Part V
Interlude
Ro’moloristen thought, What a magnificent madness is the Path of Fury. Stretching across the horizon to north and south as far as the God King could see from his lofty tenar, marched wave upon wave of the People.
They marched in knots of twenty to fifty, each knot carrying by main strength a crudely lashed together wooden raft. Half the forests of France and Belgium had gone into those rafts.
Above rode the God Kings, in numbers even greater than the leading ranks of the People warranted. But from each tenar dangled a rope. The tenar would pull the rafts, and drag the People across the river to victory. The plasma cannon and hypervelocity missiles carried by the tenar flashed fire and hate at the defenders on the other side of the great river which fronted the host.
The cannon of the threshkreen were not silent. Even at this distance the thunder of thousands upon thousands of the thresh’s frightful artillery was a palpable fist. Their shells splashed down among the People, churning them to yellow froth and splintering their crude rafts.
But always there were more of the People, more of the rafts approaching the river. The artillery could kill many. It could never kill all. Slowly, the People, stepping over the bodies of the slain, reached the near bank of the river.
Ro’moloristen watched the first rank, what remained of it, disappear down into the steep river valley. He knew the People would have a nightmare of a time descending that frozen bank.
But after that, Ro’moloristen expected things to be easier for them… once the threshkreen on the far bank saw that lashed to each raft, upright on posts, were anywhere from a half a dozen to a dozen thresh nestlings.
Chapter 18
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 3 February 2008
The pit of Hans’ stomach was a leaden brick. Anna’s view-screen told the entire crew more than they wished to know. The Posleen horde advanced to the shallow and now frozen river… and about half of the aliens carried or prodded ahead of it a human captive.
Though the aliens and their captives were in easy range, few human defenders — and those mostly the snipers — fired upon them. Here and there Hans saw a Posleen stumble and fall, its chest or head ruined by a well-placed bullet.
There were none of the aliens’ flying sleds in the air. Those, Hans was sure, the defenders would have engaged gleefully, even as the snipers shot down any Posleen to which they had a clean shot.
But it makes not a shit of difference, killing those few. Their numbers are, effectively, endless. And their most powerful weapons today are their captives.
Schultz, sitting below Hans’ command chair trembled, the commander saw. Glancing around the battle cocoon, Hans saw that everyone in view, from Harz to the operations officer, looked sick. Harz kept saying, over and over, “Oh, the bastards; the dirty, stinking, miserable bastards.”
My boys can’t do it. They shouldn’t have to do it. We never made them that kind of soldier. Shit.
“Dieter, sit back from the gun. Anna, commander’s gun.” Relieved beyond words, Schultz sat back from the sight immediately.
“Yes, Herr Oberst,” the tank replied. From above, a gunner’s suite, almost exactly like Schultz’s, descended to encase Brasche.
“Sergeant Major Krueger, take control of the bow guns. All others be on watch for enemy flyers but do not engage. Sergeant Major, engage at will.”
With a smile, Krueger began raking the mixed formation of humans and enemy. “Fucking Slav untermensch,” he whispered. In the view-screen, men, women and children were ripped apart even as were the Posleen. The only difference was that the human’s cries could be more readily understood.
The sound was more than Hans could bear. It was as terrifying as the sergeant major’s glee, and even more hurtful. “Anna, kill external microphones. Operations, pass the word to the other Tigers: only old SS will engage. New men are not to fire upon the horde except in point self-defense.”
Seeing that the operations officer understood, Hans commanded, “Load antipersonnel. Prepare for continuous antipersonnel.”
The loader pressed the required buttons. From Anna’s ammunition rack hydraulics withdrew a single canister cartridge and fed it to the gun.
Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 3 February 2008
“Feed it to them, Reinhard, feed it to the bastards.”
“Hit!” announced Schlüssel, as a small new sun formed and deformed thirty kilometers up.
“Mueller, hard right.”
Even held securely as he was by his straps, Rinteel felt the sudden, jarring turn as the driver twisted the tank and raced forward to get out of the expected Posleen riposte. As always, the Indowy was terrified speechless. As always, he was disgusted at the slaughter his human comrades were inflicting upon the Posleen when he allowed himself to think upon it.
And yet… and yet… familiarity had dulled the fear. The disgust was severe still, but not the paralyzing force it had been. It was a remarkable thing to the Indowy, to be not so afraid as the situation warranted. More remarkable still was it to be less disgusted by the slaughter his mind envisioned. He was finding he could face both fear of dying and fear of killing a bit better than he had ever imagined.
And, too, Rinteel was discovering that he could kill, had killed, vicariously and without any moral dilemma. After all, though it was the crew that fired the gun, it was he, Rinteel, who made sure that gun was in full operating order. And he thought, And though it is the humans who actually fight the Posleen; it is we, the Indowy, who build them the weapons to fight with. How pure we think ourselves, how above the blood and slaughter. Yet that slaughter would be impossible without us. A foolish people mine, to think that distance from murder turns it into something besides murder.
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 3 February 2008
God, I was a soldier, not a murderer. Do you hate me so much then, that even this sin I must commit.
Hans’ loader, eyes fixed on the screen before him, announced, “Up!”
Through his helmet’s VR, Hans looked upon the frozen-over river. He could see that Krueger’s bow guns were having an effect. He could also see that effect was not enough.
Hans’ vision fixated on a screaming little blond Polish girl held firmly in the grasp of an alien.
Look at the little girl, Brasche. You have killed hundreds of people in your life, maybe thousands. You tried to think they were all armed enemies. Yes, on how many villages did your fire fall, villages containing little girls like that one? On how many did you call artillery? For how many did the armored spearheads of which you were a part open the way for the Einsatzgruppen? You are already a murderer ten thousand times over.
What are a few thousand more, after all?
Hans thought, Anna, forgive me. If this causes me never to come to you, forgive me please. Hans’ finger pressed the firing stud.
Wiesbaden, Germany, 3 February 2008
Thomas’ hand hesitated over the detonator. He could see the bridge. He could see, too, the horde of aliens crossing on it. But he could also see and hear the mass of French civilians the aliens drove among and ahead of them. Again and again the young French soldier tried to force his hand to complete the circuit. Again and again he failed.
Nearby, Sergeant Gribeauval fired his rifle at the crossing aliens.
“Damn it, boy, blow the bridge!” he screamed.
The boy stammered, “I… I… I can’t, Sergeant.”
“Merde,” the sergeant said. He was barely keeping the leading Posleen away from the wires that connected the detonator with the explosives affixed to the bridge, just barely. He couldn’t get away from his firing position long enough to set off the charges without risking that those charges would be made ineffective in that time. “Boy, drop the bridge!”
“Sergeant, I am trying… but…”
Gribeauval turned from the firing position. “Merde! Just do it!”
Thomas looked at the sergeant, wide-eyed and fearful, just in time to see Gribeauval’s head explode from a Posleen railgun round. The boy was flecked with the sergeant’s blood and brains. Morally frozen as he had been, his terror left him utterly paralyzed.
And, while the boy was so paralyzed, the leading Posleen tore out the demolition’s wiring.
* * *
Isabelle trembled with fright. People passed by the field hospital, fleeing to the north. The staff was in turmoil, in a shouting, screaming panic.
The enemy was over the Rhine.
With shaking hand Isabelle made a call to the house she lived in with her son. Briefly, she told her hosts the terrible news, then asked them to see that her boy was dressed and sent to her. They promised they would do so.
Medical orderlies carried away on stretchers those wounded that the doctors thought had some chance. As a truck was filled with wounded it headed away to some unknown destination to the north. Yet the supply of wounded was so much greater than the supply of trucks.
Around her was the din of dozens of moaning, wounded soldiers. A doctor walked among them, announcing, “Routine… Urgent… Expectant.”
That was the dread word: “Expectant.” Expected to die.
“Mon dieu, Doctor, what are we going to do for those poor boys we can’t evacuate?”
“We have hiberzine for some of them, the ones we might have some small chance of saving,” he answered. The doctor’s mouth formed a moue. “But we really don’t have very much of it. Most will have to be abandoned.”
Isabelle went white. “Abandon them? To be eaten? My God, no, Doctor. We must do something?”
“What do you suggest Madame De Gaullejac?”
“I don’t know… but something, surely. Oh, my God… I don’t know.”
Then her eyes fell upon a field cabinet she knew contained syringes and various medicines, painkillers mostly.
“There are better ways to die, Doctor, than being eaten, are there not?”
Following her gaze to the cabinet he answered, “There are if you are strong enough. I tell you though, madame, I am not.”
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 3 February 2008
I must be strong, insisted Hans as he fired yet another round of canister into the mixed Posleen-human mass. He found that he was unconsciously unfocusing his eyes to spare himself a clear view of the carnage he had been, and was, causing.
They had changed firing positions three times now, Anna and her crew. From each position Hans had sent out two to three canister rounds, each shot effectively obliterating most Posleen and human life from an area of roughly one million square meters.
There had only been so many human shields available to the Posleen along this sector. Once Hans cut those down the infantrymen along the river’s edge found they were able to do their jobs. In this sector the attack was being stymied.
But a quick glance at the general situation map told Hans that this was very nearly the only sector where that was true. The red-shaded portions of the display showed that the enemy was already in and among the defending infantry over more than half the front.
Other markers on the display showed Brasche that neutron bombs were being expended wildly. Tens of millions of Posleen, and even some humans, were receiving a dose of radiation that would leave them quaking, puking, shitting, choking and all-too-slowly dying caricatures of living beings within minutes.
And none of it would make any difference. This front was broken… and all Hans’ murder in vain.
Headquarters, Commander in Chief-West, Wiesbaden, Germany, 4 February 2008
Mühlenkampf spoke into a speaker phone lying on his desk. The Posleen had still not succeeded in inconveniencing the Bundespost’s telephone system, though the vicious fighting taking place scant miles to the south did interfere slightly with the conversation.
The field marshal’s voice held an utter weariness to match that of his civilian chief. “No, Herr Kanzler, there is nothing I can afford to send to reinforce the east. Even with what I have here, I am unlikely to hold. Herr Kanzler… the demolition on the bridge between Mainz and Wiesbaden failed. And the enemy has established several dozen lodgments on this bank besides. They pulled the same trick they used in the east, only crossing under a shield of children here. Most of the men could not shoot… would not anyway.”
“Then alles ist verloren?” asked the chancellor. All is lost?
“There are still tens of millions of our people, and those of our allies, to save to the north and south, Herr Kanzler. And the Army will pay whatever price we must to give you the time to evacuate them to the mountains and the snows. So no, Herr Kanzler, all is not lost, not while we can save our people.”
“I will give the orders, Field Marshal Mühlenkampf. Cover the evacuation as best you can.”
* * *
While his staff worked on the plans for delaying the Posleen advance and moving the headquarters back, Mühlenkampf thought it a good time to visit the front here in the city. Accompanied by his aide, Rolf, and half a dozen guards he set off in a Mercedes staff car.
People were fleeing afoot, by vehicle, and by bus.
Yet not everyone was fleeing. Mühlenkampf noticed a young soldier, sitting in apparent shock on a set of stairs leading from the sidewalk to a house. The boy’s eyes seemed fixed on some spot below the surface of the Earth.
“Stop the car,” he ordered.
Once the Mercedes had come to a halt by the side of the street the field marshal exited and then walked the few short steps to stand in front of the boy. He saw the boy could not be more than fifteen, at most, though grime and exhaustion would have made him look older to a less experienced officer. The cuff band on the soldier’s winter uniform coat said “Charlemagne.”
“What is your name, son?” Mühlenkampf asked in quite good French.
Without looking up from whatever private hell he contemplated, the boy answered, “Thomas De Gaullejac.”
“Where is your unit?”
“Dead? Fled? I don’t know.” Still Thomas did not look up. “I just know my sergeant died. And then I was the only one left. And that I was supposed to blow the bridge and… didn’t.” Low as it was already, with those words Thomas’ head hung lower still.”
“Aha,” said Mühlenkampf. That is one mystery cleared up. “Why didn’t you detonate the bridge, young man?”
Thomas closed his eyes tightly. “There were people on it… men… women… some children. They could have included my mother and brother. And so I just couldn’t. I tried. But my hand wouldn’t move. I can fight. I did fight. But I couldn’t kill all those people. Even though I tried.”
The boy began quietly to cry then.
“Damned if I can blame you for that, son,” sighed Mühlenkampf. And what you need right now is a chaplain or a psychiatrist. Possibly both. “Come with me.”
Thomas went along, even though some part of his mind wondered if it was only to attend a quick court-martial and slow hanging.
Nothing in Mühlenkampf’s demeanor, though, seemed threatening. The field marshal helped Thomas to his feet and led him to the car. “Rolf, take the car and two guards and see this boy to the nearest field hospital for the Charlemagne Division. Can you find that?”
Rolf consulted a laptop that he never left behind. He answered, “Yes, sir. No problem. There’s one about six miles from here. Though traffic may be a little tight.”
“That will be fine,” said Mühlenkampf. “Meet me back here in… say… two hours. The guards have a radio for me to communicate with Headquarters. They and I are going to have a little tour of the front lines.”
* * *
Wounded were still pouring in from the front. Many were fixed, to the extent they could be fixed, on the spot, before being sent back to the slaughter. Others were marked for evacuation or for being left behind.
To these, as to the others she had previously helped, Isabelle brought syringes filled with a powerful morphiate, a guaranteed overdose. For those who were awake she simply left a syringe. For the unconscious ones with an awake comrade nearby she asked if the comrade would assist.
And then she came to a ward tent holding one lone soldier with no comrades… and no arms. The soldier was conscious though faint, pale from shock and pain and loss of blood. Even so, he understood instinctively what the woman was offering and understood he could not accept it as offered.
“Can you help me?” he asked, weakly.
Her first instinct was to turn around, pretend she was there on some other business. But that would have been cowardly and she knew it. She walked and stood next to the armless soldier’s cot.
He was awake enough, if only just, to read her face and the moral confusion drawn upon it. It was a grave and terrible responsibility she had taken upon herself, a responsibility the soldier did not envy her. He tried to help her as best he could. “Madame, I am in great pain. Could you give me something… ?”
She knew as well as did he the game he was playing, but, since it made her task easier, she played along. “Certainly, young man. I have something for pain right here.”
Her finger flicked the needle as the thumb of the opposite hand forced out any air that the syringe might have contained. Then she stopped as she realized she had never given anyone an injection anywhere but in the arm.
He twisted his head slightly in the opposite direction. “They have been using my neck,” he advised.
Isabelle searched for a vein, found it, and forced the hair-thin needle into it. A slight withdrawal of the plunger confirmed she had pierced the vein well, as blood from the vein was drawn into the syringe. She pushed some of the syringe’s content into the vein.
And then she stopped pressing. You cannot do this, Isabelle. This is murder.
The soldier helped her again. “That feels a little better, madame, but I am still in great pain. Could I have some more?”
Again, Isabelle pressed another quarter of the syringe’s drug into the vein. But again, she stopped before reaching a fatal dosage.
“I think, madame, that I will still be in unbearable pain until you give me all of it.”
Isabelle looked deeply into the soldier’s eyes. She was not sure if she were looking for confirmation that the soldier wished to die then and there, or confirmation that he did not. The eyes gave no answer; between his injuries and the amount of drug she had already given him, they were simply too dull and blank.
“… all of it, madame, please? The pain…”
Shutting her own eyes then, Isabelle slowly forced the rest of the syringe’s contents into the young man’s neck. She waited there, eyes closed and unmoving, for several minutes as the horror of what she had done washed over her. When she opened them again and withdrew the needle, she saw that the soldier’s eyes had closed, that his breathing had gone shallow. In a few minutes, under Isabelle’s gaze, the breathing stopped entirely.
Then, eyes full of tears and heart full of sorrow, she fled, leaving behind the now empty ward tent.
* * *
Thomas was not alone in the reception tent of the field hospital, but he was ignored by the people bustling to and fro.
That was fine by him; he wanted to be ignored. He did not want to answer any questions, and he did not want any of the people here or in the city to know it was his fault that they had to leave their homes and stations and flee for their lives.
Finally an old noncom stood before him, asking, “Grenadier Thomas De Gaullejac?” Seeing the boy’s distant nod, the NCO continued, “We are admitting you on the advice of Field Marshal Mühlenkampf’s aide. But we cannot treat you here. The psychiatric section has already displaced to the rear. So, for that matter, has the chaplain. You are to go find yourself space on one of the trucks waiting outside and go with them. Do you understand?”
Wearily Thomas nodded again. Then he stood and walked out of the tent to where the trucks awaited.
* * *
Isabelle never even noticed the slump-shouldered, filthy soldier leaving the reception tent as she hurried across it on her way to her own ward. She likely would not have even had her eyes not been tear-filled and swollen with weeping. She had to focus on returning to her own place of work to pick up her youngest boy.
Upon her eldest, Thomas, she refused to think. He was almost certainly lost. The same innocent and sweet son she had raised would never have survived alone in the nightmare their world had become.
* * *
Mühlenkampf, his party down to himself, a radio bearer, and a single guard, waited at the same place from which he had dispatched Rolf with the young French boy.
Bad, so bad this situation is. Worse than anything I have ever seen, to include the Russian Front. They are chewing through us even faster than the Russians might have. And I need time.
Mentally, he consulted his order of battle and the placement of every unit down to division level. Hmmm. Goetz von Berlichingen is close. Jugend is close, too, but Frundsberg is closer. Frundsberg is Panzer… almost useless in these quarters… while Jugend is panzer grenadier. And we have two infantry corps within range.
Then again, Jugend has an average age of under seventeen, excluding old SS leadership.
Reluctantly, Mühlenkampf took the radio from its bearer and called his headquarters. “Give me the 1A,” he demanded.
After a wait of a few minutes the radio came back, “Generalmajor Steinmetz, here, Herr Feldmarschall.”
“Steinmetz? Mühlenkampf. Pass the warning and prepare the orders. Ternty-first and Fortieth Korps, reinforced by SS Divisions Goetz von Berlichingen and Jugend respectively, are to attack, without regard to losses, to drive the enemy back from the city of Wiesbaden.”
“I can do this, sir, but are you…”
“Just do it, Steinmetz.”
“As you wish, sir.”
Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 3 February 2008
The Indowy Rinteel wished desperately to be somewhere, anywhere, but here in this tank, shuddering under repeated hammerings of the Posleen landers that pressed in their attack like nothing Rinteel had ever imagined.
There had been no powerful direct hits of course; Mueller’s deliberately spastic driving made a kinetic projectile strike a matter of, so far happy, chance. The near misses rocked the tank viciously, however. The Indowy’s body had been bruised, bruises over bruises, with every jolt.
There had been plasma hits, more than a few. Yet Brünnhilde’s ablative armor had been able, so far, to shrug those off. A quick glance at his damage control screen showed Rinteel, distressingly, that that armor was wearing thin in places.
Thin too, the Indowy thought, was wearing the courage of the crew. In continuous action for more than twenty-four hours — for the enemy had come looking for the tank from space a bit before their successful assaults across the river lines, the crew had begun to exhibit signs of something very like the Indowy equivalent of the Darhel’s lintatai.
Though with the Indowy it was a cultural and physical issue, not a genetic one.
He looked around the tank’s combat cocoon at the crew, trying to analyze those almost inscrutable un-Indowy faces. All glistened of sweat, sweat pulled forth by fear.
Prael, living and fighting under the desperate pressure of a command he had never trained for, but for which he had so far proved more than suitable, had developed a twitch in his cheek. Even to an alien to whom German was worse than a merely foreign tongue, Prael’s vocal commands to the crew had acquired a nervous, half-mad tone.
Schlüssel’s hands, gripped tight on his gunner’s spade-grip, trembled, Rinteel saw. He had not been able to so much as pull his face from the gun’s sight for over six hours. The previous break in his concentration? Well, the Indowy couldn’t recall it.
Breitenbach, whom the Indowy suspected to be the youngest of the crew, sat shaking. Yet the young man’s eyes never left his engagement screen, his hand still stayed fixed to his cannon’s control handle.
Henschel, running the loader’s station, seemed to retain an old being’s calm, as did Nielsen of the humongous feet. The others of the crew did as best they might.
And the Indowy was, wonder of wonders, terrified and disgusted and admiring all at once. He wished himself to be like the humans, too; able to be terrified and brave all at once, to quake at the heart with fear and still to make the hand and eye steady when it counted. What an amazing species, marveled the little bat-faced, furry, Indowy. If we must have an overlord species — and unless we ever learn to fight, and we can’t, we must — then we could do worse than to serve these humans.
Tiger Anna, Southeast of Berlin, 4 February 2008
In twenty-four hours the crumbling line had been driven back more than twenty-five kilometers. Three times in the last day Hans had ordered his brigade to turn about and lunge back at the enemy. Three times they had driven the Posleen eastward, fleeing in terror. Three times they had carpeted the frozen earth with a blanket of dismembered and crushed enemy bodies.
Yet, each such lunge had also seen the enemy return, in numbers uncountable, pressing at the front and oozing around the flanks. Each such lunge had left a Tiger or two smoking on the East Prussian plain.
The enemy had chosen, so far, not to risk its ships. Hans Brasche smiled grimly for a moment at this mute testimony to the fear in which the Posleen held his much-weakened brigade of Tigers and their lighter comrades.
Out in their vehicles, the lighter troops — Leopard tankers and panzer grenadiers in their Marders — smiled, too. They smiled at being alive, which they would certainly not have been, most of them, had not their brigade commander’s tank ignored the Posleen’s human shields and blasted both humans and aliens to kingdom come.
On other sectors of the front, so the word had been passed, some units had completely disappeared under the alien wave because no one had been able to bring themselves to fire on women and children until it was too late. Great gaps had been torn in the front, gaps that the Germans and their Polish and Czech allies were struggling to repair.
Each attempt at repair seemed to find the front ever more westward.
Hans was facing eastward when Anna’s voice called to him, “Emanations from thirty-eight enemy ships heading this way, flying low, Herr Oberst.”
Hans maintained his smile after hearing that news. Action, something to take his mind from his recent crimes, was a welcome relief.
* * *
Borominskar cursed futilely at his misguided and insubordinate underling. “You foolish abat! You incarnate insult to your forebears! You never sufficiently to be cursed, thrice-damned idiot! Turn back.”
“Up yours, old one,” answered the younger God King, Siliuren of Sub-clan Rif. “The enemy is broken and my people are hungry after the long fast you inflicted upon them. I am going to grab my own place in the sun of this world and to the shit-demons with you!”
* * *
Not bad odds, thought Hans. Not bad odds at all. We have faced worse in any case, much worse.
Losses had forced Hans to consolidate his three battalions of Tigers into two. Even those two mustered only ten tanks apiece. Curiously, his Leopard and panzer grenadier units were much nearer full strength. It was the drawing of the enemy fire away from the lighter units and towards us that spared so many of them, I think.
The twenty-one remaining Tigers, including Anna, waited patiently under their camouflage foam for the Posleen to enter engagement range.
Hans spoke into his microphone to the entire brigade. “The important thing here, boys, is that there is no ground for us to hide behind. If we engage too soon then the enemy will pull back and just pelt us from out beyond our effective range. So we have to let them come in close. Dial down your antimatter and wait until the bastards are within five thousand meters. Then, when I give the command, fire for all you are worth. There are thirty-eight of the swine coming. I don’t want more than two or three to get away to spread the word among the others: ‘Don’t fuck with ’Brigade Michael Wittmann!’ ”
* * *
Siliuren of the Rif chortled at his defiance of his nominal overlord. What, after all, meant it to be a God King of the People of the Ships if one couldn’t exercise the freedom inherent in that status? If he chose to load his oolt in their ships to a new land on his own, by what right could Borominskar object? It certainly had not been because of the care with which he had fed the people; Siliuren’s oolt’os were thin to emaciation by their enforced short rations.
The God King viewed the snow-covered land passing beneath his ship with a certain measure of disgust. It is a bare place, and inhospitable. Why ever did I leave the world of my birth?
An honest answer to that question would have been something on the order of, “You left your world because it was about to be blown to flinders, radioactive flinders at that.” An answer more honest still, though Siliuren was not among either the brightest or the most devout of the People and so unlikely to have read or listened with understanding to the Book of the Knowers, would have been, You left your world because it was about to be destroyed, but it was about to be destroyed because in eons past beyond clear memory, some people called Aldenat’ decided that the universe ought to be a certain way and, for a while, were able to make it look that way.
* * *
God, if there is a God, please, if the aliens look, do not let them see. So Brasche prayed and so, if perhaps using different words, prayed every man of the brigade.
Whether a distant God, scarcely in evidence on the Earth as it was, was paying attention, or the Posleen ships’ masters were not paying attention, the swarm of alien ships flew closer and closer to the irregular waiting line of Tigers, Hans never knew. He only knew that the time eventually came when he was able to order, “All Tigers, Fire. Fire at will.”
* * *
Siliuren of the Rif barely noticed the voice of his ship’s AI. Indeed, the ships never put into their artificial voices any intonation that might have been characterized as attention grabbing.
It wasn’t until the third time the ship said, “There appear to be twenty-one enemy fighting machines ahead,” that the God King asked, “WHAT?”
It was the last question he ever asked.
* * *
“First and Third Battalions, bend in your flanks,” ordered Hans. “Let’s trap as many of the bastards as we can. Little brothers,” — the brigade’s panzers and panzer grenadiers — “cover our flanks until we are done.”
The Brigade Michael Wittmann, much reduced in strength but not one whit in fighting heart, not one whit in their hate, rolled forward to its last victory.
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 3 February 2008
The pit of Hans’ stomach was a leaden brick. Anna’s view-screen told the entire crew more than they wished to know. The Posleen horde advanced to the shallow and now frozen river… and about half of the aliens carried or prodded ahead of it a human captive.
Though the aliens and their captives were in easy range, few human defenders — and those mostly the snipers — fired upon them. Here and there Hans saw a Posleen stumble and fall, its chest or head ruined by a well-placed bullet.
There were none of the aliens’ flying sleds in the air. Those, Hans was sure, the defenders would have engaged gleefully, even as the snipers shot down any Posleen to which they had a clean shot.
But it makes not a shit of difference, killing those few. Their numbers are, effectively, endless. And their most powerful weapons today are their captives.
Schultz, sitting below Hans’ command chair trembled, the commander saw. Glancing around the battle cocoon, Hans saw that everyone in view, from Harz to the operations officer, looked sick. Harz kept saying, over and over, “Oh, the bastards; the dirty, stinking, miserable bastards.”
My boys can’t do it. They shouldn’t have to do it. We never made them that kind of soldier. Shit.
“Dieter, sit back from the gun. Anna, commander’s gun.” Relieved beyond words, Schultz sat back from the sight immediately.
“Yes, Herr Oberst,” the tank replied. From above, a gunner’s suite, almost exactly like Schultz’s, descended to encase Brasche.
“Sergeant Major Krueger, take control of the bow guns. All others be on watch for enemy flyers but do not engage. Sergeant Major, engage at will.”
With a smile, Krueger began raking the mixed formation of humans and enemy. “Fucking Slav untermensch,” he whispered. In the view-screen, men, women and children were ripped apart even as were the Posleen. The only difference was that the human’s cries could be more readily understood.
The sound was more than Hans could bear. It was as terrifying as the sergeant major’s glee, and even more hurtful. “Anna, kill external microphones. Operations, pass the word to the other Tigers: only old SS will engage. New men are not to fire upon the horde except in point self-defense.”
Seeing that the operations officer understood, Hans commanded, “Load antipersonnel. Prepare for continuous antipersonnel.”
The loader pressed the required buttons. From Anna’s ammunition rack hydraulics withdrew a single canister cartridge and fed it to the gun.
Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 3 February 2008
“Feed it to them, Reinhard, feed it to the bastards.”
“Hit!” announced Schlüssel, as a small new sun formed and deformed thirty kilometers up.
“Mueller, hard right.”
Even held securely as he was by his straps, Rinteel felt the sudden, jarring turn as the driver twisted the tank and raced forward to get out of the expected Posleen riposte. As always, the Indowy was terrified speechless. As always, he was disgusted at the slaughter his human comrades were inflicting upon the Posleen when he allowed himself to think upon it.
And yet… and yet… familiarity had dulled the fear. The disgust was severe still, but not the paralyzing force it had been. It was a remarkable thing to the Indowy, to be not so afraid as the situation warranted. More remarkable still was it to be less disgusted by the slaughter his mind envisioned. He was finding he could face both fear of dying and fear of killing a bit better than he had ever imagined.
And, too, Rinteel was discovering that he could kill, had killed, vicariously and without any moral dilemma. After all, though it was the crew that fired the gun, it was he, Rinteel, who made sure that gun was in full operating order. And he thought, And though it is the humans who actually fight the Posleen; it is we, the Indowy, who build them the weapons to fight with. How pure we think ourselves, how above the blood and slaughter. Yet that slaughter would be impossible without us. A foolish people mine, to think that distance from murder turns it into something besides murder.
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 3 February 2008
God, I was a soldier, not a murderer. Do you hate me so much then, that even this sin I must commit.
Hans’ loader, eyes fixed on the screen before him, announced, “Up!”
Through his helmet’s VR, Hans looked upon the frozen-over river. He could see that Krueger’s bow guns were having an effect. He could also see that effect was not enough.
Hans’ vision fixated on a screaming little blond Polish girl held firmly in the grasp of an alien.
Look at the little girl, Brasche. You have killed hundreds of people in your life, maybe thousands. You tried to think they were all armed enemies. Yes, on how many villages did your fire fall, villages containing little girls like that one? On how many did you call artillery? For how many did the armored spearheads of which you were a part open the way for the Einsatzgruppen? You are already a murderer ten thousand times over.
What are a few thousand more, after all?
Hans thought, Anna, forgive me. If this causes me never to come to you, forgive me please. Hans’ finger pressed the firing stud.
Wiesbaden, Germany, 3 February 2008
Thomas’ hand hesitated over the detonator. He could see the bridge. He could see, too, the horde of aliens crossing on it. But he could also see and hear the mass of French civilians the aliens drove among and ahead of them. Again and again the young French soldier tried to force his hand to complete the circuit. Again and again he failed.
Nearby, Sergeant Gribeauval fired his rifle at the crossing aliens.
“Damn it, boy, blow the bridge!” he screamed.
The boy stammered, “I… I… I can’t, Sergeant.”
“Merde,” the sergeant said. He was barely keeping the leading Posleen away from the wires that connected the detonator with the explosives affixed to the bridge, just barely. He couldn’t get away from his firing position long enough to set off the charges without risking that those charges would be made ineffective in that time. “Boy, drop the bridge!”
“Sergeant, I am trying… but…”
Gribeauval turned from the firing position. “Merde! Just do it!”
Thomas looked at the sergeant, wide-eyed and fearful, just in time to see Gribeauval’s head explode from a Posleen railgun round. The boy was flecked with the sergeant’s blood and brains. Morally frozen as he had been, his terror left him utterly paralyzed.
And, while the boy was so paralyzed, the leading Posleen tore out the demolition’s wiring.
Isabelle trembled with fright. People passed by the field hospital, fleeing to the north. The staff was in turmoil, in a shouting, screaming panic.
The enemy was over the Rhine.
With shaking hand Isabelle made a call to the house she lived in with her son. Briefly, she told her hosts the terrible news, then asked them to see that her boy was dressed and sent to her. They promised they would do so.
Medical orderlies carried away on stretchers those wounded that the doctors thought had some chance. As a truck was filled with wounded it headed away to some unknown destination to the north. Yet the supply of wounded was so much greater than the supply of trucks.
Around her was the din of dozens of moaning, wounded soldiers. A doctor walked among them, announcing, “Routine… Urgent… Expectant.”
That was the dread word: “Expectant.” Expected to die.
“Mon dieu, Doctor, what are we going to do for those poor boys we can’t evacuate?”
“We have hiberzine for some of them, the ones we might have some small chance of saving,” he answered. The doctor’s mouth formed a moue. “But we really don’t have very much of it. Most will have to be abandoned.”
Isabelle went white. “Abandon them? To be eaten? My God, no, Doctor. We must do something?”
“What do you suggest Madame De Gaullejac?”
“I don’t know… but something, surely. Oh, my God… I don’t know.”
Then her eyes fell upon a field cabinet she knew contained syringes and various medicines, painkillers mostly.
“There are better ways to die, Doctor, than being eaten, are there not?”
Following her gaze to the cabinet he answered, “There are if you are strong enough. I tell you though, madame, I am not.”
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 3 February 2008
I must be strong, insisted Hans as he fired yet another round of canister into the mixed Posleen-human mass. He found that he was unconsciously unfocusing his eyes to spare himself a clear view of the carnage he had been, and was, causing.
They had changed firing positions three times now, Anna and her crew. From each position Hans had sent out two to three canister rounds, each shot effectively obliterating most Posleen and human life from an area of roughly one million square meters.
There had only been so many human shields available to the Posleen along this sector. Once Hans cut those down the infantrymen along the river’s edge found they were able to do their jobs. In this sector the attack was being stymied.
But a quick glance at the general situation map told Hans that this was very nearly the only sector where that was true. The red-shaded portions of the display showed that the enemy was already in and among the defending infantry over more than half the front.
Other markers on the display showed Brasche that neutron bombs were being expended wildly. Tens of millions of Posleen, and even some humans, were receiving a dose of radiation that would leave them quaking, puking, shitting, choking and all-too-slowly dying caricatures of living beings within minutes.
And none of it would make any difference. This front was broken… and all Hans’ murder in vain.
Headquarters, Commander in Chief-West, Wiesbaden, Germany, 4 February 2008
Mühlenkampf spoke into a speaker phone lying on his desk. The Posleen had still not succeeded in inconveniencing the Bundespost’s telephone system, though the vicious fighting taking place scant miles to the south did interfere slightly with the conversation.
The field marshal’s voice held an utter weariness to match that of his civilian chief. “No, Herr Kanzler, there is nothing I can afford to send to reinforce the east. Even with what I have here, I am unlikely to hold. Herr Kanzler… the demolition on the bridge between Mainz and Wiesbaden failed. And the enemy has established several dozen lodgments on this bank besides. They pulled the same trick they used in the east, only crossing under a shield of children here. Most of the men could not shoot… would not anyway.”
“Then alles ist verloren?” asked the chancellor. All is lost?
“There are still tens of millions of our people, and those of our allies, to save to the north and south, Herr Kanzler. And the Army will pay whatever price we must to give you the time to evacuate them to the mountains and the snows. So no, Herr Kanzler, all is not lost, not while we can save our people.”
“I will give the orders, Field Marshal Mühlenkampf. Cover the evacuation as best you can.”
While his staff worked on the plans for delaying the Posleen advance and moving the headquarters back, Mühlenkampf thought it a good time to visit the front here in the city. Accompanied by his aide, Rolf, and half a dozen guards he set off in a Mercedes staff car.
People were fleeing afoot, by vehicle, and by bus.
Yet not everyone was fleeing. Mühlenkampf noticed a young soldier, sitting in apparent shock on a set of stairs leading from the sidewalk to a house. The boy’s eyes seemed fixed on some spot below the surface of the Earth.
“Stop the car,” he ordered.
Once the Mercedes had come to a halt by the side of the street the field marshal exited and then walked the few short steps to stand in front of the boy. He saw the boy could not be more than fifteen, at most, though grime and exhaustion would have made him look older to a less experienced officer. The cuff band on the soldier’s winter uniform coat said “Charlemagne.”
“What is your name, son?” Mühlenkampf asked in quite good French.
Without looking up from whatever private hell he contemplated, the boy answered, “Thomas De Gaullejac.”
“Where is your unit?”
“Dead? Fled? I don’t know.” Still Thomas did not look up. “I just know my sergeant died. And then I was the only one left. And that I was supposed to blow the bridge and… didn’t.” Low as it was already, with those words Thomas’ head hung lower still.”
“Aha,” said Mühlenkampf. That is one mystery cleared up. “Why didn’t you detonate the bridge, young man?”
Thomas closed his eyes tightly. “There were people on it… men… women… some children. They could have included my mother and brother. And so I just couldn’t. I tried. But my hand wouldn’t move. I can fight. I did fight. But I couldn’t kill all those people. Even though I tried.”
The boy began quietly to cry then.
“Damned if I can blame you for that, son,” sighed Mühlenkampf. And what you need right now is a chaplain or a psychiatrist. Possibly both. “Come with me.”
Thomas went along, even though some part of his mind wondered if it was only to attend a quick court-martial and slow hanging.
Nothing in Mühlenkampf’s demeanor, though, seemed threatening. The field marshal helped Thomas to his feet and led him to the car. “Rolf, take the car and two guards and see this boy to the nearest field hospital for the Charlemagne Division. Can you find that?”
Rolf consulted a laptop that he never left behind. He answered, “Yes, sir. No problem. There’s one about six miles from here. Though traffic may be a little tight.”
“That will be fine,” said Mühlenkampf. “Meet me back here in… say… two hours. The guards have a radio for me to communicate with Headquarters. They and I are going to have a little tour of the front lines.”
Wounded were still pouring in from the front. Many were fixed, to the extent they could be fixed, on the spot, before being sent back to the slaughter. Others were marked for evacuation or for being left behind.
To these, as to the others she had previously helped, Isabelle brought syringes filled with a powerful morphiate, a guaranteed overdose. For those who were awake she simply left a syringe. For the unconscious ones with an awake comrade nearby she asked if the comrade would assist.
And then she came to a ward tent holding one lone soldier with no comrades… and no arms. The soldier was conscious though faint, pale from shock and pain and loss of blood. Even so, he understood instinctively what the woman was offering and understood he could not accept it as offered.
“Can you help me?” he asked, weakly.
Her first instinct was to turn around, pretend she was there on some other business. But that would have been cowardly and she knew it. She walked and stood next to the armless soldier’s cot.
He was awake enough, if only just, to read her face and the moral confusion drawn upon it. It was a grave and terrible responsibility she had taken upon herself, a responsibility the soldier did not envy her. He tried to help her as best he could. “Madame, I am in great pain. Could you give me something… ?”
She knew as well as did he the game he was playing, but, since it made her task easier, she played along. “Certainly, young man. I have something for pain right here.”
Her finger flicked the needle as the thumb of the opposite hand forced out any air that the syringe might have contained. Then she stopped as she realized she had never given anyone an injection anywhere but in the arm.
He twisted his head slightly in the opposite direction. “They have been using my neck,” he advised.
Isabelle searched for a vein, found it, and forced the hair-thin needle into it. A slight withdrawal of the plunger confirmed she had pierced the vein well, as blood from the vein was drawn into the syringe. She pushed some of the syringe’s content into the vein.
And then she stopped pressing. You cannot do this, Isabelle. This is murder.
The soldier helped her again. “That feels a little better, madame, but I am still in great pain. Could I have some more?”
Again, Isabelle pressed another quarter of the syringe’s drug into the vein. But again, she stopped before reaching a fatal dosage.
“I think, madame, that I will still be in unbearable pain until you give me all of it.”
Isabelle looked deeply into the soldier’s eyes. She was not sure if she were looking for confirmation that the soldier wished to die then and there, or confirmation that he did not. The eyes gave no answer; between his injuries and the amount of drug she had already given him, they were simply too dull and blank.
“… all of it, madame, please? The pain…”
Shutting her own eyes then, Isabelle slowly forced the rest of the syringe’s contents into the young man’s neck. She waited there, eyes closed and unmoving, for several minutes as the horror of what she had done washed over her. When she opened them again and withdrew the needle, she saw that the soldier’s eyes had closed, that his breathing had gone shallow. In a few minutes, under Isabelle’s gaze, the breathing stopped entirely.
Then, eyes full of tears and heart full of sorrow, she fled, leaving behind the now empty ward tent.
Thomas was not alone in the reception tent of the field hospital, but he was ignored by the people bustling to and fro.
That was fine by him; he wanted to be ignored. He did not want to answer any questions, and he did not want any of the people here or in the city to know it was his fault that they had to leave their homes and stations and flee for their lives.
Finally an old noncom stood before him, asking, “Grenadier Thomas De Gaullejac?” Seeing the boy’s distant nod, the NCO continued, “We are admitting you on the advice of Field Marshal Mühlenkampf’s aide. But we cannot treat you here. The psychiatric section has already displaced to the rear. So, for that matter, has the chaplain. You are to go find yourself space on one of the trucks waiting outside and go with them. Do you understand?”
Wearily Thomas nodded again. Then he stood and walked out of the tent to where the trucks awaited.
Isabelle never even noticed the slump-shouldered, filthy soldier leaving the reception tent as she hurried across it on her way to her own ward. She likely would not have even had her eyes not been tear-filled and swollen with weeping. She had to focus on returning to her own place of work to pick up her youngest boy.
Upon her eldest, Thomas, she refused to think. He was almost certainly lost. The same innocent and sweet son she had raised would never have survived alone in the nightmare their world had become.
Mühlenkampf, his party down to himself, a radio bearer, and a single guard, waited at the same place from which he had dispatched Rolf with the young French boy.
Bad, so bad this situation is. Worse than anything I have ever seen, to include the Russian Front. They are chewing through us even faster than the Russians might have. And I need time.
Mentally, he consulted his order of battle and the placement of every unit down to division level. Hmmm. Goetz von Berlichingen is close. Jugend is close, too, but Frundsberg is closer. Frundsberg is Panzer… almost useless in these quarters… while Jugend is panzer grenadier. And we have two infantry corps within range.
Then again, Jugend has an average age of under seventeen, excluding old SS leadership.
Reluctantly, Mühlenkampf took the radio from its bearer and called his headquarters. “Give me the 1A,” he demanded.
After a wait of a few minutes the radio came back, “Generalmajor Steinmetz, here, Herr Feldmarschall.”
“Steinmetz? Mühlenkampf. Pass the warning and prepare the orders. Ternty-first and Fortieth Korps, reinforced by SS Divisions Goetz von Berlichingen and Jugend respectively, are to attack, without regard to losses, to drive the enemy back from the city of Wiesbaden.”
“I can do this, sir, but are you…”
“Just do it, Steinmetz.”
“As you wish, sir.”
Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 3 February 2008
The Indowy Rinteel wished desperately to be somewhere, anywhere, but here in this tank, shuddering under repeated hammerings of the Posleen landers that pressed in their attack like nothing Rinteel had ever imagined.
There had been no powerful direct hits of course; Mueller’s deliberately spastic driving made a kinetic projectile strike a matter of, so far happy, chance. The near misses rocked the tank viciously, however. The Indowy’s body had been bruised, bruises over bruises, with every jolt.
There had been plasma hits, more than a few. Yet Brünnhilde’s ablative armor had been able, so far, to shrug those off. A quick glance at his damage control screen showed Rinteel, distressingly, that that armor was wearing thin in places.
Thin too, the Indowy thought, was wearing the courage of the crew. In continuous action for more than twenty-four hours — for the enemy had come looking for the tank from space a bit before their successful assaults across the river lines, the crew had begun to exhibit signs of something very like the Indowy equivalent of the Darhel’s lintatai.
Though with the Indowy it was a cultural and physical issue, not a genetic one.
He looked around the tank’s combat cocoon at the crew, trying to analyze those almost inscrutable un-Indowy faces. All glistened of sweat, sweat pulled forth by fear.
Prael, living and fighting under the desperate pressure of a command he had never trained for, but for which he had so far proved more than suitable, had developed a twitch in his cheek. Even to an alien to whom German was worse than a merely foreign tongue, Prael’s vocal commands to the crew had acquired a nervous, half-mad tone.
Schlüssel’s hands, gripped tight on his gunner’s spade-grip, trembled, Rinteel saw. He had not been able to so much as pull his face from the gun’s sight for over six hours. The previous break in his concentration? Well, the Indowy couldn’t recall it.
Breitenbach, whom the Indowy suspected to be the youngest of the crew, sat shaking. Yet the young man’s eyes never left his engagement screen, his hand still stayed fixed to his cannon’s control handle.
Henschel, running the loader’s station, seemed to retain an old being’s calm, as did Nielsen of the humongous feet. The others of the crew did as best they might.
And the Indowy was, wonder of wonders, terrified and disgusted and admiring all at once. He wished himself to be like the humans, too; able to be terrified and brave all at once, to quake at the heart with fear and still to make the hand and eye steady when it counted. What an amazing species, marveled the little bat-faced, furry, Indowy. If we must have an overlord species — and unless we ever learn to fight, and we can’t, we must — then we could do worse than to serve these humans.
Tiger Anna, Southeast of Berlin, 4 February 2008
In twenty-four hours the crumbling line had been driven back more than twenty-five kilometers. Three times in the last day Hans had ordered his brigade to turn about and lunge back at the enemy. Three times they had driven the Posleen eastward, fleeing in terror. Three times they had carpeted the frozen earth with a blanket of dismembered and crushed enemy bodies.
Yet, each such lunge had also seen the enemy return, in numbers uncountable, pressing at the front and oozing around the flanks. Each such lunge had left a Tiger or two smoking on the East Prussian plain.
The enemy had chosen, so far, not to risk its ships. Hans Brasche smiled grimly for a moment at this mute testimony to the fear in which the Posleen held his much-weakened brigade of Tigers and their lighter comrades.
Out in their vehicles, the lighter troops — Leopard tankers and panzer grenadiers in their Marders — smiled, too. They smiled at being alive, which they would certainly not have been, most of them, had not their brigade commander’s tank ignored the Posleen’s human shields and blasted both humans and aliens to kingdom come.
On other sectors of the front, so the word had been passed, some units had completely disappeared under the alien wave because no one had been able to bring themselves to fire on women and children until it was too late. Great gaps had been torn in the front, gaps that the Germans and their Polish and Czech allies were struggling to repair.
Each attempt at repair seemed to find the front ever more westward.
Hans was facing eastward when Anna’s voice called to him, “Emanations from thirty-eight enemy ships heading this way, flying low, Herr Oberst.”
Hans maintained his smile after hearing that news. Action, something to take his mind from his recent crimes, was a welcome relief.
Borominskar cursed futilely at his misguided and insubordinate underling. “You foolish abat! You incarnate insult to your forebears! You never sufficiently to be cursed, thrice-damned idiot! Turn back.”
“Up yours, old one,” answered the younger God King, Siliuren of Sub-clan Rif. “The enemy is broken and my people are hungry after the long fast you inflicted upon them. I am going to grab my own place in the sun of this world and to the shit-demons with you!”
Not bad odds, thought Hans. Not bad odds at all. We have faced worse in any case, much worse.
Losses had forced Hans to consolidate his three battalions of Tigers into two. Even those two mustered only ten tanks apiece. Curiously, his Leopard and panzer grenadier units were much nearer full strength. It was the drawing of the enemy fire away from the lighter units and towards us that spared so many of them, I think.
The twenty-one remaining Tigers, including Anna, waited patiently under their camouflage foam for the Posleen to enter engagement range.
Hans spoke into his microphone to the entire brigade. “The important thing here, boys, is that there is no ground for us to hide behind. If we engage too soon then the enemy will pull back and just pelt us from out beyond our effective range. So we have to let them come in close. Dial down your antimatter and wait until the bastards are within five thousand meters. Then, when I give the command, fire for all you are worth. There are thirty-eight of the swine coming. I don’t want more than two or three to get away to spread the word among the others: ‘Don’t fuck with ’Brigade Michael Wittmann!’ ”
Siliuren of the Rif chortled at his defiance of his nominal overlord. What, after all, meant it to be a God King of the People of the Ships if one couldn’t exercise the freedom inherent in that status? If he chose to load his oolt in their ships to a new land on his own, by what right could Borominskar object? It certainly had not been because of the care with which he had fed the people; Siliuren’s oolt’os were thin to emaciation by their enforced short rations.
The God King viewed the snow-covered land passing beneath his ship with a certain measure of disgust. It is a bare place, and inhospitable. Why ever did I leave the world of my birth?
An honest answer to that question would have been something on the order of, “You left your world because it was about to be blown to flinders, radioactive flinders at that.” An answer more honest still, though Siliuren was not among either the brightest or the most devout of the People and so unlikely to have read or listened with understanding to the Book of the Knowers, would have been, You left your world because it was about to be destroyed, but it was about to be destroyed because in eons past beyond clear memory, some people called Aldenat’ decided that the universe ought to be a certain way and, for a while, were able to make it look that way.
God, if there is a God, please, if the aliens look, do not let them see. So Brasche prayed and so, if perhaps using different words, prayed every man of the brigade.
Whether a distant God, scarcely in evidence on the Earth as it was, was paying attention, or the Posleen ships’ masters were not paying attention, the swarm of alien ships flew closer and closer to the irregular waiting line of Tigers, Hans never knew. He only knew that the time eventually came when he was able to order, “All Tigers, Fire. Fire at will.”
Siliuren of the Rif barely noticed the voice of his ship’s AI. Indeed, the ships never put into their artificial voices any intonation that might have been characterized as attention grabbing.
It wasn’t until the third time the ship said, “There appear to be twenty-one enemy fighting machines ahead,” that the God King asked, “WHAT?”
It was the last question he ever asked.
“First and Third Battalions, bend in your flanks,” ordered Hans. “Let’s trap as many of the bastards as we can. Little brothers,” — the brigade’s panzers and panzer grenadiers — “cover our flanks until we are done.”
The Brigade Michael Wittmann, much reduced in strength but not one whit in fighting heart, not one whit in their hate, rolled forward to its last victory.
Interlude
Frankfurt bowed down, weighed to the ground under its own ruins. In its way, the gray, ugly city was more to Posleen architectural tastes than were the brighter, homier of the thresh’s dwelling places.
But “more” was a far cry from “entirely.” Athenalras was not sorry to see his people tearing the place down and rebuilding it in Posleen style. Especially was he not sorry to see the places which armed the threshkreen stripped to bare earth. His clan had suffered greatly, wounds without precedent and without imagining, from their battles with the humans.
“God how I hate the vile abat,” muttered the God King lord.
“My lord?” questioned Ro’moloristen.
“I came here, young one, with a bright and shining host. What have I left? Between the threshkreen’s radiation weapons, their fighting machines, and their damned artillery and their infantry which refuses to run unless they see an advantage in it, I lead but a pale, bled-out shadow of a clan. The long body of water the thresh call the ‘Rhein’ is choked to within a few measures of its surface with the bodies of our people. In the east, their rivers Oder and Niesse overflow their banks for all the bodies of the People deposited in them. Their mountains are ringed with our dead. Their fields are carpeted with the remains of the host, sacrilegiously ungathered.”
“But my lord… we have destroyed them. The Germans reel north and south to barren wastes.”
“We have destroyed ourselves. Do not count the humans down, my eson’sora, until the last breeding pair are digested. And that, I fear, we shall never do.
“I wish we had never come to this world,” finished Athenalras, lord of the clan.
Chapter 19
Lübeck, Germany, 1 March 2008
Seven Tigers, along with a half a battalion each of panzers and panzer grenadiers, reinforced with all that remained of the Brigade’s artillery — a couple of undersupplied batteries, stood lonely guard south of the town. To the north and the west, the shattered Kampfgruppen[48] of nine Korps — perhaps the equivalent of a dozen or fifteen divisions, preinvasion — dug in furiously. A further four Korps, or the scraps that remained of them, were turning Hamburg into a fortress to grind the alien enemy. From Hamburg, stretched thin along the Elbe River’s broad, deep estuary, what remained of the Bundeswehr and a few SS, all bridges before them blown, awaited the final enemy onslaught.
Ferries operated by the Bundeswehr Pioneere[49] evacuated what could be evacuated of the millions of trapped civilians and soldiers lining the Elbe’s southern banks. All, perhaps, could have been evacuated in a matter of days had the bridges been left standing. And yet all knew, now — at last — they knew, that some evils were worse than others, and that killing the helpless was not always the worst evil.
It had been a long, hard and bitterly contested withdrawal for Hans Brasche and his men. They had made stands at Potsdam and northwest of Wittenberge and around Schwerin. Each temporary stand had bought time. Each moment of time had bought human lives moved to safety. The price for the salvation of those civilian lives had always been the same: blood and steel and fire, unmarked graves and fat-bellied aliens, gray- and black-clad bodies left to rot or — more likely — to feed the enemy host.
Each stand was a physical defeat, seeing the Brigade driven back leaving smoking tanks and ruined men behind. Yet each stand had bought the seeds, O let it be so, of future victory.
Hans was as proud of his men as ever he had been of the men he had led in Russia… or the legionnaires… or the Israelis, once he had earned Israeli trust.
Hans’ left hand stroked his right lapel, feeling the Sigrunen sewn there. And they are clean, my soldiers. No crimes to their name, not even the crimes of necessity. Their sins, if any, I have assumed. And I was likely damned anyway.
Well, thought Brasche, I will find out soon enough.
Kiel, Germany, 3 March 2008
Most of the refugees had to make the weary trek north on foot with occasional wheeled transportation to assist. Medical units, such as were not needed at the front or, more importantly, were needed to care for the wounded, assembled with their charges instead at Kiel on the Baltic coast for movement by sea to Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, and even Glasgow, all cities still in human hands and likely to remain that way. Some combat units, those judged too exhausted and depleted, also mustered at Kiel for the northward journey.
In a scene reminiscent of Dunkirk, or the Japanese evacuation of the Aleutian Islands, masses of people waited in tents, or shivering in the cold open air, for word that another ship was loading, and they were to join it.
The Posleen, of course, attempted to stop the evacuation, as a farmer might prevent the escape of a turkey destined for the dinner table. Yet Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and British Planetary Defense Batteries were generally successful at keeping the alien ships at bay. Moreover, the Swedes had jury rigged several stout merchant ships with salvaged Posleen railguns. These last gave the aliens fits as they never remained in one place long enough for the Posleen to engage.
Despite the defenses, though, more than one human merchant vessel lay sunken and smoking at its moorings among Kiel’s many wharfs and quays. Still, out in the fjord, the city’s natural harbor, everything from huge container ships to little two person sailboats bobbed among the waves, awaiting the call to come in and dock. Though Posleen fire occasionally succeeded in pelting the harbor from space, the greatest danger to the ships and boats assembled was each other.
Harbormasters from the usual, civilian, port authorities, supplemented by the sailors of the Germany Navy, kept order as best they could. This best was poor enough, given the density of watercraft in the fjord. More than one crash had occurred, with resulting great loss of life.
* * *
This one has lost his will to live, thought the doctor, a psychiatrist trying desperately and, in the case of Thomas De Gaullejac, unsuccessfully, to heal the hidden wounds of war.
The boy had been cleaned up now, his black uniform exchanged for a fresh gown of hospital green. The trench-bred lice were gone; his hair was cut. Even so, his weight was down and continuing to plummet. He ate, when he ate, only on command… and then, only if watched.
The doctor had tried everything he knew. When all of that had failed he had even called in a chaplain, thinking, Where art and science fail perhaps faith may help. Sadly, the boy appeared not to have been raised to be terribly religious. The chaplain’s “God’s inscrutable will” had fallen on deaf ears.
The doctor knew the story behind young Volunteer De Gaullejac. This had been drawn out early on, before his disease of the mind had taken him over so fully. Once the course of the boy’s guilt had been determined, the doctor had tried a different approach, calling in one of Charlemagne’s officers to explain to Thomas that he had not been unique; that almost the entire front had seen men unable to kill the helpless victims of the Posleen’s human shield.
“That does not mean that I didn’t also fail,” De Gaullejac had insisted. His condition had taken a turn for the worse then, enough so to make the doctor regret having brought in the soldier to assist. It was at that time also that it had become necessary to watch the boy to ensure he ate.
* * *
Isabelle watched over her remaining son like a brood hen guarding her last egg. She had seen more than one child, separated from its parents, wandering lost and alone between Wiesbaden and here at Kiel. The fact that she never saw the same child twice spoke grim volumes about the likely fate of many of those children. Though her heart had ached for them, she saw the children only in passing, as the division used its motor transport to race away from the aliens.
Mother and son had boarded ship only a few hours before. Becaause they were a family unit, however small, the ship’s Norwegian crew had found them a small, a very small, stateroom for the voyage. Though after the filth she had seen in the last few months the ship seemed almost eerily clean, an unpleasant aroma — residue of recent passengers who could not take a rough sea voyage, perhaps — pervaded the vessel’s interior.
Instructing her youngest to remain there in their stateroom, Isabelle had gone to help with loading and billeting the rest of the hospital staff and their patients on the ship.
* * *
Her name was Cordelia and she was out of Haifa. Once her stern had sported the Flag of Liberia, a ruse that fooled no one but was considered useful in carrying cargos to ports, mainly Muslim ones, that would never have accepted an Israeli-flagged vessel.
Now, however, there were no Muslim ports of any significance left in the world. The little blue-and-white ensign fluttering on her short mast told the world, and any Posleen who dared come close enough, that here was an Israeli ship.
The ensign was the only clean thing about the ship, for she had carried a load of passengers from Haifa before the fall of that town, and had been continuously engaged in ferrying Israelis and Europeans to the north, and war materials to the south, for over a month with no chance for maintenance or even sanitation.
Cordelia stank to the heavens.
She was also, just possibly, the sweetest sight Oberstleutnant David Benjamin, Judas Maccabeus Brigade, had ever seen… and to hell with the stench.
In command of the remnants of the brigade, some three hundred twelve worn-out and filthy men and women, sans heavy weapons or other equipment, and in control of about fifteen thousand Israeli refugees, Benjamin oversaw the loading of these tattered remnants of his people as they boarded ship.
Benjamin turned his attention from the loading at the approach of a Mercedes staff car bearing the insignia of a German field marshal. He had saluted, something Israeli soldiers did rarely in any case, before he recognized the gray-clad, young-looking man who emerged bearing a white baton.
“Where are your Sigrunen?” he asked confrontationally. Hans Brasche was the only man in the world who wore the double lightning flashes that Benjamin could really stand to be around. He and Mühlenkampf had never quite managed cordiality, despite what the Israeli recognized as the German’s sincere attempts at amends.
“I didn’t need them anymore,” the German answered, simply. “I had made my point, given my former followers and comrades back their self-respect. And now, commanding far more regular troops than SS, I have dispensed with them for myself. They were only a symbol, after all, one that meant different things to different people.”
To this Benjamin had no response. He could accept that the Sigrunen meant something different now — the lightning sword of vengeance — to most Germans, to most Europeans, and even to a fair number of Israelis. But to him they were just hateful and nothing would ever change that.
“Your destination is Stockholm, I believe?” queried Mühlenkampf.
“Yes, Stockholm and then by rail north to a Sub-Urb. They are collecting all that remains of Israel at the same place.”
“I wonder if that is wise,” mused the field marshal.
“Wise or not,” quipped Benjamin, “it is still necessary. Mixed in with you lot and you and the Posleen would end up accomplishing what Hitler never could, the extinction of the Jewish people as we all interbred. There are just too few of us left.”
“That’s what I mean. Maybe we should all be extinguished as separate peoples. Maybe we should become just a human race.”
The Israeli shook his head in negation, looked the German straight in the eyes and answered, “I remain a Jew.”
Mühlenkampf glanced at the Jew’s Iron Cross. “You remain, my friend, a lunatic. But I am glad all the same that we are of the same species.
“Good luck to you anyway, lunatic. Good luck and Godspeed.” Mühlenkampf held out his right hand in friendship.
For reasons he could not at the time understand, Benjamin — standing not far from the Israeli flag fluttering at Cordelia’s stern, and only after a moment’s hesitation, accepted.
* * *
Isabelle looked over the stern at the receding German coastline. She wondered whether they would manage to get everyone out in time or if, as seemed likely, some other woman might have to wander hospital wards murdering the hurt and sick to save them from a worse fate.
It was a moment of inexpressible loneliness. Part of this was the voyage and the loneliness of the sea. But the greater part was that there was no one she could talk to, not one person to whom she could unburden the sickness in her soul. The chaplain? She had left the church long ago; there was no salvation there for her. The psychiatrists? Her husband, and she was certain now that he was her late husband, as Thomas must by now be her late son, had been a real doctor. She had picked up his attitudes towards those he deemed “quacks.”
The others among the hospital staff were also out of bounds. They all knew what she had had to do. Perhaps they even understood. But she had heard the whispering. She would never find a friend among them. She was unclean now.
The sea beckoned to her. A short plunge and the icy waters would clean her. She had no fear of death for herself, not anymore. Yet her remaining son held her to this world as if by chains stretching like an umbilical across the generations.
She shook her head, no. The sun was setting, the sea was calm. She thought she might risk a meal. Isabelle turned from the stern, walked the deck, and reentered the ship.
Isabelle barely noticed the slump-shouldered youth being fed by a nurse in the ship’s galley. Lost in her own miseries she walked to the line along which food was dispensed. Then she turned, dropped her tray and ran.
She reached the youth and dropped to her knees beside him, wrapping arms tightly around neck and torso. “Oh, Thomas, my son, my baby!”
To the surprise of the nurse feeding him, for the boy had slipped ever deeper into some hell of his own, Thomas’ eyes showed a little life for the first time in days. He even turned his head towards this strange woman.
“Mama?”
Tiger Brünnhilde, North of Hanau,
Germany, 4 March 2008
“Motherfuckers,” muttered Prael as he counted the numbers against him and selected a priority target for Schlüssel. Brünnhilde’s railgun once again thrummed.
“Hit,” announced Schlüssel, without energy or enthusiasm.
Prael had no new target for Schlüssel. The enemy had become clever, staying out of Brünnhilde’s range until they could assemble a group and then driving into to unleash a furious attack. It was hell on the commander to both scan the skies for priority targets and direct Mueller, the driver, out of the likely impact area of incoming Posleen fire.
But that was the intermittent threat. The imminent danger to the tank were the hordes of enemy normals and God Kings roaming unhindered through Germany’s heartland. Though Brünnhilde and her crew had, so far, crushed and scattered all comers.
The price of that had been the wearing away of the tank’s ablative armor to the point where several spots might well permit a high-velocity missile, or plasma cannon burst, to get through.
If the Posleen were not so poor at cooperating, thought Prael, we’d have all been dead long before now. But, no. The dumb shits come with their ships and they come with their infantry and flyers. But they never manage to do so at the same time. Still, eventually they will do so by chance and then we are dead with our armor in the state it is. Hmmm. Maybe something can be done about that.
The screens showed blank for the nonce, a condition unlikely to continue for long. Prael said, “Rinteel, we seem to have a little quiet time. Take Schmidt and go topside to see if you can’t undo some ablative plates and fix them where they are most needed.”
“Wilco,” answered the alien, with unconscious irony. More manually dexterous than Schmidt, he unbuckled himself quickly.
“Fifty-seven enemy ships inbound,” announced the tank in her usual monotone. “At current rates of closure they will be in range in six seconds. Several hundred enemy flyers closing as well, in range in fifty-two seconds. I have no information on infantry…”
Lübeck, Germany, 1 March 2008
Seven Tigers, along with a half a battalion each of panzers and panzer grenadiers, reinforced with all that remained of the Brigade’s artillery — a couple of undersupplied batteries, stood lonely guard south of the town. To the north and the west, the shattered Kampfgruppen[48] of nine Korps — perhaps the equivalent of a dozen or fifteen divisions, preinvasion — dug in furiously. A further four Korps, or the scraps that remained of them, were turning Hamburg into a fortress to grind the alien enemy. From Hamburg, stretched thin along the Elbe River’s broad, deep estuary, what remained of the Bundeswehr and a few SS, all bridges before them blown, awaited the final enemy onslaught.
Ferries operated by the Bundeswehr Pioneere[49] evacuated what could be evacuated of the millions of trapped civilians and soldiers lining the Elbe’s southern banks. All, perhaps, could have been evacuated in a matter of days had the bridges been left standing. And yet all knew, now — at last — they knew, that some evils were worse than others, and that killing the helpless was not always the worst evil.
It had been a long, hard and bitterly contested withdrawal for Hans Brasche and his men. They had made stands at Potsdam and northwest of Wittenberge and around Schwerin. Each temporary stand had bought time. Each moment of time had bought human lives moved to safety. The price for the salvation of those civilian lives had always been the same: blood and steel and fire, unmarked graves and fat-bellied aliens, gray- and black-clad bodies left to rot or — more likely — to feed the enemy host.
Each stand was a physical defeat, seeing the Brigade driven back leaving smoking tanks and ruined men behind. Yet each stand had bought the seeds, O let it be so, of future victory.
Hans was as proud of his men as ever he had been of the men he had led in Russia… or the legionnaires… or the Israelis, once he had earned Israeli trust.
Hans’ left hand stroked his right lapel, feeling the Sigrunen sewn there. And they are clean, my soldiers. No crimes to their name, not even the crimes of necessity. Their sins, if any, I have assumed. And I was likely damned anyway.
Well, thought Brasche, I will find out soon enough.
Kiel, Germany, 3 March 2008
Most of the refugees had to make the weary trek north on foot with occasional wheeled transportation to assist. Medical units, such as were not needed at the front or, more importantly, were needed to care for the wounded, assembled with their charges instead at Kiel on the Baltic coast for movement by sea to Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, and even Glasgow, all cities still in human hands and likely to remain that way. Some combat units, those judged too exhausted and depleted, also mustered at Kiel for the northward journey.
In a scene reminiscent of Dunkirk, or the Japanese evacuation of the Aleutian Islands, masses of people waited in tents, or shivering in the cold open air, for word that another ship was loading, and they were to join it.
The Posleen, of course, attempted to stop the evacuation, as a farmer might prevent the escape of a turkey destined for the dinner table. Yet Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and British Planetary Defense Batteries were generally successful at keeping the alien ships at bay. Moreover, the Swedes had jury rigged several stout merchant ships with salvaged Posleen railguns. These last gave the aliens fits as they never remained in one place long enough for the Posleen to engage.
Despite the defenses, though, more than one human merchant vessel lay sunken and smoking at its moorings among Kiel’s many wharfs and quays. Still, out in the fjord, the city’s natural harbor, everything from huge container ships to little two person sailboats bobbed among the waves, awaiting the call to come in and dock. Though Posleen fire occasionally succeeded in pelting the harbor from space, the greatest danger to the ships and boats assembled was each other.
Harbormasters from the usual, civilian, port authorities, supplemented by the sailors of the Germany Navy, kept order as best they could. This best was poor enough, given the density of watercraft in the fjord. More than one crash had occurred, with resulting great loss of life.
This one has lost his will to live, thought the doctor, a psychiatrist trying desperately and, in the case of Thomas De Gaullejac, unsuccessfully, to heal the hidden wounds of war.
The boy had been cleaned up now, his black uniform exchanged for a fresh gown of hospital green. The trench-bred lice were gone; his hair was cut. Even so, his weight was down and continuing to plummet. He ate, when he ate, only on command… and then, only if watched.
The doctor had tried everything he knew. When all of that had failed he had even called in a chaplain, thinking, Where art and science fail perhaps faith may help. Sadly, the boy appeared not to have been raised to be terribly religious. The chaplain’s “God’s inscrutable will” had fallen on deaf ears.
The doctor knew the story behind young Volunteer De Gaullejac. This had been drawn out early on, before his disease of the mind had taken him over so fully. Once the course of the boy’s guilt had been determined, the doctor had tried a different approach, calling in one of Charlemagne’s officers to explain to Thomas that he had not been unique; that almost the entire front had seen men unable to kill the helpless victims of the Posleen’s human shield.
“That does not mean that I didn’t also fail,” De Gaullejac had insisted. His condition had taken a turn for the worse then, enough so to make the doctor regret having brought in the soldier to assist. It was at that time also that it had become necessary to watch the boy to ensure he ate.
Isabelle watched over her remaining son like a brood hen guarding her last egg. She had seen more than one child, separated from its parents, wandering lost and alone between Wiesbaden and here at Kiel. The fact that she never saw the same child twice spoke grim volumes about the likely fate of many of those children. Though her heart had ached for them, she saw the children only in passing, as the division used its motor transport to race away from the aliens.
Mother and son had boarded ship only a few hours before. Becaause they were a family unit, however small, the ship’s Norwegian crew had found them a small, a very small, stateroom for the voyage. Though after the filth she had seen in the last few months the ship seemed almost eerily clean, an unpleasant aroma — residue of recent passengers who could not take a rough sea voyage, perhaps — pervaded the vessel’s interior.
Instructing her youngest to remain there in their stateroom, Isabelle had gone to help with loading and billeting the rest of the hospital staff and their patients on the ship.
Her name was Cordelia and she was out of Haifa. Once her stern had sported the Flag of Liberia, a ruse that fooled no one but was considered useful in carrying cargos to ports, mainly Muslim ones, that would never have accepted an Israeli-flagged vessel.
Now, however, there were no Muslim ports of any significance left in the world. The little blue-and-white ensign fluttering on her short mast told the world, and any Posleen who dared come close enough, that here was an Israeli ship.
The ensign was the only clean thing about the ship, for she had carried a load of passengers from Haifa before the fall of that town, and had been continuously engaged in ferrying Israelis and Europeans to the north, and war materials to the south, for over a month with no chance for maintenance or even sanitation.
Cordelia stank to the heavens.
She was also, just possibly, the sweetest sight Oberstleutnant David Benjamin, Judas Maccabeus Brigade, had ever seen… and to hell with the stench.
In command of the remnants of the brigade, some three hundred twelve worn-out and filthy men and women, sans heavy weapons or other equipment, and in control of about fifteen thousand Israeli refugees, Benjamin oversaw the loading of these tattered remnants of his people as they boarded ship.
Benjamin turned his attention from the loading at the approach of a Mercedes staff car bearing the insignia of a German field marshal. He had saluted, something Israeli soldiers did rarely in any case, before he recognized the gray-clad, young-looking man who emerged bearing a white baton.
“Where are your Sigrunen?” he asked confrontationally. Hans Brasche was the only man in the world who wore the double lightning flashes that Benjamin could really stand to be around. He and Mühlenkampf had never quite managed cordiality, despite what the Israeli recognized as the German’s sincere attempts at amends.
“I didn’t need them anymore,” the German answered, simply. “I had made my point, given my former followers and comrades back their self-respect. And now, commanding far more regular troops than SS, I have dispensed with them for myself. They were only a symbol, after all, one that meant different things to different people.”
To this Benjamin had no response. He could accept that the Sigrunen meant something different now — the lightning sword of vengeance — to most Germans, to most Europeans, and even to a fair number of Israelis. But to him they were just hateful and nothing would ever change that.
“Your destination is Stockholm, I believe?” queried Mühlenkampf.
“Yes, Stockholm and then by rail north to a Sub-Urb. They are collecting all that remains of Israel at the same place.”
“I wonder if that is wise,” mused the field marshal.
“Wise or not,” quipped Benjamin, “it is still necessary. Mixed in with you lot and you and the Posleen would end up accomplishing what Hitler never could, the extinction of the Jewish people as we all interbred. There are just too few of us left.”
“That’s what I mean. Maybe we should all be extinguished as separate peoples. Maybe we should become just a human race.”
The Israeli shook his head in negation, looked the German straight in the eyes and answered, “I remain a Jew.”
Mühlenkampf glanced at the Jew’s Iron Cross. “You remain, my friend, a lunatic. But I am glad all the same that we are of the same species.
“Good luck to you anyway, lunatic. Good luck and Godspeed.” Mühlenkampf held out his right hand in friendship.
For reasons he could not at the time understand, Benjamin — standing not far from the Israeli flag fluttering at Cordelia’s stern, and only after a moment’s hesitation, accepted.
Isabelle looked over the stern at the receding German coastline. She wondered whether they would manage to get everyone out in time or if, as seemed likely, some other woman might have to wander hospital wards murdering the hurt and sick to save them from a worse fate.
It was a moment of inexpressible loneliness. Part of this was the voyage and the loneliness of the sea. But the greater part was that there was no one she could talk to, not one person to whom she could unburden the sickness in her soul. The chaplain? She had left the church long ago; there was no salvation there for her. The psychiatrists? Her husband, and she was certain now that he was her late husband, as Thomas must by now be her late son, had been a real doctor. She had picked up his attitudes towards those he deemed “quacks.”
The others among the hospital staff were also out of bounds. They all knew what she had had to do. Perhaps they even understood. But she had heard the whispering. She would never find a friend among them. She was unclean now.
The sea beckoned to her. A short plunge and the icy waters would clean her. She had no fear of death for herself, not anymore. Yet her remaining son held her to this world as if by chains stretching like an umbilical across the generations.
She shook her head, no. The sun was setting, the sea was calm. She thought she might risk a meal. Isabelle turned from the stern, walked the deck, and reentered the ship.
Isabelle barely noticed the slump-shouldered youth being fed by a nurse in the ship’s galley. Lost in her own miseries she walked to the line along which food was dispensed. Then she turned, dropped her tray and ran.
She reached the youth and dropped to her knees beside him, wrapping arms tightly around neck and torso. “Oh, Thomas, my son, my baby!”
To the surprise of the nurse feeding him, for the boy had slipped ever deeper into some hell of his own, Thomas’ eyes showed a little life for the first time in days. He even turned his head towards this strange woman.
“Mama?”
Tiger Brünnhilde, North of Hanau, Germany, 4 March 2008
“Motherfuckers,” muttered Prael as he counted the numbers against him and selected a priority target for Schlüssel. Brünnhilde’s railgun once again thrummed.
“Hit,” announced Schlüssel, without energy or enthusiasm.
Prael had no new target for Schlüssel. The enemy had become clever, staying out of Brünnhilde’s range until they could assemble a group and then driving into to unleash a furious attack. It was hell on the commander to both scan the skies for priority targets and direct Mueller, the driver, out of the likely impact area of incoming Posleen fire.
But that was the intermittent threat. The imminent danger to the tank were the hordes of enemy normals and God Kings roaming unhindered through Germany’s heartland. Though Brünnhilde and her crew had, so far, crushed and scattered all comers.
The price of that had been the wearing away of the tank’s ablative armor to the point where several spots might well permit a high-velocity missile, or plasma cannon burst, to get through.
If the Posleen were not so poor at cooperating, thought Prael, we’d have all been dead long before now. But, no. The dumb shits come with their ships and they come with their infantry and flyers. But they never manage to do so at the same time. Still, eventually they will do so by chance and then we are dead with our armor in the state it is. Hmmm. Maybe something can be done about that.
The screens showed blank for the nonce, a condition unlikely to continue for long. Prael said, “Rinteel, we seem to have a little quiet time. Take Schmidt and go topside to see if you can’t undo some ablative plates and fix them where they are most needed.”
“Wilco,” answered the alien, with unconscious irony. More manually dexterous than Schmidt, he unbuckled himself quickly.
“Fifty-seven enemy ships inbound,” announced the tank in her usual monotone. “At current rates of closure they will be in range in six seconds. Several hundred enemy flyers closing as well, in range in fifty-two seconds. I have no information on infantry…”
Interlude
My lord and chief is not the same as once he was, Ro’moloristen thought. These humans have broken his heart.
On an intact bridge over the river the humans called the “Elbe” Athenalras advanced on foot to meet Borominskar. Ro’moloristen’s chief, though senior as the People reckoned things, walked unsteadily, like an old Kessentai ready to enter “the Way of the Knowers.”
Borominskar still stepped briskly. His trunk Ro’moloristen saw to be covered with some kind of blanket seemingly made of mid-length, light-colored thresh fur. The fur seemed very young and fresh, blowing as it did in the early spring sun. Since the People did not have the thresh art of weaving, Ro’moloristen made the logical assumption.
I pity you, Borominskar, if the threshkreen ever capture you alive within a million measures of that blanket. They will not merely kill you; they will cut out your living entrails and roast them before your eyes, then leave your agonized remains for this planet’s insects to devour. They will do the same to each of your followers, too, for nothing affects these thresh like the murder of their young.
For you see, lord, that these people are not like us. We kill to eat, with no more pain given than necessary for that purpose. We are not a cruel race, merely a practical one.
But the humans are a cruel species. They can revel in an enemy’s agony. I pity you, Borominskar, when the thresh return in strength and break out from their fastnesses.
And they will return, O Lord of the east. And they will break out. Our species, as it exists, is doomed.
Chapter 20
Tiger Brünnhilde, the end
I survived. How is it possible I survived?
Groggy and disoriented, the Indowy Rinteel arose slowly and unsteadily to all fours from the deck where he had been thrown after the last Posleen hit on Brünnhilde. There was a coppery smell in the air, something unique in the Indowy’s experience. To Rinteel it seemed to be coming from the thick, red liquid sloshing across the deck. He lowered his head and sniffed at the deck. Ah, so human blood smells like that.
There was smoke in the air, bitter and acrid and easily overwhelming the smell of blood once the Indowy managed to drag himself to his feet. Some of that smoke poured from Rinteel’s own damage control panel.
If I had been in my chair leaning forward I would be dead now, he thought.
He heard the faint whistle of the tank’s blowers, apparently working on automatic once they detected dangerous material in the air. Soon it was clear enough for Rinteel to see around the combat cocoon.
What he saw wrenched his heart. Lining both sides of the cocoon his human comrades slumped in death, hanging loosely against their straps. So many holes had been torn through most of the bodies by the shattering of Brünnhilde’s armor that the bodies had gone pale.
Looking back, Rinteel saw that the corpses of Schlüssel, Henschel, and Prael were more torn than most. The Posleen penetration had done its worst work at the rear of the cocoon. Bits of flesh and bone were stuck by blood all over that section.
The horror of the scene seemed to make something go “click” in the Indowy’s mind. Rinteel felt a portion of his sanity go gibbering away. With that portion gone, he found, he was able to feel things he had never felt before… anger, hate, a desire to punish. At the same time these things crept into Rinteel’s mind he felt a deep pain in his body, his people’s cultural and philosophical conditioning against violence coming to the fore.
Frantically, the Indowy pushed aside the hateful thoughts. He did not regain his full sanity by doing so.
The came a low moan from the front of the cocoon, Mueller’s driving station.
Perhaps I am not alone after all, Rinteel thought. Friend Johann may live yet. He raced somewhat unsteadily on his short legs to Mueller’s station and twisted the chair around.
Mueller was alive, though barely. A red foam frothed from his chest as a red stream poured down his face.
“Friend Johann, how may I help?”
“Rinteel, is that you? I can’t see you.”
“You are badly hurt, Johann.”
“Is there anyone… ?” Mueller began to ask.
“No, I am sorry. All are dead but for you and me.”
With that grim news Mueller sank into a semi-torpor. “All dead. All… Rinteel, you must fight the tank. I am dying, and I cannot.”
“I cannot either, Johann. My people are not warriors.”
“There are warriors and then there are warriors, Rinteel. You must fight the tank.” Mueller was overtaken by a spasm of coughing which brought blood and bloody gobbets forth from his mouth. When the spasm was finished he said, so low as barely to be heard, “Use your mind, Rinteel. Find a way… perhaps the tank can help you.”
Mueller began coughing again. When the fit ended, the Indowy could see, breathing had stopped.
Rinteel had never before lost a friend. A bit more of his sanity departed with the loss.
* * *
A sane Indowy, Rinteel knew, would have abandoned Brünnhilde by now. Yet Rinteel found that he simply could not leave. Between his conditioning and the sense of duty and honor he had learned from the crew, the Indowy was able to put a name to the disease affecting his mind. A human would have called it schizophrenia, though that would not have been perfectly accurate. He had not developed a twin personality so much as he was rapidly developing a twin set of values.
It was in such a state of mental confusion that he asked of the air, “Tank Brünnhilde?”
“I am here, Indowy Rinteel.”
“What is your condition? My damage control screen is broken.”
“Everything critical is operable, Rinteel.”
“You can fight then?”
“No, Indowy Rinteel, except in self-defense. And I cannot use my main battery in any case without a commander or crewmember to give me the order to do so.”
“Am I an official member of the crew, Brünnhilde?”
“You are, Rinteel.”
The Indowy stopped then, while different values, new and old, warred within him. He thought that if he gave in to the urge to fight, that part of his now split value system would likely take over all of him. He thought, too, that his body would never survive such a course, that his conditioning would kill him if he gave in to the primitive urge.
And Rinteel did not want to die.
* * *
“I do not wish to die, tank Brünnhilde,” he said, sipping some intoxicant that had miraculously survived the Posleen strike.
“I understand that is common with sentient life, Indowy Rinteel.”
“You have instructions, preprograms, do you not, which require you to try to survive?”
“Yes, I do, Rinteel. But this is a matter of programming and not one of personal preference. I have no personal preferences. I am not a person.”
To the Indowy this seemed specious. He was, after all, from a civilization in which AI’s, notably the Darhel produced AIDs, did have personalities. “Refresh my memory, Brünnhilde. You cannot engage your survival program while you maintain more than two rounds of your ammunition aboard?”
“This is correct, Rinteel.”
The Indowy thought about that, then asked, “Are there Posleen ships about overhead, Brünnhilde?”
“There are, Rinteel. I surmise they are not finishing us off because we appear to be dead. The enemy flyers have likewise withdrawn. After the hit that got through I let my close-in defense weapons go silent to fool them. This was part of my survival programming, though I note that it is a war crime under international law.”
Dead? Dead? I do not want to die. And yet, if I must…
“How many projectiles do you retain for your main battery, Brünnhilde?”
“I have one hundred and forty-seven KE projectiles, DU-AM, Rinteel. Plus fifty-nine antipersonnel canister.”
“And how long would it take you to expend all but two of the KE?
“Slightly more than one hour, Rinteel.”
“And then you will be able to engage your survival program?”
“Yes, Rinteel.”
Again the Indowy stopped speaking to allow himself to think. When he had finished he asked, “Can you distinguish the color of the sky, Brünnhilde?”
“I can.”
“Can you note the color of the earth?”
“Yes, Rinteel.”
“Can you change colors in your perceptions? Modify what you perceive?”
“I can.”
“Good. I want you to modify your perceptions such that the earth and sky are all green.”
“Very well, Rinteel. I have done so.”
“Good… very good. Thank you, Brünnhilde. What colors remain?”
“Just the silver shapes of the Posleen warships.”
“Excellent. Now, Brünnhilde, I want you to expend all but two of your remaining KE projectiles. But you are not to aim at the green.”
Instantly the tank’s railgun raised to near vertical, the turret swerved, and the tank itself began to shudder with the pulses of death being sent aloft.
The Indowy smiled then; madness had overtaken him fully despite his philosophical sleight of hand. When the tank was finally destroyed by Posleen counterfire, he would still be smiling.
Spandau Prison, Berlin, Germany, 5 March 2008
The sound of alien claws on the concrete floors and reverberating off of the stone walls and steel doors of the ancient prison filled Günter Stössel with dread.
The guards were gone; had left laughing, in fact, over the presumed fate of the charges they were deliberately abandoning to the Posleen. Neither pleas nor offers moved the warders. Though no Sigrunen flashed from their collars they were perhaps more in tune with the mindset of many of those who had worn the double lightning flashes in earlier times. Certainly they were pitiless with those of the prisoners who were serving sentences for collusion with the Darhel.
Shivering in his cell, for without the prison staff the heat had shut down, Günter started at the sound of screaming coming from down the corridor and around a bend. The words of the screamer, to the extent there were words, were indistinct. Most of the sound, in any case, was a mindless howl, pleading for life.
The howl suddenly cut off. Günter thought he might have heard the sound of something hitting the concrete floor, but could not be sure. He was sure that he did hear a concerto of snarling, snapping feasting. He also heard many more screams and pleas, and more articulate ones, coming from other prisoners.
The sounds of claws on concrete came a bit closer. The screaming pleas, such as one might have heard in some nineteenth-century madhouse, grew ever louder and ever closer.
The Posleen cosslain, when it came to Günter’s cell and blasted the lock on the door, found him hiding under a blanket in a far corner of the cell. The cosslain simply removed the blanket and dragged him by the hair to the corridor outside, where all could feed without the jostling that often led to internal fighting among the People.
After the terrified wait, after the growing concert of shrieking and pleading and the patter of falling heads, Günter was no doubt quite mad by the time the Posleen arrived at his cell. When the cosslain drew his boma blade and swept it through Günter’s neck, severing head from torso, Günter was as indifferent as was the cosslain.
Stockholm, Sweden, 12 March 2008
“All is lost,” muttered the chancellor hopelessly.
Mühlenkampf shrugged in his hospital bed. “We have lost a battle, Herr Kanzler. But we have not lost the war.”
What universe does this soldier live in? wondered the chancellor.
Mühlenkampf as much as read the chancellor’s thoughts. He answered them with, “A battle is not a war, nor is even a series of battles a war, Herr Kanzler. This war will not be over until the last of us is dragged, biting and kicking from the last trench or the last hole after we have expended the last round of ammunition.”
“We have saved nearly twenty million of our own people here; a like number have found safety in the Alps. Add to that several million more French and Poles and Czechs and Italians.
“The people we saved, too, are the most precious: women to breed more soldiers in abundance, wise farmers, skilled workers. And enough soldiers have been saved to make a seed from which mighty armies will grow. North and south we shall grow again; we shall marshal and build our strength. And the enemy has no chance of digging us out from either Scandinavian snows or Alpine fortresses; they’ll starve first.
“But we will not starve, Herr Kanzler. Oh, yes, rations may be a little scant and bland until we can break out from our mountain fastnesses. So what? The Volk had become pudgy with prosperity, and a lean wolf is a fierce one.
“No, Herr Kanzler, the war in not lost, but only beginning.”
* * *
The remnants of Division Charlemagne had made it to safety; a mere two thousand from a division that had once boasted over twenty thousand, and had lost nearly twice that number in action. In a relatively small corner of a huge Stockholm Sub-Urb, the survivors among the French civilians warmed to and welcomed the tiny band that was all that remained of a once great and courageous army. Already, boys and girls as young as twelve were being turned into something their people needed to survive: soldiers.
To Isabelle it was an abomination, to take those so young and twist their hearts and minds to make them killing machines. An abomination it was, but still, she knew, it was not the worst form of abomination. She could not like it; she could not even keep herself from hating it. And yet she knew she could accept it, for the alternative was far worse.
She thought about an old American science fiction series, Journey to the Stars or some such title. She had once enjoyed it greatly, though she found few of the plots believable two minutes after a show had ended. Nor had much of the philosophy of the show really moved her.
Yet two things had. The lesser of these was “having is not, after all, so pleasing a thing as wanting.” Much more important, especially in her current circumstances, was the simple line, “Survival cancels out programming.”
She walked to the small cubicle in her apartment, barely more than a large closet really, where Thomas slept when he had no duties with Charlemagne. Opening the door slightly, she peered in on her resting son.
Sensing that Thomas was asleep, she risked opening the door wide enough to enter. Not wanting to take a chance on awakening him, as she might have had she sat on the bed, Isabelle instead sat on the floor. She was tall enough, and the bed low enough, that she could still reach out easily to gently stroke her son’s hair.
“Survival cancels out programming,” she thought. I was programmed by my mother who had seen France lose three wars in a row and thought that the entire exercise was futile. My mother was programmed by her mother who had feared she would never marry because the Great War had created such a shortage of men. And you, my dear son, were programmed by me.
I made you to be a fine boy, warm and kindhearted and good. And so, when the time came, and you needed to do something horrible to prevent something worse, you could not. But it was my hand that froze yours, my loving mother’s heart that pierced your own. The guilt, my son, is all mine. And none of the blame is yours.
And so, tomorrow when you awaken to breakfast… and for every morning to come, you will find a mother who will give her heart and soul into making you what I never wanted you to be: a soldier. You will find a mother who will advise you and prompt you and support you in becoming the best French soldier in a century.
For “Survival cancels out programming.”
Tiger Anna, the end
Es ist zu Ende, thought Hans. It is over: the pain, the war, the struggle. Well, there are still a few things to do.
Hans looked around the combat cocoon. Every man turned a questioning face towards him. We have followed you to the end. Now there is nothing more to do. What now, commander?
Hans turned his own face from his followers, put on his VR helmet, and said, “Anna, situation map please, strategic situation.”
“Yes, Herr Oberst,” the tank answered, and it seemed to Hans there was a deep yet inexpressible sadness in the artificial voice. Perhaps that was merely because the tank’s words were filtered through Hans’ own, weary and hopeless, mind.
The enemy suddenly appeared on the map Anna’s VR placed before Hans’ eyes, a great red splotch covering Germany from Munich to Hamburg. A thin, irregular line of blue remained at the passes into the Bavarian and Swiss Alps and in Schleswig-Holstein. This line represented the last holdouts among the defenders. All the rest who had not found secure flanks in the mountains were even now drowning under the alien tide.
Passing through the blue line, even as its rear was being overwhelmed and engulfed by the red tide, were the last fleeing million of civilians, showing on the VR map as evaporating pools of green.
“Anna, end image.”
Hans’ removed his VR helmet and turned his attention back to the crew. “There is nothing more most of you can do. Schultz, Harz, grab your bags and go. Find safety in the north.”
Both Dieter and Rudi began to object, but Hans silenced them. “Just go, gentlemen. Your country, which is more than a collection of fields and hills and towns and rivers, needs you alive. Find wives; raise families. Bring up sons as good and brave as yourselves, sons that will someday take our homeland back for us. And if you would be so good as to take my hand as you leave…”
With similar words, similar handshakes, Hans dismissed all the crew, one by one and two by two, until only he and Krueger were left. Krueger kept his vision carefully fixed on his driver’s screen, hoping the commander would find no more use for him and would release him to flee for safety.
But Hans just sat silent in his command chair, his hand stroking a little packet in his left breast pocket, his eyes staring at Krueger’s back.
* * *
Outside of the tank, Schultz and Harz joined the swelling stream of refugees and scraps of units retreating to the north. It was a sight they had seen too many times before. Yet familiarity had not dulled the pain of watching old men and women struggling to keep ahead of the alien hordes, had never accustomed them to the sight of hungry mothers pushing and leading hungry children for some distant, hoped for, safety.
“We should go back,” said Schultz. “No matter what the commander says, he should not be left to die alone. And I am ashamed to be running with these people when we should be standing on the line and fighting to give them half a chance.” Dieter turned to go back when Harz’s restraining hand gripped his shoulder.
* * *
Krueger started when he first felt Brasche’s hand on his shoulder. The commander had made no sound in his approach, had made no sound since releasing the last other member of the crew.
“It is just you and I left now, Sergeant Major Krueger, just the old SS. It’s fitting, don’t you think, that we who were there at the first should also be there at the last?”
What is this fucking maniac talking about? thought Krueger. I don’t want to be anywhere at the last. I don’t want there to even be a “last” for me. And what is this friendly tone? We both know we detest each other.
Sensing that the sergeant major would make no answer, Hans removed the hand and walked, no longer trying to be silent, back to his command chair.
“Where you there at the first, Sergeant Major?” Hans asked.
“I was SS from 1938 on, yes, Herr Oberst.”
“Really?” asked Hans, conversationally. “I looked over your record of course, when you were assigned to me. It indicated only that you served with Totenkopf Division from 1942 onward. What did you do before then?”
“Sonderkommando, Einsatzgruppe C, Totenkopfverbaende.[50] Then I pissed someone off and was sent to the front,” Krueger answered.
“Totenkopfverbaende?” Hans queried. “In the camps?”
“Yes, Ravensbrück,” the sergeant major said.
“Ah. I was never there, though I did do a very short time at Birkenau. I had a dear friend who was at Ravensbrück. Tell me, Sergeant Major, were the women there really as pliable as all that?”
Krueger didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “Are you going to let me go?”
* * *
Dieter attempted to shrug off Harz’s iron grip. “Let me go,” he demanded. “I am going back.”
“No, damn you, you are not going back! If I have to deck you and carry you out over my shoulder you are going to follow the commander’s last orders: run, live, breed, return and fight for our country again.”
“But I don’t want to do any of those things,” Dieter said, simply. “Maybe if Gudrun were still alive…” The sentence drifted off, unfinished.
“And it does not matter a whit what you want, old son. What matters is where your duty lies. And it does not lie in getting killed to no purpose. Would your Gudrun want that, do you think?”
* * *
“But why would you want to go, Sergeant Major? Isn’t this what you always dreamed of, a final Götterdämmerung?”
“Maybe that is your dream, Herr Oberst. It has never been mine. I enjoy life too much to want to throw it away.”
* * *
Seeing the confusion on Dieter’s face, Harz pressed on that point. “Don’t you think she would want you to live? I saw her face, friend, that one night. She was in love with you; don’t you ever doubt it. She would want you to live… and be happy.”
* * *
“You are happy with your life then, Sergeant Major? You are happy with yourself?”
“Why should I not be?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Hans. “I find that I have rarely been so. Though there was a time…”
Behind him, Krueger heard the sound of cloth ripping, of stitches being torn. Still he did not turn around. There was something to be feared in the commander’s tone of voice now, something he could not quite put a finger to. There was an edge, perhaps, to the commander’s words, some bitter undertone.
“I was always under someone’s orders, you see, Sergeant Major, all the time of my youth unto my later manhood. Never my choice. Never my will. And there was only the one person, gone now, who’s will actually meant more to me than my own.”
“Now, however, I find I am free.”
* * *
Locked in place as if by chains, though the chains binding him were moral rather than physical, Schultz simply stood in place with his head hanging.
What an easy thing it would be, he thought, to return to the tank and fight and die. Never to feel the loss of a loved one again. Never to have to worry about my mother and father, or my sister. Maybe even, if the priests were right, to find my Gudrun again. How sweet and easy and attractive going back would be.
How cowardly it would be. Krueger, for all he was a bastard, made me tougher than that. And Oberst Brasche, too, showed me the way of duty and courage that comes from inside. Krueger would despise me for taking the easy way. But Brasche would be disappointed in me and that would be worse.
Dieter looked Harz directly in the eye. “You are right friend. We have much suffering to do yet before we earn our freedom and our rest. Lead on to the north.”
* * *
“Very well then, Sergeant Major, you have certainly earned your reward. You may go and claim it.”
In a flash Krueger was out of the driver’s chair and grabbing at his pack. He began stuffing some extra necessities into it.
Anna announced, “We have enemy ships coming this way, Herr Oberst.”
“I am sure we must, Anna. Well, this won’t take long. You had best hurry, Sergeant Major.”
Krueger stopped stuffing the pack and began to walk the row between the battle station chairs lining both sides of the battle cocoon. Krueger stopped, taken aback, at seeing a square black cloth rectangle lying on the tank’s metal deck. A similar rectangle graced Krueger’s own lapel, though on his the SS showed.
Krueger looked up to where Hans sat. He saw that Hans’ right lapel was bare where the silver SS had once stood. “Why?” Krueger asked.
“I told you, Sergeant Major. I am free now… well… almost free. I still have my restrictions. And I never wanted to wear that symbol again. For the rest, it was fine. It meant something good. To me it did not. But I felt I had to wear it and try to bring honor again to it for the others.”
Hans reached into his tunic’s left breast pocket and withdrew a little package. A thin folded cloth something or other he set aside on his chair’s armrest, as he did a small folded paper. The last item, a picture, he handed to Krueger.
“Does she look familiar, Sergeant Major?”
“Maybe,” he answered with a shrug. “Pretty girl. Your wife?”
“Yes, she was. Look carefully,” Hans insisted. “See if you can’t remember seeing her before.”
“I don’t have time for…” And then Krueger saw that Brasche had his pistol drawn.
“What the hell is this?”
“I told you to look carefully.”
Heart beating fast, Krueger looked down at the picture again. “Okay, yes, I have probably met the girl. I don’t know who she is though.”
Brasche smiled then and said, “I didn’t expect you would know her name, Sergeant Major. My wife was called ‘Anna.’ This tank is named for her.
A set of memories tugged at Krueger, memories of a little, emaciated Jewess being used by a squad of men. He dropped the picture and began to reach for his own pistol.
Hans’ pistol spoke and then spoke again. Krueger was spun to the floor. He lay there on his back, going into shock, bleeding to death.
Krueger’s eyes lost focus for a moment. When focus returned he saw a broadly smiling Brasche standing over him, pistol pointed directly at Krueger’s head.
“This is for my wife, Anna, whose name you never asked, you NAZI SON OF A BITCH!”
* * *
Beaten in war or not, the Germans were still thorough. Several miles up the road, Harz and Schultz were met by busses, just returning from dropping off one load of refugees to pick up another. The loading was orderly and soon the two were in line on an asphalt parking lot awaiting boarding. Their route, so they were told, would take them into Denmark, across several bridges, and even underwater, before they reached Sweden.
Dieter stopped before joining a line to board a bus. He looked around at a homeland he did not expect ever to see again. Suddenly, without a word, Dieter began walking off the asphalt to the nearest patch of bare earth. There, while Harz looked on without comprehension, Dieter started digging at the earth with his helmet. Soon he had the helmet half filled and another pile of dirt beside the little hole. Dieter reached into his pocket and removed a plastic bag. This he placed onto the dirt in the helmet. Then he filled the helmet with the remainder, tamping it down carefully. He walked back to Harz and the forming line carrying the helmet by its strap.
“And what was that in aid of?” asked Harz.
“At first, when I was digging, I just wanted to bury Gudrun, the only part of her I have to bury anyway, as a human should have been buried. But then I thought that someday, children will ask us, ‘What is Germany?’ And I thought I might be able to point to this helmet, filled with the rich soil of home and the last remains of as pure a spirit and heart as Germany ever produced, and encased in and protected by a helmet of war as only soldiers ever could have protected Germany. And with that, maybe I will be able to explain.”
* * *
Anna’s picture was retrieved from the floor where Krueger had discarded it. Safe in Hans’ pocket again, it was joined by his little packet of her hair. He smiled at the nearness, warmly, and thought, Soon, love, soon.
“Anna, full automation. Prepare for continuous antilander fire. Close-in defense weapons under your control. Engagement parameters Posleen flyers and infantry.”
“Yes, Herr Oberst,” the tank answered.
“Anna, call me Hans, can’t you?”
“Yes, Hans, I can call you by your given name. Hans, those Posleen ships are almost in range, and there are more of them than I thought. I am loading DU-AM now.”
“Thank you, Anna. How much time?”
“Two minutes, Hans.”
“Very good.”
Hans took the small folded cloth something, and began to open it into a yarmulke. “Commander’s gun,” he announced. His gunner’s controls descended around him.
As the first Posleen ship appeared in his sight, Hans began to recite, “Hear, O Israel… the Lord is God… the Lord is One…”
Tiger Brünnhilde, the end
I survived. How is it possible I survived?
Groggy and disoriented, the Indowy Rinteel arose slowly and unsteadily to all fours from the deck where he had been thrown after the last Posleen hit on Brünnhilde. There was a coppery smell in the air, something unique in the Indowy’s experience. To Rinteel it seemed to be coming from the thick, red liquid sloshing across the deck. He lowered his head and sniffed at the deck. Ah, so human blood smells like that.
There was smoke in the air, bitter and acrid and easily overwhelming the smell of blood once the Indowy managed to drag himself to his feet. Some of that smoke poured from Rinteel’s own damage control panel.
If I had been in my chair leaning forward I would be dead now, he thought.
He heard the faint whistle of the tank’s blowers, apparently working on automatic once they detected dangerous material in the air. Soon it was clear enough for Rinteel to see around the combat cocoon.
What he saw wrenched his heart. Lining both sides of the cocoon his human comrades slumped in death, hanging loosely against their straps. So many holes had been torn through most of the bodies by the shattering of Brünnhilde’s armor that the bodies had gone pale.
Looking back, Rinteel saw that the corpses of Schlüssel, Henschel, and Prael were more torn than most. The Posleen penetration had done its worst work at the rear of the cocoon. Bits of flesh and bone were stuck by blood all over that section.
The horror of the scene seemed to make something go “click” in the Indowy’s mind. Rinteel felt a portion of his sanity go gibbering away. With that portion gone, he found, he was able to feel things he had never felt before… anger, hate, a desire to punish. At the same time these things crept into Rinteel’s mind he felt a deep pain in his body, his people’s cultural and philosophical conditioning against violence coming to the fore.
Frantically, the Indowy pushed aside the hateful thoughts. He did not regain his full sanity by doing so.
The came a low moan from the front of the cocoon, Mueller’s driving station.
Perhaps I am not alone after all, Rinteel thought. Friend Johann may live yet. He raced somewhat unsteadily on his short legs to Mueller’s station and twisted the chair around.
Mueller was alive, though barely. A red foam frothed from his chest as a red stream poured down his face.
“Friend Johann, how may I help?”
“Rinteel, is that you? I can’t see you.”
“You are badly hurt, Johann.”
“Is there anyone… ?” Mueller began to ask.
“No, I am sorry. All are dead but for you and me.”
With that grim news Mueller sank into a semi-torpor. “All dead. All… Rinteel, you must fight the tank. I am dying, and I cannot.”
“I cannot either, Johann. My people are not warriors.”
“There are warriors and then there are warriors, Rinteel. You must fight the tank.” Mueller was overtaken by a spasm of coughing which brought blood and bloody gobbets forth from his mouth. When the spasm was finished he said, so low as barely to be heard, “Use your mind, Rinteel. Find a way… perhaps the tank can help you.”
Mueller began coughing again. When the fit ended, the Indowy could see, breathing had stopped.
Rinteel had never before lost a friend. A bit more of his sanity departed with the loss.
A sane Indowy, Rinteel knew, would have abandoned Brünnhilde by now. Yet Rinteel found that he simply could not leave. Between his conditioning and the sense of duty and honor he had learned from the crew, the Indowy was able to put a name to the disease affecting his mind. A human would have called it schizophrenia, though that would not have been perfectly accurate. He had not developed a twin personality so much as he was rapidly developing a twin set of values.
It was in such a state of mental confusion that he asked of the air, “Tank Brünnhilde?”
“I am here, Indowy Rinteel.”
“What is your condition? My damage control screen is broken.”
“Everything critical is operable, Rinteel.”
“You can fight then?”
“No, Indowy Rinteel, except in self-defense. And I cannot use my main battery in any case without a commander or crewmember to give me the order to do so.”
“Am I an official member of the crew, Brünnhilde?”
“You are, Rinteel.”
The Indowy stopped then, while different values, new and old, warred within him. He thought that if he gave in to the urge to fight, that part of his now split value system would likely take over all of him. He thought, too, that his body would never survive such a course, that his conditioning would kill him if he gave in to the primitive urge.
And Rinteel did not want to die.
“I do not wish to die, tank Brünnhilde,” he said, sipping some intoxicant that had miraculously survived the Posleen strike.
“I understand that is common with sentient life, Indowy Rinteel.”
“You have instructions, preprograms, do you not, which require you to try to survive?”
“Yes, I do, Rinteel. But this is a matter of programming and not one of personal preference. I have no personal preferences. I am not a person.”
To the Indowy this seemed specious. He was, after all, from a civilization in which AI’s, notably the Darhel produced AIDs, did have personalities. “Refresh my memory, Brünnhilde. You cannot engage your survival program while you maintain more than two rounds of your ammunition aboard?”
“This is correct, Rinteel.”
The Indowy thought about that, then asked, “Are there Posleen ships about overhead, Brünnhilde?”
“There are, Rinteel. I surmise they are not finishing us off because we appear to be dead. The enemy flyers have likewise withdrawn. After the hit that got through I let my close-in defense weapons go silent to fool them. This was part of my survival programming, though I note that it is a war crime under international law.”
Dead? Dead? I do not want to die. And yet, if I must…
“How many projectiles do you retain for your main battery, Brünnhilde?”
“I have one hundred and forty-seven KE projectiles, DU-AM, Rinteel. Plus fifty-nine antipersonnel canister.”
“And how long would it take you to expend all but two of the KE?
“Slightly more than one hour, Rinteel.”
“And then you will be able to engage your survival program?”
“Yes, Rinteel.”
Again the Indowy stopped speaking to allow himself to think. When he had finished he asked, “Can you distinguish the color of the sky, Brünnhilde?”
“I can.”
“Can you note the color of the earth?”
“Yes, Rinteel.”
“Can you change colors in your perceptions? Modify what you perceive?”
“I can.”
“Good. I want you to modify your perceptions such that the earth and sky are all green.”
“Very well, Rinteel. I have done so.”
“Good… very good. Thank you, Brünnhilde. What colors remain?”
“Just the silver shapes of the Posleen warships.”
“Excellent. Now, Brünnhilde, I want you to expend all but two of your remaining KE projectiles. But you are not to aim at the green.”
Instantly the tank’s railgun raised to near vertical, the turret swerved, and the tank itself began to shudder with the pulses of death being sent aloft.
The Indowy smiled then; madness had overtaken him fully despite his philosophical sleight of hand. When the tank was finally destroyed by Posleen counterfire, he would still be smiling.
Spandau Prison, Berlin, Germany, 5 March 2008
The sound of alien claws on the concrete floors and reverberating off of the stone walls and steel doors of the ancient prison filled Günter Stössel with dread.
The guards were gone; had left laughing, in fact, over the presumed fate of the charges they were deliberately abandoning to the Posleen. Neither pleas nor offers moved the warders. Though no Sigrunen flashed from their collars they were perhaps more in tune with the mindset of many of those who had worn the double lightning flashes in earlier times. Certainly they were pitiless with those of the prisoners who were serving sentences for collusion with the Darhel.
Shivering in his cell, for without the prison staff the heat had shut down, Günter started at the sound of screaming coming from down the corridor and around a bend. The words of the screamer, to the extent there were words, were indistinct. Most of the sound, in any case, was a mindless howl, pleading for life.
The howl suddenly cut off. Günter thought he might have heard the sound of something hitting the concrete floor, but could not be sure. He was sure that he did hear a concerto of snarling, snapping feasting. He also heard many more screams and pleas, and more articulate ones, coming from other prisoners.
The sounds of claws on concrete came a bit closer. The screaming pleas, such as one might have heard in some nineteenth-century madhouse, grew ever louder and ever closer.
The Posleen cosslain, when it came to Günter’s cell and blasted the lock on the door, found him hiding under a blanket in a far corner of the cell. The cosslain simply removed the blanket and dragged him by the hair to the corridor outside, where all could feed without the jostling that often led to internal fighting among the People.
After the terrified wait, after the growing concert of shrieking and pleading and the patter of falling heads, Günter was no doubt quite mad by the time the Posleen arrived at his cell. When the cosslain drew his boma blade and swept it through Günter’s neck, severing head from torso, Günter was as indifferent as was the cosslain.
Stockholm, Sweden, 12 March 2008
“All is lost,” muttered the chancellor hopelessly.
Mühlenkampf shrugged in his hospital bed. “We have lost a battle, Herr Kanzler. But we have not lost the war.”
What universe does this soldier live in? wondered the chancellor.
Mühlenkampf as much as read the chancellor’s thoughts. He answered them with, “A battle is not a war, nor is even a series of battles a war, Herr Kanzler. This war will not be over until the last of us is dragged, biting and kicking from the last trench or the last hole after we have expended the last round of ammunition.”
“We have saved nearly twenty million of our own people here; a like number have found safety in the Alps. Add to that several million more French and Poles and Czechs and Italians.
“The people we saved, too, are the most precious: women to breed more soldiers in abundance, wise farmers, skilled workers. And enough soldiers have been saved to make a seed from which mighty armies will grow. North and south we shall grow again; we shall marshal and build our strength. And the enemy has no chance of digging us out from either Scandinavian snows or Alpine fortresses; they’ll starve first.
“But we will not starve, Herr Kanzler. Oh, yes, rations may be a little scant and bland until we can break out from our mountain fastnesses. So what? The Volk had become pudgy with prosperity, and a lean wolf is a fierce one.
“No, Herr Kanzler, the war in not lost, but only beginning.”
The remnants of Division Charlemagne had made it to safety; a mere two thousand from a division that had once boasted over twenty thousand, and had lost nearly twice that number in action. In a relatively small corner of a huge Stockholm Sub-Urb, the survivors among the French civilians warmed to and welcomed the tiny band that was all that remained of a once great and courageous army. Already, boys and girls as young as twelve were being turned into something their people needed to survive: soldiers.
To Isabelle it was an abomination, to take those so young and twist their hearts and minds to make them killing machines. An abomination it was, but still, she knew, it was not the worst form of abomination. She could not like it; she could not even keep herself from hating it. And yet she knew she could accept it, for the alternative was far worse.
She thought about an old American science fiction series, Journey to the Stars or some such title. She had once enjoyed it greatly, though she found few of the plots believable two minutes after a show had ended. Nor had much of the philosophy of the show really moved her.
Yet two things had. The lesser of these was “having is not, after all, so pleasing a thing as wanting.” Much more important, especially in her current circumstances, was the simple line, “Survival cancels out programming.”
She walked to the small cubicle in her apartment, barely more than a large closet really, where Thomas slept when he had no duties with Charlemagne. Opening the door slightly, she peered in on her resting son.
Sensing that Thomas was asleep, she risked opening the door wide enough to enter. Not wanting to take a chance on awakening him, as she might have had she sat on the bed, Isabelle instead sat on the floor. She was tall enough, and the bed low enough, that she could still reach out easily to gently stroke her son’s hair.
“Survival cancels out programming,” she thought. I was programmed by my mother who had seen France lose three wars in a row and thought that the entire exercise was futile. My mother was programmed by her mother who had feared she would never marry because the Great War had created such a shortage of men. And you, my dear son, were programmed by me.
I made you to be a fine boy, warm and kindhearted and good. And so, when the time came, and you needed to do something horrible to prevent something worse, you could not. But it was my hand that froze yours, my loving mother’s heart that pierced your own. The guilt, my son, is all mine. And none of the blame is yours.
And so, tomorrow when you awaken to breakfast… and for every morning to come, you will find a mother who will give her heart and soul into making you what I never wanted you to be: a soldier. You will find a mother who will advise you and prompt you and support you in becoming the best French soldier in a century.
For “Survival cancels out programming.”
Tiger Anna, the end
Es ist zu Ende, thought Hans. It is over: the pain, the war, the struggle. Well, there are still a few things to do.
Hans looked around the combat cocoon. Every man turned a questioning face towards him. We have followed you to the end. Now there is nothing more to do. What now, commander?
Hans turned his own face from his followers, put on his VR helmet, and said, “Anna, situation map please, strategic situation.”
“Yes, Herr Oberst,” the tank answered, and it seemed to Hans there was a deep yet inexpressible sadness in the artificial voice. Perhaps that was merely because the tank’s words were filtered through Hans’ own, weary and hopeless, mind.
The enemy suddenly appeared on the map Anna’s VR placed before Hans’ eyes, a great red splotch covering Germany from Munich to Hamburg. A thin, irregular line of blue remained at the passes into the Bavarian and Swiss Alps and in Schleswig-Holstein. This line represented the last holdouts among the defenders. All the rest who had not found secure flanks in the mountains were even now drowning under the alien tide.
Passing through the blue line, even as its rear was being overwhelmed and engulfed by the red tide, were the last fleeing million of civilians, showing on the VR map as evaporating pools of green.
“Anna, end image.”
Hans’ removed his VR helmet and turned his attention back to the crew. “There is nothing more most of you can do. Schultz, Harz, grab your bags and go. Find safety in the north.”
Both Dieter and Rudi began to object, but Hans silenced them. “Just go, gentlemen. Your country, which is more than a collection of fields and hills and towns and rivers, needs you alive. Find wives; raise families. Bring up sons as good and brave as yourselves, sons that will someday take our homeland back for us. And if you would be so good as to take my hand as you leave…”
With similar words, similar handshakes, Hans dismissed all the crew, one by one and two by two, until only he and Krueger were left. Krueger kept his vision carefully fixed on his driver’s screen, hoping the commander would find no more use for him and would release him to flee for safety.
But Hans just sat silent in his command chair, his hand stroking a little packet in his left breast pocket, his eyes staring at Krueger’s back.
Outside of the tank, Schultz and Harz joined the swelling stream of refugees and scraps of units retreating to the north. It was a sight they had seen too many times before. Yet familiarity had not dulled the pain of watching old men and women struggling to keep ahead of the alien hordes, had never accustomed them to the sight of hungry mothers pushing and leading hungry children for some distant, hoped for, safety.
“We should go back,” said Schultz. “No matter what the commander says, he should not be left to die alone. And I am ashamed to be running with these people when we should be standing on the line and fighting to give them half a chance.” Dieter turned to go back when Harz’s restraining hand gripped his shoulder.
Krueger started when he first felt Brasche’s hand on his shoulder. The commander had made no sound in his approach, had made no sound since releasing the last other member of the crew.
“It is just you and I left now, Sergeant Major Krueger, just the old SS. It’s fitting, don’t you think, that we who were there at the first should also be there at the last?”
What is this fucking maniac talking about? thought Krueger. I don’t want to be anywhere at the last. I don’t want there to even be a “last” for me. And what is this friendly tone? We both know we detest each other.
Sensing that the sergeant major would make no answer, Hans removed the hand and walked, no longer trying to be silent, back to his command chair.
“Where you there at the first, Sergeant Major?” Hans asked.
“I was SS from 1938 on, yes, Herr Oberst.”
“Really?” asked Hans, conversationally. “I looked over your record of course, when you were assigned to me. It indicated only that you served with Totenkopf Division from 1942 onward. What did you do before then?”
“Sonderkommando, Einsatzgruppe C, Totenkopfverbaende.[50] Then I pissed someone off and was sent to the front,” Krueger answered.
“Totenkopfverbaende?” Hans queried. “In the camps?”
“Yes, Ravensbrück,” the sergeant major said.
“Ah. I was never there, though I did do a very short time at Birkenau. I had a dear friend who was at Ravensbrück. Tell me, Sergeant Major, were the women there really as pliable as all that?”
Krueger didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “Are you going to let me go?”
Dieter attempted to shrug off Harz’s iron grip. “Let me go,” he demanded. “I am going back.”
“No, damn you, you are not going back! If I have to deck you and carry you out over my shoulder you are going to follow the commander’s last orders: run, live, breed, return and fight for our country again.”
“But I don’t want to do any of those things,” Dieter said, simply. “Maybe if Gudrun were still alive…” The sentence drifted off, unfinished.
“And it does not matter a whit what you want, old son. What matters is where your duty lies. And it does not lie in getting killed to no purpose. Would your Gudrun want that, do you think?”
“But why would you want to go, Sergeant Major? Isn’t this what you always dreamed of, a final Götterdämmerung?”
“Maybe that is your dream, Herr Oberst. It has never been mine. I enjoy life too much to want to throw it away.”
Seeing the confusion on Dieter’s face, Harz pressed on that point. “Don’t you think she would want you to live? I saw her face, friend, that one night. She was in love with you; don’t you ever doubt it. She would want you to live… and be happy.”
“You are happy with your life then, Sergeant Major? You are happy with yourself?”
“Why should I not be?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Hans. “I find that I have rarely been so. Though there was a time…”
Behind him, Krueger heard the sound of cloth ripping, of stitches being torn. Still he did not turn around. There was something to be feared in the commander’s tone of voice now, something he could not quite put a finger to. There was an edge, perhaps, to the commander’s words, some bitter undertone.
“I was always under someone’s orders, you see, Sergeant Major, all the time of my youth unto my later manhood. Never my choice. Never my will. And there was only the one person, gone now, who’s will actually meant more to me than my own.”
“Now, however, I find I am free.”
Locked in place as if by chains, though the chains binding him were moral rather than physical, Schultz simply stood in place with his head hanging.
What an easy thing it would be, he thought, to return to the tank and fight and die. Never to feel the loss of a loved one again. Never to have to worry about my mother and father, or my sister. Maybe even, if the priests were right, to find my Gudrun again. How sweet and easy and attractive going back would be.
How cowardly it would be. Krueger, for all he was a bastard, made me tougher than that. And Oberst Brasche, too, showed me the way of duty and courage that comes from inside. Krueger would despise me for taking the easy way. But Brasche would be disappointed in me and that would be worse.
Dieter looked Harz directly in the eye. “You are right friend. We have much suffering to do yet before we earn our freedom and our rest. Lead on to the north.”
“Very well then, Sergeant Major, you have certainly earned your reward. You may go and claim it.”
In a flash Krueger was out of the driver’s chair and grabbing at his pack. He began stuffing some extra necessities into it.
Anna announced, “We have enemy ships coming this way, Herr Oberst.”
“I am sure we must, Anna. Well, this won’t take long. You had best hurry, Sergeant Major.”
Krueger stopped stuffing the pack and began to walk the row between the battle station chairs lining both sides of the battle cocoon. Krueger stopped, taken aback, at seeing a square black cloth rectangle lying on the tank’s metal deck. A similar rectangle graced Krueger’s own lapel, though on his the SS showed.
Krueger looked up to where Hans sat. He saw that Hans’ right lapel was bare where the silver SS had once stood. “Why?” Krueger asked.
“I told you, Sergeant Major. I am free now… well… almost free. I still have my restrictions. And I never wanted to wear that symbol again. For the rest, it was fine. It meant something good. To me it did not. But I felt I had to wear it and try to bring honor again to it for the others.”
Hans reached into his tunic’s left breast pocket and withdrew a little package. A thin folded cloth something or other he set aside on his chair’s armrest, as he did a small folded paper. The last item, a picture, he handed to Krueger.
“Does she look familiar, Sergeant Major?”
“Maybe,” he answered with a shrug. “Pretty girl. Your wife?”
“Yes, she was. Look carefully,” Hans insisted. “See if you can’t remember seeing her before.”
“I don’t have time for…” And then Krueger saw that Brasche had his pistol drawn.
“What the hell is this?”
“I told you to look carefully.”
Heart beating fast, Krueger looked down at the picture again. “Okay, yes, I have probably met the girl. I don’t know who she is though.”
Brasche smiled then and said, “I didn’t expect you would know her name, Sergeant Major. My wife was called ‘Anna.’ This tank is named for her.
A set of memories tugged at Krueger, memories of a little, emaciated Jewess being used by a squad of men. He dropped the picture and began to reach for his own pistol.
Hans’ pistol spoke and then spoke again. Krueger was spun to the floor. He lay there on his back, going into shock, bleeding to death.
Krueger’s eyes lost focus for a moment. When focus returned he saw a broadly smiling Brasche standing over him, pistol pointed directly at Krueger’s head.
“This is for my wife, Anna, whose name you never asked, you NAZI SON OF A BITCH!”
Beaten in war or not, the Germans were still thorough. Several miles up the road, Harz and Schultz were met by busses, just returning from dropping off one load of refugees to pick up another. The loading was orderly and soon the two were in line on an asphalt parking lot awaiting boarding. Their route, so they were told, would take them into Denmark, across several bridges, and even underwater, before they reached Sweden.
Dieter stopped before joining a line to board a bus. He looked around at a homeland he did not expect ever to see again. Suddenly, without a word, Dieter began walking off the asphalt to the nearest patch of bare earth. There, while Harz looked on without comprehension, Dieter started digging at the earth with his helmet. Soon he had the helmet half filled and another pile of dirt beside the little hole. Dieter reached into his pocket and removed a plastic bag. This he placed onto the dirt in the helmet. Then he filled the helmet with the remainder, tamping it down carefully. He walked back to Harz and the forming line carrying the helmet by its strap.
“And what was that in aid of?” asked Harz.
“At first, when I was digging, I just wanted to bury Gudrun, the only part of her I have to bury anyway, as a human should have been buried. But then I thought that someday, children will ask us, ‘What is Germany?’ And I thought I might be able to point to this helmet, filled with the rich soil of home and the last remains of as pure a spirit and heart as Germany ever produced, and encased in and protected by a helmet of war as only soldiers ever could have protected Germany. And with that, maybe I will be able to explain.”
Anna’s picture was retrieved from the floor where Krueger had discarded it. Safe in Hans’ pocket again, it was joined by his little packet of her hair. He smiled at the nearness, warmly, and thought, Soon, love, soon.
“Anna, full automation. Prepare for continuous antilander fire. Close-in defense weapons under your control. Engagement parameters Posleen flyers and infantry.”
“Yes, Herr Oberst,” the tank answered.
“Anna, call me Hans, can’t you?”
“Yes, Hans, I can call you by your given name. Hans, those Posleen ships are almost in range, and there are more of them than I thought. I am loading DU-AM now.”
“Thank you, Anna. How much time?”
“Two minutes, Hans.”
“Very good.”
Hans took the small folded cloth something, and began to open it into a yarmulke. “Commander’s gun,” he announced. His gunner’s controls descended around him.
As the first Posleen ship appeared in his sight, Hans began to recite, “Hear, O Israel… the Lord is God… the Lord is One…”
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