least he wasn’t hungry, as he had been for a few days when the food he had carried aboard ran out. He had managed to cobble together a food synthesizer in an unused space between Brünnhilde’s fighting compartment and the exterior hull. It stood right next to what the human crew had dubbed “the Nibelung’s still.”

Rinteel found himself growing more and more dependent upon the product of that still. Through the long days and nights of battle, he had come to seek its relaxation — even the oblivion it could provide taken in excess quantities — as a respite from the horrors he endured.

He noticed too that the German crew never lost a chance to loot any alcohol they could find in any abandoned town. Though, being German and therefore almost as neat as an Indowy, the trail behind the über-tank was marked by neat piles of amber and green bottles anywhere Brünnhilde had found a half a day’s safety to stop and rest.

Right now the tank sat idle and quiet under a thick blanket of camouflage foam and snow. She needed resupply, she needed maintenance, and she needed them now.

Fortunately, the trucks carrying spare parts, ammunition and food had already begun to queue up, under cover of the snow-clad woods nearby. Already the first of the ammunition trucks was parked beside the massive hull, pallets of ammunition being lifted by Brünnhilde’s external crane and stowed below.

While resupply was ongoing, below a large crew of mechanics worked repairs to the massive yet intricate mechanisms of the tank. Still others gauged and, in teams, tightened track, checked the suspension, or performed any number of other tasks required under the fleeting supervision of Rinteel.

The Indowy had nothing to do with the resupply. Instead, he spent his time alternating between rest, food, drink, repairs and reading the manual. Much of the sleep was catch as catch can. The food was usually wolfed down. The drink imbibed served to relax him enough, if just enough, to sleep. The repairs were never ending.

And the manual was… obtuse.

Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse line, 17 January 2008

The shallow valley of the Niesse was covered in dense thick fog. Anna’s thermals could pierce the fog easily, of course, and to a considerable distance. Even so, Hans had left his operations officer in charge below, seated in the command chair to view the screen and keep watch over the rest of the area via his virtual reality helmet.

Hans, instead, stood in the commander’s hatch atop the turret listening for… he knew not what. There were no targets for the artillery, not given that observers could not see through enough of the fog to justify using shells that were becoming slightly harder to find than they had been. There was no rifle fire from the near bank, nor railgun fire from the Posleen. Only the occasional rumble from fore or rear told of artillery laying down sporadic “harassment and interdiction,” or H and I, fires.

H and I fires could be said to be the price one pays for making the enemy’s life miserable and uncertain… and keeping him from becoming too bold.

Hans’ mind dialed out the artillery’s intermittent rumbling. His eyes he let go out of focus. His ears, enhanced by the same process that had returned him to youth, strained to find something, some hint or sign, of what had so terrified that Pole.

His ears, enhanced or not, picked up nothing. Hans cursed the fog that kept him from seeing.

Borominskar cursed the damnable weather of this world. He needed for the humans to be able to see!

And he needed them able to see well… and soon. All his plans depended on the threshkreen being able to see what they were facing. Only that, the God King was sure, would take his host to the far bank and beyond.

Would this fog never lift? Would he be forced to feed his host on the thresh gathered, to feed them before the thresh had fulfilled their purpose? The thought was just too depressing. Already he had ordered the male thresh so far gathered slaughtered to feed his oolt’os. That was of little moment. But he needed the young and the females to see his purpose through to completion. If the fog did not disappear within a few days, Borominskar knew he would have to order the slaughter of even these.

The God King tried to relax. Unconsciously his hand reached to stroke the thick, soft pelt of the blanket that warmed his haunches.

Frustrated and half frozen in the fog, Hans left the commander’s hatch and descended by the Anna’s elevator to the heavily armored, and properly heated, battle deck below.

“Commander on deck,” the 1a announced, quickly vacating Han’s command chair.

Wordlessly, Hans took the chair and placed his VR helmet on his head. The crew, their battle stations, the main view-screen, all disappeared instantly.

The helmet took its input directly from Anna. Where all was clear she used her external cameras to send clear images. Where only her thermal, radar and lidar vision could reach she supplied what could only be called a best guess. In those circumstances, the images she projected were somewhat simplified, iconic and even cartoonish.

“Anna,” Hans whispered.

“Yes, Herr Oberst,” the tank replied in his audio receivers.

“I am sorry, Anna, I was talking to someone else.”

“Yes, Herr Oberst.”

Hans’ hand stroked the little package in his left breast pocket. Anna, I have a very bad feeling about tomorrow. No, not that they will defeat me here. That, they will do, eventually, anyway. But there is something going on, something different… something I do not think my men can face. I wish so very much you could be here with me. I think you were always as much braver and smarter than I as you were better looking. And, I am alone and afraid.

Wiesbaden, Germany, 18 January 2008

Through the long days and nights the stream of people fleeing the Posleen hordes never completely let up, though night, weather, and enemy fire occasionally caused it to slacken. Thomas marveled that so many could have made it out of the west to safety here.

He knew one reason why so many civilians were still pouring over to safety. To meet and pass the flood of refugees, a thin continuous column of gray-green clad men and boys crossed in the opposite direction, an offering of military blood to save civilian blood.

“It’s the Germans, boy,” pronounced Gribeauval. “Give the bastards their due. When their blood is up, when it really matters, they know how to die.”

Thomas knew this was so. He knew it from the eerie flares illuminating the town of Mainz to the southwest, and from the red tracers that flew upward to meet those flares after ricocheting off of some hard surface. The German boys — boys no different from himself and his mates — still fighting and dying to hold an arc around the bridge and around the hundreds of thousands of civilians still waiting the word to cross to the north, wrote grim testimony to their own courage and determination to hang on to the bitterest end.

“Read this,” said Gribeauval. “It just came in… a radio message from some corporal over there.”

Thomas read:

“There are seven of us left alive in this place. Four of us are wounded, two very badly, though each mans a post even so. We have been under siege for five days. For five days we have had no food. In ten minutes the enemy will attack; we can hear him massing now. I have only one magazine left for my rifle. The mines are expended. The machine gun is kaput. We are out of range of mortar support and I cannot raise the artillery. We have rigged a dead-man’s switch on our last explosives to ensure our bodies do not go to feeding the enemy. Tell my family I have done my duty and will know how to die. May the German people live forever!”

Thomas felt unwelcome tears. He forced them back only with difficulty. So gallant, so brave they were, those boys over there fighting and dying against such odds, and with so little hope.

Gribeauval, seeing the boy’s emotions written upon his twisted face, said, “Yes, son; give them their due. They are a great people, a magnificent people. And we are damned lucky to have them, now.”

Thomas agreed. And more; he thought of himself, alone, trying to save his mother and little brother from the alien menace. He wished to be a man, was becoming one, he knew. But alone he could never have made the slightest difference for his family’s survival. That took an army, an army of brave men and boys, willing to give their all for the cause of their people.

Perhaps for the first time, Thomas began to feel a deep pride, not so much in himself, but in the men he served with, in the army they served, and even in the black-clad, lightning bolt-signified, corps that was a part of that army.

Thomas was learning.

“Save that message, son. Keep it in your pocket. The day may come when you need a good example.”

Isabelle had wanted to set a proper example. So, though she had no medical training, she had been married to one of France’s premier surgeons. Much of medical lore she had picked up as if by osmosis, across the dinner table, at soirees, from visiting her husband’s office. She thought she might be able to help, with scullery work if nothing else. And she knew to be clean in all things and all ways around open flesh.

She thought, at least, she could follow that part of the Hippocratic oath which said: “First of all, do no harm.”

Once assured that the Wiesbadener family would see to her youngest, once she saw him learning this new language, this new culture, she had made inquiries and set out on her quest.

It had been difficult. For the most part, if Germans learned a foreign language it was much more likely to be English than French, a long legacy of cozying up to new allies and away from ancient enemies. In time, her own badly spoken, high school German had seen her to a French-staffed military hospital. She was surprised to see the Sigrunen framing the red cross, surprised to see the name in not Roman but Gothic letters: Field Hospital, SS Division Charlemagne.

“You wish to join as a volunteer?” the one armed old sergeant had asked.

“Oui. I think I may be of help. But, to help, monsieur, not to join. You have already taken one of my sons. The other needs me.”

“Have we? Taken one of your boys, that is? We could certainly use some help… well… let me show you around. As you will see, nothing here is by the book.”

Tiger Brünnhilde, near Kitzingen, Germany, 18 January 2008

Still reading the manual, that obtuse, damnable, almost incomprehensible operators and crewman’s manual, a frustrated Rinteel spoke with the tank itself.

“Tank Brünnhilde, I am confused.”

“What is the source of your confusion, Indowy Rinteel?”

Rinteel took a sip of intoxicant from a metal, army-issue cup, before answering. Thus fortified, he continued, “Your programming does not allow you to fight on your own, is that correct?”

“It is correct, Indowy Rinteel.”

“It does allow you to use your own abilities to escape, however, does it not?”

“If my entire crew is dead or unconscious, I am required to bring them and myself to safety, yes. But I am still not allowed to fight the main gun without a colloidal sentience to order me to. I can use the close-defense weapons on my own, however, at targets within their range; that is within my self-defense programming. And I may not retreat while I carry more than two rounds of ammunition for the main gun.”

“Can’t you direct your main gun without human interface?”

“I have that technical ability, Indowy Rinteel, but may still not fire it without a colloidal sentience to order me to.”

“How very strange,” the Indowy commented, sotto voce.

“I am not programmed to comment upon the vagaries of my creators, Indowy Rinteel.”

“Then what do you do in the event escape is impossible?” the Indowy asked.

“I have a self-destruct decision matrix that allows and requires me to set off all of my on-board antimatter to prevent capture. As you know, my nuclear reactors are essentially impossible to cause to detonate.”

The thought of several hundred ten-kiloton antimatter warheads going off at once caused Rinteel to drink deeply of his synthesized intoxicant.

A few meters from Rinteel, separated by the bulk of the armored central cocoon, Prael, Mueller, and company toasted with scavenged beer tomorrow’s adventure while going over plans and options.

“The big threat, so far as I can see,” commented Schlüssel, “is the bridgehead over the Rhein.”

“I am not sure,” said Mueller. “The Oder-Niesse line is a sham; it must be.”

“For that matter,” added Henschel, “we still have infestations within the very heart of Germany. Oh, they are mostly contained, to be sure, but if we could help eliminate one we could free up troops that could then move and eliminate another.”

“The problem is,” said Prael, “that none of the troops containing those infestations have any heavy armor to support us. If we get caught alone in a slogging match we… well, Brünnhilde has only so much armor, and not that thick really anywhere but on her great, well-stacked chest.”

“There are A model Tigers to provide support along the Oder-Niesse,” observed Mueller.

Prael consulted an order or battle screen filched by Brünnhilde’s nonpareil AI and downloaded for his decision making. “Yes, Johann, but so far as we can tell they don’t need us. The whole Schwere Panzer Brigade Michael Wittmann is there, and they are not alone. Along the Rhein it is a different story. The retreat from the Rheinland was disastrous. Many Tigers were lost. We are most needed there, I think.”

“So, then,” said Henschel, the oldest of the crew, “it is to be ‘Die Wacht am Rhein.’ ”[43]

Rinteel was somewhat surprised to hear a faint singing coming from the open hatchway to the battle cocoon. Not that singing was unusual, of course. A few beers… a little schnapps… and the crew was invariably plunged into teary-eyed, schmaltzy gemütlichkeit.[44]

The surprise was the words and tune. He had never heard this song before, and he would have bet Galactic credits that he had been subjected to every German folk and army song since he had joined the tank’s crew.

The words were clear, though, and the melody compelling. Rinteel heard:

Wiesbaden, Germany, Mühlenkampf’s HQ, 18 June 2008

Below his window, marching by the city’s streetlights, the weary but upright battalion of “Landsers”[45] sang:

Where was this spirit? Mühlenkampf thought bitterly, looking down from his perch. Where was it back when it could have made a difference?

Don’t be an ass, Mühlenkampf, the general reproached himself. The spirit, deep down, was always there. No fault of those boys that their leaders were kept from bringing it out.

The general sighed with regret, contemplated the economic disruption of the Posleen infestations… contemplated, too, the increasing shortage of ammunition, fuel and food. And now, he sighed, spirit is all we have left in abundance.

Mühlenkampf turned away from the window and back to the map projected on the opposite wall. Slowly, all too slowly, he was pulling those units of his which had covered the withdrawal from the Rheinland back to a more central position. Casualties? Who could number them? Divisions that had been thrown into the battle at full strength were, many of them, mere skeletons with but a few scraps of flesh hanging onto their bones. The replacement system, now running full tilt, could add flesh… but it took time, so much time. And there was only so much flesh to be added, so much meat available to put into the sausage grinder.

Some of that sausage-bound flesh, in the form of the infantry division marching to the front to be butchered, sang under Mühlenkampf’s window.

Looking into the marching boys’ weary but determined eyes, the general felt a momentary surge of pride arising above his sadness and despair. Perhaps you are lemmings, as I judged you, my boys. Perhaps you are even wolves when in a pack. But you are wolves with great hearts all the same, and I am proud of every one of you. You may not see another day, and you all know it, yet still you march to the sound of the guns.

While Mühlenkampf watched the procession below, the sun peeked over the horizon to the east, casting a faint light upon the marching boys.

Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, Germany, 23 January 2008

The rising sun made the fog glow but could not burn it away. In that glow, standing and shivering in the commander’s hatch, Hans glowered with frustration. Something is so wrong over there, and I have not a clue what it is.

Hans had, four nights previously, ordered a renewal of the nightly patrols. This was not, as in days recently past, to help to safety Poles fleeing the aliens’ death machine. Instead, he had put his men’s lives at risk for one of the few things in war more precious than blood, information.

Afoot where the water was shallow enough, by small boats where this was possible or by swimming where it was not, the patrols had gone out, eight of them, of from eight to ten men each. Hans had seen off several of these himself, shaking hands for likely the last time with each man as he plunged into the river or boarded a small rubber boat.

Yet, as one by one the patrols failed to report back within the allotted time, Hans’ fears and frustrations grew stronger.

Other commanders along this front had had much the same idea. Though Hans didn’t know the details, over one hundred of the patrols had gone out. He didn’t know, either, if even one had returned. Only brief flare-ups of fighting, all along the other side of the rivers told of bloody failure.

Success is sweet, thought Borominskar as reports trickled in to him of one slaughtered group of humans after another. What effrontery these creatures have, to challenge my followers on land fairly and justly won by them.

“Fairly” might have been argued. “Justly” no Pole would have agreed with. But that it was “won” seemed incontrovertible. The deaths of one hundred human patrols, nearly a thousand men, admitted as much.

David Benjamin admitted to nothing, especially not to the notion that the war was hopeless or that the patrols were doomed.

An experienced officer of the old and now destroyed Israeli Army, he took the ethos of that army to heart: leaders lead. In a distant way, Benjamin knew that that lesson had not been learned so much from their deliberate and veddy, veddy upper-class British mentors but from the unintentional, middle-class, German ones. Add to this an officer and NCO corps that was more in keeping with Russian practice than Western — many officers, few NCOs of any real authority — and there had really been only one thing for David to do.

The patrol he led had crept in the dense fog to near the banks of the Niesse River. There they had inflated their rubber boat, then carried the boat in strictest silence to the water’s edge. The men, Benjamin in the lead, had hesitated for only a moment before walking into the forbidding, freezing water. The shock of that water, entering boots, leaking through even thick winter uniforms, and washing over skin, had rendered each man speechless. It was as if knives, icy knives, had cut them to the heart.

But there was nothing for it but to go on. As the lead men found their thighs awash they had thrown inboard legs across the rubber tubing at the front of the boat. The rear ranks still propelling the boat forward, the second pair had thus boarded, then the third, then the final. As each pair boarded the men took hold of short, stout paddles previously laid on the inside of the rubber craft.

Finally, the boat drifting forward, Benjamin gave the command in softest spoken Hebrew, “Give way together.” The men dug in gently with the oars, quickly establishing a rhythm that propelled the boats slowly forward.

Up front, David and his assistant patrol leader, a Sergeant Rosenblum, used their paddles also to push away any of the sharp bits of ice that might have damaged the boat. Once, when the horrifying image of a burned and frozen Posleen corpse appeared out of the fog, David used his paddle to ease it over to sink into the murky depths of the stream.

Once gaining the far side, Benjamin leapt out, submachine gun at the ready. Meanwhile Rosenblum pushed a thin, sharpened metal stake into the frozen ground, made the boat’s rope fast, and then helped the others ashore.

The last two men were left behind to guard the boat, the patrol’s sole means of return to friendly lines.

Rosenblum and the other four waited briefly while Benjamin consulted his map and compass — the Global Positioning System was long since defunct — and pointed a direction for Rosenblum, taking the point, to follow.

The patrol passed many Posleen skeletons, but few full corpses. David and the others pushed away thoughts of their families back in lost Israel, pushed away especially thoughts that those families were, most of them, long since rendered like these Posleen corpses and eaten.

Benjamin faintly heard a horrified Rosenblum whisper, “Not even the Nazis…”

Past the broad band of corpse-laden Polish soil the patrol emerged into an area of frozen steppe. Here, Benjamin elected to return to the edge of that band to rest for the day.

Normal camouflage would have been a hopeless endeavor. Instead, staying as quiet as possible, the men created three small shelters of humped-up Posleen corpses and remnants of corpses. Under these, at fifty-percent alert, the six men slept and watched through the short day of Polish winter.

Many times that first day of the patrol they heard the growls and snarls of Posleen foragers. Twice, the foragers came close enough to make out faintly in the fog. On those occasions, sleep was interrupted and the men went to full alert.

“Something is bothering me about them,” whispered Benjamin to Rosenblum.

“What is that, Major?”

Rosenblum thought for a moment, trying to determine just what it was that seemed wrong. Then it came to him, “They are looking for the merest scraps of food, rotten food at that. It is as if they were starving.”

“Well,” answered the sergeant after a moment’s reflection, “it is winter, after all. The harvest…”

“They can eat anything, to include the harvest gathered a few months ago, and to include any winter wheat still standing. They can eat the grass and the trees and Auntie Maria’s potted geraniums. But why should they when there were so many Polish civilians trapped or captured? It doesn’t seem logical somehow.”

Though the increasing light told of a sun risen halfway up to noon, the fog still held the front in its grasp. A few dozen half frozen men had made it back by now, never more than one or two per patrol, though. The men told Hans’ intelligence officer — when they could be made to give forth something like intelligent speech from frost-frozen lips and terror-frozen minds — that it had been hopeless. The Posleen were too thick on the ground, too intent, to penetrate through to their rear and whatever might be lurking there.

As he had for many a day, Hans Brasche cursed the fog in his mind.

The God King’s hand stroked the warm, light blanket covering him. He had not thought to send out counterpatrols. Indeed this whole human intelligence gathering activity seemed to him faintly perverse. It was not the Posleen way to skulk through the night and fog, avoiding detection. Rather, the People rejoiced in the open fight, the deeds done before the entire host for the Rememberers to record and sing of unto future generations.

But, happy instance, on this occasion, necessity had provided what Borominskar’s own brain had not. Searching for scraps of food amidst the slaughtered of the previous battle, his host had inadvertently provided a thick screen against the threshkreen’s cowardly snooping. And, hungry as they were, the scattered bands of the People had every reason to concentrate on the loose bands of threshkreen wandering the steppe. Only thus could their hunger be assuaged given the severe rationing imposed on the host by Borominskar’s decree.

It was nice to see something working for a change.

Well, the Path is a path of chance and fortune, after all…

Fortune favors the bold. Benjamin remembered that as the title of some motion picture he had seen once with his wife, in happier times. It was true then, and was no less so now.

At nightfall the band set forth again to the east. There were fewer Posleen patrols once past the strip of corpses from the prior battle. What bands there were were easily detectable from a distance by the light from their campfires. These Benjamin and his men skirted, taking a wide berth. These diversions David also recorded on his map.

The next sunrise saw the patrol twenty kilometers deep into Posleen-controlled territory, at a desolate and deserted little Polish farming village. Not that the people had abandoned their homes, no. Their fleshless skeletons dotted the town’s streets and littered its dwelling places. But the souls were fled, the food was gone. All of Rosenblum’s scrounging revealed nothing more nourishing than a few bottles of cheap vodka.

Benjamin’s men subsisted that day on their combat rations, German and thus as often as not containing despised pork. Well, many Israelis did not keep kosher. And for those who did? Necessity drove them to eat what was available.

Perhaps the vodka, parceled out, helped overcome their dietary scruples.

Harz drew the duty of feeding the commander. Filling a divided tray with a mix of Bavarian Spätzle, rolls and butter, some unidentifiable greens and some stewed pork, one hand grasping a large mug of heavily sugared and mildly alcohol-laced roggenmehl[46] coffee, he stepped onto the one-man elevator that led to the other topside hatch and commanded, “Anna, up.”

Still listening and peering into the gloom, Hans seemed not to notice as Harz emerged from the automatically lifted hatch and left the tray beside him. Harz stood there for a while, leaving Brasche alone with his thoughts. Finally, he made a slight coughing sound to get the commander’s attention.

“I heard you emerge,” Hans answered.

“Lunch, Herr Oberst,” Harz announced.

“Just leave it there, Unteroffizier Harz. I’ll get to it when I have time.”

“Sir, I must remind you of the wise Feldwebel’s words. ‘Don’t eat… ’ ”

Interrupting, Brasche finished the quote, “… ‘when you’re hungry, eat when you can. Don’t sleep when you’re tired, sleep when you can. And a bad ride is better than a good walk.’ I’ve heard it before, thank you, Harz.”

“Yes, sir. But it is still good advice.”

“Very well, Harz. Just leave it. I’ll see to it in a moment. Return to your station.”

An order was an order. Harz didn’t click his heels, of course. That habit even the reconstituted SS had not readopted. But he did stand at attention and order, “Anna, down.” The hatch eased itself shut behind him.

Alone again, Hans picked up the tray. The Spätzle, the vegetables, the rolls and butter he ate quickly. Then, pulling the collar of his leather coat tighter around him, and grasping both hands around the steaming mug, he peered once again into the fog.

Hans’ earphones crackled with the intelligence officer’s voice. “Sir, they want you down by the river.”

With outstretched hand a cosslain offered Borominskar a fresh haunch straight from the slaughter pens. It was a meager thing, not more than half a meter long, by threshkreen measures. But the God King had decreed no meat for the cosslain and the normals, and scant meat for the Kessentai. The thresh must be saved for the nonce.

Had they looked, the setting sun would have shone bright into the eyes of the traveling group of Posleen. That might have been all that saved the patrol from the keen alien senses. Had the accompanying Kessentai, flying five or six meters above and slightly behind the party, checked his instruments they might have told him there were wild thresh about.

What can they be saving them for? wondered Benjamin, at the sight of yet another small band of humans, apparently healthy and well fed, being herded to the east by Posleen showing ribs through thinned torsos. Any sensible, any normal group of Posleen would have long since eaten those prisoners and gone looking for more.

Even amidst Poland’s flatness there were interruptions: waves in the soil, trees, towns. It was from one of these, another deserted town atop a low, slightly wooded ridge running north-south, that the Israeli patrol watched the slow progress of the Poles and their Posleen guards.

Not one man of the patrol was of direct Polish ancestry. None but would have, had they delved into Polish-Jewish “relations” over the preceding several centuries, felt bitterness or even hate. Yet Benjamin spoke for almost all when he announced, “We’re going to free those people, tonight.”

“There are twenty-four of them,” cautioned Rosenblum, “and a God King. Pretty steep odds, boss. And how are we supposed to move one hundred people thirty kilometers back to the river and then ferry them across, without getting caught? Major… I’d like to help them but…”

“But nothing. We are going to do it. And I know just how.”

The stars shone here, five or more kilometers beyond the thick fog which still rose nightly from the Oder-Niesse valley. The half-moon did as well.

The human prisoners huddled in the center of an alien perimeter. That perimeter, two dozen Posleen normals, half facing in, half out, seemed slack somehow, the aliens’ heads drooping with apparent hunger or fatigue.

Above, circling endlessly, the lone God King’s tenar traced a repetitive path, moving on autopilot, between those normals facing in and those facing out. The Kessentai’s own head drooped in sleep, his crest flaccid.

Rosenblum, carrying the team’s one sniper rifle — a muzzle-braked, straight pull action, Blaser 93, chambered to fire the extraordinary Finnish-developed .338 Lapua magnum cartridge — took in the entire scene through his wide-angle, light-amplifying scope. The sergeant’s job was to kill the God King, no mean feat at nine hundred meters with a moving target.

“And don’t, Don’t, DON’T hit the power matrix,” Benjamin had warned. “It will kill all the Posleen, but all the people as well.”

Rosenblum had promised to do his best, while privately promising himself that if it came to his comrades’ survival, or that of the Poles, the Poles would, sadly, lose.

The sergeant’s ears were covered with headphones connected to his personal, short-range, radio. This was his sole hearing protection and, firing the Lapua, it was barely enough.

In any case, the major had his patrol on radio listening silence. Who could tell what the aliens might be able to sense?

Listening, creeping slowly as a vine, stopping to listen some more before creeping forward again; this was the universe of Benjamin and his men.

There were sounds to cover their movement, human cries of nightmare, Posleen grunts and snarls, and the ever steady whine of the tenar. Benjamin had counted on these to move his team quickly to within a few hundred meters of the enemy.

Now, however, they were too close for quick movement. It fell to creep, listen, then creep some more.

Benjamin, with two men and carrying all the teams’ six claymore mines, moved to the right of a line drawn between the abandoned town and the Posleen-human encampment.

The claymore was nothing more than an inch-thick, curved and hollow plastic plate. Seven hundred ball bearings lay encased in a plastic matrix to the front. One and one quarter pounds of plastic explosive lay behind the ball bearings. Cap wells atop allowed the emplacement of blasting caps into the explosive.

The claymore was often considered a defensive weapon and had often been derided by the ignorant as yet another inhuman “antipersonnel landmine.”

Neither was quite true. Though the claymore could and often was used as a sort of booby trap, so much could be said for a hand grenade; a weapon the aesthetically sensitive had, so far, not targeted for its attentions. Indeed, so much could be said of a tin can filled with nails and explosive and wired for remote detonation. For the most part, though, claymores were used to help protect manned defensive positions, and were command detonated rather than left for a wandering child to find.

Yet they did not have to be used defensively. The claymore could also be used to initiate a raid, giving instant fire superiority to an attacker while decimating the defense in the same instant.

For claymores could be aimed, and had predictable zones of destruction. Moreover, these zones of destruction were twofold, near and far, with a wide safe area in the middle. Properly aimed, to graze upward out to fifty meters, the claymore would butcher an enemy to that distance. Thereafter, however, the rising ball bearings flew too high to harm a standing man… until they reached about two hundred to two hundred fifty meters away, at which point their trajectory brought them back down to a man-, or Posleen-, killing height. Benjamin’s plan depended on this.

Sixty meters away the sleeping Posleen stood like the horse it somewhat resembled. To Benjamin it looked and sounded asleep, its snarls and faint moans those of a dog having a bad dream, its head hanging down slightly.

About ten meters past, and offset to one side, the inward-facing Posleen guard seemed likewise to be dozing.

Carefully, oh sooo carefully, Benjamin emplaced the claymore onto the ground. He had tried forcing the pointed legs down into the frozen soil but with no success. Instead, separating those legs to form two shallow upside down Vs, he simply laid it on the ground, twisted his head to bring an eye behind it and fiddled until he had a proper sight picture.

Fifty or sixty meters to either side of Benjamin, the other two men of his party did more or less likewise. When they were finished with the first claymores, the other two crawled further out and emplaced the second, aiming for additional pairs of Posleen guards. Benjamin saved the last claymore for a rainy, or even a foggy, day.

All crawled back as soon as they were finished. The claymore’s scant sixteen meters of wire did not suffice for the Israelis to meet at a common point. Trying to daisy chain the claymores, or to link them with detonating cord for central control, Benjamin had deemed an exercise in foolishness, given the nearness of the enemy. Instead, during weary rehearsals conducted earlier in the day, Benjamin had measured the time from separation to emplacement to retreat to firing position. This he had then doubled for safety and added fifty percent to for a bit more safety. Thus, each man had one and one half hours from separation to be returned and ready for firing.

When his watch told him the allotted time had passed, Benjamin lifted his own small radio to his face and queried, “Rosenblum? Machine gun?”

“There is a human radio transmission coming from one hundred and fifty-seven measures to the southeast,” the tenar beeped.

“Wha? What!” The Kessentai was awake in a flash, though true alertness and rational thought would take longer. Checking his instruments first to confirm, he took over control of his tenar from the autopilot to which he had delegated it. For a brief moment, the tenar stood motionless in the sky.

“Here,” answered Sergeant Rosenblum.

“Take your best shot,” said Benjamin, over the radio.

“Wilco,” the sergeant answered, settling into final firing position and confirming that his sights were set on the now-motionless God King’s chest. His finger took up the slack in the trigger quickly. Then the sergeant continued applying the steady pressure taught to him long ago in a Negev desert sniper course.

The explosion, when it came, came as a surprise.

The God King, just coming to full alertness, felt a horrid jolt that ran from one side of its body to the other and sent waves of shock and pain across its torso. It kept to its feet for the moment, but just barely. Twisting its head to look down at the side from which it thought the first shock had come, the Kessentai was surprised to see a small hole gushing yellow blood. Turning the other way the God King was shocked to see a plate the size of a double fist torn roughly from that side. The God King felt suddenly sick at the image of the damage wrought on its own body.

Its knees buckling, the mortally wounded Kessentai slumped to the floor of its tenar, whimpering like a nestling plucked from the breeding pens for a light snack. Pilotless, the tenar followed its default programming and settled gently to the ground, its bulk causing the frozen grass and soil to crunch below it.

As soon as the sound of Rosenblum’s shot carried to him, the waiting Benjamin gave his “clacker,” the detonator for the claymore, a quick squeeze followed by another.

The first squeeze had been sufficient however, as it was in almost every case. A small jolt of electricity raced the short distance down the wire to the waiting blasting cap. This, tickled into life, exploded with sufficient power — heat and shock — to detonate its surrounding load of Composition Four plastic explosive.

The C-4 shattered the resin plate containing the ball bearings. Though these did not entirely separate, indeed at least one piece that took off down range consisted of thirteen ball bearings still entrapped together, not less than three hundred projectiles of varying weight and shape were launched.

The near Posleen had its two front legs torn off almost instantly and took further missiles in its torso. It fell to its face. The slightly farther one, facing inward, was struck by one missile in its haunches and another two in its neck. Both shrieked with surprise and pain. The further Posleen took off, bleeding, at a gallop.

From either side of Benjamin came two more explosions. He could only hope that those claymores did their work well.

Little Maria Walewska, eleven years old, was trying to sleep, fitfully, against her mother’s warmth. The girl was not awakened by the sound of the alien’s flying machine, whining down to rest about twenty meters away, nor even by the distance muffled shot that was the cause of that.

Instead, it was the five distinct flashing explosions that came from the other side of the guarded human “encampment” that brought her from her fitful sleep.

Maria turned her little head in the direction of the explosions, but could see nothing. Something, many things, passed overhead, sounding like a flight of angered bees.

Then she heard the screaming of her guards as the bees descended to strike.

“Human soldiers!” Benjamin screamed repeatedly as he ran forward, submachine gun at the ready. He had his doubts that the words would be understood, was pretty sure — in fact — that they would not be, since they were spoken in Hebrew. But, understood or not, surely the Poles could distinguish human speech from alien and draw the correct conclusion.

Benjamin’s first burst of fire went into the nearest of the Posleen guards, the one missing both legs. Its head came apart in a blooming flower of yellow bone, teeth and blood.

To either side of Benjamin the two other Israeli soldiers likewise screamed as they ran. They, too, fired at any Posleen they crossed, seemingly dead or seemingly hale.

It was called, “taking no chances.”

“Let’s take our chances and run for it,” shouted a standing Pole. Without waiting for encouragement the Pole took off to the north. He had not run a dozen meters before one of the guard’s railgun rounds exploded his chest. That example was enough to make all who saw fall to the ground and cling tight to Mother Earth.

Nestled against the earth, as soon as Rosenblum saw the God King’s body reel from his shot and the sled begin to settle he turned his attention to other, still-standing, Posleen. Automatically, his right hand stroked the straight pull bolt to chamber another round. The machine gun team, engaging from Rosenblum’s left front, was bowling over the Posleen on that side of the encampment. Many of them, he saw, acted as if they had been wounded and stunned. Despite their erratic movements, the machine gun team scythed them down.

“Well, volume of fire is their mission, after all,” Rosenblum muttered. “But precision is mine.”

Whereupon, the sergeant settled his sights “precisely” upon a Posleen guard, then lifting its weapon to shoot at the Poles.

Maria and her mother stared helpless, wide-eyed, and open-mouthed as one of their captors, one already bleeding from a roughly torn hole in its chest, lifted its weapon to spray them. They kept that stare even as the Posleen was struck again by something that traveled with a sharp, menacing crack overhead.

Taking a .338 Lapua from straight on, the alien was thrown back on its haunches, dead in that instant.

Benjamin stopped not an instant while donating a staggering, disoriented, alien a killing burst from his submachine gun. Still shouting “Human soldiers!” at the top of his lungs, he soon reached the edge of the cluster of humans at the center of the encampment. From here on out, he knew, he would have to control his fire more carefully. He shouted out as much to dimly perceived Israelis to either side of him.

Reaching the center of the human circle, Benjamin heard one more crack pass overhead — Sergeant Rosenblum in action. The line of tracers the machine gun had been drawing across his front on the far side of the Poles suddenly ceased. Benjamin looked around frantically for other signs of alien resistance but saw none.

He queried into his radio, “Any of them left?”

The radio answered, “Rosenblum here. I see none standing… Machine gun team. I think we got them all… Bar Lev here… none standing… Tal… scratch one last on this side.” Benjamin heard a final burst, Tal’s last victim, off to his right.

He issued a final command, “Perimeter security… Rosenblum come on down,” before settling, exhausted, on his weary, black clad, Israeli ass.

Under the moonlight, a little blond Polish girl stood before him, her hand outstretched as if wanting to touch her deliverer, though fearing to.

Benjamin smiled and took the girl’s hand. Then he stood, picking the girl up, and called out, again in Hebrew unintelligible to the Poles, “To whom does this little girl belong?”

Maria’s mother, though still in a degree of shock, came over and took her from Benjamin. She turned away, briefly, before turning back with a sob and throwing her arms around her Hebrew deliverer. Benjamin patted the woman, in no very intimate way, before disengaging.

Rosenblum, his sniper rifle slung, stood on the deck of the grounded tenar. “We’ve got a live one here,” he announced, unslinging the rifle. “Firing one round.”

“Wait,” ordered Benjamin, not quite certain as to why he hesitated. Possibly he just wanted to see one of the hated invaders in agony. He threaded his way among the mostly still-prostrate Poles; then joined the sergeant at the alien’s sled.

Looking down he saw a badly, almost certainly mortally, wounded God King, leaking its life’s blood out onto the deck. The alien moaned, eyes open but poorly focused. From somewhere on the sled itself came the chittering, squealing, snarling and grunting sounds Benjamin presumed to be the aliens’ tongue.

“Pity the creature doesn’t speak Hebrew, or we Posleen,” Rosenblum observed.

At that the tenar’s grunting and squealing redoubled for something over a minute. When it subsided the machine announced, “I can now.”

It was too late, and the exhaustion of combat too profound, for Benjamin to be surprised at this. It had been a war of wonders all along, after all.

Instead he asked of the alien machine, “What is this one saying?”

“The philosopher Meeringon is asking you in the name of the Path and the Way to end his suffering.”

“Philosopher?” Benjamin queried. “Ah, never mind.” He thought for a minute or two before continuing, “Tell this one we will grant his request… for a price.”

The Israeli waited while the machine translated. “’The demand of price for boon is within the Way,’ Meeringon says.”

“Good. Ask Meeringon, ‘Why?’”

The body of the mercifully killed God King cooled beside the tenar; Benjamin had been as good as his word.

“Go back to the boat,” he ordered Rosenblum. “The machine says it will carry you without problem. Once there use the boat to get to the friendly side. Don’t risk trying to cross on this machine; they’ll blast you out of the sky on sight. When you get there, find someone higher up than me. Pass the word of what the Posleen have in store. Set up a retrieval for these civilians if you possibly can. We should be along in a couple of days.”

“Sir, you really should be going, not me. You can explain this better.”

Benjamin took a look at Maria and her mother, then swept his gaze across the other Poles. “Sometimes, Sergeant, one really must lead from the rear. Now go.”

Just my fucking luck, thought Rosenblum, standing in the freezing fog in a trench on the Niesse’s western bank. Just my luck to run into these fucks. Though he shared the basis of the uniform with the German SS, he did not share a language and felt an almost genetic hatred of them.

Still, he had to admit the bastards were polite, sharing their food and cigarettes with the half-frozen Jew with the Mogen David on his collar rather than their own Sigrunen. Another SS-wearing man entered the trench. The Germans seemed both pleased and anxious to see the man appear from the fog.

Thus, unable to communicate with the Germans, Rosenblum was surprised when he heard the new arrival say, in perfect Hebrew with just a trace of accent, “My name is Colonel Hans Brasche, Sergeant. What news have you from the other side?”

Headquarters, Commander in Chief-West, Wiesbaden, Germany, 1 February 2008

The twenty-year-old-appearing Mühlenkampf did not quite catch the self-imposed irony. Ten years ago, he thought, selling used cars at the sprightly age of ninety-eight, I would have enjoyed this. Now I am just too old.

For the word had come down, from the Kanzler through his chief of staff, Generalfeldmarschall Kurt Seydlitz, that the former CiNC-West was deposed and that he, Mühlenkampf, was to relinquish command to his own exec and assume control of the battle in the west.

Mühlenkampf, personally, thought this unfair. The former commander had held the Siegfried line inviolate for longer than anyone should have expected. That this defensive belt had ultimately fallen was due to nothing more than the sheer weight of numbers the alien enemy had thrown against it. Further, the new field marshal doubted he — or anyone — could have done any better.

In deference to his new position, Mühlenkampf had relinquished his SS uniform and donned the less ornate but more traditional field gray of the Bundeswehr. Gone were his Sigrunen, gone his black dress.

Well, no matter. My old comrades have their symbols back; their pride, traditions and dignity restored. What does it matter to me? I wore the field gray for many years before I joined das Schwarze Korps.

Rolf, the aide de camp, interrupted Mühlenkampf’s reveries. “Field Marshal, you have an appointment in half an hour, at the field hospital for Charlemagne.”

There were no longer enough French soldiers left to keep the hospital filled. Instead, German wounded were being sent for what care and restoration could be provided. Some wore field gray, others the black of the SS. Isabelle found she did not much see a difference. They bled the same color, the same color as had the French soldiers she had cared for. Some wept with pain while others bit through their own tongues to keep from crying out. Perhaps the black-clad ones wept a tiny bit less, but if so she could not perceive much difference.

The sufferer was the age of her own son, Thomas — fifteen or perhaps sixteen at most. Black clad he was, with a black-and-silver Iron Cross already glittering by his pillow. Below that pillow the boy’s body stopped about two feet short of where it should have.

Some Boche high muckity muck had come by that morning and pinned it by the legless boy. Isabelle had understood not one word that had been spoken, though she had seen the beginnings of tears in the too-young Boche general’s eyes.

She barely understood the semi-intelligible moans of the boy now. Only, “Mutti, mutti,” came through clearly.

Well, so what if he wears black? My own son does now, too. Am I to hate him for that?

The boy was by far the worst on the ward. None of the doctors expected him to live. And his cries for his mother touched the Frenchwoman’s heart. She picked up a stool and sat down beside him, taking his hand in her own.

Once or twice during the night the boy’s eyes opened. Yet the eyes were unfocused, he knew not where he was. He only knew he was in pain and that he wanted his mother to stop it.She whispered to him what little German she knew, stroking his fever-wracked face.

Just before sunrise the boy’s eyes opened for a final time. This last time they focused. Clearly, though in high school French, he said, “Thank you, madame. Thank you for taking my own mother’s place.”

In Isabelle’s hand the boy’s hand went limp as the eyes lost their focus for the final time.

Weary with fatigue, Thomas De Gaullejac found it difficult to keep his eyes open, let alone in focus. Tracers flying over Mainz still scarred the night, leaving further imprints on his retinae and making focus more difficult still. Lack of sleep and catch-as-catch-can rations did not help matters.

Across the river, as Thomas knew from Sergeant Gribeauval, Mainz’ last defenders were preparing to cross before their last line of retreat, the sole remaining bridge, was cut. Already, all the wounded practical to carry had been brought back by bridge or ferry. What would happen to the others, those too badly hurt to move, he did not care to think about.

But his own possible futures the boy had to consider. “Sergeant?”

“Yes, boy,” Gribeauval answered without taking his night vision goggles away from the firing port from which he scanned the river below and the air above that.

“Sergeant… if I am hit… and you must leave me behind… ?”

“Don’t worry about it, son,” said the sergeant, understanding immediately. “We’ll leave nothing behind for the aliens.”

Thomas felt a little rush of relief. At least his body would not become mere food. “Thank you. One other thing?”

“Yes?”

“My mother, Isabelle De Gaullejac? Could you let her know? At least try to find her?”

Gribeauval answered honestly. “Son, I can’t promise to be alive to promise that.”

The frigid bunker congealed for a while in silence, while Gribeauval continued to scan.

“Sergeant?”

“Yes, Volunteer De Gaullejac?” answered Gribeauval, just a trace of irritation tainting his voice.

“I thought I should let you know; if it falls to me to do so, I am not sure I can drop the bridge with people on it.”

“Son, if you don’t drop that bridge at the first sign of aliens on it, I’ll shoot you myself,” Gribeauval said. Then, relenting a bit, he continued, “Do you think that any people that might be on the bridge would not prefer a clean quick death to blast, fall or frozen river to being turned into a snack?”

“I honestly don’t know, Sergeant. I doubt I can speak for all of them.”

Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 1 February 2008

Hans had moved his command vehicle forward to the water’s edge to ensure that Benjamin and his charges made it across the river in safety. He had also moved a battalion of self-propelled 155-millimeter guns to a position far enough forward to provide support for Benjamin for the last part of the trip back. He was unwilling to order men to cross over, given the fate that had befallen most of the patrols sent forward. Nonetheless, a company of the Brigade Michael Wittmann had volunteered to cross over with rubber boats to help the Poles back.

Though the artillery battalion had been in almost constant employment, Benjamin had managed to bring out better than four fifths of the civilians he had rescued. These were even now heading for a safe place in the rear. Benjamin, naturally, and his three remaining men — Tal had bought it to a random railgun round — were the last to leave. Exhausted, filthy and starved, they were simply carried to the waiting boats by the company that covered the retrieval. The SS men rowed the Jews back.

Of the four remaining Jews, Benjamin was the first one out of the water. He was met at the shore by Brasche and Sergeant Rosenblum, the two taking turns slapping the major’s back and shaking his hand.

“Oh, excellent job, David!” Hans exclaimed, pumping the Israeli’s hand. The Jew was too worn to do more than nod his head in thanks and submit to the fierce handshake. Some corner of his mind perhaps found amusement in the scene, the SS and the Mogen David meeting in friendship at the front. Mostly though, Benjamin’s mind and body wanted only a warm, soft bed, some decent food, and perhaps a stiff drink.

He might have added to that wish list, “And a woman,” but little Maria’s mother had made it clear enough, without words, that one woman, at least, was his for the asking. He thought he might just take her up on the offer made by her soft brown eyes, perhaps at some time in the not too distant future.

He managed to croak out his wish list to Brasche.

With a smirk Brasche brushed aside Benjamin’s immediate concerns. “Soon enough, my friend, soon enough. But you are a hero to three nations today and so, before you get to trundle off to your bed a little ceremony is in order.”

Benjamin raised a hand in protest but that too Brasche brushed off. “Achtung,” he ordered to the two dozen smiling men assembled. “Yes, you too, Major.”

Reluctantly, and maybe a bit shyly too, Benjamin stood to attention.

Conversationally, Hans mentioned, in German for all those assembled to hear, “It is not well known, you know, but the first Iron Cross won in the First World War was won by a German Jew. Sergeant Rosenblum, publish the orders.”

Rosenblum spoke just enough German to struggle through the recital, “In the name of the Kanzler of the German Republic, and by order of the Commander in Chief, Eastern Front, for conspicuous gallantry in action, and for the saving of human life… the Iron Cross, First Class, is presented to Major David Benjamin, Brigade Judas Maccabeus, German Federal Armed Forces.”

As Hans, smiling broadly, hung the simple, traditional medal around the Israeli’s neck, he spoke quietly, in Hebrew, “I could have given you the Second Class on my own authority… but I thought what you have done deserved a bit more. And, with the information you sent back, the Field Marshal agreed.”

David whispered back, “What are we going to do about the enemy’s plans?”

Still smiling, for what else was there to do, Hans answered, “My friend, we have not the first fucking clue.”

Watching on Anna’s forward view-screen, and listening with her electronic ears, Krueger simply could not believe his commander’s heresy. Stupid, clueless, Yid-loving bastard, he fumed. Traitor to the Fatherland and the Führer’s memory. Bad enough you saved the kike, but decorating him? For saving some fucking untermensch Slavs? It reeks.

The world would be a better place without either of them, the Pollocks or the Yids. And if it cost the lives of nine out of ten Germans to make the world so, the price would be fair.

Krueger would have been appalled to learn that, at the level of core philosophy, he, the Nazi fanatic, and Günter Stössel, the Reddish Green fanatic, were not so far apart after all.

Berlin, Germany, 1 February 2008

Everyone in Germany, from the chancellor on down, was pale with the weak winter sun. Even so, thought the chancellor, Günter looks palest of all.

“Prison life does not agree with you, I see,” commented the chancellor.

“Life as dictator seems to agree with you fully,” retorted his former aide.

The chancellor merely grinned and answered, “Let me see; I am a dictator because I would not let you and yours have your very undemocratic way with the fate of the German people? But you, and they, were not dictatorial even though you wished to flaunt the will of that people and wished to turn most of them over to an alien food processing machine? I must admit that I am at a loss to follow your logic, my former associate.”

To that Günter had no answer that did not sound hollow. Instead he retreated into an argument against the hated symbols. “You brought back the SS. That makes you nothing but another Nazi.”

“Bah! I resurrected a body of fighting men that we needed to survive, my doctrinaire friend. And good service they have done, too. If giving them their symbols back helps them fight one iota better, that it offends such as you seems a very small price to pay.”

The chancellor held up a hand to stifle further argument. “In any case, I did not call you here to bicker. I called you here to tell you that although your sentence was death, and a damned just sentence I deem it too, I have decided to commute your sentence to life in prison. But you will live out your days in Spandau Prison, Herr Stössel, you and the other four hundred and forty-seven seriously implicated traitors.”

Günter asked simply, “Why?”

“Because I think you are less dangerous, locked away and forgotten, than you might have been as martyrs.”

Headquarters, Commander in Chief-West, Wiesbaden, Germany, 2 February 2008

Mühlenkampf could not drive the image of the martyred, legless boy from his mind. Small recompense it must have been to the lad, even had he been able to understand, that I pinned a medal to his pillow. Small recompense too, to the girl he left behind him or the mother who bore him. Jesus, that is the part that I hate, the broken, crippled, dead and dying innocents that war takes.

I wish I didn’t love it so much, or feel like such a damned cheat that it is always the poor boys who suffer and die while I get away scot-free.

Still thinking upon the dying boy, Mühlenkampf mused upon a different kind of world, a different kind of war. Wouldn’t it be nice if only the real professionals, people like me, were the ones who fought and died? Ah, but would the politicians abide by the battlefield’s decision? Hah! Not a chance. As soon as they saw their own oh-so-precious hides at stake they’d be grabbing young ones like Gefreiter[47] Webber off the street and tossing them into the meat grinder.

The general shrugged. He hadn’t made the world the way it was. And it would not be one whit better for his dreams or for his pretending it was other than it was, either.

In his dream Thomas was little again. But little seemed no bad thing, not when one was warm and safe and pressed to his mother’s breasts. He had a full belly and the rosy glow of a glass of wine coursing through his veins. Life was good.

Outside of Thomas’ dream, however, life was one continuous nightmare of deprivation, hardship, and mind-numbing terror. The rare dreams now, stolen when he was able to catch some even more rare uninterrupted sleep, were all that remained to him of the lost world of… before.

The world of “now,” however, intruded on Thomas’ pleasant foray into the past. Stealthy as a cat, a new level of cold crept through his thin blanket, nibbling and biting at his consciousness, gnawing at his dream.

Thomas awakened with a shivering start.

Mühlenkampf, despite his heated headquarters, shivered himself.

Before him stood his staff meteorologist and his intelligence officer. Both looked as serious as they might have at their mother’s own funeral.

“We still have stations in Scandinavia,” explained the meteorologist. “And the Americans are still sending us data from Greenland. Iceland, too, reports confirming data. We are going into a deep freeze like we haven’t seen in fifty years.”

The general nodded, calmly, even tried to keep a confident gleam in his eye. “Will the Rhein freeze over?”

“Yes, likely, sir,” answered the meteorologist. “Within ten days at most. And yes, sir, it will freeze solid enough to support the weight of enemy bodies.”

“On the plus side, sir, the cold will not support either fog or snow, so if the aliens attack we will have clear fields of fire.”

“And that was what I wanted to talk to you about, sir,” said the intelligence man. “Clear fields of fire are all well and good, but we have this rather frightening report from CInC East…”

Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 2 February 2008

Hans still maintained, as he so often did, his lonely vigil atop Anna’s turret. This night was lonelier than most.

No fog today, so the reports say. No fog and the enemy on the other side is just waiting for daylight. Scheisse!

But cursing fate did Hans no good. Fate was as it was, he knew. In the dim mists of time some meddlers at godhood had played genetic games with a subordinate species. That species had resisted in time and been driven forth. Eventually it had reemerged into the Galaxy, spreading death and destruction across a path that the meddling had made inevitable.

The path had led that enemy species here. Here they had been thrashed enough, and badly enough, that they were forced to think for a change. They had thought upon their problems; they had seen a possible answer.

And now, inevitably… by fate, that answer was massing on the other side.

Some part of Hans accepted fate. Some other part rejected it. A large part just wondered at his own.

Am I then doomed? Is my soul forfeit for the part I once played in a great crime? Are my comrades’? Are those of the men I command?

And tomorrow? What will be the better part, to take the burden of evil upon myself by acting alone or to share it out among those who have no guilt for any past crimes?

Unconsciously, Hans spoke aloud, “Anna, I wish you were here to guide me.”

“I am here, Herr Oberst,” answered the tank.

For some inexplicable reason, Hans didn’t want to answer in any way that might offend the tank. Yes, he knew it was just a machine. Yes, he knew it was not so sophisticated as the Galactics’ AIDs. Yet, Anna the tank had been home all the long months of this war. He felt she had a spirit of her own, even if she could not articulate it. He had felt as much for the panzers that had carried him though so much of the last war, and they not only couldn’t talk, they couldn’t even heat coffee.

“Anna,” he asked, “what am I to do tomorrow?”

The tank answered, “My programmers would have called that one a ‘no-brainer,’ Herr Oberst. As you always have, you must do your best.”

Down below, in the battle cocoon, a jubilant Krueger poured schnapps for the rest of the crew. “A great day coming tomorrow, my boys, a great day.”

The crew accepted the schnapps. Facing what they soon must, how could they not? But not one of them shared the sergeant major’s plain elation.

“How can you do it, Sergeant Major? How can you just…” Harz turned away in disgust.

Krueger answered, “Ask Schultz here if it is so hard. Ask him what he felt kicking the barrel out from under that coward at Giessen. It is nothing, boys, nothing. Why I remember a place called ‘Babi Yar’… in the Ukraine, by Kiev, that was…”

The setting sun illuminated the golden onion domes of the great city to the southeast. Kiev, once home to one hundred and seventy-five thousand Jews, would see that population reduced by over thirty-three thousand in the course of two days.

Little seven-year-old Manya Halef, holding her mother’s hand, turned around from time to time as they walked. The golden domes looked very pretty, very wonderful in a little girl’s eyes.

Manya wasn’t sure why she and her mother had to leave their cramped Kiev flat. But she had seen the Germans and — much like her stern-faced teacher in school — they looked like men who had to be obeyed.

Sometimes, as they walked, Manya’s mother would pull the girl to her and cover her eyes. At first Manya resisted but, once she had seen what her mother was shielding her from, she sought her mother’s shelter. The road to the Jewish cemetery at the junction of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets was lined with bodies of the dead.

Manya had been along this road before, twice. The first time she didn’t remember very well. But the last time had been to bury her ancient grandmother, here in Kiev’s old Jewish cemetery.

While cleaning his machine pistol, Krueger watched the Jews being herded into the makeshift, barbed-wire-surrounded camp dispassionately. What cared he for their cries? What cared he for their miserable whining? Were they not all enemies of the Reich? Did they not all deserve to die?

Less dispassionately, he watched them strip. Though the Jews had been instructed to come well clothed and with money in their possession, as if for travel, he knew they would not need clothing or money where they were going. It was a useful little lie designed to make them easier to dispose of.

The ad hoc strip show had Krueger’s rapt attention. A few of them Jew whores are lookers, he thought. Shame we can’t get some use out of them.

Manya just didn’t understand it. Here was Mama, always so proper Mama, taking her clothes off here in the open. It was just wrong, wrong, wrong and Manya knew it.

And then — unthinkable! — Mama began tugging at Manya’s own clothing, a short, light summer dress. The little girl resisted until someone came by and hit Mama with a stick for being too slow. Then, her face leaking tears, Manya submitted.

But she still didn’t understand; she was only seven years old.

The fucking Yids have no clue yet what is going to happen to them, Krueger chortled to himself. You would think that taking away everything would have been hint enough. But no, they are still in denial, can’t believe it is happening. Stupid pieces of shit; be a blessing to the world to rid it of them.

With a click, Krueger seated a full magazine into his Schmeisser.

Manya promised the Germans that she would be a good girl. She promised! So she could not understand why they were hitting her and her mother to drive them from the camp. Nor did she understand the two lines of soldiers wielding sticks who drove them forward.

Her mother tried to protect her from the blows as best she could. Even so, sometimes the soldiers hit her. And she had promised, too. Maybe the sticks wouldn’t hurt so much if only she’d still had her clothes on.

But she didn’t and they did and she just didn’t understand it at all.

All she could do was cry.

The Jewish whore wanted to keep her brat with her, did she? Well, orders were orders and Krueger was a man who obeyed orders. The Jews were to be shot in groups of ten, not eleven. He rudely pulled the squalling naked brat out of the harridan’s arms, tossed it to the ground, and then spent a few moments to cuff and kick them both into submission.

Manya was stunned by the German’s blow as even being forced to undress in public had not stunned her. She sat naked on the bloody ground crying for her mother; a little girl’s wordless, endless, wrenching cry. The mother too wept and shrieked.

The squalling brat’s noise was irksome. Nonetheless, Krueger enjoyed the mother’s shrieks as he raised the machine pistol and, like the professional he was… smiling, squeezed the trigger.

“That will be enough, Sergeant Major,” said Hans as he placed a firm grip on Dieter’s shoulder. “The men will be sickened enough as it is. There’s no need for you to sicken them further.”

“Yes, sir,” answered Krueger, will ill-concealed contempt. “They’re just fucking Slavs, after all. It isn’t like they’re real people. I thought the boys should know that.”

“Shut up, Sergeant Major,” said Hans, eyes flashing and one hand resting on his pistol. “Just shut the fuck up.”

The combat cocoon was silent now, as was that of every Tiger along the front, of every other armored vehicle, and every infantryman’s trench or bunker. Each soldier, German or Polish or Scandinavian — or on one other front, French — was left alone with his thoughts.

Equally alone, Dieter Schultz pondered on the morrow. He had killed countless nonhumans, and as part of an execution party, one human being.

After many weeks and months of thought, Dieter still didn’t know how he felt about that. At the time it had seemed… right, somehow. Later on, he had begun to question.

Truthfully, Dieter didn’t know what was right anymore. War… twisted things, made things inconceivable become real and present. Did that poor bastard of a panzer grenadier deserve to hang? Maybe not. But had what he deserved had anything to do with anything? Again, maybe not.

What was reality? Gudrun was dead. The panzer grenadier was dead. That was reality. There was no sense in wishing that things were any different, no sense in living an illusion.

And tomorrow, Dieter knew, his last illusions would be stripped. Tomorrow he would enter the ranks of the real Nazis, the murderers.

Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 2 February 2008

“Driver Johann?”

“Yes Indowy Rinteel?” Mueller was so tall that the Indowy had generally avoided him to date. Perhaps it was that he was lying on his driver’s couch, bringing his eyes down to Indowy level, that made conversation possible now. Then again, that every other member of the crew was sound asleep may have had something to do with it.

“I have read your history, particularly from the last of your centuries. And I do not understand it at all.”

Mueller sighed. “Rinteel… neither do we.”

The little furry alien went silent then, and turned as if to leave.

“Wait, Rinteel,” Mueller said. “What part of our history don’t you understand?”

The Indowy turned back to face Mueller, lying on his couch. “Those humans you call ‘Jews’? What made them the enemy? Why and how did they deserve what your people gave to them?”

Again, Mueller sighed. How to answer such a question?

“Rinteel, to this very day every German bright and knowledgeable enough to be entitled to an opinion goes to bed every night wondering the same thing. The Assyrians murdered cities… but at least they had a reason. Marcus Licinius Crassus crucified six thousand slaves along the Appian way… but at least he had a reason. The Mongols killed twenty million Chinese to make grazing grounds for their horses… but at least that was a reason. But the Jews?”

Mueller stopped for a moment. The very insanity of his country’s history weighed down upon his shoulders.

“Rinteel, when we spent a generation getting ready for our First World War, our spiritual poet was a man named Ernst Lissauer. He wrote a poem called “Hasengesang gegen Engeland,” a Song of Hate against England, rousing Germany’s sons to what he thought was their true enemy. Rinteel, Ernst Lissauer was a German Jew.

“When we rolled across the Belgian frontier, in 1914, and our soldiers were slaughtered in droves trying to storm the fortresses, the first man to win an Iron Cross for bravery in battle was a German Jew.

“When Adolf Hitler was recommended by his lieutenant for the Iron Cross, the officer recommending him was a Jew.

“They gave of their blood and they gave of their hearts. They fell in battle in droves for their ‘German Fatherland.’ Ten thousand of them fell in battle, Rinteel… giving all they had to give for what they thought of as their country. Rinteel, ten times that many served. More than the national average. They were us.

“And so, Indowy Rinteel, it is as if God used us, we Germans, to some purpose of his own… but we just don’t know.”

The Indowy digested that… thought upon the foolishness… thought upon the pain in Mueller’s voice. Finally he said, “It was a madness then.”

Mueller agreed. “Yes Rinteel, it was a madness.”