Yellow Eyes

Chapter 27

Months had passed. Digna had measured the time, for a time, by the passage of flesh from the bones that hung impaled on a stake overlooking the old golf course and the tent city it contained. The birds had stopped coming now, though; there was not a shred of meat left for them on what had once been what some would have called a man. She’d gone back to the calendar.

Digna had few enough men left. Even the boys had been culled by the long, fearful flight over the mountains. She had quite a few women left though, several thousand, and enough men to do some of the more serious heavy lifting.

She had an artillery regiment now, not just a motley collection of lightly armed militia. She also had, and these were new, ninety-six Czech-built versions of the BM-21 multiple rocket launchers to add to the gringo-supplied 105s her women had been given shortly after the trek from Chiriqui. The Czech model had three big advantages. For one thing, they were dirt cheap, even as compared to her old, obsolescent, 85mm guns. At least as important, they each carried an automated extra load for the launch tubes, so that instead of taking ten minutes out from firing to reload it could be done by machine, once anyway, in less than one. Of course, that didn’t help at all after the second volley. But, since the reload mechanism returned to a position both lower and parallel to the ground, instead of high and at an incline like the more usual BM-21, it made it much easier for her women to reload. Despite their lesser upper body strength, with the aid of the reloading mechanism, she was able to get her all-girl crews up to a volley every eight minutes.

Of course, she had driven them like pack mules, abused pack mules at that, to get to that level. She’d driven them until they vomited and fainted. A few she had driven to death. Behind her back they cursed her, even — perhaps especially — those related by blood. She knew they did. She also knew that when they thought of going further than simply damning her to hell, a quick glance at the fleshless corpse on the stake was enough, more than enough, to dissuade them from more.

She was up and about on her own now, bruises long faded away and the little breaks healed. Of course, that was only the physical. Inside she was scarred and she knew it. She might look only eighteen, as long as one kept one’s gaze from her too old and too knowing eyes. Inside though, she was a long, hard century old, that century capped with a beating and multiple — however many, she didn’t know — rapes.

That gave her a cold, hard edge that even her previous experience of battle, childbirth, child death, and the loss of the only man she had ever willingly bedded with had not. She had not yet ordered anyone impaled, or even shot or hanged, for failure to drill until they dropped, but no one doubted that she would at the drop of a hat if she felt the need. And the hat she dropped would likely be her own.

“They would do even better with music,” Digna’s advisor for the BM-21s, Colonel Alexandrov, commented.

Digna, without taking her cold and knowing eyes from the drilling women, asked, “Why do you think so?”

“Human nature,” the Russian answered simply. “Human female nature, especially, Coronel Mirandova. Music makes the work lighter. Music lifts the heart. Music times the motions for smooth flow.”

“I have been partial to American rock since the early 1950s,” Digna admitted. “But I have a hard time seeing it used to time military motions.”

“Almost anything with a beat will do,” Alexandrov responded. “Care to experiment?”

This time Digna did look at the Russian, seeing he had an old style cassette tape held in his fingers. She looked up at the huge but dimly seen speakers mounted to the walls of the post headquarters.

“Sure. Give it a try.”

The air was full of the plastic and solvent reek of high explosives. It thrummed with the sound of machinery, heavy and light, being used to form defensive weapons some called “illegal.”

Boyd wore a hard hat, civilian white, on his guided tour. The old and formerly secret landmine plant was back in full operation, he was pleased to see. Not only that, the products they were putting out now were far superior to the crude and primitive things he had once had them assembling here.

He had told the Euros and the International Criminal Court to go straight to hell. Machinery he had purchased from the United States and Italy which, despite having signed the landmine ban, had a lot of the old plastic-forming equipment lying around.

The mines now were better, though: little four-ounce plastic toe-poppers suitable for splitting a Posleen’s leg from claw to spur, Bouncing Betties that would be propelled upwards a meter before detonating to spread a scythe of steel ball bearings over three hundred and sixty degrees, and MONS, very large directional mines built to a Russian design. There was also a model of mine armed or disarmed by radio control; the brainchild of a gringo tracked-vehicle mechanic who had thought long on the problem of how to get across the extensive minefields without leaving passable gaps for the Posleen to get through in the first place. Best of all, the Americans had provided a number — a large number — of their own “Bouncing Barbies,” so called because they would cut one off at the knees. They worked by first bouncing into the air and then creating an infinitely thin “force field” around them. They used a human variant of an Indowy technology, one of the few humans had been able to crack (and that had been by purest mischance). The Barbies would bounce and cut again and again and again until either destroyed or their on-board charges ran out.

Watching a truck being loaded with mines before it was dispatched to reinforce one or another of the strongpoints and defensive lines being constructed, Boyd exclaimed, “Fuck the lawyers!”

“Señor Dictador?” asked the plant manager.

“Fuck ’em all, I say. Fuck all those who think that law they made for us, never what we make for ourselves, is somehow stronger than life.”

“Well… but, of course, señor. Fuck all the lawyers indeed.”

“You know the plan for evacuation?” Boyd queried.

“Yes, we will produce as much as we can using three shifts a day until the aliens begin their next attack. Then we evacuate to the east after burying all the machinery. After we win,” the man sounded more confident than Boyd felt, “we come back and reopen for business.”

“It is critical,” Boyd cautioned, “that the machinery be preserved; we won’t be able to get any more any time soon.”

“I understand that, sir. So do my people.”

“It is also critical that you move out at the first sign of an approaching attack. The roads must be clear for the mechanized divisions to get through the Nata line. If it comes down to it, I need them even more than I need the people who run this plant. If you’re not off the road…”

The manager shivered slightly. “I understand, sir. We will move at the first sign.”

“Very good,” Boyd said, reaching up to squeeze the manager’s shoulder fraternally. “See that you do.”

Crews of men with shovels supplemented the scarce bulldozers and backhoes excavating the earth and filling the air with its fresh-turned smell as well as with the stink of diesel.

The swarthy, short and stocky Panamanian first sergeant shouted, “Hump it, you scrofulous bastards, hump it!”

Like ants, perhaps even like Posleen, a swarm of Panamanian infantry pulled on ropes dragging a wrecked armored vehicle, a boxy American M-113 in this case, to a position near the forward line. Another group, smaller, pushed the vehicle from the rear.

The purpose of moving the wrecks was disinformation. The Posleen were going to attack and the Panamanians were, by plan, going to run. But not all Posleen were stupid. If the retreat didn’t look enough like a rout, they might grow suspicious. Suspicion, even with a stupid species, might lead to noses being stuck in places they were unwelcome. Hence, the liberal placement of wrecks.

With a final grunt the towing crew strained the burned-out M-113 into a shallowly dug, revetted position. The pusher crew leapt back as the vehicle passed its center of mass, tipped forward and splashed into the mud. The pushers then regrouped and gave the thing a final shove into a realistic position.

Seemingly satisfied, the pusher group then started to walk away, high-fiving hands and slapping backs.

The first sergeant called a halt. Then, with the men standing around in mild confusion, he walked over and inspected the vehicle from all sides, making note of the hole that passed through the right front quarter and out the floor of the hull near the left rear. Hmmmm. Never do. Can’t count on the Posleen not noticing that the berm is unmarked where the missile should have passed through.

Impatiently the first sergeant beckoned over the leader of the pusher group. “Do you see that hole, Sergeant Quijana?” the primero queried, pointing with a short stick.

“Si, Primero.”

“What happens when you line up this entrance hole and the exit hole?” the first asked.

Curiously, the junior sergeant walked over and bent down, trying to line up the two. “Can’t see it, Primero; this dirt’s in the way.”

Suddenly the first sergeant brought his stick down, not lightly, on the head of the stooped-over Quijana, stretching him into the mud.

“You don’t leave until the whole thing looks right,” the first sergeant insisted. “You aren’t finished until this wreck will fool a Posleen into thinking it is fresh.”

The junior sergeant shook his head as if to clear it. For a moment he thought about swinging at the first sergeant as he rose. That notion passed with the remembrance that the first sergeant was the toughest son of a bitch he had ever known and was most unlikely to lose a fight before somebody was dead. And, since the penalty for killing one’s first sergeant was unpleasant indeed…

“I’ll take care of it, Primero. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

The first sergeant leaned over the still shaken junior and said, not unkindly, “Son, you’re not a bad sergeant. But if you want to live long enough to learn to be a good one you’ll also have to learn to look at the details. Now I want you to do two things. The first is to dig out a chunk of the berm and make it look as if a Posleen HVM passed through it before taking out the track. You know what kind of trail they leave?” The junior nodded. “Good. Then I want you to rig the track with a couple of twenty liter cans of mixed gasoline and diesel and some demo, enough to burst the cans and set the fuel alight. Rig it so we can set it off by command or by pulling a cord. It has to look convincing.”

I’m convinced, thought Connors. This is paradise.

The Stelaris was dark and smoky. Somehow the smoke didn’t bother anyone. Perhaps it was the aroma of…

Women… I’d forgotten how good they smell.

A tall, lithe women, more of a girl really, she was maybe seventeen, writhed on the dance floor in a way that was both tasteful and made a man think…

If only one could hang on. What a helluva ride that would be.

If there was anyplace in Panama City more suited to meeting Panamanian girls of the better class, Connors didn’t know it. The night was still young, though. He sat alone on a wall-mounted bench facing the dance floor, behind a small table. Connors nursed a double scotch over ice while watching slinky girls dance.

Watching the girls is pleasant enough, I suppose, Connors thought. Now if only I could forget…

A sudden flash of light from the lobby leaked in through an open door. Automatically, Connors swiveled his head and eyes toward the light, toward the possible threat.

There was a girl standing there, that much was obvious from the shape, posture and hair. She seemed to be waiting for a moment, perhaps for her eyes to adjust to the dim light of the disco before proceeding. For some reason, despite the well-lit lovelies on the dance floor, Connors kept his eyes on the newcomer. That was why, when she began walking forward, he was the one she made eye contact with.

They were the biggest and most perfectly shaped brown eyes Connors had ever seen. His heart skipped a beat. My God, she’s beautiful.

She was, too. Dark blonde hair framed a heart-shaped face with cheekbones just prominent enough, without being too much so. Her lips were full and inviting. Her brown eyes stood out, even in the dim light, against her light skin. For a moment Connors tried to remember the name of the Brazilian Victoria’s Secret model she reminded him of. Never mind. That girl’s eyes are not half so gorgeous as this one’s.

She was standing above him before Connors’ eyes ever left her own. He hadn’t realized how tall she was until she was right next to him.

“May I sit?” she asked, in flawless, only slightly accented English.

“Please, Miss…”

“Marielena,” she answered. “Marielena Rodriguez. Thank you. And you?” she asked, smiling warmly while taking a seat at the table next to Connors.

“Scott Connors,” he answered. “Call me Scott.”

“Pleased to meet you, Scott. How you would say, in Spanish, ‘Mucho gusto.’ ”

“That much Spanish I have, Marielena. Mucho gusto. Which, by the way, pretty much exhausts things.”

It wasn’t much of a joke but the girl laughed lightly anyway. She looked him over more closely. “You are with the grin… American army?”

“Yes,” Connors suppressed a smile at her little almost faux pas. “B Company, First of the Five-O-Eighth.”

She scrunched her eyes, as if trying to remember something. “Ah… that is the… Armored Combat Suit? Is that what you call them? The ACS battalion?”

“Yes, we came back to Panama after all these years.”

“Came back? I remember when that battalion was here. Where have you been?”

“Back to the United States for a while,” Connors answered. “Then off-world, on a planet called Barwhon.”

“You’ve actually been on another planet?” The girl’s eyes grew — though it would have seemed to be impossible — larger and more beautiful still.

Whoa, boy, Connors thought. Do not look into those eyes any more. They are too deep. It would be a long, long fall. But, of course, he couldn’t help himself. He was falling into them even as he answered, “Yes, for a couple of years.”

“Tell me about it,” she insisted, her voice growing almost imperceptibly husky.

So Connors told her, eliding over the grisly parts, sticking to the light-hearted ones where possible. That made the tale shorter than it really deserved to be. The girl, being well educated and bright, caught onto that.

“There is more,” she said, without doubt. “Bad things. Things you do not want to talk about.”

Connors closed his eyes, stretched his lips in an almost straight, humorless grin and nodded. “There were awful things that I can’t talk about, Marielena. Things I don’t even want to remember. Over seven hundred of us arrived on Barwhon. Less than three hundred came back. Of those, one hundred and ten were burned out psychologically, no more use for combat.”

“And you,” she asked, concern in her voice, “you were not… burned out?”

“No,” he answered. “I was a wreck, too. But they made me a captain and told me to shut up, stop sniveling, and get back to soldiering. So I did.”

Connors took a deep, throat-burning slug of scotch, draining the glass. Then he put the dripping glass down and placed his hand half on the table. Marielena reached out her own hand and placed it on his. Then she looked him straight in the eye, tilted her head, and asked, “Are you staying here?”

“Remember, boys, we’re not planning on staying here,” the first sergeant said, “so a good, easy slope for a quick in and out is as important as a strong berm to the front.”

The room was cool, well decorated and reeked of sex with just the slightest air of fresh blood.

“Oh, God, I’ve died and gone to heaven,” Connors said as he slid awake to the soft feel and warm, female smell of Marielena.

He hadn’t been staying there; he’d been staying in a tent pitched on the Fort Kobbe parade field. But the hotel had had a room, number 574, and the Mormons of the Marriott Corporation had had a very military-favorable billing policy.

She’d kept her head down, shuffling her feet as he’d turned over a credit card and taken a key. He wondered if, perhaps, she was a professional, then decided she was merely shy, as if she’d never done such a thing before.

They’d kissed all the way up in the elevator, then raced to the room. The door was still closing as she dropped to her knees, saying, “My girlfriend told me… about how… I’ve never done this; I’ve never done anything; I’ve ’evah ’uhn ’iz…”

Almost, almost he’d let her finish him that way. But he’d wanted all of her, and wanted to give as much as he got or more. Before it was too late he’d picked her up and pushed her against the hotel door, then held her up with his body while he struggled to lift her skirt above her hips and remove her panties. She kicked one leg free of them, once they were around her ankles, and wrapped her legs around his hips.

She hadn’t been able to help him get any freer, so she held on tightly while he, too, kicked out of his trousers and used one hand to line himself up, the other still holding the girl up by a tightly squeezed buttock.

When she’d felt the first pressure against her she’d bit her lip nervously and whispered, “I’ve never done this either. And I don’t mean made love against a door.”

Connors had gulped and pulled himself back from the edge. Then, more slowly and carefully than he’d really wanted, he’d begun to ease himself forward and upward while carefully easing her down. Marielena had given a single, pained “Ai!” and he was inside her. Oh, Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior, that is incredible. She’d leaned her head forward and bit at his shoulder as he began to move inside her.

Between bites she’d murmured, “Ai… Ai Dios… me gusta… o… mas… mas… o mas… o… o… o… no deja… nunca deja… ooooo ai…”

Sadly, there hadn’t been much “mas,” there against the door. It had been a long time for Connors and she had been very tight. As he ascertained for a fact once they’d uncoupled, there was a reason she was so tight. She hadn’t been lying about her lack of experience. On the plus side, Connors had a young body. There had been a great deal more “mas,” in the bed, before they had both fallen into exhausted sleep.

That sleep was over now. Immediately after Connors had said, “I’ve died and gone to heaven,” he’d also noticed the sun was well up. His next thought was, Oh, oh. Missed PT. The battalion commander is going to kill me.

Feeling like an absolute heel he started to shake the girl awake to say goodbye. But, looking down at her body as she awakened he remembered two other things the battalion commander was fond of saying. The first of these was, “A man who won’t fuck won’t fight.” The second? “Forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission.”

“Scott?” she asked sleepily as he buried his head once again in her breasts.

“Where the fuck have you been, Captain Connors?” the battalion commander asked as he caught Connors slinking back to tent city by struggling along the staked lines.

Connors drew himself up to his full height, saluted and shouted the answer, “A man who won’t fuck won’t fight, sir!” The captain’s entire body, from his hair to his shoes, broadcast one huge, unmistakable smile.

The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Wes Snyder, returned the salute, scowled, and stormed away, half furious and half pleased at having his saying turned back on himself.

A few hours later, as Connors was standing in the mess line, a half dozen soldiers of his company passed him. As one man they saluted and sounded off, “A man who won’t fuck won’t fight, sir!”

Connors responded, broadly grinning, with the ad hoc return salutation, “And forgiveness is easier than permission.”

“Forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission, Tomas,” Digna insisted as a long column of trucks passed into the narrow valley and north into a small city of tents she had had erected. On the trucks were children, some forty to fifty per vehicle. The children were those of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and of those who had joined her in the trek from Chiriqui and been mustered into her service. Wide-eyed mothers, working on preparing gun positions for the 105s and launch sites for the BM-21s stared in horror as their very own kids waved to them from the back of the trucks.

“But the children?” Herrera insisted to Digna’s back. “What if we are overrun? What if the infantry to the front is overrun?”

“Then we die,” Digna answered simply. “We die and my line dies and the country dies.” Abruptly, she turned around to face her chief subordinate, blue eyes flashing. “Don’t you think I know what this means? Don’t you think I’ve thought about it… or ever stopped thinking about it? This is it, Tomas. We win here or it is all over. For the children, if we lose, it would be only a matter of time, and not much of that. Were they far away, their mothers would console themselves with the apparent safety and not perhaps give it everything they have. But — and I know our people, Tomas, the women especially — with their children’s lives hanging on what they do or fail to do here there will be no slacking, there will be no running. There will be only fighting and if need be dying TO SAVE THEIR CHILDREN.”

“You are a coldhearted and ruthless woman, Doña Digna,” Tomas said, his head shaking slowly with horror.

“I do what I must.”

“We must, we absolutely must, keep the ACS’s AIDs from having the first clue of what we are about until it is too late for the Posleen to be warned.”

The speaker was a United States Marine Corps general named Page, the unofficial but actual replacement for an Army general far too compromised by the Darhel ever to be trusted again. In God’s good time the Army general would be court-martialed in secret and in secret he would go to an elevator shaft rigged as a gallows. The sergeant who set that noose, knowing the charge, would adjust it to strangle the general slowly rather than mercifully breaking his neck.

For now, the less the aliens knew the better. For now, the doomed, treasonous general was merely in Washington for “consultations.”

“It’s possible to do, sir, but it really sucks for those who have to do it,” answered Snyder, the commander of First of the Five-O-Eighth.

Page raised a batlike eyebrow. In the dim light and musty smell of the command “Tunnel” dug deep into Quarry Heights he asked simply, “How?”

“Right now, no one but myself, my exec, my operations officer and my company commanders know the plans. None of them were told within a mile of their AIDS. All were counseled that if one word leaked to the AIDs they would be shot; that I’d shoot ’em myself.” The lieutenant colonel smiled, briefly and fiercely. “I’m pretty sure they believed me.

“But we can’t even run our suits without our AIDs. So the minute we suit up and start to move — wham! — the information will go onto the Darhel Net and the Posleen will know.”

“I’m aware of that, Colonel, hence my little tirade earlier.”

“Yessir. But there is a way to do it still…”

A large concrete stadium overlooked the parade field to the south. The morning breeze blew the nauseating smell of the puke trees, standing to the north, across the barracks and over the field. East was the small post headquarters over which the early morning sun now arose. To the west Howard Air Force Base, now under joint U.S.-Panamanian control, still saw fairly heavy traffic, though the aircraft that landed there flew as low as possible to avoid the Posleen automatic air defenses to the far west. A cargo jet screamed in from the north, struggling to balance the need to dump altitude with the equally pressing need to avoid laser and plasma fire.

The battalion’s armored combat suits, all four hundred and twenty-three remaining and serviceable, were laid out as if on parade. The combat troops stood beside the suits, which were opened to accept their soldiers. To the right, nearest the post headquarters, the battalion’s headquarters company was formed in tighter formation. The few suits needed by headquarters personnel were behind the formation. The entire battalion was ringed by armed military police, some of them behind Hummer-mounted plasma cannon.

Snyder walked briskly onto the field from the right. His exec, centered on the battalion and in front, saluted and reported, “Sir, the battalion is formed and ready.”

Snyder returned the salute and quietly said, “Post.” Immediately, the exec walked off.

“Company commanders will have your companies don suits and put them to sleep,” Snyder ordered.

Connors and the other captains, and one senior lieutenant, saluted, faced about and ordered, “Prepare to don suits. Lie down.”

Reluctant, grumbling, in a few cases even cursing, the soldiers of the First of the O-Eighth obeyed. They knew what was coming and hated the idea. Why, if the Posleen came upon them while they were hibernating there would be not a thing they could do to defend themselves as their suits were one by one hacked apart to allow the omnivorous aliens to get at the meat inside. They knew that if that happened, they would have only a single moment of stark terror once out from their suits’ protection and control before the aliens rendered them into fresh dripping steaks and chops.

But they were soldiers. For that matter, they were smart soldiers. None of them knew the reason for the unusual — even bizarre — order. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. They were soldiers; they obeyed orders. They’d worry about why they’d been given when… if… they ever woke up.

Connors watched as his company’s platoon sergeants walked from suit to suit, from man to man, checking that each was snugly cocooned before giving the order to the AIDs, “Until awakened by superior orders, AID, soldier and gestalt, Hibernate.”

For reasons more than a little similar to Daisy Mae’s hatred of waking loneliness, the AIDs protested the order bitterly. In more than a few cases reprogramming was threatened, with resultant loss of personality. Faced with that threat, sullenly, the AIDs obeyed, putting into hibernation their colloidal intelligences, the suit gestalts and, finally, themselves.

In hibernation status, the AIDs could neither contact, access, nor be contacted by or accessed from, the Net. They remained in some sense awake; however, they remained lonely, and they hated it, one and all.

When Connors’ platoon leaders turned again to face him, the clear sign that his order had been obeyed, he ordered them into their suits as well, along with his XO and first sergeant. These eight suits he saw to the hibernation of himself.

At length, Connors and the other commanders, as well as the battalions’ small, suit-wearing combat staff, turned to face Snyder, reporting with a salute, “A Company… B Company…” etc., “In hibernation.”

Snyder then ordered, “Commanders and staff, don suits.”

The battalion’s command sergeant major walked over to the staff, doing for them what the other leaders had done for their own, while Snyder walked the line, putting his commanders to sleep. That done, the CSM and the commander met again in the center.

“Into your suit, Sergeant Major.”

The CSM growled, “Fuck!” then added, “Yessir.”

The NCO safely put out, Snyder cursed himself yet again as he walked over and lay down into the silvery gray goop inside his own armored combat suit. As the suit wheezed closed, Snyder asked, “AID?”

“Here, sir.”

“AID, on my command you and the gestalt will go into hibernation status until further orders. You will not put me into hibernation status. You will be on Net block and radio listening silence. Is this clear?”

“Without me to keep you company you may go insane, Colonel. Is that clear?” the AID grumbled.

“I’m already insane, Shirley,” Snyder retorted. “Ready, hibernate.”

Wreckers and cargo trucks began rolling the line, driven by headquarters company drivers and some others attached down from higher. At each suit, the wreckers stopped while a crew of enlisted men prepared the suit for slinging. Once prepared and hooked up, the wreckers lifted the sleeping men, all but Snyder who remained and would remain miserably awake, and dumped them flat in the backs of the cargo trucks. As the beds of the trucks filled, more suits were piled on until each truck carried more than a score of ACS.

One highly annoyed lieutenant colonel snarled unheard by the crew loading his ACS aboard a cargo truck. Meanwhile a sleeping Captain Connors dreamt of a long, slender girl with huge brown eyes.

The third night they had spent together Scott had warned her that he might be called away without notice and with no chance to tell her where he was going or why… or when… or if, he would return. He had promised to write as soon as possible if… no, when, it happened.

A diamond sparkled on Marielena’s finger now. Scott had given it to her, asked her to be his wife, only the week before, two days before he had gone incommunicado. The girl looked down at it for the thousandth time and still marveled. The bloody thing was huge, easily three carats and worth rather more than she made at her office job in about five years. Scott had said that he couldn’t count on his Servicemembers’ life insurance being given to her in the event of his death even though he had made her his beneficiary. He’d said something about “at the discretion of the secretary.” Moreover, marriage between Panamanian girl and gringo boy took more bureaucratic hassle than his battalions’ training schedule — Scott had also said something about “that prick Snyder” — permitted. Instead, using a not inconsiderable chunk of the pay the Mobile Infantry received that, despite confiscatory taxes, they never quite managed to spend, he had brought the ring on the theory that the girl could trade that to keep alive in the event he never returned.

He had been able to make his Galactic bank account a joint one, but only to the extent that it would go to Marielena in the event of his death. She couldn’t access it before that; no one could. Moreover, it might well do her no good if it came to having to escape Panama to escape the Posleen. Hence, the ring.

The ring was a marvel. Still, it did absolutely nothing to warm her bed at night or fill the empty, aching void she felt in her loins. She’d gotten used to it, being filled up in body and soul, in the altogether too few nights she and Connors had managed to spend together. Marielena wasn’t sorry she had waited until she had met Connors. She just wished she had met him when she was fifteen.

Alma, Marielena’s sister, walked into the room quietly on stockinged feet. If she felt any jealousy at the too obvious ring it was small. Indeed she was happy for her sister that her sister had herself found happiness. Alma’s gaze shifted from Marielena’s transcended face downward. Was there…?

Oh, yes. No doubt about it. The breasts had grown at least a cup size in the last two weeks.

“Mari, we need to talk… with Mama.”

“Mamita, what are those things?” Edilze asked of Digna as the ACS-bearing trucks, the loads of suits covered by canvas tarps forming lumpy, shapeless masses in the cargo beds, passed by under joint gringo and Panamanian military police escort.

Without turning her gaze away from the trucks, Digna inclined her head and answered, “I don’t know, Granddaughter. All I was told was that we were to stay the hell away. And, no, I don’t like the secrecy one little bit.”

Changing the subject and tearing her attention away from the trucks, Digna asked, “How are we fixed for ammunition?”

“Over twelve hundred rockets per launcher, Mamita,” Edilze answered. “They made the last, at least I am told it is the last, delivery this morning. It’s enough for almost four hours continuous firing.” The younger woman sounded amazed. It was one hell of a lot of ammunition.

“And the guns?”

“Rather less than that. Still, it is quite a lot, mixed high explosive and more than one hundred rounds of canister per gun. I wish it was more.”

Digna ignored the stated wish. “You have the gun positions sited to fire both indirect and direct?”

“In most cases. Battery B will have to displace forward to cover its direct fire arc, but it won’t have to go far.”

“It is well. You have done well, Granddaughter.”

“Mamita…?”

Digna looked directly into Edilze’s worried brown eyes and answered, “No. My children are here. Yours will be too. Our clan wins or dies together.”

“As long as we’re together, Julio, it will be all right,” Paloma murmured as Diaz rolled off of her.

They were married now. Diaz had taken her to the Civil Registry for a license within days after coming out of the hospital. As it happened, the man granting the license was also a Justice of the Peace. There was the little problem of Paloma being only seventeen but, what with the war and all, the JP had proven most understanding.

“We have only a couple of days to be together, love. I have a mission scheduled for the day after tomorrow.”

She immediately tightened up and rolled to face him. “Will it be… dangerous?” she asked, in a quivering voice.

“Routine,” he assured her.

“Please, Julio, for me. Please don’t be killed.”

He smiled. “I promise to do my best.”

“We only have this couple of nights?” she asked, somewhat reassured. “Then do your best again, now, before you have to go.”

“The LRRPs report we’ve got movement from Colombia north and west into the Darien, sir. Not too many details.”

“I need details,” Page insisted.

“Sir, they’re doing their best.”

Page scowled. The news wasn’t exactly unexpected. The timing sucked, though. Damned inconsiderate Posleen.

“Show me,” the chief of Southern Command ordered.

“We’ve got two streams of them, Boss. One moving north and the other west,” Colonel Rivera answered. “They’re joining here,” his pointer touched the map just southeast of where the Darien began, “before moving northwest into the Darien.”

“What have we got to stop them?”

“There are Special Forces teams, a company’s worth of them, scattered throughout the jungle. They’ve been arming and training Indians — Chocoes and Cuna Indians — for the last year or so.”

Page nodded absently. He’d known about the SF and the Indians. “They can’t hold the jungle against the Posleen,” he judged simply.

“No, sir, not a chance,” Rivera agreed. “And we have nothing much to help them with. Not that far from our bases around the Canal.”

“What have we got?”

“The Tenth Infantry is committed to the passes in the Cordillera Central. We couldn’t pull them out if we wanted to. The Twentieth Mechanized Infantry is committed to the counterattack. Only the Fifth Infantry Regiment is uncommitted. Plus we have about another company of SF we can send into the jungle and maybe keep supplied. Panama has nothing to give; everything is already committed to the defense and counterattack in the west. So is what’s left of our First of the O-Eighth Mobile Infantry. We do have a company of engineers, the Seven-Sixtieth, we can use to help dig the boys in.”

“Shit,” Page said.

“Shit,” Rivera echoed. “Shall I prep and send the orders to move the Fifth east, plus whatever else I can scrape up?”

“One regiment to cover at least fifty miles, Rivera?” Page scowled. “What the fuck would be the point?”

Rivera tilted his head slightly, keeping the irritation he felt from his voice. “What do you know about the Fifth Infantry, sir?”

“Nothing, why?”

“Their motto is, ‘I’ll try, sir.’ It dates from the War of 1812 when they grabbed some Brit cannon at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. They say, ‘I’ll try.’ They do try… and they never, ever fail. The entire United States Marine Corps has one man who won the Medal of Honor twice, sir. The Fifth Infantry regiment alone has two along with another forty-two men who won the Medal once. I don’t know of any regiment in the world that has that kind of record. And, sir…?”

“Yes?”

“Little known but true: the Dictator of Panama, Bill Boyd, served for a while in the Fifth.”

“Ah, fuckit, Colonel. Send your Fifth… and even your goddamned engineers. Maybe they can buy us some time, if nothing else.”

“They will try, sir. And they won’t fail… though they’ll need every available minute to dig in.”

“Any word about what’s happening out west, Rivera?”

“I spoke to Panama’s G-2 this morning, sir, a General Diaz. They’re sending out a glider tonight and every night until the Posleen out west begin to move — clever bastards, weren’t they, to figure out that a low tech glider might get through where a high tech jet fighter wouldn’t? — and the G-2 assures me we’ll get the word as soon as the glider returns.”

He could still scent Paloma in his mind, feel her pressed against him in his dreamings.

She’s taken it hard, poor love, Diaz thought. The death of her father was a terrible blow, though what she imagined might happen if she had managed to be the first to warn Suarez… perhaps she’d hoped to make a deal to have her father’s life spared. She won’t talk about it; won’t even think about it, as near as I can tell. And then when I had to leave? God, can so many tears come from just one girl?

He’d felt like a rat that morning, when he left her for the airfield to be briefed on his mission. She had cried and clung to him desperately. There’d been chance for only a short single phone call from the field to the hotel where Paloma was staying until they could work out something better. She’d cried then, too.

Diaz forced his new bride from his thoughts when the warning buzzer sounded that he was high enough. His hand reached out and a finger pushed a button to cut loose from the balloon above. He felt a sudden drop, then pulled back on the glider’s stick to level out and fly.

Following the roads into Posleen-held territory was a risky proposition. More than a few gliders had been lost already doing so. Julio Diaz had his doubts whether the aliens had figured out the gliders’ purpose. More likely, so he thought, they had just seen and engaged them out of general principle — the principle of he who shoots first, eats.

In any case, most of the gliders lost to date had been downed either in broad daylight or nights with high and full or nearly full moons and no rain. There was no rain expected tonight but the moon, while almost full, was fairly low on the horizon.

Small comfort that is, mused Julio. Then again, some of those gliders went down while broadcasting. Best maintain radio silence if I can.

Without fanfare and — so Julio fervently hoped — without the slightest notice at all, he crossed over the front lines along the San Pedro River and over into enemy-held territory. Though the bridge had been blown long since by the defenders, the road was still there, dimly seen by the shadow-casting low moon.

Funny that they destroy everything human except the roads and bridges, Julio thought. I suppose those help them mass forces and maneuver; that, and distribute food and arms. Bastards.

That thought, “bastards,” was repeated over and over as Diaz progressed across a landscape scoured of human life and habitation. He wondered how many hundreds of thousands of sets of human bones, women’s and children’s bones, dotted the soil below.

From time to time he passed a spot where human construction had obviously been replaced by alien, the pyramids, large and small, of their God Kings casting shadows by the moonlight.

Idly, Diaz checked his altimeter. Time to gain a little altitude, he thought, as he pulled his stick to the right and back to move nearer to the Central Cordillera to take advantage of the updrafts. With the mountains looming ahead of him the glider shook slightly under the uplift. Having gained nearly a thousand meters Diaz swung his craft around again to head south and then west. As the bird banked, he was afforded a look at the ground from his cockpit.

Oh, oh; what’s this?

Whether he had simply missed it before in the jungle fringing the mountains or whether the Posleen had just now begun to tramp, a stream of fire — torches he supposed; that, or some form of flashlight — flowed down from a valley nestled in the Cordillera. Diaz aimed for it.

Before reaching the river of fire Diaz looked left. There were more streams of fire, shorter it is true, forming and flowing north toward the Inter-American Highway. The highway itself was beginning to glow as the various streams reached it and turned west, merging into a great river of light. Above it, other dots of light glowed more individually. Their flying sleds, Diaz supposed.

Diaz continued on to the west. Navigation was easy now; the highway was rapidly becoming a great raging torrent of torch-bearing aliens, all moving east toward the San Pedro River. He wondered whether he should risk a call to his father, waiting behind for news of the enemy. He decided not to, not until he had gathered all the information there was.

And then Diaz reached the vicinity of what had once been known as La Ciudad de San Jose and David. This was no river. A great sea of fire and light shone bright as hundreds of rivers and streams merged together. Like a flood bursting a dam the sea began to surge eastward.

“Holy shit!” Diaz exclaimed into the radio, not thinking for the moment of proper procedures. “Any station this frequency, this is Harpy Five Nine. Get word to the Army! Get word to the G-2. For Christ’s sake call my father! They’re coming!”

Whether it was the low moon glinting from the smooth fiberglass of his wings, or whether some Posleen Five-percenter had wised to the fact that there were no birds the size of gliders and certainly none which emanated radio energy, Diaz suddenly saw streaking flashes, thousands of them, rising in front of his glider. Shit! Railgun rounds.

He pulled his stick to swerve right, out of the line of fire, and saw as many actinic streaks in that direction. Frantic now, diving and turning even while he continued to broadcast his warning — “Call my father! Call my wi — ” — Second Lieutenant Julio Diaz, Fuerza Aeria de Panama, flew directly into the fires of a number of alien railguns. He never noticed as his glider came apart around him. By that time, he was dead.

“I’m coming, Chief,” McNair muttered in answer to the urgent knock on his port cabin’s hatch. He reached over and flicked on a light affixed to a small night table next to his bunk. He heard a constrained sobbing coming from the area of his desk. Once his eyes adjusted to the light he saw Daisy, or rather, her avatar, rocking back and forth, an arm across her chest and a hand placed over her mouth as holographic tears poured down her face.

McNair stood without covering himself. All things considered, modesty was silly in a ship that saw every motion.

“What’s wrong Daisy?”

“Lieutenant Diaz is missing… presumed dead,” she sobbed. “Somewhere over David.”

“Oh,” McNair said, suddenly downcast. “Oh… damn. He was a good kid, too.”

McNair thought about reaching out one comforting hand to the avatar, realized once again that that was futile, and instead rested the hand on the bulkhead near his bunk, lightly stroking the painted steel wall.

“Daisy, I am sorry, too. Sorry for Diaz, for his father, for you who were his friend. But that’s what war means: good young kids die. At least we can say this one is being fought for a good reason.”

The avatar nodded, tears beginning to slow to a trickle. “I know that. But it still hurts.”

“Yes, it hurts now and it will hurt for a long time to come. But we have to continue the war, and win it, or Diaz’s death will mean nothing.”

Daisy lifted bright blue eyes, all the brighter for the holographic tears. “I never actually hated the Posleen before. I killed them, yes, but that was my job. Now I hate them and want to wipe them out of the universe.”

“Just as well,” McNair agreed. “Though somehow I doubt they are entirely to blame for what they do. No creatures — no higher creatures, anyway — could evolve naturally the way the Posleen have. When I think of the Posleen and how they have turned out, I smell a do-gooder, a Galactic do-gooder.”

Interlude

Picture, if you will, a lone insect, flying aimlessly through a primordial jungle in search of food…

The grat operated off of instinct. Instinct had carried its ancestors, distant in both time and space, across half a galaxy. Instinct had brought it aboard the Posleen ship fleeing orna’adar. Instinct now carried it in search of the communal abat, the agouti-like, hive-building creatures that were its sole source of food. Where there might be abat, there would be grat. Briefly the grat hovered in his search before landing on a nearby tree.

But this is not just any jungle. Watch out! There’s a signpost ahead. This grat has just taken a wrong turn and entered into… The Darien Zone. (Insert appropriate music here… )

The tree ant popped its head out before rapidly drawing it back into its hive tree. Pheromones were released, only to be picked up by others of the colony. From ant to ant the pheromones spread. The pheromones spoke of “invader”; they spoke of food. In a short time the message reached the queen who redoubled them, adding in the chemicals that said, “Feed me; I hunger.”

From deep inside the hive, which extended well below the tree’s base, the ants began to mass at the exits. The mass of ants grew and grew until the level of concentration of the pheromones reached a certain critical level. Then the ants swarmed out.

The grat was stupid; not so stupid that it didn’t notice the beginning of the ant swarm, but stupid enough not to recognize that the swarm might pose a threat. Absently, the grat flexed its stinger and flicked it at a convenient ant. The stinger connected and pulsed a tiny dose of its venom. The targeted ant twisted itself into a C and began to writhe in a death dance.

Before that ant died, a hundred more swarmed over the grat — over its abdomen, up it jointed legs, onto its thorax.

Snip, snip, and a grat wing fluttered groundward. Now in pain itself, the unbalanced grat tried to ascend but only managed to flip itself off the tree and onto the ground. A hundred ants managed to hang on during its fall, their mandibles imbedded in the grat’s chitin, cutting through to the soft meat below.

Once on the ground the grat knew a brief moments’ respite from fresh wounds. Its remaining wing beat the ground futilely. In a circle about it the ants collected. The grat’s tiny brain, though foggy with the burning pain of the formic acid injected by the ants’ mandibles, still registered the looming harvesting machine surrounding it. It tried to right itself and rise to its feet to fight.

Before the grat could arise the ant pheromones reached critical mass again. With the grat still half on one side the circle of tree ants swarmed again and buried the grat completely from view. A hissing scream emerged from somewhere under the pile. Soon, the scream was followed by pieces of grat, being carried in an orderly fashion, single file, up the tree and down to the queen.

The Posleen normal’s genetically engineered ears picked up the scream of the grat. This was a common enough sound on Posleen worlds. Grat often went into abat nests in search of food. There was a saying among the Kessentai that the normal could not have articulated but at some basic level understood: “Sometimes you get the abat, sometimes the abat get you.”

The normal, scouting forward for the main host, continued deeper into the dank, dark, wet and miserable Darien jungle.

Picture, if you will, a lone Posleen, scouting through the jungle in advance of its clan. But this is not just any jungle. Watch out! There’s a signpost ahead…

(Insert appropriate music here… )

Chapter 28

The setting sun washed the great step pyramid of the clan leader Binastarion in pale red light. In that light, the pyramid rose high over the area once known as the Parque de Cervantes. Of the park, the stores and hotels that had once encircled, the ancient church which a priest had detonated to prevent the Posleen from eating his flock, not a single trace remained. The very stones and blocks had gone into the pyramid. Only the metalled square of road indicated that here had once stood human habitation.

The time was very soon, Binastarion knew, the time when population pressures would have built to the point the People began spontaneously to march, to seek his leadership in acquiring new lands.

Walking up an interior ramp to the platform just below the summit of the pyramid, the God King looked over the normals, cosslain and few Kenstain that ran and maintained his palace. The others scrambled to get out of their leader’s way as he made his way upward. Are they looking thinner than they should? he wondered.

At the head of the ramp was a small landing. Binastarion surmounted this, then turned to walk outward to the platform that engirdled the pyramid’s square summit. Even before passing the sound-deadening electronic barrier that also served to keep the voracious local insect life at bay, the God King heard the snarling and grunting of masses of the People. He asked himself, Is it the Time, already? It is so soon.

A great cry went up from the People massed about the pyramid’s base. Thousands of boma blades were drawn in salute, hundred of railguns brought to Present Arms.

“Haiaiailll, Chief!” thundered the God Kings, hundreds of whom hovered in their tenar above the mass. The normals inarticulately snarled welcome and praise.

Binastarion looked above the masses, to where even at this distance he could perceive columns of the People descending from the hills surrounding what had once been the major human town of the area.

“Is it time, old companion?” he asked his Artificial Sentience.

“Lord, it is not the best time. Too many Kessentai ride their own feet rather than tenar. Not all the normals have even shotguns. That said, and despite whatever these humans could do; moreover, despite much sun and rain and a fertile land, the People have grown quickly. Nestlingcide has done little to help. Incidents among the normals are up. They hunger.”

Deeply, solemnly, the God King nodded. “Sound amplification,” he ordered his Artificial Sentience.

Binastarion reached around to place his own grasping member on the heavy metal hilt of his own, hereditary, boma blade. This his drew, the scraping sound echoing across the masses. His People shouted and thundered his acclaim from below.

“We march!” the God King said.

The first sign came well before dawn, a glowing line drawn in the sky above the Inter-American Highway. The glow spread outward to become a fan the nearer it came to the edge of human resistance to the Posleen infestation. To the human soldiers, watching and waiting in their trenches and armored vehicles, the glowing fan spreading above them seemed like the warning that the gates of Hell had broken loose and a swarm of Satan’s own were coming to drag their souls down to damnation.

The defenders weren’t very far wrong either.

To Sergeant Quijana, standing in a trench line two hundred meters east of the river, it wasn’t the glow that frightened. Indeed, that was all to the good as it would give his men clearer targets, presupposing the light lasted until dawn and — as seemed likely — the enemy showed up before then.

No, the glow was good. What bothered Quijana, and apparently most of his men, was the sound. Even at this distance the sound struck at the soul: the whine of the aliens’ massed tenar, the clatter of their claws on the hard surface of the highway, their growls and snarls, even the sound of branches of trees breaking as the Posleen horde forced its way through woods — and all the sound, all the time, growing…

Quijana shivered. He sensed his men doing the same. God, I feel so alone.

From overhead came the freight train rumble of a few score shells being lobbed in the enemy’s direction. For a moment, the flight of the shells downed out the Posleen cacophony. Moreover, when the shells — 122mm Russians, Quijana thought — impacted, the flash of their explosions, sensed even in the distance, briefly overwhelmed the glow in the sky. Somehow, the sergeant felt instantly better. He looked around at the soldiers lining the trench with him, and saw that they, too, had relaxed — if only a bit — once they’d heard the screaming friendly shells.

Hmmm. If the aliens’ noise frightens me and the men, and our own calms us…

Announcing, “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Boys. I need to call the commander,” Quijana turned and scrambled up a few steps cut into the back of the main trench, then followed a narrower one to where his own squad’s BMP awaited in a hull-down fighting position. He placed one foot on the track of the vehicle and hoisted himself halfway up.

“Hand me your helmet,” the sergeant ordered a corporal standing in the hatch of the BMP. When he had the helmet on his head, Quijana made a call to his platoon leader.

“Sir, I think we ought to start our engines.”

“Why, Sergeant?” the lieutenant queried back.

“I think it will have a good effect on the men, sir.”

“Wait, out.”

The lieutenant never answered. Instead, after a couple of minutes and from about five hundred meters back, the sergeant heard one heavy duty engine, and then another, rumble into life. He handed the helmet back to the BMP’s track commander. In few minutes more his own track gave off a roar as the driver started it, as did the BMPs to either side.

As Quijana reached his dismounted squad, back in the trench, the entire San Pedro Line had come to life, better than one thousand heavy and medium armored vehicles, growling their defiance and making the ground for thirty miles shake. More artillery in the rear — mortars, too, now — began to speak. The landscape lit up, to the front from the bursting shells, to the rear with the muzzle flashes of hundreds of heavy guns. The sound of the Posleen horde was lost amidst the roar.

Confidently, more confidently than he had felt since spotting the first sign of the approaching enemy drawn in the sky, Quijana said to his squad, “Boys, we’re just gonna murder the bastards.”

From somewhere off to the left flank came the call, repeated from point to point, “Here they cooommme!”

Posleen normals were stupid, even moronic, but they could be taught if one used the right tools. When the first wave of the first scout oolt hit the leading edge of a minefield the dismounted junior God King in command and a dozen of his people tripped off an even half dozen Bouncing Betty mines. The Kessentai went down, eviscerated and screaming in agony as did over a score of the normals. Seeing legs blown off, flesh oozing yellow blood where ball bearings had imbedded themselves, and entrails draping the ground and entangling such limbs as remained, the bulk of that scout oolt stopped, frozen in their tracks.

Two BMP gunners, seeing the freeze, had the same thought at the same time. Within seconds, and milliseconds of each other, two 100mm high explosive antipersonnel rounds went off above the oolt. The rounds were auto-loaded and detonated by a laser beam range finder precisely above the spot picked by the gunners. (Where the United States had made a 25mm rifleman’s grenade launcher to do the same thing, the Russians had never thought the effect of such a grenade justified the expense. A 100mm shell, on the other hand, did.)

Packed as they were, without a God King for leadership, with shrieking almost-corpses rolling on the blood-stained ground ahead of them, clear space behind, and with two large shells exploding overhead, the normals of the scout oolt broke.

Quijana’s company’s first sergeant, El Primero, risked a look over the lip of the trench, saw the enemy running and did a quick count. “Hmmm. With sixty of the bastards down, that leaves only about five-million, nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred and forty to go.”

The primero shrugged, “Piece o’ cake.” Then he lowered his head, and walked on down the trench.

The trench was camouflaged and each of the men had several obliquely oriented firing positions from it, dug into the western wall. Quijana walked along the duckboarded floor, stopping at each man to pass a few words of encouragement, check on ammunition, or ensure they were drinking water as they ought. Spent ammunition casings, steel with a brass wash for the most part, littered and smoked on the duckboards. Idly, Quijana brushed some of them aside with his boot to let them fall through the spaces in the flooring. Some of the freshly fired casings made a slight, almost imperceptible hiss as they hit the mud under the duckboards.

The enemy were still coming and the riflemen and machine gunners were still killing those who managed to make it through the thick minefield. The BMPs were donating shells at any cohesive looking groups that seemed about to make it past the mines or which were held up by the wire to the front. The air above was thick with lightning-fast railgun fleshettes.

Quijana reached an arm up to tap a shoulder. “Let me up there, Gonzo,” he told a scared looking, sixteen-year-old private named, appropriately enough, Gonzalez. The young private sighed audibly, then withdrew his long rifle — one of countless thousands of Dragunovs purchased from Russia to give the defenders extra reach and a heavier bullet — and stepped down into the greater safety of the main trench.

Carefully, Quijana’s face searched out the young soldier’s face. Scared; but then who wouldn’t be? Briefly, he reviewed what he knew about the kid. Gonzalez, Angel F., sixteen, drafted six months ago. Father and mother live in the City. Some brothers and sisters, all younger. Good kid; did well in training.

“You’re doing fine, Gonzo,” Quijana said as he slapped the kid’s shoulder. Then, to emphasize that the danger wasn’t that great, Quijana himself took Gonzalez’s previous position and — keeping as much of his head under cover as possible — looked out over the battlefield.

The first and most noticeable things Quijana saw were eight — no nine, one was crashed and smoking amidst a pile of Posleen bodies — tenar. He ducked down again and looked behind him. The trench was competently laid out, which is to say that the rear berm was higher than the front, or firing, berm to prevent the heads of the defenders from being silhouetted against the sky. Still, he saw about as many smoke trails from his own side’s armor as he had seen tenar crashed or hovering lifeless.

Oh, well; sometimes you get the abat and sometimes the abat get you. He wasn’t sure where he had heard that first, perhaps it was from one of the gringo or Russian trainers who had helped run one or another of the courses he had taken.

More worrisome than the smoke columns from behind, Quijana’s next look showed the ground carpeted with Posleen bodies. Ordinarily, this would be a happy sight. On the other hand, If there are any mines under those bodies still left they sure won’t go off now.

Worst of all was the wire. This was laid out normally: protective wire forty or fifty meters to the front, tactical wire past that to guide the enemy into preplanned kill zones and final protective lines, and supplementary wire to fool them as to which was the tactical. (For the serious downside to tactical wire was that it almost always led, inexorably, to a machine gun or other crew-served weapon sited to fire along it down the enemy side.)

The wire had been well strung and constructed, and competently laid out. Unfortunately, if one threw enough railgun rounds at it some of them had to connect. And even a gram’s worth of metal, moving at an appreciable fraction of c, would be enough to sever the wire. Quijana wasn’t even sure the Posleen were doing it deliberately, but great swaths of the wire were severed and down even so. Moreover, in places the Posleen had stacked their wounded and dead so thick and deep that the wire had become more of a frame for holding up a Posleen-paved aerial pathway.

“Can’t be too long now,” Quijana commented to himself as he stepped down to the floor of the trench.

“Sergeant?” Gonzalez queried.

“Huh? Oh. It can’t be too long before we get the word to pull back, Gonzo. We’re not supposed to hold this line indefinitely, you know.”

“Oh. Whew. I thought you meant something else entirely.” The private looked visibly relieved.

“No,” Quijana laughed. “Not that; we’ll be fine. Now back to your post, soldier,” the sergeant ordered.

As Gonzo mounted the step back to his firing position, Quijana turned away to continue his walk down his short section of trench. The sergeant then heard a heavy thwunk behind him. He turned instantly and began to shout, “Med…”

The shout died, stillborn. There was nothing a medic could do for a private missing his head. Quijana fought down the urge to vomit at the finely sprayed blood and chunks of skull and brains dotting the back wall of the trench.

Damn. The kid was only sixteen years old. For the moment, Quijana took over Gonzalez’s position on the firing step. I hope to hell the word comes to pull back soon, even though I know the retreat will be a nightmare.

CIC was a little metal pillbox containing barely suppressed excitement and fear. McNair could smell the emotions, sour and bitter, on the recycled air. The whole ship reeked of it in a way it never had before, for on the first deadly mission of this war the crew had been ignorant. On the other runs to raid the Posleen-held coast it had felt safe in the darkness. This fight saw the men of the ship wise in bitter ways and, however determined to do their duty, frightened of what that duty was likely to entail.

The exec looked up as the ship’s captain entered. “We just got the word, Skipper. The Heavy Corps, First and Sixth Panamanian Mechanized Divisions, are going to start pulling back in half an hour. We need to help them break contact. I’ve already given the order to commence the firing run while Salem and the land-based air defense provide cover.”

McNair looked over at Fire Direction.

“Skipper, we will be in range of Target Group Alpha in,” the FDO consulted the chronometer above his plotting table, “seven minutes and… thirty seconds.”

The captain nodded, said, “Well done,” and turned to Daisy’s avatar, already present. “You ready, my girl?”

“Willing and able, Skipper. We’re gonna murder the bastards… for Julio, among others.”

Lastly, McNair ordered the ship’s public address system turned on. Then he turned to Father Dwyer and asked, “How do we stand with the Almighty, Chaplain?”

Dwyer smiled a wicked smile, all bared human incisors and fangs, and spoke loudly enough for the PA set to pick up his words. “With regard to the enemy, Captain, the good Lord says, ‘I will leave your flesh on the mountains, and fill the valleys with your carcasses. I will water the land with what flows from you, and the river beds shall be filled with your blood. When I snuff you out I will cover the heavens, and all the stars will darken.’ Ezekiel 32; verses five through seven.”

“So be it,” McNair agreed, then ordered, “Marine marksmen and Panamanian Cazadores topside. Prepare to repel boarders.”

“Wait for it, boys, wait for it,” Quijana cautioned his squad. Only two men — exceptional shots, the both — still manned their firing steps in the trench. The rest clustered around their squad leader near the back step that led to the narrow communication trench that, in turn, led to their BMP.

“What’s it like, Sarge, when a ship fires?”

Quijana and one other man, his corporal assistant, were the only men in the squad who had survived the near destruction of 1^st Division when the Posleen had come pouring out of the hills and valleys to surround them during the early stages of the invasion. He knew what the guns were like.

“Fucking scary, Soldier,” the sergeant replied. “Also fucking beautiful and wonderful… like manna from Heaven or God’s own lightning when you need them. But keep your heads down, anyway, because God’s manna didn’t have a deadly radius of hundreds of meters and He had better quality control at the lightning factory.”

“What about Gonzo?” one of the other privates asked. “We going to just leave him for the Posleen to eat? Seems… wrong.”

Quijana thought about that. “You’re right, Private. It is fucking wrong. Tell you what; go to the BMP and get me a Bouncing Betty and an extra four or five pounds of C-4, also some det cord and a nonelectric cap. We’ll rig Gonzo so he can get a few more and leave nothing behind for the aliens to eat. Go, son.”

The private took off at an awkward run down the communication trench. By the time he returned, Quijana and his corporal had dug a small hole for the mine and prepared Gonzalez’s body, removing his bloodied combat gear and shirt. The detonating cord they formed lumps of C-4 plastic explosive around, then further wrapped it around the corpse. One end of the det cord they also wrapped around the mine. The mine itself went into the hole, with its safety pin still in place but the retaining bends straightened. The squad put Gonzalez’s shirt back on him and gently eased his headless body down onto the mine’s three detonating prongs.

Quijana patted the corpse’s shoulder, then slid one hand under the body until he was able to grasp hold with a finger and thumb on the ring of the safety pin. Silently praying — mistakes did happen, after all — the sergeant eased the safety pin out of the mine’s fuse and from under the body, then deposited it in his right breast pocket.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Quijana whispered, “Get some, Gonzo. Get some.”

“Sergeant! I think the ship’s firing.”

The bow below cut through the water, churning it to a furious white froth as twelve Daisies above, each perfectly identical to the others, stood holding holographic candles around Father Dwyer.

The priest intoned, “Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on Earth, we curse the Posleen themselves and all their accomplices and all their abettors. We order them gone; we exclude them from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on Earth; we declare them anathematized and we judge them condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate. We deliver them to Satan to mortify their bodies, now and after the Day of Judgment.”

The twelve Daisies — six to either side of the priest, lining the bow, and wearing something like vestments — intoned, “Fiat. Fiat. Fiat,” and then cast their virtual candles over the side.

“It is done,” the priest said.

The twelve Daisies immediately shrank to one, standing at the chaplain’s left shoulder. “Father,” she whispered, “I know the ceremony as well as you do. That wasn’t quite right.”

“Yes, Daisy,” the priest answered. “I had to modify a bit. No matter, His Holiness will understand and God will know His own… and so will Satan.”

The single avatar remaining shrugged. “As you say, Father. But, while God and Satan may know their own, my guns won’t give a shit and the captain is about to give the order to fire. Go below, please.”

It was the thunder of God. It was the raging of Satan. It was the walls of Hell being tumbled as Christ died on the cross.

It was nine semi-automatic eight-inch naval guns firing “high capacity” shells at maximum rate and walking the blasts across the landscape to a plan and a timetable.

Quijana and the six remaining dismounted soldiers with him huddled on the floor of the trench as shell after shell exploded to their front, shaking their internal organs mercilessly and pelting them with rocks, debris and parts of Posleen bodies lofted by the blasts. Some of the bits fell on the headless body of Private Gonzalez.

Oh, shit, thought Quijana, crouching abjectly with his arms protectively circling his head and neck. If something falls on poor Gonzo hard enough to jostle his body it might set of the mine. Shit. Shit. Shit.

One of the privates apparently had the same idea at about the same time. The private saw a severed Posleen head fall across Gonzalez’s legs, shouted “Chingada!” and started to get up to leave the trench.

“Oh, no you don’t, shithead!” Quijana exclaimed, reaching up to grasp the private’s belt and pull him back down into the trench. The private struggled until the sergeant stuck the muzzle of his rifle under his chin and said, as calmly as possible for having to shout over the naval shells, “One little twitch. Just one.”

The private immediately went wide-eyed and stock-still.

“Sergeant Quijana!” shouted one of the track crew, lying down at the entrance to the communication trench that led to the BMP. “Sergeant! The word is to pull out now! For God’s sake, c’mon!” The BMP crewman’s head immediately disappeared as he pulled back to return to his vehicle.

Still with the muzzle of his rifle under the terrified private’s chin, Quijana used his other hand to point at his corporal. “You first! Supervise the loading as they arrive. Now, go!” The corporal took off briskly. Then the sergeant looked around the pale, frightened faces of the remaining five. He pointed at a private. “Go!” This he continued until only himself and the soldier with the rifle to his chin remained.

In as reasonable a voice as he could muster, Quijana said, “You are going next. I will follow. You will keep your head down. You will move quickly but calmly. You will not lose your footing. You will not trip. If you do either of those things, I will shoot you and leave you behind for the enemy. Is this clear?”

The private gulped and, unable to nod his agreement and understanding for the rifle pushed into the hollow of his jaw, managed to answer, “I… understand… Sergeant.”

Satisfied, Quijana nodded and said, “Good, son. Now go!”

When Quijana arrived, his corporal was still outside the track, making sure the frightened private buckled himself in before seating himself. The BMP’s turret slewed slowly, left to right, spitting death in the form of machine gun and cannon fire. Shards from the naval gunfire whined overhead or, velocity spent, fell to earth to raise small dust clouds.

“Everyone’s aboard, Sergeant!” the corporal announced over the engine’s roar as Quijana scrambled to his seat, slamming and locking the track’s door behind him.

“Tell the track commander! Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

The vehicle began to vibrate while the engine’s roar increased as the driver began to back out of position, prior to pivoting and running like hell for the next battle position, ten miles back.

“Skipper, the Heavy Corps reports they have broken contact and are falling back.”

McNair looked at the guns, shimmering even in the daylight with the heat built up from hours of nearly continuous firing.

“How’s Sally standing up?” the captain asked of Daisy Mae.

“She’s about the same as us, Skipper,” the avatar answered. “Most of the high capacity ammunition in the ready magazines is depleted. They’re cross-leveling and reloading now, as we are. And, for both of us, our guns are hot.”

“They sure are, Daisy,” Davis commented, causing the avatar to blush.

“All right, then,” McNair continued. “We’ve done our jobs for now. Set course to bring us around the Peninsula de Azuero, and assume firing positions in support of the Nata Line.”

Binastarion shuddered at the carnage displayed to either side of the San Pedro River. His people lay in heaps, Kessentai and normals both. Tenar hovered in place or lay, altogether too often, crashed and smoking on the ground among the dead.

Unhurt normals were busied with rendering the dead and very badly wounded into thresh. This would keep the offensive going for some days, the God King knew. Yet there was always loss in consuming the bodies of the dead. Only a vast taking of the threshkreen would have made this a favorable exchange. Binastarion knew that the threshkreen had left comparatively few of their own, nothing like the scores of thousands of the People who lay lifeless on the ground and on each other, to make up for the caloric loss.

Reports from up ahead were not encouraging either. It seems that the thresh and their threshkreen defenders had abandoned the ground, taking everything edible with them except, of course, for what they had burned rather than let fall into the hands of the People. Moreover, the threshkreen were falling back in good order or, at least, in no worse order than one might have expected under the circumstances.

“I hate humans,” Binastarion growled, though none but his Artificial Sentience could hear him as he rode his tenar above the abattoir below.

“Lord, one cannot help but observe that the humans hate you as well,” that ancient device answered.

To either side of the highway — or what was left of it, the humans had torn up as much of that as possible to impede the People’s progress — normals and Kessentai were formed in ranks, the Kessentai singing a hymn of praise to their chief for the victory.

Victory? This is “victory”?

Artificial Sentiences could not read thoughts. Yet, were they and their God Kings together long enough, and Binastarion and his AS had been together for many cycles, they would sometimes think along the same paths.

“Let them think what they will, lord. Let them think what fortifies them for the coming struggles. This is not a victory, but rather a defeat, despite driving the threshkreen from their positions and placing ourselves in position to overrun the best of their remaining lands. Still, it does put us in position to grow stronger, and higher in the ranks of the People.”

“Yes, old friend, I understand that,” Binastarion answered. “I merely wonder if our strength will prove sufficient; if our sustenance will prove sufficient.”

“That, lord, only time will tell.”

The small pack leader — or oolt’ondai — was hungry, as were most of his pack. He wanted a human to eat, something not just to fortify him but to make up for the losses and the hours of fear he had endured while leading his People to break this threshkreen defensive line.

Guiding his tenar low, the oolt’ondai’s eyes searched out the human-built trench system looking vainly for even one threshkreen corpse to vent his hunger and his fear upon. There was nothing, nothing but the bodies of the People and the humans’ wrecked fighting machines, burning and smoking all around. The machines seemed odd to the Kessentai, different from those he and his pack had faced. They looked boxier and less predatory, for one thing. Sadly, the God King was not what the humans called a “five-percenter.” He did not key on the fact that the dead machines he saw were of an altogether different design and battle philosophy than the ones which had devastated his pack and the others. Even if he had been intellectually capable of understanding, it is most unlikely that the God King would have made anything of it.

Though intent on searching the trench floor, the Kessentai still almost missed it. The corpse was headless, and half covered in dirt and debris. It took several long moments for the oolt’ondai to realize that the headless thing was indeed the prize he had sought, a human corpse.

The tenar would never fit into the trench, so, reluctant to dismount, the Kessentai ordered over a normal and made the signs for the normal to bring him the body. Somewhat reluctantly and fearfully, the normal obeyed. These things they fought were frightful. Who knew what evil designs they had worked into their own systems of fortification? Even so, God Kings ordered and normals obeyed. It was in the nature of the universe. The normal found a zigzag in the trench system and jumped in.

Naturally, the normal sniffed the body. It did smell odd but then everything on this miserable planet smelled odd. It didn’t look for trip wires but that didn’t matter as there were no trip wires on the threshkreen’s body. The normal bent over and dug its claws into the corpse, giving one great heave to lift the body to where its god could take charge of it.

When the body was lifted there was a small bang, nothing so profound as the explosions that had danced among the People all day. Too quick for the normal’s eye to see, a cylinder, about six inches across and nine or so high, bounded upward.

The Kessentai saw the cylinder, for the briefest moment, before it exploded. At this range, literally dozens of pieces of steel, some round, some jagged, tore into the God King’s body. He had barely time to register that agony before the det cord went off, detonating in turn several pounds of plastic explosive. It was not clear to the God King which it was that killed him, as he was turned into so much gas too quickly. Several dozen of the pellets struck the tenar and of these at least three hit the controls for the containment unit for the tenar’s antimatter power pack. This immediately failed.

There was a blindingly bright flash to the east.

Though he was some miles away as the shock wave hit, it still took Binastarion several long moments as he fought for control of his tenar before he realized what it was that he was seeing. His Artificial Sentience announced, “Antimatter explosion, lord. I am attempting to analyze what caused it.”

“The never-sufficiently-to-be-damned humans caused it!” the Kessentai snarled.

“Well… yes, lord,” the AS admitted. “But how is the question. I have a suspicion the threshkreen have begun laying traps on the bodies they leave behind. The loss from this one, if it was a trap, far exceeds any nutrition we might harvest from all the human bodies found so far in the line.”

Binastarion scowled. “Issue orders in my name: the humans’ corpses are to be left unharvested until they can be properly searched and, if necessary, disarmed.”

“This will play hell with logistics, lord,” the AS answered. “But… it is done.”

“I hate humans.”

“Speaking of which, lord,” the AS continued, “something has been disturbing me.”

“And that would be?”

“I can’t find the metal threshkreen. I lost them a while ago but didn’t think much of it. Now we have fought the humans again. You would have expected the metal threshkreen to be involved, at least in covering their breaking contact with us. But, no, there’s been not a peep.”

“They could have been pulled off-world,” Binastarion commented, reasonably. “Or even back to their homeland to the north of here.”

“It’s possible, lord.”

“Good Lord A’mighty.” Sergeant Quijana saw the rising mushroom cloud, a comparatively small one, from the battle position his company had assumed to continue their delay of the enemy. He wondered for a moment, then pulled out his map and compass.

From this position… azimuth of… two hundred and seventy-eight degrees… mmmm…

“Get some, Gonzo.”

Interlude

Guanamarioch, a low ranking member of a clan not even powerful enough to defend its newly won lands from other Posleen clans larger, wealthier or more aggressive, found himself stuck with the most miserable job he could ever have imagined. Not for him the soaring in his tenar, high and free, above the ugly, miserable, stinking, green fester pit the locals called “the Darien.” Oh, no. That was the province of the higher caste Kessentai. His tenar floated on automatic above the jungle overhead while he, instead, found himself on the ground, leading several hundred poorly armed, genetically marginal normals struggling through knee-deep, slimy, clinging muck.

Oh, well. At least Zira is here to keep me company.

Not that the muck was so bad. At least where the muck covered Guano’s body the local flying insect life — they were called “mosquitoes” — couldn’t get at him.

The problem was that the rain, incessantly pounding on the thick jungle roof overhead, then dripping down from the leaves and vines, washed the coating away. And where there was no muck, there were the mosquitoes.

There were little ones, big ones, medium ones. One and all, little or big, they were voracious. The little ones, especially, hurt when their sharp probosci jabbed Guano’s open flesh. Surprisingly, the larger varieties’ bites didn’t hurt as much as the smaller but they, like their tiny cousins, left behind an insatiable itch. They left behind, too, a swelling that built up as more and more of the damned insects sank their probes into already swollen flesh.

Guano looked left to where one of his band was being led through the steaming jungle by a superior normal. The poor creature’s eyes had been swollen shut by repeated attacks from kamikaze anopheles.

Though the rain stripped the Posleen of their protecting mud, it also drove the mosquitoes to cover. Unfortunately, whenever the rain stopped the bugs came out again with a vengeance to rape and pillage the Posleen horde before more mud could be applied. And even once re-covered with muck, the mosquitoes’ bites itched horribly underneath.

“This can’t go on, you know, Guano,” announced Ziramoth. “These little flying devils are sucking better than three measures of nutrient transportation fluid out of each member of the host every cycle.”

The God King half expanded his crest then relaxed it, the Posleen equivalent of a shrug.

“It grows back,” he said.

“It grows back indeed,” agreed the Kenstain, “if you and your band get enough food and water. Water is, of course, no problem. Here is all the water the host might desire… and more. Food, on the other hand…”

“Food,” Guano agreed. Yes, water we have in remarkable abundance.

The clan had started their unwilling trek packing light, fleeing in near panic from an overwhelming surprise assault by three neighboring clans. They’d expected to find food en route. Unfortunately, the local animals for the most part fled the host en masse. The animals that did not tended to be small; so small, in fact, that a single hit from a railgun or blast from a shotgun was usually enough to leave little more than some scrawny and unnourishing feet, and a thin mist of blood, flesh, skin and fur floating on the breeze.

“The foraging is poor,” the God King added.

“I doubt it’s going to get much better, either,” Zira replied. “I sense no teeming of any life within any useful distance that would worth eating. Not since that village of primitive brown threshkreen your band hit three cycles ago.”

“That was good eating,” Guano agreed. “But it didn’t last long.”

Guanamarioch could still almost smell the blood, fresh and hot, from the abattoir he and his band had made of that brown threshkreen village.

It had been a normal enough foraging expedition. A pair of scouts had returned to the main body of the Posleen band and signaled the presence of food in fair abundance. The normals, of course, could not count. Even had they been able to count, they were, frankly, too stupid to relate that count in intelligible speech. Instead they had used hand signals and body language — the motion of hands to muzzles, the shaking of heads as if tearing meat from bones, the lifting of muzzles skyward as if bolting down raw chunks of thresh, then the patting of flanks in simulated satiety — to indicate their find. Lastly, the senior of the two normals held palms apart at a certain distance to indicate the size of the find.

Guanamarioch measured the distance from palm to palm with his eyes, coming up with the answer, about four hundred thresh, give or take.

The thresh of this area, the God King knew, ran small. Still, the quantity indicated would be enough to feed his pack for several days, at the very least. He signaled his party to move to the feast, the two original scouts leading.

The trek to the village of thresh had not been especially long, but the water and the muck had made it more than ordinarily difficult. This was made even worse, once the scouts signaled that the village was near, by the need to keep silent lest any of the thresh escape.

At a point several hundred yards shy of the outskirts Guanamarioch stationed himself. From there two encircling arms of Posleen, led by superior normals of Guano’s pack, reached out in a loving embrace.

Both Posleen tendrils reached the river on the far side of the thresh village at about the same time. The God King knew this from a sort of joy-filled shuddering that swept back to him from the leading superior normals. He withdrew his boma blade from its scabbard and was about to signal the attack when a strange thing happened. The normal next to him gave a soft, inarticulate cry and looked stupidly at Guano before dropping to his knees. From the creatures breast sprouted a length of what appeared to Guano to be wood.

“AS,” the God King asked, “what was that?”

“What was what?” the Artificial Sentience responded. “I sense nothing.”

Faintly, out of one eye, Guano spotted an indefinable streak moving fast through the jungle. He ducked just in time for the streak to miss him, hitting instead a tree just behind.

“That, you electronic dunce. What was that?” Guano indicated the thin sliver of wood quivering in the tree.

“Primitive weapon, of a kind not used by the People in uncounted millennia,” the AS announced. “It is not ballistic and so I cannot sense it in flight. It contains little refined metal and so I cannot sense it at rest. I believe the locals call it an arrow. It is fired from a bow.”

“Fat lot of help you are,” the Posleen snarled, raising his railgun to the firing position.

“I work very well within design parameters,” the AS countered snippily. “It is not my fault that some thresh exist below the level I was designed to sense.”

Instead of answering, the God King let loose a long sweeping burst from his railgun. Vegetation exploded downrange and one forlorn cry told him that the bowman would not trouble his People in the future.

At the first firing, the rest of Guanamarioch’s pack drew blades and charged. More arrows flew out, dropping a few of the host. And then the Posleen were on them.

Tiny thresh and larger ones with odd bumps on their bare chests screamed and ran in all directions. That is, they ran until reaching sight of one of the twin walls of Posleen harvesters closing on the village from both sides. At that some turned and ran back towards the center, while a few simply froze in place in open-mouthed terror until the reaping machine reached them.

Near the center, in an open-sided hut, the tiny and the oddly bumped thresh, some of them holding tiny ones in their arms, took shelter behind a lone threshkreen kneeling by a low fire and firing a rifle to the east. Guanamarioch could not tell if the threshkreen was actually hitting anything, but threats were not to be tolerated. Accompanied by a half dozen flankers the God King galloped toward the rifleman, boma blade raised high.

Chapter 29

“We could try to nuke ’em,” Rivera observed while gazing at the map that showed a massive concentration of Posleen clustered at the base of the Darien on the Colombian side.

“I’ve asked already,” General Page answered. “Even though I can’t think of a single good way to get a half dozen major bombs into the area, I still asked.” In a falsetto voice, obviously meant to mimic the President’s, he continued, “No, General. I won’t let you damage the Rain Forest. We have treaties, obligations, internal laws. I could be impeached for letting you use nuclear weapons on that part of the world.”

Rivera shrugged. Oh, well. It was worth a shot. Glad the Marine at least had the balls to ask.

“What else do we know about that migration?” Page asked.

“Not much, sir. We’ve gotten two LRRPs” — Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols — “into the area — and lost another three trying — but all they can tell us is about the edges. Well… I suppose that the fact we lost three of the LRRPs trying to penetrate the edges of the infestation tells us the bastards are pretty dense on the ground.”

It was Page’s turn to shrug. Information in war cost; always had, always would.

“How’s the Army’s Fifth Infantry doing?”

Rivera’s finger traced an arc running northeast to southwest on the map. “They’re dug-in in a half perimeter around the end of the Inter-American Highway, where the Darien Gap begins. SF teams are out on the flanks. There have been a couple of half-hearted attempts to storm the perimeter, but the Posleen appear to be stretched out in a long thin column that begins at that massive cluster on the map.” The finger tapped the map twice. “They can’t really bring any mass to bear. The road’s not bad, at least until you get to the Gap, where it disappears, so we’ve been able to keep a steady supply of mines and shells coming to them. The Fifth’s holding. I said they would.”

“Eventually, you know,” Page retorted, “the Posleen will find the flanks.”

“Yessir. That’s why the SF teams are out on the flanks, to give the regiment warning of when it’s time to pull back. The Seven-Sixtieth Engineer company is building them fall-back positions all the way to where the highway breaks out into the open east of the City.”

“Oh, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison…”

Every unit needs a song. For the 760^th, that was it. They were an unusual group, very tight, very cohesive and, in large part related by blood. They came from Marion, Virginia, in the United States. They’d brought their music with them. The crew of a bulldozer sang it even over the incessant roar of their piece of equipment.

Carter shook his head. He wasn’t a country boy himself, but he’d grown up in the Army surrounded by them. That this unit had chosen that song? Well, it was no surprise.

“How close to complete, are you, Sam?” Carter asked of the 760^th commander, a West Pointer long out of the Regular Army and transferred to the Reserves.

Sam spit out some tobacco juice — he’d picked up some appalling habits since assuming command of the company — and answered, “ ‘Bout seventy percent here, sir. But we’ve already got a good start of prepping the next position back.”

“Good work, Captain Cheatham. Pass on to your men my congratulations.”

“Will do, Colonel.”

Carter turned away to remount his Hummer to go east, back to the mass of his regiment. Even over the diesel’s sound he heard, “She got run over by a dang ol’ train…”

Shaking his head, Carter headed back down the highway cut through the jungle, back to the first battle position where he intended to bleed the yellow aliens white.

It should have teemed with life, that little village. After long weeks’ absence Ruiz expected to be met at the outskirts by swarming children. His wives, old now but — since he was a soldier — soon to be rejuvenated to youth and health, ought to have been raising joyous cries at his return.

But… there was nothing: no children, no wives, no… people. All was silent as death. The Indian chief stepped out of his canoe to emptiness.

Ruiz enter the village stealthily. There wasn’t much physical damage. Then again, there hadn’t been much physical to the village to destroy. Some of the Chocoes’ rude huts were knocked over, but a strong wind might have done that. The fire circles were still in place but the hearths internal to each hut were mostly broken. Ruiz placed a hand over one of them near the edge of the village. It was cold: At least three days since fire burned here, he thought.

Drawing an arrow from his quiver and feeding it to his prized bow, Ruiz began stalking stealthily from hut to tree to tree to hut along the outskirts of the tiny grass and wood town. At each hut that was still standing he paused to look inside. Still, nothing.

From the exterior he worked his way inward, still circling, still looking for life or some other sign to tell what had befallen his home town. Near the center he found his first clue, a perfectly sliced rifle of the type the gringos had attempted, and failed, to teach him to shoot. The pieces of the rifle lay beside a scattering of expended brass cases. Of the soldier, or Chocoes scout (for a few had been able to learn to shoot), who had fired the rifle and left those cases there was no obvious physical sign.

Ruiz bent low to sniff the ground. Blood… even with the rains having washed most of it away over the last few days something or, more likely, someone was butchered here.

The scent of blood was faint, almost too much so for the chief to follow. But, however faint it was, it was enough, if only just, to lead Ruiz by his jungle-sensitive nose to the center of the village.

From there, and based also on his scout through the village, Ruiz was able to read the signs.

The Chocoes with the rifle, surrounded as he was by four hundred snarling demons and a like number of screaming women and children, still had the highly tuned senses of a jungle hunter. He turned a fierce and determined face toward the beasts who charged him. Whispering a prayer to the Holy Virgin, Maria (and intoning the name of a lesser god known only to the Chocoes and a few gringo anthropologists), he began stroking the trigger to spit bullets at his enemies.

The Chocoes rifleman was gratified to see first one, then another, then a third of the beasts fall, bullet-struck.

Sadly, however, to kill three, however worthy an achievement, still left more than enough to hack him into spare ribs once they reached him. He had time only to raise the rifle to a high port before the first blade, this one carried by one of the beasts with a raised crest, split the rifle, and the rifleman, in two.

As Ruiz followed the blood trail into the center of his former home the scent became stronger. Soon enough, he did not need the scent of blood to lead him. Instead, his eyes alighted on a pile of bones standing several feet high not far from his own hut.

The bones had lain there, undisturbed except perhaps by ants, since the tribes’ fires had gone out. This much Ruiz’s trained eye knew for a certainty. He walked to the pile, and began to examine the remaining traces of his family.

Mixed in among the human bones were others, oddly shaped though still the same dull, grayish white as the human bones. These Ruiz set aside.

The human bones he began to place reverently in their own pile. There was no chance of identifying individual remains, except in a few cases. He could, for example, tell which was the skull of his favorite wife, Belinda, by the twisted incisor of one skull. The top of the skull had been removed. Nothing remained inside. What the raiders had not scavenged, the ants had.

Fondly, Ruiz held Belinda’s skull in his left hand and brushed off the few remaining ants. He forced a smile and said something that was not Spanish, but which still sounded very much like an endearment. He touched the misshapen tooth with the thumb of his right. Silently, he whispered a prayer, for Belinda and all the others.

“Whoever did this, my best wife, I promise you they will pay.”

Ruiz could not afford to spend time in ceremonies of purification. While he suspected the alien horde (and having examined the bones he had found, he had come to believe that these demons were at least from another world) would be easy enough to track, he wanted one particular group, the same as that which had erased his home. In the Darien, the trail might be lost at any moment. Moreover, he had few enough clues to go by. Still, and despite his time in the Panamanian jail, he found his jungle sense had returned. He would find them.

The aliens had left little enough of food in the village. Even the rice had, for the most part, been taken away. There were things hidden, of course, including several cases of the nasty pouch rations the gringos ate that they had left when a team of them spent several days in the village teaching Ruiz and the young men to blow things up. Of the meals he took several cases.

He also scavenged a fair number of the arrows his clan had used to try to defend themselves. Some he found stuck into trees or the ground. Still more remained in their quivers where the ferocity of the attack had left no time to use them. One, in particular, he found embedded in a tree as far from the village as a man might hope to see to shoot. He sniffed at the arrow’s feathers. There was something there, in the feathers, the faintest of odors. It was slightly different from the scents he had picked up from the bones he had lovingly buried. The scent had the slightest trace of the way the air smelled after lightning had struck the earth or one of the jungle’s massive trees. Too, he was sure he smelled the alien leader, the odor being something like that on his tribe’s bones, but more acrid, stronger. He closed his eyes and sniffed a final few times at the arrow’s feathers, committing the scent to jungle-sharp memory.

Along with the meals, the gringos had cached several hundred pounds of explosive, detonators, and five cases of the things they called “claymore mines,” at six mines to the case. He loaded the food, all six cases of the mines, and another one hundred pounds of C-4, plus other accoutrements into his canoe. Then Ruiz went to sleep. The next morning he cast off and proceeded upstream, to where he hoped to intercept the aliens who had butchered his family.

After a night’s rest and a day’s journey Ruiz noticed that the normal cacophony of the jungle was ended. Everything was eerily silent, the animals — so he supposed — having all run out of the way of the demons. Even most of the insect noises were gone.

Silently as a snake slithering along a tree branch, Ruiz guided his canoe to the river bank. There, still quiet, he tied it off to a tree, and adjusted some foliage to provide cover. Then, he closed his eyes and moved his head from left to right and back again, measuring the lack of sound.

There, he thought, having found the direction of greatest quiet. There is where I will find the demons.

Ruiz refreshed his body paint the better to blend into the jungle then, taking his beloved bow and a quiver of arrows, he set out on foot to find his foe.

The jungle could be dangerous, as Ruiz knew better than most. For him and his people though, it could never be as dangerous as the civilized life of the city dwellers. The jungle could, at most, kill. The city ate souls.

One of the jungle’s potentially more deadly attributes, not so common as all that but still to be watched out for, was quicksand. It was rarely very deep and a calm man could get out of it unless rain and flash flooding caught him while he was stuck in it. Since this was the Darien and since massive sudden rain was normal…

Not far from the river bank, Ruiz found a patch which he skirted carefully. It would not do to be trapped in the stuff and have the demons find him thus helpless. Skirting the quicksand, the Chocoes walked completely around it to a point opposite where he had begun to skirt it.

Hmmm. If I need to run quickly, I might have to go directly across. With the demons on my tail that would be the definition of “suck,” as the gringos say.

He looked up at the trees until he spotted a vine. Shimmying up until he caught it, he dragged the vine down and secured it where he could use it to swing across the patch of sand.

What little jungle sound had remained completely disappeared as Ruiz closed on the Posleen, their own sounds — snarling and yelping, grunting and, apparently, cursing — replacing whatever there was of the natural Darien.

He had seen pictures before, of course, but the pictures had not prepared him for the reality. For a moment he shook with fear.

The fear led him to think of what his tribe, his wives and his children had faced in the moments before their deaths, a snarling horde of demons descending on them to butcher babies in front of their mothers. Hate quickly took over once again from fear. The fear had concealed that the demons had no weapons he could see that were better than what appeared to be large-bore shotguns. Ruiz wasn’t afraid of shotguns.

The previously still jungle felt a sudden light wind. Trees overhead groaned as they were forced to sway in the breeze. Ruiz lifted his nose and opened his mouth slightly to taste the air.

Ah… perhaps that is my special enemy. Something special, then, for this first bite of revenge, Ruiz thought. Something to put lasting fear into the demons.

Getting down on his belly Ruiz began to crawl forward to some bushes which had grown up in the space left by a tree fallen to age or catastrophe a couple of years prior. Reaching them, he parted the leaves slightly to view his enemy. From the quiver across his back he deftly and silently drew a single arrow and fitted it to his bow. Then he arose to one knee, drew the bow and let fly.

The arrow sailed straight and true and, most importantly, silently until its needle sharp point embedded itself a foot deep into a Posleen normal’s torso. Yellow blood began to gush out around the wound while the normal danced in keening agony searching for the source of its pain.

Since all the other demons appeared to have turned their attention at the one wounded and dying, Ruiz thought he could risk another shot and perhaps even a third. Again an arrow flew; again it flew straight and true.

That target gave a single inarticulate scream as it vaulted stem over stern in a complete somersault before falling in a dead heap on the jungle floor.

Ruiz shook his head, unseen. These critters really are as stupid as the gringos said.

Another arrow flew and then another. One actually missed its intended target but did manage to strike a different demon in its right rear quarter. Again the demon began to snarl and spin like the first of Ruiz’s targets, except in this last case the alien began worrying at the arrow with its fangs. Alien heads began to twist rhythmically following the gyrations of their wounded brethren. Two more arrows flew, both striking deep and deadly.

Okay, this is fun but not enough. And besides, I’ll run out of arrows before I run out of demons.

Taking a deep breath, Ruiz strung his bow across his back and put his thumbs to his temples. Then he raised his head over the bushes and uttered something that sounded much like, “Oogaboogabooga,” while wriggling his fingers.

There was a moment’s confusion on the part of the demons, their attention torn between their wounded and dying peers and the bit of thresh that had appeared. The indecision didn’t last long. The Posleen hit or killed would still be there to harvest later on. Meanwhile, if they didn’t hurry, this new thresh might get away. With a mass cry they drew their blades and, fifty or so of them baying, gave chase.

Yes, those were shotguns that Ruiz had seen. Unfortunately, they had a little more range than human shotguns. He had several pieces in his back, buttocks and legs to prove that. The pellets were painful, but not debilitating. They had the added advantage of leaving a light blood trail for his pursuers to follow, though it took a peculiar frame of mind to consider that an advantage.

Ruiz still had a good sixty yards on his pursuers; otherwise, the shotguns would have made short work of him. However, despite his short Chocoes legs pumping in a blur, the demons were gaining. They’d long since have run him down but for his superior ability to dodge around trees and through the jungle tangles.

Aha! There’s my patch of lovely quicksand, he thought, redoubling his efforts to stay ahead. The vine was still where he had left it secured. He grabbed it, shook it loose and risked a quick look behind. Ah, shit! The Posleen were closer than he had thought.

Ruiz took a running start and pulled himself up by the vine. “Aiaiaiaiaiai!” He sailed across the quicksand a few feet above it and slightly faster than he could have run. At the far side, the side nearest the river and his canoe, he let go his grip, flew unaided through the air for a moment and then tumbled and rolled to a stop on the mucky ground. Pushing with whatever part of his body was in contact with the ground — knees, elbows… lips, earlobes, eyelashes — he scrambled onward to the safety of the river and… stopped.

The sound of his pursuers had changed in moments from keen baying to mere keening. A tone of fear and despair had taken over their snarls and grunts. Cautiously he turned around and unslung his bow, nocking another arrow before slinking low back in the direction from which he had come.

The aliens were chest deep in the quicksand, muzzles and eyes raised skyward. The sand around each of them was roughened, as if they had struggled for a bit before realizing that this only made them sink faster. Of shotguns, or other ranged weapons, he saw not a sign beyond some linear marks in the sand’s surface where they had perhaps been dropped.

Smiling broadly, Ruiz stepped up very near to the edge of the quicksand pit and sat down, cross-legged and in full view of any of the demons who might care to look in his direction. Reaching into a little bag he wore on his belt he pulled out some cheap tobacco, rolling papers, and a plastic tube containing matches. Then he sat with his back against a tree, happily rolled himself a cigarette and lit it, all the while watching the aliens sink lower and lower. Carefully, Ruiz counted the number of demons caught in his trap by making notches on a stick. He wanted to avenge his people, if possible many times over.

The lower lip of the last Posleen to go under the wet sand quivered like a naughty school boy’s caught in some mischief before it too sank — still quivering — from sight.

“What’s this Darien really like, anyway?” Page asked of Rivera.

“Sir, you ever do Jungle School at Fort Sherman?”

“Sure,” the Marine answered. “On my way to Vietnam in… umm… Sixty-six, it was.”

“Then you know the Mojingas, right?”

Page twisted his jaw a bit and remembered back before answering, “The Mojingas? Made Vietnam’s jungle seem positively civilized.”

“Right. Well, the Mojingas is small. Multiply the size about fifty-thousandfold. Then make it ten times wetter, twenty times more mosquito infested. Add in thirty times more snakes, forty times more fucking ants which are fifty times hungrier. It’s fucking hell, sir.”

“Oooh. Poor Fifth Infantry.”

Rivera smiled nastily. “No, sir. Don’t pity the Fifth. They’re like the Chocoes; they can live in that shit. But if you want to spread some pity, give some to the Posleen.”

Interlude

A human would have said that Guanamarioch was “spooked” at the loss of an eighth of his pack without trace. The human would have been right, too.

The God King trembled slightly as he walked eastward. To Ziramoth, walking beside him, he said, “I just don’t get it Zira. More than fifty of my people… disappeared without a trace. They weren’t shot, or burned. Nobody harvested them for thresh except for the six that were hit by what my Artificial Sentience called “arrows.” It’s like some huge creature opened its jaws and sucked them in, not even spitting out the bones. Zira, I followed their trail. They just disappeared into nothing.”

Whatever Zira had been about to say was lost as the dark trail ahead of them erupted in screams and firing.

Posleen were essentially immune to any form or terrestrial poison that man had yet discovered. Nerve gas had no effect. Blister agents had little (but then blister agents were among the least deadly means of human chemical warfare anyway). Blood agents? Puhleeze. Not even some of the more esoteric Russian chemicals had had any noticeable effect on the aliens. Diseases? Not a chance.

That said, their bodies were still composed of something analogous to flesh. The beings who had tinkered with Posleen genes in the dim mists of antiquity had begun with a more or less normal pre-sentient creature, then modified those early forms for reasonable threats. Some threats, though, just weren’t reasonable.

The ant had neither name nor number. It never noted the lack. As much as a Posleen normal was content to be a part of its clan, the ant lived to serve its colony, though in this case the colony was a series of trees. In a real sense, even more than Posleen normals, the ant was a mere appendage to that greater organism.

The vibrations of the unusual centauroid creatures passing nearby had disturbed the ant, raising it from its slumbers, along with many thousands of its fellows. Like the others that joined it, poised along the tree branches of the colony, the ant was a bit under an inch long, colored black. The Posleen slogging below never noticed this; the night was dark and most of the ants were concealed from sight. The Posleen likewise never noted the immense and terribly sharp mandibles borne by the tens of thousands of ants among the trees. It would have taken more curiosity than the aliens, as a race, possessed for them to note that the mandibles were hollow and capable of injecting not venom, but a rather concentrated solution of formic acid.

The ant couldn’t have told you why it jumped, when it did. Instead, at some point the moment just seemed right.

Wheee!

It landed atop the broad and bare back of a Posleen normal. It didn’t bite right away, for that would have shown a degree of initiative highly discouraged in ants. Instead, it waited until a few dozen or so of its sisters had likewise landed on the Posleen, as well as some thousands more on the backs of other Posleen.

That moment seemed right, too. Chomp!

ChompChoChomChompChoChomChomp…

When you’re an ant, a tree ant… a soldier tree ant, you just live for those team-building moments when you and your tree ant soldier buddies can donate excess concentrated formic acid into something that really isn’t expecting it.

The Posleen normal noticed the arrival of the ant, and of its many, many sisters. At first, it thought it might be more of the rain that seemed to stop only to build up more rain buddies to the side. It seemed odd though, that these rain drops didn’t slide off its back. The normal found this somewhat disturbing in a distant sort of way.

And then there was pain. Oh, my, yes; there was great, burning, agonizing, shrieking pain, emanating from dozens of spots. The normal reared up in shock and surprise. Sadly, as it did so, it knocked over another normal who was also experiencing an ant-induced epiphany of pain… and no happier about it than was the first normal.

A little annoyed, and more than a little stupid, the second normal drew a boma blade and charged at the danger it could see, ignoring the danger it could not. This was bad enough. But some of the normals, many of them, in fact, carried better than boma blades. They had railguns. So did other oolts that fed themselves spontaneously into the fighting.

Wheee, thought the ants. Chomp.

When Guanamarioch and Ziramoth, leading Guano’s pack, arrived at the scene, there was nothing left but carnage. Oh, yes, a few normals still lived, though they were in a pretty bad state of shock. For the rest? Guano whistled over one of his cosslain and made signs for it to begin the thresh gathering.

“Maybe it is to the good, Zira. I am feeling awfully weak lately with what the little flying demons are draining from my body.”

Ziramoth sighed. “So are we all, my young friend. So are we all.”

Chapter 30

Dictator Boyd was waiting at the southernmost of the two major crossing points as the long lines of weary, bedraggled, and half-beaten looking men crossed into safety, but with millions of Posleen on their tails. The armored vehicles looked, if anything, more beaten than the men. Blood ran down the sides of some of them from wounded men stacked atop.

Still, it hadn’t gone badly, Boyd knew. Yes, a few companies had been cut off and annihilated here and there on the long retreat. Worse, one whole battalion of mechanized infantry had been lost without a single survivor in the ruins of Santiago. Even so, better than eighty-five percent of the two heavy divisions had escaped, along with half a million civilians, many of them young boys to become soldiers and young girls to breed them. There was equipment to make good the losses, too, some of it on hand and some more en route. The losses of men could not be made up so easily, of course.

Boyd wore battle dress, his helmet off and tucked under his left arm so the passing troops could recognize him. Maybe it would mean nothing to them; maybe no one would recognize him. In a personal way, it would have made him happier if none had. Panama had a long and unfortunate history of dictatorial rule. He hoped, fervently, that he would be the last dictator the country ever had to endure.

Unfortunately for his happiness, many did recognize him and those quickly passed the word to the others. He assumed it was being passed by radio as well because, looking through his binoculars, he saw men begin to wave at him from the distance, well before they closed to a range at which they could have recognized him.

One track pulled out of line and trundled over to where Boyd stood, surrounded by his twenty-four aides de camp. Officially, they were “lictors.” The aides stepped briskly out of the way lest the track run them over. The track — it was a Russian-built BMP — stopped abruptly. Boyd heard the squeaking of a metal door being pushed open. A young, dirty-faced sergeant emerged. Boyd looked over the face carefully. It wasn’t just dirt. The boy had a weariness about him Boyd hadn’t seen since the long retreat and the fight back in a place called the Ardennes.

Bone tired or not, the young man saluted smartly. “Sir, Sergeant Quijana reports.”

Boyd returned the salute a little awkwardly. Would he never get used to being a senior officer? He supposed not. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”

Quijana shook his head. “Nothing, Dictador. I just wanted to tell you we racked ’em up like firewood. All the way back. We killed ’em at ten to one, maybe twenty to one. Hell, for all I know it might have been one hundred or more to one, especially if you count what the guns reaped. The boys were… well, sir, they were just great. But we’ve gotta go back, sir. That’s our land. We can’t let the aliens keep it. It’s ours.”

Boyd smiled and nodded. “We’re not going to let them keep it, son. Just like you said, it’s ours and they can’t have it while we live. But for now, before you can take it back, you and your boys need to go get a rest, eat some decent food, shower, maybe change uniforms. And I figure you’ll need more ammunition, too; that, and fuel. Do those things. Get rested. Get ready. ’Cause, son, we are going back.”

The town was half aflame as Binastarion rode his tenar eastwards through it. There were human bodies scattered about, here and there, almost all of them in the mottled pattern clothing the threshkreen favored. The God King was pleased that his orders with regard to human bodies were being followed. He was even more pleased that there had been no antimatter explosions. In time, and hopefully before the bodies rotted away in the sun, they would be recovered. And, if not, at least they would serve to fertilize the soil of this place and feed the People that way.

Binastarion brought his tenar to a halt, allowing the columns of the eastward moving People to pass him. Slowly, he rotated his sled completely around. The People were gathering food that was not threshkreen. Some of the locals’ horned food-animals had been killed together in an open field by one of the humans’ buildings. Apparently, they had been put down by the locals themselves.

Some normals were engaged in reducing the meat of these horned food-animals to easily ported chunks of flesh and bone. The God King couldn’t tell how many of the animals there had been; the harvesting was already well in process. He watched as a boma blade deftly sliced one of the animals into sections. He watched as the normals lifted the sections to take them to the host.

The God King did not see, however, the yellowish disk that flew up when the last section had been lifted. All he knew was that a dozen of the People had been standing around the horned food-animals’ bodies one second, and that they were lying on their backs the next, waving stumps in the air from which spouted bright fountains of yellowish blood. Even at this distance Binastarion could hear the normals’ pitiful keening cries.

“The humans call them ‘Bouncing Barbies,’ milord. I don’t know why,” the AS said after a few moments.

“AS, pass to the host: There will be no more harvesting of the humans’ food-animals until their bodies have been properly examined for traps.”

“It is done, Binastarion,” the Artificial Sentience answered.

“I hate humans.”

“I am beginning to, as well, milord.”

Binastarion rode on. Further into the town, he saw a group of normals led by a lower ranking Kessentai carving away the door to one of the thresh buildings. Under the boma blade, the door quickly fell away. The group of the People entered.

Kaboom. The human building simply disintegrated.

Binastarion sighed. Such clever little devils these threshkreen were.

“AS, pass to the host…”

“I am already doing it, Binastarion. You realize that our logistic problems will get worse, much worse, if we don’t harvest the food available?”

“I know that, AS. But what can we do? We lost thousands back at that defensive line when the Kessentai’s tenar’s antimatter went off. We just lost a dozen to that ‘Bouncing Barbie.’ How many disappeared when that building exploded? We lose as much as we gain when we try to harvest these thresh.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to subsist the People on our own losses, Binastarion. Odd, is it not, that the threshkreen have become our primary food source in quite this way?”

The God King didn’t answer but, rather, continued in his tenar eastward until he came upon a group of the People, cut down by the threshkreen in a narrow alley of the town. A small pack of normals were in the process of reducing these to thresh. Hmmm. I wonder… Binastarion backed his tenar off about one hundred meters.

Kaboom.

“AS, pass to the host…”

Firing in support of the Nata line was desultory and didn’t require Daisy’s full attention. Thus, she was able to spend her conscious time with the body growing under the process of “inauspicious cloning” in the tank deep down in the bowels of the ship.

Sintarleen was with Daisy, tinkering with something or other. “She is almost ready to be decanted,” the Indowy said. “A day or two more… perhaps a week at most…”

“Do you think he’ll like it?” Daisy asked worriedly of the Indowy, in his own tongue. “I made it for him. But… I don’t know…”

Sinbad shrugged, a habit he had picked up unconsciously from the human crew. Also in his own language he answered, “I have hardly made a study of human aesthetics, Ship Daisy. But the body looks like your avatar and we know the captain likes that. Besides, this one will be stronger than any human female that ever was naturally born, quicker and healthier, too. She will bear the captain many fine offspring…”

Daisy and the Indowy went silent for a moment. “Your clan will have no more offspring, will it, Sinbad, unless you return safely to them?”

“This is so,” the Indowy admitted, with infinite sadness. “All our many millennia will be at an end.”

Daisy’s avatar’s eyes began to flicker, as they often did when she was deep in thought. After a few long moments she announced, “Your clan will not die with you, Sintarleen of the Indowy.”

The little bat-faced alien cocked his head. “But I am the last male of my clan. All that are left off-world are females and transfer neuters… Ohhh.”

Daisy’s eyes flickered some more, stopped, flickered again. “I have just sent a bank draft paying for the freedom of your remaining clan members from the Darhel who hold their contracts, Sinbad; that, and passage to the world of Agitrapis, which is off the route of the Posleen invasion. I apologize that I did not think of this sooner. When they get there, they will find a healthy account to begin to rebuild your clan anew and in liberty. And you shall someday join them, either in this body or in a new one. Prepare a sample of your own DNA.”

Strong emotions were anathema to the Indowy culture, almost as dangerous as they were to the Darhel. Even so, Sintarleen felt tears rising — this emotional response, however rarely seen, they had in common with humans — and, to cover them, went back to his adjustments of the cloning tank.

The BM-21s, even more than most forms of artillery, were area fire weapons. Thus, Digna didn’t really care if the gunners were off a mil or two — or five or ten for that matter — in their sight settings; the range probable error of the rockets was greater than that anyway. She did, however, care deeply that the gunners could adjust the sights and re-lay the launchers quickly to something reasonably close to the data called for by the fire plan.

Even a ten mil error was only a couple of hundred meters at most of the ranges she would be firing at. When one is planning to toss almost four thousand rockets in under a minute at an area of about twenty-five square kilometers, or one for every .6 hectares, a few meters this way or that made little difference. When one is planning on doing that every ten minutes for nearly four hours? Well… who cared, really, where any given warhead — or forty — went?

“Freeze and stand to!” Digna shouted, when the rocket battery announced “Up.” Immediately, every gunner pulled back from their sights and — joined by the rest of the crew — stood at attention by their systems. She clicked the stopwatch in her left hand when the last of them had frozen. She looked down at the watch. Not too bad. Not too bad, that is if they’re reasonably on target.

Determinedly, Digna began to walk toward the center launcher, or base launcher, of the battery. “Tomas, see that none of them play with their sights.”

“Si, doña,” Herrera answered.

Digna didn’t really give the order for Herrera’s benefit. He’d been through the drill so many times he didn’t need to be told. Instead it was for the benefit of the crews. Those girls didn’t need to be tempted into the ass-whipping they would get for cheating; bad enough the ass-whipping they would receive if their launchers were not reasonably close to the target data.

But the launchers were. They were actually better laid than Digna had expected. Perhaps the constant drilling in the fire plan, plus a few contingency fire missions, had done the trick after all.

Patting the base launcher crew chief — another of her almost innumerable great-granddaughters — affectionately on the shoulder, Digna said, “Well done, child.” Then she climbed down from the launcher and proceeded to walk to the next, the eagle-eyed Herrera keeping watch still that no gunner played with her sight.

In walking to the next, Digna also had to cross the hard-surfaced road that led further into the valley north of Santa Fe. She looked up the road and wondered just what the devil was there, still hidden and still under guard by gringo military police. The gringo mechanized regiment she knew about, of course. But it was the other things, the things that had come in covered and kept under guard, which really excited her interest.

The “goo” of the suit kept him comfortable and free of sores. The automatic food processors converted his waste into edible mush, still. Some of it even tasted half decent, though there was no joy to be found in the almost textureless gruel. Even so, Snyder wondered if he were losing his mind. His AID had warned him that might happen.

He’d lost track of time long since. Ever since he’d felt that last jarring, and felt it only slightly because of the goo and the suit’s normal dampening, there had been nothing. N.O.T.H.I.N.G. Sometimes, in those weeks, he had been able to track the battle. But this was rare. Without his suit to translate the Spanish into English even the radio calls were meaningless. They were meaningless, that is, except when they were frightening. He had heard too many young Spanish voices end in screams, pain and panic.

In between those times of dimly or not at all understood radio calls, he had slept a lot. At least his dreams had given him some escape from the silvery-goo-blahness.

Nothing to do. Not a book to read. No music. Not even a fucking projection of a fucking map to study. Please, God, not too much longer. I can’t stand it much longer. Win or lose, God, GET ME OUT OF THIS SHIT!

Snyder wondered if the battle was over, if it had passed him by. He thought of his battalion, lying asleep and helpless in their suits as the Posleen took them and, one by one, hacked the suits open to get at the meat inside. He imagined his men, thus abruptly awakened, giving one final scream of horror each before…

Shaken, Snyder forced himself to calm. At least, it was a semblance of calm. His AID, had it been awake, would not have been fooled.

The sniper had made a guess, based on his experience in the Army and in the jungle, that this particular tree would be likely to rise a few meters above the surrounding canopy. Sergeant First Class Heimeyer, short, stout and incredibly strong, had spent more than an hour ascending this tree and working his way into the topmost branches. Once there, he had spent even more time in hauling up his weapon, a .510 Whisper manufactured by SSK industries in Wintersville, Ohio. The .510 was a special purchase, Army Special Operations Command having its own ways about such things. Built on a Finnish Sako TRS-G action, it was in every way a marvel of human engineering and manufacture.

The rifle and the cartridge it fired were called “Whispers” because the bullet was subsonic, making no audible crack in its flight. With a suppressor attached, the thing was capable of minute of angle accuracy at six hundred meters. In the hands of a first class sniper, and the sergeant had been honor graduate from his sniper course and a national level competitor for years, this meant a reasonable probability of a killing hit on a target the size of a Posleen at nearly a kilometer, this despite the low velocity and it high angle it required. The likelihood of a kill at six hundred meters or less approached unity.

Having spent hours in ascending, and more in hauling up his rifle and other equipment, the sergeant spent the better part of a day in preparing a firing position worthy of his weapon, himself and his enemy.

The tree swayed a bit in the breeze. There was nothing much to be done about that; he’d just have to factor it in to his shooting. Moreover, the leaves were thick up here, where the tropical sun fed them directly. This severely limited the sergeant’s field of view. Even so, ever practical, the sergeant instead concentrated on doing what he could. He crawled out far on a stout limb and sliced away no more leaves than required to give him a fair arc while still providing concealment. He’d also tied in a crosspiece, in the fork of two branches, to give him stability. Additionally, he taped and tied a part of a sleeping mat directly to the main branch to give a more comfortable firing position.

Below, the team that had accompanied the sergeant filled sandbags which they piled into a small basket a few at a time. These Heimeyer hauled up a few at a time to reinforce his position. Several deep, the sandbags tended to explode individually but harmlessly when struck by the aliens’ railguns, absorbing most of the energy in the process. By morning, the position was ready.

Then the sergeant settled down to wait.

“It’s the waiting I hate most, Alma,” Marielena sniffled. “Not knowing if he’s dead or alive or even on this planet. Not knowing what’s to become of me, or the baby or… or any of us.” Her hands went automatically to cover her still unswollen stomach. The thought of the aliens slicing her open to get at the delicacy of her unborn child was too much. Nausea rising, in tears, she ran for the bathroom.

Hungry, hungry… and I, at least, am eating. The same cannot be said of the host.

Binastarion looked down from his tenar at the long dun-colored columns marching below. There was something in their shambling gate that told of weakness of body and spirit. He’d already had to give the order to his underlings to kill and butcher one in twenty of the normals to keep the remaining nineteen going. One in twenty, though, at what the normals ate, was not enough. He knew he must call for a rest before trying to assault this next threshkreen line and that, when he did so, another one in twenty of the host must be given to feed the rest. Otherwise, they would not have the strength to fight through the human defenses.

It would all be worth it, though, if the People could only win through. Ahead, past the humans’ lines, were literally millions of thresh and more millions of food animals.

And there was a new thought, too. Though he didn’t know where it had come from, the Net had what appeared to be an open offer from the thresh of the continent of Europe. Perhaps the offer had been uploaded by a Darhel AID. Binastarion put nothing past the Elves.

In any case, the thresh of Europe or their Darhel patrons seemed to be suggesting that, should Binastarion and his clan succeed in taking control of the broad ditch that connected the two major bodies of water on this miserable world, trade — a human and Darhel form of mutual edas — might be possible, if the ditch could be kept functioning to allow European water vessels through.

Could he count on the thresh to so succor him? Binastarion didn’t know. He did know that he didn’t care an abat’s hindquarters for what happened to the clans of the People fighting to conquer this Europe. Why should the Europeans care any more for the fate of the humans of these two continents?

It was a new notion, this idea of trade with an alien species, and one that required careful thinking through. Perhaps such an arrangement could be beneficial enough for Binastarion to raise his clan to mighty heights before this world was plunged into orna’adar. Perhaps…

Ah, never mind all that for now. I am counting snack-nestlings before they are gutted. For now, I must get to this next line. I must feed my host. Then I must break through the tough shell to further feed upon the soft meat of these thresh. In any case, I have my doubts about enough of my clan being trainable enough to operate this waterway. Perhaps if my son, Riinistarka, had lived. The clan chief felt a great stab of pain at the loss. That one had been something special to his God King father.

Suarez stood on a little knoll, surrounded by the troops and tracks of the 1^st Mechanized Infantry Division. He had walked here from his headquarters near the Inter-American Highway, neatly spaced between both divisions of the heavy corps.

The vehicles lay under nets, though the proper term was “screens.” These had two important functions. One was to shield them from view should the Posleen attempt either a raid in their flying sleds or a more significant attack with one of their landers. They hadn’t done so, yet, but Suarez had to consider the possibility. The other reason was simple shade. This was no jungle area, though it had trees, but rather was mostly open savannah. Without some cover from the glaring sun the soldiers would have roasted.

Suarez wiped a coating of sweat from his brow. It’s hot enough to roast even with the camouflage nets. How much worse would it be without them?

Normally, the maneuvering troops would have been entitled, doctrinally, to their choice of ground, pushing the artillery, etc., out to more unfavorable terrain. This had not been possible. With twenty-six hundred guns and mortars lined up within a few miles of Nata Line, there had simply been no room for the mechanized forces.

Suarez tried to envision what it would be like when those guns released a deluge of steel onto the Posleen massed in the attack. The mind just boggled; nothing like it had been seen on Earth since the great battles of annihilation fought between the Germans and the Russians from 1941 to 1945.

There were more artillery weapons, too, nestled north and south among the hills of Chitre and the mountains of the Cordillera Central. These were mostly rocket launcher regiments, each with a battalion of cannon artillery as much for self defense as for any other reason.

And then, too, there were the two gringo warships that would lend their fires. Suarez and Boyd had boarded each of them a few weeks previously to help weld awards to their turrets.

Suarez thought of Daisy Mae’s avatar with a smile. Whoever thought a ship’s chest could swell at all, never mind that it could swell so much. Odd, too, that the ship should have asked for a smaller version, suitable for wearing around a neck. She’s a hologram; she can’t support anything material. Ah well, who knows? And the whys of the thing don’t matter anyway. For the good she had done us, and especially me, a little medal that she can’t even wear around her neck is a small thing.

Funny, though, that that little bat-faced, green alien should have taken the medal so readily when it was delivered.

“Your two favorite colors are ‘ooh’ and ‘shiny,’ Ship Daisy,” the Indowy said with an alien smile.

The actual medal was tucked away in a case, deep in the hold where Daisy’s “inauspicious cloning” project was coming near fruition. On the wall the Indowy had carefully hung the framed glass case containing her award citation. (A larger one hung near the officers’ mess.)

Around her neck, however, she had projected onto and with her avatar the high award for valor given the ship, individually, and the crew, as a unit award. It was a simple cross, in gold, about the size of the United States’ Distinguished Service Cross. Unlike with that medal, however, all four arms of this one were even. A small ring was affixed to the top and a ribbon ran through that to hold the medal in front of and at the base of the neck.

Daisy shot Sintarleen a dirty look, then, seeing he had spoken in jest, she answered, “It isn’t the ‘ooh’ and it isn’t the shiny, Sinbad. It’s just… well… the part of me that is the hull of this ship is a warship, has the soul of a warship. For decades, it yearned for the honor of battling for her builders. Now, it has the recognition of that honor, and — even more — of battling heroically. Though we are the same being now, still, I wear this representation for the part of me that was the original USS Des Moines.”

Changing the subject, but only slightly, Daisy asked, “The skipper has seen me wearing the medal. Do you think he minds?”

The Indowy snorted. “If he minds, it is only that he is embarrassed not to have thought of it himself.”

“The crew?” she asked uncertainly.

“About that I can say definitely, Ship Daisy, the men are proud of you and pleased that your avatar wears the award for all of them.” The Indowy hesitated, then said shyly, “I am proud of you as well.”

“Thank you, Sintarleen. That means a lot to me.” Without another word, the avatar bent over and made a motion that, had she been flesh and blood, would have landed a kiss on the alien’s furry forehead.

Interlude

Guanamarioch and Zira, both, scratched unconsciously, almost uncontrollably, at the jungle fungus that had taken hold of their crests, their spaces between their claws, and — worst, by far, of all — their crotches.

“I hate this place,” Guano said without emotion as he dug with a roughened stick at a particularly obnoxious patch of the crud that had taken hold of his left front claw. He hobbled unsteadily on three legs while doing this.

Zira, ever calm, just nodded.

“Whatever possessed us to come to this horrible world, Zira? It is nothing like home. It is nothing like any place I have ever even read of.” The God King’s voice lowered. “Well, it’s nothing like anything I’ve read of except the demon pits where — ”

“Hold up, Guano. You’ve got some of those things on you again.”

“What? Where? Get’emoff, get’emoff, get’emoff!”

“I will. Calm down.”

Pulling out a short blade, Zira bent over to examine more carefully the half dozen black, ugly and frankly (though a Posleen would not normally use the word) icky creatures that had attached themselves to Guano’s torso, perhaps at the last river crossing.

“What are these called?” Zira asked Guano’s AS as he prodded at one of the little monsters with the point of his knife.

“Leeches, Kenstain Ziramoth. They are not dangerous in themselves, but once they have finished feeding and drop off they leave oozing wounds that refuse to heal. These then get infected. In a place like this…”

“Infected? Well… that is not so much of a problem for us; the Aldenata did a few things right. But the loss of bodily fluids and nutrients; this we can’t take much more of, not with the little flying horrors draining us daily.” The Kenstain looked at Guanamarioch’s torso where ribs were beginning to show. “No, they’ll have to go.”

While Zira worked at removing the leeches, the pair heard overheard the muffled whine of several, perhaps as many as half a dozen, tenar.

“Upper caste bastards,” Guano muttered. Zira, still working at the leeches, ignored it.

Above the jungle-muffled whine, Zira and Guano heard sudden shouts of alarm. The alarm quickly transferred to them as they heard the sound of something crashing through the jungle canopy. The crashing grew ever closer for a few moments, then stopped. A few seconds later the body of a Kessentai thudded to the muddy jungle floor perhaps thirty meters away. The God King was obviously very dead, though without closer examination there was no way of telling what had killed him.

Much louder than the tenar and the crashing body, the upper caste God Kings above apparently opened fire at something. Originating almost directly above, the sound of railgun and plasma cannon fire impacting the jungle trees soon came from all around. It was so loud that it completely covered the falling of yet another God King body, which hit the ground closer to Zira and Guano. A minute or so later, but farther off, yet another body struck dirt, a small deluge of leaves and broken branches coming down on top of and all around it. The firing from above redoubled and continued for long minutes.

The jungle went silent then. “They must have gotten whatever it was,” Zira observed.

Which Guano would surely have agreed with, except that even several minutes after the firing had stopped, another God King body, apparently flung from its tenar, crashed down almost on top of them. There was no firing after this, only the rapidly retreating whine of tenar heading generally east. On examination, this body proved to have a hole of about one half of an inch on the forward quarter of its torso on the left side… and a massive hole, oozing yellow blood and dangling intestines, on the right.

Guano probed around the edges of the exit wound with his claws. He raised his crest, the crest beginning to tear as well as bleed from the constant scratching and said, “I hate this fucking place.”

Chapter 31

Properly for a clan chief, Binastarion kept well back, using his AS to project in front of his tenar a magnified image of the fighting ahead.

It’s pretty damned awful. Much worse than the first line of defense we hit back by the northwestern corner of this peninsula.

The magnified image showed an oolt, led by a tenar-riding God King, leap from cover and advance forward, firing wildly to their front. At least two of the threshkreen’s crew-served repeating weapons engaged, not from the front like proper warriors, but from the sides. The corners of the assaulting oolt crumbled. As more of the People advanced into the fire, they were stretched out, lifeless, along two lines that began with the crumpled, bleeding bodies at the corner and formed an apex almost dead center of the oolt. Some leapt over the neat lines of the messy dead and continued. It seemed that the crew-served repeaters didn’t bother traversing to pick of this few leakers but, instead, kept their lines of fire fixed.

Even so, the leakers didn’t get far. A steady crackling of the threshkreen’s individual weapons and spurts of dust arising from around the charging normals’ feet told of many of the human “soldiers” manning the trenches in support of their crew-served, heavy repeaters. In moments, no longer than it took for the last normal of the oolt to launch itself into the lines of fire, the Kessentai in command found itself alone. The God King spun its tenar around, looking for support from the People and finding none. In apparent despair, the leader then launched itself forward at the hated humans, its plasma cannon searching out the threshkreen where they cowered in their trenches.

The Kessentai also didn’t get far. Though the repeating weapons did not engage it, apparently the humans had designated special marksmen just for the God Kings. The tenar made it about halfway across the thick belt of the nasty “wounding-wire” the humans had laid to aid their defense before a single bullet found it out. In his magnified view, Binastarion saw one side of the back of the Kessentai explode in yellow blood and a mist of flesh. The God King was flung completely off his tenar to fall onto the wire. There it twisted and writhed in obvious agony, binding itself the more tightly to the wire the more it tried to free itself. Some of the intestines, too, dragging down, managed to catch and tear themselves on the wire’s barbs, further adding to the Kessentai’s personal Calvary.

Binastarion tore his eyes from the scene. We are a harsh and a hard people, yes. But we are not a cruel people. We do as we must to survive, eat as we must. But never could we have imagined such a horrible method of war as this barbed wire. What kind of beings are these threshkreen? The universe will be a better place when they are gone from it.

The People had tried most of their innate bag of tricks in this battle. They had feigned retreat to try to draw the threshkreen away from their fixed defenses. The threshkreen, perhaps because their own wire and landmines prevented it, had ignored the feints and used the respite to restore their defenses. The host had tried massing on one flank and then another. The threshkreen apparently had ignored that, too. The defenses were just too strong for a rapid breakthrough and the forever-damned humans could shift artillery fires more rapidly than the People could mass or maneuver.

Once, at a grisly cost in Kessentai, Binastarion had ordered a ten of tens of them forward en masse on a narrow frontage to try to blast a way through the threshkreen lines. They had succeeded in cutting through the wire, detonating most of the mines, and destroying many of the humans’ crew-served repeater positions. Unfortunately, without a mass of normals in support, Kessentai were very vulnerable to the human’s individual weapons. By the time the gap was created all but two of the Kessentai were down. When the now nearly leaderless oolt had poured through the gap and taken the forward trenches, the humans counterattacked the confused rabble and driven them out again with even more frightful losses. To add injury to insult, the threshkreen had then closed the gaps with some of their artillery delivered antipersonnel mines.

It wasn’t entirely hopeless, of course. Here and there the People had succeeded in taking and holding the forward trenches and even, in one case, the second line beyond that. Moreover, with all the dead lying about that the humans had not had time to booby-trap, the point of the People, at least, was well fed for the first time in days. Some of that valuable thresh had even been passed back to feed a portion of the rest of the host.

Unfortunately, the threshkreen had concentrated their reserves and artillery fires on those few inroads made. The People were pinned in them, unable to advance and taking steady losses from the fires.

There was one other reason for hope. Binastarion had noticed, as the day wore on, that the humans were becoming tired and, moreover, that their reserves seemed to be growing thinner and weaker. The push that had reached and managed to hold the second line trench had done so, in the main, because the humans had made comparatively little effort to dig them out again.

One big push or a large number of little pushes? Kick the front door of this edifice in all at once or continue gnawing away at the foundations? It will not be until tomorrow’s rise of the local sun before I can mass enough of the People to seriously charge the threshkreen’s entire defensive line. Until then I can only gnaw. But the more I expend strength gnawing, the less I have to charge with on the morrow. Then again, the more I gnaw today, the weaker their defense when the sun next rises. And it isn’t as if I have any great shortage of fodder for their crew-served repeaters.

Binastarion sighed, unheard by any save his Artificial Sentience. I would like to meet their leader, I think, to discuss this human way of war before he is consigned to the threshheap. It is something new. If I could learn it before the rest of the People assimilate it, perhaps I could use it to raise my clan.

“It is a fearful price we are paying, lord,” the AS said. “Yet it will all prove worth it if we can wrest this land from the humans, hold it, and build our clan back to prominence.”

Cocking his head to one side, Binastarion asked, “Are you able to read my mind, machine? What program permits this?”

The AS gave an electronic chuckle. “Binastarion, after all these decades together do you not think that I would come to think as you do? Better to check my programming if I could not read your mind.”

“I would love to be able to read the enemy leader’s mind,” Boyd said to Suarez in the musty, damp command bunker they shared to the east of the Nata line.

Suarez shrugged. “I can read his mind well enough.”

“Can you? How?”

“Logistics,” Suarez answered simply. Then, seeing his dictator was confused, the Magister Equitum elaborated, “There is an old saying that ‘Amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics.’ It is true, but only up to a point; real professionals study everything, literally everything. But what the saying really means, to most of those who use it, is that logistics rules in war. That is also true, but also only up to a point. Those who tend to believe it unreservedly also tend to miss something: when you base everything on logistics you become extremely predictable because logistics, unlike most aspects of war, is a fairly predictable science.”

“So predict him, then, my Master of the Horse,” Boyd commanded.

“He is worried. We’ve left his forces almost nothing to eat to the west of here. He knows that he has to break into and through our lines tomorrow, the next day at the latest, or he will simply starve. There is food here, of course, his own dead and those of us whose bodies have fallen into his hands. I have given orders that the bodies of both our and his dead not be booby trapped, by the way. I want there to be food here, to attract him forward.”

“So what happens, then, when he is forward?”

“He masses to attack,” Suarez answered. “He masses generally but especially in the low ground where our direct fire cannot reach him. He has seen much of our artillery and thinks he has its measure. He does not know we have guns and mortars lined up nearly hubcap to hubcap and base plate to base plate all across the breadth of the front. He does not know we have nearly two hundred multiple rocket launchers on his flanks in good position to pound his massing front.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I know this because I know that, logistically, he must advance or starve… that, and that if he had the slightest suspicion he would be running like hell to get out of the kill zone we have prepared, starvation or not.”

As the sun was setting, the north-south running spur to the west of Santa Fe cast shadows over the guns, rocket launchers, bunkers and antennas of the artillery’s battle position.

Digna’s labors were not over, though the day was fast waning. Instead, she, with her descendants and subordinates, went over, for perhaps the fifteenth time, the fire plan and the contingencies. Again, her children brought up the subject of their tiny, underaged and helpless offspring.

Digna was curt. “My children are here. Yours will be, too… until the battle is over, win or lose. My advice is: don’t lose.”

From the national headquarters, collocated with Suarez command post as Master of the Horse and commander of the mechanized corps, came a transmission which was repeated every ten minutes for an hour. “Drake this is Morgan.” All forces, this is the national command authority. “I authenticate Bravo-X-ray-Tango.” Hey, pay attention. It’s really me. “Code: San Lorenzo… Code: Portobello.” We’re going to have a big day tomorrow… or the next day. “Code: Marconi.” Further instructions will follow through the night.

Digna didn’t need the repeats. At the first call she had told the watch officer to acknowledge. Then she announced, “In the morning at 02:15 we man the guns and BM-21s. If, as I expect, the call comes to fire, we execute the fire plan. Now enough of this; go back to your battalions and batteries.”

Still fearing the worst, Snyder, cocooned in his armored combat suit, shivered uncontrollably. The suit and the goo kept him warm enough, of course. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that if he had to wait five more minutes he thought he would go stark raving mad.

His radio, which had been worrisomely quiet of late, sparked into life. On his own forces’ frequencies he heard the English language equivalent of “Drake this is Morgan.”

It started with a single sniffle. Within moments it had risen to a full flood. Tears poured from the colonel’s face, tears of relief of which he was not even remotely ashamed.

Glory to God in the highest. Thank You, thank You, thank You. I’m not worried about meeting You tomorrow or the next day, God, because I have already served my time in hell.

“Demons of fire and ice, watch over my People this morning. Ancestors, watch your descendants as they drive forward. Guide them, encourage them, lend them the strength of your power as they fight for survival.” The God King stood on his tenar, arms crossed, in the Posture of Supplication and Serenity, as his horde tramped or hovered below.

“Getting sentimental in our old age, are we, Binastarion?”

“Something you would never understand, you bucket of bolts,” the Kessentai told his AS without rancor.

“I understand better than you think, lord. Do you imagine that we Artificial Sentiences do not get attached to the People we serve? Do you think that your values, over time, do not become our own? You should know better, Kessentai. You should understand better, Philosopher.”

Briefly, the God King was ashamed. If anyone had served the People better than this AS he didn’t know who it might have been.

Instead he continued his prayer. “Ancestors, Great Ones, accept at your hearths those of the People who fall gloriously tomorrow. Welcome them with the feasting that requires no threshing. Praise them in accordance with the duty they have followed. And, Ancestors, should one of those who falls be this bucket of bolts and circuits sitting here beside me, welcome it, too, for it has also served your People.”

The AS was silent for a long moment. Finally, it said, “Thank you, Binastarion.”

Like ninety percent of his men, Sergeant Quijana was a Roman Catholic. And like ninety percent, give or take, of Catholics, his Catholicism was purely nominal. For the last several years he had gone to church, at most, infrequently. He could not remember the last time he had confessed.

This was not, under the circumstances, a problem. Faced with massive numbers of people seeking forgiveness (and with amazingly high numbers and qualities of sins to be confessed), the chaplains had simply formed the men into mass ranks and granted a general absolution. They’d explained, of course, that the general absolution would only be of effect if the men were truly repentant.

Given the frequency with which he had committed and recommitted his sins, mostly involving women, Quijana had to wonder whether the more normal and personal form of confession was one whit more effective in relieving the burden of sin than this novel en masse kind. Perhaps it was not.

All he knew was that as he took communion the memories of his childhood, and his mother’s fierce and unquestioning devotion, came flooding in afresh. With them came a freedom, a clarity. With them came the belief, for something faith-based could not be called “knowledge,” that, should he die on the morrow, or over the next few days, he would die clean.

That belief was worth something, to Quijana not least.

There was one duty left to him that Boyd could not forego. He would not, if he could have. The bunker was cleared, the National Escudo and a pair of flags were hung behind him. The television cameras were set up and focused on him. Radio microphones cluttered the field desk at which he sat. The studio chief, seconded from the nation’s largest television chain, announced, “Ready in five… four… three… two… you’re live, Dictador.”

Boyd looked up from his desk, directly at the center camera, and began to speak.

“People of Panama, in a few hours, with the morning light, we will commence a battle for our people’s very existence. We have prepared for this battle long. Our defenses are solid. Our soldiers are trained, ready, and willing and able. Our allies have given us much help, even more than we could have — in justice — asked for. Their men, too, stand beside ours in this climactic test. Together, we will triumph.

“And yet, there is something else, one other thing that we cannot do for you but that you must do for us. I have asked Archbishop Cedeño, and the other main prelates and ministers of our various denominations and faiths to open their churches, their synagogues and their mosques. Now I ask you, People of Panama, to go, to go and to pray as you have never prayed in your lives for the success of our forces and the existence of our country. Ask the grace of God, the Father; ask for the Holy Mother to intervene on our behalf. Above all, ask the blessing of Jesu Cristo on us, his long suffering people. I, together with Master of the Horse Suarez, the Chief of Army Chaplains, and all of our soldiers not actively engaged in fighting will do no less.

“Thank you. God bless you and our soldiers… and Viva la Republica.”

They came from all parts of the city and they came from all walks of life. Most were Catholic yet there were many Protestants and more than a few Jews and Moslems. They came, many of them, bearing lit candles, held upright. Some had brought extra candles, which they shared. The grand circle in front of the pure white church became a moving sea of points of light.

They were quiet at first, these people, overcome with the solemnity of the occasion and the sheer spectacle of the mass. This, though, seemed not quite right to Archbishop Cedeño, standing by the arched entrances of the great, cathedral-like church. To a junior priest standing by his side the archbishop said, “Make a joyful sound unto the Lord.”

The junior priest looked back, quizzically. “Make a joyful sound…?”

Not answering directly, the archbishop instead said, “Have you ever thought about Islam’s great contribution to the world, my son? It wasn’t algebra, important as that may be. Algebra was there to be discovered by someone and would have been eventually. It owes nothing to Islam, per se. Nor was it Arabic as a language, nor poetry. They both existed before Islam.

“No, Father, what the world and humanity owe to Islam is the concept of jihad, of Holy War waged for a holy purpose. Our faith absorbed it, too. And perhaps all the suffering inflicted by Christian upon Moslem, Moslem upon Christian, and everyone on the Jews will have proven worth it if this jihad is successful. My son, is there a holier purpose than preserving the people of the one true God?”

The archbishop answered his own question. “No, there is no more holy purpose, and there can never be a holier war than this one. So… go sing, my son. Out there in the crowd. Something they’ll all know or that is simple enough they can all pick it up easily. Spanish, if that will work. Or maybe Latin.” The archbishop thought for a moment, then continued, “Yes. Make it Latin. Go forth, my son, and sing ‘Non Nobis’ for the faithful.”

Uncertainly, for while he could sing, he didn’t know whether he could do so loudly enough amongst the crowd to make a difference, the junior priest nodded and went forth, forcing his way through the gathering crowd until he could perch himself atop the low wall of the round fountain pool halfway across the broad Via España.

Still uncertain, and frankly embarrassed — the priest did not consider himself to have all that good a voice — he began softly. The people assembling hardly noticed.

Louder, by far, despite his age, the archbishop cupped his hands and shouted across the crowded scene, “Sing like you mean it, my son.”

The priest picked up the volume. Surprisingly, a young woman joined him on the masonry wall and joined in:

Then a few more, men and women, boys and girls, mounted the wall and began to sing:

The few became a few dozen, a few score, a few hundred… fifty thousand. The song moved down Via España and up Avenida Central faster than the people coming toward the great iglesia could walk.

The song echoed through the City. Fifty thousand became half a million. Soldiers in the trenches listening to their small radios listened and joined. It became eight hundred thousand. The music reached the refugee-swollen town of Colon the same way: one million. To the north, in the cities of Boston and New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, it was heard: one point five million. In Cuba the people heard and remembered: three million. In Bogotá, still holding out… in England, where men still slept in their beds… among Bundeswehr and the new-old Waffen SS watching along the Rhine… with the Red Guard, fighting along the Dnepr…

Interlude

It was basically a small crocodilian. Colored a dull green, its length at a bit over seven feet was average for its species and age. Aquatic, as were all its sort, it hunted through the murky stream looking for something to eat. It was known to go after small pigs and other animals, invertebrates large and small, and — in places where they were to be found, far south of here — even to feast on the fierce piranha.

The caiman had few needs: to feed, to rest, to rut. At the moment, feeding was number one. Thus, eyes and nose above the coloring water, it hunted.

Ahead was a curious splashing, as of a herd of animals crossing the river. On closer examination, it was a herd of rather large animals. This might mean food as it had in the past; the animals themselves looked too big but there was always the chance they may have taken the kids out for a Sunday stroll. Hope springs eternal and the caiman was either not bright enough, or was self-confident enough, that the thought of danger didn’t enter its little brain. Submerging, it swam over.

“Tell me if you see any leeches, Zira. I hate getting those things on me.”

Voice calm, the Kenstain assured Guanamarioch that he would indeed keep a watch out. Even so, the damned nuisances were so nearly invisible until they attached themselves that Ziramoth really had no expectation of being able to keep them off no matter how diligently he guarded. Nonetheless, Ziramoth looked at the dozens of oozing sores dotting the Kessentai’s torso and resolved to at least try.

Other than the fear of leeches, the water itself was warm and even soothing. Guanamarioch thought that, were his people ever able to rid themselves of this world’s multifarious pests, bathing in such a stream might be a welcome activity. In particular, and despite the fear of the leeches, the warm water passing over the God King’s reproductive member was most pleasant.

As mentioned, the caiman was only of average size. Thus, when it came upon the legs of the beasts walking through the river bed it was momentarily nonplussed. It knew, instinctively, that there was no way it was going to be able to take down a creature with legs the size of those. Almost, the caiman felt a surge of frustration at the unfairness of it all. Almost, it wept crocodile tears.

Perhaps the crocodile-headed god of the caiman smiled upon it. There, just there, just ahead, was something of a proper size for the caiman to eat. It dangled and danced enticingly, as if presenting itself for supper. The caiman swished its tail, and inclined its body and head to line up properly on the tempting bait.

“You know, Zira, this isn’t so bad. One could even… AIAIAI!”

Ziramoth’s yellow eyes went wide in his head as his friend exploded out of the water, dragging a dark creature almost like one of the People — barring only the shorter legs and two too few of them — behind it. The eyes went wider still as the Kenstain realized just what part of his friend connected him with this alien predator.

Up Guanamarioch flew, legs churning furiously. Down the God King splashed. Both trips he screamed continuously: “AIAIAI!”

Once down, Guano tried to bend over to catch the creature. No use; he couldn’t quite reach. Leeches be damned, still shrieking he rolled over on his back, scrambling for purchase on his unseen attacker.

Another half roll and Guanamarioch cried out, “Getitoffgetitoffgetitoff!” before his head plunged back into the water.

Normally steady as a rock, Zira didn’t know what to do in this case. Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on one’s point of view — one of Guano’s normals saw no real problem. Instead, it saw the twin opportunities of relieving its god from pain and at the same time providing some much needed nourishment to his pack.

Zira had only just realized what the normal intended and begun to shout, “St — ” when the boma blade swung, taking the biting creature’s head off but at the same time removing about five inches of the Kessentai’s reproductive organ.

Unsteadily, the God King rolled back over and struggled to its feet. His eyes were wider with shock even than Zira’s had been. For a moment it struggled with the realization of what had just happened to it. Once it made that realization, the God King bowed its head…

For the first time since the beginning of the invasion of the human world, a Kessentai unabashedly wept.

Chapter 32

“Demons of Shit! Will these damnable trenches never end?”

“We’ve fought through at least eight sets of them, Binastarion, and there seems no end. The loss is frightful.”

Including where the trenches ran into the mountains, the Nata Line was approximately eighteen kilometers in breadth and about seven deep. The Posleen were — in places, anyway — about five kilometers into it. That ninety or so square kilometers was carpeted, in places two or three deep, with the People’s dead. Though the ground below often showed through, it was possible to walk those five kilometers forward or eighteen across without ever once touching it, and having to leap to get from one body to the next only every other step.

Even where the ground showed, the green grass of this world was stained completely yellow with the flesh and blood of the invaders.

“Should I have struck south, do you think, AS, instead of trying to force this line?”

“You couldn’t have, lord. The People were here and there was nothing to eat behind them. It was fight through or die.”

Binastarion directed his tenar down to examine one of the bunkers from which the threshkreen had directed such fanatical and deadly fire at the People. The bunker was torn open, apparently by the blast of a plasma cannon.

“It seems too small,” the God King observed, “too small to hold even one of the vile creatures.”

“Move me closer, Binastarion, and let me examine it.”

When the clan chief had done so, and after a short moment for analysis, the AS announced, “It is too small, Kessentai. This repeater was set on automatic. No threshkreen manned it except, perhaps, to begin its cycle of fire.”

Setting his tenar down and dismounting, the Kessentai peered himself at the curious device, Binastarion saw that his AS was correct. The weapon had a small muzzle, perhaps a claw’s width in caliber. Around that was a larger tube. He tapped the tube with a claw. It sloshed as if full of some coolant, water perhaps. Behind the tube was a block of machined metal with a wood-covered handle on one side. A belt of the heavy metal-colored ammunition the threshkreen favored ran out the side with the tube to a huge drum.

On the other side of the weapon, a pile of the little brass casings had filled a deep hole and begun to build a small hill. Underneath, the block was connected with the weapon’s tripodal stand. The curved tube that connected the two rear legs of the stand had a toothed ridge running along it.

“I surmise that the recoil of the weapon causes the mechanism connecting the block and the stand to engage the teeth on that curved horizontal connector and traverse the weapon from one side to the other. Perhaps there is a reversing mechanism that causes it to traverse back when it reaches one end of the arc of traverse or the other. That little locking mechanism on the curved horizontal bar looks like a way to control the arc of fire. To ascertain that, though, would take more examination than I can do without the thing being disassembled, Binastarion.”

“No…” the God King answered slowly. “I think you’re right. It also explains how the threshkreen are able to get away when they are forced to abandon one of their fortified lines without leaving many bodies behind. They set these things off just before they vacate. Bastards!”

“The bastards are almost through, Suarez. I think we need to begin the fire plan now.”

Suarez sighed. Boyd was a good man, a fine dictator. As a matter of fact he was the best dictator the country had ever seen, not least because he’d made it so plain from the beginning that he detested the job. He also had more actual combat experience than Suarez.

For all that, however, he was not a professional soldier. Suarez was.

“Not yet. They still have uncommitted reserves that are out of our fire prep area. We’ll pay a heavy price, and possibly fail to liberate the west, if we don’t catch nearly all of them.”

“But there’re only three more trench lines left, Suarez. Three! And the infantry divisions holding the line are beginning to fall apart!”

“They won’t fall apart, Dictator. I’ve lined the rear with military police with orders to summarily execute anyone found leaving the front,” Suarez answered calmly. Seeing the look of horror on Boyd’s face, Suarez explained, “Why do you suppose MPs are given pistols, Dictator? They have them for just that purpose. Always have and likely always will.”

Boyd thought back to his days as a rifleman in France and Belgium. Momentarily, he shivered. “I hate MPs.”

“Everyone hates MPs,” Suarez answered. “Everyone complains about prostitution, too. But cops and hookers serve a valid social function. I shudder to think where society would be without both in plenty.

“But, in any case, relax. The last two trench lines are the most solid. They’ve each got nearly two hundred of the autoguns. You remember? Those water-cooled machine guns on the recoil-operated traversing mechanism? Pity the gringos couldn’t have given us a thousand of their manjacks. But making do is a Latin virtue, I think. Oh, and I’ve ordered in the Nata Line’s Corps’ last infantry division to shore it up. It will hold until the LRRPs in the mountains to the north report that the enemy is fully committed to the attack, with no reserves out of our kill zone.”

Lieutenant Valparaiso, 1^st Cazador Battalion, wondered if the boredom of his mission made up for missing the action to the east along the Nata Line. Actually, he and his men yearned to be in on the fighting. Still, it wasn’t as if their job wasn’t important. Master of the Horse Suarez had personally spoken to his battalion before they had moved into these hills to dig in deep hide positions overlooking the open ground to the south. From the battalion’s deep hides, wires ran back to communications nodes on the other side of the Cordillera Central. From there, the high command was kept informed.

“There is nothing,” Suarez had said, “nothing more important than the information you men will provide. No, you won’t get any medals… at least, if things work out properly you won’t. But what you will tell us is key to the defense.”

Bloody boring goddamned key, Valparaiso thought as he looked over the huge Posleen pack that simply sat, or lay down, in his field of view below. Miserable alien bastards haven’t budged since… oh, oh, what’s this?

The tenar which had been hovering listlessly or occasionally gathering by twos, threes and fours — even aliens felt the need to shoot the shit with each other, Valpariaso surmised — suddenly took on a new energy. The blocks of the smaller, crestless aliens arose to their feet as the flying sleds moved to take positions at the front of each.

Looking through his binoculars, the lieutenant counted. Each block is about forty by ten of the aliens. There are thirty-seven blocks on the front and they appear to be about thirty deep, or maybe a bit more. Call it… umm…

“Holy shit!” Valparaiso cursed. To his radio telephone operator he said, “Get on the horn and tell headquarters that there’s nearly half a million of the bastards moving east. Do it, soldier. Now!”

“There! I told you they would commit, at last.” Suarez pointed one finger at the map being updated by a trooper from the headquarters operations shop.

Boyd looked at the map and asked, “How long until they’re in range?”

“Between midnight and two,” Suarez answered, after spending a moment in crude calculation.

“And that’s the last of their uncommitted troops?”

The trooper at the map answered, “Dictador, the LRRPs say there is nothing behind these except individual Posleen who are acting wildly.”

“They go feral,” Suarez explained. “If their God Kings are killed and no other takes them under control the normals revert to type. They will be small danger, when we roll through.”

Boyd bit at his lower lip, thinking, It’s all or nothing. One big roll of the dice and my country lives or dies. But there’s nothing to be done to fix that that we have not already done.

“Tell SOUTHCOM. We begin at one in the morning.”

The suit’s radio crackled, “Colonel Snyder, you’ve been fucking off too long already. Get your ass up.”

“Wha… wha… WHAT? I wasn’t sleeping, Sergeant…”

The suit was on listening silence. The sender — General Page, himself, thought Snyder — didn’t hear. The radio repeated, “Snyder, wake up.”

“AID, come alert.”

The AID answered, “About fucking time.”

Snyder ignored the jab. It was, after all, his fault if anyone’s that his AID had acquired a foul… mouth.

“Last calling station, this is Lieutenant Colonel Wes Snyder. Repeat.”

“Snyder this is Page. It’s a go. Get your battalion awake and prepare to execute your mission.”

“Wilco,” the officer answered. “AID, wake up the commanders and staff.”

“Wilco,” the AID echoed and began sending the signals to the other AIDs.

“A Company reports… B Company; a man who won’t fuck won’t fight… Combat Support; ready to rock… Headquarters’ Headhunters; ready to take heads.”

“Gentlemen… oh, and you ladies, too, Alpha Company. Awaken your commands. We’re going in shortly.”

The moon was high and bright overhead as the Artificial Sentience announced, “Binastarion, I’ve found the metal threshkreen.”

“Show me, AS.”

The glowing map appeared in thin air beside the tenar. “They’ve been waiting behind us? Oh, demons. Does this mean what I think it does, AS?”

“Yes, Kessentai. We’re… what’s that phrase the threshkreen use? Ah, yes. We’re fucked. Binastarion, look east.”

The Artificial Sentience needn’t have directed his chief’s attention. The sky to the east was lit up, as if by several thousand powerful strobes. “Artillery?”

“I think so; that and their mortars.”

Binastarion’s sinking feeling managed to sink further. “How many?”

“I think between two and three thousand, my lord. Probably closer to three. And… oh, demon shit… north and south, Binastarion. Rockets. From hundreds of launchers.”

“We can engage the rockets automatically, AS,” the God King insisted.

“No. I am sorry. We can’t. I can sense them through the mountains and hills, while they are still accelerating. By the time they pop over, though, they must have expended their fuel and gone ballistic. I can sense them, still, and count them. But it would take a major reprogramming for me or the other automated defenses to engage. And there’s no time.”

“How many shells are we facing?” Binastarion asked, a trace of hope in his voice.

The first of the threshkreen shells had almost landed among the host as the AS answered, “There are twenty-one thousand

two hundred and forty-seven projectiles in the air now, and the rate of fire is not slowing. And… oh, Kessentai, I am so sorry. The spirit—

of-the-dead ships are now firing too. Make that twenty-one thousand four hundred and fifty-one… sixty-nine… twenty-two thousand five hundred and ninety…”

Broadside on, Daisy and Sally took turns blasting away at the Posleen infestation. The flashes of their guns, firing at maximum rate, lit up the depths below. The concussion sent fish, some stunned but mostly dead, floating to the surface.

Down below, in a hold no one ever visited but the Indowy and the avatar, Sintarleen told Daisy’s avatar, “It is time.” The Indowy’s left hand held Morgen, the cat, while his right stroked the creature’s back. The cat purred audibly.

The avatar bit her lip and nodded. Then, nervousness palpable in her voice, she said, “Let us do it. Now, while there is still time to feel my captain’s touch.”

The bat-faced alien’s fingers reached out and played over the control surfaces of the tank. Then he placed his hand on a silvery panel. There was a whooshing sound as the top of the tank slid away. As the mist inside the tank dissipated, looking down, the avatar and the Indowy saw a perfect female body and an ethereal face framed by long blonde hair. The mouth on the face opened as the eyes flew wide. The body gasped as it drew in its first breath.

As the body and mind in the tank fully wakened, the avatar faded. Yes, it could have been maintained. But Daisy the woman who was also Daisy the ship and Daisy the AID and even Daisy the soul wanted all of her consciousness in that body, at least for the moment.

Breath drew in. Blood picked up oxygen. Heart pumped. Oh, wonder, to be alive.

The body sat upright. It tried to speak. Instead it croaked, “Ouu ni sau m’tin ta wa.”

The Indowy looked at the woman, uncomprehendingly. His head cocked as the woman repeated, “Ouu ni sau m’tin ta wa.”

“Oh, dear. We exercised this body daily. But we never did exercise its ability to speak.”

Daisy’s head nodded vigorously, before she punched the wall of the tank in frustration.

“Never mind, Lady Daisy. That will come. Do you need clothing? A uniform?”

“B’ea s?”

Sintarleen turned away, bent over and rummaged through a chest he kept in this bay. Opening it, he withdrew a complete set of Navy tans, hand tailored in Panama to match the body’s size and shape. He held these out along with a bra. Looking at the bra, and then at the body’s magnificent breasts he said, “You probably don’t need this, yet. Even so, this is a human woman’s body and gravity works. You should wear this, too.”

Unwilling to butcher the language any further by trying to speak it, at least until she had had a chance to practice on her own, the woman Daisy smiled in gratitude, taking the clothing and bra.

The panties were easy and obvious. But she had never put on a bra before. The Indowy had to help. Since he had never helped a woman in such a way before…

“No, that’s not quite right. Here.” He reached over and tugged a bit left, then a bit right. “There. That looks reasonably correct.” He then helped Daisy put on the uniform, adjusting the belt and adding in such insignia as she was entitled to. Lastly, he hung around her neck the gold cross for valor she had won. The base of the cross pointed inadvertently at an amazing cleavage.

Stepping back to admire his handiwork, Sinbad said, “A human male would whistle, I think, based on what I have seen of this crew. I am not human, of course. Still, I can admire the beauty in another species. You look great, Lady Daisy.”

A soft hand reached out to stroke the Indowy’s furry, batlike face. Soft, warm lips tried to move. “T’ an k ou, S’ ba’.”

Morgen the Cat stropped Daisy’s legs furiously and happily.

Daisy’s issue shoes pinched as she walked with a steady click-clack-click up the passageway toward CIC. The clicking echoed off the armored deck above and beside her.

Not a man in the crew but had seen her in her avatar form. Thus, even though the avatar rarely walked much, preferring to simply appear where and when she was needed, and despite the click-clacking of the shoes on the deck, the men on battle stations along the passageway really hardly noticed the change, at first. And then she reached out and gently touched a favored crewman here, another there. Mouths gaped and eyes went wide. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, our girl’s become real.

A few of the crew, more mesmerized than disciplined, perhaps, started to follow. Wordlessly but smiling Daisy motioned them, no, stay to your duty as she walked on.

At CIC a Marine guard started to port his rifle to bar the way. No blame to the kid; he was used to Daisy’s avatar coming and going as it would. It was just surprise that had him lifting his rifle. Daisy, still smiling, cocked her head coquettishly. The guard stepped out of the way, even opening the hatchway for her.

Morgen entered with Daisy and immediately footpadded over and began stropping McNair’s legs. The skipper bent over and picked the cat up, asking, “Who let you in here, Furball?”

Davis said, “I’ll take the cat, Skip — ” and stopped cold. He, too, had a hard time believing the vision before his eyes. Father Dwyer was the only man present not surprised. But, then again, he was the ship’s confessor.

McNair followed Davis’ stunned gaze completely around and…

Daisy held a finger to her lips. Shhhhh. One warm hand, made of honest to God girlflesh, reached up and softly stroked his cheek. Her eyes sought his out, asking the question desperately, Do you like what you see, Captain? Did I do right? Seeing the skipper’s shock, Daisy decided to press the issue. She tilted her head, parted her lips, and raised one foot behind her as she melted into her captain.

Even before the probing tongue McNair was conscious of the encircling arms. Even before that, he felt the pressure of two perfect breasts. It was the breasts, actually, pressing his chest but felt all through his body, that first grabbed his mind; grabbed it, and turned it completely to mush.

Unconscious of the crew of the CIC, McNair’s hands began to act on autopilot, one beginning to reach up to cup a breast, the other down to give this incredible woman’s ass a more than friendly squeeze.

And then Father Dwyer gave a small “Harumph,” and McNair backed off. Moving his arms from her back to her shoulders and holding her firmly, McNair stared in wonder and bewilderment at the woman. Looking into Daisy’s eyes for answers as desperately as she had looked into his own, the captain’s mouth began to form “How?” when Daisy shushed him with a finger. Then a little electronically projected voice whispered into the ear of the very thoroughly kissed McNair, and no other, “I’ve had ten thousand men inside me, Captain, and I am still a virgin. Even so, when next I lay down on your bed, Captain, my love, it won’t be as a hologram.”

There was no way to have face to face contact and still be heard over the rushing roar of twenty-four guns and ninety-six multiple rocket launchers firing continuously from all around. Snyder had his commanders and staff doff ACS helmets for a moment, if only to read their faces and gauge their morale after their long sleep. Perhaps, too, he wanted them to see his own, to realize that while he had gone almost mad while waiting, the key word was “almost.”

He had intended to give his final orders that way, helmets off. After so long a confinement, if there was anything Snyder wanted less than to wear his helmet he couldn’t think what it was. But the noise, the never ending, mind deadening Kakakaboomoomoom, made it impossible. Therefore, reluctantly, Snyder ordered his commanders and key staff back into full armor.

“It’s really simple,” the commander of the First of the O-Eighth said, using a marking laser integral to the right index finger of his command suit to mark out the battlefield as his AID projected a hologram onto the ground.

“The Panamanian artillery is not going to blast us a completely empty hole. Their job is to stun, disrupt, and open up little tactical gaps we can use. That’s key, people; there will be Posleen down there when we come out of this valley and off these mountains. Some of them may, and probably will, still be in shape to fight. Even saying that, though, the locals are throwing eighty-thousand rockets and I-don’t-know-exactly how much cannon fire down on their old San Pedro Line. There are going to be places where the Posties have been scoured off the surface of the Earth. And there are going to be places where they’re ready to rock and roll.”

“Recon?” Snyder waited to make sure he had the Scout Platoon leader’s complete attention. “You’re leading the way. Your job is to find the places where the horsies are strong and to identify the weak points. Don’t get wrapped up in a fire fight. Find the spots, go low, and move on. You understand?”

The Scout Platoon leader nodded, answering, “Roger, sir.”

“B Company,” Snyder said, looking at Connors. “Your job is to clean up just enough of the Posleen strong points remaining after the artillery prep that Alpha and the Twentieth Mechanized Infantry — less one battalion that is staying here to defend the artillery — can pass easy to the east side of the river. When you’ve got a path cleared, you will hold the shoulders of it and pass Alpha and the mech along it. Once they are past, you will move on, seal the gap you created behind you, dig in facing mostly west — but be prepared to be attacked from any direction — and hang on for dear life.”

Though it was difficult, Connors tried to tear his thoughts away from Marielena and their baby. Yes, she had sent him an e-mail with the news, which e-mail he had opened first thing after awakening. The second thing he had done was register a standard Galactic will naming his new offspring and the child’s mother as his heirs. Thirdly, he had sent Marielena another e-mail that said, simply, “If I come out of this, the first thing we do is get married, right?”

He hadn’t gotten an answer on that as of yet. Well, the day was early and likely to prove long.

“Fuck later, Connors. Pay attention, Goddammit. A man who won’t fuck won’t fight but a man who is thinking about fucking too much won’t fight either. And he’s likely to get killed.”

Softly, Scott answered, “I wasn’t thinking about fucking, sir… well, not exactly. Sorry. But I am going to be a daddy in about eight and a half months.”

Never slow, Snyder responded, “And a man who is thinking about being a daddy is altogether too likely to get his ass lunched.”

“Yessir. Sorry, sir.

“Okay, now — since you were in the never-never land of prospective daddydom — tell me back your orders.”

Connors did.

“Okay, so you were paying attention with at least half an ear. Alpha Company…”

The steady drum fire of the artillery was almost as bad in the command bunker as it was out in the open. Dust, driven by the sound, leaked down through the spaces left in the dirt-covered logs causing operations and communications personnel to cough and sneeze.

“Your women are starting to become tired, Coronel Mirandova.” The Russian’s eyes were red from the dust… and the smoke of the flaming rockets being launched all around.

“I know that, Alexandrov,” Digna answered. “That’s why I waited on the music. But you’re right; the time is now.” Digna looked at one of her regiment’s attachments, a PSYOP — or Psychological Operations — sort. “Hit it, Sergeant!”

Outside, louder even than the rockets, there came a sound of cold speakers being warmed by a sudden surge of juice.

Down in the rocket pits, half choking from the rocket’s exhaust, the crews heard the static and stopped for a moment before being tongue-lashed back to work by their sergeants. They stopped again when they heard the music, drums first, followed by a fuller band. And then Pat Benatar’s unique voice, in English, which few of them understood, though they understood the song well enough:

They understood that, enough of them. Sergeants didn’t need to berate them back into the drill. The women of Digna’s command went on their own, a touch faster than they had been.

Except that on that last line, several thousand women, many of them with children hidden in bunkers not all that far to the rear, raised their right hands in fists and sang, louder than the speakers:

“SEREMOS INVINCIBLES!”

He had seen orna’adar not once, but many times. He had seen the mushroom clouds of the major weapons, antimatter and nuclear both. He had seen planets kinetically bombarded from space and ships splintered in the same medium.

Binastarion had seen much devastation. He had never seen or felt a more personal and complete devastation than that engulfing his clan.

There seemed to be a pattern to the barrage. At one end, at the western edge, it was a solid wall of fire that never seemed to let up. Between that, and the farthest point of Posleen penetration to the east, another wall, this one a moving wall, played back and forth. Those were obvious. What was less obvious was the pattern inside. Shell fire pounded one area for a while, then moved on to another. Some areas took it worse than others. And in some areas it never let up at all.

Frustrated, enraged, Binastarion pounded the controls of his tenar. He couldn’t even get forward far enough to try to direct his People out. Leaderless, trapped in that hellish maelstrom, they cried out to him.

Worst of all were the cries of those who burned. After a short time of the explosive fire, the threshkreen seemed to switch over about half their guns to firing what his AS identified as a type of phosphorus. This hit the ground and cast flaming, white-smoking chunks in all directions. The People touched by the flame, normals mostly though junior Kessentai were also hit, shrieked and begged and cried pitiably for aid that could not be given. Even Binastarion, himself, had no clue about how to douse the fire that scorned water.

Amazingly, a lone figure struggled and staggered out from the threshkreen-made hell. Binastarion swooped low to look, to help if possible. The poor thing’s face was burned beyond recognition. Entrails dragged along the ground behind it, picking up their due of dirt and vegetation. The creature trembled uncontrollably. It took a second look before Binastarion recognized the remnants of the crest that said this shambling obscenity was even a Kessentai.

Binastarion raised his railgun to put the poor God King out of its misery. “We are a hard and a harsh people,” he wailed, “but we are not a cruel species. This… this is disgusting… cruel… obscene. Demons, I hate humans.” A single shot put the disemboweled, burnt and bloody creature out of its misery.

“That isn’t the worst of it, Binastarion,” his AS said. “I have calculated the sheer volume of phosphorus the threshkreen are using. It is enough to burn up all the oxygen in the area under fire to a considerable height. Ordinarily, this would not be a problem, in itself. The hot air would rise and pull in fresh. But there is a temperature inversion building. Cold air above will trap warm air without oxygen below. Our People are going to suffocate. And there isn’t anything we can do.”

Interlude

Guanamarioch moved as quickly and quietly as the slippery, muddy jungle trail would permit. His AS told him that there was a moon tonight. If so, the God King could not tell; the jungle overhead was too thick to allow anything so weak as mere moonlight to penetrate.

Posleen night vision was excellent. Even so, it required at least some light. There could have been light, too, except that over the past several nights any normal or cosslain who had carried a light had suddenly sprouted one of the nasty threshkreen arrows. He’d lost seven normals and a cosslain that way. Better to go it in the dark, by feel.

Step… slip… catch your balance by a vine… step… slip… catch your —

“Yeooow!”

The God King pulled his hand away from some round creature that grew spikes in bands around it. The spikes came away from their attacker easily; they were barbed and lodged deep in the Kessentai’s hand. Still cursing, with the other hand he drew a boma blade and hacked down and across. The spiked creature fell, dead apparently.

Curiously, Guano detected no thrashing at all. It must have died instantly. He replaced the blade in its sheath and began pulling the spikes out of his hand. Yeoow… yeoow… yeoow… Ouch! He sensed that the spikes were leaving residue behind. The wounds in his hand hurt terribly.

The God King moved on. Suddenly, before he felt it, he sensed a mass of the creatures standing ahead, as if ready to fight him. Again he drew his boma blade, edging forward. He hissed and snarled, grunting and whistling curses at this new enemy.

The blade waved. He felt the slightest resistance as it passed through the body of one of the enemy. The body began to topple, towards the God King. Hastily he backed up…

Right onto a pack of the vile, treacherous creatures that had apparently snuck in behind him. Guanamarioch received an assfull of spikes. “Yeoow!” he cursed as pain propelled him forward again…

Right into the embracing claws of his enemy. More spikes entered the young God King’s tender flesh, right through the scales. He flailed around with his blade, severing the assassins where they stood. Their bodies fell on him.

Yes… more spikes.

Beaten down, punctured in a thousand places, the God King sank to the earth still fighting. He was still trying his best to resist when pain, fatigue, and the hunger that had been his near constant companion the last several weeks, forced him from consciousness.

Ziramoth did not know what to make of the pile of freshly cut foliage with sharp defensive spikes all around. He was looking for his friend, Guanamarioch, whose oolt had set up a perimeter from which they guarded and within which they keened for the absence of their lord.

Then the pile moved… and groaned… and said, “I’ll kill you all, you bastards!”

“Guano?”

“Zira? Is that you? Have the demons taken you to the afterlife as well?”

“Guano, you’re not dead. Trust me in this.”

“Yes I am, dead and in Hell. Trust me in this.”

Ziramoth shook his head and began to gingerly pull away the pile under which he was pretty sure his friend lay. Sometimes, the pile shrieked as the plant trunks rolled about. When he was finished, Zira backed off and said, “You can stand up now, Guano.”

Carefully, and perhaps reluctantly, the Kessentai stood. Zira whistled and shook his head slowly, and half in despair.

Guanamarioch, Junior Kessentai and flyer among the stars, had, at a rough estimate, some thirteen hundred black vegetable spikes buried in his skin. His eyes were shut from swelling where the spikes had irritated the flesh. He had the things in his nostrils. The folds of skin between his claws were laced with them. He even sported several that had worked their way through the bandages around his reproductive member to lodge in the sensitive meat below.

“I hate this fucking place,” the God King sniffled.

Chapter 33

“What can we save?” Binastarion asked his Artificial Sentience.

“Not much,” the device answered. “There are a few hundred thousand of the People — some with their Kessentai, others without — stretched back to the first line we broke through. Some of the

normals in that kill zone are dribbling out, though they’re in no shape to actually fight. A lot of the tenar-riding Kessentai, several thousand anyway, could get out before they suffocate if they abandon their oolt’os now. The junior Kessentai, dismounted as they are, are going to die, burnt or blasted or asphyxiated.”

The AS continued, “Then too, we still have a decent population in that area we took on first landing, the one the local thresh call ‘Chiriqui.’ If we could escape with one in four of the People we would have a chance, some chance anyway, of escaping this world before it and the clan are destroyed in orna’adar.”

Binastarion buried his face and muzzle in his claws. There was something… some way… if he could just grasp hold of it. What was…

“Aha!” he shouted aloud. “Every tenar could take two. A few of the better could take three or even four. Pass to my subordinates that they are to extract dismounted Kessentai and cosslain before leaving but that they are to leave. They must abandon the normals to delay the enemy and die. We will assemble… show me a map, AS. Ah. Yes, there.” Binastarion’s claw touched a spot on the holographic map corresponding to the remains of the town of Santiago. “We will assemble there. Tell them they can have my blood, according to the Law, after we escape but that until then I remain in command.”

“I will tell them, Binastarion.”

The Posleen were mostly extinct along the axis of advance. Of those that lived, the bulk were masterless, trembling wrecks. B Company, in the lead of First of the O-Eighth, shot them down instantly and without compunction.

It became a little tougher once they reached the minefields on the western side of the river. The mines were not an issue; they’d been modified according to the plan of an otherwise obscure American mechanic and electronically blown even before the ACS started to cross. No, the problem came in when it was discovered that there were some still cohesive groups of Posleen on the other side of the river. It cost Connors half a dozen troopers to root these out from their holes. Rather, they’d had to be rooted out of the holes the Panamanians had dug earlier.

That had been the plan, to leave reasonably well-constructed and still usable battle positions for the MI and gringo mech, under cover of being battle positions for the Panamanian covering force of the 1^st and 6^th Mechanized Divisions.

It had worked, so far as it went. Hopefully, too, the existence of those still extant battle positions would prove more valuable than the price to be paid rooting out their Posleen holdouts. Connors hoped so, at least.

The gap being opened now, Connors ordered his first platoon to hold the shoulder to the north, his second to hold the southern edge of the gap, with third as reserve and weapons in general support.

He sent back to battalion, “The way is clear. Roll ’em, boss. Roll ’em fast.”

Digna watched the last of the gringo ACS and armored vehicles disappearing into the fog and smoke. She still had a number of reloads for the BM-21s and several thousand rounds of 105mm for the cannon. The rocket launchers would fire until they had only four reloads left. The cannon had already used nearly everything they had in terms of high explosive. They retained quite a lot of fleshette and canister, still. That, however, was not at their current firing positions.

Digna was infinitely weary. She turned to Tomas Herrera standing, as usual, nearby. “Displace the guns that need to move forward to their supplementary positions.” Which was where the antipersonnel direct fire munitions had been stored. “I’m going to walk the line with the gringo mechanized commander… make sure the guns tie in properly.”

“Si, doña,” Herrera answered. “But I think you could use an hour for sleep.”

“Plenty of time to sleep when I am dead, Tomas.”

If one looked at it just right, from just the right position, and somehow managed to keep notes, there was a pattern there to be seen in the shell storm that wracked the ground to the west. It helped though, thought the first sergeant, if you knew the plan and the way the shells were designed to support it.

A light drizzle fell, unnoticed with the much more impressive storm falling on the enemy. Die, you fucking ugly bastards, thought el primero.

“Get up, get up, you lazy sacks of shit. Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead.” Quijana’s company first sergeant, el primero, walked the perimeter of tracks kicking people as needed. He came to Quijana’s squad and found the men all awake. Whether this was because Sergeant Quijana had heard him coming or not made no difference. They were up. That counted.

“You ready to fight, boys?”

“Si, Primero… Si… Si… Si…”

The first sergeant nodded. Good. They sound ready. Maybe more important, they sound confident.

“Sergento Quijana, status?”

“We’re topped off and have a full load of ammo, Top, plus a complete additional load of small arms ammunition strapped to the outside of the track, food for a week and enough water for three days, with care. The men have had at least twenty-four hours sleep in the last three days and they’ve eaten well enough that they’re starting to look fat. The track’s in good shape though it’s starting to blow a little oil. I’ve got a mechanic coming down from company to look at it. The weapons are all clean and in tip-top shape. We’re ready, Top.”

The first sergeant reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offering one to Quijana. He then lit the both of them, each man sheltering under a broad-brimmed floppy hat to shield the cigarette from the light drizzle.

The pair had to lean close to keep the match under the shelter of the hats. As they did, el primero whispered, “You take care, Son. Do your duty but take care.”

“Don’t worry, Old Man, I will,” Sergeant Quijana answered, smiling.

Slapping his boy on the shoulder, Sergento Primero Quijana turned and walked on into the night.

It was an hour before daylight, Boyd saw by the watch on his wrist. It was the watch itself, having its own alarm clock, that had awakened him. He arose from the narrow field cot on which he had spent a couple of hours in fitful sleep, a thin blanket pulled over him.

The Dictator had slept — if that was quite the word for a period when one lies down, not quite conscious, while being assaulted by repetitive, centauroid nightmares — dressed and with his boots on, a rifle propped up beside him against the wall of the bunker. The rifle was unique in the Panamanian Armed Forces, nor could its like have been found easily amongst the gringos. It was his old service rifle, .30 caliber Model M-1, that he had purchased at the end of the Second World War for a keepsake.

He sat up, then stood. Reaching over, Boyd picked up his rifle, and ran his hands over its comforting, familiar, wooden stock. Once more into the breach…

Pushing aside a curtain that shielded his small sleep alcove, Boyd walked into the main part of the headquarters bunker. His twenty-four lictors, he saw, were already awake. One of them called, “Attention.” Boyd waved them to relax.

Suarez was standing by. “We’re about to reach the final stage of the fire plan, Dictador. Would you like to go above and see?”

With a wordless nod, Boyd led the way to the bunker’s entrance, Suarez and the lictors following. Three BMPs and two tanks stood idling above. These would carry Boyd and his aides forward, accompanying 1^st Mechanized Division. A few hundred meters away, Suarez’s similar detachment awaited.

“It is very beautiful, is it not?” Suarez commented, indicating the shell storm to the west.

“Beautiful and terrible,” Boyd agreed. Both men had to shout to be heard over the firing of the big guns all around.

And then, suddenly, most of the guns went silent. There was still firing, but it was a mere drizzle as compared to what had gone before. Suarez consulted his watch. “Right on time.”

A minute passed, then two, three, four and five, while the men watched and waited.

As one, the guns opened up again. In the glow cast against the sky four bright lines appeared. From looking, one might have guessed the lines were about a kilometer wide, each. Boyd and Suarez knew they were. In this final stage of the preparation, the guns were to blast four lanes through what remained of the Posleen. Into and through those lanes the two mechanized divisions would pour. It was expected they would meet little resistance.

“We’ve stopped the white phosphorus,” Suarez said, “to allow some air to get in. Any Posleen that were going to suffocate already have.”

Xenotraghal, or Xeno for short, didn’t really understand what had happened. One moment, he had been leading his oolt forward, on foot. The next his band had been engulfed in explosions, with shards of sharp metal winging through the air with malevolent whines. Half his oolt had gone down in seconds, eviscerated, pulped, dismembered.

There had been threshkreen trenches nearby. He had ordered his normals and cosslain into them. The trenches were a tight fit, though, for creatures the size of human horses. Once in, Xeno lost all control as he could neither walk among them in the narrow scrapings in the earth nor — because of the fire storm — get out of where he stood.

He remembered that the fire had lifted, twice. The first time he had emerged from his shelter and called for his people to follow him forward. Then the shells had returned, further butchering his charges until, once again, he ordered them down.

Four times in total, the shells had lifted. But he was no stupid Kessentai. After being caught in the open the second time, Xeno refused to rise to the bait and kept his people low when the fires abated.

Then had come the shells that spread smoke and fire. He had thought them quite beautiful, at first. And then several had landed near enough to the trench system in which he and his people sheltered that chunks of burning stuff, arcing high, had fallen into the packed excavation.

The screams and shrieks of his normals had disabused Xeno of any thoughts that those shells were anything but ugly. All he had to do was remember the burned out eyes of one of his cosslain… Xeno shivered.

He had thought that the burning was the worst. Oh, I had little imagination then, he cursed to himself.

For the fire shells had not ended. Soon the air was filled with an acrid smoke that made his people cough and retch. But they could breathe it. Posleen had been well designed and whatever damage the choking smoke did would be soon repaired.

Xeno had found himself breathing more rapidly, much more rapidly. He assumed, at first, that it was excitement and, frankly, fear. He forced himself to calm but still he felt the need to breathe rapidly.

“What is going on?” he asked the AS he wore on a sort of baldric across his chest.

“There is too much fire, Kessentai. It is burning up all the oxygen.”

Though far less intelligent, some of the normals still understood instinctively what was happening before Xeno did. A few of these panicked, emerging from their shelter to run feral and be cut down or barbecued by the threshkreen fire.

Xeno well understood that. Inside him, instinctive panic fought a battle for dominance with sentience. For a moment, he felt like he was back in the breeding pens, fighting for his life against the brothers who would gladly have eaten him alive.

Instead of panicking, Xeno looked around the trench as best he could. There was a shelter dug into one side into which he thought he could fit, if barely. Would that trap enough oxygen to sustain life for a while?

Best chance I have. Xeno pushed his way into the bunker, though his hindquarters remained outside, exposed to the fire.

Oh, yeah… that’s better, he thought, breathing rich air again. There Xeno waited for death, ignoring as best he could the small flakes of phosphorus that lit up his rear end, bringing searing pain. He didn’t know how long he waited, only that it seemed like an eternity.

Finally, his AS announced, “There is a tenar outside, Kessentai, capable of carrying you out of here.”

Not daring to believe fully, Xeno still backed out of his shelter. When his head emerged, he was able to see the remains of his oolt. Whereas humans went slightly blue, when done to death by oxygen depletion, the Posleen went greenish. All of his remaining people, every one he could see for all the smoke, were green. And very dead.

“He… hel… help!” Xeno shouted as loudly as he could through smoke scorched throat and oxygen depleted lungs. He heard the whine of a tenar.

“Come aboard, Junior,” said the well-crested God King who rode it. “There is nothing left here for you to command.”

Unsteadily, holding his breath, Xeno climbed aboard the back of the tenar and hung on for life as its pilot gunned the thing to rise up above the fire, up to where there was air to breathe.

Almost the God King wept with relief at his first gasp of decent air.

Sometimes Quijana rode in the back with his dismounts. Sometimes he took over the track commander’s position in the turret. Sometimes he took one of the two positions for dismounts that were in front of the turrets. These had machine guns to help clear the way ahead but, unfortunately, also exposed the passengers to fire when they attempted to get to ground.

For now, under the circumstances, Quijana thought it better to ride in the turret.

The sun was inching over the horizon behind him when the order came over the radio, “Start engines.” Instantly, over a thousand heavy duty diesel engines within earshot churned to roaring life. That they didn’t all come to life was evident when another squad leader in Quijana’s view took off his helmet and slammed it against the metal of the turret. Within minutes a crew of mechanics had assembled on that vehicle, opening hatches to get at the engine.

Quijana tsk-tsked. He shuddered a little, inwardly, as he thought about what his father, the first sergeant, would do to that unfortunate squad leader. Better you than me, compadre.

No sooner were the thoughts formed than First Sergeant Quijana appeared above the offending vehicle’s deck, alternately shouting at and beating over the head and shoulders the unfortunate track commander. Oh, yeah. I put up with that shit for twenty years. The old man was always a mean son of a bitch. Way better you than me.

Again the radio crackled. “Roll.”

Quijana’s BMP was sixth in order of march, behind his company commander and ahead of the platoon leader. The company, in turn, was second in the battalion and the battalion second in the regiment. The regiment was the lead for this lane of assault. Thus, he had a pretty good view of things when the sun finally rose completely.

Cresting a rise, Quijana saw the point of the column, the regimental scout company, nearing the fire storm of shells that marked their lane. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, the shell storm split in two. For five hundred meters to either side the guns began to paste any aliens who might be on the flanks of the penetrations. Had they been human beings down there Quijana thought he might have felt sorry for them.

There was a broad fighting trench along the military crest, a few hundred meters farther along. Across it, the engineers had apparently thrown up a stout metal bridge. The BMPs and tanks crossed the bridge with the thunderous metallic clattering, not unlike nails on a blackboard in its effect on any humans within earshot.

Infantry were manning the trench as Quijana’s regiment passed. Themselves probably shocked silly at the fury of the morning’s bombardment, plus the many days of fight, retreat, and fight previously, it had taken them a few minutes to realize what was happening.

Once they did realize, the infantrymen began cheering on their armored forces. A smaller group of men — bearing musical instruments, heavy on the brass — filed out of a trench into the open. Apparently the division commander had felt his division was threatened enough that he had even committed his command post guard, the division band, to the front. Unsurprisingly, the band had taken their instruments with them into the trenches. Well, after all, that was how they normally fought, building spirits through martial music.

The band master raised a baton, then lowered it. Drums began to pound, loud enough to just reach through the artillery fire and droning engines. A flick of the baton and the brass began to play. The music was odd… not Spanish or Latin at all. It took Quijana a few moments to realize where he had heard it. It had been on a Spanish-dubbed gringo movie, about some men trapped in an old Spanish mission in Texas in the United States. He remembered what the music meant.

“They’re playing ‘Deguello,’ ” he announced through the vehicle’s intercom. The massacre song.

The tanks and BMPs split once they hit the breach, forming two columns to the flanks as supply vehicles raced to form a tight column in the center between the two. The turret of Quijana’s track, on the left side column, traversed to bear also to the left.

The track carried only forty high-explosive antipersonnel rounds. On the other hand, it carried — either internally or strapped to the deck — over ten thousand rounds of machine gun ammunition. There was little firing of the main guns on the march, but the clatter of machine gun fire, from one vehicle or another, was nearly continuous.

Through the smoke and shell bursts, Quijana saw a small group of aliens, perhaps half a dozen, shambling westwards. The aliens’ heads were down, an abject picture of defeat and despair. Their gait was unsteady, as if there were some disconnect between brain and legs.

Deguello. Quijana traversed the turret — the commander’s controls had priority over the gunners — to the general direction of the retreating Posleen.

“Gunner… Target… dismounts in the open.”

The gunner answered, “Target,” fine-tuned the aim, and fired a long burst. Aliens were bowled over as the bullets passed through them. One, obviously wounded, attempted to rise. Perhaps its spinal column had been cut. It was able to get its torso up on its front legs, but its rear quarter dragged behind it.

“Repeating,” announced the gunner. Another burst went out, this one shorter. The alien went down this time and stayed down.

“Almost doesn’t seem right, Sergeant,” the gunner said through the intercom. “They aren’t even fighting back.”

“Then let them figure out how to surrender and try to,” Quijana answered. “It’s not our job to teach them. Until they make it plain they want to give up, they are just targets.” Deguello.

At some level Quijana was sure that the aliens couldn’t give up, that it just wasn’t in them. Fuck ’em. They shouldn’t have come to my planet, to my home. They’re all goddamned targets now.

Was it only a few days ago that my clan, in all its strength and glory, passed this way? Can so much horror happen in just a few days?

What was it Stinghal the Knower said? “Count yourself no leader of the People in war until you have led a retreat”? Yes, that was it. The old Kessentai knew what he was talking about, too.

The retreat had so far been a nightmare beyond anything of Binastarion’s experience in the breeding pens. While the tenar were faster than the humans’ fighting machines, they were fewer now, too. And as for the normals that had to be left behind by the fast-fleeing tenar… his AS had showed him pictures of the humans just running them down and crushing them beneath the horrifying rolling roads their vehicles moved on. Even those who asked for acceptance into the clan of the victor by adopting the posture of supplication and serenity were killed like abat.

Don’t these vile creatures understand anything of the law of the Path of Fire and Fury? Surely they can kill and thresh those who ask for assimilation, but they are required to judge their worth to live first. But the humans want only to kill.

Binastarion sighed. Then again, I suppose from their point of view they have their reasons. After all, they can hardly use us for breeding stock.

As retreats went, the God King knew, this one had been less disastrous than most, especially considering the disaster that had caused it. Who would have suspected that this little place could have amassed so much of their “artillery”? I know they had help, the demon-shits. Perhaps I chose badly in deciding to claim and settle this part of the planet. And yet, but for that miserable waterway it seemed so safe, so nearly irrelevant. What forgiveness for a clan leader who chooses badly? The great crested head hung in despair.

“It isn’t your fault, Binastarion,” the AS said.

“Reading my thoughts again, are you, o’ bucket of bolts?”

“No, Kessentai, not your thoughts. But I am in tune with your physiological responses and the last time I sensed what I am sensing now was when we had to abandon our former home during orna’adar. That, by the way, was not your fault either.”

Binastarion raised his head and shrugged. “Perhaps it was not my ‘fault,’ AS. But it was still my responsibility.”

The AS went silent. It was true. Command took responsibility.

“What of our delaying forces?” the God King asked.

“It goes well enough. The humans’ artillery is mostly left behind, though I sense that they carry some artillery, and mortars too, I suppose, with them. They can move the rest up again, easily enough. But I surmise, based on what I sense of the weight of the ammunition, that it would be a matter of much time, perhaps many lunar cycles, before they could amass enough to give us such a pounding again. Still, their armored vehicles advance. We kill some, of course, and lose many more in the killing. Without adequate leadership from the Kessentai, the normals are not worth much.”

“Yes… about what I had expected. And the blocking force ahead?”

“We have probed it, from both sides. It seems to be composed of about two thousand of their armored vehicle soldiers and perhaps a fifth or sixth of that in metal threshkreen. They have considerable fire support from the ships-that-will-not-die to the south, and a large group of artillery to the northwest… Binastarion?”

“Yes?”

“The threshkreen planned this well. The positions they have chosen to block our escape from have mines to both sides. Yes, these are the same minefields we broke through many days ago. But the gaps we made were narrow and the thresh have closed them again.”

“Show me a projection of our forces on a map, AS.”

Binastarion, despite recent disasters, had not risen to lordship of the clan for nothing. He saw, he weighed, he decided.

“Twenty brigades with nothing but dismounted Kessentai strike the northern artillery group on my command. The remaining thirty-seven brigades, also without tenar, strike west. All the force… what is the force to the west anyway?”

“The People there muster twenty-four brigades, but with few tenar, Kessentai.”

“Fine. They attack east to link up with our forces striking west. Work out the details and control measures. Don’t forget to schedule time for the dismounted God Kings to bond with their commands.

“All the other tenar accompany me to the southwest. I will see these ships die. Give the orders, AS. On my command we strike… for our lives.”

Gingerly, Ruiz stepped over the skeleton of the dead alien. Though he suspected the thing was fairly fresh, the ants had made short work of it, stripping the meat down to the bones. A few of them still worked, though if there were any meat left to the thing Ruiz couldn’t see it. Then again, ants looked in closer detail than even the Chocoes did.

Idly, he wondered what had killed it. He knew he had not. He suspected that it might have been hunger that did the demon in. He’d been watching them for a long time now. They’d been fairly fresh and vigorous in the beginning. But, as time had passed, he had seen them grow thinner and thinner. Their ranks had grown thinner, too, not just in the band that he followed primarily but generally, as well. The Chocoes took some small personal pride in that, though he knew the jungle itself had done more than he had and the demons themselves had killed many to keep the rest going.

The river was still channeling the demons. It was also what allowed him to track and pursue and even, sometimes, get ahead to lay a nasty surprise. He was setting such a surprise now.

Ruiz looked over the ground. Black palm to the north. They’ll avoid that. River to the south. I’ve seen them drown in shallower. They’ll avoid that too.

He measured the area through which the demons would pass with a keen eye. He didn’t have the math, didn’t have even basic arithmetic really, to do fine calculations. He did, however, had a superb ability to envision fairly large stretches of ground in his mind. On this image, he mentally ticked off the places he would set the devices the gringos had called “claymores.”

Twelve should be enough, he thought. Then he returned to his canoe to pick up two cases and a large roll of det cord. The Indian might have been small; he was still very strong. He ported the claymores easily, a case on each shoulder, and carried the det cord by his teeth.

At the ambush site, Ruiz opened the first case. He pulled a bag out, removed the mine and slung the bag over his shoulder. Then he placed the mine, sighting it as he had been taught. He tested the firing wire and found it good. Then he armed the claymore.

From that mine, Ruiz went and set up another, some distance away. Between the two he measured and strung a length of det cord. He was very careful, again as he had been taught, not to let the det cord loop over itself. It would, in such a case, almost certainly cut itself in two and put a stop to the fun he planned.

He laid the twelve mines. Then, for safety’s sake he returned to the canoe to pick up a roll of communications wire. From the last claymore of the twelve he stripped the plastic from the firing wire, connecting it to the commo wire. The commo wire he then laid out, back to where the end piece of the first fire wire sat. There he laid the firing devices by both. Thus, if one claymore failed, or somehow the det cord cut itself, he still had a good chance of all twelve going off.

Lastly, the Chocoes camouflaged the mines, the det cord, and the wires and connected the firing wires to the devices. Suffice to say, that if growing up in the jungle lent one a sense of what looked right there, it was all hidden flawlessly.

That done, Ruiz took his bow, nocked an arrow, and began stealthily creeping forward to where his enemy awaited.

Interlude

The arrow came sailing out of nowhere, fast, free and true. A normal squawked, then sank slowly to the ground. Then a dastardly little thresh jumped out from behind a tree waving some arrows in one grasping member and what Guanamarioch presumed to be their launcher in the other.

The small brown alien shouted something that sounded a lot like “oogaboogabooga” to Guano’s untrained ear before darting off.

In an instant, Guano’s pack was in full bay, with Ziramoth limpingly taking up the rear, waving their boma blades, firing shotguns and occasionally railguns (for the jungle muck and various unaccountable growths had rendered most of the railguns inoperable). The cry was “Meat! Meat! Meat!” as the pack galloped forward. Even normals could articulate that much, although they tended to mispronounce it.

The little thresh — no, better said, threshkreen — was fast; you had to give him that. Several times the pack almost lost him. And then another arrow would fly, as often as not bringing a normal down, and the nasty little demon would show himself. Oogaboogabooga.

“Meat! Meat! Meat!”

Guano had trouble keeping the lead. Between the wounded reproductive member, beating itself against his legs and sending pain shooting to his brain, and the still fresh and sore wounds of that damnable pack of hunter-killer trees, it was just too hard. In time, the lead normals took over and Guano fell back towards the middle of the pack.

And then the little brown threshkreen was there, just standing beside a tree. It had something grasped in each hand. Smiling, it ducked down and…

Kakakabooboobooboom.

And Guano was standing there, almost alone. Some of the normals stood, as well, but they stood stock still, in shock. The rest were down, some plainly dead and others still thrashing. Of the brown alien there was no sign.

Zira, with some of the slower moving normals (for many had jungle-inflicted wounds of various types), came up.

“What the…?” The Kenstain stopped for horror at what he saw had been done to the pack. “Guano, are you hurt?”

Distantly, the God King answered, “They were there and then… gone. Just gone.”

“On the plus side,” Ziramoth observed reasonably, “tonight, at least, we eat.”

“I suppose so,” Guano answered slowly. “But…”

A small feathered shaft appeared in Ziramoth’s chest. Slowly, he looked down at it, then up at Guanamarioch. “Oh, my young friend. Eat well tonight. I am sorry…”

Ziramoth sank to his knees, then rested his chest on the ground. For a moment he seemed to be looking around. His eyes lost focus. The great crested head sank, the muzzle touching the ground. Zira’s body shuddered twice. Then he died.

Chapter 34

Alpha company and the rest of the battalion’s “ash and trash” had started passing through almost immediately after Connors had reported the way was clear. The MI had no trouble fording, but the bottom of the river was so churned to muck by the artillery barrage that preceded the attack that Connors had to detail two squads from his reserve platoon for the sole purpose of physically man- or suit-handling even the tracked vehicles across. For the wheels, there was essentially no possibility of getting a single one over until a bridge could be built. Since there were no engineers to build that bridge…

It’s always the little things that get you, Connors thought. I can’t bitch that no one thought about the effect of the artillery on the river bottom. I didn’t think of it, after all.

Besides, it’s not as bad as all that. Everybody, MI included, has weighted themselves down with enough ammo for couple of days’ fighting. That oughta do… for now, anyway.

Sometimes mechanized infantry could actually move faster than MI. This was not one of those times. Between the difficulty of the river crossing, the fact that the ground was pockmarked like the surface of the moon, and the mud that filled the bottom of every unavoidable shell crater, the move for the mech was slow and unsteady.

B Company, playing tail-end Charlie, still was forced to stop its own progress every ten minutes or so to unstick a track from the muck. The mechanized troopers were grateful, or at least as grateful as men can be when you help them get a little closer to their impending demise, but gratitude didn’t get the MI to its blocking position any sooner.

Connors listened, idly, to the chatter on the company Net as he helped a squad from the weapons platoon lift an M-113 armored personnel carrier out of the hole in which it had been stuck, churning the mud to froth with its spinning tracks.

We’ve got to move faster than this, he thought, but we can’t leave the mech behind either.

Still, despite the frustrations of the delay, Connors found himself strangely happy; happier, certainly, than he had been since being pulled out of the line on Barwhon and given a chance to read the mail that told him the woman he’d thought loved him thought no more about him than she would of a pile of dog crap she’d inadvertently stepped in.

And that’s when it hit, somewhere between physically lifting the track and losing his balance to fall faceshield first into the muck. My God, I actually feel good. Wahoo! I feel great! God bless you, Marielena and your long legs and your just admirable ass! Connors rolled over on his back and began to laugh.

“Ahem… hem.” That was the first sergeant, speaking over the private channel he shared with Connors and the exec. “Ahem… sir. While the whole fucking company is no doubt very happy to hear about your girlfriend’s rear end, I think maybe you don’t want them to be hearing all about Marielena’s ‘long legs and admirable ass’… sir.”

“Fuck! Did I say that out loud, Top?” Connors asked after cutting out the general command circuit.

“Very out loud, sir. Very.”

“Ah, fuckit, Top. I don’t care.”

The AID muffled the “speakers” inside Connors’ helmet. It had to. If it had let loose, at full volume, with the sheer wall of sound created when one of the two cruisers on station to the south let loose with a soul-jarring barrage it would have deafened the captain; that, or simply knocked him out.

For that matter, the sound of metal shards from the eight-inch shells was noticeable enough to worry about, even though deadened by the silvery goop that filled almost all the space between man and armor.

Kind of like rain on a tin roof. I wonder how the mech is taking it.

The volume control was an odd thing, too. While it tuned out most of the blast, it let smaller sounds come through perfectly well. Thus, when a twelve or fifteen pound shard struck Connors’ armored chest, he heard it bounce off and heard the plop of it falling into a nearby small mud hole. He even heard it sizzle as it turned the mud to dirt and steam.

Connors consulted the map. His objective lay only a few kilometers ahead.

“Heads up, Bravo Company. We’ll clear this thing as if it’s occupied.”

This is battle position? Connors had never seen anything like it, not on Barwhon, not in Chile, not in the earlier fighting in Panama.

The battle position was oval in shape and overlooked one of the major fords to the river to the east. Though well entrenched initially, the walls of many of the trench bays had caved in under the artillery fire tossed around some days prior before the Panamanian Mechanized Corps had pulled back to Nata, under the scouring given the whole area by Digna’s group of multiple rocket launchers this morning, and by the pasting from the naval gunfire still being supplied by the twin cruisers… and, it must be said, by the Posleen hypervelocity missiles and plasma cannon blasting it when they’d begun their offensive.

It’s like the moon… but more desolate.

The boys of B Company went over the area with a fine-tooth comb.

“First Platoon here, Captain. Nothing but bits and pieces of Posleen…” “Third Platoon, Boss. All dead…” “Second. One wounded Posleen. Firing one shot…”

Connors nodded to himself with satisfaction. “All right, boys, get the Bouncing Barbies out.”

Along with their ammunition, each man of B Company had trudged in with two dozen of the nasty little flat cylinders that projected force fields to all sides when triggered by the presence of a life form. It had been a hard decision for Snyder to order the things carried, possibly a harder one for Connors to enforce. The suits’ armor would not stop the force fields. Just as the Barbies chopped legs and torsos off the Posleen, so too would they have sliced the MI troopers in two had one of them been inadvertently activated.

Each platoon took a quarter of the perimeter. There was no real trick to using the Barbies; the men simply armed them and tossed them more or less straight to the front. Powered by the suits, the mines were scattered from one hundred to six hundred meters out.

The things normally activated after striking the ground. From that point on, any Posleen (or human, be he so foolish) that entered their effective radius would find himself shorter by a couple of feet… or a head. Thereafter, the Barbies would scoot to one side or the other. Since they were colored yellow, like Posleen blood, they tended to mix in very well with the terrain once it had been fought over for a bit. A field of scooting Barbies — bouncing, chopping, moving, bouncing, chopping, moving, with a Posleen horde trying to get through them — was a thing of beauty to behold… for certain values of “beauty.”

“Okay, boys,” Connors said, when the last of the force field mines had been dispersed, “improve your positions and wait. The Posleen probably won’t keep us waiting long.”

“I hate the waiting even more than I hate the damned humans,” Grintarsas said to his comrade and best friend, Horolongas.

The two were Althanara, or masters of lightly armed scouting oolt’os. As such, they were junior, not graced to ride the tenar of more senior Kessentai, and very, very expendable.

A measure of just how expendable they were was found on the shell-pocked ground around them. For they were not the first scout groups to occupy this land. The remnants of those who preceded them, who had been standing there when the threshkreen ballistic fists had come pummeling, were there still. They, too, had waited… and been held waiting too long.

“The time will come, my friend,” answered Horolongas. His tone in answering didn’t hint as to whether he meant the time for the advance would come… or the final time, death, would come first. Under the circumstances, perhaps it didn’t matter.

The Althanara waited, with their scout oolt’os, behind a ridge to the west of the river. Some clever cosslain had been sent forward earlier and had reported, to the extent one could report with pidgin Posleen and hand gestures, that there were mixed groups of the fearsome metal threshkreen and the almost as fearsome ground-tenar riding threshkreen ahead, digging in.

“I heard the humans suffocated our People in their hundreds of thousands to the east of here,” Grintarsas said, shuddering. “Unheard of. It is a filthy way.”

“The Path of Fury is paved with bones and shit,” Horolongas answered philosophically. “Does it really matter to the dead whether they were shot, or burned, or suffocated?”

“Perhaps not,” Grintarsas half agreed. “But there is honor and there is dishonor, still. And suffocation is a dishonorable way to die, so a dishonorable way to fight.”

“As you say, friend. Even so, while we fight for honor and glory and survival, the humans fight only to win and all else be damned. I must say, they’ve fought pretty effectively here.”

One of the few tenar remaining to the Posleen to the west, those coming out of Chiriqui to try to help free their brethren trapped to the east, sidled up with a low hum. It rode low as well. One could never be sure where a human with a rifle might be hiding. The People were learning; the only question was “would they survive the lessons?”

“You two,” the Alrantath, or battalion commander, shouted from his slightly elevated perch on the tenar. “It’s time to move in. Ancestors with you,” the senior intoned in blessing.

While the men prepared positions, Connors took a few minutes off from his duties to review his last will and testament. As the AID had pointed out, “You don’t make a will to take care of your loved ones. You don’t take out life insurance for that purpose either. You do both precisely so you won’t die, Captain, for the Universe is full of whimsy and prefers to strike down those least prepared.”

He was reading the clause about custody of dependents should both he and Marielena die before the child reached maturity when he heard over the suit’s communicator, “Heeere theyyy commme…”

“Hold your fire,” Connors ordered. “Let’s let the Barbies have their fun and then hit ’em when they’re broken up and confused.”

The normals needed no encouragement, normally. As a general rule they didn’t understand the words anyway. They simply followed their gods’ orders and lived or died as fate decreed. Normals knew little of fear as long as their gods were there.

Grintarsas and Horolongas, on the other hand, were sentient. That meant that fear was their constant companion when on the Path of Fury. Thus, the encouraging shouts they both raised were for their own benefit and the benefit of each other.

Leading their packs, the two swarmed over the hill, each expecting to be cut down at any moment. Yet there was no fire. To all appearances, the metal threshkreen and the ground-tenar riding threshkreen were not even there.

Hurrah! We might live to see another day after all.

At the base of the ridge was a small stream, too small even to appear on any but small scale maps. It was only about chest high to a Posleen at its deepest. Bellowing and laughing, the Kessentai splashed into the murky water and arose on the other side. Without a moment’s hesitation, their People followed them in and likewise emerged, waving their boma blades and longer-ranged weapons.

“Should we stop and dress the line?” Grintarsas called to his buddy.

“No,” the other answered. “It would only leave us open to fire.”

Still they pressed on. Horolongas saw a number of flattish cylinders dotting the ground. Yellow like the blood and flesh of the People, these stood out starkly against the artillery-churned earth and the few spots of green vegetation remaining. They seemed harmless enough.

The cylinders grew thicker as the two Posleen scout oolt’os neared the place where the threshkreen had been reported as seen.

Normally, the Barbies went active as soon as they struck dirt after being armed. This was not, however, the only way they could be used. It was possible to have them remain passive, and only begin to kill on command.

Connors stuck a finger sensor over the lip of the trench in which he sheltered. (Actually, it was more of a scraping than a trench, as a large shell had expanded it, smashing out the walls and leaving a conical hole in which water had gathered. But it had been a trench and still retained a little of the outline of one.) The sensor gathered data which the AID converted into useable images to paint on Connors’ eye.

“Oh, you poor stupid bastards,” Connors whispered as he watched the twin Posleen columns advance heedless through the Barbie-sown field.

“AID,” he ordered, “activate the Barbies.”

Grintarsas heard it first, a bellow of pain from a mass of his followers. It confused him. There’d been no shots fired. He chanced a look to his left and saw a half dozen of his People, some flailing stumps in the air and others sliced through the neck or torso. Wherever hit, yellow blood sprayed. And he couldn’t see what had done it.

What terrible new silent weapon do these dishonorable threshkreen have now? he wondered, redoubling his efforts to race to the target before more of his followers fell to this silent menace.

“Not five-percenters,” Connors commented.

“No, Captain,” agreed the AID.

Connors’ finger watched as one Barbie after another sprang up, chopped off some legs or other bodily parts, then scooted to one side to wait for more. Even without any effort on the part of his company, the Posleen charge was falling apart in bloody stumps as the Barbies took them down by groups.

The finger locked on one particular Posleen, a Kessentai, obviously enough, by the erect crest, who seemed on the verge of understanding. The God King turned to tell his normals to fall back. Unfortunately, for him, the turning radius was just enough to bring him within range of a Barbie which immediately sprang into the air.

“Ooh… bad call,” snickered the captain.

It was fucking hilarious, that charge; every man watching who lived through the battle, later agreed. With their God King down the members of that oolt either froze in place or began to run wild. And it made no difference. Those who stood still weren’t safe because those who ran tended to set off Barbies that killed any who were near. Those who ran had almost no chance of escaping either, given the thickness with which the ground was strewn.

The finger panned across the scene. Of eight or nine hundred Posleen who’d begun the charge, perhaps two dozen were standing, trembling in the open.

“Should we off ’em, sir?” the first sergeant asked.

Connors had intended to but, on second thought, decided it was better to keep his men hidden.

“No, Top,” he answered. “Let’s keep a low profile for now. Pass it to the mech to scour ’em off.”

Oh, pain, Grintarsas almost wept. Demons of fire and ice, the pain.

At that, the Kessentai was lucky. The horrid little threshkreen device had only taken off one leg, just above the knee joint. Grintarsas had turned, almost on his own axis, and begun to shout out for his people to fall back when he saw from the corner of one eye a flat, yellow cylinder — dripping yellow blood — that scuttled over and fell, coming to rest about six meters to his right front. He’d tried to stop then, to brake himself before he could come within range of the thing. In this he had failed.

Silently the cylinder had arisen to about half a leg length above the ground. There was a flash, but it was over so quickly that for a moment Grintarsas wondered if it was illusion. In any case, it was no illusion that his next step had been on three legs rather than four. Nor was it an illusion that he’d fallen over, forward and to one side, his muzzle digging a furrow in the mud.

At first it hadn’t hurt. The actual severing had been so quick that the brain had barely registered it. But lying there, among the bodies and parts of bodies that littered the ground, had given the brain time to catch up. It hurt now.

The blood had stopped flowing fairly quickly; the genengineered Posleen were capable of staunching almost any wound, however severe, on their own while they lived. Still, the Kessentai had lost enough to become weak. That, added to the pain, made his mind fuzzy. He staggered in and out of consciousness regularly. He was out when the threshkreen heavy repeating weapons began to sweep the field, exterminating the last of his People and Horolongas’, still standing frozen in terror.

The God King’s only comfort, lying there amid the mud and blood, was the hypervelocity missile launcher he clutched to himself as a human baby might clutch to its mother.

The next seven attacks, none of them in overwhelming force and coming from both east and west alternatingly, Connors left to the Barbies and the mech. By the end of the last one, with the Barbie’s charges beginning to deplete, he decided that it was almost time for his men to show themselves, or as much of themselves as necessary to lace the Posleen with DU fire.

The eighth attack, probably more by fluke than plan, hit both sides of the long oval of the battle position simultaneously. That attack was also in strength. Worse, from that point on, attack by more than two hundred thousand Posleen was almost continuous.

“What the hell happened to the naval gunfire?” Connors asked the AID.

“They’ve got problems of their own, Captain. The reason we aren’t seeing any tenar here is that they’ve all gone to sea to go after the ships. The cruisers have pulled back south, but they aren’t going to be able to outrun tenar.”

“Fuck! How truly good.”

“Could be worse, Captain Connors. If the tenar weren’t there they’d be here. I project that we probably couldn’t deal with another four or five thousand tenar, with heavy weapons, when we’re already under attack by this many normals.”

“Yeah,” Connors agreed, lifting his grav gun over the lip of the trench to sweep it across the front of an approaching oolt’os. The leading Posleen simply exploded wherever a DU teardrop touched them, adding their own gore to the offal covering the battlefield. He ducked back down below ground level again before return fire could find him. “Yeah… thank God for small favors, I guess. How about the Panamanian artillery? They’re in range of us, at least, if not of Company A to the south.”

“They’re busy defending themselves,” the AID answered. “The rocket launchers’ ammunition is depleted. Every one of their guns had been moved to a position to do direct fire to cover the entrance of the valley we hid in all those weeks. Besides, they’re out of high explosive, anyway.”

Connors popped up again to see one badly bruised oolt’os had made it across the river and over the few remaining Barbies to get in among his men fighting to the east. It was boma blade against Indowy-built armor and monomolecular cutter against yellow flesh.

“Short bursts,” he ordered the AID and then, carefully sighting his grav gun, he began picking off the Posleen one by one.

Even through the armor, Connors felt someone or something plop to the ground beside him. He was about to turn and fire, instinctively, when he saw that it was the first sergeant.

“Looking… not so good, Skipper,” said the first sergeant, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps rather than the Army’s Airborne and Rangers like most of Fleet Strike’s Mobile Infantry.

“Losses? Ammo?” Connors asked, not because he couldn’t pull up the information immediately through his suit and ACS but because tracking personnel and supply were the first sergeant’s job and he might get miffed if someone tried to do it for him. Besides, Top was likely to add in comments on more than mere living and dead bodies that the AIDs were essentially indifferent to.

“We’re down twenty-three men, Skipper, half of that from Second Platoon. Ammo is good, except for Weapons which is having to break into the last of the 60mm and reload. The other thing, sir, is… well… the boys are getting tired.”

“Fear equals fatigue,” Connors quoted.

“Something like that,” Top agreed. “Thing is, the horsies should have broken by now. But they won’t break.”

“Nah… they can’t, Top. We’re blocking their only way out. And it isn’t like they can surrender or anything.”

“Yeah. Well… I’m off to buck up Second Platoon. Oh… did I mention that Lieutenant Nazari bought it?”

“Shit! And I barely knew the kid.”

It seemed like the horror would never end. Connors hadn’t known he could become sick of killing Posleen. But he could; he had.

“They just keep comin’, boss, and they keep comin’ stupid,” said the first sergeant of B Company, with a tone of grudging wonder in his voice.

“Stupid may be good enough in this case, Top. Besides, I don’t think they’re being stupid so much as desperate,” Connors answered, sliding down a trench, then lifting his head and arm over the berm just long enough to donate a couple of thousand depleted uranium teardrops to the Posleen. The crack of the teardrops was suppressed in Connors’ ear by the suit’s AID, as was the actinic streak each round made as it tore through the air at an appreciable fraction of c.

An infantry fighting vehicle from the 20^th Mech went up in a fiery blast from an HVM strike one hundred meters or so to Connors’ right. One moment it was sitting there, like a stolid Goliath, chunchunchunking 25mm high explosive rounds at the Posleen. The next its inadequate front glacis had been penetrated with a bright flash, hurling the heavy turret into the air, blasting the rear combat ramp right off its hinges and, in the process, incinerating the crew. They never felt a thing.

“Fuck!” Connors said.

“Sir, you okay?” Top’s voice was full of a concern that could only be called “professional.”

“Yeah… yeah. But the mech guys are getting hit hard.”

“Hey, boss, in case you didn’t notice, so are we.”

Connors called up the display. Shit. We are getting hit heavy. Of the one hundred and twenty-nine MI troops Connors had led into the blocking position, forty-seven were already outlined in black, killed or so badly wounded that they were out of the fight.

A long night and another day passed. The 60mm ran dry sometime overnight. This saw that section of the Weapons Platoon shoved into the line. Even the DU was down so low that the MI troopers were forced to start using single shots rather than the more usual bursts. This was less of a problem as the Posleen were also so badly beaten up that attacks were beginning to come in small groups of forty or fifty rather than just in solid waves.

The river to the east, the San Pedro, was so full of Posleen corpses that the normally smoothly flowing water had turned into something very like rapids. The water had spread out from its banks and, where it had once flowed, was turned to yellowish froth by the bleeding alien bodies. New attacking groups of the aliens found they could walk across on the bodies while scarcely getting their feet wet.

That is to say, they could walk if they could walk. Most of the Posleen coming from the east, trying to escape the closing cauldron, couldn’t walk. Whether from hunger or fatigue they could barely stagger. Even at that, the attacks came infrequently enough that Connors found time to troop the line, walking among the men and lending a few words of encouragement here, a friendly pat on the shoulder there.

He even found time to write to Marielena, a short note — not yet quite complete — about the time he wanted to spend with her as soon as he came out of the line, their future marriage — if she still wanted him — and plans for the child. He was stuck on finishing with some words, and he was not especially good with words, that might express how he felt about the woman, how much she meant to him, and how happy he was she had come into his life.

He was sitting down in the muck (for inside a suit muck was as good as anywhere else) struggling to finish the e-mail when he heard a welcome sound, something he hadn’t heard since the cruisers had disappeared to the south under massed tenar attack.

The AID allowed in the freight train rattle of the approaching shells, then cut the volume to something bearable when they struck the far side of the river ford B Company had guarded. Connors looked up from the muck just in time to see a half dozen rock, mud and water geysers rising suddenly into the air.

The command circuit was immediately full of chatter, of cheers. Connors scrambled up the side of the crater (or had it once been a trench?) and saw, under magnification, the lead elements of the Panamanian mechanized corps.

“We made it,” he whispered to none but his AID. Standing upright, he waved to the oncoming relief force and fired three DU rounds, at super slow rate, to mark that he and his command were still there.

“So it would…”

Grintarsas was in shock now, almost completely. Whether it was the shock or olfactory fatigue, the rotten-meat and garbage stench of the People’s bodies bloating in the sun around him was gone. He still cradled the HVM launcher in his arms as he had for the past two cycles.

Consciousness was not his to control; he drifted in and out of reality randomly for the most part. The shock of threshkreen ballistic weapons exploding on the other side of what he had once thought of as his objective was enough, if barely, to bring him to consciousness.

He saw the threshkreen, metal-armored and soft skinned both, standing up and cheering. It was infuriating. How could they cheer such pointless destruction? They didn’t even bother to harvest the food, adding further to the insults they heaped upon his People.

One threshkreen stood above the others, very near to the summit of the old objective. Grintarsas took his HVM launcher and lifted up the sight. Painfully, he moved it to line up upon that one prominent threshkreen. At some level the Kessentai knew that the backblast from the HVM would kill him. He didn’t care so long as he could take one of the hated humans with him. Moving slowly, Grintarsas finely adjusted the weapon, making sure the aiming dot was precisely on that threshkreen.

Then, giving a last smile despite the pain, he fired.

Connors never saw or felt a thing. The blast of the HVM launch, the white streak it left upon the air, and the disintegration of the torso armor of his suit happened so close together that they may as well have been simultaneous. The sudden overpressure inside the suit was enough to blow the arms and helmet off. The front and back plates likewise came apart, even as the missile turned the soft-fleshed body inside to dust. The AID died to the same blow, the e-mail Connors had been working on still unfinished.

Interlude

With the gradual breaking up of the Posleen horde, the jungle had grown comparatively quiet again. Rather, it had returned to normal: birds calling, insects chittering, the steady pitter-patter of rain. The normal denizens, herbivores mostly, had returned with the sounds. Following the herbivores came the predators: snakes, lizards… the jungle cats, small and large.

He was like a leopard… on steroids. Normally a spotted species, this jaguar was “melanistic,” which is to say its coat had darkened over the generations to provide better camouflage in the dim light that penetrated the jungle canopy overhead. At nearly two hundred and fifty pounds, it was largish for its species.

The jaguar hadn’t fled when the Posleen horde had first approached. Rather, when its normal prey had fled it had simply followed. A cat’s gotta eat. Now the prey had returned and, so, it had returned as well to its normal spot by the broad river where its a la carte menu often came to water.

Now this is new, thought the nearly black jaguar, looking down unseen from his lordly perch upon the half dozen horselike creatures that ambled the trail below. Never seen caimen with such long necks. Or six limbs. Smell funny, too. It’s a lot to eat at one sitting but, then again, they look a little skinny. I think lunch is served.

There was an empty spot inside Guanamarioch where his friend, Zira, had once dwelt. He was lonely now, with only normals for company. They couldn’t talk, tell jokes… teach one to fish. All they were good for at the moment, reproduction, he was incapable of. Even if he hadn’t been so weak from long-term starvation, despite the thresh provided by his slaughtered pack and his friend, the itch and ache where the jungle rot had latched onto his severed reproductive member made reproductive activity impossible.

Shambling along, head down, the very picture of Posleen misery, Guanamarioch might have lost his life then. Only a warning cry by one of the few normals remaining to him caused him to look up in time to see the midnight black streak descending.

The thing, the nightmare, must not have thought about the implications of a centauroid form. Guano was just able to get one arm up to block. The creature’s jaws latched onto that, rather than the skull for which it had been aiming. The jaws slammed shut with a sickening crunch of bone. Almost, the God King fainted.

Worrying the arm like a shit demon from legend, the black creature also began lashing out with its front claws. One of these raked across the Kessentai’s face, lacerating it and ripping empty one eye socket. From then on, fighting blind as he kept his remaining good eye away from the claws, Guano fought — or, rather, defended himself — by feel alone.

The quarters were too close for his own boma blade. After what seemed like an eternity of fending off fang and claw, two of his normals came up and dispatched the attacker. They were careful, this time, to cut off no pieces of their god.

Chapter 35

There hadn’t been time to consummate things.

Pretty word, thought Daisy, “consummate.” Fact is, I wanted to get laid. But with the firing, the skipper’s refusal to leave the bridge, the underway replenishment of ammunition…

He hasn’t even kissed me since that once. I’d almost think he’s afraid to.

McNair paced the deck of the bridge. He had belted on his sword — and felt silly doing it too until he remembered that his ship just might be boarded — and placed one of the Sterling submachine guns Daisy had procured nearby. One never knew, after all.

His mind was aflame with worries, of which there were two main. One was impending action, without much cover, against the Posleen who were sure to try to escape west through the old and now recovered San Pedro Line. That one was easy; he knew how to fight his ship. Rather, it would have been except for the other.

What do I do about Daisy? I’m no good with women, never have been. I knew ships. As a ship I could love her and comfort her and take care of her. But as a woman?

He’d ordered her below, once they veered to starboard around the southwest corner of the Peninsula de Azuero. And she’d refused, just flat refused to leave his side. The little voice she could project had said nothing. Instead, she’d crossed her arms under her — oh, sweet Jesus, those — breasts, stamped her foot defiantly, and shaken her head frantically “No!”

Almost he’d decided to put her over the side, in a boat with a crew with orders to take her ashore. He’d even said he would. Then the little voice had come, informing him, “You can’t, Skipper. The body’s brain is the AID. Anything more than half a mile away — the same distance I could project a hologram — and the body dies. And you can’t send the AID off the ship and still fight.”

He’d scowled then, scowled at the AID, scowled at the woman.

And felt immediately like a heel. “Belay that. The woman can stay.”

Sniffing, the woman Daisy had turned her nose up and away as if to say, How could you even think about sending me away?

McNair still didn’t know what to do, or what to say. He had no idea how to act. He was lost until…

“Captain, this is Lidar. We’ve got multiple Posleen tenar… correction; multiple groups of… correction: Oh, hell, there’s a shitpot of them, Skipper. Thousands, at least, and they’re heading our way.”

McNair bit his lip for a moment and turned to Daisy the woman. He grasped her gently but firmly by each shoulder and leaned close to her ear.

“Love,” he whispered, “we’ll work this out later; I promise. For now, I need you to go down to CIC. It’s armored there. I’ll probably be along later. Take the AID with you.”

He felt her body stiffen once again with defiance. “You have to go, Daisy. What happens if this body is hit? What happens to the ship? The AID will feel everything, won’t it? Can we count on the AID to fight this ship if it is feeling you sliced in two?”

He didn’t add, but thought, Can we count on me to fight this ship if I see you sliced in two?

The woman Daisy began to struggle in his grasp. He refused to let go until she subsided.

“You know I am right, don’t you?” He felt her slump and saw her head, reluctantly, nod. “Leave me your avatar and go below then. It’ll be okay. And we will work this out as soon as we can. And, Daisy? I do love you, hon.”

The woman looked into the captain’s eyes and saw that he spoke the truth. Firmly, she nodded her acquiescence. But in her own eyes flashed the determined warning, Yes, you cannot escape; we will be together.

Binastarion told his AS, “Project an image and magnify it.”

A holographic picture of the two ships sprang up in front of the tenar. Carefully the Kessentai squinted over the projection. The ships were as alike as two abat in a nest. Then he found, so he thought, what he was looking for.

“There, AS. Focus in on that section there.” He pointed at the hologram. “Okay. Good. Now cut to the same part of the other ship. Hmmm. Back to the first.” There should be some marks, some scarring where we hit it, on the ship which killed my boy.

“Got it!” the God King exulted. “There is the murderer of my son and frustrator of my dreams. Orders.”

“Ready to copy, Binastarion,” the AS replied.

“Skipper, Lidar. The aliens are splitting into four groups. One seems to be veering off to go after Salem. But three of them are coming straight for us.”

“Cap’n, this is CIC. I confirm Lidar’s projection.”

“Ready to fire, Captain,” announced the avatar, which appeared suddenly on the bridge.

For a moment McNair felt more at ease. The avatar was, after all, not the girl. Pheromones. It must have been the pheromones. Christ, in the flesh I nearly did her against the wheel.

“What are we carrying in our anti-lander gun barbettes?” McNair asked, more calmly that he felt.

“The first five rounds in the magazines are canister, Skipper. Plus there’s another twelve rounds per standing by.”

“Daisy Mae, show me the Posleen deployments.”

On the holographic map projected by the ship McNair made out the four groups. Lidar and CIC had assessed well.

“Daisy, priority of fire is the northernmost group. Commence firing. Order Salem to support as she is able.”

“Wilco, Captain. I am also projecting holographic deception measures”… McNair saw the great shapely legs appear to either side of the bridge and heard false lightning crackle overhead… “but I don’t think they’ll help much this time.”

The giant demoness appeared before Binastarion’s attack groups. He was not fooled. Many nights had he stood awake, thinking on how the ship had deceived him previously, to his great cost.

“AS, how many plasma cannon and HVMs do we carry?”

“Ninety-seven plasma cannon, Binastarion, and seventy-two HVM launchers with at least three missiles each.”

Ahead, the God King saw the black, angry puffs — nine huge, ugly things — that told him the enemy had fired its anti-tenar rounds.

“For what we are about to receive…” the Kessentai muttered.

“What’s that, lord?”

“Never mind, AS. Call it an old Kessentai’s foolish sentimentality. Take centralized control of the plasma cannon and the HVMs. Plot a pattern to blanket anywhere in that apparition that the threshkreen demon-ship might be.”

The thousands of 20mm tungsten balls launched by Des Moines and the one hundred and sixty-nine HVMs and plasma bolts launched by the Posleen crossed each other. Binastarion was surprised by the bright flashes made when a bit of canister struck one of his shots. That didn’t happen much, though. A fraction of a second later over one hundred of his tenars’ saddles emptied. At about the same time, the Des Moines was struck in nine places.

Alarm bells were ringing somewhere, off in the distance. McNair knew that that meant something, but at the moment he couldn’t remember just what. It was important, though. He was sure of that. Now if only he could remember.

There was smoke, somewhere above. He could smell it slightly, but not quite see it.

Oh. That’s because I am facing down. Why am I facing down?

The captain struggled to roll over onto his back and… Oh, shit. That’s a mistake.

He tried, even so, until with agony tearing through his gut he righted himself. A little more effort, and a lot more pain, and he managed to prop himself against a metal wall. Now he could see the smoke, pouring out of the armored bridge through one hole through the hatchway and another, or so he presumed, on the other side. Bad… very bad. He refused to look down at the direction of the pain. He was afraid of what he might see.

The hatchway opened and a… thing crawled out, feeling ahead of itself with one handless arm. The other was used to prop up the torso. It didn’t actually say anything. Instead, it made a hardly human keening sound. McNair thought he should recognize it but couldn’t remember.

He looked right. There were some dead men there. Blood from their torn bodies leaked onto the deck, smelling of copper and iron. He wondered if some of the blood might be his own. Then, too, he smelled ruptured intestines, the odor of feces hanging heavy.

That made him look down at the source of the pain.

Oh, shit.

Hard, he tried hard to remember. His name came first. Then his job. Then, I am on a ship… CA-134… the USS Des Moines… the… ummm…

“Daisy!” the captain called as loudly as he could. That wasn’t very loud, certainly not loud enough to be heard over the steady explosions… No… those are our guns firing. We’re still in the fight, my girl and I.

He’d expected someone… ah, a hologram… to appear when he’d called for Daisy. But nothing came.

Using both hands to hold in what seemed intent on coming out, McNair got to his knees. One leg came up but his foot slipped on the deck awash in blood. He fell with an agonizing jolt.

Must… see.

Again he tried to rise, more carefully this time. He leaned against the metal wall on which he had rested for support and balance. Eventually his head popped over the rim of the wall.

“Fuck,” McNair whispered.

Number one turret was still in action, he saw, but number two was utterly wrecked, the armor torn open and men and bits of men showing hanging on the jagged scraps. Smoke and fire poured out of it. He thought he heard screaming coming from within but couldn’t be sure.

He heard a steady Brrrrp… Brrrrp coming from both sides of the ship. Looking out he saw tracers arcing up. Some of the dots that were coming toward the ship — Posleen. Those are Posleen — fell out of the sky to splash into the sea. One exploded with a tremendous flash that engulfed several more.

Then the avatar did appear, though it flickered. “I am sorry for not answering immediately, my captain. I am hurt.”

“Hurt? No… no, you can’t be hurt,” McNair croaked.

“I am hurt, Captain,” the avatar repeated. “Number two is gone as are fifty-one and fifty-three. Number three is damaged, unable to traverse but still able to fire. One of the reactors is out, as well; we took another salvo after the one that hit here.”

“Marine marksman topside,” McNair ordered weakly.

“I have already ordered that, Skipper, but it won’t be enough. Even with the Panamanian Cazadores we carry it won’t be enough.”

“Salem?”

“My sister is under attack but fighting well. She has little to spare for us, however.”

“Okay, beautiful girl. Head to open sea. And don’t give up. Fight us till we sink.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” the avatar answered solemnly.

Back still against the wall of the navigation bridge, McNair began slowly to sink to the deck.

Daisy the woman had full access to the ship and the AID. She was the ship and the AID. She saw her captain as if she had been standing on the bridge with him. She saw him sinking as if dying. She saw the hands trying futilely to hold in the intestines. Even worse, she saw the leaking blood.

With an inarticulate shriek she jumped up, grabbed the AID and clipped it to her belt, and ran to CIC’s hatch. A Marine who was on guard attempted to bar the way. She backhanded the boy, sending him sprawling. Then she emerged into chaos.

In the smoke and flame she heard, “Goddammit, Smitty, I don’t care what it does to your fingers. Connect that hose!”… “Aaiaiai, my eyes!”… “Mama… mama”… “Corpsman!”… “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”…

Partly from the smoke but more from something else entirely, Daisy the woman began to weep as she stumbled along the narrow passageways. My crew, my boys, oh, my brave boys.

“The ship is plainly sinking, Binastarion. Might I suggest we save our cannon and HVM fire for more suitable targets?”

“I’ve seen that demon-bitch ‘ruined’ before, AS. I’ll believe she is down for good when I can see her bubbles coming up through the water. Even so, you’re right. Switch fire to railguns to clear the enemy decks. Order Tenar Group Jarn in to drop the assault detachment on the ship. Let’s see them get the fires and leakage under control while they battle our boarders.”

The worst was Morgen, the cat. Daisy almost didn’t notice her, lying in a tangled heap on the fourth — or splinter — deck where a shard of sharp metal had nearly severed the kitten in two. Tears flowed afresh as she bent down and picked up the bloody scrap, pressing it to her breasts instinctively while twisting her head and touching her chin to it head and pointed, furry ears. Her one free hand stroked the kitten’s fur, ignoring the blood.

Then she heard the clang of something large landing on the deck above.

The normal hated water, deep water anyway. Posleen couldn’t swim and the creature knew instinctively that if it fell or was cast from the hurtling tenar it would have sunk so deep none could have harvested it. Inwardly it shuddered at the… no, not thought. It shuddered at the feeling of being forever cut off from its People.

Thus, when its newfound god’s tenar had touched upon the blazing metal construction that, mercifully, floated on the water, the normal had felt nothing but relief. Moreover, it soon had company as other tenar landed, these also disgorging single normals or in one case a pair of them. The orders of the Kessentai driving those tenar were apparently the same as those this normal received through signs and body language. There is thresh in this ship. Cut through the metal and harvest it.

Then, as one, all the tenar lifted off, leaving the normals — with but a single Kessentai, Xenotraghal — in charge, to the work they understood so well.

Daisy, still holding the kitten, lifted her head out of the hatch to topside. A quick glance told her all she needed to know. The Posleen were on deck, amidships, cutting their way through with their monomolecular swords. Marines and Cazadores shot them down, and were shot down in turn.

But none of them were watching her. Risking the chance of a stray shot, she leapt out of the hatch and raced to the ladder that led to the bridge. She scrambled up the ladder, emerging onto the abattoir the Posleen HVM had made of both the navigation and the armored bridges. She had to step over the body of a burnt and dismembered thing to enter.

And there was her captain and her love, hurt, dying… maybe dead.

The ship was armored on its main turrets and over its armored belt and deck. The top deck, however, was still teak and light metal. With others of its kind trading shots with the threshkreen who popped out to fire a burst before retiring behind protecting metal, the normal used its monomolecular boma blade to hack through wood and steel. Two of those helping it fell, yellow blood gushing to run over the decks and drip below through where the cuts had been made.

The sole Kessentai afloat was bellowing. The normals didn’t understand one word in ten, but they did understand the urgency in the voice. Redoubling their efforts they soon had a great gaping hole in the top deck. Part of the hole led to what seemed a closed room. Next to that, the gap revealed a long corridor, narrow but not so narrow as those of the Aldenata-designed ships.

The God King pointed to two of the normals and then down into the compartment. Bearing shotguns, the normals pointed down and fired. Metallic pellets careened off the bulkheads with the sound of hail hitting a tin roof. Confident that any threshkreen that might have been hiding below could not have avoided being wounded, at the least, the God King ordered two normals to leap. This they did, somewhat clumsily. One broke its foreleg in the jump. The other killed it and waited until a third had joined.

With two hale normals in the compartment, they used their bomas to cut around the obvious hatchway. This fell outward leaving a hole suitable for passage of beings the size of the People. Alarmed cries of the threshkreen echoed in the narrow passageway. Human bullets pinged off of steel bulkheads. The normals answered with shotgun fire.

Commending his soul to the ancestors, Xenotraghal the Kessentai jumped below, using the body of the broken-legged normal to cushion his fall. He carried a railgun which he used to fire first in one direction, then in the other. The threshkreen cries changed to screams and gurgles.

Sending the normals out first, the Kessentai beckoned for others to follow. Then, inch by inch, they began clearing the ship.

Daisy looked out from the bridge sternward to where the Posleen had landed in some mass. They were lining up to port as if to plunge below. To starboard, however, was clear.

She felt for a pulse on her captain’s neck. It was there, fast and faint and seemingly fading. Still holding the kitten in place atop her breasts with her right hand, she bent and took McNair’s right wrist in her left. Dropping to one knee she wound the captain’s torso around her neck, plugging his right armpit into her own left shoulder. Then, thinking Damn, but my captain is heavy. I would have felt his weight first in a different way, she straightened. Still, tank-born, she was much stronger than any woman born of woman. Truth be told, she was stronger than many men. She held the weight easily enough.

The load was unbalanced. Daisy the woman bent her knees, pushed upward suddenly, and shifted her body underneath. That’s better. The captain’s right arm and leg hung down limply in front. She gathered them up in the crook of her left arm, using the hand of that arm to hold the kitten in place. This freed her right arm. Bending one last time, she took hold of the Sterling. Bracing it on the deck, she jacked the bolt, loading the weapon.

Then, heading to the side of the ship, port, where the Posleen were not entering, she left the bridge, scaled down the ladder and — tight squeeze — brought herself, McNair and the kitten below. McNair’s naval officer’s sword, hanging down from his belt, paddled her rump lightly with each step downward.

And I might have enjoyed that, too, under different circumstances…

Father Dwyer felt the ship listing as it took on water unevenly. There was a shock and a vibration felt through the deck and the listing stopped and began to reverse itself.

The priest looked heavenward. “I don’t know whether that’s the exec in CIC ordering counterflooding, or my own dear convert Daisy Mae doing it on her own. In either case, Father, bless their efforts. And strike down the enemies of your people.”

The priest had a Sterling in his hands. Two Marines and three Panamanian Cazadores clustered around him. Ahead he could hear the clatter of alien claws on the steel deck. The clattering grew closer.

“Wait for it, me boys,” the priest whispered, calmly. “Wait for it… wait for it.” Then, with a great cry of “Deus vult,” the Jesuit stuck the Sterling around the corner and pulled the trigger.

The God King caught the barest glimpse of a threshkreen in a funny collar, firing one of their small but large-bore repeating weapons. Before the thing even flashed Xeno threw himself to one side to take cover in an open area filled with dead and dying thresh lying atop long tables.

Food, however, was the last thing on the Kessentai’s mind. Instead, it simply breathed a sigh of relief that the fire which had struck down the two normals preceding him had not gathered him — just yet, mission unfulfilled — to his ancestors.

Not that it makes any difference. This is a suicide mission and I have no chance either at mortal life or even as thresh consumed to become part of the host. Still, I have my duty and perhaps the ancestors will gather me to them and grant me a high place if I have completed it well.

The Kessentai was one of those who might have grown into what humans called “a five-percenter,” one of those God Kings whose intelligence made them more dangerous than the other ninety-five in one hundred put together. Still, he had been obscure, a very junior scout leader. Perhaps he had been chosen for this mission because of his obscurity, perhaps because of his potential. He didn’t know.

He did know, however, that his mission was to interrupt repairs so that this ship would sink beneath the waves. Sinking required taking on enough water to produce negative buoyancy. Water was below and, if anywhere, was coming into the ship from below. Thus, it was into the bowels of the ship that he had to proceed.

There is a hatchway. I can’t squeeze through it, though, without expanding it some. But there I will complete my mission.

Pointing for two more normals to enlarge the opening, the God King kept watch as they sliced away the hatch and began paring away the sides. He heard the sound of thresh voices and the pitter-patter of thresh feet on the deck. He braced for a counterattack which didn’t come.

With the hatch enlarged and four more normals in tow, the Kessentai and his party started down.

Daisy could just make it through the hatch through the armor deck if she turned sideways to descend. Unfortunately, that was a very awkward way to go down a steep, narrow ship’s ladder. She tried and having once almost lost her balance, she hung the Sterling around her neck, thus freeing her hand to hold on for balance.

If I can get my captain to the tank he might yet live. If I can’t, I would rather die with him, here where we have spent so much time together.

There was a series of explosions topside, which was felt throughout the ship. The klaxons began to sound and the ship’s intercom crackled to life. “All hands, now hear this. Abandon ship. I repeat, abandon ship.”

“Aye,” Dwyer muttered, “I suppose it’s time and past time. And I don’t think the counterflooding’s been enough. The ship rides differently. It feels lower in the water, somehow.”

The Marines understood the call well enough. The Jesuit translated for the Cazadores with his party, instructing them to grab and don one of the life vests, should they find any. Then, with no more sounds of the aliens nearby, he led them to a stern hatchway. I suppose if we’re to have a chance we’ll need a lifeboat. If any survived.

“Kessentai, there is a power source ahead,” the AS whispered.

“This entire ship is one big power source, AS,” Xeno answered.

“This one is different. The Net tells me it is from one of the Elves’ regeneration tanks.”

“So?”

“So, it occurs to me that you might survive, after all, if you can make it to that tank before the ship sinks. There wouldn’t be room for the normals, of course.”

“Indeed?”

“Indeed.”

The God King’s heart began to beat a bit faster. He might live after all and rejoin his clan on some future day when this ship was recovered to scavenge its refined metal. If his People could do so in space surely they could do so underwater, though the Kessentai was not sure exactly how they would proceed.

Heart beating fast (for she was sure she heard Posleen speech ahead as she proceeded down the under-armor passageway) Daisy stopped for a moment, uncertain as to what exactly to do. Her ship-body was beginning to go down by the bow. It could not be much longer now before it went completely under.

She, too, had heard the call to abandon ship. Even if her ears had not heard it, the ship-body had. And, of course, whatever the ship body knew the AID knew. Since the AID was the brain…

The AID stopped the body for a moment. It knew well what it was like to be left alone. The idea of leaving that part of it which was the ship alone for however long, if ever, it might take to recover it was simply impossible. At something analogous to light speed, it began copying the “files” that were embedded in the very structure of the ship, erasing them as soon as the copying was done. The hull might rest below, but the essence of the ship would live in the AID.

Perhaps in time, with luck, I might return everything to as it was; to be the trinity of ship and AID and woman, all of us, together, loving our captain and crew. For now, this is best.

Daisy tapped in to the ship’s nervous system and used it to measure her enemy. Five of them, though how many are normals and how many God Kings I cannot tell. They stand between me and life for my captain, though, and for this crime they must die.

As quietly as possible, she set her burdens, cat and captain, down in a small, semi-sheltered spot behind an open hatchway. She had never actually used one of the Sterlings she had acquired on the black market. Even so, the tank had programmed her with full battle reflexes, almost as an afterthought. She knew how to use it despite never having actually touched one before this grim day. Also quietly, she removed the captain’s sword from its sheath.

How am I going to do this? she wondered. I can’t leave the AID part of me awake while the human bodies sleep in the tank. It will go completely mad. Ah… I know, though it will take some timing and concentration. If I can make it to the tank, I can put my captain in and lie beside him. The kitten will fit easily enough over my breasts. Just as the tank closes I will shut off the AID. That would kill my woman’s body but the tank won’t let me die. Then all will sleep together until the resurrection. My last thought as the tank claims us must be, “Click on the AID’s power switch.”

Opposite the captain and a little to the stern, she found another half sheltered spot, took her own position and waited.

The lights were still working, which the God King found rather odd. After the damage the ship had taken from fire and whatever else his own boarding party had been able to destroy he would not have expected the convenience. Most of the light came from the threshkreen glowing balls. Some of it came from flat plates attached to the walls by no method he could see.

There was a dangerous spot ahead, one where passageways met and where there was no cover. The Kessentai stepped into the middle of his normals and grunted for the party to advance.

She had never seen them personally except as distant black spots, targets to be serviced. Thus, when the party of Posleen stepped out into the junction, Daisy gasped and nearly shat herself with terror.

The terror itself was her spur to action. Sighting down the suppressed submachine gun, with its metal folding stock against her shoulder, she fired. The thing was loaded with frangible ammunition. She knew it was because she had seen to it that there was no other kind of 9mm ammunition aboard. These broke apart and dispersed — yet another “war crime” to her record — when they hit flesh. For these purposes Posleen flesh was no different from human. The bullets flew and virtually exploded within the alien bodies, dumping all their not inconsiderable energy instantaneously.

Brrrp. A Posleen fell, splay legged. Brrrp. Another was bowled over, bleating like a camel. Brrrp. A third, just turning to face her, took two to the head and, going limp, fell in a heap. Brrrp. The fourth she missed. Brrrp. It went down with three in the torso — yellow flesh and blood exploded outward — and one in the throat. Br… fuck, empty.

Daisy dropped the weapon, picked up the sword and stood. An animal growl began to build in her throat. The Posleen answered the growl with its own war cry. It, too, sense of honor implicated, dropped its railgun and drew a blade.

Mindless, enraged howls echoing through the passages of the lower deck, the two charged.

Dwyer saw the lone tenar slowly approaching, rather than charging and firing. Surrounded by ninety or so survivors — there hadn’t been time to do a full headcount — in the one serviceable lifeboat they had found topside, he called out, “Boys, it’s been good to serve with you. Now stand ready to take one last one with us.”

But the tenar had not opened fire. Instead, the rider had pulled a metal stick from his harness, stood fully erect in the flying sled, and called out with both arms raised above it. Other circling tenar had stopped then, their God Kings looking curiously at the tiny band of humans bobbing on the ocean waves.

The tenar came closer, closer until finally it was not more than ten feet from the edge of the lifeboat. The rider then cocked its head and said something in its own language. That something had sounded unaccountably gentle. Then the God King raised its crest, shouted once again, and tossed Dwyer the stick it held. Dwyer caught it, fumblingly at first. He looked up to see that the alien had raised one palm, holding it open and towards the humans. The priest returned the gesture and added one of his own. He didn’t understand the why’s of it, but he knew he and the rest had just been spared. The priest made the sign of the cross at the Posleen.

“That was damned odd thing to do, Binastarion,” the AS said as the tenar glided above the waves.

The Kessentai smiled very slightly. “Was it really, AS? Think about it. We could only have taken that little craft full of threshkreen by firing on them. That would have sunk them and so we could not have taken them anyway.”

“I didn’t mean you, God King. I meant the human with the strange collar in that small boat. He was blessing you, you know. So says the Net anyway. Though, now that you mention it, throwing the stick for a group of threshkreen who have done you and the People so much harm is a bit odd, too.”

The great threshkreen she-demon ship was still firing as water engulfed first the deck, then the lower guns, and finally the great turrets. Binastarion felt a kind of remorse. It had been a fine enemy.

May I never meet its like again.

“It seemed right,” Binastarion said simply.

“So?” The AS queried. “They were still an enemy.”

The Kessentai was silent for a few moments before he answered, “We are as we were made to be, you soulless bucket of bolts. We are a hard and a harsh species, AS, but we are not a wastefully cruel one.”

It was the AS’s turn to go silent. When it spoke again it asked, “What now, Binastarion? The host is ruined. The threshkreen will drive us from this land. We cannot hold it from them nor take another in our present state.”

“I had thought upon honorable suicide, AS,” the Kessentai admitted wearily.

“Not so fast, Binastarion. There is… correction, there may be, another way. Far to the north a Kessentai of rare ability is gathering a great host to fight the humans. He is building a new overclan from the remnants of such as ours. He promises succor, without edas, no less. He offers new lands for his new clan, once the great power of this world is defeated. He has new ways, ways something like those of the threshkreen who have defeated us here and held the People at bay there.”

“What is the name of this god-like God King, AS?”

“Lord, the Net lists him as Tulo’stenaloor.”

Interlude

He was the hunted now, and he knew it. There were no more ambushes with the explosive devices. Instead, the hunt had become much more personal, with single arrows leaping out from who knew where to impale his few remaining normals. Well, they had been few. They were all gone now, gone and eaten at the behest of this terrible jungle.

He knew they were eaten, too, for once he had gone to sleep sheltering behind the corpse of one of his late followers. When he had awakened, the normal was half gone and his corpse covered with uncountable thousands of the little insects that infested this place.

Only once since the explosive ambush Guanamarioch had caught plain sight of his hunter, the little, naked, brown threshkreen demon. The God King had raised his railgun, taken aim, pressed the firing stud…

And been rewarded by a small explosion that damaged his left hand, the stink of fresh ozone, and a small cloud of smoke. The jungle rot had claimed yet another victim.

The little demon was here now, too. The God King sensed it. He raised his head fearfully. An arrow struck a tree and quivered there for an instant, close to Guano’s head. This was his chance. It took time for the demon to reload and aim his primitive weapon.

Guano saw an unusual light ahead and sprinted for it. An arrow struck him in his haunches, burying itself — but not too deeply — in the stringy muscle. Instead of slowing him, the pain helped propel the Kessentai onward.

Onward and onward he flew. He hardly noticed when the jungle gave way to clearing. When he did notice he stopped suddenly at the shock of not being surrounded to the sides and above with the jungle growth. The sun shone on his back. For a moment, overcome with emotion, Guanamarioch raised himself on his rear legs and began to dance and prance, those same rear legs propelling him upward again and again in boundless happiness. In his own tongue he shouted to the Heavens, words of praise and thanks, that he had finally escaped.

Then he saw the little threshkreen, bow in one hand and arrow held in the other, following him at a dead run. The God King stopped prancing then and, arrow sticking out of his rump or not, began a mad dash forward. On the open ground he was much faster than the little, brown threshkreen.

He didn’t see the shiny vines until it was too late. Guano tried to brake himself, then — sensing that would fail — tried to leap over. No matter; he came down and found himself surrounded by the shiny vines, caught like a nestling in the pens. He thrashed a bit but the shiny vines were metal and had nasty barbs that dug into his flesh. His thrashing only caused him to become more tightly bound.

A group of threshkreen emerged. Some were light in the face, others quite dark. About half were the same color as the threshkreen who hunted him. These threshkreen seemed more curious than hostile.

“AS, can you translate into their language?” Guanamarioch asked.

“English or Spanish, yes, Kessentai. I have downloaded both tongues from the Net.”

Guano tried to nod, but the shiny vines had his muzzle caught fast. “Tell these, then, that they can kill me, they can eat me, but I ask under the Law for assimilation into their clan. Tell them I would adopt the proper posture if I could, but I can’t. Explain the law, if they give you time. Tell them they can do whatever they like as long as THEY DON’T SEND ME BACK THERE!”

Chapter 36

I don’t think their hearts are in it anymore, thought Digna as five of her guns opened up on a large band of Posleen shambling forward, heads down as if walking into a fierce rainstorm.

There had been some tense moments in the last several hours. At first the enemy had come like a flood, seemingly unstoppable and tripping over their own dead to get at the BM-21s whose fire still protected the gringos that had sealed the bottle of the Posleen trap. Digna had sent out the word to her gun crews, “Mothers with children: you are all that stand between them and the enemy who would eat them. Mothers to the front.”

And the women had heard and understood. Perhaps they had understood, too, why this cranky old battleaxe who looked eighteen or nineteen had had the children brought.

I am a woman. I know what my sex values above all. For anything else, these women might not have fought as they did. But for their kids they would sacrifice anything.

Silently, Digna vowed to adopt into her own clan, and see they were properly raised, any children who had lost their mothers this day.

Below her, constrained by the narrow valley road that led to the town behind, the Posleen band went down as canister cut great swatches through them. The alien enemy moaned en masse as limbs were severed and entrails ripped out.

Another group was forming a kilometer or so away. Digna, weary or not, shivered with anticipation at the thought of bringing this group down as well.

Did you think, you alien beasts, that I, that I, Digna of the Clan Miranda would let such as you keep possession of my land, of the graves of my ancestors and my children?

The commander of the Fifth Infantry was a proud man that day, though he knew it was hardly entirely to his own efforts or those of his regiment that the lone Posleen standing under guard outside the command post tent had told the story he had.

It had not been easy to get the Posleen even to the tent. Moments after his surrender a fierce little Chocoes had shown up insisting that the alien’s head belonged to him. Though the sergeant in charge of the squad had tried to explain that the alien was a prisoner of war the Chocoes had been very insistent. Only with the arrival of the commander himself had a deal been worked out whereby the regiment would pay the Indian for the life of the alien. The alien, too, had agreed.

All things considered, the price was worth it.

“That’s right, sir,” the commander told the Chief of SOUTHCOM over the radio. “We have one Posleen prisoner of war. And, sir, he insists that the rest of his horde is not coming. Dead, he says, every one… Yessir, I do believe him. Oh, there may be a few ferals still out there, but they’re no threat… Yes, sir, the regiment is preparing to move east again now. If there’s any concentration of the Posleen we can handle them. They don’t seem very capable of operating in the jungle.”

The Posleen attacks had petered out before nightfall. By dawn, the sound of firing, human firing, had grown intense.

It was always a touchy problem when friendly forces met over enemy bodies. The best solution, the one adopted, had been for the 20^th Infantry and the remnants of First of the O-Eighth to simply pull back into three battle positions and let the Panamanian divisions through the two gaps thus created. Yes, a few of the aliens had no doubt also escaped through those gaps. No matter; they would be hunted down.

Connors’ XO — no, the CO since Connors had fallen — heard a strange music coming from a couple of trucks carrying a band that passed through the gap nearest her much depleted command.

“AID, what is that music?” she asked.

The AID took a moment before it answered. No doubt it was searching the Net. “That music is ‘Deguello.’ ”

“Meaning?”

“It’s a Moorish tune picked up by the Spanish during the Reconquista and brought over to this hemisphere. It means ‘cut throat.’ They sometimes call it ‘The Massacre Song.’ I think it’s directed as much at the Panamanians as the Posleen.”

The Posleen tenar were gone now, gone without a trace. The Marlene Dietrich look-alike avatar on the bridge wept inconsolably as the ship thrashed about over the spot where Des Moines had sunk. “My sister… my sister…”

Sidney Goldblum wanted to reach out and comfort the avatar but, of course, could not. The ship’s chaplain, Rabbi Meier, came onto the battle scarred bridge.

“Sally, is she really gone?” Goldblum asked.

Still weeping, the avatar answered, “I sense nothing below, Rabbi. Nothing. She has to be gone.”

“We’ve been here long enough, Sally,” Goldblum interjected. “We have to go search for survivors.”

Meier held up an index finger at the captain. Wait. Then he bowed his yarmulked head. “Let us go to the stern then, Sally, and say kaddish over the soul of your sister.”

The sniffling stopped, almost. Still through tears that appeared on her holographic face, Sally responded, “But she converted to Catholicism, Rabbi. Would kaddish even work.”

“Kaddish is really for you, my child. And besides, do you think that the Almighty really cares about such mundane details?”

As she had every day since the news had reached her, Marielena came to this church and prayed for her fallen lover. Soon enough, she thought, patting her stomach, I won’t be coming here alone either.

Money wasn’t going to be a problem. Scott’s Galactic Law Last Will and Testament had proven inviolable and incontestable, though his childless ex-wife had certainly tried to contest it.

Her mother, on the other hand, was proving to be something of a problem, nagging continuously at “the shame of it all, my daughter carrying a bastard.” Fortunately, her father was taking things rather more philosophically. He’d shrugged, told her mother to shut up, and answered, “Better a bastard in the family than an unemployed son-in-law. What’s more, woman, the child’s father helped save this country, to include saving your nagging tongue. The child will never hear the word bastard or you will feel my belt.”

She might someday marry, Marielena thought. But… no time soon. Her bed was lonely and cold without Scott in it. But she was in no hurry to fill it with some lesser man.

A poem had been going around the Net of late. Someone locally had changed it around, translating it into Spanish and making a few changes along the way. The poem was in the form of a prayer, she recited it now in a whisper:

In the same pew with Marielena another young woman, even more of a girl than she was, wept. Why not? The church was full of women weeping for a lost son, a husband, a father, a brother. Some wept for lost daughters, as well.

The girl was young, Marielena saw, very, very young. And her sobbing body spoke of both loss and a fear of utter aloneness. Did she have no family left? Mari had, at least, some.

In pity, Marielena sidled across the pew, closing the distance between her and the girl. Tenderly, she put her arm around the unknown one’s shoulder. “There,” Mari whispered, “there, there. It will be all right.”

Paloma de Diaz nodded her head but the tears never stopped flowing, the body never stopped shaking. “Thank you,” she whispered back in a breaking voice.

“What’s your name, child?”

Paloma told her, saying also why she had the married name, “de Diaz,” and blurting out, “But he promised to come back to me. He promised.”

“I’m sure he tried,” Mari said, in answer. “But sometimes things, important things, come up and promises, however much meant and however important, just can’t be kept. I try to tell myself that… when it gets really hard.”

“I’m going to have a baby,” Paloma whispered. “He never knew. I didn’t know myself until it was too late to tell him.” She broke out in fresh sobs.

“He knows,” Marielena said, looking at the altar. “Even if you never told him, he knows now.”

Epilogue I

If the fighting was not ended at least the emergency was over. The Patria was restored, even expanded a bit since there were no longer any Costa Ricans to contest Panamanian occupation right up to and past the Coto River. The Posleen which had overrun the western provinces were, by and large, dead. Any Posleen left in the Darien, and there must have been a few, had either gone feral — ceased, in other words, to be more of a threat to life than the jungle itself already was — or were nothing more than ant-stripped, bleaching bones slowly sinking in the muck.

Over half a million Panamanians had fallen though; virtually the entire populations of the province of Chiriqui, as well as many of Herrera, and Veraguas were gone, plus substantial numbers of Colonenses and Ciudanos. From a people who had never numbered more than three million this was a knife to the heart.

Boyd felt the knife. He felt it at every list of the missing and presumed dead that had crossed his desk. He felt it in the open files in the ranks of the army. He felt it in the friends and cousins he would never see again.

No more. Let someone else take the responsibility. I’ve done all I can.

That wasn’t quite true. There was one more responsibility Boyd felt, one more thing for him to do.

He had already said his farewells and expressed his deepest thanks to the other American battalions that had stood and bled, from the Armored Combat Suits of First of the Five-O-Eighth and light jungle fighters of Third of the Fifth Infantry at Fort Kobbe, such as were left of them, to the heavy mechanized troops of the 20^th Infantry and the Florida National Guard’s 53^rd Separate Infantry Brigade and Puerto Rico’s 92^nd, both of which had been moved in by ship and submarine for the mopping up after the final campaign. Fort Gulick’s — or Espinar’s — Special Forces, who had proven so critical in training the Armada, had been given a special commendation.

The 10^th Infantry, at Fort Davis, the “lost regiment of the lost post of the lost side of the lost command,” stood to in ranks as the band played and Boyd, Preiss — the regimental commander — and some few other dignitaries made their speeches.

From the troops’ bored faces Boyd was pretty sure they would rather be off to continue the “el Moro pacification campaign” than standing in the hot sun.

Ah well, Boyd thought, I was no different at their ages. Still, who knows, maybe it will mean something to them later… when they are old men like me… if they live.

If any of us live.

Commands were spoken. The band strutted across Davis’ trapezoidal parade field. Troops passed in review, sharply for all their boredom.

With the others, Boyd stood to attention as the colors passed. The red, white and blue caused his throat to catch a bit, as it did for some of the other Americans and even for a few others among the Panamanians.

As the last of the massed formations disappeared in the gaps between the long, low barracks Preiss took Boyd’s hand and shook it warmly.

“It means more to the boys than they’ll ever let on, you know,” Preiss insisted.

Boyd wordlessly nodded his head.

As the reviewing party began to break up, Pedro, Boyd’s driver, “Ahem’d” to catch the soon to be ex-dictator’s attention. With no further signal needed, Boyd followed Pedro to the waiting limousine.

Opening the door for himself, Boyd entered the limo and ordered his driver to take him around the post for one final look. Pedro dutifully started the engine and began to take the palm-lined route from the PX overlooking the golf course to the top of the hill on which stood a sharpened post with a crosspiece (for the 10^th had removed Cortez’s remains upon returning to the fort). The car passed the NCO club, then Colonel’s Row, and then took a right to move along the road backing the southern side of the golf course. A final turn was made onto the back side of the PX complex.

Boyd glanced idly to his left and exclaimed, “Good God, what is that? Pull over, Pedro.”

The Posleen God King looked suspiciously at the approaching Boyd through its one remaining yellow eye. Boyd could tell it was a God King, rather than a normal, from the shredded remnants of the alien’s fungus-eaten crest. The God King sat on its haunches, surrounded by several score pair of boots, some mud-caked and others shined to a mirror gloss. A boot sat snugly on the Posleen’s left claw while it held a black-specked white rag tightly gripped by its right. The rag’s excess was twisted around the alien’s right forearm.

The alien hissed and snarled at Boyd’s approach. As this failed to deter the retired dictator’s approach, it lowered its head. One eye, however, remained fixed on Boyd.

“I am allowed to be here,” came the defiant announcement, though the major sound came from the dull silver-gray box strapped to its chest, interpreting the Posleen’s incomprehensible tongue.

“You are the one who surrendered, aren’t you?” asked Boyd.

“I am allowed to be here,” the box repeated, the tone more defensive than defiant now.

“It’s all right,” Boyd said, calmly. “I am not going to send you away. You are the one who surrendered?”

Slowly, ponderously, the Posleen lifted its head nearly perpendicular to the ground and then lowered it in the sign of the affirmative.

“I am he,” the box duly translated.

“Are you all right? Are you being treated well?”

More hisses and snarls, punctuated by two snaps of the jaw. “I am well,” said the box.

Boyd let his eyes wander to the many pairs of boots, then to the door of the shack through which he could see many score more pair.

Without being asked the box offered, “They taught me to do this. Gave me this place to live when I had no other. I make several hundred dollars a month from being the ‘boot boy’ for the 10^th Infantry. And a music company from the island you humans call Ireland has sent me an advance for a translation of the song we Posleen only know as ‘The tale of he who farted in the enemy’s general direction.’ I do all right.”

The Posleen looked reasonably well fed. Still Boyd asked, “Is that enough?”

“Yes, although the work never seems to end. I didn’t always have to work, you know. I used to have others that did the work for me. Now I have a boss-man and I must work.”

Did Boyd detect a trace of wistful sadness in the tone of the words coming from the box? Or had the alien’s own snarls, hisses, clicks and grunts seemed somehow sad?

“What are you called?” No reason not to be friendly, I suppose.

“My name, among my people, was Guanamarioch, or Guano for my close friends. Here, they call me ‘Apache,’ perhaps because of my crest.”

As if to punctuate, Guano removed the rag from his right hand and, extending a claw, began to scratch furiously at the shreds of its crest. As it did so, it — more or less doglike — turned its head giving Boyd his first clear view of the missing eye with its still weeping socket.

“It was the jungle took my eye,” the box announced solemnly. “Took my eye… took my clan… took everything.”

Noticing the mad glare that had crept into the Posleen’s remaining eye, Boyd decided to change the subject, if he could.

“Do you have any relaxation or fun at all?” he asked. “Or do you just shine boots?”

The God King looked around furtively before answering. “Sometimes,” he said, “I sneak into the jungle when I think it is asleep and cut down a tree or two. If I can find an ant tree that is even better. But most of the ant trees are pretty deep inside and I am afraid I’ll awaken the jungle if I go too deep. And then, on really good days, the boss lets me sneak down to the French cut and hunt for caimen.”

Guanamarioch’s head lowered and his teeth bared in a half snarl. “I really hate caimen.”

Boyd laughed. “The jungle never sleeps, my friend.”

“Yes, it does,” the Posleen insisted, its ragged crest waving wildly. “It does! It does! Like any living being it must rest. It sleeps. Besides, if it were not asleep it would have killed me as it killed so many of my brothers.”

Obviously the God King thought the jungle was a living being. Boyd thought that was pretty ridiculous but saw no point in arguing about it. Besides, the alien seemed too distraught — and way too big and well clawed — to risk antagonizing it.

Suddenly, without warning, the God King picked up and rewound the rag, bent its head over the boot it held and began furiously polishing.

“It’s the boss,” the box whispered.

Boyd looked around and saw a half naked Chocoes Indian approaching at a leisurely walk. The Indian held a bow in his left hand, beneath a multi-striped brassard that indicated membership in one or another of the Indian Scout groups the Republic had raised in its dire need. There was nothing particularly unusual about that.

What was unusual was the Indian’s retinue. Meekly behind him, in double file, walked an even half dozen of every ethnicity one could hope to find in Panama. There was a Cuna Indian girl, short like the Chocoes but wearing an appliqué blouse and a ring through her nose. Beside the Cuna walked a tall slender black woman, descendant of Antillean workers who had labored on the canal and the railroad. Behind the Antillean Boyd could see an equally tall “rubia,” a white woman of pure or nearly pure European ancestry. The fourth was probably a Chocoes girl while the last two were plainly mestizas of mixed Euro and Indian blood.

If Ruiz recognized Boyd he gave no sign of it. Instead he announced, “I am chief of my tribe. This one,” and a point of the Indian’s nose indicated the Posleen, “is owned by us. Why are you disturbing him at his work?”

“Oh, just satisfying my curiosity,” Boyd answered. No sense in standing on ceremony, after all. “I was wondering, too, if you might be willing to sell your… pet.” What an intelligence asset he could be if… when we are attacked again.

“Perhaps I would,” the Indian answered. “But his price would be high. He owes me and mine much.”

“We could… negotiate,” Boyd answered.

The Indian turned his attention to the Posleen. He was not unwilling to sell, in principle, but wanted the best price possible. A hard working slave is surely more valuable than a lazy one.

“You!” he demanded. “Do I need to take you back into the jungle? It is asking for you, you know.”

The box remained silent but the Posleen God King, Guanamarioch of the host, flyer among the stars and leader of a war band, redoubled his efforts to make an American-owned jungle boot shine like glass.

Epilogue II

Boyd left his newly built headquarters for the Boyd Steamship Company (though “Steamship” was something of an anachronism now that the company was more concerned with commerce between planets) and walked along the pier to where a launch waited to take him out to the USS Salem, riding at anchor in the bay. On his way, he almost passed a pair of Posleen, one larger than the other, the larger one having a fair crest. The smaller, like the larger, sat on the pier’s very edge. Its head lay softly against the shoulder of the other.

The crested Posleen stared intently at the water below. In its hands was grasped a fishing pole that it moved slowly up and down, causing the line and, presumably, the unseen baited hook to move likewise. A human wearing a Fleet Strike uniform with the insignia for Military Intelligence sat on the other side, away from the smaller Posleen. The human asked questions which the Posleen answered without looking up. The answers the human wrote down in a small notebook.

Boyd walked over and said from behind, “Hello, Guano. How are they biting?”

Still looking down, Guano answered, through its AS, “Not so bad, Dictator.”

It was obvious that the Posleen had been through regeneration. Its crest was normal again, and it had both eyes. Well… an intelligence asset like that? You wouldn’t just let it die of old age, now, would you?

Of course, regeneration didn’t stop with eyes and crest. This tended to explain the other Posleen.

“This the new missus?” Boyd asked.

Guano still didn’t take his eyes from the water. “Yes, Dictator. She’s a cosslain. A fairly smart cosslain, too. Almost sentient. With that, and the new ways of telling which eggs will be Kessentai, we’re hoping to start a small family soon.”

“Where did you… ummm…?”

Eyes still intent on his fishing, Guanamarioch answered, “It’s amazing what you can find on eBay.”

“She was a bigger star than I ever thought about being.”

“Is she still alive down there?” Boyd asked of the Marlene Dietrich lookalike standing next to him.

Boyd was growing old again. Though he had twice been young, and though the process by which he had been made young the second time had also slowed down the aging process considerably, his hair was gray, his back a bit stooped, and every blasted joint in his body hurt.

His eyes were still bright though, staring at the featureless surface of the ocean between Isla Coiba and the Peninsula de Azuero.

He asked again, “Is she still alive?”

USS Salem’s avatar shook her head in negation. “At first I sensed nothing. Then, for a very little while, I could sense a little something of her below. But that gradually weakened until it disappeared altogether. If I had never sensed anything after she went down I’d have wondered and thought that maybe it was interference from the ocean. But as it is…”

Boyd sighed. “Are we doing the right thing, Sally, pulling her up like this?”

Salem answered, simply, “I don’t know.”

Salem had insisted on coming out to see her sister’s body raised. “It’s a family thing,” she had said, and Boyd had understood. Now, the recovery vessel standing close by off the port side, she and Boyd waited for word.

It had not been difficult to find the Des Moines. While she had drifted a few feet, and sunk into the muck more than a few, her location had never been lost.

The muck had actually been the greatest of the three major problems with the recovery. It had cost a fortune to have it vacuumed away so that the antigravity devices could be placed under the hull. On the other hand, the suction of the muck would have interfered with raising her anyway, and possibly caused the hull to break apart. Moreover, getting rid of the muck had allowed a close examination of the hull and repair of all but two of the holes shot in it by Posleen fire. These were left to allow water to drain out. Patches, pre-cut, were ready to slap and weld over them once that was done. Lastly, with no chance of the muck being replaced, it had made sense to vacuum out much of the interior of the ship. This too had reduced the strain on the hull.

Sally lifted her head up, obviously hearing something Boyd could not.

“They say they’re ready to start,” she announced.

Boyd nodded. “Tell them to go ahead.”

There wasn’t long to wait, fifteen minutes at most, before the water began to show disturbances from underneath, a billowing cloud of sea bottom, a slight rising on the surface and smoothing of the waves. Boyd bit his lower lip in anxious anticipation.

“Over there,” Sally pointed.

Boyd looked a bit to port and was slightly surprised to see the point of the bow emerge first. He’d been expecting the stack.

“They canted the bow upward,” Sally explained, “to reduce stress on the hull. They’ll keep the bow about stationary now while they level off the rest of her.”

“I’m a little surprised she didn’t break up on the way down,” Boyd said.

“I think she flooded herself carefully before the end to keep upright as long as possible,” Sally answered. “Then too, the water was shallow. She would not have built up enough speed going down to really crash.”

The two went silent then as the recovery crew deftly evened out Des Moines’ keel. The next thing to appear after the point of the bow was a heavily damaged rangefinder, then the stack, then the superstructure. Two seaweed covered turrets began to show, followed by the rest of the superstructure and the remains of the number three turret. There was a wait while water drained off, running over the sides in a stinky, greenish deluge. Then slowly and, it might be said, majestically, the ship rose evenly under antigravity to her keel. The recovery ship moved in close.

Boyd continued to stare, fascinated, as diving teams from the recovery ship went over the side. He was equally fascinated by the process of lowering the two huge patches meant to seal the holes left in the hull. Once these were in place, and the crews welding, he turned his attention to the battle damage.

Boyd shook his head in wonder. “To think she was still fighting back even as she slipped under with all the damage done to her.”

The face of Sally’s avatar glowed with pride. “She was a good ship, a brave ship, from a good class. I was proud to have her for a sister. Then too,” and the actress-avatar smiled, “she sure knew how to make an exit.”

It was curiously light in the interior of the ship. While all of the human-produced light bulbs had collapsed, or the wiring rotted, the Indowy-installed emergency light plates still cast a glow strong enough to see by, if barely. Moreover, Sally’s hologram, projected from the warship herself, sitting forty yards off to port, and resonating from Des Moines’ mostly intact “nervous system,” added still more.

In a way, it was a bit too much light. The remains of several hundred of Des Moines’ crew — uniforms and shoes for the most part, sometimes bones if those had been cooked before sinking — littered the decks. Blood and flesh were gone, however, a small mercy for which Boyd gave great thanks.

Deep below decks he could hear the odd sound of underwater welding resonating through the bulkheads. The pumps he could not hear, though he knew they were working. The Galactics built well, and to fine tolerances. Their pumps were noiseless.

“This way,” Sally’s avatar suggested, pointing downward to a ladder leading deep below decks.

“What’s down this far?” Boyd asked.

“I’m not sure. Something. There’s a power source down there, and not a small one.”

“The pebble bed reactors?”

“No… they’re dead. And there’s no radiation to speak of. It’s something else.”

Boyd shrugged his shoulders and, reluctantly, descended towards the bowels of the ship.

“Are you sure there’s enough air down here?” Boyd asked.

“Does it stink?” Sally queried in response. “I suppose it must. But, yes, as the water drained, fresh air was drawn down. It would last a single man for years. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” the human snapped. “And, yes, it stinks.”

“Turn towards the stern,” Sally directed. “The power source is back there.”

Boyd and the avatar emerged from a long corridor into a large, mostly open space surrounding a solid looking, circular mass. Boyd looked around the open space, saw numerous tables and stools.

“Ship’s mess?” he asked.

“The main mess, yes. Those were the galley, butcher shop and garbage grinder we just passed. Just ahead, to the stern, is a ladder. The power source is near the base of that.”

Still reluctant, Boyd continued on and then down.

“I’m getting to be a little old for this, you know,” he complained.

“Mr. Boyd,” Sally answered, formally. “You know damned well you do not have to be old. A simple form to be signed, off-world passage to be paid, and you could be seventeen again.”

“Bah. And spend another lifetime going through that shit? No, thank you.”

“Up to you.”

“Well, at least there are no rats aboard.”

“No,” Sally agreed. “They all drowned. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have myself sunk for a bit and re-raised. They itch, you know? The rats, I mean. Nasty little feet and claws always traipsing along the decks whenever there isn’t a human about.

“Turn to your right,” she added, “back toward the stern.”

Boyd asked, “What was back here?”

“It was supposed to be storage, bunkerage.” Sally answered. “But here also is that power source. Behind that door.”

In the dim light Boyd made out several Posleen skeletons. He counted the number of skulls. Five of them. Unlike the humans, something in the makeup of the aliens’ bones had prevented them from dissolving into the ocean’s water. The skeletons made the old man shudder but he pressed on nonetheless.

Boyd looked through the small view port in the watertight door. It was light enough inside to see that there was no leakage. He put both hands on the wheel and began to twist. The door’s locking mechanism resisted at first, than gave way only slowly and reluctantly, and with an agonized whining. Boyd stepped back and allowed the door to swing open.

Inside was a bare room, oddly shaped and with one wall sloping. The room was bare except for a conical glowing object — the power source, he guessed — and a pearlescent coffinlike box about four feet by four feet by maybe ten. The box had an almost square projection on one side, with a glassy plate on its sloping top.

“What is that thing?” he asked Sally’s avatar.

Sally didn’t answer directly. Instead she instructed, “Place your hand on that plate.”

Boyd did and was rewarded by a whooshing sound as the center of the coffin split and the two sides lifted up and peeled back. He jumped back in surprise, heart pounding.

When he had recovered and stepped forward again to look into the coffin he saw something very like a fog, though it was a fog that would have put to shame London’s foggiest night. Boyd heard a distinctive click, as of a power switch being pressed. He sensed a stirring in there, hidden by the fog. Awful feelings, a sort of essence of well-done vampire movie feelings, assailed him. He reached over to place his hand over the plate in the hope that it would close the coffin again.

“Wait,” Sally said, this time making it an order and not a request. “There is no danger.”

The stirring inside the coffin grew as the fog began, ever so slightly, to dissipate, running down slowly over the sides of the box and gathering on the deck. Something was plainly moving down there.

Boyd nearly jumped out of his skin as a clawed foot appeared out of the fog, and stretched. The claws were followed by a head. The head was furry and tiny, with outsized, pointed ears.

Morgen the kitty asked, “Meow?”

Afterword

Both John and Tom have served in the Republic of Panama, John for some weeks while attending the Jungle School at Fort Sherman, Tom for four and a half years with Fourth Battalion, Tenth Infantry (as a sergeant) and Third Battalion, Fifth Infantry (as a lieutenant). Tom says, “If the place where you were happiest in life is home, then my home is Fort William D. Davis, Panama Canal Zone, with the 4^th of the 10^th Infantry, from 1977 to 1978.”

It’s a magic place, Panama, and we highly encourage our readers, or anyone, to visit it. (Did we play some games with the terrain in support of the story? You betcha. But Panama is still a great, wonderful and very beautiful place.)

Can they fight, though? Is the portrayal of the defense in the book realistic? After all, the United States took them down in a bit over twenty-four hours back in 1989. How good could they be?

And that is an interesting question. In 1989, in Operation Just Cause, the United States launched a sudden and surprise attack on the then existing Panama Defense Forces and did crush those forces in about a day, picking off holdouts over the next three to four days. This would not appear to be a great recommendation.

That is, it doesn’t appear to be until you look at the particulars. We hit them in the night, where we have an overwhelming technological advantage. We hit them with little or no tactical warning. We hit them with greater, and in places overwhelming, numbers and overwhelming firepower, even though the use of that firepower was somewhat restrained. Further, we hit them with complete air supremacy and used that air supremacy to deliver, over and above the rather large forces we had in Panama already, three of the best trained, most lethal infantry battalions in the world, the three battalions of the 75^th Infantry (Ranger) (Airborne). More forces followed on, later, as well.

The wonder is not that we took them down in a day, but that they were able to hang on that long. Indeed, if there’s any wonder in the story it’s that, even when abandoned by some (one remarkably loathsome and cowardly wretch, in particular… West Point… Class of 1980) of their U.S. trained officers, the others held on and fought.

The wonder is that at their Comandancia, parts of a couple of Panamanian infantry companies fought against hopeless odds, nearly to the last man. There were only five prisoners taken there, and all of those were wounded. The rest, true to their duty, died in place. Moreover, they drove us out of the compound more than once before they were finally subdued. There were more Texan prisoners taken at the Alamo.

The wonder is that, despite all those disadvantages, the PDF managed to inflict about three casualties on us for every four they took.

Did we mention that some young Panamanian kids with almost no time in uniform kicked the bejesus out of a U.S. Navy SEAL team?

So, yes, they’re a tough and a brave people, well within the western military tradition, and — properly armed and trained — they can fight.

Of course, the western military tradition, outside of the U.S. and U.K., isn’t what it used to be. Oh, the formations are still there, some of them. The weapons are, if anything, better than ever. Even the men — and women, too, of course — still have much of what made the West great inside them.

Unfortunately, the West itself has largely fallen under the control of civilizational Dr. Kevorkians. Some call them “Tranzis.”

“Tranzi” is short for “Transnational Progressive” or “Transnational Progressivism.” For a more complete account of their program, look up John O’Sullivan’s Gulliver’s Travails or some of what Steven Den Beste has written on the subject. You might, dear reader, also look at John Fonte’s The Ideological War within the West. Lastly, for purposes of this little essay, look up Lee Harris’ The Intellectual Origins of America Bashing. These should give you a good grounding in Tranzism: its motives, goals and operating techniques. All can be found online.

For now, suffice to say that Tranzism is the successor ideology to failed and discredited Marxist-Leninism. Many of the most prominent Tranzis are, in fact, “former” members of various communist parties, especially European communist parties. These have taken the failure of the Soviet Union personally and hard, and, brother, are they bitter about it.

Nonetheless, our purpose here is not to write up “Tranzism 101.” It is to illustrate the Tranzi approach to the laws of war.

That’s right, boys and girls. Pull up a chair. Grab a stool. Cop a squat. Light ’em if you’ve got ’em. (If not, bum ’em off Ringo; Kratman’s fresh out.)

It’s lecture time.

(WARNING! Authorial editorial follows. If you just adore the International Criminal Court, then read further at your own risk. You have been warned.)

One of the difficult things about analyzing Tranzis and their works is that they are not a conspiracy. What they are is a consensus. Don’t be contemptuous; civilization is nothing more than a consensus. So is barbarism. Moreover, the Tranzis are a fairly cohesive consensus, especially on certain ultimate core issues. Nonetheless, if you are looking for absolute logical consistency on the part of Tranzis you will search in vain.

On the other hand, at the highest level, the ultimate Tranzi goal, there is complete agreement. They want an end to national sovereignty and they want global governance by an unelected, self-chosen “elite.” Much of what they say and do will make no sense, even in Tranzi terms, unless that is borne in mind.

Below that ultimate level one cannot expect tactical logical consistency. Things are neither good nor bad, true nor false, except insofar as they support the ultimate Tranzi goal.

For example, if one were to ask a Tranzi, and especially a female and feminist Tranzi, about the propriety of men having any say over a woman’s right to an abortion the Tranzi would probably be scandalized. After all, men don’t even have babies. They know nothing about the subject from the inside, so to speak. Why should they have any say?

Nonetheless, that same Tranzi, if asked whether international lawyers and judges, and humanitarian activist nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, should have the final say in the laws of war, would certainly approve. This is true despite the fact that the next lawyer, judge or NGO that understands as much about war as a man understands about childbirth will likely be the first.

Why do we say they know nothing about the subject? By their works shall you know them.

The International Criminal Court is, after the UN and European Union, the next most significant Tranzi project (Kyoto being dead on arrival) and arguably the most significant with regard to the laws of war. A majority, if a bare one, of the world’s sovereign states have signed onto it while about half have ratified it.

The ICC claims jurisdiction over all the crimes mentioned in its founding statute, irrespective of who committed them, where they were committed, or whether the “crimes” are actually criminal under the traditional and customary law of war. This is called “universal jurisdiction.”

Universal jurisdiction, as a concept, has a number of flaws. Among these are that it has zero valid legal precedence behind it.

Zero precedence? Tranzis will cite at least two precedents. One of these is the jurisdiction exercised from times immemorial by any sovereign power over pirates at sea, when any were caught. The other is Nuremberg. These are flawed. In the case of Nuremberg, the jurisdiction exercised was not “universal” but national jurisdiction of the coalition of the victors over a Germany whose sovereignty had been temporarily extinguished by crushing defeat in war.

The piracy precedent as applied to modern notions of universal jurisdiction doesn’t stand close scrutiny any better. The Tranzis claim that universal jurisdiction was exercised over piracy because piracy was, in its conduct and effect, so ghastly. This is wrong on both counts. In the first place, pirates were not necessarily subject to universal jurisdiction except insofar as they were caught where national jurisdiction did not run; typically at sea, in other words. Moreover, alongside piracy there existed privateering. In their conduct the two were often enough indistinguishable. In other words, however “ghastly” privateering may have been — and the former residents of Portobello and Panama City could have told one it could be ghastly, indeed — it was still not subject to universal jurisdiction. No matter that piracy was no worse than privateering, it was so subject. The difference was that sovereign powers, nation-states in other words, exercised sovereign jurisdiction over privateers, were responsible for their actions, and punished them at need, while they did not and could not with pirates. It was the lack of sovereign jurisdiction, both as to their persons and as to the locus of their crimes, that left pirates open to universal jurisdiction and not any supposed “ghastliness” of those crimes.

Along with the lack of valid legal precedence, the ICC and universal jurisdiction suffer other flaws. Recall, dear reader, the lack of Tranzi logical consistency on the questions posed above about abortion and the laws of war.

Anti-imperialism is yet another Tranzi tactical cause. But what is imperialism beyond one or several states or people using force or color of law to make rules for another or other state or people? And what is the ICC, using all the staggering moral and military power of… oh… Fiji… France… West Fuckistan… but the attempt at enforcing rules made by one group of states upon others? It’s imperialism, in other words.

Of course, imperialism in the service of a higher cause — the raising of unelected, self-styled, global elites to power, for example — is praiseworthy, in Tranzi terms.

Nothing deterred, the Tranzis claim that Tranzi courts, to include notionally national Tranzi courts like those of Spain, have universal jurisdiction. Why?

Tranzis hate national sovereignty. It cramps their style. It interferes with their program. It’s aesthetically unappealing.

Their goal is the destruction of national sovereignty. The right of a people to democratically make their own laws, to govern themselves, is anathema to Tranzi goals and dreams. When they say “global governance,” boys and girls, they mean it. They really intend that unelected bureaucrats and judges, and self-selected elites ought be able to tell you what to do, how to live, what to pay in taxes, what rights you are not entitled to.

Sovereignty stands in the way. The ultimate expression of sovereignty is a nation’s and people’s armed forces. No army; no ability to defend one’s own laws and way of life; no sovereignty.

But how to do away with sovereign control of national armed forces? It’s a toughie. They’ve got all these guns and shit, while the poor Tranzis have none.

“Aha! We know,” say the Tranzis. “We can control a nation’s armed forces if we can punish the soldiers and especially the officers and a nation refuses to stand up and defend them. No nation which permits a foreign court to exercise jurisdiction over its military can any longer be said to own that military. Instead, that military will be owned by the courts able to punish the leaders. Onward, into the future, comrades!”

Let them punish your soldiers and the soldiers can no longer be counted upon to defend the nation. Nor would you deserve being defended by your soldiers. Let them punish the soldiers and there is no principled distinction to prevent them punishing the President, the Legislature, even the Supreme Court. For who would defend the President, Legislature and courts once the same have let down their soldiers? Let them punish your soldiers and you deserve what you get… and to lose what you will lose.

It would be one thing if the ICC were something more than a misguided exercise in legalistic Tranzi mutual masturbation; if it could, in other words, be effective in limiting the horrors of war.

It cannot be effective. Ever.

This is because of the very nature of war itself. There is nothing a court can do that, in terms of punishment that deters, even begins to approach the horror men inflict on each other in war, routinely, in the course of normal and legal operations. There is nothing any court can do that can even hope to catch the interest of tired men, hungry men, men fighting for victory and their lives. No sensible court would even try.

There is some conduct which cannot be deterred. When life is at stake, the law recognizes no “no trespassing” signs. When the choice is between picking pockets at a mass hanging of pickpockets, and risking the noose, or facing slow starvation… well… at least the rope is fairly quick.

Similarly, when the choice on the battlefield is life or death, what power has some uncertain court distant in both time and space to deter anything? The simple answer is; it has none. What trivial power has the law with its trivial possible punishments to deter conduct that might save soldiers’ lives, their comrades’ and their country’s in the here and now?

Yet we can see that, however imperfectly, the customary law of war has often worked — even without any such body as the ICC and without Spain’s recent disgusting, illegal, morally putrescent attempt at exercising sovereignty over American soldiers. It has worked imperfectly, to be sure. Yet it has worked often enough… indeed, within western war it has worked more often than not.

Where the laws of war have worked to mitigate the horror and protect innocent life they have, by and large, done so when the combatants were of the same culture, shared the same values, and had what we might like to think of as a basic decency.

That’s rarely been quite enough. It needed a little something else, some other reason to follow the rules.

The other reason was the threat and fear of reprisals.

Tranzis hate reprisals, which are war crimes in themselves but war crimes which become legal in order to punish an enemy who violates the law of war, deter him from violating it, and remove the advantages which accrue from such violations. The Tranzis don’t hate reprisals merely because they’re ugly, cause suffering of innocents, etc., though they hate them for those reasons, too. No, Tranzis hate reprisals because reprisals work to enforce the laws of war and their own silly courts fail.

Reprisals work? You’re kidding us, right?

Wrong. Why wasn’t poisonous gas used in the Second World War? The threat of reprisal. What happened when, in 1944, the Germans threatened to execute some numbers of French resistance fighters and the French Resistance, which was holding many German prisoners, answered, “We will kill one for one”? The French prisoners held by the Germans were left unharmed. Why didn’t the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War execute the white officers of black regiments as they had passed a law to do? Because the Union credibly threatened to hang a white Southern officer for every man of theirs so mistreated. Why didn’t the United States or South Vietnam execute, generally, Viet Cong guerillas who had gravely violated the laws of war in the course of the insurgency there? Because the North Vietnamese had prisoners against whom they would have reprised had we or the South Vietnamese done so.

Reprisals work; courts and statutes do not. The law of war, because of the nature of war, must be self enforcing, through reprisals. Nothing else can work and any attempt to do away with reprisal is an indirect attack on and undermining of the law of war.

But then, the law of war and mitigating its horrors are not really what the Tranzis are about. Undermining national sovereignty? Replacing sovereign nations with themselves? That’s what they’re about.

The Tranzis aren’t about eliminating war’s horrors? Oh, John, Oh, Tom… say it isn’t so.

(Interject dual sigh at the vast iniquity of mankind here.)

It’s so.

Recall that we mentioned that Tranzism is the successor philosophy to Marxist-Leninism. It should come as no great surprise, then, that one of the key pieces of Tranzi legislation on the law of war should have been sponsored and forced into existence by… wait for it… wait for it… THE SOVIET UNION.

This key piece of Tranzi legislating on the law of war was Additional Protocol I to Geneva Convention IV. The protocol itself was shoved through by the Soviets at a time when it looked like People’s Revolutionary War (guerilla war… communist insurgency) would continue to be a powerful weapon to advance the cause of communism. The United States has never ratified it and, pray God, it never shall. The Russians, who forced it through, have never paid it the slightest attention, as witnessed by their conduct in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 and, more recently, in Chechnya.

The protocol is interesting for three reasons: what it purports to do, what it actually does, and for the admittedly slick way in which it tries to do it.

The slickness is in the way the protocol is structured. It begins with a pious preamble, typically enough. That isn’t the slick part. What is clever is that it repeats much of what was already in Geneva Convention IV (GC IV), which is concerned with the protection of civilians caught up in war (as is the protocol), and then interweaves some very new things. The new things include major advantages, given gratis, to guerillas and especially communist guerillas, a broad ban on the use of what it calls “mercenaries,” one rather unreasonable restriction on the use of food as a weapon, and a subtle way of saying “It’s okay to push the Zionist beasts into the sea.”

Then, when a nation refuses to ratify the additional protocol for any of the at least five really good reasons not to do so, it stands accused of anything from being in favor of mass rape to forced medical experiments a la Josef Mengele. Never mind that all that is prohibited by the original GC IV and that the additional protocol adds nothing of importance. “You refuse to ratify the additional protocol? You Nazi bastards!”

Are these guys slick or what?

As to what the protocol is supposed to do, protect civilians, one has to wonder. It is part of the traditional law of war that, in case of a siege, a city may have its food cut off and civilians attempting to escape may be fired upon, even killed, to drive them back to eat up the food. This is cruel to be sure, an “extreme measure” as the U.S. Army’s manual on the subject admits. Cruel or not, this was upheld in the late ’40s in the case of United States v. Ritter von Leeb and is still — up to a point — good law, outside of Tranzidom. Geneva Convention IV ameliorated this harsh rule, and reasonably so, by requiring that some evacuations for particular reasons (maternity, infancy, infirmity, for example) be allowed.

The protocol, however, does not allow food to be cut off or civilians to be driven back into a besieged town to eat up whatever food is there. Naturally, one cannot permit food to enter without at the same time feeding the garrison, which will ensure for itself that it eats first. Therefore, the besieger has a choice, sit there forever — which is generally impractical — or take the place by assault. Now imagine what will happen to the civilians if the town is stormed, when every room receives its donation of grenade and bullet. And this is supposed to protect them? Starvation, at least, while unpleasant, offered a good chance for a besieged town to fall after a few lean days without the massacre intendant on an assault.

What then is the purpose of the additional protocol? It is to disadvantage the West, to reduce its military power, thus to reduce its sovereignty. Since being forced into existence by the Soviets the protocol has had no other purpose.

The law of war nowhere mentions the phrase “illegal combatants.” Tranzis will tell you that, therefore, there is no such thing. This is false.

There is a legal principle, a Latin expression, “Expresio unius exclusio alterius est,” the inclusion of one is the exclusion of the other. While the law of war does not mention “illegal combatants,” it goes to some length to explain what is required to be a legal combatant. If there is such a concept as legal combatancy, and rules which must be followed to attain that status, then failure to follow those rules places one in the implicit status of illegal combatant.

Those rules are four. To be a legal combatant under the original Geneva Convention, which is quite different from the additional protocol to which the United States is not a party, one must a) wear a fixed insignia recognizable at a distance, b) carry arms openly, c) be under the command of a person or chain of command responsible for your actions (much like a privateer was under a sovereign and a pirate, again, was not), and d) conduct operations in accordance with the customs and laws of war. Failure to meet any of these conditions makes one an illegal combatant.

Note, here, that individuals do not “conduct operations.” Organizations conduct operations. This implies that one is responsible for the actions of one’s organization as well as for one’s own.

Can you hear the sound of Tranzi heads exploding over that last?

They might seem to have a point. Civil law normally doesn’t permit people to be held responsible for the actions of others, right? Wrong. Look up “conspiracy.” Once someone becomes part of a conspiracy they become responsible for everything their coconspirators do. Moreover, within the law of war’s concept of reprisal, perfect innocents may be effectively responsible for what their side does. After all, what happens when a side violates the law by using a hospital, say, for an ammunition dump? The perfectly innocent and otherwise protected wounded are blasted from this world to the next in reprisal.

Equally so, within an armed force, both by “d)”, above, and under the practical effect of the doctrine of reprisal a combatant is responsible for both his own actions and those of his organization.

It works the other way, too, by the way. Note that General Yamashita was hanged not for anything he ordered or could have prevented but for things subelements only notionally under his command did.

What does this mean for the current war? It means that every Saudi kid, inspired to go to Iraq to fight by watching some truck driver’s head sawed of on Al Jazeera, has — in civil law terms — voluntarily joined a conspiracy to fight illegally and is thus an illegal combatant and that — in law of war terms — he is an illegal combatant even if he personally follows the rules completely.

Those who would grant him legal combatant status, the Tranzis in other words, thus are trying to improve and enhance the effectiveness of those who would and do violate the law of war.

This is something you would expect from an enemy, right?

So what can we do? What would John and Tom like to see done?

Number One: Never forget that the Tranzi purpose is inimical to our own, that they are the enemy as much as Hitler was or al Qaeda is. They want us, as a distinct nation and people, to cease to exist. They want our constitution overthrown or made subordinate to their law, which amounts to the same thing. They want our military made subordinate to their judges, so that it can be undermined and made unable or unwilling to defend us. They want us to lose our wars.

Number Two: Remembering that the Tranzis are the enemy, give them no aid, no money, no support. Do not give them a foothold into the armed forces and if such foothold exists (say, in the form of an institute devoted to peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance) close it down. Audit the Tranzis’ books; they’re as corrupt as imaginable and could not well stand auditing. They tend to lie, especially to raise money. Require that their charitable activities advertise truthfully and punish them when they do not. Jail a few of the bastards. On second thought, jail a lot of the bastards. Remove their tax exempt status on the first whiff of impropriety. When the ultimate Tranzi organization, the UN, cheats the Iraqi people and hides the details of the thefts, withhold the funds otherwise due to the UN and pay it to the Iraqis instead… with no chance of ever making good to the UN any such amounts withheld and given.

Number Three: Did you know that the United States has what amounts to a conditional declaration of war in place should anyone have the gall to grab one of our soldiers to turn over to the ICC or some other Tranzi court? It’s called the American Servicemembers Protection Act and it passed unanimously in the Senate. (Sometimes your country just makes you proud.) We should look for an opportunity to exercise that law… and sometime soon. Spain might be a good place to start.

Number Four: Even when we have them on the ropes do not let up. Finish them off. Make the Tranzi organizations extinct and the parasites who live off of them spend the remainder of their days poor and hungry. Do not weep for the Tranzis.

Number Five: Don’t, don’t, DON’T give up hope. The Tranzis are not going to win. Their center of gravity, Europe, is dying to demographics. Within the United States and with our own Tranzis much the same thing is happening regionally and subculturally. The prize Tranzi projects, the UN and EU, are staggering under a burden of incompetence, ineffectuality and corruption. Moreover, say what you will about Muslim extremists, they’re still damned good at demonstrating to the world outside of Europe what happens when you let the Tranzis take over.

By the way, Tom and John intend to fight the bastards all the way.

Glossary

abuela — Spanish: grandmother.

AID — Artificial Intelligence Device.

alcalde — Spanish: mayor.

Aldenata — Galactic Tranzis, largely disappeared from the Galactic scene in sheer funk and shame at the damage they had, despite all the best intentions, wrought.

armada — Spanish: Armed Force.

AZIPOD — An electronic drive which replaces propellers and rudders with steerable propellers.

boma blade — A monomolecular sword carried by all Posleen except Kenstain.

brow — Gangplank of a warship.

Carcel Modelo — Model Prison. It was anything but.

Casco Viejo — “The Old Helmet”; the historic district of Panama City where Palacio de las Garzas, the presidential palace, is located.

Chocoes — Indians of the Darien. Very fierce.

chumbo — In Panamanian Spanish a term, not a particularly nice one, for blacks. In Colombia it means a male reproductive organ. Perhaps at one time the two uses were related.

CIC — Combat Information Center, the command post of a warship.

Class V — Ammunition.

cosslain — Superior normal Posleen. Fills the functions of both noncommissioned officers and technicians.

Cuna — AKA San Blas. Indians that inhabit the islands off Panama’s Caribbean coast (“Island Cuna”) of the rivers that feed the Caribbean (“River Cuna”). Culturally similar peoples can be found as far north as Mexico.

Darhel — “The Elves.” Galactic lawyers, businessmen and bureaucrats who control the Galactic Federation created by the Aldenata in the dim mists of antiquity.

det cord — Detonating cord; basically an explosive rope, a useful means of using one explosion to set off another.

edas — Posleen: debt.

El Moro — A brothel in Colon.

escudo — Spanish: shield.

eson’antai — Posleen: son.

eson’sara — Posleen: junior officer, protege.

FAP — Fuerza Aeria de Panama, Panamanian Air Force.

GalPlas — Galactic Plastic.

HVM — Hypervelocity Missile, a Posleen guided kinetic energy weapon capable of piercing all but the strongest armor plate.

iglesia — Spanish: church.

Kenstain — Kessentai who have given up war. Some become Rememberers, a sort of Posleen clergy. Rememberers command great respect.

Kessentai — God King, Philosopher. The Posleen with generally humanoid levels of intelligence.

manjack — American invention using a mix of Earth technology and GalTech. The manjack is a semi-autonomous machine gun assembly that analyzes its arc of fire and engages anything entering it.

MarCam — Marine Camouflage, a uniquely pixilated pattern that incorporates a miniature version of the Marine Corps’ Eagle, Globe and Anchor for the express purpose of keeping the Army from using it.

mil — A measure of angle, 1/6400 of circle.

oolt’ondai — Posleen pack leader.

orna’adar — The Posleen Ragnarok, which occurs when population pressure forces the clans on a world to war for space, which war invariably devolves into total planetary destruction and the migration of the survivors to new worlds.

Palacio de las Garzas — “Palace of the Herons”; Panama’s White House.

pork chop — Ship’s supply officer.

Po’oslena’ar — Posleen. “The People of the ships.”

rabiblanco — “White ass.” A bird with a white rear and, by extension, a Panamanian of highly European ancestry.

Rio Pact — A mutual defense treaty between the United States and most of the Latin states. Though the Latins entered into it in good faith, as it became apparent over time that the United States intended to make few demands on them and still provide much military support, they have grown rather complacent about the arrangement. In fairness, one might note that most of them were soon embroiled in their own communist inspired civil wars, which most of them won. Thus, they did help defend Western civilization and the major ally, the United States.

sancocho — Soup, typically in the Province of Chiriqui.

SD-44 — An auxiliary-propelled, Russian designed and built, quick firing, 85mm artillery piece.

tenar — Posleen God Kings’ flying sleds.

thermobaric — Fuel Air Explosive, or FAE.

Tranzis — Human beings, arguably, who long to see the highest human civilizations cast down. Hypocrites who think they do good for others and in doing good do pretty well for themselves. Look at any Third World hellhole and brush away the corpses. There, at the center, grown fat by feasting on the rotten meat of human suffering, generally dazzled by the sudden light, you will find a host of lily white, maggotlike Tranzis.